Читать книгу Feast Days - Ian Mackenzie - Страница 8

My husband worked for a bank in São Paulo, a city that reminded you of what Americans used to think the future would look like—gleaming and decrepit at once. The protests began in late spring, although, this being the Southern Hemisphere, it was really the fall. I was a young wife.

So. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travelers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.

Our tribe was an anxious tribe. This was after Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after Occupy—people were starting to talk about the economic crisis in the past tense, boxing it up in the language of history. The Great Recession. The name was something we needed. I was amazed by how fragile wealthy men seemed in their own eyes. They could be thin-skinned also, mistrustful, myopic, boastful, cowardly, and frequently sanctimonious. Call it the anxiety of late capitalism. I should say that it was my husband who belonged to this tribe. I was ancillary—a word that comes from the Latin for “having the status of a female slave.” That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was “trailing spouse.”

I wasn’t aware until after living there for some time that São Paulo lies almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn. The city was a liminal place, not quite tropical, not quite subtropical—really, it was both things at once. This fact, when I discovered it, possessed a kind of explanatory force.

One night we went to the Reserva Cultural to see the new Coen brothers film, about a folksinger in Greenwich Village in the 1960s who fails to become Bob Dylan, and afterward we walked up Avenida Paulista, past the radio antenna that from a distance resembled an ersatz Eiffel Tower, to a restaurant in Consolação. All the magazines liked it, a pretty restaurant on a bad corner. Nearby there were buildings covered with skins of stale graffiti, boarded-up windows, decaying brick, that sort of thing. I saw drug addicts in flagrante delicto. It wasn’t uncommon in São Paulo to find high-end dining in the midst of ruin. The whole thing could have been an art installation about gentrification: High-End Dining in the Midst of Ruin. On the sidewalk I saw the froth of old garbage, blown around by city wind.

Inside the restaurant you were assaulted by tastefulness. The click of ice in a steel shaker, a curl of white staircase. The walls were stacked cubes of smoked glass. My husband said the chef was famous.

“Apparently this used to be a dive bar,” he said. “Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque used to come here.”

“Those are co-workers of yours?”

“No, singers.”

“Oh,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re doing Facts About Brazil again.”

The men wore shirts with open collars. The women wore as little as possible. The bartender, a skinny black tie. The menu bragged of steak tartare, ceviche, gnocchi, gourmet minihamburgers. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a dive bar anymore.

We ate out in São Paulo. Restaurantgoing was the local cult, and we got involved. A home-cooked meal, as a solution to the problem of sustenance, would have set off alarms—who made this? That makes us sound terrible, perhaps, and unable to look after ourselves, but it isn’t an exaggeration.

This was around the time I stopped thinking of New York as back home. I told myself this meant I was officially an expatriate. My husband’s transfer to São Paulo had come about almost entirely because he already spoke some Portuguese—college girlfriend, five semesters. We’d been in São Paulo six months already, and we might stay on for years. The adventure was open-ended. Everything depended on my husband’s job; on variables outside my control, on events that hadn’t happened yet. One of the first words I learned in Portuguese was the term for the fine rain that fell constantly in that city, something between drizzle and mist. I was blonde, slim hips. I liked to wear green clothes. At night the city had an electric chartreuse glow. I saw more dark windows than lighted ones in the concrete faces of apartment towers. I saw Brazilian flags, soccer matches playing endlessly on flat-screen televisions, traffic signals changing at empty intersections.

“So, in this scenario.”

“In this scenario.”

“In this scenario we wouldn’t even be here.”

“Or there would be a nanny. A professional caregiver.”

“I meant we wouldn’t be here in Brazil.”

“People have children in Brazil,” he said.

“But it would be different.”

“It would be different.”

“Because there would be this small creature with us all the time.”

“You remain skeptical.”

I laughed. “In a word,” I said.

