Читать книгу Feast Days - Ian Mackenzie - Страница 9

I was out wandering in the neighborhood, waiting for my husband to come home from work, when I was caught in a sudden rain. It was evening. I went into the nearest store, a bookshop; the shelves of blond wood and ordered rows of spines seemed to collect and cast back the warmth of the shop’s lamps. I walked through, in no hurry. There was a café, the fragrance of espresso. I felt better. I was in fiction, then nonfiction, then something else. There was a case of English-language books, out of order and seemingly chosen at random. I liked the inconsiderate chaos of it. I used to be depressed by the thought that you would never read every book that was worth reading—you wouldn’t be able to read even a significant percentage, and much of what you did read would turn out to be dull or unoriginal or simply forgettable. In this light, any bookshop came to seem almost pointless in its abundance; its infinity of print mocked a lifetime’s finiteness. My friend Helen, when I told her this, said she didn’t understand me at all; and later I came to think she was right, that I was worrying about the wrong things. I found a shelf of novels by Clarice Lispector. I’d read something of hers once, in an English translation; harrowing. She was a diplomat’s wife. She and her husband had lived in Naples, Washington, Switzerland. In letters she complained of the cocktail parties. I pulled down one of her books and flipped at random to an interior page. “É como se eu tivesse uma moeda e não soubesse em que país ela vale.” Money is confusing, in other words. Then I went back to the beginning and in my mind’s English read the first sentences: “– – – – – – am searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand.”

I knew other Americans in São Paulo. My husband had some American co-workers, and he knew Americans working at the other banks. Americans sometimes turned up. I overheard English at the cafés on Rua Oscar Freire.

There was a little collective, which privately I referred to as the Wives. We formed a circle because of the language we spoke, the roles we inhabited. We gathered together over time as if by some natural process; every other week I met someone new, and someone else stopped coming. I was once the new person. There were lunches, afternoon drinks; we ordered bottles, sauvignon blanc. I knew diplomats’ wives, the wives of company lawyers. The Mormon wives didn’t drink, but they laughed and gossiped as much as the drinking wives. The women who had children had nannies as well.

I met the Wives at a restaurant that was all windows, no walls; it was a shrine of glass and status anxiety. The point of all that glass was to look. The lunchgoers looked at one another, the passersby on the street looked in at the lunchgoers, and the lunchgoers occasionally looked out to see who was looking in. All that looking was highly contagious. You looked at strangers with more interest than you looked at your companions. It was a palace, a temple of looking.

The Wives had lived in London, Miami, Budapest, Nairobi, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, they had lived all over, moving always because of their husbands’ jobs. They spoke about the boredom of interesting places. We were all of us ancillary. Expatriates had a way of talking selectively about the past. It was a perk of the lifestyle; no one asked for the full story. They talked about the way things were done in other countries, how the roads were, the horror of traffic, what you could buy in the grocery stores.

Karen said that when she learned she and her husband were moving to Brazil, she cried for three days. “But now I love it here. My husband found this bar in Pinheiros, we go and listen to music. You would love it. Brazilian music.” Rachel said, “My greatest fear isn’t growing old. It’s going blind. They’ve done the laser eye surgery twice already, and it keeps wearing off.” Whitney said, “Every time I come here, the prices have gone up.” Alexis mentioned Stanford, a degree in history. “So you and I are roughly equals in unemployability,” she said, addressing me. Vanessa said, “My mother had a great-uncle who lived in Brazil for years, up in the central savanna. He was a rancher, raising cattle. I can’t even imagine.” Lucy said, “There were no wild years for me.” Karen said, “God, I hate São Paulo sometimes.” Whitney said, “Do yours talk about old girlfriends in a way that tells you they still keep in touch?”

Stephanie had lived for a time in Addis Ababa. She talked about the absence of modern technology; her style of complaining was to make a show of not complaining. “I almost never read e-mail, there was no Wi-Fi anywhere. Life without all that was such a revelation,” she said. “I did all this thinking that’s impossible to do anywhere else. Ethiopia is such a spiritual place.”

