A World of Cultural Shock : Brazilian Finds ‘Perfect’ U.S. Isn’t the Place for Him

After its opening salutations, the letter from Rio de Janeiro read: “When you come from the Third World to the First World by plane, the first thing you notice is that everything around is so refined and civilized that you can almost reject your own culture.

“Then you start to ask yourself lots of questions. Well, since I was there (in the United States) and it would be impossible to answer those questions over the confrontation between cultural values and civilization, I finally decided to check it out down here.”

The letter was written by Marcelo Filardi, with whom I had felt an unusual rapport when I was writing a Calendar series of articles last year called “The New Americans.” Filardi, a 25-year-old guitarist and singer from Rio, was one of a group with whom I spent time trying to measure the impact of the cultural collision between their old world and our perpetually self-regenerating, and self-discarding, new.

I spent time with Vietnamese, Cubans, Iranians (Farid Mohajer and his wife, Shahin, who fretted about the effect of America’s blatant sexual precocity on their two young children) and a family of Romanians (Elena Nadler recently said to me, after visiting Romania and coming back to the United States: “I cried every night about being away from home. Now I know I’m an American”).

They are all admirable, courageous people who left home and emigrated here, not because America represented some grand Valhalla of munificent splendor on Earth, but because the conditions of their lives had grown insupportable; the fault lay not in themselves but in their governments. As parents, they couldn’t bear to raise their children in what they themselves were living through.

Filardi was here for different reasons. The first time I had met him was when I was dining at Copacabana’s Cafe Moenda, which featured northern Brazilian dishes served in candlelight and, through a murky window, commanded a view overlooking Avenida Atlantica and the wall of darkness thrown up by the Atlantic Ocean at night--a wall on which I beamed my images and memories of a past from which I felt momentarily dissociated, a past I could pensively toy with, like the food in front of me.

That’s one of the things foreign travel does for you: It allows you to see the absurd relativity of matters that you once considered irresistibly absolute, before it reveals those small matters as having made up the absolute nature of who you are.

Filardi came out fronting a trio consisting of another young man and a woman--a flutist and a strolling percussionist. Some of their music consisted of modern Brazilian pop standards; some of it was original. But all of it contained the quiet, polyrhythmic exuberance and sensual ease that we’ve come to associate with Brazilian music, which has always been one of that country’s marvelous exports.

I introduced myself to Filardi and we exchanged addresses, and that was the last I heard from him for several months until he wrote, and then called, saying he was giving the United States a try.

Although he comes from a fairly well-to-do family and has a law degree, he arrived on a shoestring and took a job as a waiter and night manager in one of those all-night Hollywood greasy spoons that collect the human flotsam of bums and strung-out druggies like a sink drain. Filardi was lonely and miserable and spent the bulk of his days practicing in his ratty apartment until he linked up with another Brazilian musician, Clario DeMoraes, and moved to more upscale digs in the Valley.

He began getting gigs (he and DeMoraes often played the Comeback Inn in Venice), but he never quite settled in. One of my enduring images of him is when we met at 2nd and Spring at dusk for dinner at a nearby restaurant. It was a cool, gusty night. Filardi was dressed in a light white shirt, and he hadn’t brought a jacket. His balsa-light frame seemed unprotected in the chill; its frailty was even more pronounced against the gigantic backdrop of L.A.’s muscling skyline, whose sky-cramping height dwarfs the human scale, and with it, the human spirit.

He was late. A truck had overturned on the freeway and he’d been tied up in traffic. “Yes, yes,” he sighed melodiously, by way of explanation. It was an idiosyncrasy of his, this soft descending two-note phrase with which he seemed to escape, cloud-like, the specter of any calamity (that gliding quality seems a Brazilian characteristic).

His self-division about being in America was deepening, not lessening, as one might expect when culture shock wears off. At dinner he spoke of how much he admired American efficiency and technological precocity, the open mix of cultural and political expression, and its stable dollar--a miracle state of economic being for someone who faced a surreal 300% inflation rate at home.

