Your Body is in America
by Chico Felitti
Every first semester of university in the United States of America is a leap semester for foreign students. Classes start a day earlier for us, the so-called “international community” of the Master in Fine Arts at Columbia University in the City of New York. It’s common in American academia to have a day that welcomes foreigners to the country itself, not to the school or to the program. Americans are expected to join us the following day, when the program starts, since they are already used to the country.
A friend, who is an MBA candidate at the University of Arizona, was taught by a leaflet handed out in her international community welcome event that “Americans shower daily”, and that became our own little thing. When I mentioned my plans of moving to New York City, she texted me: “But you do realize that Americans shower daily, right?” once a day, like American showers, for 37 days in a row.
Ironically, I smell like someone who doesn’t shower daily on my first day in the country, in the fall of 2018. I arrive at the Columbia campus, via JFK and the A train, carrying two pieces of luggage that weigh my exact 80 kilos and also carrying all over my skin the stench of the 12-hour flight crossing America — the continent, not the self-named country. Remains of both chicken, pasta and two pills of clonazepam (which Americans would call Klonopin) from the two meals at cruising altitude have crossed the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and entered the country with me, maybe illegally.
I arrive in America on the first day of school for foreigners. And there’s a reason for that: I couldn't afford to take a week off of my work, for which I was paid 20 thousand dollars a year, to get to New York earlier. And I would not be able to afford the 40 thousand dollars semestral tuition fee even if I worked for three lives, had a miracle not happened months ago.
But, miracles aside, here I am, with two pieces of luggage that weigh exactly the same as me, standing in front of a neoclassical building that is the heart of the Manhattan campus. The Butler Library looks like something transplanted from an ancient civilization to the heart of Manhattan. Plundered, column by column, fresco by fresco, philosopher’s name by philosopher's name, to the richest city in the world. Like a group of Floridian retirees visiting the Pantheon, an ocean-sized gap stands between me and the building. The marble construction is too beautiful to have people like me inside, or anyone who is not a shepherd that has gone blind after marrying his mother by mistake, anyways.
But, when I get to the School of Fine Arts, where the mandatory welcome event is taking place, I go from Louvre to Detran — which an American would call the DMV, I would find out in the following months. The welcome session is held in an auditorium that could be both in Columbia University or in the town hall of Columbia City, Indiana, population 9,155. The carpet is liver-colored and stinks of time covered with Lysol. There’s a stage and an audience of red folding theater chairs that squeak at every opportunity. And they get plenty of opportunities to squeak as the auditorium gets half-packed in minutes. Dozens of foreigners enter the room as soon as they open. Painters from Poland. Poets from Papua. Filmmakers from France. It’s like a UN convention on a casual Friday.
Like the flight I was on until hours ago, people prefer to sit next to no one on the first day of school, so the disposition is: a person, an empty chair, a person, an empty chair. The newbies from abroad are making sure not to sit with one another, as if to mime the geographical distance in between their original lands.
At 10 AM sharp, a woman takes the stage. A bun in her hair and the black acetate of frames over her eyes. She is the first contact with American Academia. Ironically, she is what the Soviet Union would look like, if countries had human forms. No one says “welcome to America” and hands out little flags with stripes and stars for us to wave, like I might have secretly fantasized. Instead, she says “Hello” and presents herself. She works in something called International House, a literal house, a brownstone outside Columbia that handles the bureaucracy of all of us, the “international students”, that she refuses to call foreigners. And she Americanly goes straight to the point: “If you are here, it is because you are in America on a student visa. So you are all here to study.” She does not use any contraction of verbs or apostrophes, just to be clear to all English proficiency levels of the crowd of candidates to artistry.