I went out of the restaurant into bright, post-wine afternoon light. I walked with Alexis and Rachel toward Avenida Paulista. Something was happening there. Traffic was stopped. It was a demonstration of some kind, maybe a few hundred people. Some carried signs. It wasn’t immediately clear what was at stake. I heard chanting, whistles. Rachel asked what it was. “Oh,” Alexis said, “labor grievances or something. They’re like the French here. They’re always on strike.”

Marcos, my husband’s co-worker, had the idea that I should give English lessons, and offered himself up as my first client. I didn’t hear this directly from him; my husband acted as intermediary. “Marcos already speaks English,” I said. My husband responded by pointing out that I would have to be paid in cash. It happened suddenly: I was a tutor of English. A tutor, not a teacher—teachers have relevant degrees.

I streamed some videos whose intended audience was people learning English as a foreign language. I thought that if I saw things from the student’s perspective I would make a better tutor. This led me to a video in which a Finnish teenager “speaks” different languages—that is, she babbles nonsensically while replicating the music and cadence of more than a dozen tongues. She conveys amusement, boredom, anger, sarcasm, and exhaustion without ever using actual words, always convincingly, even in “English.” This all looked like a lot more fun than actually learning a new language.

My single qualification as a tutor was the ability to speak a language whose deep grammar I had acquired before I could independently use the toilet. But apparently Brazilians did this, they hired stray Americans as language tutors; the market proved that people would pay money for instruction from someone with no training. I assumed I was less expensive than someone with training. Michelle, one of the Wives, said she knew several American women who had picked up tutoring work this way. So it seemed these Brazilians never stopped to wonder if they could turn around and teach a foreigner Portuguese.

At our first lesson Marcos told me he was looking for “refinements.” He spoke as if I were a shopkeeper and refinements were a kind of tiny, hard-to-find screw he needed to fix his watch. The fact that he knew the word refinements suggested there was little I could do for him. I asked what the Portuguese was for refinements, and the word he used translated more literally to “perfectings.” Already, the lesson was facing the wrong way.

Late at night, prostitutes waited for men in cars to stop and roll down their windows. This would happen a few blocks from our apartment. The prostitutes were tall, with tight skirts, strong shoulders, long, smooth hair. They used to be men. One lived in her car; I often saw her in the daytime on the sidewalks, shouting at people. Once, as I walked past, she spoke to me. I’m sick, she said.

My husband sat in an armchair, reading. I was in theory reading as well, but I couldn’t concentrate, and kept looking at him. Of course, I’d spent much of the day reading already. My husband’s face made an expression of trying to shut out the world in order to focus on the words in front of him. I turned to a new page in my book, and he swiped to a new page in his. He sat with good posture. He had good genes. He exercised. I asked him to read aloud something from his book. “ ‘When the British tried to levy a hut tax—a tax of five shillings to be raised from every house—in January 1898, the chiefs rose up in a civil war that became known as the Hut Tax Rebellion,’ ” he said. It was a work of economic history that purported to explain the inequality among nations. I said: “Is it considered a civil war if they were rebelling against their colonizers?”

I performed virtually all the housework—it almost goes without saying. My husband didn’t ask it of me, and he made a nominal effort, but he was at work all day and I was at home all day, so. I had no instinct for it, no homemaker gene, which, whether you want to admit it or not, some women do in fact possess. Some women do not feel especially put upon to find themselves washing a husband’s underwear; I felt put upon. But I also felt the anxiety of the non-earner, of household dead weight, and so I washed my husband’s underwear without mentioning to him, or to anyone, how strange it made me feel. Perhaps this was the start of resentment; but to resent my husband, I would have had to believe he’d stolen me away from a career, a path I wanted, and of course that wasn’t the case at all. If it weren’t for my husband, I would have been in New York authoring a fresh tweet about an exciting new blended cement—blending your cement guards against bleeding and inhibits sulfate attack—made from supplementary cementitious materials such as fly ash, hydrated lime, and furnace slag.