The waiter interrupted us to ask, in English, if we were enjoying the meal. When he went away I could see that my husband was annoyed. He felt it was an insult to his Portuguese, since he had used Portuguese earlier with the same waiter. I was sure the waiter only wanted to practice his English. It was perhaps fair to say that both men wanted to show off. “He was being polite,” I said. “I know,” my husband said.

São Paulo was a metropolitan area of twenty-one million people, and always in the throes of something. There were rumors of drought. There were gangland killings, labor strikes. Carjackings. Whole bus yards mysteriously went up in flames a couple of times a year—that was a thing. Criminals used dynamite to blast open A.T.M.s. Drinking water was delivered to our door in twenty-liter plastic jugs, and Brazil was making preparations to host the World Cup. The term of art was megaevent. “We’re not ready,” said the Brazilians I knew. I wondered if you could classify war as a megaevent. São Paulo was a megacity. Information began to accumulate. I was told things. I personally knew only rich Brazilians, because of my husband’s job. But all Brazilians took such delight, perplexing to an American, in criticizing their country; it was a style of critique that managed to deprecate nation and self at once. They would break into spontaneous arias of complaint. Everybody did this—taxi drivers, dentists. The reservoirs were low, politicians were corrupt, the economy was failing. The levels that should have been rising were falling and the levels that should have been falling were rising. Taxes—taxes were high. I read in the newspaper that the police murdered more people than the criminals did. Everything in that city was intimately juxtaposed—favela and high-rise, crack dealer and opera house.

I saw a favela on a souvenir coffee mug before seeing one in person, and recognized instantly that the mosaic of crowded bright rectangles signified the makeshift roofs and walls of poor people’s homes, such an image having become global visual shorthand for the shantytowns of the third world’s developing urban gargantuas. Tourists bought the coffee mugs because apparently there was something heartwarming about aestheticizing squalor. Poverty was colorful. The middle class was said to be “emerging”: a moving target. As soon as you get a bit of money, the things you once tolerated become intolerable.

When wealthy Brazilians left the country on vacation, they didn’t visit museums, or do anything cultural, as far as I could tell. They shopped. They shopped for clothes and perfume, for smartphones, for children’s toys.

In New York, I’d had a job in the public relations department of a multinational cement company. I wrote content for the company’s Facebook page and Twitter feed—a cement company with a Twitter feed. It paid as well as you would imagine. My husband used to suggest I do a master’s. He couldn’t say in what. I was twenty-five years old on the day of our wedding, an age when the future still seemed to shape itself willingly around whatever decisions I made. “With your degree,” said my unmarried friends—who were most of my friends—as if marriage somehow precluded the rest of life. But that degree wasn’t doing much for me. And I loved my husband. Something hadn’t jelled for me after college, professionally, and because I married early, because my husband made money, I was able to get away with it. “A woman without a job actually is like a fish without a bicycle,” as a friend of mine put it. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” I said. “Well, you have to imagine the fish looking really sad about not having the bicycle,” my friend said.

And so the prospect of living abroad initially had a primal, precognitive appeal—Brazil! I wrote the country’s name on A.T.M. receipts, cocktail napkins, Con Ed bills. We talked about what I could do there. It seemed like a chance to press the reset button. My husband, with the idea that I might write a blog, made the case that life in a foreign country automatically conferred interest. “You have the right sense of humor for that kind of thing,” he said. “And we could always have a kid,” he said.

We made love the night before leaving America and then lay in bed, at the hotel the bank was paying for, sharing a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and adding up all the relocation expenses the bank was also paying for. I wrote everything on the inside cover of the novel I was reading—Operation Shylock, in which Philip Roth discovers that someone named Philip Roth is causing increasing amounts of trouble in Israel—and then we both stared, mesmerized, now with more anxiety than excitement: it looked like a list of debts.

Once upon a time I had the idea of doing translation work, of making that my career, but “translation work” turns out to be a contradiction in terms, unless you know Chinese and want to translate technical manuals.

