There are an infinite number of ways to die. A good majority of those ways can be found in Brazil. I was lucky enough not to directly encounter any of them, but I only lived there for 14 months. If I had stuck around longer, I would not have stayed lucky, not forever. Like in gambling, the longer you play, the greater your chance of eventual ruin.
If you talk to a man named Nicholas Nassim Taleb about probabilities and long tails, he'd tell you just as much, but in terms of upsides and downsides, and with a mathematical basis. To put it in probabilistic terms, staying in Brazil had a nice fat tail on the downsides column.
This book is a book about probabilities. Something I think we all often forget is that probability is the science, if you can even call it that, of counting. First, you count the number of times a thing had a chance of happening. Then you count up the number of times that it actually happened. Divide the 'times it DID happen' by the 'times it could have happened' and viola, you have a probability.
What is the probability that a plane will crash? Given the the above formula, we can take the number of flights that have been flown and divide it by the number that have, in fact, fallen out of the sky. Usually this gives you a number somewhere like 1 in millions.
If the plane that you are flying on crashes, the number will then be 2 out of millions + 1. What is the post-event probability that your plane will crash? It's 1. Your plane crashed. Out of the number of times that you were on that particular plane, in that particular place (one), how many of them crashed? Again, one. What's the probability that that plane would crash?
It was 1.
Was there anyway for you to know this? No. But that doesn't change the probability, the fact, the count.
The following stories all had the exact probability of happening that equaled 1. Which is to say that they happened, in this universe at least.
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I think the best way to begin is by telling the almost-death that was the inspiration for this book. This is the incident that, as I was sitting at my laptop, staring at the Google results that explained some phenomena I had just witnessed, I realized how close to death I might have actually been. Which got me to thinking about what other times I had been this close to death in the past few months that I had been in Brazil this time around. And then the previous trip. And the time before that.
I started a list that, although it didn't quite reach 87 at the time, was unsettlingly larger than zero.
There's something to those not so random downsides of Nicholas Nassim Taleb.
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One way that you can die in Brazil, or anywhere, really, is by blowing yourself up with propane gas. All it took for me to realize this was a single attempt at 'fixing' the house stove. I started cooking freshman year of college, and used to use my skills in the kitchen to woo Brazilian friends and admirers alike. More on my particular sweet tooth later. For now let's stick to that one time that I was in Sao Paulo, living with some other USP students. Like most houses and apartments in Sao Paulo, the stove was a small white powder coated aluminum contraption. It was powered by a canister of propane, not unlike the propane tanks for a gas grill in the states, as there were no gas lines. There was a gas man that you would come by to change out the tanks on a schedule; he'd bring in a new one and replace the old one while you watched. I later discovered that you could call the gas man and he would make a special trip to fix up your gas if you fucked it up.
Like I did. The actual starting conditions are a bit blurry now, but I believe I was trying to make some rice, but the gas burner was sputtering. Try as I might, I couldn't get the gas to come on and stay on without sputtering. None of my roommates were at home, at least not the crucial Brazilian one whose family owned the house and probably could have told me that what I was about to do was about as dumb it gets.
I accepted the dumb gringa label with more force and alacrity than most.
So. I'm trying to heat up a pot of water, and the gas won't stay solidly lit. It keeps sputtering up or is flaring out in weird way. I get it into my head that this is a problem that I can fix. The gas tank has a valve on it. So I took to fiddling with the knob on the valve, opening it and closing it, all the while the stove top is lit, and sputtering. It sputtered while I turned the gas knob up and down, almost seeming to go out and then flaring up brightly, the flame struggling to keep up with all the gas that was escaping from the tank. For all my fiddling, it didn't even out, not a bit. If anything it got worse.
I turned it off, think I should go read up on Google how to better make it work. This is when I discovered exactly how close I was to exploding myself, the rinky-dink stove, and house. When my Brazilian roommate and landlord Everton got home, I told him in shitty Portuguese what had happened. He told everyone else not to use the stove, gave me about fifty reais, and told me where I could find the gas man. I'd never been to a gas canister depot before. It turned out that we had one in our neighborhood, only a few blocks away from the house.
Recently, when sleep is closing in and I'm about to shut my eyes, I'll remember watching the flame creep downward as the gas valve spun shut, almost as if it were following the flow of gas back down the pipe. I firmly believe that other dimensions exist; equally firmly I know that there is a good portion of those alternate realities where I was blown up by a canister of propane gas in Butanta, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
By knitting needle, when the long-haul bus that you're riding on takes an abrupt turn and you accidentally stab yourself in the eye with it, instead of knitting the socks you're working on. It'sa party bus that's carrying you and your newly made friends on a 16 hour journey from Sao Paulo to Diamantina for 7 days of debauchery called carnaval.
