Her name is, indeed, Carolline, double ll, Carol. She is Flavia’s daughter, my brother Sergio’s first granddaughter. She is 18 and just finished normal school, elementary teacher training. She attended Julia Kubitscheck Normal School where once upon many years I passed grueling exams and was hired to teach sociology of education. Because we had a dictatorship in power at the time, and sociologists were officially considered by nature to be subversivos--people who questioned and preached against the status quo--the discipline was removed from the curriculum. I had to teach “Moral and Civics” instead, more agreeable to the always holy Right. I had a fight with the principal, a man who I perceived to be a pro-military tug, Araquem, and found best to leave the school.
When the family mentioned commencement taking place on December 28 at 7 p.m., I did not hesitate. I was going to attend for two reasons. First, I wanted to be part of the family gathering to honor Carol at this important rite of passage. Second, I wanted very much to find out about how the ceremony would be conducted, thirty years after I had the opportunity to be at one.
It was 1974. I had left Julia K. two years before, after being criticized for being “too close to the students—they like you.” (Truthfully, I was too young, rebellious, and too enthusiastic of a teacher to take the principal seriously then. I would reason with him differently today.) The graduating class of 1974 had chosen me as “class best teacher.” This was an honor. I walked proudly to receive the plaque from no less than Araquem’s very hands. It was victory over the reactionary principal; I felt love for those students who elected me two years after I had disappeared from the school. (This plaque today is in my office at SUNY Oswego.)
When I got to Tijuca Tennis Club I had to wait outside for 20 minutes or so before I found Carol with the invitation. With that, I entered the gymnasium where the ceremony was going to be held. It was about 90 degrees F.inside, one of the hottest days of summer in Rio thus far. Many people had brought hand held fans or improvised them from discarded sheets of paper and fanned themselves away, trying to breath the hot air. Students put on black robes with long sleeves, small cascading white lace bibs (I am sure there must be a correct name for this) and a blue satin sash pinned around the waist. It could not be worst academic garb for the weather. Teachers wore clothes, only graduates were robed.
I sat besides Zelia, my brother’s wife #1, Carol’s grandmother. We saved four seats for some of the rest of the family who came in later: Sergio, his wife #3, Nereida and their daughter Marcela; Isa, Carol’s younger sister; Flavia and her husband Fabio; Fabio, Flavia’s brother, and his pregnant wife Daniela, Dany. Carol’s live-in boyfriend Rodrigo also came. Then there were the grandparents from Carol’s father’s family who I had never met, and their daughter, Carol’s godmother. Yes, lots of people to cheer.
The ceremony was a full hour late starting. The program had 16 items. It lasted from 8 to 11 p.m. The graduating group of teenage teachers was divided into six classes. Item #1, entrance: students came in by alphabetical order of their first name (not last name as it is common in Brazil) by class. Each graduate walked in accompanied by a “graduation godparent” (male or female) who they embraced and kissed on both sides of the cheek before he or she sat at the chair, and the godparent walked out of the court. My brother was Carol’s graduation godfather. After the 150 or so graduates were finally seated, activity number two on the program started.
Number 2 – Ecumenical Service. The very short blessing that used to be, and it still is at commencements in the States, became almost a full-length evangelical service, complete with two sermons, reading from the Bible, and many hymns! I could not believe my eyes! There was nothing “ecumenical” about this obviously Protestant service. Now, remember, Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world… I was aghast. Why? The students, however, seemed to be enjoying, at least during the more animated songs when they could clap or sway. They seemed to know the hymns, or songs, something like pop songs one would hear on Christian radio. (Later a sociologist friend explained, as I kept saying, indignant, “This is a public school!” He said that since an evangelical couple, husband and wife, had been state governors in succession, and the Worker’s Party had as head Benedita, also an evangelical, as the mayor of Rio, that religion got a new life in public schools, this time with Protestant flavor. Religious instruction is still optional for students, though. He thus gave me the institutional context for why this was happening at graduation.) Amem.
Forty-five minutes later we had #3, the official commencement opening with the principal—a very attractive woman, dressed a bit seductively for American standards for such occasion—calling the teachers forth to sit at the head table located in front of the students’ chairs and beside the podium. As I said, teachers came in party clothes, two of the women in sequins. As teachers were called, students cheered more or less, clearly demonstrating their preferences with loudness. The most cheered was an African Brazilian teacher. One teacher came in several minutes late.
After teachers were seated, a Music teachers conducted the students singing the Brazilian National Anthem, the crowd standing and following along. I always choke on anthems and often sing them for fun on my own. So, I had a few tears and looked sternly at two teens behind me who were chatting away, no respect for the Fatherland!
Unfortunately I did not hear the speech by graduating senior Luan, a male student, one of five or six I could count in the crowd. I did not hear because I had tissue inside my left, the good ear. The sound system was terribly loud throughout the ceremony. So loud, in fact, that I could hear everything with my deaf ear! I was not really paying attention to the full text, though. Sorry. It was about the usual, new life graduates are about to begin. One of the students was carrying a sign that she would prop up throughout the ceremony: “I need a job!” Very familiar, indeed.
The speech (#5) was followed by students singing the school’s anthem (#6), and the speech by the class paraninfo—the invited speaker (#7). This was a female teacher educator from the school itself who wished the students all the best in their lives as a teacher. A musical interlude followed (#8).
Each student in each of the classes had their names read aloud (#9), and one of the graduates conducted a swearing (#10), students repeating after her: “With my thoughts [focused] on Brazil, and conscious of the responsibility of the mission with which I am entrusted, I promise to consecrate the best of my energies, my purest sentiments, and all of my idealism to national education, to the greatness of the Fatherland, and the happiness of Brazilian children.”
(Note here, please: children’s happiness, NOT scholastic achievement measured by grades. There is hope in the world!)
Degrees were awarded (#11) collectively and the diplomas were handed individually by class, with students joining for one last class picture holding their (empty) diploma cases in their hands (#12). The real thing will come later. Afterwards, students threw their hats up in the air, just like students in the U.S.
Number 12 was recognition of teachers and staff as selected by the students. One of them, a female teacher, sang a very well-known ballad about love from a favorite Brazilian singer, Roberto Carlos. Students and the crowd, sang with her because the words and the song are so well-liked. Emotions were high. I thought that Paulo Freire, for whom the whole group of graduates was named, would be happy about all the talk about love that teachers must have for their students, as the teacher-singer exemplified, if too sentimentally.
The principal the spoke brief farewell words, and activity #14 was skipped, words by the highest authority present—there was none (thankfully, given the late hour…) While the coral organized to sing, students kept leaving their seats and getting in groups, or individually, for pictures taken by relatives. General chaos in the rink. The song led to all the students and teachers to improvise and form a circle holding hands for the last time, so said the principal, as students and now teachers. Someone said, “please return to your seats,” but before that happened, the machine prepared to shoot small pieces of silver paper was set in motion. This elevated the mood even higher and chaos could no longer be contained under the silver paper rain. Then #16 happened, the principal declared the ceremony closed.
