No braço do mar // In the arms of the sea,
Bem na ponto da areia // And on the edge of the sand,
A terra treme, o tempo serra // The earth shakes, time splits.
Quem manda na chuva é o vento // It is the wind that controls the rain.
Quem manda na chuva é o vento // It is the wind that controls the rain.

It is the wind that controls the rain. The Serra do Mar mountain range runs from from the state of Espirito Santo, north of Rio de Janeiro, south and parallel to the ocean into the state of Santa Catarina. As wet Atlantic air travels inland and up the mountain slopes, it cools and condenses into thick clouds. Those clouds, in their westerly descent, settle over a small portion of the Brazilian Highlands on top of which can be found the city of São Paulo. The city is known, in Portuguese, as the Cidade de Garoa for this reason. The City of Drizzle. The days are cool, often cloudy. There is a language of rain, of sun, of being inside and outside that is spoken here. It’s an accent, an expression of Brazilian culture focused through something physical and ecological.

The rain determines a lot about the city. It nourishes. It imposes limitations. There is a dialogue between a rain that purges discarded food and gasoline from the streets, rain that greens the carnuaba palms, and a rain that forces you to be inside. Inside Ubers or under highway overpasses. The city is notable for this culture of the inside. Museums. Cafes. Warehouse parties and multi-story clubs. Electronic music playing in the background. Music designed in the studios of rainy Northern European cities. Bass reverberating into the concrete foundations. Computer music. Latent Brazilian cultural energy channeled into a kind of techno-social lightning rod. Lightning rod — pará-raio. It’s an affront to the acoustic push of samba. That’s beach music. Churrasco music. There is no beach here.

This is why the architecture of the city is so overwhelming. Architecture is born out of necessity. I had a conversation with a German recently, the boyfriend of the mother of a close friend, explaining this dynamic. A culture of the inside is powerful. It externalizes human necessity and then proceeds recursively, designing our lives, which we use to design our surroundings, which we then use to design our lives. Interior design is a cultural practice of those who must be inside. Who must make the most of it. Ikea could only be the product of Swedes escaping the harsh Nordic cold. Apply this to Japanese minimalism in the face of hyper-dense urban agglomeration. Apply it to offices in New York City’s Financial District, glass walls immersing white-collar workers in the spoils of American corporate extremism.

São Paulo is a monument a very particular trait I notice in Brazilians. A kind of balance. The city teeters on the edge of the tropics. The city is immense. Where Americans hyper-focus on building monolithic, internally-consistent identities, Brazilians layer identity and belief. Many things can be true at once. Brazilians don’t seem to get shocked by much. They acknowledge many things, but are rarely shocked. It’s what makes this presumably conservative Catholic country such a beacon for sex, parties, and progressive politics. It’s what allows Brazilian culture to be so profoundly collective, and Brazilian society so astonishingly unequal.

The architecture of São Paulo is a balance of many things. It’s in the street art. In the graffiti. Color injects form into buildings of function. Any vantage from within the city layers upon itself and into the distance. White skyscrapers in the foreground stack on top of bizarre brutalist behemoths balanced on top of cylindrical columns. Wide avenues flanked by narrow towers and divided by bus lines. Shopping malls, grocery stores, kiosks, and dilapidated tents with small fires burning outside. The hilliness adds a stacking effect. The streets aren’t laid out in a grid, so there are angular conflicts as your eye traces the skyline. In the end, what is left is a kind of cubist urban sprawl. It’s post-modern. The city spills out on top of itself.

It’s lovely to be outside in São Paulo, but it feels almost like an afterthought. A coincidence. Trash gathers on the sidewalks. The sidewalks crumble. I’m sitting outside as I write this. A range of Paulistano life is walking by, although it is an incomplete snapshot of this city of twenty-million. Baby carriages and dogs. Men in white linen shirts, unbuttoned to the sternum, and earth-toned pants. Sunglasses tucked into the mid-chest collar. The day has gotten a bit cloudy. I’m in Vila Madalena, the artists neighborhood, upscale clothing stores, bars and reastaurants with English names. The topology is reminiscent of Lisbon or San Francisco, steep hills driving roads up and then down and then up again.

I didn’t go out last night, Friday night, because of the rain. My friends were busy and I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to figure something else out. I could hear the clubs that line the street next to my hostel playing music until almost one in the morning. And I needed the sleep. I really struggled with it at first. It’s a development in my psyche that I’ve noticed over the last year or so. It might be some kind of long-standing trauma from the pandemic — a feeling that the two years of my life that were lost must be reclaimed in an unwavering commitment to the bit. I’m nearly 25 already! The feeling is visceral. I remember sweating as I laid in my bed. The air conditioning had stopped working in my room, but it might have been something psychosomatic. The city pressing in on my chest. Everything was right in front of me. Life pouring into the silence around my hostel bed. Life that wasn’t mine to take. Its a feeling I get walking home at night, when I see groups of Brazilians, couples, friends gathered around tables drinking long-neck Antartica Original Beers and smoking rolled cigarettes.

Paulistanos!

To live here as I have has been an exercise in self-assuredness. Finding the signal within the noise. If I were to do anything, what would I do? I’d become an author. I’d travel the world. It’ll work, but only if I insist that it does. It’s like a pinwheel in the hand of a child trying to make sense of the world. When the air is still, the pinwheel is still. It is through experience alone, through a recognition of the push and pull of the wind, that the wheel spins. I take the deepest breath I can, extending my diaphragm into my stomach. And I blow. I blow and blow until the plastic wings of the pinwheel succumb to my exaltation and begin to spin on their metal axis. Pinwheel — cata-vento.