I’m just a few days shy of the three-month benchmark in my stay ... I got my raw scores back for the Foreign Service exams, and they were sucky: 92% English, 81% logic, 56% situational. (—I mean, 56% situational!!! What is up with that?) My only hope now is that the Canadian government only requires its officials to make sensible decisions roughly half the time. Still, it looks like I have a back-up plan, because the drunken Canadian consul here still wants to give me a sort-of-legal job in his office, and that would mean that I could stay here for the rest of the year instead of getting booted out of the country after six months like a common tourist.

But the Canadian consul ... I really don’t think I can bear much more than a month of working for him. He’s a volunteer who surrounds himself with all the superficial symbols of power, apparently out of his own pocketbook: he hires a Brazilian chauffeur who doesn’t know anything about the city, and who took us down several wrong streets when I rode with him, finally convincing me just to ask to be let out of the car; his office reeks of pipe smoke, because whenever anyone visits him to ask about their visa, his response is to screw up his features and suck furiously at his pipe; the consulate is really being run by a step-daughter of his who replaces him in the afternoons, and the only reason he’s latched onto me is because she’s like nine months pregnant and he needs to find another factotum on the double. We shall see how this all pans out. Maybe this is a fair indicator of how much competence the Canadian government really requires, after all, and his pipe-smoking silhouette can just happily recede into the distance as it drives around and around in the back seat of his chauffeur-driven car.


I came back last Tuesday from a long trip up in the flat, drought-prone sertão north of Salvador ... on my way home I was feeling swimmy and teary-eyed, just from the greatness of things, and I had my latest little revelation when three groomed and tailored businessmen stepped onto the bus at a stop in a sudden industrial park on the plains. They didn’t belong there with the poorer people in the other seats, and they were laughing and happy and generally pissing me off. What got me thinking is that, really, I belong just as little as they do, and I can do nothing to take off the rich man’s suit that everyone sees in my blue eyes and light brown hair. Which just gives me an even greater appreciation for the people who are able to see through that—I’m not sure I’m half as open to the suit-wearing dips in my own life.

The town I was in is called Ribeira do Pombal, built on a sandbank overlooking distant fields, and beaten down everywhere by the sun. The centre of town is cobblestone, but the surrounding houses are lined up along roads of deep, broad sand cut up by crisscrossing furrows of sewage water ... the children try to keep their soccer balls from getting into the muck, and inevitably end up screaming when they do, and then fish them out and take them inside to be washed before they resume their games. During the day when the neighbourhood kids disappear, their places are overrun by clutches of black-headed vultures, and those fly away in turn when the occasional men on horseback come whipping their humped cattle through town. The cowboys here are well catered to—all the leatherwork stalls in the marketplace carry bulletbelts along with the saddles and broad-brimmed hats.

I was in town with my Bahá’í friends, who’d been invited by the local Assembly to help with some regional elections, paint the local centre, etc. We got to visit a fair number of tiny outlying towns, and while the gungho Bahá’í youth went off to do gungho Bahá’í things, I got to sit with the older ones and listen to them talk about which snakes were good to eat if you could shoot one in the fields, or what you had to do if you were bit by a rattler (“No way would I be willing to drink anti-venom—the best thing I know is straight cachaça [which is the wicked-strong cane liquor everyone drinks in the squares here]”).

I got to know the neighbourhood kids pretty well too. They dig getting piggyback rides and drawings of their favourite toys (wooden semi trucks, Transformer knock-offs), which I’m well equipped to offer—I was very impressed by the resolve of Manuel, who was about eight and hung around with me a lot just to, you know, “shoot the breeze,” and who stoically gave up his favourite of two semi trucks to a younger kid, and then silently watched him colour it all way outside the lines. Fabiana was a ten-year-old black girl who decided to have an adolescent crush on me, but aside from just bringing me freezies from the ice cream man every day, she also consistently tried to hook me up with a girl she referred to as her “older sister”, an act which I was never entirely able to ascribe to either unconscious transferral or some kind of more self-aware sacrifice.
The first day that I drew a few pictures for the kids there, Fabiana begged me to come draw her sister, sitting me down in the shade with the local gossips while she ran inside to get her. The girl that came out with her was, relative to all the hot Brazilians I’ve seen here, incendiary. The fine blond hairs on her lower back looked like they’d gone fair from the roots up, out from her torrid brown skin without any help from the sun. Despite the unwilling overbite I’m sure I assumed, I dutifully started looking at her and taking her down in her notebook.

I spent the entirety of the next four days drafting and painting a new sign on the front of the Bahá’í centre, sitting up at the top of a rickety ladder with my face an inch from my brushhead and my neck in the blistering sun. Whenever Adailza came outside my work slowed down enormously, mostly out of a need not to fall off of the ladder. Those of you who know Russia know that Russian women change into housecoats when they get home—Brazilian women, from what I’ve seen, pretty much change into outfits that pass as bikinis back home in Canada—spaghetti straps and lycra. And there she was, always just stretched out in whatever crack of front door that would always keep her in view.