By STD, specifically AIDS, from some random person that you banged at Carnaval.
Death by sex with the really hot Brazilian guy that you've been watching all week, even though you're pretty sure you've fallen in love with another one of your friends who is nearby but you can't admit it to yourself so instead you spend an entire week attempting to get this other guy who won't give you the time of day to notice you, pining after him at the dances even though other guys really want your attention and there's Davi whom you fell in love with in that moment on the sofa during a planning meeting. You weren't planning to, but you looked over and locked eyes with him and felt something shigt deeply within yourself and it was like lightness and happiness and he was laughing too. He had the prettiest brown eyes and was rich enough to have a car, red, that he had driven out to the conference from ITA where he was going to school. I've always had a thing for brilliant men, and he was one that defined that rule. It mostly ended though when I failed to commit to going on a drive with him to pick up supplies and then did nothing but talk about how I was nothing but infatuated with this other man named Pablo. It was the last night of the two week conference when I finally got Pablo to notice me and when we made out it was as good as I thought it would be. It was hot. Making out with Pablo was the hottest, best, most drunken kissing I've ever had. I wish I could say the same thing about the sex but I don't remember it as well as I should, all things considered.
Looking back, I have only regrets, about not spending more time with Davi. I ended up meeting up with him, much much later. We kept in touch, off and on, over G-chat or Facebook or what have you. At some point, years later we ended up in Montreal at the same time. I was on vacation by myself, one of my first big breaks from work on my own. I was living in New York City at the time, where there's a train that, in exchange for 10 to 12 hours of your time, will carry you north to Montreal. A friend of mine had given me use of her apartment while she was out of town, so I had a place to stay and a cheap-ish way to get there and Davi was going to be in town. We met up and got lunch and it was just two old friends catching up on whatever it is that time does to people, given a long enough opportunity. He was getting his doctorate in material science at a school in France. I very much doubt that he was going back to Brazil after. His English wasn't so good, his French was impeccable, and my Portuguese was a bit coarse after years of disuse. We managed to communicate, barely. He asked me where my friends were and I just looked at him in askance and I think in that moment he knew what I had been hoping would happen, deep in my soul, nevermind that he had a girlfriend in France and things could never be close between us, not again. Some opportunities you burn like paper above a candle, some are consumed like paper in a roaring flame, and yet others disappear, pulled out of your hand by the passing wind and pushed farther down the road away from you as you chase after it fruitlessly, watching it escape from you in twists and turns until it's lost.
From sadness, also known as saudades.
By falling from a pedestrian overpass. We didn't see him fall directly, but it happened a few short moments after we emerged from the Metro station at (downtown sao paulo metro station. name??). We were downtown to catch the last few hours of Virada Cultural, where they turn the whole downtown seat of Sao Paulo, normally the turf of homeless and criminal, mixed with commercial, into a 24 hour celebration of the arts with free movies and concerts for an entire 24 hours. Virada means 'turned', in a rotational sense. The stray dogs here are called 'vira latas', which literally translates to 'can turners'. The dogs, they turn the cans they find discarded in the street, nosing them over noisily with their noses. Similarly, the Prefeitura (think City Council) of Sao Paulo attempted to 'turn over' downtown Sao Paulo's dark, drogado streets with revelers and music and 'culture' for 24 hours, Saturday to Sunday. There were music acts in every street, art exhibits in galleries, musical dances in the plazas, free cinema in the theaters. It was kind of magical, but also terrifying, wandering the dark streets with your group of friends, trying to stay within sight of other groups of revelers, and the police, avoiding dark corners and alleyways. Downtown Sao Paulo is a bit like a set of narrow, winding valleys between highrises. Any wrong turn will land you in a dark side street.
We had gone home late to get some sleep, and then returned in the morning to catch some last minute music acts and then explore Japantown in the Liberdade neighborhood. As we were exiting the Metro station, one that opened onto a busy thoroughfare, one of the openings of Túnel Papa João Paulo II (Pope John Paul the Second's Tunnel), there's a pedestrian walkway high above. Maybe it was the Viaduto do Cha (Tea Viaduct), built to bridge the original city of São Paulo with the less well-to-do neighborhoods of Republica and Consolacão. That would make the Metro station Anhangabau, the street Avenida Vinte e Trés de Maio (23rd of March Avenue), so renamed in 1932 for Sao Paulo's Constitutional Revolution of 1932.
