Another entry for my bulging file of cab-ride tales. Slipped out early from work and went book shopping, emerging into cold winds on lower Van Ness in San Francisco, with no 47 or 49 bus in sight.
I flagged down a cobalt blue De Soto.
“Two stops,” I told the driver, who sported Bono-style wrap-around shades. “First one’s Polk and Pacific, that’s a wine store; they have a parking lot. Then we’ll go to Pine and Gough.”
“Got you covered, man.”
There was smooth music spilling from his radio.
“Is that in Spanish or Portuguese?” I asked him.
“Spanish, maybe? I should know. I’m from Brazil.”
“Well, I heard her sing ‘cancione,’ but could be that’s the same word in both languages.”
“This is an embarrassment, almost, man. I cannot speak Spanish, but this does not sound to me like Portuguese.”
“I like the song, though.”
“I like it, also, but still…”
One or two choruses later he definitively identified it as Portuguese. We began talking about samba and bossa nova.
“I managed to see Joao when he played at the Masonic two or three years ago.”
“Earlier. That was October, a couple of years earlier. He rode in my cab. I could not believe this. I told him how much he had changed my life, and he enlisted me for two tickets to that performance.”
“So you saw it. Beautiful show. Even when the sound system went down and everyone thought that was his son’s fault.”
“Joao had not played in this country for 20 years. He is a true master, and when he came into my cab the feeling was … as if a fragment of a dream, one I will for sure not forget.”
“Were you nervous? We call it ‘starstruck’.”
“Strangely no. I was simply . . . a follower, a…”
“Disciple?”
“Yes. I immediately told him how pure and powerful his music was. Never did it enter my mind I would see the show.”
“Brilliant. We were in a trance. He’s a genius.”
“I agree with you, completely. That is the only word.”
“Who else do you listen to?”
“From Brazil?”
“Well, for a start. Caetano Veloso? Gal Costa?”
“Where do you find your knowledge of these performers?”
“Seen some of them. I’ve never been to Brazil. But I must have 30 discs of musicians from your country. There’s just deep feeling there; not so much that it makes me happy, more like a good meal, one that leaves you satisfied and full.”
“You have surrendered to the message. For me, there is Maria Bethania, Milton of course, and you may not have heard of her, but a female singer called Alcione.”
“Oh, c’mon. She cut one of my favorite songs: Sufoco.”
Briefly, I feared the driver might veer into an adjacent lane or endanger us otherwise. He’d been clearly pole-axed.
“Now you have amazed me.”
“How did I do that?”
“Do you know the meaning of the song?”
“Not word-for-word, but I always assumed something along the lines of ‘your love suffocates me,’ or ‘leaves me breathless,’ but she still has to have it, like an addiction.”
“That was the exact song that we played first inside the limousine, as we drove my youngest brother to church in Sao Paulo for his marriage. We were already drinking too much very bad liquor, and we were all singing.”
“You really want that sort of tune on the way to the altar?”
“There is a positive and negative side, both. You never seek to have no room, unable even to breathe, but who would not desire to be completely surrounded, nearly driven mad, by love?”
I started humming Alcione, unable to handle the intro in Portuguese. But we harmonized on the chorus, howling it out together while we made a right turn on Pine. As I climbed out, he got a flamboyant tip; I was Mister Multicultural; and, for a moment, all seemed right with the world. This hemisphere, anyway.
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