So we moved to Brazil. And that night, at the restaurant that used to be a dive bar, we ate too much; we drank too much. The chef was famous. The meal was expensive. My husband, reviewing the bill, said: “The bank’s paying for our flight home at Christmas.” It was a private joke now—any time we spent money, we recalled something the bank was paying for. If we dined out after my husband returned from a business trip elsewhere in Brazil, he would say: “Per diem.” As we left the restaurant and passed the maître d’, my husband said, “Valeu.” It was what people said after a meal. It meant: Worth it.

They came out of nowhere. They—three of them, boys. They hadn’t come out of nowhere, of course, but we didn’t see them until it was too late. “O.K.? O.K.?” the boy who was holding a knife in my face said.

The security people at the bank had given a briefing during our first week. The man who spoke was short, ridiculously muscled, ex-police. Something he said lodged in memory: You have to remember it’s a transaction; you want to end it as fast as possible. My husband and I joked that the briefing should have been called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Robbery Victims.”

Two boys worked on my husband—wallet, watch, phone. They searched his pockets by hand. Later, I thought of one’s helplessness during a medical examination. They told us what to do, how to behave, and we obeyed. The boy with the knife pulled the strap of my purse over my head. He had bloodshot eyes, wrists like old rope; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

“Aliança,” one of the other boys said. He meant my husband’s wedding band; I usually left mine at the apartment, on the advice of the ex-policeman. They were favela boys, dressed raggedly, seething with adrenaline and desperation. It was lucky for the boys that my husband spoke Portuguese—or lucky for my husband, or lucky for me. No foreigner without Portuguese would have known the meaning of “aliança.”

Luck—the part of life you don’t control. Or: you make your own luck. I can see both sides of that one.

The boy with the knife went through my husband’s wallet and took out the cash. He wasn’t satisfied. He threw the wallet to the pavement. “Tem mais,” he said. It meant: You have more.

He put his hand on my shoulder. I was now a prop in the argument he was having with my husband; he gestured with the knife between my husband and me, saying things I didn’t understand. While this was happening my mind was silent, empty. I didn’t scream. I nodded when words were spoken in my direction. When I thought of it later, my mind ran to the safety of cliché. I was petrified. My heart was in my throat. But it was already a cliché: poor, dark-skinned street kids robbing rich, white-skinned foreigners—it was a script other people had performed on countless nights before this. Two of the boys were suddenly moving away with my husband, taking him somewhere, leaving me and the one boy alone. “O.K.?” he said to me. “O.K.?” I was scared out of my mind.

You heard stories in São Paulo of robberies that went badly. People were killed. People who resisted what was happening, people who were too slow to hand over the car keys, people who failed to follow the script. That was the ex-policeman’s first piece of advice regarding the habits of highly effective robbery victims. Don’t resist.

The lights of a car blazed suddenly across the boys’ thin bodies. The sound of tires, other voices. It was enough to spook them. They ran. As he turned, the boy with the knife shoved me, and I fell to the ground. I closed my eyes and took a breath. I heard the sound of cheap plastic clapping on stone, going the other way, flip-flops.

My husband was there, lifting me, hugging my body to his. “I didn’t think,” he said.

I could see the light of the restaurant’s door, people going in and out, in sight of where we just were robbed. I was empty. I could have stood in the same spot forever, empty. Moments ago we had been paying a check.

“You were leaving,” I said.

“They were taking me to an A.T.M. They wanted me to take out more money,” he said.

“Then what would have happened?”

The next day we went to a police station. I knew at once there was no point. The city was too large, and there were too many boys, too much everything. My husband told the story, made a report. They asked him to provide a list of what was stolen. Wallet, brown, leather, brand unknown. Purse, black, leather, Dolce & Gabbana. Men’s watch, Burberry. Mobile phone, Samsung. Digital camera, Nikon. Cash, amount unknown. Wedding band, gold.

I wrote to Helen. Within hours, she wrote back:

That sounds god-awful. Of course I imagine they were black, and I imagine this somehow makes you feel worse about what happened. Don’t. Don’t think about it one more second.