Does it matter what the Metro station was called, where we were when we saw the figure fall, and heard the sound of body impacting pavement?
The sound of man (it's always a man) hitting pavement is loud, it's wet, it's definite. It reverberates, but doesn't ring. There is a solid definity to the smack.
We didn't go to look at the body. There wasn't an easy place to see down into the freeway where he had fallen. I'm still a bit hazy as to whether I saw it. Sometimes I imagine I remember it, this stiff log-like figure that folds itself over the railing, bodily willing, pushing their head out further and further until gravity takes over and they topple, like a limp doll over the railing. In my imagination they tumble, head over heels, arms wheeling as if they've changed their mind halfway, their instinct to survive has woken up and their trying to claw fight fly their way back onto solid ground. In reality, I think they just fell, as all dead weight objects do -- down with little ceremony.
I once hung myself over a balcony, leaning out the same way I imagine this man did. It was a 2nd floor railing at the suburban home I grew up in. It was only 12 feet up; the floor beneath was this beautiful cool white marble. I had my feet firmly on the floor, but leaned anyway and wondered. What would it be like to just fall.
Sometimes I imagine what it must have been like, to be driving along that particular stretch of highway, coming out of a tunnel name for a pope, emerging into the light, to see a man falling. Tumbling from above, down into the road in front of you. Do you catch their eye on their downward trajectory? Are you the last person that they see, the last moment they have to ask to communicate to scream. Their last moment of actually being seen, and it's you. Dumb, mute, horrified, you.
What's the chances of something like that happening to a person?
I'll tell you.
It's 1. Out of 1.
The Virada Cultural was the locus of several close encounters with death. The night before, I almost experienced death by stampede. Drug sellers that caught in a rave and someone came at someone else with a knife (or something) and then the next thing you knew there was an entire wall of bodies headed my way as the sound of funk blared in the backgroiund. The wave of fear rising up out of the dark, midnight crowd still haunts my nightmares.
From sleepiness, like the guy that I met one of my first nights in Sao Paulo the city who had gone downtown for a show with his backpack on, fallen asleep, drunk, after a party or something, maybe during another show, up against a fountain downtown and woken to an empty backpack. No laptop. No money. He was waiting for someone back home to wire him money so that he could pay his hostel bill. I had just arrived back in Brazil, my third and final trip during my college years. I had just graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and was taking one last trip to Brazil before starting work at a boutique IT consulting firm. For reasons I don't now claim to understand, I had taken a position based out of Houston. I had just four months for one last Brazil adventure before returning to the States to begin a Career.
// riding the subway out to the end
// first trip on the yellow line
I was there when they opened the Yellow line in Sao Paulo. The opening of new subway lines is, globally, a fairly rare event. This line had been in the works for decades, multples of the time that I'd been alive. And they finished a part of it, opened the station to the public, while I was there. It was beautiful, gleaming, modern. There were glass panels separating you, the people, from it, the train. My roommate Everton informed me that this was to prevent suicides. Death by train. The trains had no conductors. They would glide into the station, train doors perfectly aligned with the glass doors, and then both would slide open. The trains had yellow accents, a nice blue color for the seats. This was a new, max capacity train -- there were no doors between the cars. Rather the whole thing was one, smooth sinuous line. You could traverse the train from end to end. Board at Butanta, the then end terminal and walk all the way to the front as you journeyed to Luz, curving track accordioning the ends around such that you couldn't see from end to end until you hit a straight.
// sergio and the physics class; disappearing into the abyss of ...sergio drove me to the airport. sergio and everton that is. they dropped me off at Guarulhos. Goodbye, goodbye. Sergio was going into the convent, except the man version of the convent. I believe the correct term is 'monastery'. they are transformed into monks. sergio and everton would spend long times talking about sergio's future. sergio would leave his car at everton's place sometimes. i was sorry to leave, sorry to hear that sergio was giving up the world of carnality for a place among the brothers. the kind of sorriness that's more of a mourning dead futures than it is any amount of actual pitying emotion. sergio was warm and the brothers would be, maybe are, lucky to have him. sergio took me to a physics class with him. it was an undergraduate level physics class at one of the top universities in Brazil. at my university, i had taken
// learning french through portuguese and other crackpot ideas.