In New York, I was spared, because of my husband and his job. I was spared a certain kind of apartment in a certain kind of marginal neighborhood, roommates scavenged from the Internet, furniture scavenged from the street—a shipwreck life. I knew those things, I had done those things; but not for as long as I should have. Splitting a two-bedroom apartment four ways, foldouts in the living room, and always avoiding the landlord. I knew people who lived like that. The people who lived like that told me about it over coffee, over drinks, my treat. I had friends who spent their waking hours in cafés, working on their novels, screenplays, art concepts, graphic designs. They inhabited colonies of people like themselves, all hunched forward slightly in front of laptop screens, seated in rows behind their shields of glowing apples. They gentrified. I should have been made to suffer more. I should have had to live with the moral knot of gentrification, of being one of the gentrifiers. Instead I had a view of the Hudson from an apartment in Tribeca that a real-estate agent had found. I should have been deprived, because of who I was and what I wanted, what I did not want, what I enjoyed; because of what I could and could not do. Could: write a coherent sentence, handle a first-declension Latin noun (e.g., latebricola, latebricolae —“one who lives in hiding”). Could not: conduct a regression analysis, code in Java or Python, handle tools, afford health insurance.

Marcos’s wife, Iara, made an effort to look after me. She once spent five months in San Diego studying English and had nothing but good things to say about America. She was a housewife, a mother, but the childcare they paid for seemed to take the sting out of motherhood; she was free during the days. One afternoon she took me to an exhibition of photographs at a gallery in Vila Madalena. The photographer was French. His subject was crowds—faces, bodies, community, anger. They were photographs of demonstrations and had simple titles: Beirut, Islamabad, Istanbul, Gaza, Sanaa. There were no dates. The titles of two photographs could have been switched without anyone knowing. It was impossible to distinguish the wailing women and rock-throwing men of one place from those of another.

The photographer’s trademark was close-up shots of groups. In his pictures you saw only faces, no surroundings. People filled the frame like paving stones. And they were gorgeous images. The photographer aestheticized rage and suffering. I supposed they didn’t resent the photographer’s presence: wailing and rock-throwing are acts of performance; demonstrators want to be photographed. The pictures felt familiar, the way every morning the newspaper feels familiar. You came away with the sense that political despair was a universal and permanent condition.

“This one looks a bit like you,” Iara said. Her finger hovered over the face of a woman near the front of a crowd. She had dark hair and skin, brown eyes, and was perhaps my age but in almost every other way was different from me. “I know she doesn’t look exactly like you,” Iara said, anticipating my objection, “but the shape of her face, the way her chin is like this, it reminds me of you. She is like the Palestinian protestor version of you.”

John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, always reminded me of my mother—of my mother not as I knew her from memory, but as I knew her from pictures taken in her youth. It hadn’t occurred to me previously that if Madame X (who in truth was a socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, and whom Sargent painted when she was twenty-five years old, about the age I would have been when I first saw her portrait) resembled a previous edition of my mother, then she must, in some way, resemble me. I don’t believe in past lives. But for a long time I used to have the feeling that someone, somewhere, had already done whatever I was going to do.

Iara was looking at a photograph of a suffering child. “Just because it makes you feel something doesn’t mean it is art,” she said.

In our building there lived a boy of no more than nine or ten who wore the uniform of what I knew to be an excellent and expensive private school. He spoke eerily fluent English. He was like a little American boy. He asked questions when I saw him in the elevator. Sometimes I felt as if I were being interviewed. He had the glossy brown hair of a boy in a T.V. ad, the kind of large brown eyes that seduce parents into recklessness.

