About individuality, with Mário de Andrade and Arthur Nascimento. Originally in Portuguese.

aza plays.

Yesterday I went to Ibirapuera with Arthur. We remembered our pact to get married when I’m 40 and he’s 50. I noticed that the old pact was for when I was 30 and he was 40.

We discussed the names of our future children. Maybe Natália and Henrique, because I immediately rejected the “Yasmin” he suggested. I think Natália is the older one, but Arthur thinks it’s Henrique.

Arthur wants to live in Curitiba or Florianópolis. I suggested Salvador, even though I’ve never been. I asked him what we would do about the children not studying at a school in a big capital city—whether they’d be missing opportunities. He thinks that, if we make the effort, we can teach at home, nurturing their curiosity. Did we really need to live at such a frenetic pace to get where we are today?

“We can teach at home, yes. You’re Arthur—you’re a celebrity. I used to hear about you when I was a kid. They say you shouldn’t meet your idols, right? I met you and became an even bigger fan.”

I had the faint suspicion that maybe Arthur would try at first, but once he decided he didn’t want to anymore, he’d become an absent father. He denied it. Maybe I don’t know that side of him.

I asked him if we would get married in a church. He said no. I also asked what stories we would invent. We would sit together and rehearse our pre-wedding stories. Maybe he would have cheated on me, and I would have forgiven him. Maybe I would have put college on hold after the ultimatum he would give me: “Either you come back to Brazil or you can forget me!”

“Arthur, do you think people are going to feel something strange about our marriage?”

“No—what’s wrong with our marriage?”

I told him I would work for a few years in the United States, invest in a private retirement plan, and we would live well without having to work much. We would have lots of friends, he said, and we would throw lots of parties. Our friends would be very eccentric. I also think our children would be very beautiful.

I got stuck in the first phase of Romanticism, I want to tell my therapist.

“Why is it so important for you to build this sense of identity?” she asks.

So much goes through my head. So much that I know I need to discuss with her, but I don’t want her to know—or I don’t want me to know. She thinks my identity lies in talking to people. In being open-minded.

“You’re not part of an organized fan club. You’re afraid of being uprooted, but do you actually have any roots?”

“Deep people seek deep people,” regardless of roots, I know she wants to add. But does she know who Arthur is? Do I understand her? Does she understand me?

I think she wants to tell me… My root is having no root. It’s in reinventing myself with every person, every dialogue.

“Does becoming this introspective make you sad?” she asks.

I answer that I try to understand reality, and reality is sometimes inevitably sad. She tells me about how motherhood gave her a feeling of belonging, how it removed her inner emptiness. I don’t want to be like that with Natália or Henrique.

“Do you have an emptiness inside you that having an identity fills?” she asks.

I wander through my individuality. I know people whose language I don’t even know. I’ve known a Moldovan woman for years, but I can’t remember the capital of her country no matter how many times she tells me. Is anyone other than me going to care about my individuality?

“I need to learn to be the only person who understands all the faces of my individuality,” I say. I’m not going to marry Arthur—that’s what she wants to say—but my home is in our plans to get married someday. It’s in every time Arthur made me question reality when I was 14. In every perspective on being a woman that he said he would never understand if he hadn’t met me. In every time Ygor showed me that there are so many struggles I don’t live but could live. In every time I showed Ygor the hypocrisies of his beliefs. In every time Shruti lived for me and brought me their teachings. In every time I taught them what it means to be a foreigner in their own country.

I don’t know—and should I know, or should I teach myself to resist the desire to build an identity to know? She agrees that I’m stuck in Romanticism, not Modernism.

To know myself is to know you too.

And one day I will add you to my identity.