Maids

Maids play an extraordinary role in Latin America. Some maids raise a family's children and remain with the family long enough to raise the children's children. They are members of the family. Unlike the scenes in the movie The Help, maids in Brazil are not the domain solely of the upper class.

Like the Native Alaskan vocabulary for snow, there are several names for maids in Portuguese and all of them are necessary – faxineira, camareira, diarista, empregada. Some maids belong to a union and others are self-employed. There are those who work in the same home every day, while others work only once a week in different homes. Some work full-time for apartment buildings cleaning common areas – elevators, floors, windows – but not inside the apartments. Some maids are nannies, living in the home to take care of and cook for the children.

Every store has a maid, even supermarkets, where they mop the floors before and after anyone spills something. They work in clothing stores, doctors' and dentists' offices, law offices, and jewelry stores where they dust the display cases and hose down the sidewalk out front. Even the post office has a maid.

In the large bank branch where my wife works, there are no less than five maids – four to clean the floors, windows, and bathrooms, and the fifth to supervise the kitchen, with her primary duty to make coffee. This guarantees a steady supply of free fresh coffee all day for the employees and customers, as is true in most shops.

Brazil is the world's largest coffee producer. As you might imagine, people are obsessed with coffee. It's the elixir that lubricates social contact, like whiskey in black/white movies poured down the throats of men on their death beds.

One morning I refrained from coffee because I was scheduled for a blood test. The clinic opened at 7 am and performed only blood tests. Their operation was very efficient. After the nurse wrapped the reddened test tubes, she advised me, “Don't exert yourself for the next 30 minutes.” Then she told my wife, “Get him some coffee. It's free in the lobby.” At the coffee station, I encountered the clinic's maid.

Everyone has a maid; they are an essential element of social status. Homemakers evaluate and compare maids to make sure their friends and neighbors know they have one. I imagine some of the maids have maids. It's impossible to be a member of the middle class and not have one. You would need superhuman strength to withstand the gossip swirling around your pseudo middle-class status should you forego the services of a maid. “Did you hear Marisa will be traveling to Europe?” “I don't believe she's really going. She'll probably just visit her sister up north. How could she afford to go to Europe? She can't even afford a maid.”

If you want to make your neighbors envious, you tell them your maid never steals or breaks anything. Families treat their maids with great care, believing honest maids are impossible to replace. For the past decade, my wife and I have had the same maid, and before I arrived, my wife's maid was our current maid's sister, who left because she got pregnant. To this day, my wife still complains about the sister who returned to work after having her baby but not for us, sending her sister in her place.

Our maid comes once a week and has raised her daily rate 150 percent during her ten-year tenure. She has broken so many items my mother would call her a bull in a china shop. The fact is she's built like a bull. When we bought our first flat-screen TV, we gave her our old TV, which must have weighed 80 lbs. She stands no more than 5'3” but she carried it out herself.

Our maid has never stolen anything so we wouldn't dream of replacing her, but not all maids are honest. When my wife was a teenager, her parents had a maid who over a period of six months stole every pair of my wife's underwear.

Underwear theft is a large concern in Brazil because there are no safe deposit boxes in banks; everything from jewels to passports is kept in the underwear drawer. Brazilian women must believe if a thief were to enter the house, he would never have the gall to search their underwear.

Thanks to their domestic access, maids must be master spies. They never confess to any mistake they've made. If a glass or plate disappears, we assume the maid accidentally broke it. However, she'll never confess but rather hide the evidence, which isn't easy as visitors are let in and out of the building by a security doorman. Wouldn't it be easier to admit to the crime? Who asks for reimbursement from a trusted maid for a broken 99-cent water glass? I'm curious how our six glasses became five, but short of waterboarding, I don't expect a confession. To a maid, an admission of guilt is tantamount to failure. There must be plausible deniability, the exit route of every spy. If they escape undetected, there is no proof. No murder without a corpse; no reason to get fired.

Unlike in the US, maids don't arrive with their cleaning supplies and equipment. Rather, they make shopping lists for their employer of all the items they need along with stipulations for the brand of the particular product. We must buy everything, and substitutions are not accepted. Once I tried to introduce cellulose sponges to our maid. All the sponges in Brazil are plastic, and I brought some better ones back from the US. I thought our maid would be thrilled to enjoy the increased spongeability of the item smuggled into the country. She wasn't.