Parents and relatives invaded the gym for more hugs, kisses, and pictures. The crowds dispersed slowly just after 11 p.m. My family proceeded to go to a restaurant, La Mole, where we had good meals. I was too tired to eat a full meal that late; I had only one of my favorite desserts instead, papayette, papaya mixed with vanilla ice cream and drizzled with liqueur de Cassis. I got home at 1:30 in the morning, taken by Fabio and Dany.
This is the first time I have tried to upload pictures. In the first one Fabio is fixing Carol's cap while Rodrigo, her live-in boyfriend, looks at her. In the second picture all the family members are with Carol, her mom Flavia, grandmother Zelia, my brother Sergio, Isa her sister...
segunda-feira, 31 de dezembro de 2007
sexta-feira, 28 de dezembro de 2007
Baratas (cockroaches)
I am generally peaceful and am known to be a saver of displaced bats, spiders, minor insects. I love meeting snakes. In Texas, I danced with a rattle in Red River canyon one time.
But two-inch cockroaches I DESPISE.
For the second night in a row I opened the kitchen door at night to fetch some water only to surprise one of the big ones, good wings, tiptoeing like a ballerina, probably feeding on the bits of crumbs that are impossible to sweep from the black tile floor in my father's kitchen.
The first night it ran under the sink.
Last night I caught it in the middle of the kitchen. As I turned on the light, it stopped cold, disoriented for one second. Just enough for me to take my Havaianas sandals* into my hands and quickly beat it once, twice, three times so that it would not just pretend to be dead but be gone, splashed, guts all over, sickening, ugly, a hell of a crushed roach. (I hope not to reincarnate as one.)
As I turned to get a napking to clean the spot there it was, another one behind me, a little smaller, maybe one and half inch at the most, pretending to be nice and running like hell to a small hole between two separated tiles near the floor.
"OK. At least I got one. Need to buy roach baits. I cannot allow them to run the place." If left alone, they WILL RUN THE PLACE with their fangs.
I got the napking from inside a plastic box that once had ice cream in it: everything is put inside recycled plastic boxes and bottles at my dad's... no, the lecture about leeching chemicals would not be understood... I scooped my roach corpse and threw it in the small trash can, making sure it was really closed.
As I post this on the blog, I am sitting on the sidewalk--fortunately in the shade-- up the hill from my dad's house. Mosquitoes feast on my blood. I hope they are just the common ones, not carriers of dengue fever.
Life in the tropics can be very adventurous.
*Havaianas, or Hawaiian sandals, are a Brazilian invention now known worldwide, sold for $30 pounds this summer in England. They are dirt cheap rubber/plastic flip-flops that now come in many colors. My new ones are brown. They have tiny Brazilian flags on each side. Like the dental floss bikini style, Havaianas has become a symbol of Brazil.
But two-inch cockroaches I DESPISE.
For the second night in a row I opened the kitchen door at night to fetch some water only to surprise one of the big ones, good wings, tiptoeing like a ballerina, probably feeding on the bits of crumbs that are impossible to sweep from the black tile floor in my father's kitchen.
The first night it ran under the sink.
Last night I caught it in the middle of the kitchen. As I turned on the light, it stopped cold, disoriented for one second. Just enough for me to take my Havaianas sandals* into my hands and quickly beat it once, twice, three times so that it would not just pretend to be dead but be gone, splashed, guts all over, sickening, ugly, a hell of a crushed roach. (I hope not to reincarnate as one.)
As I turned to get a napking to clean the spot there it was, another one behind me, a little smaller, maybe one and half inch at the most, pretending to be nice and running like hell to a small hole between two separated tiles near the floor.
"OK. At least I got one. Need to buy roach baits. I cannot allow them to run the place." If left alone, they WILL RUN THE PLACE with their fangs.
I got the napking from inside a plastic box that once had ice cream in it: everything is put inside recycled plastic boxes and bottles at my dad's... no, the lecture about leeching chemicals would not be understood... I scooped my roach corpse and threw it in the small trash can, making sure it was really closed.
As I post this on the blog, I am sitting on the sidewalk--fortunately in the shade-- up the hill from my dad's house. Mosquitoes feast on my blood. I hope they are just the common ones, not carriers of dengue fever.
Life in the tropics can be very adventurous.
*Havaianas, or Hawaiian sandals, are a Brazilian invention now known worldwide, sold for $30 pounds this summer in England. They are dirt cheap rubber/plastic flip-flops that now come in many colors. My new ones are brown. They have tiny Brazilian flags on each side. Like the dental floss bikini style, Havaianas has become a symbol of Brazil.
quarta-feira, 26 de dezembro de 2007
The galera (crowd) in Elisa's kitchen
The sun came out strongly for Christmas day in Rio, a beach day. Before I tell my story, please accept my warm wishes for the Christmas that was yesterday, for the many to come, and for the year 2008.
And here is the story:
This morning there were many people in my cousin Elisa’s kitchen.
The kitchen door separates two worlds at her apartment in Ipanema Beach. The apartment is part of a building that Brazilian real state business calls “of noble location,” Nascimento Silva Street, between the beach and the lagoon, Lagoa. People with money live here. Elisa lives here with her two young adult daughters, Paula and Joana. The apartment belongs to her former husband Paulo with whom she still has a very cordial relationship.
Elisa’s former husband was born in a family of Jewish immigrants who came to Brazil as ghetto refugees with a lot of education, scientific and business sense. They built their wealth through chemical products, construction, real state and other enterprises during the booming 1950’s. They were not religious. In fact, they wanted to be in a country where religion of origin was not an issue.
I had the pleasure to meet her husband’s mother, now deceased, a few years ago when I came to Rio for kidney surgery. She was a petite woman, very thin, always elegantly dressed, with impeccable taste and manners. Dona Janete had been educated in New York. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly where. I will ask her son next time I see him because I would not be surprised at all if she graduated from Juilliard. She was a pianist. Her family could afford to send her to study in New York.
There she met her future husband, a dashing—and poor—young Brazilian of Italian descent, Heitor Alimonda. He was studying to become a concert pianist and composer. Just thinking about the romance between these two Brazilians from opposite sides of the social class spectrum, loving each other passionately and deeply amidst concerts in Manhattan sends shrills through my spine. Yes, I heard it with my own two ears: she told me that the romance was hot, her family against it, but at the end they won.