Other things bothered him. Conformity, for one thing. “We call it ‘ mente coletiva, ‘ “ he said. “In ‘Five Easy Pieces’ Jack Nicholson can get the chicken sandwich, but he can’t get the toast.’ ” Cultural and environmental plunder, for another, where America’s mythic expansion west has rebounded back as change for novelty’s sake, and natural human appetite is re-conceived as insatiable consumer appetite whose after-effect is the litter of the psychic and natural landscape with used-up materials, images, ideas and creative effort. And spent people.

“What strikes me about America is its obsession with technology,” he said. “To me, everything here works, is perfect. Or near to it. But it’s like people here have forgotten they have a soul. I feel this lack of sensibility. There’s no spontaneity between men and women. If you express yourself openly and emotionally, in the Latin manner, people think you’re crazy. In my music,” he concluded, “I would love to mix the great technology of the American school with the feeling of the Brazilian.”

In his letter, Filardi acknowledged, “I was already realizing that my Brazilian soul lacks that response from the public you have when playing for your public.” His year and a half in America had afforded him experience and confidence, but he decided that home was where his musical heart was. For him, beneath the thumping, searing electronic grid of international rock lay a softer Brazilian air, warmer, calmer, more sensually linked with a language perfumed with subtropical languor and an innately Latin philosophical feel for the mortality of the flesh.

Maybe he’d find it in some definitive way that one day we’d hear about, or maybe not. I thought he was an unusually astute analyst of the social ontology of rock; he felt its most authentic voice came from Great Britain’s underclass, and that what was suspect about it in democratic America became positively ersatz in Brazil. That’s the way his mind worked, and I’ll miss him, even though the tyranny of distance in L.A. kept us from seeing each other much.

That he came here only to find himself reclaimed intrigues me. Most of us are so much at the center of our own world that we fail to realize how much place lends definition. Auden had a great line about the poet C.P. Cavafy, who “cocked his hat at a particular angle to the universe.” But Cavafy saw all of his ancient Greek history as up-to-the-minute, and did a lot of writing about the shops and bars and erotic encounters that he could see on hot nights from his apartment window. The angle, it turns out, was generated from a small source.

I was touched by Filardi’s farewell: “To finish I’d like to remind you that you have a friend in Rio de Janeiro, and whatever you need just let me know and I’ll be ready to help in anything I can do . . . wishing we can meet someday in any of the world’s corners . . . Good luck, love and happiness. . . . “ And maybe I’ll even go back down to see him one day.

But I’m here, in America, in Los Angeles, this place and country that puzzles, beguiles and depresses me in all the manifold ways its great and good intentions are undone, by shysters of every stripe, quick-buck artists, covert operatives, the crackling of spiritual ruin and parental despair. By its rudeness, its mounting fast-food mentality, its adoration of the gleefully inane, its snotty intolerance pitted against its dumb amorphousness of knowledgeable standards. And yes, its mente coletiva.

But the center still holds, however uncertainly. We’re still a generous people, as Billy Wilder noted at the Academy Awards ceremony. We still have faith in our ability to fix things. We still believe in progress. We take for granted freedoms much of the rest of the world can only dream about and envy. We remain the noblest, most enduring political experiment in the history of Western civilization.

Several years ago Barney Simon, the artistic director at Market Theater in Johannesburg, took me on a little tour of the city that included a drive past John Voerster Center, the police station that Simon referred to as “the most feared building in Africa.” Mockingly, he pointed to the iron fence and said: “That’s to keep the public from getting hurt when the interrogators fling prisoners out of the 10th-story window.”

Later, he took me up an elevator to the roof of a rickety apartment building, where we watched the sun go down over hills that had literally been pushed up by gold mining and whose accumulated dust made them gleam in the mounting twilight like gigantic ingots.

“Why do you stay here?” I asked. “The situation is so awful. The country is ready to blow.”

“It’s still my country,” he said sadly. He looked at the hills. He wanted me to see their beauty, and I did. “In some small way, I still think I can make a difference.”

At that moment I envied Simon his sense of place. I have a similar regard for Filardi. I submit that to be a thinking man in America is to be an heir to alienation (though that may be true anywhere). But they’ve given me the clue to why I stay here, beyond the ease of familiarity and the trap of circumstance: One’s culture exerts the gravitational force field of one’s identity. This is my place, my angle on the universe. Here is where I think I can make a difference.