Marcos had recommended me highly, the man said. I had the impression that Marcos had said something else to him, that I was a kind of charity. “The American wife has time on her hands,” etc. The man’s office had quite a view: a deep, cinematic plunge into the heart of the city. Helicopters sailed along the axes of the skyline, floating at the limit of my eyesight, like ships on a horizon. A good number of high-rise apartment buildings in this part of the city had mansard roofs or other architectural elements from the past—the idea being to make those buildings look older than they really were.

Some people had a sincere desire to improve their English for professional reasons, or they had an intellectual love of language; for others, I came to understand, keeping an English teacher on the payroll was proof of status. And I came to see that my skills as a tutor weren’t the thing that mattered, only whether or not I was liked.

Obediently I began to think of these people as my clients. The client I liked best was an obstetrician who worked at the city’s most exclusive hospital. Her name was Claudia. Claudia was in her forties, and she had a directness of manner and speech that impressed me, a sense of her bearings; the way she carried herself made me think male colleagues would know better than to mishandle her. At the hospital she attended several foreign women per month and wanted to communicate more easily with them. The husbands are always more nervous than the wives, she said.

“And I always know when one of them, one of the husbands, is not faithful,” she said. I gave lessons at her apartment in the evening or, occasionally, the early morning. When we met in the morning her family would smash around through breakfast in the next room. They were people I heard and never saw. “He will give a lot of time talking to the male doctors and talk with me not so much. Only the husbands who are guilty cannot talk to an attractive woman,” Claudia said.

“He will spend a lot of time,” I said.

To prepare for our lessons, I taught myself medical vocabulary. The terms were unfamiliar to me even in English—vernix, lochia, oedema, words that weren’t English, really, but specimens cut from the cadavers of Greek and Latin and then preserved in the formaldehyde of a medical dictionary.

I worked for Claudia; I was her employee. She had other employees. This was a category of people in her life, the category I belonged to. I saw the housekeeper when I came to the apartment. Days for Claudia’s housekeeper began very early and ended very late. She arrived in darkness and left in darkness. I was paid more by the hour but was involved much less intimately in Claudia’s life than the housekeeper, a woman who bought groceries and changed the linens and walked the two dogs and polished the frames of the family photographs; and yet I was the one who came by way of the social elevator, like a guest. Claudia never required me to use the service elevator—which the housekeeper surely never had to be told that she was expected to use. The difference, I supposed, was that I also lived in an apartment like Claudia’s. She was indeed an attractive woman.

Marcos paid me in envelopes. Claudia folded bills around her thumb and then handed them to me. In one case the money was invisible, in the other it was unregarded.

It was work whose purpose was to relieve boredom rather than to earn a living—which made it not work at all, but a pastime.

Sometimes my husband met me after work for a drink at a boteco near Maison Monet. It was on the corner, by a frozen river of traffic, the chairs arranged carelessly on the sidewalk. The neighborhood men clustered there in the evenings, eating pastéis and bolinhos, while the owner himself brought out more bottles of Antarctica beer. Some nights musicians would set up inside and play songs of old Brazil. The men at the tables talked and talked. It was a country of never-ending social obligation, social approach. We knew the owner—the bar had been his father’s, it had been in business fifty years. Passengers in cars stuck in traffic would roll down the windows and chat with the men at the tables, and one of the men would hand over a glass, a sip of cold beer before the light changed, a fleeting scene under the city glow of dusk. Evenings: the ashtrays quickly filled up, and the owner came around to replace them.

“Although usually you come home much later than this.”

“I wouldn’t say usually.”

“You’re frequently absent.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.”

“Let me say it differently, then. This is nice, being here with you like this. I wish it happened more often.”

“The reason I stay late isn’t that I don’t want to be here.”

“But you like what the late hours signify. You’re central to the enterprise. Without you, the ship would sail off course.”

“I want to be good at my job, yes.”

“My point is that you already miss things.”

“I wouldn’t miss anything important. Not something truly important.”