I guess in a sense he won—he became a well-known figure in Brazilian classical concert rooms. She became a mother. Yes, she continued to play for pleasure, but she did not have a career as a concert pianist as intended. “I was not as good as he was,” she told me. (I did not believe her for one second, after years in Women’s Studies. But I nodded, said nothing.)
Yes, the marriage did not work, they parted ways later, he had affairs, then settled with another woman, and Dona Janete became a grand dame of Brazilian salons, receiving guests in her apartment, noted musicians from all over the world, a gracious and knowledgeable hostess. In her enormous apartment, in an even nobler location in Leblon’s Bartolomeu Mitre Avenue, she had a stellar international collection of works of art. I was there only once. I could not take my eyes from the walls and from the grand piano. A couple of young musicians from Italy were staying there for the month.
But that was a while ago. She is now gone, the apartment rented to someone who can afford its luxury. My cousin Elisa got to house some of the art, at least temporarily.
It is at Elisa’s that I found myself this morning waking up early. The apartment was quiet. Joana had stayed at her boyfriend’s. Paula had wandered in her room (where I was sleeping) half way through the night, surprised to find me, who she still considers her other “mother,” in her bed. I told her mom had made the arrangement for me to sleep there. Elisa herself was getting ready to go to a party around 11 p.m. when I was going to sleep after the daily dosage of TV Globo soap opera (more about this another time.) I did not see Elisa return from the party or even if she did return. The two dogs, Phoebe (named after the Friends’ character) and Zuca, had barked only when Paula came in.
So, it was a quiet morning after a night of revels. They like to sleep late anyway and they had all the right reasons to stay in bed. I had to go back to my dad’s home.
I opened the kitchen door and closed it behind me. Water was boiling on the stove. “Good morning, Dona Tania!” We walked toward each other and embraced as if we were good friends. “Valdineia!” I saluted one of the maids, “I love your hair!” Valdineia looked like one of the Black dolls from when I was a child, with her hair tied in knots all over her head. “How’s life?”
Valdineia proceeded to tell me that life is good. She is adept of ballroom dancing, she tells me at once, the secret of happiness. I told her of my experience with Rodrigo, the dance teacher and partner my sister “rented” a couple of years ago to go out dancing with us. “I could not follow his directions, I bombed, one-two, one-two, he goes to one side and I in opposite direction, a shame!”
“That’s only in the beginning,” Valdineia reassured me explaining that one has to keep dancing, “So I learned! I only dance with the teacher, though. If I do something wrong, he corrects me.”
“Where do you go dancing?” I ask. “Tiradentes square. I went two years in a row to Estudantina,” Valdineia responded mentioning this nightclub I had never attended during my well behaved Catholic girl youth but I certainly knew about it, “the” place to go dancing. This very moment I felt like dancing with a good feet shorter than I, very spunky Valdineia right there in front of the stove. But she was making the morning coffee, I was afraid of interrupting her with a samba.
She boiled water in two different containers. She poured one in the thermos that she had carefully washed. She used the second container to pour water through the filter filled with Mellita coffee, just oh, so good, robust, aromatic. She discarded the water from the thermos in the kitchen sink and filled it with the strong, rich golden brown liquid. “Would you accept a cafezinho, Dona Tania?” she asked, gently, setting the delicate white china demi tasse cup on top of the small kitchen table. “But of course.” I accepted what its called “petite coffee” here, eagerly. She poured my first one (and typically it is enough of a caffeine jolt) and I continue to pump the gold after I finished two, three, drinking coffee like an American. “No sugar or artificial sweeter?” she asked me horrified at the thought of drinking coffee straight. “No way!”
Valdineia goes back to work in the kitchen and I look at the headlines on the fresh newspaper, named O Globo also, same powerful media group, set on the table. Not for long. There comes Tania, maid number two and first maid; actually, Tania is the dona da cozinha,“owner” of the kitchen, the cook, and decider. Tania looks thinner than when I saw her last year. She came in wearing tight exercise pants and a t-shirt. Her skin is a coffee-and-milk shade, she wears long straight black hair down her back and a beautiful smile. She got rid of an abusive drunken husband.
Tania asked me how I was, when had I arrived, and prepared to drink coffee and milk in a large cup. Valdineia joined her for breakfast. They both ate toast--torrada—with creamy cheese, and chatted about how they really want to save money to come visit me in the U.S., asking about ticket prices.
Then Senhor Sebastião came in. Almost 70, he is Elisa’s chauffer. She inherited his services when Dona Janete passed away. Mr. Sebastião had been Janete’s chauffer almost all her life. “I knew her son, Dona Elisa’s husband, since he was a young boy!” Sebastião had immigrated as a young man from the Northeast and was able to create a good life for himself and for the family he created in the South. He is extraordinarily faithful to my cousin and to her two daughters, especially Paula, who has all the spunk in the world. He has already had breakfast at home, so he did not join the crowd but sat nearby.
A few minutes later there comes in the building’s porter. Also from the Northeast, the man was a veritable Hulk. He does not want any coffee. He walked in to step immediately on the scale that I had not noticed on the floor just beside the stove (Tania begged for years to get this new good stove to work) “Eighty-five kilos, he said, I need to lose ten more!” (And I think, “Me too”, already overtaken by the carioca’s obsession for slim figures and perfect bodies, amply advertised on the beaches and on TV stars… ) I touch his arm and comment, “Forty kilos each bicep here, do you lift weights?” He looked proud for me noticing the giants, and replied, “Not anymore, at my age…” “No age!” I said right back, “I am almost seventy like Sebastião” and laught. I don’t believe him, I half believe him… He then pointed to Tania’s skinny arms, no tone, dangling flaccid skin, and tells her to malhar, a verb that means to exercise but more than that, to work really, really, really hard at something. Whoever can say, I malho, is a human being proud of themselves.
I say goodbye to the animated friendly group. I am ready to leave. Mr. Sebastião says he is going to take Paula to work shortly. “She should be at work now!” I say. “She sleeps until one minute before she needs to go, and I take her.” But Paula today is going to sleep late and Elisa managed from bed to tell her chauffer to take me to the Metro station. I am happy to get the ride.
We leave Valdineia and Tania to domestic work. The two men and I take the elevator to the garage. My cousin and her daughter sleep away the tiredness of the late partying on the side of the apartment that the kitchen door keeps quiet, free from the noises of pots and pans and the smells of good coffee and black beans cooking on the stove.
And here is the story:
This morning there were many people in my cousin Elisa’s kitchen.
The kitchen door separates two worlds at her apartment in Ipanema Beach. The apartment is part of a building that Brazilian real state business calls “of noble location,” Nascimento Silva Street, between the beach and the lagoon, Lagoa. People with money live here. Elisa lives here with her two young adult daughters, Paula and Joana. The apartment belongs to her former husband Paulo with whom she still has a very cordial relationship.
