Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  I asked my husband what we had witnessed. “Macumba,” he said. “In macumba the crossroads are important, I think.” Macumba—witchcraft. At our gate he spoke with the porteiro, who had also seen the young woman; the man was having trouble controlling his laughter. I asked why he was so amused. “He said that ex-boyfriend is fucked,” my husband said. So it was the dance of a jilted woman. It hadn’t occurred to me previously that we were living at a crossroads.

  Through a friend of Iara’s I was put in contact with a priest who ran a refugee center at a church downtown. The father was taking in droves of Haitian refugees and he needed help. Here is a woman who speaks French and has time on her hands, the friend of Iara’s said, or something like that.

  The church was still considered a natural place of sanctuary. Anyone could go to a church. I was so far from all that, I sometimes forgot this was the case.

  Droves of Haitians, and Syrians as well. You see the horrible news about what is happening in Syria, but when the Haitians come to us, they are in worse shape than the Syrians, the father told me. That’s because the Syrians are fleeing war, but the Haitians are fleeing poverty. You can’t escape being poor. When you are well-off, even if you lose all your money—you are still well-off, you know?

  I liked Padre Piero at once. He had no English, and so we used Portuguese together; to communicate with the Haitians, Padre Piero spoke Italian with a French accent. In spite of circumstances, the father had a sense of humor. He was maybe forty years old. He wore glasses with stylish frames. I could imagine him walking through the streets of Rome in a suit.

  He put me to work translating right away. A Haitian man calmly explained how he had come to Brazil. He left his small half island by boat, then went on foot through the jungle with an exorbitantly paid guide across the border from Colombia or Peru and into the territories of the Amazon, and finally traveled for days by bus. Others had come the same way. The bank had flown us to São Paulo from New York in business class. The route the Haitians used would have killed me. I didn’t have to return to the church; but two days later I was back.

  Droves—the term refers to cattle. You use it with people only when you don’t feel like counting everybody.

  When they discovered I was American all they wanted to know was whether I had connections in the American consulate. The Haitians used a sui generis mix of indecipherable English, fragmentary Portuguese, Creole French. They were thoughtlessly interested in acquiring U.S. visas, like lottery tickets—like nail scissors, something it’s better to have with you than not. The men asked me about visas circumspectly, the women outright. Some of them talked about getting a visa the way you would talk about getting a gun—a thing that certain people obtained legally and certain people not so legally. Rumor and superstition came back to me in the form of insane questions that I couldn’t answer. Is it true that the Americans prefer to see a statement from Banco do Brasil, that I should go early on a Tuesday morning, that I should mention a cousin in the United States and never a brother? Sometimes a crowd formed around Padre Piero, people holding out hands, papers. He would laugh and say, “Calma, calma.” Newcomers were the most avid. In general, though, it was a zone of idleness, of waiting. Everyone learned how to wait. Everyone acclimated to tedium.

  Life had been movement, danger, and uncertainty, and now life was waiting. The women on benches inside the church, the men standing around the dust of the church parking lot, everyone, men and women, reclining on floors. This was the reason they swarmed Padre Piero whenever he appeared—there was nothing else to do. Signs from an inkjet printer were posted around the church, or they were handwritten, bad French under the Portuguese—where the kitchen was, the bathroom, please don’t sit here.

  In a large hall, electric fans bolted high upon the walls. Men sprawled on mattresses Padre Piero himself had put down, hand luggage everywhere, blankets, shoes. A few of the men folded everything very neatly, but for the most part it was ramshackle, phones charging in every wall socket. A drugged languor, total inertia; only the fans stirred the air. Plastic bottles, half-full of liquids that didn’t match the labels. Surely these men were bored out of their minds. For some reason the wall sockets were installed at eye level, and the phones, dangling by their cords, didn’t reach the ground. I didn’t see any books.

  My main job was to help with papers. Haitians in Brazil were eligible for work permits and temporary residence. This was remarkable to me, an American accustomed to a diet of politicians vilifying immigrants. The Haitians spoke no Portuguese, and for some of them, any kind of writing was difficult; I didn’t really speak Portuguese, and I didn’t really speak Creole, but there I was.

  The Haitians found work in construction, cleaning, factory jobs. Some worked on the metro. Prospective employers came to the church twice a week. “I need two,” they would say. “I came for eight.” Usually they were women, which surprised me, some of them older, women who owned carpet factories, small clothing businesses; they arrived with documents and went off with a couple of Haitians who had agreed to stitch blue jeans. “I have three already, I need three more,” things like that.

  For the Haitians, time was chalked off in periods of waiting. “Two more days.” “They said four more days.” They all knew the term carteira assinada. The carteira assinada was something official; and an official document was talismanic, stamped, signed, it would consecrate their existence. They traded numbers, the hoped-for salaries—one thousand, two thousand—rumors condensed to figures, amounts of money recited as if they were Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

  They took turns using the limited number of available wall sockets to charge their phones. I would have expected a certain amount of resource conflict in all this, but it appeared to be a fairly relaxed economy, with a guiding principle of most in need, first in line.