Helen had also left New York during the previous year. She had a different set of reasons and went to Washington—a job, putting distance between herself and an ex-boyfriend, a general hunger that she had. Helen was my Republican friend. She said and thought things I would never say and rarely thought. She possessed a kind of Ayn Rand ruthlessness that troubled me but which I also admired. I replied:

Only one of the boys was black.

The cement vastness of São Paulo, seen from above, was otherworldly. Overgrown crops of high-rise condominiums extended endlessly under a pale yellow haze of polluted air, towers nuzzled together with tombstone snugness. Our neighborhood was south of Parque Ibirapuera, new money. The money aged as you went north; and then, farther north, the money disappeared. Poverty radiated outward to the edges of the city. At some point, driving around São Paulo, you crossed from the first world into the third world. Sometimes this happened in the space of a single block. Everywhere they were putting up more luxury high-rise condos, crushing to dust older buildings that had outlived their usefulness to the rich. I saw beggars and drug addicts going in and out of decaying structures in the last days before demolition. Creative destruction —that’s the polite way we have of putting it now.

The building we lived in was called Maison Monet. That delicate name belied the reality that it was a fortress. You passed through two locking gates at the entrance. There were cameras in the garage, in the elevators. At night, an armed guard, always well-dressed. The building had twenty-eight stories of floor-through apartments, a pool, a phalanx of doormen. The penthouse and its residents were a mystery; I never saw anyone push the button for the top floor. The features of the building were the product of fear, a set of fears that New Yorkers generally didn’t have anymore; New York had been tamed, but São Paulo was hairy with crime. We heard stories of apartment invasions, teams of men with guns. Men with guns swept through restaurants, hotels, they took everything. I thought about this every time I left the apartment, and the fact that I thought about it, that I was now a person who imagined the worst, bothered me more than the fear itself. The bank subsidized our apartment in São Paulo so that it cost no more than what our apartment in New York had cost, a difference of almost a thousand dollars a month. Here was one measure of my husband’s professional value.

I was able to track my husband’s phone over the Internet. There it was: a dot on the map, in a far northern zone of the city, impoverished and intimidating. I showed my husband. “Whoever that is, it’s not those kids,” he said. “And I already filed the insurance claim.” I zoomed in, and the digital map approached the limit of its resolution. The dot—an exact, real-time location, complete with geocoordinates—seemed like a promise, but I had the feeling that if I were to physically move toward it, it would simply move away from me.

We told our Brazilian friends about the robbery. Everyone cooed with sympathy and recognition: it was as if we had passed some test of admission. “They normally rob you with guns in São Paulo,” Marcos said. “Rio is knives,” Iara said. We laughed. They had stories of their own. Crime was a source of anxiety among the upper classes in São Paulo. Until you became so rich that you literally flew everywhere by helicopter.

At dinner, a conversation about money. Brazil’s economy, the mess it was in. Everything had gone so well for so long—and now the forecast was disaster. Our friends blamed the president, the party. Marcos worked with my husband and was married to Iara, and they knew João from somewhere. It was difficult to become friends with Brazilians—someone would suggest a time and not a place or a place and not a time—but after several months we were somehow still going to dinner with these people. They never laughed when they talked about politics.

Food appeared in portions so small they looked decorative, zoned on white plates, squares of black slate. Each plate-thing was accompanied by a lecture from the waiter: the per-dish speaking time was almost equal to the per-dish eating time. This was the tasting, the degustação. I didn’t make an effort to understand when the waiter talked; I wanted to know as little as possible about what I was putting in my mouth, to be totally unprepared. I wanted no context. In some cases, I couldn’t tell what the ingredients were, even after chewing and swallowing. Degust and disgust have the same root—gustare, to taste—but opposite meanings. Ignorance: that’s the word for what I wanted.