if misunderstanding men is a testament to lesbianism, than i have no further excuse. while i was teaching classes at grade schools in Butanta, I thought it would be fun to audit a French class at USP. I went to a few classes; I wish I had gone to more. I can't remember what excuse I gave for showing up at a class that I was not registered for, that I had practically waltzed into. Maybe Everton did some work for me, using AIESEC as an excuse at the registrar to let me slip into this class. My grasp of Portuguese was pretty good at this point; I knew nothing of French. The teacher was a Paulistana by birth, Japanese by heritage. She spoke fluent French, Portuguese, Japanese, German, and something else that I am no doubt forgetting. Spanish, perhaps? She was the fun kind of strict, she cared a lot about us getting better at French. She talked in French almost the whole time, falling back into Portuguese from time to time to help explain things. She glossed over parts where French and Portuguese are the same. We learned about etre and shaving your mustache. We listened to tapes of French people talking, sometimes with different accents, and I did not understand a single thing.
It was fun. One day, one of my classmates offered to drive me home as I lived far and it was dark and late and he lived on the way. He had a car, which I didn't really think through at the time, but that meant he was rich. He had been to Norway, his dream was to move to the Nordic countries, and build sailboats, sailing the fjords forever. He had a nice watch. I stopped going to class after that. I never saw him, or the girl who I was intensely curious about, ever again. I used to have worksheets for French, written in Portuguese, that I kept for a long time and then threw away.
// history of not following things i'm curious about
I have a list of things I'm curious about but didn't follow through on. Sometimes for dumb reasons. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes it doesn't. When I studied abroad in Salvador, our program had a relationship both with a private catholic university in the city and the public university. We could take classes at either. We took Portuguese lessons at the catholic university, I took Brazilian History at the public. There was a literature class that I had wanted to take that was at the public university. We would have studied Brazilian literature, the more recent stuff. I went with Annalisa, my then constant companion. We took all the same classes. I wanted to take the Brazilian literature class but it would have required waking up early and getting there at strange times a few nights a week. Annalisa decided it was not a good idea. I had no reason to object, so I also dissisted. I we went to one class total.
There was a man named Sebastian who helped me get copies for class. He was much older, taller than me, a strange fellow. He showed me and Annalisa where the copying bureau was and lent us his texts to copy. I never saw Sebastian again nor responded to any of his messages, but that didn't stop him from messaging me for years afterwards. It'd be chain letters, strange posts on Orkut, Google's original social network. They weren't romantic, just weird. I don't even know if they were directed at me, or just some way of including me in his social network. Sebastian, why? What did you want to know? What were you hoping that I would answer? Did I just seem that friendly? Is this what payment you expected for your unlooked for kindness in lending us copies of your texts?
If misunderstanding men is proof of lesbianism, then I have no further case.
(In later years, Facebook would overtake Orkut as *the* social platform for contacting people, but some people never really got off of it. As far as I know, Sebastian never found my Facebook.)
// xeroxes, how they work. the xerox copying as an integral part of university life
Books in Brazil are expensive. I used to spend a lot of time at the Livra Cultural in one of the downtown malls on Avenida Paulista.
I bought a couple and despite having KonMari'd away, at this point, 95% of my book collection, I just can't bring myself to let go of the fortune I spent on the books I bought while I was in Brazil. One interesting side effect of this price problem is the popularity and centrality of Xerox'ed copies in university life. You don't buy a book for Brazilian university; you make copies. Usually these are copies of copies.
I used to just go to Avenida Paulista to pass the time. I'd wander up and down the strip, and invariably end up in the book store. Sometimes I went shopping, trying on fashions that felt so foreign as to make the person staring back appear alien. I took some photos with my old school flip phone and sent them, somewhere, an alien apparition traversing the airwaves. I have one piece of clothing that has survived the intervening decade; it later got me into trouble on a train in Italy a few years back. But that's another story, another year, another adventure.
// going away party in the park, that feeling of friendship and happiness and just wondering, what if. what if i stuck around. what if i became friends with these people and i stayed and just figured out what's next. what if.
// hiding your eyes with glasses at a dance party in USP
// dance parties late at night, around the architecture building, in a pit of grass
The hammocks at that place were divine.
By investigating the drug trade on your own, with the help of Mateus.
By answering questions you probably shouldn't have, like 'Execuse me, do you have the time?'
By embarrassment, when you 'torpedo' a toilet in the middle of Chapada Diamantina (no relation to the other Diamantina), miles from the nearest plumber's helper on Christmas Eve.
