Building Something

Even though everything inside the apartment has long since changed and become more like home, there is a constant reminder right outside the guest room window of what those first few months after I arrived in São Paulo -- those jours du agoniste when I spent nearly all my time in a state of anger and fear.

It seemed that the exact week that Vini and I moved into our apartment last March, a massive construction crew broke ground on a smallish new apartment building across the way. I said to him one morning, as the sound of multiple jackhammers tearing at concrete literally began to rattle my glass of orange juice on the counter, that I didn't quite remember that deafening sound when I swept into the place for the first time a month earlier and said that this was the place. "Somehow I would have remembered this," I said through a clenched jaw. (I think his reply was, "What was that??")

And for the first two or three months, beginning at 7:30am every morning (even some Saturdays, and one Sunday), the jackhammers would begin. They were going at the foundation of the previous building in the same way you'd clean the toilets of the Empire State Building with a toothbrush. Leaning out the window and watching them do this gave me a sense of awe and hopelessness at the same time, not believing the primitive machinery and approach they were using. And since we were in an empty apartment, a large and empty apartment, the sound was impossible to escape from. It shook every single wall, floor and window. All day. With an hour for lunch. (The only saving grace was that, like clockwork, it would end at 4:59pm on the dot every day.)

It got so that I couldn't do my work, or talk on the phone, or even think. I often headed down to take advantage of the free wi-fi at Suplicy, which had already been my 'remote office' back in the days I was lodging at Emiliano and merely visiting the city on business or pleasure. But being at Suplicy meant I would invariably have to battle loud, chatty customers around me and the roar of the espresso machines and the giant bean roaster in the back being loaded and emptied -- all while conducting conference calls with the U.S., Argentina, Jamaica, Mexico or Guatemala on my little cell phone. It wasn't working out so well.

Then, one day, almost like that pivotal scene in Rosemary's Baby when Mia Farrow is going to reach for the phone to call off the pregnancy, and I, in turn, was ready to hurl myself out the window --- it stopped. The jackhammers stopped. And a great big cement truck arrived, one so large it couldn't fit inside the walls of the site.

And then they took a week or two off.

It still took them forever to build the foundation and the underground garage. They also began laying out the inevitable maze of PVC tubing for the electrical grid, as it would be the first thing assembled for each level, subsequently entombed in concrete.

"You'll see," Vini said many times, "once they get all that done at the bottom, it'll go up fast."

Well, not quite so fast. More fits and starts. An occasional hint of labor troubles now and then, featuring a union van with a sound system mounted on top, spouting propaganda to the men (and handing out pasteis). And they'd abandon the site at the first droplet of rain.

When my parents visited, my Dad mentioned how odd it was that they had so many men, who seemed to be working so hard, and so little was getting done.

"It's the Brazilian way," Natalia quipped. "We like to do things our way."

There's a great deal of building going on all over São Paulo. No subprime crisis here, no sireebob. There isn't even much of a mortgage system, with consumer loan interest rates soaring into triple digits for those without a massive down-payment on hand. And yet, there are cranes and cement mixers and hard hats all over the landscape -- in Jardins, in Moema, in Morumbi, all over. Lots of new apartments coming onto the market, and from what I read in the local press, far fewer than the market demands. That's wealth, baby. Or it's quite a society of savers.

And so now, the construction site has slowly been absorbed into our daily lives as almost a fixture. With so little progress to see from day to day, how could it not? One of Clancy's two preferred peeing spots is against the utility pole right on the corner of the site. The workers are all the same guys from the beginning, and I'm almost getting to know their faces. One of them gets dropped off every morning by a broken down VW bus that literally looks like it's going to disintegrate at the next bump in the road. One day last week, since they're now on their fourth storey, I can occasionally hear one of them telling a dirty joke, or another practicing a song that is probably this year's Carnaval song for his neighborhood escola de samba.

I got used to it. The banging, the clattering, the sound of what seems like a metal saw against metal, the hollering and the hammering. Just like the sound of the traffic at rush hour under our front windows.

I'm starting to realize that I'm approaching the one-year mark here in Brazil. It's just over two months away. It'll be the day after my 40th birthday. A whole delegation is coming down from Washington and Paris to celebrate with me in staggered weeks throughout March. So naturally, I'm thinking about where I've come from, where I stand on this new project of mine.

I really am building something new. It's taking a very long time, probably with equally primitive tools despite my experience in life. The noise (as Vini can attest) is sometimes unbearable. But if you just look around you in this city of 18 million people, just like the blogrolls that interconnect from this site outward, I'm not the only person who is currently under construction. I feel much more a part of everything this way, and have no idea quite what it's all going to look like when it's done. But so far, the structure seems solid.

It'll come together, in it's own time.