Monumental perfection

Brasília is like a perfectly white wall. The instant you touch it, all you can see is the smudge left by your finger. What was meant to be perfection ends up throwing a spotlight on the fissures in that imperfection.

The sweep of the monumental axis is meant to be a sort of massive open-air art museum, dialoguing with the city and the sky and the cerrado. But I couldn’t help seeing it as the inverse. With the perfectly white wall, all you can see is the smudge; with Brasília, all I could see were the people. The antlike pedestrians struggling up the grassy slope in front of the Congress, digging their brogues into the little red-dirt paths that have formed where a normal city would have sidewalks. The ice-cream vendors pedaling their lonely way through the vast open square in front of the Museu Nacional. The Ficha Limpa protesters humiliatingly dwarfed by the Praça dos Três Poderes. The whole city is like an art installation of humanity in all its glaring asymmetry and smudginess.

Everything in Brasília seems to be at a distance. Even the pedestrians who brush past each other on the sidewalks (where there are sidewalks, my God) might as well be miles apart; the city breeds solitude. I was shocked by the number of people I ended up introducing to each other. Well, a lot of Brasilienses ended up meeting each other because of me, but I guess that’s not the surprising part. The real story was how flabbergasted all of them seemed at meeting new people. Since the city is organized in little self-contained cells – residential block after residential block, little clusters of apartment buildings each with its own highway exit and commercial block – there’s no place for people to run into each other. It’s a model of efficiency: you go from home to work to shopping and back, all in your car. And all without getting to know your neighbors or fellow citizens (socializing, it turns out, is not efficient). Just by being the gringa who invites everyone to everything, I had the feeling that I left at least a handful of new friendships in my wake.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First impressions. As my plane skimmed through the clouds of the cerrado, the city revealed itself bit by bit through glimpses of dirt roads, roundabouts, and swimming pools. Lots and lots of swimming pools. The roads were clear, and the little cars seemed never to stop.

When I set foot in the dark granite of the airport, it was with certain reverence: Brasília’s airport is older than the city itself. The place seemed ancient, worn smooth by thousands of legislators’ shoes: I was told that deputies and senators tend to spend Tuesday through Thursday in the capital and spend the rest of the time in their home states. Nobody sleeps in Brasília if they can help it.

A few weeks earlier, one of the readers of my blog had emailed me with comments on my take on Roberto Carlos, Carmen Miranda, etc. “I live in Brasília,” she wrote, “and visiting here probably isn’t in your plans… but getting to know the capital is a good way to find out what certain disciples of the Soviet Union thought Brazil should be like.” As it happened, I was already formulating my contrarian travel plans, and so I wrote her back on the eve of my flight. Brazilian hospitality never ceases to astound: she and her boyfriend ended up picking me up at the airport and taking me out for lunch and a tour of the city.

“The city,” as it happens, is pretty much the eixo monumental. And after an entire afternoon of walking and driving around, I was left with the unsettling feeling that I hadn’t arrived in Brasília yet. You know those little cities built around strip malls, drive-through towns really? Brasília felt like that. I kept expecting to get to the , but Brasília has no downtown, no financial center, no historic quarter, nothing that would make you feel as though you were in a city proper. Because it’s more of a spaceship than a city proper. After spending a day in Brasília, Yuri Gagarin told JK that he felt as though he’d stepped onto another planet. True story.