June 1992 - From Lhasa To São Paulo #7

The Last Two of the Four Things I Always Wanted to Do

The Colors of June

These fine, mild days'

Enfold me in a June

Of suspended animation.

In late afternoon, I walk

Past Chinatown, Soho

Pause at a street stall

To buy apricots, mangoes, cherries.

I pass faces intent

On work or their cocktails

They hurry; I linger

Preoccupied with little

In this June of no distractions.

Nothing to hide behind as I enter

The apartment I love

I sigh at its emptiness.

I write emptiness as a sad thing

But work so hard to reach it inside.

I hear again the voices

Of two friends on the telephone.

One confides she's leaving home

Accumulations and possessions

Longs for a studio, spare,

In peach and beige.

The other craves margaritas and spice

Rid of her fears and assumptions

Complains of her office. Itʻs all

Just peach and beige.

Is emptiness what we desire

Or desire to be rid of?

How do we feel

About peach and beige?

---

In re-reading my journal of the 20 days spent in Tibet in 1992, I am humbled to see that the things that came easily to me then are still easy for me now, and the things I found difficult and vowed to change – well those patterns are still difficult and embarrassingly resistant to change.

Making friends with people who look and think different from me, hanging out at a picnic table and sharing stories, jokes, and deep thoughts on the meaning of life over a beverage or two and a meal to which many hands contributed – I still do that a lot. Not listening carefully, being so intent on what I have to say next that I jump in first, interrupt too quickly – I still do that a lot.

I really should take the advice I wrote to myself as I left my companions in Chengdu, China to travel home via Hong Kong and Tokyo:

Another gattha from Thich Nhat Hanh –

“A lotus for you

A Buddha to be”

--If I could only remember to pause long enough to silently greet each person with this....

Which is not to say that I left Tibet unchanged.

It’s a commonplace that it takes 21 days to form a positive habit. The actual research shows that is wrong; it takes on average a couple of months of repetition to build a new pattern of behavior and much, much longer than that to excel at it. The foundation on which the habit is built at the beginning also matters. My introduction to formal meditation during the month I traveled with Vijali was qualitatively different than, say, downloading an app and beginning with 10 minutes a day of guided meditation. It was more like an extended formal meditation retreat, with alternating periods of instruction, sitting meditation practice, walking meditation practice, dharma talks, and private interviews with the teacher. With a highly qualified teacher.

Itʻs somewhat unsurprising then that contemplative practice, and taking that mindfulness off the cushion, and an orientation towards engaged Buddhism in service to social change, these are the transformations that stuck with me.

It helped that I had the luxury of a gentle month of re-entry, a June during which I could walk home in daylight from my Wall Street office to my West Village apartment, weeks in which I could take the time each morning to continue my new practices. Rather than returning to the demands of a job with five weeks of backlogged tasks, I returned to a proposal. In discussions about my next assignment before leaving I was insistent that it be a line position, having just completed a couple of internal, staff assignments. I also indicated I would be open to an overseas posting, hoping to fulfill one more of my Four Things I Always Wanted to Do.

The job that I was offered met both those criteria. Latin American countries were just qualifying for re-consideration by the international capital markets. Mexico and Argentina had both made the cut and Brazil was next in line thanks to positive changes in its financial health after elections in 1990. Fernando Collor was the first democratically elected president following decades of military government and his Finance Minister was gaining respect in the banking community. I would head a small group based in New York, and spend half my time in Brazil, working with our offices there to identify opportunities to raise funds for Brazilian companies in international bond markets.

Rather than accept immediately, I agreed to think about it.

I had only been to Brazil once before, to tour an aluminum smelter in remote São Luis de Maranhão in the far northeast. On that trip I made friends with Jes Staley, a colleague my age who represented Alcoa in Brazil. I knew Jes had been very successful during his years assigned to our office in São Paulo, not to mention having come back to New York with a beautiful, smart Brazilian as his wife. Jes was known to be a rising star at the Bank (one of my few peers who stuck with banking and eventually rose to be CEO at Barclays). Naturally I sought out his advice. Did he think it was a job worth taking? And if so, what would I need to do to be successful in it?

Jes had two pieces of advice for me. His first caution was that I could not succeed by hanging out in the expatriate community; I would only really know what was happening and be able to identify the right opportunities with the right companies by developing local relationships, in local settings. His practical suggestion for how to achieve this was that I insist the Bank rent an apartment rather than put me up in a hotel during the two weeks of each month I would spend in Brazil. That would force me to learn the language and interact with Brazilians on their terms.

His second tip was to go to Rio de Janeiro and shadow Gabriela Icaza, the head of our office there. That was how I would learn the protocol for doing business the Brazilian way. This I totally understood. I had done enough business in Europe to know it was the same in Italy. An expatriate manager always ran our offices in São Paulo and Milan; a long time local manager kept important relationships alive via their secondary positions in Rio and Rome. Gabriela was fulfilling the role in Rio that Stefano Balsamo played in Rome. I would need her to be my cultural mentor, teaching me to kiss on both cheeks the first time I met someone in their office, and to sit gossiping for 45 minutes before an invisible signal would indicate it was time to sit up taller, explain our business, and get agreement in the last 10 minutes of the appointment (leaving five minutes for a round of abraços and beijos).

The apartment was easily arranged. One of my team members had an apartment near our offices that his parents were happy to rent to the Bank for me, with the added bonus of a guest membership at the nearby Country Club so I could exercise before work and work on my tan poolside on weekends. I asked for three weeks of Portuguese immersion before officially beginning my new assignment and left for Brazil at the beginning of July.