Dinner with Brazilians—the first courses arrived at the table after nine o’clock. We ate alien forms from the sea, Galician octopus, slate-pencil urchins, a funny-looking gratin of salt cod. This chef was famous, too, a woman. Late in the evening, she emerged from the kitchen, observed by the diners, admired, radiating gentle authority. She was young, roughly my age. People went to her, and she received her guests like an ambassador, calm and generous. We ate suckling pig. We ate pastes and jellies and cold soups made from native Brazilian fruits. I couldn’t disguise my dislike of certain things. My husband talked about every dish as if he were making notes for a review. Since moving to São Paulo, he had become one of those gastro-creeps. Food, as a subject for conversation, was for me on par with pornography. I wished that for him food were more like pornography: something to be enjoyed privately and not discussed as if it were art. I’m sure there is such a thing as better pornography and worse pornography, but you aren’t supposed to go on about it.

And we ordered the wine pairings, of course. My husband insisted on this, as if in life one thing were always destined to be paired with another. I had as little interest in talking about the wine as I had in talking about the food, but I enjoyed drinking it. The waiters were happy to top off the glass of whatever they had just poured and I had just finished, gratis. “I’m having the wine pairing with the wine pairing,” I said.

João was talking about soccer and asked my husband something about the rules of American football. My husband was in love with speaking Portuguese. I followed the conversation with more success than I participated in it, and I wondered if this made our Brazilian friends think of me as someone who was quiet, who let her husband do the talking. We draw our power from language. You aren’t yourself in a foreign tongue. I can see why some people find this liberating.

I preferred to learn Portuguese by reading the newspapers. In the written language I could decode a number of words from their similarity to French. Live conversation was altogether different; I often found myself plunging into a state of zombielike incomprehension. Learning a language is a nonlinear affair. A moment of triumph often follows a crisis of confidence. Or else, after days of utter mastery, as your brain processes the language without that laborious sensation of actually processing it, you might find yourself suddenly suffering from language panic, total verb collapse, making errors of conjugation like someone blindfolded striking at tennis balls. You reach for a preposition from the shelf in your mind and find nothing there, absolutely nothing, no language whatsoever.

There had been a news event that day. Members of a homeless-rights group were occupying an unused building owned by a telecom giant. In Portuguese, the occupation was called an “invasion.” Police blasted the occupiers out with water cannons; there were injuries. João was the one who mentioned it. He disapproved, but at first I misunderstood the source of his disapproval—the actions not of the police but of the homeless-rights group.

Marcos concurred: The government tolerates these people, he said. They let them do this business. Eventually they use the police, but for political reasons they don’t arrest anyone after it is over. It is illegal what these people do. It is a kind of theft to use a building that doesn’t belong to you. In the world, there is legal and illegal, there is not some third thing.

Iara spoke, his wife. “The only time a Brazilian will wait at a red light is when there is a camera,” she said. She spoke in English; she wanted me to appreciate her point. “In America, even in the middle of the night, you wait at the red lights. Marcos never waits at the red lights.”

Iara, I had loved her at once, she had a taste for irony. Her life had a vague glamour. She knew artists. She seemed to belong professionally to the gallery circuit of São Paulo without, as far as I could tell, actually making any money at it. That was the sort of thing that impressed me.

I heard tales of killings in our neighborhood. A kid who was closing up a café at the end of the night, shot by a robber. Three guys, connected guys, executed as they left a nondescript restaurant where they went for whiskey and cigars once a week; maybe a gambling debt. This happened just up the street. One of the doormen told me the next day as I was coming back to the apartment. The killers shot only the men they were trying to shoot, men they had reason to kill; they even warned off a waiter before opening fire. This information, when the doorman offered it, was intended to reassure me.

I spent a lot of time inside the apartment. I didn’t have much of a choice. Even if I’d spoken Portuguese well enough, and even if there had been something for me to do, professionally, I didn’t have the right kind of visa. I was a double major, cultural anthropology and dead languages. I was a net loss, in the idiom of my husband’s industry. Or maybe I was a write-off. Housewife—I couldn’t bring myself to use the word. Nor could my husband, I noticed. There really wasn’t anywhere pleasant to walk.