Elisa’s former husband was born in a family of Jewish immigrants who came to Brazil as ghetto refugees with a lot of education, scientific and business sense. They built their wealth through chemical products, construction, real state and other enterprises during the booming 1950’s. They were not religious. In fact, they wanted to be in a country where religion of origin was not an issue.
I had the pleasure to meet her husband’s mother, now deceased, a few years ago when I came to Rio for kidney surgery. She was a petite woman, very thin, always elegantly dressed, with impeccable taste and manners. Dona Janete had been educated in New York. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly where. I will ask her son next time I see him because I would not be surprised at all if she graduated from Juilliard. She was a pianist. Her family could afford to send her to study in New York.
There she met her future husband, a dashing—and poor—young Brazilian of Italian descent, Heitor Alimonda. He was studying to become a concert pianist and composer. Just thinking about the romance between these two Brazilians from opposite sides of the social class spectrum, loving each other passionately and deeply amidst concerts in Manhattan sends shrills through my spine. Yes, I heard it with my own two ears: she told me that the romance was hot, her family against it, but at the end they won.
I guess in a sense he won—he became a well-known figure in Brazilian classical concert rooms. She became a mother. Yes, she continued to play for pleasure, but she did not have a career as a concert pianist as intended. “I was not as good as he was,” she told me. (I did not believe her for one second, after years in Women’s Studies. But I nodded, said nothing.)
Yes, the marriage did not work, they parted ways later, he had affairs, then settled with another woman, and Dona Janete became a grand dame of Brazilian salons, receiving guests in her apartment, noted musicians from all over the world, a gracious and knowledgeable hostess. In her enormous apartment, in an even nobler location in Leblon’s Bartolomeu Mitre Avenue, she had a stellar international collection of works of art. I was there only once. I could not take my eyes from the walls and from the grand piano. A couple of young musicians from Italy were staying there for the month.
But that was a while ago. She is now gone, the apartment rented to someone who can afford its luxury. My cousin Elisa got to house some of the art, at least temporarily.
It is at Elisa’s that I found myself this morning waking up early. The apartment was quiet. Joana had stayed at her boyfriend’s. Paula had wandered in her room (where I was sleeping) half way through the night, surprised to find me, who she still considers her other “mother,” in her bed. I told her mom had made the arrangement for me to sleep there. Elisa herself was getting ready to go to a party around 11 p.m. when I was going to sleep after the daily dosage of TV Globo soap opera (more about this another time.) I did not see Elisa return from the party or even if she did return. The two dogs, Phoebe (named after the Friends’ character) and Zuca, had barked only when Paula came in.
So, it was a quiet morning after a night of revels. They like to sleep late anyway and they had all the right reasons to stay in bed. I had to go back to my dad’s home.
I opened the kitchen door and closed it behind me. Water was boiling on the stove. “Good morning, Dona Tania!” We walked toward each other and embraced as if we were good friends. “Valdineia!” I saluted one of the maids, “I love your hair!” Valdineia looked like one of the Black dolls from when I was a child, with her hair tied in knots all over her head. “How’s life?”
Valdineia proceeded to tell me that life is good. She is adept of ballroom dancing, she tells me at once, the secret of happiness. I told her of my experience with Rodrigo, the dance teacher and partner my sister “rented” a couple of years ago to go out dancing with us. “I could not follow his directions, I bombed, one-two, one-two, he goes to one side and I in opposite direction, a shame!”
“That’s only in the beginning,” Valdineia reassured me explaining that one has to keep dancing, “So I learned! I only dance with the teacher, though. If I do something wrong, he corrects me.”
“Where do you go dancing?” I ask. “Tiradentes square. I went two years in a row to Estudantina,” Valdineia responded mentioning this nightclub I had never attended during my well behaved Catholic girl youth but I certainly knew about it, “the” place to go dancing. This very moment I felt like dancing with a good feet shorter than I, very spunky Valdineia right there in front of the stove. But she was making the morning coffee, I was afraid of interrupting her with a samba.
She boiled water in two different containers. She poured one in the thermos that she had carefully washed. She used the second container to pour water through the filter filled with Mellita coffee, just oh, so good, robust, aromatic. She discarded the water from the thermos in the kitchen sink and filled it with the strong, rich golden brown liquid. “Would you accept a cafezinho, Dona Tania?” she asked, gently, setting the delicate white china demi tasse cup on top of the small kitchen table. “But of course.” I accepted what its called “petite coffee” here, eagerly. She poured my first one (and typically it is enough of a caffeine jolt) and I continue to pump the gold after I finished two, three, drinking coffee like an American. “No sugar or artificial sweeter?” she asked me horrified at the thought of drinking coffee straight. “No way!”
Valdineia goes back to work in the kitchen and I look at the headlines on the fresh newspaper, named O Globo also, same powerful media group, set on the table. Not for long. There comes Tania, maid number two and first maid; actually, Tania is the dona da cozinha,“owner” of the kitchen, the cook, and decider. Tania looks thinner than when I saw her last year. She came in wearing tight exercise pants and a t-shirt. Her skin is a coffee-and-milk shade, she wears long straight black hair down her back and a beautiful smile. She got rid of an abusive drunken husband.
Tania asked me how I was, when had I arrived, and prepared to drink coffee and milk in a large cup. Valdineia joined her for breakfast. They both ate toast--torrada—with creamy cheese, and chatted about how they really want to save money to come visit me in the U.S., asking about ticket prices.
Then Senhor Sebastião came in. Almost 70, he is Elisa’s chauffer. She inherited his services when Dona Janete passed away. Mr. Sebastião had been Janete’s chauffer almost all her life. “I knew her son, Dona Elisa’s husband, since he was a young boy!” Sebastião had immigrated as a young man from the Northeast and was able to create a good life for himself and for the family he created in the South. He is extraordinarily faithful to my cousin and to her two daughters, especially Paula, who has all the spunk in the world. He has already had breakfast at home, so he did not join the crowd but sat nearby.
A few minutes later there comes in the building’s porter. Also from the Northeast, the man was a veritable Hulk. He does not want any coffee. He walked in to step immediately on the scale that I had not noticed on the floor just beside the stove (Tania begged for years to get this new good stove to work) “Eighty-five kilos, he said, I need to lose ten more!” (And I think, “Me too”, already overtaken by the carioca’s obsession for slim figures and perfect bodies, amply advertised on the beaches and on TV stars… ) I touch his arm and comment, “Forty kilos each bicep here, do you lift weights?” He looked proud for me noticing the giants, and replied, “Not anymore, at my age…” “No age!” I said right back, “I am almost seventy like Sebastião” and laught. I don’t believe him, I half believe him… He then pointed to Tania’s skinny arms, no tone, dangling flaccid skin, and tells her to malhar, a verb that means to exercise but more than that, to work really, really, really hard at something. Whoever can say, I malho, is a human being proud of themselves.
