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.