New pome up.

I've just posted a new poem, 'Elegy in a Brazilian Churchyard'. It's meant to be just slightly on the side of funny. Not laugh out loud funny, you understand, more like, 'heh, I could smile at that if I wasn't so damn cynical' funny. 

This offering comes after my other recent one 'each/other', which shows I am clearly stuck in an alphabetical rut as regards titles. 

Comments, naked pictures and floral bouquets spelling the word 'twat' all most welcome. 

Round The Corner.

Just back from a trip round the corner to the gas station to buy some water. It’s a little after twilight, newly dark, and the pavements are thinning though the roads are still choked with stationary traffic, belching trucks, vacant faces in bus windows. What I want to think about is why I get such a sharp little thrill from these moments out in the city on my own. It’s not the city which does it. Sao Paulo is far too ugly, big and unmistakably western for anyone to romanticise it as either beautiful or extraordinary. There are no hooded lepers begging for change, no muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, only poor people working hard, occasional beggars and prostitutes discernible among the regular folk and those random outbreaks of violent crime which everyone prays not to get caught up in. So, no, what I get off on at such moments is not the city itself but the sensation which I get at such moments of being far away, immeasurably far away. Accomplishing something so mundane as buying water here, with its autopilot assumptions of where to go, who might be working at the gas station tonight and what I will say, brings sharply into focus the extent to which I have become embedded in a place and a life which has no connection, and no knowledge, of the country I am from. This is liberating, and I feel the weightlessness of it for a second as I’m wandering home through the exhaust fumes and glare of headlights: the possibility that I have, at least for now, escaped.

Underemployed.

Brazil doesn’t offer its citizens any unemployment protection. The absence of unemployment benefit means everyone needs to work. This is why you’ll often see middle-aged and older people working as waiters and shelf-stackers, and seeming to take a degree of pride and enjoyment from their work which is conspicuously absent in the UK. However, there are some unintended consequences of this policy.  

Gone are the sulking teenagers from your coffee shop, gone is the self-checkout from your supermarket. In their place stands a mass of eager and subservient functionaries ready to do every kind of work imaginable so that you don’t have to raise a finger, unless it’s to point at what you want. If you choose, there’s someone to do quite literally everything for you, and often there are several of them. Two people come round to put up your shelf. Three people are involved in watering a lawn. Four people will put up a sign (one up the ladder and three watching, offering advice and passing tools).  I once saw a whole crew of guys doing some street-sweeping, with one guy obviously the overseer. Remember, this is street-sweeping: not so much to oversee. Consider it. ‘So, what have you got there? Looks like a leaf?’ ‘Yup, leaf.’ ‘Well, sweep it up, will you?’ ‘Yes, boss.’

In a domestic setting, it all gets a bit Lives of the Eminent Victorians. It’s quite common for a wealthy family of four to have a maid, a cleaner, a couple of security guards, a cook and gardeners. The family has the money, the poorer members of society need some of it. An understanding is reached. This imperative to find work permeates every level of society; there’s none of the industrialisation and automation we associate with mass production. Take bread. In the UK a bog-standard loaf of bread is always sealed by those strips of clear sticky tape, clearly administered by some clever little machine. Here in Brazil they’re sealed with wire pipe cleaners. So, instead of a machine doing each loaf of bread, they’re done by hand, each one, in some factory somewhere.

Perhaps best of all was the time my wife and I went to get some passport photos done. We took ourselves off to a shopping centre and found a booth. It looked exactly like a standard coin-op booth, except a bit bigger. My wife went inside and was just adjusting her chair, when a hand snaked in from behind the screen and adjusted the overhead lighting slightly. My wife emitted a polite scream appropriate to the situation, and a little old lady’s face peeked round the corner to ask if she was alright. That was her job: to squash herself in behind the screen and wait for people to come along and get their picture taken. It’s not a vocation, I imagine, but it is a job. 

One Year Here.

So, yes, we have now been in Brazil for a year. This weekend we commemorated the anniversary by welcoming a bunch of new teachers (so young, so innocent, so drunk) and wasting a day and then a very late night in a churrascaria and a bar.

What have I learned in that time? Well, I can say what I haven't learned: I haven't learned that more than two caipirinhas in an evening and I talk the most abominable shit, I haven't learned that eating my body weight in picanha makes me hate myself and I haven't learned to avoid ordering desserts which sound awful and look like a caramelised penis breaching a choux-pastry volcano.

