Life Without a Thermostat

A few years ago, right around the time I stopped writing bad poetry, I abandoned lame metaphors. Life without a thermostat isn't a metaphor. There's no thermostat where I live because there's no furnace.

Truth be told, I'm not a homeless poet. I live in Brazil, and there has never been central heating here, which isn't all that surprising for a tropical locale. Expats insist the allure of living in a foreign land is the exotic charm and this outweighs the inconveniences, but I'll leave the final assessment to you.

The southern region of Brazil is geographically subtropical. Subtropical sounds hotter than tropical to my cartographically-challenged mind, so it took me a while to realize the south is colder than the north in this hemisphere. I needed an education to understand for optimum indoor light, it's best to build a house with northern exposure. It's an upside-down world with the seasons reversed, like when we were kids and thought the Chinese on the other side of the world upside down.

Offshore drilling rig off the coast of Rio de Janeiro

The absent convenience of central heating can't be blamed on a lack of natural resources; Brazil is rich in oil. Meanwhile, many homes utilize electric showers, and the ones that don't have outdoor propane tanks for hot water and cooking. Natural gas, a byproduct of oil exploration, is surprisingly absent.

Before moving to Brazil, my exposure to propane was strictly through outdoor grills. Should you make the mistake of mentioning to a Brazilian man, as he’s standing over several kilos of meat at his indoor barbecue preparing a Sunday lunch for a few friends, that Americans are accustomed to grilling with propane, you’ll be viewed as the devil himself. You might as well tell him he's rooting for the wrong soccer team. Wood charcoal is the only acceptable fuel; he'll tell you he can taste the difference between propane-cooked meat and charcoal. (Don't worry, I've already asked the obvious question, “How can you taste 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.

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 the table by a waiter carrying a sword of sizzling meat like a huge shish kebab skewer. The waiter passes among each of your tablemates hoping for an affirmative nod. When it happens, the waiter slices a wafer-thin piece onto your plate. Thus, a meal at a churrascaria can take 2-3 hours, and even if that stretches to 5 hours, no one will be encouraged to finish up.

Before I lose you salivating, let me lay the grilling groundwork. First, the only time a male is ever seen cooking is at his grill; the division of labor remains steadfast. Some men are known to barbecue every weekend, but even the occasional barbecue hipster 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 or pork is his only endeavor. (Brazilians do not barbecue vegetables or fish or chicken.) Before cooking, the chef coats the meat with salt chunks the size we throw on the sidewalk in winter. Despite the fact that Brazil is the world's number one beef exporter, the beef is inferior to US cuts, more like Charlie Chaplin's shoe in The Gold Rush. When I mentioned this to a Brazilian, he replied, “All the best beef gets exported.” Go figure.

Second, 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 sinks, kitchen cabinets, a half bathroom, and seating for a dozen or more hungry friends. The charcoal consists of small pieces of wood, untreated and irregularly shaped, not the chemical-compressed briquets I grew up with, which may explain why Brazilians haven't died off as a race from charcoal cancer.

It's evident from the country's dedication that grilling meat over a wood fire is as old as mankind. It's a sacred tradition demarcating the division between humans and the animal kingdom. I read about a woman living 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.

Be that as it may, this isn't a tale of Lévi-Strauss and his seminal barbecue, it's about thermostats. Curitiba, the southern Brazilian city where I live, sits at 3,000 feet on a plain between two mountain ranges. When winter arrives, a damp chill settles into my concrete apartment building with a vengeance. Even interior walls here are composed of concrete-covered brick; there's no sheetrock in sight. (Don't ask me why, it's one of those mysteries too big for my non-metaphorical brain.) Needless 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 cold like the US. It never snows and anything below 60ºF (15ºC) is considered cold. However, when winter temperatures drop into the 40s (4ºC) at night, the fun begins. Interior thermometers can hover at 60 degrees for a few months. Frequently 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 Brazil 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 never get warm. Suffice it to say a furnace or fireplace would come in handy here.

Admittedly, it's warm most of the year so people leave their windows open. Yet, in another sphinx-like riddle, Brazil hasn't invented window screens. With screenless windows open, it's a 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. For the venture capitalists among you – buy window screens and sheetrock and come on down.

It gets more bizarre: even on cold winter days in the south, 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. Now that air-conditioning in restaurants and stores has arrived, don't think the open-window policy has been adapted. Windows and doors stay open with the air-conditioners running in summer.

In the north of the country where the equator passes and it rarely drops below 80, screenless windows never close, despite the fact that diseases carried by mosquitoes like malaria and yellow fever still occur.

One winter's day in Curitiba on a visit to my mother-in-law, she was in her usual rocking chair buried under an avalanche of blankets. At 89 pounds (40Kg), 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 that day, and, as evidenced by her chattering teeth, the most likely disease sailing through would be pneumonia.

Perplexed by this open-air custom, I 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.)

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. Signs were posted in government buildings and on public buses to leave the windows open. I felt awful for criticizing my mother-in-law who was following the dictates set when she was a child.

Meanwhile, I will continue telling Brazilians that in cold regions of the US, windows are double-sealed for half the year, and when spring arrives, out come the window screens. Should a bug sneak in, a fly swatter takes care of business. There are no fly swatters in Brazil; that's not a metaphor either.