While I should be writing

Coffee

First of all, let me just state firmly for the record that Brazilian coffee is, of course, great. I had possibly the best espresso of my life at the Coffee museum, but walk into any café you like and you’ll find a great espresso.

The problems arise when you want to add milk. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not critizing Brazilian coffee! I know that it’s my own fault for wanting to ruin a great espresso with warm milk. In fact, that seem to be the Brazilian way of looking at it: you either want coffee, or milk. So if you order coffee with milk, chances are you’ll end up with coffee coloured milk or so much foam that you have to dig your way down to any hint of coffee. Order a cappuccino and it might be covered with so much cacao that it turns into a, delicious of course, hot chocolate.

It’s even worse if you want a large coffee. I usually do, but large in this context means “same amount of coffee, more hot water”. And then they add the milk.

Today I’m going to experiment with saying “um café grande, por favor, com un pouco leite” and see if it helps. Either that or just ordering two coffees at the same time and pretend one is for my imaginary friend.

The days in Santos

I’ve been in Santos, outside of Sao Paolo in Brazil, for about five days now, and life has settled into a nice routine. I wake up each morning at nine, still slightly exhausted after a great night’s slepp. Between nine and ten I drink as many cups of coffees as humanly possible (averaging some five or six cups), and eat some scrambled eggs and papaya.

After breakfast, I spend some half an hour walking on a treadmill with a view of the beach and the bay. Everyday I watch the freight ships in the horizon, heading towards the harbour that’s defined Santos for centuries. Sometimes there’s a freight ship in the middle of the bay. Often they are half hidden by fog. And everyday I feel that ancient pull to sign up on a freight ship and spend years traveling from harbour to harbour. Who knows, maybe tomorrow I will? Since it’s early spring here, they are all freight ships, but in a few months the bay will be full instead of cruise ships. I feel no longing at all to sign up on one of those, although I suppose it would give me plenty to write about. Ivander used to work on a cruise ship, and he told me about this older woman who was a passanger on it and probably suffering from alzheimers. Every night she called down to reception asking them when the cruise departed. “It was like she never went on the cruise at all. She was always waiting for it to depart.” If that’s not a metaphor about life I don’t know what is.

Lunch is at 12.30. That is, I show up at 12.25, and Ana, Zé and Ivander turn up at 12.45. We usually eat at the same Italian restaurant (excellent fish, as everywhere in Santos), have a great coffee afterwards at the bookshop, and then Ana spends the afternoon sightseeing and I head back to the hotel to regroup.

(Ana is the portuguese writer that joined us a few days ago, and her full name is: Ana Margarida de Carvalho. Never have “Bivald” felt more boring!)

I contemplate the next developments in the book I’m working on by swimming around, around in circles in a very small pool. There’s something very meditative with swimming around in small circles. I usually get an idea or two, but if inspiration is really lacking I spend some time in the hot tub as well. That usually does it. And then I sit in the hotel bar with a coffee of varying quality and write down whatever idea I had.

Evenings are spent at the bookfestival, sitting high up in a theatre and listening to the talks while Ivander translate besides me. Yesterday was a translator who was working on One thousand and one nights, from arabic to portuguese. He was currently on volume 4, but had no real hope of translating the whole thing. There are some twenty volumes and an indefinite amount of different versions and were he to translated it all he would, as he put it, “die translating”. Which is not a bad way to go, I felt. The other writer was Milton Hatoum, who had lived all over Brazil and wrote novels with strong female characters in them. He had himself grew up in a family where the men were silent and the women strong, and he believed that childhood and the teenage years influenced what a writer wrote later in life, which is probably true.

Dinner is ten pm and lasts until about one am, which is the reason I wake up slightly exhausted every morning at nine.

Humour and resistance in Brazil

During lunch, the conversation eventually and inevitably turned to the political situation in Brazil. Voldemort, as my guide calls Bolsonaro, would set the country back to the middle ages. He’s like Trump – but with a military background. He’s candidate for vice president is a former general. In most countries in South America this would be a terrifying prospect even if he hadn’t also openly celebrated the use of torture and the dictatorship. And Pinochet, for good measure. But the Bookseller also told me about the typical Brazilian way of dealing with disaster: “We laugh at things so we don’t cry about them”. This has lead to a number of amazing initatives on Facebook, such as: “Cookies against Bolsonaro” or “Colour blinds against Bolsonaro” or, my favourite, “Sea turtles against Bolsonaro”.

Both the humour and the seriousness of the situation was also discussed during the two first talks of the book festival. The festival takes place in an old theatre. Someone told me that Sarah Bernhardt had once perfomed there. Someone else told me that it had at one point been a strip joint. It had also burned down, so the inside is completly new, but they kept the old facade. Because Ivander has to talk to me constantly to translate everything that’s being said, we were allowed to sit on the balconies upstairs. So the writers on stage talked, Ivander translated, and I listened, fascinated.

Diógenes Moura had written a book about the invisible Brazil. For years he photographed and wrote about the homeless people he met on his way home. His view of the country was ruthless: “The barbarity is the same in the entire country. The misery is real. The people abandoned”. He added, completely unnecessarily: “It is not a book to make you happy.”

In the next talk, professor Elias Thome Saliba told us about his research on the history of humour: “Brazil is a country of involuntary humorist”, he said. He had also studied some 160 different national anthems. Brazil’s was the only one that mentioned the word “smile”. Twice.

