There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything.
James Hilton, Lost Horizon
There is no central heating in Brazil, which isn’t all that surprising for a tropical locale. Hence, there’s no thermostat in my home because there’s no furnace.
Expatriates like myself insist the mysteries of living in a foreign land are essential to the exotic charm and therefore outweigh the inconveniences, but I leave the final assessment up to you.
The southern region of Brazil where I live is geographically subtropical, not tropical. Subtropical sounds hotter than tropical to my cartographically-challenged brain, and it took me a long time to figure out the south of Brazil is colder than the north.
I also needed an education to understand how optimum indoor light is best achieved in a house with northern exposure, which is the reverse of the U.S. Brazil belongs to an upside-down world with the seasons reversed, like when we were kids and thought the Chinese lived upside down.
The missing element of central heating here can’t be blamed on a lack of natural resources; Brazil is rich in oil. Many homes use electric showers, and if not, they have propane gas for hot water and cooking. Natural gas, a byproduct of oil exploration, is surprisingly absent.
Before coming to Brazil, my only exposure to propane was with an outdoor grill. Should you make the mistake of mentioning to a Brazilian, as he’s standing over several kilos of meat at his barbecue preparing lunch for a few friends, that Americans are accustomed to grilling with propane, you’ll be viewed as the devil himself.
Barbecuing is a national obsession; every apartment has a built-in grill on the balcony, and a typical house will sacrifice the entire backyard to a barbecue building complete with double sink, kitchen cabinets, half bathroom, and seating for a dozen or more hungry friends.
I was reading about a woman in Brooklyn who was the world’s oldest human. When a journalist asked about her diet, she said she ate four slices of bacon every day.
The charcoal here is merely small pieces of wood, untreated and irregularly shaped, not the chemical-compressed briquets used in the U.S. Thus it requires zero time to get hot, but it also burns faster than U.S. charcoal.
A Brazilian man scoffs at the idea of grilling with propane and will tell you he can taste the difference between propane-prepared meat and charcoal meat. I have no clue how he knows the difference if nobody uses propane to barbecue.
Brazil is entrenched in propane, using it even to power cars, but keep it away from the grill. You might as well tell him he’s rooting for the wrong soccer team.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the role of barbecued meat in Brazil. The most popular restaurants are churrascarias, an all-you-can-eat meat orgy with the barbecue sallied out to your table by a waiter carrying a sword of sizzling meat like a huge shish kebab skewer.
The waiter passes among each seated diner hoping for an affirmative nod. When it happens, the waiter slices a wafer-thin piece onto your plate to ensure you won’t be satiated. Thus, a meal at a churrascaria can take two or three hours, and if that stretches to five or six, no one will be asked to finish up.
Let me lay the grilling groundwork. First, the only time a male is ever seen cooking is at his grill; the domestic division of labor remains steadfast in Brazilian homes the way it has since the beginning of time.
Before cooking, the chef coats the meat with salt chunks that are the size Americans throw on their sidewalks to melt snow and ice.
Also, while some men are known to barbecue every weekend, even the occasional barbecue master isn’t going to accept questions about his technique. He’s devoted to his culinary style like a professional chef despite the fact that grilling beef is his only expertise. Brazilians do not barbecue vegetables or fish or chicken as we do in the U.S.
Despite the fact that Brazil is the world’s number one beef exporter, I find the beef inferior to the U.S., more like Charlie Chaplin’s shoe in The Gold Rush. When I mentioned to a Brazilian that I thought the meat was a little tough, he replied, “All the best beef gets exported.”
II
Be that as it may, this isn’t a tale of barbecue, it’s about thermostats. Curitiba where I live sits at 3,000 feet on a plain between two mountain ranges. When winter arrives, a damp chill settles into the concrete walls of my apartment with a vengeance.
Even interior walls in Brazil are composed of concrete-covered brick; there’s no sheetrock. Suffice it to say, being encased in a concrete block without central heating is like spending a leisurely afternoon in a walk-in refrigerator.
Curitiba doesn’t experience winter like the U.S. It never snows and anything below 60 degrees Fahrenheit is considered cold. However, if temperatures drop into the 40s at night, the fun begins.
Interior thermometers can hover at 60 degrees for weeks. I find myself going out in the afternoon overdressed because it’s ten degrees colder inside my apartment than outside.
The first winter I spent in Curitiba I thought I would end up like one of those guys who falls through the ice of a frozen pond. He’s rescued, but for the rest of his life he can’t ever get warm. A furnace or fireplace would come in handy here.
Admittedly, it’s warm most of the year, and people can leave their windows open. Yet, in another riddle, Brazil hasn’t invented window screens. With screenless windows open, it’s paradise for people who love fresh air and bugs, especially the kind looking for food.
Not surprisingly, people are tolerant of inconveniences such as a birthday cake with a fly stuck in the icing. Homemakers are fond of decorative cover dishes to screen foods like bread and fruit that stay out on the counter.
It gets more bizarre — even on cold winter days, people leave their windows open. They believe refreshing the air is a critical defense against sickness.
Windows are open on public buses and in taxis; shops and restaurants keep their front doors open so patrons can enjoy dinner with their coats on. If the entrance door were closed, one restaurant manager said after my idiotic request, people might think the restaurant was out of business.
In the north of the country where the equator passes and it rarely drops below 80, windows without screens never close despite the fact that diseases carried by mosquitoes like malaria and yellow fever still exist.
One winter’s day on a visit to my mother-in-law, she was in her usual rocking chair, buried under an avalanche of blankets. At 89 pounds, she’s not exactly a powerhouse, and she confessed she was unable to propel herself out of her chair from beneath the blankets. As I helped her up, I suggested she close the windows. She looked at me as if I’d offered her a live chicken for lunch. Anyone visiting can carry disease, she said. Sickness could settle into her furniture.
I pointed out we were her only visitors, and, as evidenced by her chattering teeth, the most likely disease sailing through would be pneumonia.
Perplexed by the open-air custom, I did some research and discovered there were other countries with iron-clad beliefs regarding open windows. In Moldova for example, it’s bad luck to open a window in a moving vehicle, the air allowing bad spirits to enter.
While the two countries have opposing opinions on open windows, both countries agree it’s bad luck to put your purse on the floor. Another riddle.
I traced Brazil’s open-windows policy to the early 20th century when public health officials recommended it as a preventive measure against airborne diseases like tuberculosis and bacterial meningitis. I felt awful for criticizing my mother-in-law who was following the dictates set when she was a child.
I love telling Brazilians that in the winter in the U.S., windows are double-sealed for half the year and never opened. When spring arrives, out come the window screens.
Michael Rubin is an American who has been living in Brazil for twenty years. He’s a contributor to Brazzil.com and more of his work can be found at www.bmichaelrubin.com.
