The island of Florianopolis sits off the mainland of Brazil a little way, connected to the South American continent by a skinny, curving bridge. Directly where its concrete umbilical cord connects to the island there is a sprouting of small skyscrapers ringed by lower apartment buildings and a few odd favelas of tightly packed, improvised houses with colourful pastel walls that run up the sides of the hills. Spreading from this centre are a network of roads that wind around the island, following the lines of the easiest terrain, that stretch out to the various communities of the islands that range from the ostentatious nightclubs and old money of Jurerê to little fishing villages and surf outposts.
A year ago my friend Jake and I chose the centre as our staging post, reasoning that as we wintered on the island, it would be the best place to still have some sort of social life, rather than the windy, empty ghost towns by the beaches. It was rather silly of us, really, not to predict that a global pandemic would wash over our lives and completely end any semblance of social life, at all.
I’ve been here in Brazil for a year, more or less, and it's been a strange twelve months. I know I speak for a lot of people when I say that it has been a weird time. And, for me personally, a confusing and sad one as well. Perhaps the most ever.
I don’t know what this Brazilian period will add up to, in the long time scale of the rest of my life. I haven't written anything, nor filmed anything, in a long time for reasons that even I have difficulty discerning. Brazil has twenty six states, and I have visited exactly two of them. My work has largely been slowly mouthing words in an American accent to Chinese kids an ocean away every morning. Of course it’s nothing compared to the ruin that has visited so many people around the globe, of course, but it has been nevertheless difficult.
Having said that, I can say that I speak Portuguese now, kind of. Plop me down in front of a Brazilian and we can talk about politics, about sport, about just about anything, provided they take off their face mask and enunciate clearly.
That's the thing. You just don't go from not speaking a language to speaking a language. Instead you move up a gradient and how you feel about your language ability depends on who you’re talking to, and the amount of background noise in the room. First you start with single words, usually nouns, sometimes verbs. Then you string those into sentences. Sometime later you start to identify the odd word that a native is speaking. But I have to say that there still remains a vast delta separating the basic maintenance of a conversation with a sympathetic native speaker, which I can do, and effortlessly understanding what a group of these same natives are saying to each other, in the middle of a game of football, say, or at a noisy bar. I’m still inching across this delta, but I’ve made commendable progress.
Anyway, that’s an aside. For the past few weeks Jake and I have been living, in separate houses a few minutes’ walk apart, out in Barra da Lagoa, one of those little communities that has grown backwards from one of the many beaches on the eastern side of the island. It has lush trees and a football pitch of that thick, spongy grass that you find in hot, wet places. It has one small supermarket, a fish shop, variety stores selling sun umbrellas and beach wear, and a preponderance of hostels and guesthouses that exists to serve the summer invasion.
That summer is on the doorstep, but I won't be here to enjoy it because my year in Brazil is coming to an end. I have a new job. I'm about to go back to the frontier, to move to a blank on the map that has held a magnetism for me for as long as I can remember. I will tell you about it soon.
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