From walking the streets of Rio after dark, version one. **heading home from a party?
From walking the streets of Rio in daylight, version one. Going to the neighborhood of Santa Tereza to look at artwork and being told about how incredibly sketchy the area is.
From walking the streets of Rio after dark, version two. Walking home a few years later with the after the best dinner I've ever had in my life, a French-Brazilian fusion that was crepe and goibaba and curry. I've never had anything that delicious since. Afterwards it was dark out and we went to a bar, maybe the one where Girl from Ipanema was composed, but probably not. I'm not sure we were in that part of town, so to speak. Then we headed to back to our hotel but got lost, the three of us, ladies, dressed up for a night on the town, of sorts. At one point we made a wrong turn and could see the beach ahead of us. You don't want to go to the beach at night. A place of revelry and dense crowds during the night, it empties out into a long deadend where homeless men and bandits roam just outside the surf. Their turf now that the suntan oil and the people are all gone. We were somewhere on the Ipanema, Copacabana border and had gotten turned aroiund in the winding streets. No one approached us, but there were figures in the dark, just beyond where we were. I can't remember why we didn't get a taxi, but I get the distinct impression it's because I still had some irrational fear of being kidnapped by a taxista, which many years later in NYC would prove to be prophetic. But that's not part of this story. Not right now at any rate. The sidewalks in Rio are beautiful, and legendary. Composed of black and white rocks that are put together in a mosaic, they're hard to walk on in heels or the dark because of the unevenness of the stones. They are without a doubt one of the more beautiful things about the city, that lend a sense of continuity between the beachfront boardwalk that's made from them, to the pedestrian sidewalks that line the streets between the tall buildings down town. When it's dark outside, you can't really see them, but you can feel the edges beneath your feet. Eventually we stumbled upon a taxi driver who was willing to carry us home for the right price. Having been lost and scared bythe potential of robbery or mugging at knife point while tottering over uneven stones, the semi-exboritant price that the taxi driver charged us to get us back to our hotel safe and in one piece. It felt all the world like renting an armored tank for a few brief minutes, one who's conductor has intimate knowledge of the difficult mission route, but that can get you back safely once it's all over.
Death by alcohol poisoning in Lapa.
Death by dancing at a samba club in Rio, and the favela party just right outside.
Falling to death while attempting to scale the water pipe route up the ridge just outside of Belo Horizonte. Fleur, Pedro and I were there for a hike. Fleur and I had been going to the rock climbing gym. She was much better than I was -- she had less fear, but I've never been one to be left behind.
From gas fumes while drinking beer at small plastic tables at a gas station. Fuel by day, Skol by night.
Death by drowning, from dancing in the ocean while intoxicated.
Or of just plain intoxication, version 1 (turning 21 and drinking so much Heineken in the ___ largo of Salvador that you think that you suddenly understand why the labels look like marijuana leaves -- it's because the beer tastes like it too.
Death by herb. From that classmate of a fellow study abroad-er who got a crush on you and decided that the easiest way to win your affection was by tempting your recently abandoned habit of dope smoking with a bag of dried green stuff that smelled more oregano than dank.
By taking up your protege, Mateus, on his quest to show you the underbelly world that he's a part of, and taking a field trip with him down to the favelas where his father lives, the ones where the drug traffikers have absolute control and not even the police dare set foot.
By random violence, during a police strike. Yeah, the police go on strike sometimes in Brazil. I wasn't there during the longest, worst one. My friend Ma told me her mom wouldn't let her out of the house to go to school.
By random violence, during Carnaval. Nanda told me about how another girl had gotten it in her mind to kill her. I didn't quite understand the why-for but Nanda took off through the crush of the crowd, escaping on to the orla (that means beachfront), where her pursuant followed, racing for her life in the sand as another woman with a knife tried to catch her. I'm not sure what happened next, but she made it out, alive. Safely.
I never did spend a Carnaval in Salvador, the world's largest and arguably longest lasting street party. The city grows from a small 2 million day-to-day occupants to a massive and over-bearing 6 million revelers. People talked a lot about fantasias when they talk about Carnaval in Salvador. (Every city's Carnaval is different, my friend Mele lives in Recife; don't get her started on frevo unless you want to be detained for a while).
If you go to the trouble to actually translate fantasia, you'd discover that the word means 'costume'. I thnk the Brazilian word for it is better. It says so much about the delivered promise of Carnaval -- what is your fantasy? Maybe it's the small death of a million orgasms. Or the crush of a thousand thousand bodies dancing to Olodum drums. Or running for your life from someone else's fantasy to see you dead.