I say goodbye to the animated friendly group. I am ready to leave. Mr. Sebastião says he is going to take Paula to work shortly. “She should be at work now!” I say. “She sleeps until one minute before she needs to go, and I take her.” But Paula today is going to sleep late and Elisa managed from bed to tell her chauffer to take me to the Metro station. I am happy to get the ride.
We leave Valdineia and Tania to domestic work. The two men and I take the elevator to the garage. My cousin and her daughter sleep away the tiredness of the late partying on the side of the apartment that the kitchen door keeps quiet, free from the noises of pots and pans and the smells of good coffee and black beans cooking on the stove.
segunda-feira, 17 de dezembro de 2007
The Testimony of Irene
***Irene authorized me to post her story and her picture
“My mother is an Indian. Her skin is very dark. My father was a gypsy. I have premonitions and dreams.” (Irene’s own skin is light and yellowish. She says these words as if she were explaining that she is not what she looks, that her background is complex, difficult to explain to someone like me from Rio de Janeiro.) She has a native’s flat face, not unattractive. She speaks with an accent and the long storytelling style from the North.
I nod and respond; “Good!” in a manner that wishes to convey to her that I accept her difference and her background that seem to have been internalized as something suspicious and inferior. Irene is clearly very aware of race, ethnicity, and social class differences and knows where she stands as a half breed from the less developed Northern region. I wanted her to feel valued and an equal to everyone else in this Brazil so diverse, with Brazilian itself recalling the image of the mestizo, resulting from the continuing mixing of so many tribes from our continent, from Africa, Europe and the East throughout our history.
Irene is a couple of inches taller than I am, about five-four. Her body is solid, maybe a size 10. She is not fat and she is always commenting derogatorily about other women who “look like a refrigerator, a stove, so big they are…” Irene watches her figure. Her legs are strong and carry her through the small apartment, from the kitchen and service area to the living room, bedroom, bathroom and office. She works fast. She looks focused, like she is thinking about the steps of the work, what to do first, next. Separate the clothes and throw sheets and towels in the washing machine. Soak fine blouses and dresses in soapy water in plastic pails. Change the cat litter. Straighten up, vacuum and dust the premises. She moves fast from one task to another, non stop. She knows what she is doing and she does it. (“A great maid”, I think.)
“I have a son, Edu.” The child’s full name is Marcio Eduardo Conceição Santos, she tells me. Eduardo lives with one of her sisters in Sao José de Ribamar, a small town in the state of Maranhão. “I am not with his father. He lives in Brasilia. I ran away from him.” Irene proceeds to explain that when she was about 16 she ran away from home to go to work as a maid and a nanny for a comadre in Ceará, another state. A few years later she returned to the small town in Humberto de Campos, Maranhão, where her mother lived (“I do not have a father, more or less, to speak of… He never paid attention to us. He is a drunk and never gave us anything.”) She left again about a month later, this time for the nation’s capital, Brasilia. It was there that Irene met the father of her child.
“I took a false step in my life being with him. He was no good, very jealous and controlling. He learned from his father how to beat women. People used to say that his mother died from his father’s beatings.”
I tried to explain to Irene that men learn to beat women from society. “It is like men beating women is allowed and they learn to do it.” Irene was not very interested in my feminist sociological explanation but I continued anyway. “It is up to women to stop men from doing that. We cannot allow them to beat us. With this new one, Irene, don’t let him do that.”
“This one is a good one” she essentialized. And she is right, some are good, not beaters, and others are not, just to complicate matters. Society, still, condones misogyny and violence against women and children, the weak ones. It is always hard to make people understand these abstract notions. The immediacy of the individual with a body clear in front of you is so much more visible, much easier to assign blame and responsibility than to an idea of society and social institutions.
“Once when I was pregnant the father of my son wanted to beat me in the middle of the street. His father came out and beat him instead, telling him that he was not going to beat me! But when my son was three months old he beat me and threatened to beat my son too. I stood in front of the crib and did not allow him to touch the child. He said he would kill us both. It was because I had said I was going back to work but in a different place. I worked as a maid for this very nice family that treated me like if I were part of the family. My son had everything that they gave me, a real good crib, clothes, everything like a child of rich people. He kicked the crib and broke it.”
Irene went on to explain that one of the members the well off family for whom she worked during her pregnancy had opened a store. They invited her to work there instead of as a maid at the house. They would have allowed her to bring the baby in a carriage and leave him in the back of the store while she worked. “Everything was arranged. Imagine, I would work at a store!” She said that proudly, happy with the possibility of upward mobility.
“But he said I was not going to work at the store where other men might come in and I would be involved with these men!” Irene was indignant. “I was scared after the beating and ran back to my mother’s home again. My friend took us to the bus depot. I left everything behind. Rentals are cheaper in Brasilia and I had a little house there, with a sofa, a bed, the baby’s crib, everything right.” Irene seemed sad for having left a “real life” behind because of the batterer.
“Then I could not go back to Brasilia. I hear that the father of my son has another woman now who he also beats. I came to Rio.”
Now 30, Irene lives with her now boyfriend, a younger man from the state of Paraiba, in Rio das Pedras. This is a sprawling slum like community in the outskirts of Rio where migrants from the poorer regions of the North and Northeast of Brazil build their rackety houses very close to each other in miniscule spaces. Irene faces over an hour’s bus ride to and from plush Ipanema district where she works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at my sister’s, and Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for Carmô, my sister’s friend. “Too much work at Dona Carmô’s,” Irene says, “too many people, lots of silver to polish.”
“My mother is an Indian. Her skin is very dark. My father was a gypsy. I have premonitions and dreams.” (Irene’s own skin is light and yellowish. She says these words as if she were explaining that she is not what she looks, that her background is complex, difficult to explain to someone like me from Rio de Janeiro.) She has a native’s flat face, not unattractive. She speaks with an accent and the long storytelling style from the North.
I nod and respond; “Good!” in a manner that wishes to convey to her that I accept her difference and her background that seem to have been internalized as something suspicious and inferior. Irene is clearly very aware of race, ethnicity, and social class differences and knows where she stands as a half breed from the less developed Northern region. I wanted her to feel valued and an equal to everyone else in this Brazil so diverse, with Brazilian itself recalling the image of the mestizo, resulting from the continuing mixing of so many tribes from our continent, from Africa, Europe and the East throughout our history.
