Nicanor avoids leaving his apartment, except to see his girlfriend, who lives right around the corner. He divorced years ago, but explains to me that he prefers the bachelor lifestyle and having his own space. “She comes here, I go there, but it’s important to do your own thing.” When she calls again, my eye returns to the watercolor of the lovers above the couch.

Fabricio’s romantic escapades are a little more sporadic: occasionally he’ll return with a man, cordially introduce me, and they’ll disappear into Fabricio’s room. I see him in the mornings, when I’m on my way out. He’s usually smoking a cigarette in his boxers on our veranda, playing his guitar and singing Caetano Veloso’s English lyrics until he’s ready to go to the gym. He works in the evenings, performing in Anjo Malaquais, a two-man tribute to the poet Mario Quintana, at the Centro Cultural Justiça Federal in Cinlândia, in which he plays the accordion and guitar. The only section of O Globo that I ever see him read is the theater review.

One day Fabricio took me to the Mercado Popular, six blocks of stores selling the same things for different degrees of cheap and all crammed with teenagers walking several paces behind their families. He wanted fabric to reupholster the chairs on the veranda. They had to match the pillows in the living room, a stipulation that I could not grasp, and we went from one bulk fabric store to the next, searching for the proper color and texture. All of the stores were much larger and loftier than their fronts suggested, and all were doing steady business with people preparing to make their wedding dresses and Carnaval costumes by hand. We went to four stores before Fabricio decided to return to the first.

I’m beginning to think that I prefer Nicanor and Fabricio’s homebody approach. I spend my days walking around different parts of the city and looking for good places to sit down. I buy nothing; the street vendors sell only cheap purses, cell phones, and sunglasses. Instead of an ice-cream stand or a café on every corner, there’s an auto-body shop or a locksmith. I spend my evenings eating modest dinners on the veranda and reading Elizabeth Bishop, an American poet who spent 15 years living in Petrópolis, just north of Rio. In Questions of Travel, she writes:

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
Inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

“So, why are you here? Traveling? A student?” Nicanor asks. I field the question frequently and usually respond with some form of the affirmative. I never reveal that I’m here with a $2,000 grant to “deconstruct tourism in a world destination with such a specific exported image.” I told friends at home that I wanted to hone the Portuguese I had been studying for more than a year, or, half-jokingly, just to see if I can do it. Privately, I came to see if Rio really was such a Cidade Maravilhosa, a Marvelous City. I wanted to see how my idea of the place matched up to my experience, to dream my dreams and have them too.

But this time, I speak a truth that I have not yet revealed to myself: “I don’t know.” I eye Nicanor shamefully. He laughs and asks me if I’m still hungry.

I want to tell him that I am dying to get back home, that I would do anything for just one day of a cloudy Vermont sky. I think that of all people, this contentedly cynical man will understand my contempt for sunny, cloudless days. Bluebird skies rob the world of its deep, wet hues and its foggy dimension, rendering us all actors on a giant, two-dimensional set where front doors open to nothing and trees flop over in the wind. I have had too many of these days in Santa Teresa, and I am strangely satisfied with the fact that I got robbed on one of them: another black mark against the bright day.

When I arrived in Brazil, it took me almost a week to make myself go to the beach, Rio’s claim to paradisiacal fame. I walked across the hot sand, swarming with blazing bodies, until I found a couple who looked trustworthy enough to guard my things while I swam. I welcomed myself into the shade of their umbrella and struck up a conversation. They understood neither my Portuguese nor my Spanish, so I tried English. They finally replied in British accents. The husband told me they were expats of seven years, most recently installed in São Paulo and vacationing in Copacabana. It was the first time I had been in the company of people who actually purchased what the aggressive vendors offered: Guaraná soda from Styrofoam coolers and wrinkled empanadas. “It’s wonderful,” the man said. “Sit here long enough, and they’ll bring you anything.”

The mother bought olive empanadas for their two sons, who were playing at the edge of the umbrella’s shade. The boys said little to one another and worked diligently on buttressing their sand castles. They beheld their surroundings with squinting eyes, and I wondered what place they would ever think of as home. Or would they always play in new places, speak English with one another, and build their homes out of sand?

I left the couple with an anthology of travel writing to peruse while I swam. The water was warm, and a swaying line of froth where waves broke carried wrappers and cigarette butts. When I returned, the man told me he had chosen Clive Irving’s piece, “The First Drink of the Day,” which I found telling, even though I hadn’t read it yet. When I gathered my things to leave, he asked me how long it took to return to Santa Teresa. I told him that it took one bus, one metro, and one bonde: a long time, but I preferred not to keep track. “Right,” he said. “Just another thing to fill the day.” He and his wife looked out in different directions from the silent shade of their umbrella, and the boys dug deep holes for their feet.

The man’s words rang in my ears: “Just another thing to fill the day.” He was completely right, and I boarded the metro, thankful that it would be the end of another one by the time I made it back.

Nicanor and I continue to wait for Fabricio to return so that I can get into my apartment. Hours have passed, and two cups of coffee and two mango smoothies later I am beginning to feel as if I am imposing. But Nicanor is just warming up to me. He tells me that I remind him of his daughter and disappears into a closet to retrieve his photo albums. We spread them out over the newspaper that still covers the table and flip through the glossy years of her life. “She always knew she wanted to leave Brazil,” Nicanor says, and although I strain to hear disappointment in his voice, it eludes me. He tells me that she has settled in Sydney, Australia, a line I can tell he loves to drop. We turn to the albums preserving his memories of trips to visit her—cruises, casinos, opera, aquariums.

Suddenly, the pictures begin to look fake. How could this man, comfortably living his two-room life, ever have gone or been anywhere else? How did he get himself there? If everyone is transient, what happens to the places we leave behind?

Soon Fabricio arrives, and I kiss Nicanor farewell. He sends me off like he received me: while in the middle of a telephone conversation. I’m tempted to ask him for his number.
I see Nicanor once more before I leave Santa Teresa. On the day before I catch my bus, an afternoon downpour floods Rua Almirante Alexandrino, and I watch from my bedroom window as sticks and leaves and Haviana flip-flops clog the sewer drains. Backed-up water begins to cascade straight into our basement parking-garage, and Dona Carmen appears, high stepping through the rushing sludge with a broom. I watch her poke the handle into the clogged sewer gate in vain, and I descend with a broom of my own.

A wrought-iron door perpendicular to the garage entrance has caught masses of debris in its rungs, and the rush of brown water is subsequently rising into the garage. We literally open the floodgates and hurry the stuff down a staircase, but in a futile effort to protect, what? The cars inside; the television that Alex, the building’s handyman, keeps on the floor and is perpetually repairing; the locked bicycles that I always wish I could use?

Nicanor appears on his veranda above and calls out to me, “Careful! This water is toxic. It comes from the favelas.”

And I look down at my bare feet, pruning in the murky, milky water, and I fear and hate what Nicanor has said. This water comes from the air, it comes from the Atlantic. It comes from the days your daughter still lived here, and it will wash these streets clean. Perhaps Nicanor resents the water’s transience; perhaps I envy it.

In the bus station, the agent tells me that my ticket is invalid; due to a fluke computer error, my seat was canceled and sold to someone else. Think of the long trip home. I ask the woman behind me if this kind of thing is normal.

“Daughter,” she tells me, “in South America, everything is normal.”

Angela Evancie’s time in South America was funded by a Meyer Grant. Prior to her travels, she spent a summer at Middlebury’s Portuguese School. The summer after she returned, she workshopped this story at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Evancie is from Weybridge,
Vermont.

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