A Brazilian maid has rights to the refrigerator. Many wives go to the supermarket the day before the maid is due. Our maid never complains about our fridge contents, but she thinks our food is too healthy for her. We have foods she's never seen before, and she complained about it to our former maid, her sister, who now works for my wife's sister, who relayed the gossip and said we should buy better food.

Maids not only gossip with their sisters but with their employers, too. As maids find their work through word-of-mouth recommendations, their employers often know each other. Even worse, it's considered acceptable to pump the maid for juicy gossip about her other clients. Of course, gossip runs in both directions. Do I really want my friends to believe I'm so stupid I use the wrong sponges? Thus, we do our best to keep our maid, Gilmara, happy, giving her Christmas, Easter, and birthday presents, not to mention the occasional Sony Trinitron.

Old ladies counter the scathing maids' gossip by creating extraordinary employer stories, like how a maid has been stealing raw eggs. My mother-in-law believed her maid was stealing olive oil. My wife suggested she mark the bottle with a pen and check the level after the maid left, but her mother replied, “No, she's too smart for that trick. She replaces what she takes with water.”

If I've got you sold on the expat life and you're dreaming of never again cleaning your own bathroom, one word of advice – don't tell a Brazilian maid that US maids are less ubiquitous. She'll brand you as condescending for judging her to be an idiot; she knows everyone in the US is rich enough to afford several maids. On the plus side, we expats get a pass on slander, a Get Out of Gossip Jail Free card under the exemption rule. “Do you know what he did?” “Yes, but he's American.”

For most people like me who had never been around maids, it's an awkward adjustment. It doesn't help that our maid speaks only to my wife. She is uncomfortable being alone in the apartment with me and keeps her head down when I walk past her, never making eye contact. To ease the tension, mine not hers, I made an extra key that I left in the bolt lock on the inside of the kitchen entrance. Previously, with no key in the door, if no one was home, the maid was effectively locked inside. My wife insists it's a common practice to ignore maid fire safety.

Despite this obvious mistreatment, maids don't complain. Brazilians adore being entrepreneurs. Everyone has the dream of self-employment, opening a small business. Most housemaids are self-employed, and there is a certain cachet in their status. They take pride in their work, at least in England. Okay, then just on Downton Abbey.

Thanks to its army of maids, Brazil is astoundingly clean and fastidious. Maids will perform any task from childcare to paste-waxing the floor on their hands and knees, not to mention making the beds, food shopping, cooking, washing, and ironing. Our maid washes the picture windows, all 14 of them, inside and out, every week. Washing the windows on the tenth floor requires her having one foot on the top of a stepladder and the other on the window ledge leaning halfway out. I refuse to watch.

In the chicken-and-egg scenario, I'm not sure if maids are so crucial because Brazilians are germaphobes, or Brazilians have become germaphobic thanks to the plethora of maids. Either way, if you like your life clean, it's an unexpected twist on the stereotype of South America as less civilized.

Domestic orderliness in Brazil takes on the characteristic of religious devotion. Wiping off the kitchen table after a meal is child's play. The maids use rubbing alcohol or bleach to clean every surface in the kitchen. After our maid leaves for the day, my wife inhales deeply the pungent chemical aromas and announces, “Gilmara did a good job today.” The apartment smells like a hospital.

Brazilians are so germaphobic they won't share an exercise machine in the gym with someone who is waiting for the same machine. The first guy finishes and then wipes down the machine with a spray bottle of alcohol supplied by the gym maid.

Here's my favorite maid story. One Sunday morning when my wife was a little girl, her father took the family to visit cousins who lived out in the country. They spent the day with their cousins and when leaving, the host offered them bananas, as he had banana trees on his property. The exchange of handshakes and back slapping became more exaggerated than usual and somehow my wife's father found himself in possession of a crate of bananas, a few hundred of them. The crate was subsequently strapped to the roof of the car and brought back home. The following day everyone was at work or at school, and the maid was alone cleaning and cooking. Later, when the family came home, the crate of bananas was missing. When questioned, the maid claimed she had thrown out the crate because it was empty. They asked, “But where did all the bananas go that were inside?” She replied, “I ate them.”