Irene is a couple of inches taller than I am, about five-four. Her body is solid, maybe a size 10. She is not fat and she is always commenting derogatorily about other women who “look like a refrigerator, a stove, so big they are…” Irene watches her figure. Her legs are strong and carry her through the small apartment, from the kitchen and service area to the living room, bedroom, bathroom and office. She works fast. She looks focused, like she is thinking about the steps of the work, what to do first, next. Separate the clothes and throw sheets and towels in the washing machine. Soak fine blouses and dresses in soapy water in plastic pails. Change the cat litter. Straighten up, vacuum and dust the premises. She moves fast from one task to another, non stop. She knows what she is doing and she does it. (“A great maid”, I think.)
“I have a son, Edu.” The child’s full name is Marcio Eduardo Conceição Santos, she tells me. Eduardo lives with one of her sisters in Sao José de Ribamar, a small town in the state of Maranhão. “I am not with his father. He lives in Brasilia. I ran away from him.” Irene proceeds to explain that when she was about 16 she ran away from home to go to work as a maid and a nanny for a comadre in Ceará, another state. A few years later she returned to the small town in Humberto de Campos, Maranhão, where her mother lived (“I do not have a father, more or less, to speak of… He never paid attention to us. He is a drunk and never gave us anything.”) She left again about a month later, this time for the nation’s capital, Brasilia. It was there that Irene met the father of her child.
“I took a false step in my life being with him. He was no good, very jealous and controlling. He learned from his father how to beat women. People used to say that his mother died from his father’s beatings.”
I tried to explain to Irene that men learn to beat women from society. “It is like men beating women is allowed and they learn to do it.” Irene was not very interested in my feminist sociological explanation but I continued anyway. “It is up to women to stop men from doing that. We cannot allow them to beat us. With this new one, Irene, don’t let him do that.”
“This one is a good one” she essentialized. And she is right, some are good, not beaters, and others are not, just to complicate matters. Society, still, condones misogyny and violence against women and children, the weak ones. It is always hard to make people understand these abstract notions. The immediacy of the individual with a body clear in front of you is so much more visible, much easier to assign blame and responsibility than to an idea of society and social institutions.
“Once when I was pregnant the father of my son wanted to beat me in the middle of the street. His father came out and beat him instead, telling him that he was not going to beat me! But when my son was three months old he beat me and threatened to beat my son too. I stood in front of the crib and did not allow him to touch the child. He said he would kill us both. It was because I had said I was going back to work but in a different place. I worked as a maid for this very nice family that treated me like if I were part of the family. My son had everything that they gave me, a real good crib, clothes, everything like a child of rich people. He kicked the crib and broke it.”
Irene went on to explain that one of the members the well off family for whom she worked during her pregnancy had opened a store. They invited her to work there instead of as a maid at the house. They would have allowed her to bring the baby in a carriage and leave him in the back of the store while she worked. “Everything was arranged. Imagine, I would work at a store!” She said that proudly, happy with the possibility of upward mobility.
“But he said I was not going to work at the store where other men might come in and I would be involved with these men!” Irene was indignant. “I was scared after the beating and ran back to my mother’s home again. My friend took us to the bus depot. I left everything behind. Rentals are cheaper in Brasilia and I had a little house there, with a sofa, a bed, the baby’s crib, everything right.” Irene seemed sad for having left a “real life” behind because of the batterer.
“Then I could not go back to Brasilia. I hear that the father of my son has another woman now who he also beats. I came to Rio.”
Now 30, Irene lives with her now boyfriend, a younger man from the state of Paraiba, in Rio das Pedras. This is a sprawling slum like community in the outskirts of Rio where migrants from the poorer regions of the North and Northeast of Brazil build their rackety houses very close to each other in miniscule spaces. Irene faces over an hour’s bus ride to and from plush Ipanema district where she works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at my sister’s, and Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for Carmô, my sister’s friend. “Too much work at Dona Carmô’s,” Irene says, “too many people, lots of silver to polish.”
sexta-feira, 14 de dezembro de 2007
Finding Francesca
I don’t remember how I met Francesca. I think I was about 12 or 13, in my first year of ginasio, junior high. I remember walking with her to and from school. My street was on her path, so it was easy. We walked and said goodbye when we arrived at the iron gate of my house. She proceeded to her house in a vila several streets further. (A vila is a cul-de-sac surrounded by what best could be described as Portuguese style town houses.)
I listened to Francesca attentively. We talked. I was in awe at how knowledgeable she was. Instead of entering my house when we got to the gate, I started to continue to walk all the way to her house and then I would return home, pondering about what we had talked about.
I do not remember details of our conversations. I remember her talking about her family, how strict her parents were and what a drag that was. Her sister had a boyfriend and Francesca covered for her, telling lies about why her sister was late. I probably complained about my family as well, my absent father, my perennially unhappy mother, my disgruntled siblings. Sheer hell, for us adolescents.
The only story I remember from those days with Francesca was Beatriz’s story. Like Francesca, Beatriz was also older than I. She no longer attended our school. Beatriz decided to run away from home. She was quite a tomboy, I know. It was Francesca who helped her, cutting her hair and not telling which direction did Beatriz escaped dressed as a young man.
That story of transgression, gender transgression and transgression of all the behavior codes a girl must obey not to find herself in dangerous situations fascinated me! I fantasized a lot about being like Beatriz. A few years later, when I visited our recently founded new capital, Brasilia, I located Beatriz, met and spent an afternoon fishing with her at the lake. One of my heroes.
Francesca was my hero too. She had existential angst down pat. I rehearsed it too, feeling bored, making eyes, crying at sad songs. Francesca suffered from terrible social shyness. I could not learn that, I tried. I was just too nosy.
I don’t remember how we separated. Life brings people together and separates them, tout doucement, sans faire de bruit, as the song goes. My love for Francesca was so deep that I named my guitar Frances. It was not the full Francesca because I did not want anyone to know or admit that my guitar (masculine word violao in Portuguese) was named after a girl.
I learned at one time that Francesca had moved to Brasilia, one of the centers of student agitation just before the military dictatorship was established. Of course she would be involved. Later I knew that she had married a man with the last name Golubov. I have a letter that indicated she was having a hard time managing having become a mother. Silence. Absence. Time passing. No news of Francesca.
After I moved to the U.S., for many years I have tried to find her, with no avail. I wrote to the Correio Brasiliense, the capital’s newspaper, asking them to publish a letter of inquiry. I would look in phone books and ask people who lived in Brasilia if they knew of a Francesca. Maybe five years ago I found Jaime Golubov, an architect and artist, theorist of symmetries as a professor at the University of Brasilia. I wrote to him but never received a response. I just could not find vestiges of my Francesca.
