A History in Shanghai

It should be forbidden to mock anyone who ventures into a foreign language. One morning, as I left the subway by mistake in a blue station just like her, with a name similar to her station, I made a call from the street.

"I'm almost there," I said.

I suspected at the same time that I had spoken nonsense because the teacher asked me to repeat the sentence.

"I'm almost there..." there was probably some problem with the word almost. But instead of pointing out my mistake, she made me repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, then burst into laughter that made me turn off the phone. When she saw me at her door, she had a fresh fit of laughter, and the more she choke back a laugh, the more her body trembled trying to hold back.

She said, at last, that she had understood that I would come gradually, first the nose, then an ear, then a knee, and the joke was not all that funny.

This was so true, that Yue was a little sad afterwards, and without knowing how to apologize, she brushed my trembling lips with her fingertips. Today, however, I can say that I speak Chinese perfectly, or almost. When at night I begin to murmur alone, the suspicion of a very slight accent here and there greatly afflicts me. In the environments I frequent, where I speak out on national themes, I use rare verbs and correct educated people, a sudden strange accent would be disastrous.

To get the schism out, I can only appeal to Yue, who is not very reliable either; in order to hold me there eating in her hand, as she may wish, will always deny me the last crumb. Still, I ask her in secret: Do I lose my accent? Spike, she answers little by little, first her nose, then an ear... and she dies of laughing, then she repents, puts her hands around my neck and so on.

I went to Shanghai with an unexpected landing when I flew from Kuala Lumpur to Seoul as a connection to São Paulo. The company offered an overnight stay at an airport hotel, and only in the morning would inform us that the technical problem, responsible for that scale, was an anonymous bomb complaint on board. However, peering over the midnight newscast, I had been intrigued by the Malaysian company's plane standing at the local airport runway.

I increased the volume, but the locution was in Chinese, the only language in the world which, according to bad tongues, you need to live two lives to learn. I turned off the TV, in São Paulo it was seven in the evening, a good time to call home; answered by the answering machine, I did not leave a message, nor would it make sense to say: hi, honey! it's me, I'm in Shanghai, there's a bomb on the plane, a kiss. I should be sleepy, but I was not, so I filled the tub, spread bath salts in the warm water, and distracted myself for a while with amassing foams. I was in it when, zil, they rang the bell, I still remembered that bell in Turkish is zil. Curled up in the towel, I answered the door and bumped an old man in a hotel uniform, a disposable razor in my hand. He had missed the door, and when he saw me he emitted a guttural "o", like one from a deaf-mute. I went back to the bathroom, and then I found it weird a luxury hotel to employ a deaf-mute as a messenger. But I was with zil in my head, that's a good word, zil, much better than bell or campanhia. I would soon forget it, as I had forgotten the haiku decorated in Japan, the Arabic proverbs, the Otchi Tchiornie who sang in Russian, from each country I thus take the language as a souvenir, a volatile souvenir. I have this childish ear that picks up and spreads the tongues easily, if I persevered I could learn Greek, Korean, even Basque. But Chinese, I had never dreamed of learning.

It was past a time when I went to bed naked, I turned on the TV, and the same woman from midnight, a blonde with a heavy makeup, presented a rerun of the previous newspaper. I realized it was a reprise because I had noticed the broad-faced peasant who stared at the camera with her eyes bent, wielding a cabbage the size of her head. She was shaking her head and cabbage up and down at the same time, and she spoke without a break to the reporter. And she would dig her fingers through the cabbage, and she would cry, and her voice would shriek, and her face would grow redder and swollen, and she would burrow ten fingers into the cabbage, and now my shoulders would tighten, but not from what I saw. I needed to capture at least one word. Word? Without the slightest notion of the aspect, the structure, the body of words, I had no way of knowing where each word began or how far it was going.