Of curiosity (Nanda) & of boredom.
Being run over by a truck (driving back from Diamantina w/ Gabi's driver man)
Getting caught in a hookah den.
Being run over by a rollerblader in Itabiritu park. Or a skateboarder even.
Alcohol poisoning, yet again. This time because your Texan exchange friend made jello shots for your party, which with no warning got everyone drunker than a pair of bats feasting on a field of vodka laced grapes. It was the most racuous party I've ever been to with this group of friends, and we had a ball. Waking up the next morning was like coming to after a dream --
Death by falling down the sides of a mountain in Rio,, up above the clouds and not seeing the edge so you just end up in the cloud, the beach invsible down below you. It's the same place, roughly, that people paraglide from, leaping into the clouds and coasting gloriously down to the beach.
That's another way you can die. Falling to your death when the winds aren't strong enough to carry you out past the steep **granite** cliffs. Actually there's a bunch of ways you can die that are paraglider related. Most of them involve some version of an equipment failure or a wind disengagement, which are fairly grisly on the face of it, as they involve crashing back into earth at hight speed. The other one is where the wind blows you out past the shoreline where you're trying to land, really a beach is such a tiny target, just that boundary of space where the water fights so hard to keep the land that no one else can claim it, or make use of it. If the wind blows you just right while you're up in the air, or if the silent air currents are stronger than you suspected, changing rapidly as hot air rising up off the sand reaches your wings and pushes you higher yet, and you overshoot the small yellow ribbon that is the shoreline, shooting out over the endless, sparkling blue of the Atlantic until your gust runs out or gravity gets you down, as it was bound to in the end and instead of landing on the land you end up in the sea, strapped to a lightweight but now cumbersome piece of aluminum and canvas that's on top of you, pushing you under the waves as you fight to free yourself from its grasp and make your way back up to the surface to freedom.
Death by subway crush, in Sao Paulo. Most likely to happen during rush hour, on the blue? line, at least before they opened the yellow line.
Death by speaking English and then being mugged by the guys that are waiting for you in a side street to steal your shit
Death by sunburn on Porto de Galinhas, which means port of the chickens which is probably you, roasting on the sand. I would go down to the water early a few times and read a book on a towel on the semi-empty beach. My friend Maria would come down later. She must has spent nearly every day at that beach, talking to people and gettnig a suntan. I never saw her burn, even though I certainly did. Maria had a thing for Brazilian boys that I couldn't quite figure out. She was half-Ukrainian (her father, a workaholic by her own accountng) and half Brazilian (her mother). Her body tanned but her face stayed white. I think someone asked her about it once, and she claimed to use sunscreen all the same, but to this day I'm not sure what the reality is or would be. Maria was a great person to spend time with, she was friendly, happy, easy-going. She always seemed to have a different Brazilian guy that she was spending time with. First it was someone she met at a drum night near or at Pelourinho, then she started dating one of the men who worked on the beach. I should mention that Maria liked to invite me along, usually asking the man she was dating if he had any friends, and to bring them along. Or maybe it worked out the other way, where her beaus wanted to know if she had any other girls that they could introduce their friends to. I went ona few of these adventures with Maria.
Death by social convention explosion. The one time I went with Maria and talked to a man (educated) and a man of the street (dance instructor). Me, in my gym clothes, men's basketball shorts and a white tank top. They both, uniformly, wanted to know if I was a lesbian, and me wondering what it meant, to them, if I was. We argued about social politics. Maria was off in the car with her boy, steaming up the windows while it rained outside. The friend was a specimen. He was a white man, older than his younger friend by eight to ten years. He was about half a decade my senior. Maria surmised that her beau was friends with this guy because he had a car. One supplied the wheels, the other supplied the parties. Tit. Tat. The man wore glasses and, if memory serves me correctly, which it probably doesn't, worked in a university. He was short-ish, probably five eight. His hair was a greasy set of cornrows. Thin, scraggly things that were short but only accented the grease that oozed out of his pores. He was unattractive, short sighted in vision and conversation. He thought himself better because he was educated, because he had been to school, had spent time in classes thinking about famous men and facts and about how all of these other, greater men, made him more superior. It was raining, we couldn't retreat to the car, so we took shelter under one of the shop awnings. There was another man under the awning. He was about the same height, five ten, about the same age, black, lithe. He was a dance instructor, hanging out in the neighborhood for a party. He didn't think he was smart, he had voted in the last election. So we talked, all three of us. I played moderator, American maybe lesbian between two men who would have never talked. They disagreed a lot on education and learning and what it took to be a 'valuable' person in society. They both wanted to know which way I leaned, sexually and all that, you know. Some cultural concerns bridge all others.