“Any doubts?” There’s a low hum of many doubts bubbling, but none of them is articulated out loud. Except for one: a hand is raised high, in a middle row. A skinny woman with hair braided in two long brown strands speaks up. “But what if I worked for Vice Canada, a company that is not in the US?” She projects so her voice will make the trajectory from the audience to the stage, the opposite of what the architecture of the place intended, but she hides reality behind a conditional tense. The woman on stage doesn’t flinch: “You are not entitled to work while you are here. Your body is in America, so you follow American laws.” The words roll off her tongue as if she had practiced the same sentence for years. As if she had fallen in love with those words, eventually married them and now was gathering the forces to walk away from them before asking for a divorce, but not today. Today she will just repeat the same sentence in an assertive, yet comfortable, tone.“Your body is in America,” I mouth to myself. There’s an hour of lecture after that, with indications of where we can shop for groceries in Manhattan, but no reminder that Americans shower daily and so should we. But I can still hear the phrase “Your body is in America” echoing when I leave the room.
Outside, a wave of hot humid air welcomes me and the luggage that weighs the same as me to my new city. Eighty kilos over stuck wheels, under a weather of 40 celsius degrees — I could have said “170 pounds over stuck wheels, under a weather of 104 degrees,” but I’ve chosen not to. I leave campus and get lost in the numbered streets — such a cartesian mapping system is hard to understand for someone who was brought up in cities where the streets have names, as people do, as animals do, as cities do.
After minutes wheeling my weight, in what seems to be the right direction, I find myself on a christened street: Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, aka 125th street. I should be on 114th street to pick up the keys of the student housing unit where I’ll live for the next six months. But reason seems to be sweating away from me, along with the leftovers of the Klonopin. A friend has been writing a novel named The Heat of Other Cities for six years, and the name never made sense until this moment. Until my senses try to flee in front of a housing project in Harlem, while I guess that I’m heading to 114th street. I stumble on my feet. I kick the wheel of the luggage, and it recoils — it’s as if the suitcases are rebelling, after trying a wheel strike that proved fruitless. Born and raised in tropical weather, I succumb to New York City summer. I fall and stay on the sidewalk, steps away from the courtyard of the housing project. I hear thumps in my temples. Inner thumps coming from inside and outer thumps coming from the concrete steps away. Boys play basketball, which they call ball. I don’t realize I’m on the floor, looking up at one of the poorest places in the whole island. American poverty looks like Brazilian middle class. The projects look better than buildings I have lived in, and I had never considered myself poor. Wealth is a matter of geographic location, I guess. And so is the weather. When I say ball, the first thing that comes to my mind is a football match — you would probably call it soccer.
I gather my strengths and sit down. Then I support myself in the stuck luggage and stand up. I walk 20 more minutes, using the suitcases as crutches, until I get to the Student Housing offices, which stand a block away from where I had begun my summery quest. When I cross the doorway, two varieties of sweat gather in my body: cold in my forehead and warm down my armpits. The woman looks at me and reminds herself to smile and say “Oh, the art of moving…”. She is polite. Polite is rehearsed niceness — you’ve got velociraptor claws, but they’re pedicured to perfection with Chanel nail polish. Not that people where I come from are nice, but at least there’s very little gilding the pill. “Yes.” All I can say is yes. I can’t even make small talk about the weather, even though that would really be a topic of my interest.
The polite lady asks me to sign a form. Then another one. A third declaration. I will sign whatever it takes so I can shower like an American. After photocopying my passport, my marriage certificate and my credit card, she finally hands me a key. A key that will open a door that will stand between the most expensive city in the world and me. I own a door in Manhattan. I own nothing but a door. A door I couldn’t afford with Manhattan real-estate price, and couldn’t afford in subsidised twelve hundred dollars a month either. But I own a door. I’ve got a key — and five blocks to go to get to the keyhole.
The flat is on the third floor of an apartment building called Miami. The windows face brick walls, so it’s as if there were no windows, just props that imitate windows. There is no furniture. No bed. No table. Just a fridge and an oven, which is a redundancy with the temperature inside. The sun is setting, but the temperature is not.