Brazilians loved to tell you about New York City. They had been there, they hadn’t been there, and in any case they had glowing reviews. Here I am referring to rich Brazilians. Everything is so organized, they said. Everything works so well there, they said. They would all live there if they could.

After a lesson at his office, Marcos gave me a ride. It wasn’t the direction he would go normally, but he had a dinner in Brooklin; my husband was at a dinner as well, somewhere else. “Blindado,” I said, touching the leather detailing on the inside of the door. Bulletproof. I’d learned the word from the signs hanging at every car dealership—bulletproofing your vehicle was the standard practice. But Marcos corrected me: his car was unproofed. “If you have it, they notice you. It is not a good idea unless you are already a target. I don’t want to be asking for attention. People here have cars that are much more …” He didn’t have the word he wanted in English. I supplied it: “Flashy.” “Flashy,” he said, taking possession of the term. “Yes. This is what I want to avoid.”

I learned that the name of my neighborhood came from the Tupi-Guarani word for lie. Apparently, there was an epic poem written in the late eighteenth century—which, I was assured, all Brazilians once knew by heart—in which the word was used as the name of a female character. She was symbolic, the incarnation of false love.

My husband invited me to join him at an airline-industry trade fair. It was part of an annual convention. I’d never been to a convention of any kind and was curious. For centuries conventional pertained simply to any agreement between parties, to coming together, and only in later usage did it swerve into synonymy with unoriginal, and then boring. He said there would be cocktails.

The booths were like little stages: elevated, illuminated, gleaming with expensive chrome surfaces. Those booths cost money—you have to buy to sell. There were booths for tarmac guys, engine-part guys, emergency lighting system guys. I admired a booth that belonged to a designer of cabin interiors. A quartet of airplane seats was on display to show off the company’s work. The lighting was soft and invitational. Everything about it was the opposite of actually being on an airplane. Passing conventiongoers stopped to regard the seats as if they were art.

He hadn’t lied about the cocktails. At many of the booths, women dressed like private escorts mixed caipirinhas and chatted with the men who approached. Men wandered the convention floor solo, with the verve of partygoers. The women moved in groups and seemed less sure of themselves.

From the far end of the hall, I heard shouting—a sound growing, something happening, but I couldn’t see what it was. My husband was elsewhere. I went in the direction of the noise and arrived in time to see a group of men in matching blue jackets celebrating. They gave the impression of a tribe. People nearby smiled, the way spectators smile at a winner in a casino. I had no idea. I was the anthropologist, missing information. There were drinks at a nearby booth, and I went there. A girl gave me a caipirinha and a man who was standing nearby spoke to me in Portuguese. I smiled, out of instinct, which must have encouraged him; he kept going even as I failed to understand almost anything he said. His face was tanned, shining. I detected a kind of spoiled masculinity in him, a negative current in whatever he was saying. He talked ceaselessly, as if he would lose me the second he paused for breath. I knew that at any moment he would begin to touch me. I moved away. He never stopped talking, and I never stopped smiling.

“Why are we here? Why are you here?”

“You know. Meeting people.”

“To what end?”

“You never know who you’re going to meet.”

“Networking.”

“Networking.”

“You’re fishing for clients. Investment opportunities.”

“I’m interested in certain indicators about the future of Brazilian aviation that will drive specific portfolio decisions.”

“So you’re spying.”

“Spying is a pretty melodramatic word for what I’m doing. I’m listening. I’m collecting information. I’m not being secretive about it—I’m giving out business cards. I’m here to read signs. I get paid to predict the future. You’re making fun of me.”

“There’s a sign,” I said.

The sign said: COMO MONETIZAR SUAS RELAÇÕES. I wanted to ask them about it—I would have liked to know how to monetize my relationships. At the booth were two women, wearing absurd dresses and holding pamphlets. I owned shirts that were longer than the dresses those women wore. They looked like women who knew how to monetize relationships.

