Metropolis

The first time I came to Berlin, as an unassuming visitor, I had recently broken a knee in a ski accident. It had been months before, a Brazilian tourist in Austria spending a fortune in a dream of a white Christmas—which I did have, in the form of the whiteness of hospital interiors and blanks of hallucinatory pain.

My rescue was an extraordinary experience of young male Austrian beauty, an unforgettable string of handsome men who took me from ski track to helicopter to hospital bed. The emergency surgery, however, failed spectacularly. I had to repeat it as soon as I arrived in Rio if I were to save my limb from forever impaired mechanics. “We did the best that we could do in two hours,” they shamelessly told me then, as it sunk in that they wouldn’t miss their special holiday meals of dry goose and potatoes for the broken knee of a stranger. Fortunately, in spite of all developing country stereotypes, the medical staff that helped me in Brazil brilliantly undid the mess the European doctors on a Christmas day schedule made of my leg.

As soon as I was back home, I rented a wheelchair, which made my life and the lives of those caring for me much lighter, making pleasurable strolls by the beach or through the streets a welcome possibility.

The sentiment during the six months of my recovery was of confinement and abnormality. I spent weeks locked at home in pajamas years before billions of us were doing it together. Every time I went out, I treated it as a special occasion. I would wear makeup and curl my long copper hair and look like a porcelain doll. I would choose my finest silks, look stunning, and realize the streets were not equipped to react to me, a young, chic woman with a severe muscular atrophy of her heavily, freshly scarred left leg.

When I came to Berlin that first time as a tourist, I was still turning heads on a wheelchair. Having experienced Copacabana’s bumpy sidewalks, I expected Germany to be a land of smooth rolling and full accessibility. What I found was a quarter of the subway stations without elevators. I realized that Rio is surprisingly accessible. Call it sedentarism, call it having enough room to build modern spaces: we don’t really do stairs at all.

It is ironic to me that it was then, as a tourist, that I realized how much of this colonial embarrassment many Brazilians carry as we project all that is good and fair into the metropolis, the lands our conquerors left behind. It is especially interesting that it happened in Berlin, a city with a history that summarizes everything that was wrong with Europe in the last century: a racist, broken, decadent continent tearing itself apart over the last bits of land they thought they could grab from others.

I am here, and I find Europe and Germany and Berlin great. I respect their growth, the lessons learned through the decades, however imperfectly. For me, it feels better than Rio. But superior? Oh, metropolis, there is a reason you were looking for land elsewhere, and I know your secret now.