  The men were needy and occasionally impatient, but never impolite toward me, and never suggestive. I was used to the sensation, in public, of being visually appraised, the soft alarm of unwanted attention, especially near groups of men, but among these men I never caught anyone looking at me in a sexual way. I became newly alert to the racist things Brazilians said about Haitians living in their country, whom they often referred to as Africans.

  Droves. It’s one of those words; once the word comes into your mind, it becomes difficult to think of a substitute.

  I saw the prostitute who lived in her car. She was pacing the block. She stepped in front of some young men and pulled up her shirt, exposing her breasts, enormous globes of artificial fat; the young men were laughing. She did it again, and in exchange one of the young men gave her a drink from the bottle of soda he was carrying, which must have been what she asked for. The young men walked on, still laughing, a small price to pay for entertainment. She was yelling at them as they left. I thought of a title: The Power of Female Persuasion.

  Claudia was in a sour mood when I arrived. She was disappointed with her husband. He had started a business, she told me, an event-planning company, and it was failing; it never hadn’t been failing. I asked what sorts of events he planned. Very few, she said. I told her to tell me about it, in English. I said it would be good practice. When I gave English lessons, it was the only time I didn’t feel guilty for not speaking Portuguese with Brazilians.

  From the start, Claudia said, she knew her husband’s business was a terrible idea, but he believed it wasn’t a terrible idea because he had start-up money. The money came from one of his brothers. Language instruction was intimate: you practiced language by talking about yourself. “I am an only child,” Claudia said. “It saves me from doing stupid things. You make stupid decisions out of brothers and sisters.” I was an only child, too, but for some reason I didn’t mention this. “Because of brothers and sisters,” I said.

  I asked how her son was. Claudia made a face that said, Oh, children. Luciano worried her, she said, but so did her young daughter, highly emotional. “She is too much—what is the word—dramatic. She cares too much about eve
rything.” Did Luciano take an interest in his sister’s well-being? “Luciano acts as if he does not have a sister. As if he does not have a family. Luciano, let me say, it is like he is the only person in the world.”

  My husband wanted a child. In his mind this was an unexceptional desire. He wanted a child, or, to be precise, multiple children, two or three, whereas the only number I was sure I was comfortable with was zero. He said that he had always wanted children, that he had always been honest with me about this, and of course that was true; he had always been honest. I didn’t necessarily not want children. But the request made me feel like a vessel, a means to an end, and the world as I understood it made me doubtful about the ethics of having children, generally. I saw more reasons to be skeptical of procreation than reasons for enthusiasm. He found my logic vague. And so, over the course of months, a discussion about the possibility of a child had turned into an argument about the very idea of children, and that argument came to be a kind of molten core inside other conversations.

  “You know, there is now a theory in psychology about mountains. It says that people who live with mountains around them are more quiet. More introspective. Because they are surrounded. People who live near the ocean talk more, they are more open to the world,” a man said to me at a party.

  We found evidence of black magic in our neighborhood. Empty champagne bottles on the sidewalks, cachaça bottles, burnt-down candles and dead roses, wooden crosses. During the night things appeared under the fiddlewoods and leopard trees, the jacarandas. These were the prayers of women: that the husband she secretly hated should die; that the man she loved who did not love her in return should become sick; that the wife of the man she loved should never conceive a child. Middle-class women did this. We went walking on Sunday mornings and saw these little dioramas of personal suffering. The macumba is the last resort of a woman who wishes for a reality that is different from the reality she knows.

  I turned on the T.V. and found myself in the middle of a film. Vincent Cassel, the French actor with an interesting face, plays the role of an unhappy man involved in an affair. He is somewhere on the Brazilian coast. He broods; he speaks excellent Portuguese. In one scene, he wakes early while a woman sleeps by his side. This is the ultimate first-person moment: to be awake while someone else is sleeping. The implication in a film is that the sleeping person is innocent, unaware, or irresponsible, even insignificant, while the waking person is the opposite of these things: alert, burdened, morally complicated, profoundly conscious. When this happens in a film, and it’s the woman who is awake, I sympathize; when it’s the man, I lose it. On screen, Vincent Cassel stood, moved around, upset the silence of the room. There isn’t a woman in the world who would have slept through that.

  In Portuguese there is no unique word for heaven; the word is the same as the word for sky. I spent a lot of time watching the sky through the windows of the apartment. The skies of one place really are different from the skies of another. Half the cars in the city had bumper stickers that said JESUS CRISTO É O MEU SENHOR.

  A man told me that notwithstanding being Brazilian he had an American passport, as if I needed reassurance of this, and that he owned an apartment in Orlando. We were in an elevator.