I eviscerate one of the pieces of luggage that has half of my weight and lay down on top of the guts of clothes that travelled with me. I fall asleep on a nest of winter coats that make no sense in August, as they made no sense in the country I came from, and that is why I had to borrow them from people who had faced winter at least once. I collapse before I can even shower, so I guess I don’t shower daily like Americans do. On the first day of living in America, a leap day, I have a dream. I have a dream I can recall vividly.
⦿
You are walking on your hands. You’re standing, but the place where your feet have always been is now taken by hands. Two hands that mimic the ones you carry around and never know where to place — the dead ends of your body.
The Statue of Liberty is in your childhood backyard, which was just cement and an old fig tree, retired from fruit-making. She gleams in the sun. The Statue of Liberty is no statue, she is your first English teacher, Mrs. Mrs. Her name is Missus, but in a respectful manner you call her Missus Missus.
Against her chest, she holds a copy of Martha's American Food: A Celebration of Our Nation's Most Treasured Dishes, from Coast to Coast : A Cookbook. Above her head, she holds a hand. A leathery black hand that once belonged to King Kong. You recall the battle between them both, that was broadcast and sponsored by Pepsi during the Super Bowl halftime, but can’t quite recall the ending. The black leathery cut-off hand is a tip of the end you will never recall: Lady Liberty has won.
You look at your palm and the lines rearrange, as if they were an Etch A Sketch, a toy you’ve only seen in the Toy Story movies. They are now the map of the country you were born in. They are the first family picture ever taken, when your mother realized this was what she was going to be for the rest of her life: a mother, and she cried a little, but not in the picture, after you’ve taken the picture and had an entire bowl of a round black shiny fruit an American will never taste or pronounce correctly, and went back to your beds. She hid her crying face creating a little hand tent between the pillow and her cheek.
Your family is no longer there, the backyard is now taken by dozens of people who are dancing, and laughing and ignoring your presence. Someone is barbecuing, but it smells of angelicas. Sizzling in the grill are pop tarts and ding dongs and corn dogs and s’mores and every other American treat that is just a name to you, that you can taste but will never make sense to a foreign palate because corn syrup is not inscribed in your affective repertoire.
Someone comes up from the crowd. “Hey.” It’s the love of your former life. A life you had ten years ago, but which no longer suits you. A man you have been a foreigner with in three different countries. A man who was a foreigner to you, and likewise. You two would never get to the point where you were born in the same language, and that united you. You both would be foreigners to one another, even when settled in the native country of one of you. Being a foreigner is a matter of perspective.
He approaches your face. His scruff. His breath of cold cooper and warm walnuts. The pinus forest he carried in his eyes. The love of your then-life comes closer and closer and too close. He is nestled in your arms, but your arms are no longer arms, they are a chain of holding hands. The hands untie and the love of your then-life falls into the ground, so soft it opens up like cupped hands.
He is no longer there. When did the crowd start square dancing? Except for one person, who is twerking, even if the Dixie Chicks are playing. Someone says Kim is a slut. Which in fact she is, but so is the person who called her a slut. And so are you. And the president is a man who calls women sluts and uses his tiny hands to grab them by the pussy and flails his hands, that are more palm than fingers.
You look down at your hands. The hands that are where your feet used to be. Your eyes are so comfortable with their new existence that you focus on the red dirt around your lower hands. The land seems malnourished. Is this soil craving for food?
Someone taps you on the shoulder while you wonder. You look up. The love of your now-life is staring at you. Calluses in lieu of his black jabuticaba eyes. You see your reflection in the black pit of his irises. You’re now a supersized version of Thing Addams. But he is still the love of your now-life, and his glance changes from tender to sad. He is crying while looking at you. A little red palm is where his tongue used to be. He pierces you with a look and says: “Pearl-shaped shiny lard.”
⦿
I wake up in an unfurnished sizzling Manhattan studio, sleeping over coats that belong to my people, who are thousands of miles away. It’s almost six in the morning. The sun is rising over my second day in America.
Chico Felitti is also the author of The House: The History of the Cult of John of God, published in April 2020, and of Ricardo & Vania, shortlisted for this year's Jabuti, Brazil's most prestigious literary award.
