Ramble

What happens to a person when she goes abroad? Every year some friend or other comes back claiming that they’ve experienced a life changing event, and as much as I would like to believe that people change, I really think that we simply experience more intense versions of feelings that we have while we’re at home. Flannery O’Conner said that we learn everything we can write about in our childhoods, and I’m inclined to agree with her. For all of the feelings we experience there is a precedent however much more mild. My Grandmère says that life is like a revolving door—we just keep experiencing the same events slightly changed. And maybe those slight changes, like the details in a story, are the most salient bits. Also, our memories are short. How many times have you or I had a traumatic experience after which we claim that things will be different, that we’ll never do that again, or that we’ll only do things this way or that from here on out? And within moments, weeks or months we’re back to our old bad behavior, no? I am. It takes a lot of concentration and many months to discard old habits and to develop new ones, and some seem to hang on like sweat in a locker room.

For me, what has happened here on my trip abroad is that I’ve found this new kind of solitude. At home when I while my day away in a café I can eavesdrop with ease. I can mull over bits of other peoples conversations—of their lives. Here I feel like a terrible spy. I understand very little of what I hear, so I just stare at people. Here I wake up with English sloshing in my head as naturally as my blood flows through my veins, except now when I awake I find that I am still trying to construct or correct the left over bits of the Portuguese sentences in my dreams. I’ve been privileged to and fortunate enough to change my day to day habits—I don’t go to the same room to have the same beer with the same people (whom I love and miss); I don’t eat alone here, and as a result, some of my oldest habits have become more comforting. For every time I speak in an unfamiliar tongue I cling more tightly to the way that I hold my silverware. Each time I greet a Brazilian with three kisses, I feel more attached to my very American habit of staying to the right side when walking down a sidewalk. For every dish of beans and rice I consume, I cloak myself more tightly in personal habits like reading just a tad too much to seem sociable, and of course, I read a book that I’ve read at least 10 times already.


Maybe it is ungrateful of me to avoid the people with whom I live (a couple of times a week), but I have to say that I much prefer to live alone. I am not interested in being obliged to speak to anyone about anything in the confines of my home. Unfortunately, and this brings me back (only in my own head, not this entry) to the topic of home as a place and a condition, this is not my home, and with each passing year it feels more and more impossible for me to reconstruct a coherent picture of what that once was for me and how it relates to family and to geography. Moreover, it seems less and less likely to me that I will have any place to call home any time soon, and my mini-tragedy (I can be self indulgent if I want to—some people eat chocolate, I get to be dramatic) is that I am ready to settle in one place to construct the rituals that tie a person to a place. You know, like I’d like to by a $300 piece of furniture, and put it in a one bedroom apartment. But in the absence of new things I cling to familiar things.

Like I said, I’m reading a worn copy of a book that I’ve loved for a long time. This time perhaps what is interesting to me about David’s position in Giovanni’s Room is that he is a traveller, a foreigner in a place in which he is responsible to no one. His name and his voice are connected to a family that exists thousands of miles away from his present local, and so he allows himself to be all of the parts of himself that he has pruned and parsed in order to shape and maintain his identity as a mature and masculine man with reasonable aspirations toward marriage, family and upstandingness. In Paris, this place of mystery and dark and winding roads, of dead end streets and transients, he is able to air the darkest parts of himself and to the lowest dregs of society—the boys who wait for scraps to fall from the tables of richer men. They are boys, not because of age, but because of status, boys who do not fight, but who sell their affections, however brief, and their bodies for warm beds to sleep in.

I won’t pretend that I’m down here airing out the darkest parts of me. I did that in Chicago. I’m here living out a romantic fantasy in which I am an ex-pat writer completing her first book of poems and the first chapter of her novel. Of course, my fantasy also includes social work and language acquisition. But the parallels still stand. I am a foreigner in a place in which I’m responsible only to the people with whom I live. I represent my family as best I can, but to people with whom I can barely speak there are very few details involved in my saying that my niece has just learned to walk. My host mother--I feel the need to tell you some things about her: she's as pompous as professional academics must be; she has aMicrosoft word file full of pictures of all of her exes (and she took it upon herself to sit me down and tell me what each of them does now and how much they make), she has categorized freezer, she insists that I keep the the garage door opener in my bag instead of my pocket (this was two weeks after she insist that I keep it inmy pocket instead of my bag) because the panic button on it is sensitive. This woman who loves her daughter more than anything else in life and who coos to her yorkshire terrier can’t see the pride and excitement that I can feel welling up in my mother, the new grandmother, from 5,000 miles away.

But then part of this experiment is to find out how much I can say in not very many words, and how I can adapt to stressful situations (and people). So I’m adapting. As much as I would like to believe that I came here without expectations, that is not true. I expected to be occupied in a social project for at least 30 hours per week. I expected to live in a home and to maintain the same amount of independence that I have in the states. I expected to be useful, and to use my free time to write. I expected to be in language classes for two or three days per week, and what I am experiencing is very different from what I had expected—hoped for. In little ways I’m disappointed. I am only engaged in a social project 2 days per week; I am treated as a member of the groups (60-year-old women) who attend for support. I am not allowed in the main house of my host home after midnight (because my host mother is a light sleeper). I receive only 3 hours of direct language instruction per week. I do have free time. A lot of it. So now I have to figure out free and productive ways to fill it. Suggestions?

Sorry, this has been a bit of a directionless ramble. I wanted to talk about how I've never been a foreigner for a sustained period of time, and how people around the world don't much care for the U.S. And how it is difficult to discern what is a character trait and what is just a comfort zone trait, and how that matters when you're trying to be open and to adapt with people who aren't interested in adapting to or being open with you. It isn't as if they're being mean, they just being normal. They're doing what people do when they see something they've never seen before, they get excited and then frightened and then they try to show it all of the right ways to be.