Mariana was born on the eve of my forty-fourth birthday. By then I already had white hair and a belly. I never expected to have children. It was a surprise when Heloísa told me she was pregnant.
Even nowadays it is hard to understand the transformation that occurs when a child is born. One’s worldview changes. Old worries fade; others, new ones, emerge. Important things become trivial. This is true even with cats and dogs.
I would not say I was an absent father, but I know I sacrificed time I could have spent with my daughter. I do not regret it. With the time I sacrificed, I did important things for other people. After Heloísa’s death Mariana and I became closer. It was a silver lining.
My daughter is beautiful and polite. She has always been a good student. As a sophomore in college she interned at a German bank on Avenida Paulista. She was in her third year studying economics when her mother died. She was twenty.
Shortly before graduating, she told me she wanted to continue her studies. She had decided she wanted to do her MBA in the United States. She did everything herself. She filled out the applications. Wrote her essays. Obtained her letters of recommendation.
She devoted months to the effort. But it was worth it. She was accepted everywhere she had applied to. She chose Columbia University because she would have the opportunity to live in New York. I supported her choice. She asked me to help her financially, and I did.
One of the good memories I have was when I helped her move into her dormitory. She would live in a room about twenty-five square meters in size, with a small kitchen and bathroom.
We bought a bed, a desk and some other furniture from a store the university recommended. The two of us assembled the furniture ourselves. For those few days, we spent hours together, talking as friends. I returned to São Paulo proud. I liked knowing she was a student at one of the best universities in the world. I thought she would be able to build a good life for herself and do interesting things. It gave me a feeling of well-being knowing I had fulfilled my paternal duties alone.
Sergio Y. died on February 2. Four months and six days later, on June 8, Mariana’s graduation ceremony would take place.
Prior to Sergio’s death, I was looking forward to my trip to New York. After learning of his death, though, the trip became a sacrifice, something I would have to do for love, not pleasure. But I could not miss the graduation.
I had a special relationship with New York. Like my daughter, I went to school there. It was where I discovered what I wanted to do with my life. It was there that I decided to become a psychiatrist.
Soon after graduating, on the advice of a teacher at the Universidade de São Paulo, I applied for a residency at Mount Sinai in New York. At the time, it was very rare for them to accept foreigners. To the surprise of some (but not all), they accepted me.
I arrived on August 4, 1973, on a PanAm flight. It was the first time I had traveled outside of Brazil. Soon after my arrival, with the help of the hospital staff, I found a little one-bedroom on 102nd Street, near the East River. The rental was on the fourth floor of a dilapidated building, with no elevator—one of those with the fire escape outside the window—where several other medical residents lived.
I took my job seriously. I had always studied hard, but during my residency I studied like never before. Most of my days were spent locked in the hospital, breathing air-conditioned air, exposed to sterile light, absorbing all the information I could, with a medical book always at my side in case a free moment should arise.
On Sundays, I would take a break from diagnosing disease and discussing community psychotherapy techniques, and I would go on long walks around the city. I could have gone with one of my fellow residents, but I preferred going alone, to avoid having to make concessions. I wanted to conquer the city in my own way. I did not want to share it with anyone else.
I have wonderful memories of those times and those walks. I would spend all day walking, consulting maps in search of places I wanted to visit, or just wandering aimlessly, feeling the city move around me.
After I returned to São Paulo, whenever I got the chance, I would go back to New York. On those trips back, I would do my best to recreate the same sense of possibility and confidence in the future that had filled me when I was a resident there, when I thought I could do and be anything in life. After all, I thought at the time, how many Brazilian doctors, fresh out of college, get accepted as residents at one of the best hospitals in the world?
I would walk the city streets looking up, arching my head back, unable to see the tops of buildings, believing that my possibilities, and the New York buildings, reached out to infinity. It was this sense of renewal that over the years I sought to replicate in my random walks through Manhattan.
Here, now, sitting in my office, I close my eyes and imagine the sun’s rays piercing through the buildings at 9 A.M. to form pools of light on the sidewalk on Third Avenue. I can smell the detergent and fabric softener wafting onto passersby from the 98th Street Laundromat.
After I learned of Sergio’s death, my relationship with New York changed. The idea of being in the same city where he had died began to disturb me. It would mean thinking much more of him and his death than I would have liked. What is more, as a doctor I would feel the obligation to visit Dr. Cecilia Coutts, to gain more information about the Sergio-Sandra case, a case I had so obviously misdiagnosed.
New York, the city for which I had harbored only positive feelings and gratitude, had now also become the scene of the death of Sergio Y. To visit it would mean facing my own guilt.
Since the trip could not be avoided, I tried convincing myself that the sacrifice I was making was voluntary and insignificant when compared to the consequences my ignorance could have caused. Besides, there was also Mariana, whom I could not disappoint. With this in mind, I decided to ignore my fears. I bought my ticket and booked a hotel on 57th Street. I would be in town for four nights. I would arrive on Monday and leave Friday.
I would visit the places Sergio had been: the school where he had studied, the street where he had lived, the store where he bought cooking utensils. At any moment I could be stepping into the footprints he had left on his journey through New York.
It would be a way to find him once again. We would be like two actors filmed against the same backdrop at different times. We would find each other in space, but be lost to each other in time. Sergio Y. and I would recognize each other in the landscape of New York.