Yesterday my sister was showing features in the computer and we went to Orkut. I played a bit and decided again to look for Panza (Francesca’s maiden name). No results. I go to find Jaime Golubov again, and get a page from his research in symmetries where a student indicates that she is continuing to take on the topic after his death in 1996. Oh, well. No wonder he did not answer me. He was dead… There is a picture of him. “Very interesting man,” I thought, “someone who Francesca might have loved, a genius type…” Under this picture posted in Flckr, a feature of Google, there was a comment from a reader: “Oh, this is my dad! I had not seen him in so many years!” Signed, Iemanja75. By the way, for those who do not know it, Iemanja is the goddess of the sea in AfroBrazilian religions.
I just about died myself. I clicked on the comment and found Iemanja75’s pictures posted. A photographer. No doubt Jaime and Francesca’s daughter. She had a collection of family photos posted. I clicked on that. There they were, Dona Rosina, Senhor Gennaro, Francesca’s parents, and Francesca and her sister Maria Jose in a picture beside their mother, Francesca looking exactly as she did when we were schoolgirls.
I sent a message to Iemanja75 who I know now be named Leticia. She lives in London. I told her about myself, about the friendship with her mom, and asked if her mom was still alive. She answered back immediately! I could not believe it! My Francesca is alive and well and also living in England. Then Francesca herself wrote to me,
Carissima Tania;
What a surprise, and a very good one!!!!! So, you have relocated to
the USA I understand??
YES, we have a 50years catch up to do, and let's hope that our diverse
ways of using English, yours American, mine British, wouldn't interfer
in our communication.
You couldn't find me because now I am using my maiden name Francesca Viceconti-Panza, and my website is empty.
I came to London to do a PhD 20years ago, and couldn't cope with it
all due to family pressures. But we decided to stay because I could
use my Italian nationality.
Since then, I did a degree in Public Art and Design, taught history of
art, did translation work, had a grandson, joined the Palestine
Solidarity Campaign and went there to see all the Isreali violence and
racism in the flesh, and had a show of my digital images about
Palestine just last October....
It will be great to keep in touch; I am now planning to go to Rio in
April to see my sister Giusseppina, and work alongside this English
journalist who lives in S.Paulo, and is a commited Palestinian
supporter.
I am taking the liberty to attach 1jepg image of mine and hope you
will see what type of work that is about.
Love and peace, muito amor e carinho. bacci tanti con amore...
Amigona de sempre Francesca
Life is good. It gave me back Francesca. In London!
I listened to Francesca attentively. We talked. I was in awe at how knowledgeable she was. Instead of entering my house when we got to the gate, I started to continue to walk all the way to her house and then I would return home, pondering about what we had talked about.
I do not remember details of our conversations. I remember her talking about her family, how strict her parents were and what a drag that was. Her sister had a boyfriend and Francesca covered for her, telling lies about why her sister was late. I probably complained about my family as well, my absent father, my perennially unhappy mother, my disgruntled siblings. Sheer hell, for us adolescents.
The only story I remember from those days with Francesca was Beatriz’s story. Like Francesca, Beatriz was also older than I. She no longer attended our school. Beatriz decided to run away from home. She was quite a tomboy, I know. It was Francesca who helped her, cutting her hair and not telling which direction did Beatriz escaped dressed as a young man.
That story of transgression, gender transgression and transgression of all the behavior codes a girl must obey not to find herself in dangerous situations fascinated me! I fantasized a lot about being like Beatriz. A few years later, when I visited our recently founded new capital, Brasilia, I located Beatriz, met and spent an afternoon fishing with her at the lake. One of my heroes.
Francesca was my hero too. She had existential angst down pat. I rehearsed it too, feeling bored, making eyes, crying at sad songs. Francesca suffered from terrible social shyness. I could not learn that, I tried. I was just too nosy.
I don’t remember how we separated. Life brings people together and separates them, tout doucement, sans faire de bruit, as the song goes. My love for Francesca was so deep that I named my guitar Frances. It was not the full Francesca because I did not want anyone to know or admit that my guitar (masculine word violao in Portuguese) was named after a girl.
I learned at one time that Francesca had moved to Brasilia, one of the centers of student agitation just before the military dictatorship was established. Of course she would be involved. Later I knew that she had married a man with the last name Golubov. I have a letter that indicated she was having a hard time managing having become a mother. Silence. Absence. Time passing. No news of Francesca.
After I moved to the U.S., for many years I have tried to find her, with no avail. I wrote to the Correio Brasiliense, the capital’s newspaper, asking them to publish a letter of inquiry. I would look in phone books and ask people who lived in Brasilia if they knew of a Francesca. Maybe five years ago I found Jaime Golubov, an architect and artist, theorist of symmetries as a professor at the University of Brasilia. I wrote to him but never received a response. I just could not find vestiges of my Francesca.
Yesterday my sister was showing features in the computer and we went to Orkut. I played a bit and decided again to look for Panza (Francesca’s maiden name). No results. I go to find Jaime Golubov again, and get a page from his research in symmetries where a student indicates that she is continuing to take on the topic after his death in 1996. Oh, well. No wonder he did not answer me. He was dead… There is a picture of him. “Very interesting man,” I thought, “someone who Francesca might have loved, a genius type…” Under this picture posted in Flckr, a feature of Google, there was a comment from a reader: “Oh, this is my dad! I had not seen him in so many years!” Signed, Iemanja75. By the way, for those who do not know it, Iemanja is the goddess of the sea in AfroBrazilian religions.
I just about died myself. I clicked on the comment and found Iemanja75’s pictures posted. A photographer. No doubt Jaime and Francesca’s daughter. She had a collection of family photos posted. I clicked on that. There they were, Dona Rosina, Senhor Gennaro, Francesca’s parents, and Francesca and her sister Maria Jose in a picture beside their mother, Francesca looking exactly as she did when we were schoolgirls.
I sent a message to Iemanja75 who I know now be named Leticia. She lives in London. I told her about myself, about the friendship with her mom, and asked if her mom was still alive. She answered back immediately! I could not believe it! My Francesca is alive and well and also living in England. Then Francesca herself wrote to me,
Carissima Tania;
What a surprise, and a very good one!!!!! So, you have relocated to
the USA I understand??
YES, we have a 50years catch up to do, and let's hope that our diverse
ways of using English, yours American, mine British, wouldn't interfer
in our communication.
You couldn't find me because now I am using my maiden name Francesca Viceconti-Panza, and my website is empty.
I came to London to do a PhD 20years ago, and couldn't cope with it
all due to family pressures. But we decided to stay because I could
use my Italian nationality.
Since then, I did a degree in Public Art and Design, taught history of
art, did translation work, had a grandson, joined the Palestine
Solidarity Campaign and went there to see all the Isreali violence and
racism in the flesh, and had a show of my digital images about
Palestine just last October....
It will be great to keep in touch; I am now planning to go to Rio in
April to see my sister Giusseppina, and work alongside this English
journalist who lives in S.Paulo, and is a commited Palestinian
supporter.