Perhaps most annoyingly of all, I still haven't learned Portuguese well enough to prevent me from making a dick of myself in public. For example, I was recently trying to change the battery in my old back-up watch, a twenty quid Swatch which I bought from the stall at King's Cross (IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING), having recently lost my beloved, emotionally significant, thirtieth-birthday present watch doing handstands in the sea near Ubatuba. Like a grown-up.

This is what the beach looked like. 

And in the next image you can see what the watch looked like immediately before it escaped my wrist and set off for a life of adventure on the high seas. If you look closely you can see by my gormless expression and the way my body is pointing out to sea like a basset hound after a quail that I was already preparing myself psychologically for the impending loss. Good bye, watch, I am saying, thank you for the memories. 

Where is it now, I wonder? Whose wrist, if any, does it adorn? Does it comprise one-eighth of the accessories upon the arms of a fashion-conscious octopus? If so, Mr Octopus, you are no longer welcome at my birthday party. Anyway, I have written a poem about this loss, which is here. It is terribly moving. 

But I digress. I was talking about changing my watch battery, wasn't I? Well, in order to do this, I had to go back to the watch shop where I recently got a broken pin in the strap of my beautiful, now lost watch replaced. The chap at the watch repair shop remembered me from my previous visit and we discussed my horological bereavement. I then showed him my back-up watch and observed, bemused, as he gazed upon my Swatch as 'twere some precious gem. His wife joined him and they both smiled at it appreciatively. I can understand why they were behaving like that, though. You see, import duties on electronic and consumer items are 100% here in Brazil, so many foreign manufacturers simply don't bother selling stuff here. As such my old watch was a relative rarity to them. 

But not to me. Perhaps because I was still smarting over the loss of my special watch, I felt compelled to explain that really this watch wasn't all that much, especially not when compared to my old one, now buried in the bosom of the ocean deep. So I pointed at the Swatch and I said, 'Mas, este não e carro'. Which translated, I thought, as, 'but this is not expensive.'

Except the word for expensive is 'caro,' pronounced with a hard 'r' not a soft one. 'Carro,' pronounced phonetically as "ka'ho" means car.

So I was pointing at the watch and saying, well, let's be honest, shouting, 'But that's not a car.' The kindly watchmaker and his wife looked at me, polite, puzzled. 'That's not a car,' I insisted. 'Don't you understand? THAT'S NOT A CAR!'  

Jesus Christ. Was that actually the punchline? To the longest shaggy-dog story ever? Oh, lord, navigate away, quickly. Don't stay to watch! Don't see my mortification!*

* On a serious note, I have learned something this past year. I've learned that Sunday mornings are far more beautiful than the blurry swirl of lights and drunken shouting on Saturday nights; Sunday mornings are when the streets fall empty and silent and the sun reflects gold and blue off the high-rises into shady corners and you can walk out to the bakery and a café and listen to the chime of Sunday bells as you dip between the covers of your novel. Nice.

A very slow day

So it’s another perfect winter's day in Sao Paulo, the last in a long bright string of them. A sky so flawless it stills you inside. The wind scouring out thought and blowing rags of sunlight into impossible corners. It’s been very quiet around here lately. The city has emptied itself for the long vacation. The spate of intense work which I had throughout May and June has slowly ebbed away until I’m basically unemployed but without the final sign-off which would oblige me to get on with something else. My wife is also at liberty, on her summer holidays. So our days have reduced their focus to smaller acts – getting breakfast, venturing out to buy food, getting hold of a new lamp for the living room, speaking to our families at home in Britain, making dinner, eating a peach. Small victories have become important once again. We dream vividly and discuss whatever remains most vivid when we wake. Our dreams and the TV shows we’re binging on in the evenings seem more real than what we think of as our lives, the occupations we pursue in the outside world, our responsibilities. Reality has retreated. It is confusing. It feels as if the layers of my mind have become transparent glass, and I can look down through pellucid depths, reading each layer simultaneously, the meanings overlapping and making no sense except cumulatively, as the wholeness of a dream, unbound by the linearities of reason. One should enjoy these moments, but they make me feel guilty, anxious. There is occasionally the scratch of fear. It’s an effort to let go.