TAMA STARR
Letter from Brazil: The Trail of Two Cities
S
Ko
PAULO VIOLATES Aristotle's principle of physics, that two things
cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Two cities inhabit
the same smoggy valley-a metropolis of three million wealthy and
stylish industrialists, and a mega-slum with a population of fourteen
million-intersecting, apparently, only like matter and antimatter.
The guest of an extended Syrian Jewish banking family on the occa–
sion of their youngest son's wedding, I was whisked from one golden
neighborhood to another by chauffeured limo. Sao Paulo's wealthy
communities are islands in a dark, mysterious sea. The architecturalleit–
motif
is gates: hinged, roll-up, overhead, electric; wrought iron, copper,
aluminum, steel; carved, Deco, moderne, medieval-swinging open and
shut, creaking up and down.
Outside every mansion and high-rise, half a dozen men with walkie–
talkies, relaxed but alert. Guardhouses punctuate the architecture.
Empty sidewalks. A shopkeeper from whom I bought Indian artifacts
refused to allow me to walk unaccompanied three blocks to my friend's
house at midday, delegating a teenaged son to escort me. Drivers rou–
tinely ignore red lights, especially at night. Helicopters glide through the
air like blueflies, ferrying businessmen and politicians between meetings
and home.
Within the wealthy
bairros
(neighborhoods), a world of wit, gra–
ciousness, Latin hospitality, and charm. The food is better than in Paris,
the manners more refined than Savannah's. A stranger is treated like an
adopted child. My host, patriarch Senhor Edmundo, twitted my ele–
mentary Portuguese. "Let's speak in Portuguese so that our guest will
not be able to understand us," he'd say in Portuguese, enunciating care–
fully so I would be sure to catch every word .
Portuguese is a beautiful language: liquid, with a huge vocabulary of
phonemes and an elegant grammar. My efforts to speak it were
applauded (despite Senhor Edmundo's "correcting" my verb endings by
changing them from right to wrong). Guessing at vocabulary, I learned
that the reprocessed English word is sometimes right, the French or