“If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him in the head.”

This was late, he couldn’t sleep.

“You’ve never fired a gun in your life. You make fun of gun nuts.”

“He was holding a knife in your face. I wish I’d had the power at that moment to kill him.”

“No, you don’t. Then you would have killed someone.”

“My wife’s face,” my husband said.

What I did was look into other people’s homes. I had a name for it: The Life of Observation.

The glassy apartment buildings started to resemble aquariums. My neighbors floated around inside their aquariums, lifting babies, carrying bowls, watching T.V. They all had giant flat-screen televisions. I knew because I could see them: I could watch what they were watching. For important soccer matches they put out flags. By neighbors I mean the people who lived in nearby buildings—about the people who lived in our building, above us and below us, I knew little, only what could be inferred from the bump of children overhead or a moment of close-quarters elevator interaction. The servant class—housekeepers, nannies, dog walkers, cooks—spent much more waking time in the apartments than their employers did. From our balcony, sixteen stories above the ground, we had some enviable sight lines. Unobstructed, cinematic views of distant street corners, newsstands and pharmacies, the roofs and exposed white bellies of other apartment buildings, swimming pools, bedroom windows a half mile away; it was a sniper’s heaven. I didn’t shoot anyone. Instead I sat on the sofa, in the middle of my glass-wrapped living room, like an object in a vitrine, reading. The blades of a helicopter occasionally chopped around the air outside. When I grew bored, I tried reading in a different room, and soon ran out of rooms.

The living room windows gave a view of the flight path into the domestic airport. If I stood at the window for several minutes, I would see a plane making its final descent. I remembered noticing the sound of the planes when we first moved in, but my awareness of it had faded over time. I sometimes caught the scent of jet fuel’s hard cologne in the air.

Once a week a woman named Fabiana came to the apartment and gave me a Portuguese lesson. Cognates interested me because they were easy; I even invented cognates: “temptação,” for instance, or “boastar.” It was like rolling dice: once in a while I got what I wanted. “Aspiração” means what you think it means; so does “decadência.” But Fabiana knew what I was up to. She would flash a tragic look that said: You must stop believing you can get away with this. Fabiana herself had good, sturdy English, dry and smooth, with an accent almost like a Frenchwoman’s; it was the kind of accent that was paid for. Even her errors were perfect. Is it redundant to say that I saw price tags everywhere? I couldn’t remember if this had started because of my husband, or earlier.

“I work in finance,” my husband would say whenever someone asked about his job. He never said, “I’m an investment banker,” let alone gave the name of his bank. He was like a doctor who says, “I work in medicine.” Like a lifeguard who says, “I work in beaches.” I came to believe he used this formulation because he liked the mystery of it; he capitalized on enigma. You either knew what he meant or you didn’t. Secrets are important to men. Every man tells himself he could have been a spy in another life.

I was a part of this world by virtue of being my husband’s wife. It shouldn’t have been so; I never had the disposition to make money. I didn’t study the right things, I didn’t earn it—although you weren’t really supposed to ask who earned what, who deserved. Now I was used to it, more or less, but at first the transition into my husband’s world seemed sudden. It was as if I had been sucked up a column of light into the belly of the mothership, abducted into wealth. I acquired new habits, expectations of the world. We took taxis at two a.m. instead of waiting in putrid, silent tunnels for the train. We ordered wine by the bottle instead of the glass. I stopped adding up the price of a meal as I ate and instead simply enjoyed it. That’s the thing about having money: there isn’t necessarily more happiness, but there’s so much more enjoyment. I honestly hadn’t known that.

My husband often worked late. It was both in his nature and in the nature of his work. I had never watched so much television in my life. Against my will, I learned the rules of soccer.

The tracking software was still able to locate my husband’s phone. This was four days after the robbery. The dot hadn’t moved an inch. It was in Zona Norte, a place I wouldn’t normally visit; a place others would discourage me from visiting. I looked up the street view of the address. It appeared to be a little bar, a boteco. I imagined a fat man running a side business out of the back, phones and watches that boys stole from people like me and my husband and then brought to him. I knew it was only a matter of time before the dot vanished.