I said this to my husband and he laughed. He also did an admirable job of restraining himself from staring at the women’s legs.

Respectable Brazilian newspapers published reports on actresses who had recently disrobed on camera. The actresses gave interviews about it, about what it was like to be naked, about the regimes of fitness and diet they used to prepare. The newspapers faithfully debunked rumors of body doubles, because it would have been tragic to learn that the actress who was naked on screen wasn’t the same actress who was giving an interview about it.

De: a privative. Some knowledge is more monetizable than other knowledge.

Brazilians bought more plastic surgery than anyone else in the world. There was an epidemic of fake tits, and among men the vogue was calf implants, apparently. Women danced in the Carnaval parades naked, or as good as naked—they wanted their pictures in the newspapers. This was considered completely normal behavior. In my life, I had seen so many pairs of other women’s breasts on television and in movies; a naked pair of breasts was now as common a sight as an old man waiting at a bus stop. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass provided the template for society—men wearing suits, women wearing nothing. There was now the presumption of female nudity. You could tell a man was disappointed when a television show didn’t have some breasts, as if this were a breach of contract.

At Claudia’s: “I have to go mother. Mother —I may use it as a verb also, yes?”

Her daughter had forgotten something. Claudia needed to go out and rescue her child from the absence of whatever it was she forgot. I was instructed to wait for her return. I was thirsty, and felt that Claudia would want me to help myself to a glass of water. I drank the water. Then I walked down the hallway. It did not seem like something I would ordinarily do, prowling. I heard noise coming from one of the rooms.

It was Claudia’s teenage son, sitting in front of a computer screen. I saw the jagged fumbling of video footage, heard a subverbal human sound, before he realized I was behind him and closed the browser’s window. I assumed he’d been watching pornography. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He said nothing and after a moment opened the browser again. “You can watch if you want,” he said.

A crowd surged, seethed. I saw the anger in people’s faces. They carried signs, the writing in Arabic. The presence of police in military gear and the low quality of the video generated the expectation of violence. “You want to find the cell phone videos to know what it was really like,” Claudia’s son said. He spoke good English, better than his mother’s. I went toward him, the screen.

I asked if what we were seeing was Egypt. “No,” he said, “Tunisia. Egypt is next.”

We watched videos. They had no beginnings and no ends, broken shards of protest activity. Everything happened in medias res. In one video, somebody collided with the man holding the camera—the cell phone—and it fell, and for the next ten seconds we watched the shuffling of feet, oddly peaceful, like a herd of cattle in a pen. The video suggested a way of contemplating an event: to shear it totally of context; to divorce it from narrative; to isolate it like bacteria on a slide. There was only this moment of failing, swimming focus, both calm and delirious, somehow authoritative. The caption gave the place and date, nothing else: “Cairo, 28 January.” The person who made the video and uploaded it to the Internet had fished out a single moment from the stream of time, a moment that now had no way back to the stream from which it came.

Claudia’s son’s name was Luciano. He had attended an expensive private school, a school with a reputation, and now he was supposed to be studying for the university entrance exams. He was enrolled in a preparatory class, the cursinho. The exams meant everything in Brazil among a certain caste; he had failed once already. I knew, from what Claudia told me during our lessons, that Luciano’s interests in life were inchoate. She spoke as a mother, concerned. Claudia said she did not know his friends, and only a couple of years ago he didn’t behave like this. Something had changed for him. He was seventeen. I asked what signs she was seeing, what troubled her. “The books he is reading are not the books he has to read for his exams,” Claudia said.

The boy I found wasn’t reading books at all; he was watching videos of revolutions on the other side of the world. Luciano’s hair was long, falling in rich black curls, he had dark hands. “So this is what interests you,” I said. He didn’t respond. I left him with his videos, the multiple chat windows he had open; he typed without looking at his fingers. I wasn’t alarmed. I had the sense that he was a boy, doing boy things, poking around in weird holes. Claudia was a mother. Mothers worry. An interest in videos of the Arab Spring made sense to me—a seventeen-year-old wants to see evidence of people in the world whose actions have consequences beyond a score on an exam, a status update, whose lives are not bound by the same set of rules. The bedroom smelled humidly of boy, boyhood, a sweetish smell of skin on which sweat had formed and dried and formed again, as though he hadn’t gone out in days.