That first week of Portuguese immersion may be the most taxing thing I have ever done.

Our HR manager for South America wanted to try out a couple of companies, so she set me up for two weeks in São Paulo working with a small company run by a group of young entrepreneurs, followed by a week with Berlitz instructors in Rio de Janeiro. Since these this was a private course, I was facing a fresh instructor every ninety minutes while my brain rapidly fried like an egg on pavement in the heat of the tropics. The approach of the young language company was appealing though. They sent me a long questionnaire prior to my arrival, and designed around my interests. On the first day, I learned colors strolling with my very handsome, very gay instructor through an art museum. I learned the words for body parts and motions sweating through an aerobics class. They even managed to arrange for me to ride with an instructor at a riding academy in town.

My first New Year’s Eve in Brazil - at the beach with the ladies from the Language School. I’m on the far left; my “twin” Barbara is kneeling in front.

But the most astonishing lesson I had was with one of the owners on the second day. Barbara Schaller had met me at the airport, the last few moments in which I heard the English language for the next 48 hours. Now we sat in a classroom and worked on dates: how to say numbers, months, years. There was a sense she was building up to something in particular and a weird feeling that the other instructors were hovering around our classroom. Finally Barbs asked me to try my birthday in Portuguese. Then she couldn’t keep the secret a moment longer. This woman who met me at the airport on my arrival in Brazil shared my birthdate: the same day, same year – twins born a hemisphere apart! The entire staff had been crazy about this tidbit from the moment they saw it on my paperwork, convinced I was of going to be their new best friend.

Portuguese immersion turned out to be a good start at a social life – not to mention that both sets of teachers made a point to add unofficial lessons in dating protocol and vocabulary, including important words and phrases (both scientific and slang) for use in more intimate encounters. Lessons for which I was soon grateful.

On the rebound from the transitional relationship I was in at the end of my marriage, I was tired of my New York friends drawing a blank at my request to introduce me to  suitable single men. For my younger readers, let me point out that the Internet was invented in 1983; AOL’s big launch was in 1989; the first smart phone came to market in 1994, and Match.com launched in 1995. Up until then, dating only happened the analog way.

I arrived in Brazil at 36 years old, fit from weeks of trekking in the Himalayas, pretty sure I was never going to look better in a bikini. I was ready to step out. And Brazil provided a whole new set of possibilities for male companionship, in what felt like a safe environment where every one of them came pre-vetted.

São Paulo is a city with a population in the millions, but as in any society the elite privileged sector I traveled in was tiny. I was working for a Wall Street bank dealing, only with C-level executives. The creative circles that included artists, writers, performing artists, even television personalities were overlapping with the business and political elites. Everyone had attended the same schools. They knew each other’s parents and ex-spouses. An interesting man I met at a vernissage or party was already an open book to my friends, who were quick to offer a thumbs up, thumbs down or shrug of the shoulders. The men themselves were unfailingly honest.

My first boyfriend, Americo, told me that he only dated a woman for two or three months before freaking out and breaking it off. However, he promised it would be the most romantic time imaginable for those months, and he always stayed friends with his ex’s-- just ask them. I asked, they confirmed, and on my return two weeks later he picked me up at the airport and whisked me away for our first romantic weekend together.

A quirk to dating in Brazil at that time was an unintended consequence of the fact that in a Catholic country governed by a military dictatorship, divorce was illegal until 1977. Ever practical, unhappy Brazilian couples simply went their separate ways, found new partners and “married” again. Even when divorce became possible, apparently going back through the process and the paperwork to dissolve these early marriages somehow seemed like a lot of bother. That, combined with the general attitude that all married men (and, according to them, none of their wives) had affairs, made for acceptance of common law marriages and children born in them, and love affairs in general. There were men in my dating pool technically married to their high school sweetheart, raising children from later relationships, and yet happily unattached and available to sweep a new girlfriend off her feet.

Since by mid-year 1992 I was well on my way with “Live abroad and learn another language and culture,” that left only “Buy art from artists who are friends” on my Four Things list. The Universe had designed a two-for-one package, as it turned out.

A friend from the gym where I worked out in the mornings in New York offered to give me the phone number of a woman from São Paulo she’d met on a flight and spent time with, an accomplished artist our age. I called Renata Barros from my new apartment; it turned out also lived in the chic Jardins section of town and soon I was joining her regularly at art openings. The official invitation might be for 6 pm. Renata would pick me up around 9 pm because the real crowd would not arrive at the gallery any earlier. I quickly understood the endless cafezinhos (espressos) served by a roaming waiter throughout the day at the office to be a lifestyle necessity, not a convenience.

Paintings by Brazilian artist Amélia Toledo (left) and her son Mô (right)

Many of the friends I met this way will figure in my stories of the next few years. Icon of Brazilian 20th century art and eventually my mãe brasileira Amélia Toledo and her son Mô. Their art hangs above the sofas in my living room today. The painter Antônio Peticov and his photographer friend Valdir Cruz. The only thing that did not quite turn out exactly as planned was the word “buy” in the description of my goal. Close friends who are artists are more likely to simply show up on your doorstep with a rolled up canvas under their arm declaring, “This one did not sell at my show in DC so I brought it to give to you.” Obrigada, meu irmão.

Thus the next iteration of my next transformation began.