If you encounter a woman alone in the woods, and she's a lesbian, do you still have to hit on her? What if no one else is around to hear it?
If lesbianism is measured in lack of understanding men, then I have no further defense. Maria had a classmate who was into me and discovered that I was going through marijuana withdrawal what with my recent transplantation from university to Salvador, Brazil. I ended up bailing on my chance to figure out what Bahian weed tastes like, as apparently he showed up with an entire plastic bag of the stuff to impress me with at the next scheduled encounter. I wonder what it would have tasted like, what he would have expected, in return. I get accused of being transactional to a fault, but I wonder if it's just because others aren't so clued in to their own tits and tats. Maria says the weed looked like oregano. I do wonder what the inside of a Brazilian prison is like, but that is one curiosity I've never had the opportunity to indulge.
Maria was a source of much misadventure during the 6 months I spent in Salvador. She was half-Brazilian, half-Ukrainian, raised in the Northeast of the United States. She attended Penn State. When she went to the beach, which she did almost every day, she'd put sun tan lotion everywhere. Her face stayed milk white while the rest of her browned. Andrea and I were unable to tell if it was by her design or by some weird twist of biology.
Death by sex tourism trade.
Death by trance at a terra, during a festival of Orixa or something equally foreign and sinister.
Death by diabetes from eating too much brigadeiro or cake. Or the classmate Annalisa that has some weird fetish with calories and really gets off when you (in this case, I) eat cake from that really delicious bakery slash sweetshop that we found on the other side of the knoll, away from Barra in Salvador. She just sits there and watches you eat the whole thing like a glutton and if you ask her if she wants any she just shakes her head and says no I can't, but you go ahead. To this day I'm not sure what her reasoning for it was, if it was the satisfaction of moral superiority that she felt that she could resist temptation that I so readily succumbed to, never mind her role in cajoling me into a getting a piece because it looks like the most delicious cake the world has ever seen. I like cake as much as the next person, and it's probably lucky for my own mental state that I'm not really the sort of person who's going to feel bad about myself for eating a whole slice of cake in front of someone else, nevermind if they wanted some but refused to share all but the smallest of bites. Or maybe she had a thing about calories and was avoiding them. The girl was dangerously skinny, and I heard rumors that she might have at some point been anorexic or bulemic or some version of one of those food problems that women seem particularly susceptible to. In fact, I think she might have been the one who put those rumors in my head in the first place. I liked Annalisa, we spent a lot of time together, took a lot of the same classes. She talked me out of taking a class that I would later regret not doing, because it ended up contributing to having to stay in school an extra semester, so my memories of her are a bit skewed by that. But we watched A Favorita, the telenovela of the moment together a few nights a week, which ended up making great fodder for my end of semester presentation, so I'm grateful for her for getting me hooked on some really good TV. Or at least questionably good. Brazilian media was, and likely still is, heavily dominated by a single media organ, Globo. At night, I used to go down to the courtyard with my 14", clunky Dell laptop to catch the only open wifi signal that was available near my building.
