I met M. at a dinner party just outside of Lisbon. A mutual friend had invited us to a feijoada, along with a group of Brazilian, Portuguese, Polish, German and French friends.
M. was sitting at the end of the table on the terrace and I was at the corner next to her, vicariously enjoying her chain smoking, and drinking a glass of vinho verde to every three or four of hers. She ate very little, though we were surrounded by platters of all the feijoada side dishes— arroz, farofa, couve, laranja—that accompany the iconic Brazilian, African, and Indigenous stew of pork and beef simmered in black beans.
When M. was seventeen she had traveled alone to New York City, learned English, and launched a career in sign language interpretation. She expanded her translation skills to embassy diplomacy and spent the next decades enhancing communication between Brazil and the US. In her eighties now, she lived retired in downtown Lisbon—in a vault, I was told. Not a real vault, of course, but somewhere high up and secure. I like to imagine that I'm sitting there by her side, as the world tumbles and burns around us....
At the dinner table that night, discussing the dizzying sequence of Brazilian governments and incarcerated politicians, she suddenly leaned into my ear and whispered:"People. They are so stupid."
The Brazilians at our table were arguing loudly about Bolsanaro, their faces settling alternately into enthusiam or disgust. Two groups were forming around us.
M. continued to chain-smoke and drink, telling me stories of her long life traveling throughout the follies and excesses of humankind. I was grateful that our orbits had crossed in this universe, our spacetime journeys delivering us to the same dinner party on the banks of the Rio Tejo in 2019. I tuned out the others, absorbing this elegant combination of pure attitude and wild wisdom.
People. They are so stupid.
Not you , my dear M., not you.
(JANUARY 2024)
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