Tarrafa Literaria, or Catching readers with a net

I am in Santos for the bookfair Tarrafa Literaria, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The organizer is The Bookseller, as I think of him, or Zé, as he is called. He has exactly the required madness for running a bookshop and a book festival.

We were talking during lunch about how beautiful it is to see your book in print for the first time, and someone inevitably used the simile that it was like having a baby. “Better than a baby”, I said. “Books don’t cry all night.” This led the Bookseller to share the story about the time when he got Ian Sansom to visit the festival.

Ian Sansom is perhaps best known for Israel Armstrong, the bookloving vegetarian who moves to northern Ireland to take up position as a librarian. But he also wrote The Truth About Babies, a diary about the challenges involved trying to write Your Great Novel while taking care of a baby. The Bookseller loved this book, and immediately got in touch with Ian Sansoms Brazilian publisher and told them he wanted to invite him over. “Are you sure?” asked his publisher, and the Bookseller of course said he was. So in due time Ian Sansom arrived in Santos, jetlaged and tired. The Bookseller illustrated this Brittish (and, I suspect, Swedish) way of being jetlaged: empty face, dead eyes, arms close to the body, slightly hunched posture. He had barely landed before he was thrown into a discussion on stage with a Brazilian author that the Bookseller desribed as “a little bit crazy”. I’ve been here long enough to know that “a little bit crazy” by Brazilian standards is more like batshit crazy for a poor jetlaged Brittish author. The Bookseller illustrate the poor, bewildered visiting author and mentioned as a sidenote that he didn’t seem to enjoy the sightseeing either. By moped. The Brazilian author loved it of course. “Yes, I made a mistake there, pairing those two together”, the Bookseller admitted philosophically. “Ian Sansom even wrote an article in the Guardian about us.”

I have tried to find this article thinking it must be one of the greatest book festival pieces ever written, but so far without success.

One of the things the Bookseller is most proud of is that he has managed to keep the festival going through years of crisis. I think he was talking about the economical crisis, but then agian, they are also heading straight for a political one. “I think the book festival is needed more than ever in times of crisis”, I said, and he agreed: “The enemy always hates book”, he said.

“Tarrafa”, for those of you that are wondering, is the word for an old type of fishing net, used by the fishermen in the harbour. “The festival is the net that catches the readers”, the Bookseller said, which is definitely true in my case. I already know I will buy books here, and I can’t even understand Portuguese. But the Brazilian books are so beautiful! The designs are great! I will take photos today so that you can see for yourselves how impossible it is to resist them.

My own talk is on Sunday, on the theme “Tudo pode ser escrito, Suècia e Brasil”, which I am told means “Everything can be written”. I think that’s a lovely title. I am going to talk together with Giovana Madalosso, who I’ve heard is great, and who has written a book with the equally brilliant title “Everything can be stolen.”

The end of a warm and intimate friendship, and the beginning of new complications

So. I’m proud to report that my cultural competens is developing nicely. I’ve already learned several important things here in Brazil: I can now order a coffee (with milk!) without Ivander, my faithful guide and translator. I have learned not to charge ahead and walk three metres ahead of my host and, more importantly, the man that knows where we going (let’s just say that the walking speed is different in Santos than in DC). And I have mastered the always difficult hug vs. cheek kiss greeting ritual.

Those of you who follows this blog knows the huge difficulties I always have in France. In Sweden, we go straight for the hug. In France, they kiss each other on the cheek two or three or possibly four times, and if you combine these two ways of greetings chances are you’ll end up kissing new acquaintances on the mouth. Just saying. Brazil is easier. They seem to go for the very straightforward one cheek kiss. In theory, this is not a problem. In practice, it still makes for interesting situations when combined with a hug. For example, this was how I greeted Ivander the first two days:

He went for the cheek kiss. I was already on the way into a hug. His cheek kiss hit me on the way in, very normal, and easily followed up by a hug. I unfortunately remembered the cheek kiss to late, so my kiss always hit him on the neck. Which was fine with Ivander, although perhaps surpisingly warm and intimate for a friendship that’s only existed for a day. It was slightly more awkward when I also kissed the Bookseller who’s organizing the bookfair on the neck the very first time we met.

But I’ve learned now, so this morning when I met Ivander I managed to just keep a cool, normal distance and kiss him on the cheek like a normal person. I kept this up the entire day. No matter what Brazilians the world throw at me, I just gave them a cool and very normal cheek kiss. I was so proud of this new development that I even bragged about it to a friend.

I should have known better. Today a Portuguese woman entered the stage. She was a charming woman in her fifties, beautiful in that relaxed yet sophisticated southern European way, and she was in the middle of the worst stage of jet lag. I had just got through a long day of listening simultaneously to a language I don’t understand and the translation of it, nodding my way through lunch and dinner and smiling in a vague but hopefully friendly way everytime I heard my name. She was dead, I was dead. We were outside of our hotel, and the only thing that stood between us and freedom was one little, relaxed cheek kiss.

Or so I thought. Apparently, in Portugal you go for the double cheek kiss. We managed the first one just fine, but then when I started to pull away I noticed that she still sort of stayed close. So I paused. And there we are, standing outside of a hotel, with our faces close together, gazing into each other’s eyes, and involuntary sharing one of those slow, drawn out, hesitating, will we-won’t we-moment.

I really feel I should have at least bought her dinner first.