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