1A TWISTED RITUAL
IF I HAD TO PUT a marker on the low point, it would be the warm, breezy November night when I lost my balance—and nearly lost my life.
Standing on the ledge of the terrace in my apartment in Rio de Janeiro, overlooking the waves that soothe the edges of the frenetic city, I struck the dancer’s pose—again. The yoga move had become a twisted depression ritual: Clasping my right ankle with my right hand, I would thrust that leg into the air, toes pointing skyward. Left knee firmly locked, I gently lowered my torso toward the winding road twenty-one stories below and extended my left arm toward the horizon. Breathing deeply, I watched the flow of headlights light up and darken the pavement.
It had taken me years to master the pose. The trick is to keep the standing leg ramrod straight, which is harder than you’d think. If the knee wobbles, the stance collapses, and you tumble down, often headfirst. I began striking it regularly on the rim of the terrace because the strength and focus it demands had a way of quieting my mind, which had become unbearably restless in the weeks following my move to Brazil in mid-2017.
As depression mounted and sleepless nights gave way to angst- ridden days, what had been a soothing ritual became a manifestation of the suicidal ideation swelling within me. Abstract thoughts about ending my life had become disconcertingly crisp. Suddenly, there were the outlines of what a plan might entail, consideration given to how much effort various means would require, and an inclination, always, toward endings that would appear accidental.
That evening, as my chest dipped over the edge, my knee wobbled. A ripple of vertigo coursed down my spine, and I fell sideways. For a moment, I couldn’t decide whether I felt lucky or defeated. Then, an unexpected thought—an instruction, really—seeped into my mind. I was to adopt a dog—imminently. I had been tempted to do so ever since I stumbled into a dog adoption event at a park in Copacabana while running during my first week in Rio. I had fallen madly in love with a traumatized, caramel-colored mutt with a crooked mouth and a couple of scars on his ears. After holding him for half an hour, feeling his heart pound like a drum, I walked away. Depression has a way of drowning even the best intentions in a pond of ambivalence. After my downfall, even in the midst of the fog that dulled my mind at the time, this much became clear: being responsible for another living being would nix this flirtation with death. A dog’s bulging bladder would get me out of bed in the morning, which had become a growing struggle. And being greeted by the crackling excitement of a pet reunited with his human might make my sparsely furnished apartment feel a bit more like a home.
* * *
This creeping despair was not how I imagined I would settle into one of the most coveted jobs in American journalism: the New York Times Brazil bureau chief.
Brazil is a land of lush beauty, where jagged hills sprout out of the ocean in majestic disarray. The music can break and mend your heart in the same stanza. The laid-back and improvisational approach to life appealed to me after the frenzy of New York City.
But the job also came with a warning: Brazil is not for beginners—a saying shared knowingly by expats who love to hate and hate to love the notoriously indecipherable nation of 218 million. The threat of violence seems to lurk permanently in the air, keeping the senses sharp and adrenaline pumping. Then there’s the bureaucracy, so absurd that it can only be appreciated as theater.
I shrugged off the admonitions. After all, I was born and raised in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, turbulent years of drug trade–fueled armed conflict. I spent the better part of my twenties bouncing between Iraq and Afghanistan as a correspondent for the Washington Post.
The assignment was to cover the southern half of South America, five countries known for succulent steaks, mouthwatering Malbecs, and beautiful men. I’d get to sit down with heads of state and celebrities, traverse the Amazon rainforest by boat, and spend nights scanning the majestic sky over Chile’s northern desert, counting shooting stars. With a generous expense account, I’d be limited only by creative wherewithal. Accepting the position felt like winning the journalism lottery.
* * *
Just weeks after arriving and signing a lease for a penthouse unit with a private pool and within walking distance of the beach, I began to spiral into a sinkhole of despondency. Each new day felt more agonizing than the last. I fought insomnia with increasingly generous pours of single malt whiskey, which induced a restless form of sleep and left me feeling drained in the morning. Casual sex became my main prescription for a crippling sense of disconnection, but hooking up with strangers only deepened my isolation.