It was impossible to detach a word from the other, it would be like trying to cut a river with a knife. To my ears, the Chinese might be a tongue without any splendour, not made up of words, but made known only in its entirety. And the plane reappeared on the runway in a distant, dark, static image that emphasized, even more, the male voice of the voiceover. The news of the plane did not matter to me any more, the mystery of the aeroplane was obscured by the mystery of the language that gave the news.

I was listening to those amalgamated sounds when I suddenly detected the clandestine word, Malaysia Airlines.

Yes, Malaysia Airlines, surely the announcer had let it escape, the English word infiltrating the wall of Chinese words, the loophole that would allow me to unlock all the vocabulary. The newspaper was followed by a roundtable whose participants seemed to misunderstand, then a documentary on the seabed with transparent fish, and at two o'clock returned to my makeup friend, who was ageing every hour.

Meteorology, Parliament, stock exchange, students on the street, shopping mall, peasant with cabbage, my plane, and I already risked reproducing some phonemes from Malaysia Airlines. There came a girl in a red shawl and black bun threatened to speak Spanish, changed the channel in a jump-scare. I fell on a channel in English, one more, another in English, a German channel, an Italian, and back to the interview with the Andalusian dancer.

I muted the television and looked at the subtitles, and looking at Chinese words for the first time, I had the impression of seeing their skeletons.

At six in the morning, when the alarm rang, I was sitting on the edge of the bed.

Soon I would recite in unison with the announcer the news of the aeroplane, a good twenty seconds of Chinese. As it was, I dressed in disgust the clothes of the day before, because they had only released the carry-on luggage, and I went down to the lobby, which was a Babylon. The more the various languages went, the more the protests against terrorism, the airline, and the extras charged by the hotel were exalted. The voices only settled when the restaurant was opened for the free breakfast, but then the damage was done. I tried to get my Chinese words in my head and only found Malaysia Airlines.

I still tried to concentrate, looked at the floor, walked from here to here, and nothing. In the back of the room I saw a wheel of talking waiters, and I thought I could at least trace some words from them. But when they noticed me, they were abruptly silent and told me to sit down with three big slim-faced men on a table full of crumbs, fruit peels, cheese peels, and four more yoghurt glasses scraped. There remained untouched in the basket of bread a similar reddish-coloured broccoli, certainly a native speciality, which I have tried with caution and education. The dough was light, with a sweet taste that left a bitter memory with time. I ate the first, the second, I ended up eating all four because I was hungry, and it was not all bad if swallowed with tea. It was a pumpkin bread, as the maître said in English, but I did not want the broa's recipe, I wanted to taste how it sounds in Chinese.

"In Chinese," I insisted.

I suspected that they were jealous of their language since the maître was non-plussed. He made a guttural "o", poured a bunch of broccoli on my plate, rejected by the neighbouring tables, and clapped his hands to hurry me, making me see that the restaurant was empty. In the lobby, a stewardess with a list and a walkie-talkie in her hand screamed Mister Silva! Mister Silva!, and I was the last one to join the legion that was strangling on the conveyor belt ten meters from the hotel door.

We slip to the boarding gate through a long, sparkling free territory, a country of no language, a country of figures, icons and logos. In the Federal Police, a moustachioed official leafed lazily through each passport, which he returned without stamping. He drained away my hope that I would hear the ultimate voice of a Chinese, there was not a good morning out of his mouth, a thank you, a good journey, much less a come again. Who knows, as compensation, as I settled into the business-class armchair, the taste of pumpkin bread returned to my tongue, and now it was sweet again. I tightened my seatbelt, closed my eyes, I thought I was not going to sleep anymore, so I took a sleeping pill, and the plane took off. I reached the window, it was all cloudy, the pill was working. When it opened a hole in the clouds, it seemed to me that we were flying over Shanghai, cut by a river. The Yangtze, I thought, was the Yangtze but it was not blue, it was yellow, the city was yellow, the roofs, the asphalt, Funny that, a yellow city, I thought Shanghai was grey, but Shanghai was yellow.