From the first day that I was in town, Fabiana had begged me to take her to a dance that was coming up, which was cute, and I ended up offering to treat all the kids to their tickets. It turned out, though, that almost all the parents kept their kids at home that night, and I ended up going with just two of the Bahá’ís and a couple of girls who lived on the street. After all this build-up, Fabiana just paired me up with Adailza and hung back from our conversation. Which wasn’t all that rich: for the evening, Adailza had chosen to go punk-gothic, with heavy near-black makeup all over her face and clothes that had gone under the knife. I basically asked if she was still in school, she replied that she’d hated it and dropped out a long time ago; I asked what she did, she said she just stayed at home and helped her mother; I asked what she wanted to do with her life, she shrugged. The dance was busy and all I can say is I know what small-town Brazilian coverbands look like … the other city kids wanted to leave early and I went with them, and they laughed at my samba all the way home.

On my last night I hung back myself, sketching everybody on the street. It was 9 p.m. when I finished, and Adailza came up to me and asked if I’d draw myself in her notebook too. I spent another hour out under the streetlight, drawing with a mirror they brought out, and when I handed her the picture she smiled and said, “Thank-you, querido.” Which all goes to show, I guess, the kind of power that any guy wearing a suit can have over the imaginations of the most beautiful girls caught in these small towns.


I have another story to tell about the day I was with a Swedish nurse here and got captured by spiritualists, and we both barely escaped a seance, but I suppose it’ll have to wait until next time. Keep writing all of you ... there’s been a bit of a drought in my inbox as of late.


Your evil twin,
Nathan

Life is finally starting to fall into a recognizable pattern for me down here—lepers and streetkids sniffing glue under the table. No ecotourism for me—instead of travelling halfway around the world to look at a 1000-year old baobab or kapok tree or whatever and priding myself on doing my part for the planet, I do sociotourism and go look at the poor of other countries and think what a great and special thing I’m doing for society. Seeing people with legs bowed wide from rickets walking down the street in brand-new Levis jeans is fascinating, as was seeing my first Amazonian Indians on the bus—they had things that looked like cigarettes pushed through the piercings in their ears, and preppy pastel-coloured rowing sweaters tied around their necks. Which is pretty fly. (Also since women are equally strange inscrutable creatures from East to West, you’ll get a few of those too—the Bohemian, the Gringa.)

I’m trying to paint every day, the old colonial tenements and fruitstands and bathing holes on the side of the downtown drag, but it’s tough because then when I go out I keep meeting distracting people. Buildings here have all been left out in the heat and damp for too long, and every cracked pilaster has ferns growing out of it, just like all the church steeples have shrubs growing right on top—last Tuesday I was out in the streets below my apartment painting some of these when a Rasta-looking guy started poking his head out of the building behind me and making conversation—he was working for a welcome centre for street kids, and they were all going to be arriving in a few minutes and did I want to come and join the activities? (Obviously the guys running this place were Baptists, who else, and of course they showered me with pamphlets in perfect English, but this is all beside the point.)
The kids started coming and making swipes at my paintbox as they walked by, but we started talking and it gradually became clear that some of them were actually more interested in having their pictures drawn than begging me to go down the street to buy bread for them. So I filled up a page of portraits of tiny thin-limbed 15-year-olds, and they all signed their names slowly underneath, and I got to spend the rest of the day playing foosball with them and shooing them out from under the table when they hid there to sniff the glue they had under their shirts. The next Thursday I went back at the coordinator’s request to give them some drawing lessons—I brought them all pencils and showed them the proportions of the human face and stuff. Final analysis: the homeless kids in this part of Salvador can’t follow the principles of double-vanishing-point perspective, but they’re also completely unbeatable at foosball.