God the sweets in Brazil were to die for. Brigadeiro is a very Brazilian invention. It looks like bon bons in appearance, as usually they're displayed in stores in small, muffin-tin wrapper like papers, probably no bigger than 3/4" to an inch in diameter, in which is seated what looks like a ball of chocolate sprinkles. Perhaps the best description for them is a 10-year old's version of dark chocolate truffles, the likes of which you can get in any self respecting chocolatier in Paris. Gabi once made briagadeiro with me and Fluer and it was, let me tell you, an eye opening experience. Brigadeiro is made from a can of sweetened condensed milk, a generous pat of butter, and a few heaping teaspoons of Nesquick. You combine all of these things into a pot on the stove, on a medium heat. While the butter melts and the chocolate is absorbed into the sticky goop of liquidated sugar, you stir, most likely with a big wooden spoon. Wood spoons are my preferred mouthfeel for licking off the brigadeiro that is still stuck to it. You have to wait til it cools off though, otherwise it's like sticking your hand into hot glue that hasn't yet dry -- the substance sticks to your skin and burns you as you try, ineffectually, to get it off. Difference being that with brigadeiro it's not your finger that's trapped under exceedingly hot, sticky substance but your tongue. As the brigadeiro heats up, what water was left in the already evaporated condensed milk is further extracted and the mass of sugar in your pan becomes stickier and more cohesive. At this point stirring is much important, as if it gets stuck to the bottom of the pan, the sugar will burn and you'll have to scrub it off later. Or worse, you'll accidentally scrape some of it off into the balls that you're about to make with it, and they'll taste awful. Anyway, once the brigadeiro has reached the right consistency -- before it burn or turns too sticky but when it reaches the point of stiffness that you could roll it into a ball and it will stay, you fill the bottom of a shallow bowl or dish with chocolate sprinkles, find a second spoon and start forming small balls with the wooden and metal spoon that you've grabbed. Metal is important - you need the hard, defined edge to help scrape the wooden spoon off. Making brigadeiro into balls is messy work, I usually go through half a stick of butter trying to keep my hands well greased enough not to stick to the whole thing. This stuff is divine though. You can make a vanilla version of the stuff that's the same as the chocolate except you don't add the Nesquick, and then take half of the chocolate and half of the vanilla and roll them together into balls. This is not brigadeiro, but usally called 'bem casada', which means 'well married'. You roll these in plain sugar, not chocolate sprinkles. The chocolate sprinkles are reserved pretty exclusively for the pure chocolate brigadeiro balls. I once almost cried from the joy of recognition when, years later, I went to a Brazilian grocery store in New York City and saw the packets of pure chocolate sprinkles hanging, available to purchase. After Gabi showed us how to make brigadeiro, I decided to show off a very American delicacy called fudge. Fudge, at it's base, is almost the same as brigadeiro except that instead of adding Nesquick you add real bars of chocolate. The measuring cups I had at the house I was staying were in some metric units, as were all the portion size markings on the chocolate and sweetened condensed milk cans at the grocery store, so I would roughly calculate how much chocolate and butter and milk went into the pot. I can confidently state that no batch I made of that fudge was ever the same. It was something like 2 and half bars of chocolate, a can of condensed milk and almost an entire two sticks or 200g of butter. Like the brigadeiro, I'd dump everything into a pan on the stove, melt it all down and then pour it into rectangular pan that I'd lined with wax paper. The stuff was a hit with my Brazilian friends and house mates, though, much later I learned that the grandmother who I was staying with during my first trip to Brazil was diabetic and probably shouldn't have been exposed to an American with such a sweet tooth.
Death by being forked as the person next to you dives into try to get another piece of cake. I made a lot sweets the first three months trip that I took to Brazil. (story about the cheesecake)
Followed on death by hunger at a buffet (Brazilians and the buffet table).
Death by broken glass (party at CONAD08 that went terribly wrong, and I had slept through but someone else had to clean up).
Death by popular revolt because the beans were placed in front of the rice.
Death by being run over in a car by an angry Brazilian who doesn't want you squirting gross crap on their windsheild.
Death by an 18-wheeler truck on a small back road on your way to a fazenda (same word as hacienda in Spanish, it basically means big farmhouse, or ranch).
Death by early arrival (the barbeque in BH with Ju) that Fleur and I showed up on time (3pm) which turned out to be hours before we should have
Death by driving. When I first arrived in Brazil, in 2007, I knew nothing. Everything was new and different and that was just life. I knew Texas though, which meant I knew how to drive. I was 19 when I first landed in Brazil; I had been driving since I turned 15, gotten my license at just after turning 16. Floriano was a friend, he had a car. Floriano wanted to give the new girls in town (me and Fleur) a ride in his car. Things that I did not know about Floriano's driving ability but assumed because well, you know: Floriano had just gotten his license. Floriano hadn't had to have a permit. Basically this was probably the 10th time Floriano had been behind a wheel. If you've ever been to Belo Horizonte (you probably haven't), you'd know how hilly Belo Horizonte is. It's like San Francisco, but with smaller cars and traffic that doesn't stay in its lane, or necessarily pay attention to traffic lights. Floriano's car was new and it was manual transmission. I don't remember how far we made it but, we didn't die.
I recently learned that Floriano passed away this year. Someone who knew us both messaged me on Facebook to let me know that he had passed away. I couldn't figure out what the root cause of death was, but paging through the messages left on his Facebook page, it was clearly illness. Something terminal, 1 out of 1. Death by the end of life.
Death by .. cancer? by a failure of the humors? Ivan Teixiera
