São Paulo

It wouldn’t be summer in São Paulo if it wasn’t for the rain. Some of the sidewalks are actually made of a porous kind of stone, so it can absorb a small amount of water, as if it could be enough to prevent the recurring floods of January. Usually, this late in the afternoon, a storm should be raging, but the rain falling now is very light. It creates ever-changing patterns on the porous stone, filling it with slightly darker spots, as in a Pollock painting. God always held some resemblance to Pollock anyway.

I see this while I stand waiting on the bus stop. I get so hypnotized by the sidewalk that I almost forget to give it the sign to stop. Through the window I see the city and it’s post-modern patterns racing, like a movie in fast-forward. São Paulo was supposed to be gray, but it’s not. Nah, I should rather say that it is, but in a different way than usual. Newton said that if you go too fast trough all the colours, you’ll only see a white shade. I assume if he ever had a chance of seeing this city he would change his opinion. All the colours merge into gray. Gray and green. There’s quite a lot of green here, despite what people say, and despite all reason. And the green here is eternal. Maybe that’s why I think there’s a lot of trees. The place I was born was dry, no plants could ever grow proper green leaves there. My hometown was gray and blue – a unbearable, cloudless blue sky – and São Paulo is Gray and Green. But when it’s cloudy, like today, I can almost understand why people forget how green it is.

I get to the underground. Blue and Yellow lines and I’m in the center. Not the old, historic center, but the real center. Paulista, Augusta, Consolação.  Roosevelt square. Ypiranga and São João. As I walk these streets I can’t avoid remembering so many others I’ve seen. The narrow ones, the loving alleys, the royal roads all over the world. I can’t say that I haven’t fallen in love for them, in them. But in all the cities I roamed, it was a passionate love, carnal, some of them became perennial in the maps of my heart and mind, others were ephemeral. The other cities were lovers. This one is family. Is the place I'm always dragged back to. And the place I ultimately feel I have to leave. Even so, it will still be home, my home. Hometown is an ancestor, is my past, my history. São Paulo is my flesh and bones.

A famous song – and everybody must be quoting it today – says that there’s no true love in São Paulo. I guess that might be truth. This city was build upon obsession and illusion. Broken hearts and dreams. But it has its wonders, I must say. There’s no sense in a book where all the characters are good, a movie without motion, a song without emotion. São Paulo is the place where they all come from. Is a hole in the fabric of reality, showing us heaven and hell and telling both are lies. Getting us drunk on love. However fake or paid-for or misunderstood. Let’s keep the real love for the rest of the world. All we need are the Japanese lampposts in Liberdade – freedom, it means – and the Pollock sidewalks and the light rain, the city’s most renowned patrimony, over our heads. All we need is to belong somewhere.