Wayne from Winnipeg up at the Canadian embassy in Brasilia put me in touch with another Canadian here, James, who he said was a wonderful man, someone deeply involved in humanitarian activities and someone I should get to know. James looks about 60, and he’s from Saskatchewan—seriously from Saskatchewan. We had some trouble getting together initially, and once when I called him to remind him of our plans, he just spent a minute going “Oh jeepers. Oh jeepers. Oh jeepers,” over and over again. Which is a wonderful thing to hear after being away from home for so long.
So it turned out that his parish (this one was Catholic) was planning an afternoon at a support centre for lepers the following weekend (this last Sunday), and I was invited along. They were all being cured, I could shake anyone’s hands but I was advised not to talk too close to their faces. The disease doesn’t look like I’d imagined—of a room of 70 people, only one man had a missing nose. Shrunken extremities were way more common than missing ones—they weren’t so much chopped off as worked down on a lathe. James made a big deal of me during his introductions, getting them all to sing a blessing for me with arms upraised. I was grinning like an idiot up there in front. He asked if I wanted to say anything, and I just quickly went through the usual—so wonderful to receive blessings from friends in other countries, the world needs to be more united and the only thing that can do that is love. Going around serving the pop during the lunch afterward was much more my thing, I could look grinningly obsequious without looking out of place.
I stayed behind after the Christian coalition had left, when it turned out that a huge number of people there wanted their portraits done too. About halfway through, my subjects had all boiled down to middle-aged women and adolescent girls, who make up my core fan base the world over. I’m going back in the coming weeks to give everyone copies.
Final analysis: Ama, a big black woman from the centre, was shockingly kind to me on my way home, waiting at stations and accompanying me on buses all the way back downtown. It’s so rare to meet anyone who sees a white man as anything besides an easy mark—the ones so see beyond this and are willing to talk are the ones who can make the world worthwhile.

The Bohemian: My upstairs neighbour is a woman from Rio working on her Ph.D. in ethnoscenology, which seems to be theatre studied from an anthropological angle with a lot of pot thrown in. She’s a beetle-browed woman who throws her head all the way back and open-mouthed to laugh; we’ve been doing a language exchange on and off for about a month, and she lends me interesting books on African religions in the area and the remains of old kingdoms of escaped slaves. The best thing by far that she’s shown me was a class on the dancing that’s used in the African rituals here, I’ve made plans to go back and paint the drummers. She was living with a very goodlooking gay Frenchman until a few weeks ago, and I’m beginning to realise that she was deeply in love with him despite his bringing young men home every night—she keeps saying that “meeting old friends is even better than meeting new ones,” and that all the men in her life have been “in passing,” and etc. etc.
I begged a big favour of her on Monday, asking if she’d come to the Federal University with me to vouch for my using their free computers, which are normally reserved for the students. We walked a fair ways in the hot sun and sat waiting in institutional buildings for a couple of hours, while it became more and more obvious that I really wasn’t going to be allowed. She was starting to look impatient, so I suggested that if she wanted we could just drop the whole thing, and I’d find other computers to use. She flipped her lid. She said she was incredibly disappointed in me, she thought I was better than that, now she realised how spineless I was, she’d never see me the same way again. We have to follow things through to the end! I bent over backwards trying to calm her down, apologizing in twenty different ways, and it was only long afterwards, after we’d gone to a different department where she was the one who suggested we turn around without asking, that I realized that some of these men-in-passing she had known must have been very spineless indeed, and she would always be on the lookout for this fault in the men in her future.

The Gringa: Every Brazilian in the touristy parts of town opens his spiel by asking, “You into capoeira?” Because every young foreigner is in town for capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art with the somersaults and cartwheels. One night last month, just after having moved into my apartment, I was walking home with groceries on my back when I heard two kids talking English—I turned to them and said, “Look, I’m going be obnoxious and introduce myself here.” We exchanged phone numbers; of course they were capoeiristas, but they knew some foreign cartoonists in town too and said they’d hook me up. The cartoonist who ended up calling me was Wendy, a girl with a syrupy Louisiana accent of a type I figured had to be a bit of a nervous put-on, but which left me wondering two things on my walk over to her hostel: 1) was she hot and 2) (and perhaps more importantly) how would I see myself reflected in this fellow traveller, what would I learn from her about my own self-projection and motivations? Wendy greeted me wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a gold tooth, a camouflage T-shirt, plaid shorts, and psychedelic leggings, and holding two cups of mint tea. Let me make this perfectly clear: this is a country where women wear catsuits. Uniformly. She drew well; she drew with permanent markers cut up with razor blades, and with those she drew punks having sex and sticking each other multiply with needles. On our way to my place, where I was going to show her my work and give her lunch, she told me about her manic depression and about being attacked by her 30-year-old coke-addict sister just before coming to Salvador. She’d come for capoeira, of course—her nickname at the classes was “Weirdo”, and she simply couldn’t get why all the other girls wanted to be called things like “Hummingbird” or “Little Mango”. Wendy was funny like this, and brilliant, describing old boyfriends as limpets and making me work to earn my keep in the conversation. Well, she was depressed as hell in Salvador too, and she was planning on just buying a few herbs and things in the market and then splitting out of town the very next day.

Final analysis: I’m left with absolutely no idea as to what one gringo cartoonist might mean to another here, or what one country is supposed to see of itself in the other. All I know is my life is shaping up, slowly; I’m speaking Portuguese and gradually meeting more real people of depth and transparency (for every attack from Bohemians there are domino games in the park with Lana, etc.); and next week I’m going off with the Bahá’í youth here, who rule pretty much invariably, for ten days at a little village in the countryside called Pombal.

Further bulletins as events warrant,

Nathan