“So what did you write about us?” Fernanda shouted into my ear over the music. We were sitting on a curved sofa at a jazz bar, eating something fried. Multicolored lights were circulating overhead and three musicians in their early 50s were standing on a platform, laying into the middle verse of “Fly Me To The Moon.” The one at the organ (a Hammond, we were told several times in tones of reverence) was bald and wearing a waistcoat and John Lennon glasses. The drummer had his eyes closed, a slight smile playing across his face, his hands moving independently of each other, masterfully syncopated, delicate as a cat’s tail. The guitarist was wearing red corduroy trousers, looking for all the world like he’d just stepped out of a parent-teacher meeting but playing with the finesse and quiet confidence of an honest-to-god virtuoso.
It was a different scene entirely from where we had met Fernanda a week before. That had been an event subtly titled, THIS IS NOT A DATE, which I had stumbled upon while mindlessly scrolling through dog videos on Instagram. It was engineered to help adults make friends with like-minded strangers on the island and was held at a pizza restaurant in the hipster part of town where everyone has thinly-inked geometric tattoos and the soft scent of patchouli wafts through the air. When Michael and I arrived, it was raining, and we were ushered past the regular patrons to an outdoor/indoor treehouse-inspired patio that was shrouded in fairy lights. “This is a dating show,” I thought immediately, my body turning to ice. “This is Love Island on an island. This is The Bachelor for people with neck tattoos. This is a place for hot mystics and kite surfers to align their chakras. This is…hell. And I don’t even speak Portuguese.”
Luckily, I was there with my actual spouse and therefore had nothing to worry about, but I continued to tremble anyway. Music was pulsing over the loudspeakers. Even when the host said something reassuring in English, I didn’t understand her. I have never felt so pale or had so many hands that I didn’t know what to do with. I imagined my face on the TV screen, beaming out to millions of disgusted viewers, as the producers shouted at me to say something embarrassing or sexy or at least start a fight with another one of the contestants.
In the real world, the host shepherded us to a table where a male model was smoldering. “I’m Italian,” he said in English. “I’ve been here for about nine months. My dad is from here and I’ve always wanted to come back.” The conversation stalled. I looked intensely at my knees. At his left ear. He looked bored in the way people in perfume ads look bored when they glance over their shoulder at the camera in slow-motion. If this had been a dating show, he would have been given the prize money in the first episode, but this wasn’t a dating show, thank god, and we were all bored by the effort of talking to each other.
“Hi,” a clear voice said at my shoulder. “I hear you don’t speak Portuguese.” I turned, relieved, to see a woman with warm brown eyes and a smile on the verge of laughter. I later discovered that she was in her 50s, but she could easily have passed for mid-30s. “I’m Fernanda,” she said. “Where are you from?”
Fernanda, we learned, was a yoga instructor who had struck gold with a business venture up North and now spent her days pursuing life to the fullest. She had a generous laugh, a sneaky curiosity, and was better traveled than the rest of us combined. She was sitting with a woman in her early 30s – Laís – whose dark nails and stacked silver rings gave her a look of quiet intensity and impeccable style. She was a graphic designer with a reading habit, and we chatted about how the internet is destroying creativity. “Are you going to write about this?” Fernanda asked when I told her I was a writer. “I mostly write about food,” I said. “But I’ve been keeping a sporadic diary about moving here.” We talked for the rest of the evening, aside from a brief interlude where I spoke to a woman with shiny hair and a Michael Jackson nose. Her name was Sandra and she worked in marketing. She had moved back to the island after divorcing her husband – a budding tennis star – with whom she had lived in Los Angeles. She loved L.A., she told me. So many beautiful people. Now, she works from home for a high-end motorcycle dealership and goes to the beach at lunchtime to listen to funke on her speaker. “I love nature,” she said. “I have to be in it every day.” When I asked her which beaches she recommended, she said, “I prefer Praia Mole [the beach where the rich tourists from São Paulo go]. The people are so beautiful. They have a DJ some nights. I have to go to Barra da Lagoa to surf [the beach where the locals go], but I hate it there. The people are so ugly. I can’t stand being around ugly people.”
At the end of the evening, we gave our phone numbers to Fernanda so that we could arrange to meet again. We ran to our car in the rain, and I basked in the knowledge that we might have made our first friend since leaving England.
Before we proceed, it’s important to note two things. The first is that Brazil is powered by WhatsApp. I don’t mean that it’s the main form of communication. I mean that it is the only form of communication. That includes communication between friends, communication between businesses and customers, and communication between the government and the population. Most businesses here do not have websites, but they do have WhatsApp. If you want to get your nails done, you have to ping a WhatsApp message to the salon asking for an appointment. If you want a burger, you have to send a WhatsApp message to the restaurant with your order. My pilates teacher even told me that she completed her entire immigration process through WhatsApp, from tourist visa to permanent residency. Everywhere you go, WhatsApp numbers are emblazoned on signs in larger font than the names of the businesses with which they will get you in touch. If WhatsApp glitched, Brazil would glitch right along with it. There is a disaster movie waiting to be told about this, but I digress.
The second thing is that everyone sends voice messages instead of text messages. Walk anywhere and you’re guaranteed to see several people holding their phones close to their mouths, muttering quickly or monologuing at full volume. People conduct entire business meetings through voice messages while standing in line at restaurants. Relationships are started, conducted, and ended via voice message. Friends are mercilessly gossiped about in soliloquy for the world to hear. Never have I been more motivated to learn Portuguese than when I catch the tell-tale acceleration in speech that denotes hot goss as someone holds their phone not-so-surreptitiously to their mouth.
All of this is to say that the day after THIS IS NOT A DATE, Fernanda sent us a three-minute voice message. “Hi guys,” she said. “It’s rainy, huh? Lots and lots of rain.” She chuckled. “Wet weekend.” The gist, it seemed, was that there was a restaurant in another part of town that she was inviting us to for lunch the next day with several of her friends. We couldn’t make it. Too many work commitments. Too soon. A day later, she sent another voice message. Two, actually. “Rainy weekend,” she said. “I hope you’re staying dry [long pause]. So much rain.” There was a show, it transpired, at a jazz bar in the city center. Would we like to go?
“Sure!” we texted back.
The jazz bar was cozy. The band was on fire. The drinks were strong. They used a type of cachaça made with jambú, a plant from the Amazon that is colloquially known as “buzz buttons” or “electric daisy.” Within a few seconds of it hitting your tongue, everything starts to tingle and go numb. It has a warm, paralytic effect that is both alarming and pleasant. Michael and I arrived early to get dinner and had settled into the music and our jambú caipirinhas by the time Fernanda and Laís arrived. Fernanda sat next to me, shouting greetings over the music.
“So what did you write about us?” she asked.
“I didn’t!” I shouted back, wondering, in response to her disappointed expression, how to explain in as few words as possible that it wasn’t an insult. In fact, it was probably the opposite.
The band cycled through the classics – “Green Onions,” “What A Wonderful World,” “Take Five” – and received a standing ovation. In this strange corner of the island, tucked away at the farthest end of the third floor of a shopping mall, a strange alchemy was occurring. Serious musicians, cheesy American music, a small crowd of friends, strangers, and almost-strangers. Plush sofas. Tingling mouths. The guitarist beamed, lowering his head in humble appreciation. The drummer nodded. The organist held out his arms to his bandmates and then to the Hammond. A triumph all-round. Standing and clapping, the four of us cheered. It felt like a game-show again, only this time, we were the ones going home with the prize money.