  Noli me tangere. But he didn’t say it in Latin, and the Latin isn’t a good translation of what he did say, anyway.

  When you live in a city, you know the landmarks but rarely visit. They are like prominent strangers and have the emptiness of strangers’ lives. In the old center of São Paulo was a great, domed church presiding over a crumbling plaza lined with palm trees and frequented by drug addicts. Occasionally, a few tourists took photos or even went inside. I never did. But one day I noticed something. The crosswalk signals near the church weren’t silhouettes of walking men, as they were elsewhere in the city, but rather little silhouettes of the church itself. This discovery delivered a burst of childlike joy. I found others. In Little Tokyo—Japanese lanterns. At the Museum of Art—a silhouette of the Museum of Art.

  I saw a man in Centro with a sandwich board hanging from his shoulders. It said COMPRAMOS OURO, a phone number, the man’s face without expression, his eyes not quite closed. The man held the sandwich board between thumbs and forefingers the way a different man would hold the lapels of his suit. Who has precious metals to sell and calls a number he sees on a stranger’s chest? Then the answer came to me. This was where my husband’s wedding band had gone, to a man who buys gold. The date of our wedding had been engraved on the inner curve—a sentimental touch, I know.

  COMPRO OURO—I Buy Gold. COMPRAMOS OURO—We Buy Gold. COMPRA-SE OURO—Gold Bought. I saw the signs everywhere.

  I was amused by the idea of my husband’s investment bank advertising itself this way, my husband and the other men out on the street, in their Italian suits, sandwich boards hanging from their shoulders: WE BUY GOLD.

  My husband called—still at work, nothing really, plans, the name of a restaurant. I read some reviews of the restaurant online. The reviews in Portuguese were riddled with colloquialisms, outside my ability to comprehend, and I used Google to translate, to see what I was missing.

  My relationship with this glass box has surpassed 16 years. His revolving door leads us to its central bar which is facing an uninhibited kitchen that allowed to watch the duty gluttons. Your unisex bathroom is an invitation to flirt rapid eye corner. Waiters and waitresses beautiful, sympathetic. His music is touching and not touching, yet sophisticated. Models, executives, fashionistas dictate the dress-code and behavior here. Go early or try to make a reservation because the auction of beautiful people, who do not mind waiting. The strong are meats. Sweet place to enjoy and celebrate the greedy, honest wine. The menu and wine list on iPad, enable appropriate harmonization. Price a bit steep, but nothing abusive. Beautiful works of art guarantee a 100% experience.

  I was with two other people and nobody answered us. Then the waiter made fun. We ordered three desserts and only one was served. We do not pay the service, since the service was lousy. The waiter who served us went to the door to make fun of our face again. And all this is a summary of many other embarrassing situations that I underwent. This has been a week.

  I went at night. The hall was empty. As I was not well dressed, no one came to meet me or take me to a table, so I walked in, sat down, and waited to be served. As I was alone, I jumped the entrance and went to the main course. I have made the request and asked for the waiter to repeat what he had written down. And guess what? My flesh came off. A simple dish should be better prepared.

  “So when you find out about that sort of thing.”

  “We evaluate.”

  “You evaluate the decision to invest.”

  “In some cases we’ve already invested. We’re evaluating the costs of pulling out our money, changing our position.”

  “So you reevaluate.”

  “Are you really curious about my work?”

  “I’m curious about this particular thing.”

  “It’s not a thing you talk about directly.”

  There was another protest, and then another. They were in São Paulo, in the cities of the south. News coverage grew. The police were reckless, cruel, people were injured. People who had not been protesting joined the protests in anger over what the police were doing. Other causes joined with the original grievance over the bus fare. Everything now had momentum.

  Helen wrote:

  Don’t you see? This is essentially an artist’s residency. You’re living in an unfamiliar city, you have tons of free time, a nice place to stay, there are drinks, and somebody else is paying the bills. Apparently there’s even civil unrest. You should take advantage. All your starving vagabond experimental video artist friends currently being priced out of Bushwick would trade places with you in a second.

  I wrote back:

  But I’m not an artist.

  African slaves in Brazil practiced an improvised dance performance, called capoeira, in which two men appear to fight i
n slow motion. Their owners outlawed it. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, but capoeira remained illegal until 1937. The ban was lifted only when President Vargas—the same president the São Paulo rebels failed to remove from power in 1932 and who years later was found dead in his pajamas from a bullet through the heart—personally attended a performance and happened to like it.

  There was an exhibition of art in an old maternity hospital. Iara brought me. The hospital was twenty years out of use; once upon a time half a million people were born there. Now it belonged to a French businessman who planned to turn it into a hybrid of shopping mall, luxury hotel, and “creativity center.” I read as much as I could understand of an interview in Portuguese the French businessman gave to Folha. “Creativity can be sold,” the businessman said.