I am taking the liberty to attach 1jepg image of mine and hope you
will see what type of work that is about.
Love and peace, muito amor e carinho. bacci tanti con amore...
Amigona de sempre Francesca
Life is good. It gave me back Francesca. In London!
quinta-feira, 13 de dezembro de 2007
Yesterday, Wednesday 12/13/07
My cousin's wife, Marilia, came to get me late afternoon. It was raining but not that much, so we started walking slowly on Visconde de Piraja, the busy commercial avenue where my sister lives in an apartment building. We were supposed to go to Mause's (my sister) office of plastic surgery down a few blocks on the same avenue.
Marilia teaches English as a second language. Her husband, my cousin Emanoel, has a Ph.D. in Engineering from Cornnell. I spent my first Christmas in the US in 1976 with my son at their graduate student apartment on campus. They also had a baby, Gustavo, who is a physician himself today. Gustavo has cerebral palsy due to a blotched delivery, so my family believes. Gabriel (who was born in Sao Paulo, in Piracicaba) and Gustavo are the same age.
Marilia wanted to buy a gift for Sonia, my sister's office manager. She likes Sonia very much because she treats everyone with kindness and she has a great sense of humor. So we visited many, many of the mini-stores that are along Visconde de Piraja and inside many so-called "galleries", high rises with stores on the first floor. Each store specializes in something, many are outlets for designers. They are a feast to the eyes. Brazilian design has come a long ways, so the summer clothes for women are fun, creative, very, very, very feminine, with funky details, and very colorful. I could not stop thinking about Jan Kagan. She would spend all her money here!
Marilia bought a t-shirt in purple, 100 percent cotton, nothing special but of good quality. In a jewelry store (she makes fashion jewelry herself) we saw a bracelet made of tiny saphire beads in many colors, strung to form a design of flowers. It cost 10,000 reais, aboutUS$5,000. It was totally magnificent, a delight to the eyes. No, I would NOT buy it... There are many, many jewelry stores on this avenue. There are two high rises completely dedicated to the manufacture and sale of high end jewelry to tourists, H. Stern and Amsterdam Sauer. You cannot believe the beauty of the pieces against the ugliness of the poverty you can also see everywhere. What about that for contradiction?
At my sister's office, Marilia had her stiches removed from her ears. My sister developed a system to rejuvenate ear lobes. She had done Marilia's face lift--which turned out PERFECTLY. By this Marilia explains, "I look like a 55 year old woman with money in the bank." By which she means, she does not look young, she just looks really, really, good for her age, 55. And, she does. My sister is that good as a plastic surgeon! So, my sister did her ear lobes to complement.
After the stiches we took a cab to my sister's apartment because it was raining cats, dogs, and other tropical domestic animals as well... My cousins Elisa (Paula's mother, for those of you who remember my Paula living in Oswego), Alzira, and Emanoel (Alzira's brother and Marilia's husband) also came for a simple meal of brown rice, salad and organic roasted chicken in orange sauce, and flan for dessert--"pudim" as we say it here. We talked a lot and planned Christmas dinner at Elisa's, our traditional "Orphan's Christmas"--a light way to confront the fact that all of our parents, with few exceptions, died at age 50 or less. We have been orphans for a long time.
Marilia teaches English as a second language. Her husband, my cousin Emanoel, has a Ph.D. in Engineering from Cornnell. I spent my first Christmas in the US in 1976 with my son at their graduate student apartment on campus. They also had a baby, Gustavo, who is a physician himself today. Gustavo has cerebral palsy due to a blotched delivery, so my family believes. Gabriel (who was born in Sao Paulo, in Piracicaba) and Gustavo are the same age.
Marilia wanted to buy a gift for Sonia, my sister's office manager. She likes Sonia very much because she treats everyone with kindness and she has a great sense of humor. So we visited many, many of the mini-stores that are along Visconde de Piraja and inside many so-called "galleries", high rises with stores on the first floor. Each store specializes in something, many are outlets for designers. They are a feast to the eyes. Brazilian design has come a long ways, so the summer clothes for women are fun, creative, very, very, very feminine, with funky details, and very colorful. I could not stop thinking about Jan Kagan. She would spend all her money here!
Marilia bought a t-shirt in purple, 100 percent cotton, nothing special but of good quality. In a jewelry store (she makes fashion jewelry herself) we saw a bracelet made of tiny saphire beads in many colors, strung to form a design of flowers. It cost 10,000 reais, aboutUS$5,000. It was totally magnificent, a delight to the eyes. No, I would NOT buy it... There are many, many jewelry stores on this avenue. There are two high rises completely dedicated to the manufacture and sale of high end jewelry to tourists, H. Stern and Amsterdam Sauer. You cannot believe the beauty of the pieces against the ugliness of the poverty you can also see everywhere. What about that for contradiction?
At my sister's office, Marilia had her stiches removed from her ears. My sister developed a system to rejuvenate ear lobes. She had done Marilia's face lift--which turned out PERFECTLY. By this Marilia explains, "I look like a 55 year old woman with money in the bank." By which she means, she does not look young, she just looks really, really, good for her age, 55. And, she does. My sister is that good as a plastic surgeon! So, my sister did her ear lobes to complement.
After the stiches we took a cab to my sister's apartment because it was raining cats, dogs, and other tropical domestic animals as well... My cousins Elisa (Paula's mother, for those of you who remember my Paula living in Oswego), Alzira, and Emanoel (Alzira's brother and Marilia's husband) also came for a simple meal of brown rice, salad and organic roasted chicken in orange sauce, and flan for dessert--"pudim" as we say it here. We talked a lot and planned Christmas dinner at Elisa's, our traditional "Orphan's Christmas"--a light way to confront the fact that all of our parents, with few exceptions, died at age 50 or less. We have been orphans for a long time.
The first three days in Rio
December 13, 2007 - 7:56 a.m.
This is my third day in Rio. When I arrived the sun was shining. Yesterday the sun was out in the morning. My sister and I went to the beach. In the afternoon, thunderstorms. The thunder was loud and much, much rain fell. I took a nap through it. Can you believe it, a nap? Today it is windy and cooler, not so hot and humid. The skies are cloudy...
I am hoping to maintain this blog so people can check me out if they wish. I am going to include experiences, personal observations and just plain news... and talk about food also. I always talk about food!
This is my third day in Rio. When I arrived the sun was shining. Yesterday the sun was out in the morning. My sister and I went to the beach. In the afternoon, thunderstorms. The thunder was loud and much, much rain fell. I took a nap through it. Can you believe it, a nap? Today it is windy and cooler, not so hot and humid. The skies are cloudy...
I am hoping to maintain this blog so people can check me out if they wish. I am going to include experiences, personal observations and just plain news... and talk about food also. I always talk about food!
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