Notwithstanding my new job as an English tutor, I continued my own study of Portuguese. During our lessons Fabiana would deplore the state of Brazilian politics. It was clear to me that her disdain for the ruling party was the result of love that had soured. She was a passionate woman. She had fierce attachments to individual politicians. She wanted to love them, and when love failed, she had nowhere to turn but hate. Politics mixed with the finer points of language. She could veer from the Workers’ Party to the problem of false cognates in a single sentence. “Fui decepcionada,” she would say, meaning not that she had been deceived, but that she had been disappointed, as only a lover can be. She was fond of the language teacher’s old warning about “false friends,” an injunction I remembered from as far back as sixth-grade French. I faithfully corrected my own clients when they said they were pretending to buy birthday gifts for their wives.

“Anyway.”

“Anyway, what I’m hearing—you wouldn’t believe it. The money. Where it comes from, where it’s going. And everyone knows. It’s a way of life here. After a while you assume the worst.”

“Your bank is part of this?”

“No, I’m talking about the internal practices of other companies, their relationships with government. Governments, plural. What we do is watch what happens. Understand the lay of the land. It’s routine surveillance.”

“So you aren’t personally implicated.”

“Don’t talk about this when Marcos is around, by the way,” he said.

“Not that any of this would be news to him.”

Iara arrived at the restaurant with tears in her eyes. I thought perhaps she had been arguing with Marcos and was trying to wipe away the evidence. But this wasn’t the case; Marcos had water in his eyes as well. They said there was a protest. They said the police had used tear gas while they were trying to cross the avenue where the protestors were marching. They said they saw a police officer swing at a young man with his truncheon. The restaurant served Lebanese food. The air was warm, an aroma of coriander and mint. The table linens were paisley. They went to the bathroom to wash the gas out of their eyes.

“What were they protesting?”

“An increase in the bus fare.”

“Was it a large increase?”

“Twenty centavos.”

“They were protesting twenty centavos?”

The avenue where the protestors were marching was named in memory of a revolt in São Paulo in 1932, against President Getúlio Vargas, who ruled without a constitution. The revolt came after popular demonstrations across the state and the killing of four student protestors; there was another avenue named in memory of the four students. A couple of decades later, Vargas, then serving a different term of office and facing a different political crisis, committed suicide in the palace bedroom in Rio de Janeiro, in his pajamas, on the day of Saint Bartholomew’s feast.

I felt pain. I tried to ignore it for a day, and then another, without admitting to myself that I knew what it was. Then it became too much, and I took a taxi to the hospital.

I had never been inside a hospital that didn’t feel like a precinct of illness, that made you forget what it was there for, but this one almost succeeded. It had many floors and many wings, like an ocean liner. It offered valet parking. At last I found the elevators—eight elevators arranged in a ring, like men standing in judgment. I was bewildered to discover they had no call buttons. A docent, seeing my confusion, ushered me to a central console, where after some discussion he entered the number of the floor I wanted; the console’s screen then told us which of the elevators would take me there; and then the button-pushing was over, as I needed only to stand in the elevator while it went automatically to my floor. It was a specific kind of inconvenient convenience: a system that seemed futuristic because, in addition to requiring a more complex internal computer, it redistributed the normal labor of elevator use—pushing buttons, choosing floors—in a novel way without eliminating any of it. The docent who loitered near the elevators was necessary to translate all that modern efficiency to the laity. It was as if the advancing edge of technology had returned us to a time when a little man sat in the elevator box and worked the controls for you. For some reason the hospital was named after Albert Einstein.