The taxi driver was skeptical when I gave him the address but agreed to take me. Because of the distance from where I lived, he would earn a large fare.

Avenida 23 de Maio. High concrete walls sprayed with graffiti and coated in shadow; boys on motorcycles pulsing through veins of space between cars in otherwise congealed traffic. I saw a woman on the back of a moto, one arm around the driver’s stomach, purse clutched to her side. She was dressed for work.

I saw none of the condominiums I was used to, the towers. Instead there were little houses, aluminum fences, all of it cheaply and quickly made and now carelessly painted by sunlight.

The boteco was on a block with a few other shops, all of them closed, almost no signs of life. “Espera,” I told the driver. He nodded; waiting meant driving me home as well, doubling the fare. It was the early afternoon, and some men sat out front, drinking beer. They sensed my strangeness at once. It was my sex, my class, my foreignness. Everything was visible on the surface. I didn’t look at the men drinking but went to the counter, a man in a white apron.

My husband lost his phone, I said in halting Portuguese. And I believe the phone is here.

The man stared at me without answering. I am looking for the phone of my husband, I said.

There was a rack behind the counter where I could see cigarettes and packs of gum. He poked around, and came back with a new SIM card. He was offering to sell it to me; he thought this was what I wanted. No, I said. The phone of my husband. Do you have some phones? The phones of other people?

I knew the men outside, the men drinking, had stopped talking in order to watch what was happening, wondering what this strange foreign woman was looking for in a place like this.

Maybe you have the phone there, I said, pointing toward a door at the back. The man turned and looked at the door, and then he turned back to me and shook his head. I glanced outside. The taxi driver was smoking a cigarette and chatting with the men. He looked perfectly at ease with them. I knew they were asking about me, what on earth was I doing.

I was becoming increasingly distressed. One of the men outside came in; he wanted to check on me. Senhora, can I help? What do you need?

“Tudo bom?” the taxi driver said when I finally went back outside. “Voltar?” He was asking if I wanted to go home. I looked around at the men, the beers in their hands, all of them silent now, watching me with the stupid, unconcealed stare people use for celebrities. “Sim,” I said. I realized I was on the verge of tears.

Later, I thought of telling my husband what I had done, but, imagining what he would say, I decided against it.

I thought about the boys who robbed us. I had an idea of their lives. A culture of violence, alien and extreme; a world of dark streets, arbitrary punishment and deprivation, gangs, armed children, a kind of steady viscerality. No one offered them help. If they were killed, the police wouldn’t bother to find the killers. Everything around them advertised the low price of their lives. They were ragged, malnourished, they were not physically imposing young men. Even the weapon they used to rob us was cheap and makeshift—there was tape on the handle of the knife. Society didn’t protect them, and so they had no incentive to obey the boundaries society created to protect others. For them, abandonment and freedom were inseparable; by freedom, I mean the freedom they felt to violate the rules others followed. The consequences of being caught robbing us were not significantly worse than the consequences of not robbing us. If they had begged peacefully, if they had asked for charity, we wouldn’t have given them anything.

Unemployment, if nothing else, gives you time to think.

For instance, it is insane to walk down a city street in America and expect the homeless men there not to attack you and rob you.

I wondered if that boy had ever used his knife on a woman whose purse he wanted. It was an enormous blade, more enormous now in memory. The fact that he had taped up the handle only made the threat seem more authentic. I felt a horizon of rage expand within me, long and bright, something like what I imagined my husband was feeling when he spoke of killing the boy who had the knife. The rage was simple, satisfying, and I savored the sensation as it melted out of me like ice.

I couldn’t think of the boys as thieves. Jean Genet was a thief.

Thief —from Old Saxon and Middle Dutch, and a whole gene pool of other dead tongues. I find it difficult to come across a word and not think about its origins. This ends up being debilitating, as you might imagine.