I had been prone to melancholy since childhood and had experienced bouts of depression before, but never one as intractable and paralyzing as this one. Depression ran in both sides of my bloodline, but I dwelled little on my genetic disposition to an illness that afflicts an estimated 280 million people globally. In keeping with a family tradition, I fought to keep my depression from spilling into public view. Because there was nothing wrong in my life that I could point to, my emotional state seemed incomprehensible, and the prospect of seeking professional help, unjustified. Besides, having covered war zones for years, I regarded my resilience as a core strength, a cornerstone of my personal and professional identity. I wasn’t someone who asked for help.
* * *
Booking one-way flights and packing my belongings into boxes every few years had become something of a way of life since I left Bogotá, my birthplace, in 1999 to attend college in the United States. I lingered in each new place long enough to get my heart broken a time or two, but always found an off-ramp before putting down the sort of roots that would make any place feel like home.
After graduating from college in 2003, I caught one lucky break after another in the cratering newspaper industry. At each stop, I sought to make myself indispensable and somehow weathered what seemed like an endless series of layoffs. Eventually, my career reached cruising altitude. After nine years at the Washington Post, the Times hired me in 2014 to join its editorial board, where I made an early splash with a series of editorials arguing in favor of normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Away from work, I had been dating John, a handsome public defender with sad eyes and a heart of gold, for a little over two years. We shared an apartment in the South Bronx with his rescue dog, Ham—short for Alexander Hamilton—a disheveled cairn terrier who went berserk with joy every evening when I walked through the door.
In early 2017, the international editors at the Times asked if I would be interested in the Brazil job. There was no compelling reason to put an end to my life in New York. But when the Brazil exit ramp appeared, I took it unblinkingly. These kinds of sharp turns had served me well professionally. To the extent that I pondered the trade-offs of a nomadic lifestyle, at each crossroads, I figured I was still young enough to ultimately lay down roots somewhere, find someone to come home to, and settle down—whatever that meant.
John seemed willing to join me. He flew to Rio about a month after I arrived for a trip that was meant to give us a chance to figure out how he might fit into my new life. But almost from the moment he walked in the door, we began arguing over petty things. I struggled to be anything other than cold and preoccupied in his presence. This man who had taken my breath away a couple of years back suddenly felt like a piece of clothing I had outgrown. It felt daunting to make room for him in this new life I was creating. As I’d done several times before, I was writing a new chapter that needed a clean slate and a brand-new cast of characters.
During John’s visit, I worked long hours on my first few articles from the region, heeding the advice of an editor who said new correspondents needed to crack the front page and make a splash right out of the gate. I spent hours each day practicing Portuguese, a language whose similarity to my native Spanish gave me an edge on comprehension, but became disadvantageous when it came to trying to speak it. While I was consumed with work, John plunged head-on into Rio’s hedonistic nightlife, once coming back home so drunk I found him asleep on the bathroom floor.
A week before he was scheduled to fly home, I broke up with him at a tapas restaurant with a sea view. It was a short and curt conversation in which we conveyed more with rigid body language than words.
* * *
Rio would seem to be the ideal city for a newly single gay man. But as I set out to date, I got ghosted and stood up with striking frequency. I took these slights personally until I realized people from Rio are notoriously noncommittal and fickle when it comes to sticking to plans. Lots of people were friendly toward me as I got settled in, but it became apparent that many were mainly interested in freelance work at the Times or to persuade me to write about their work or causes. I grew increasingly distressed by the underside of my new hometown: the smell of raw sewage along the route from the airport; the earsplitting music that soured trips to the beach; and the palpable sense of danger every time I left home. Rio was going through an extraordinarily violent period. Thronged beaches were often the target of mass robberies known as arrastões, in which swarms of young shirtless men moved in unison, wavelike, against their targets, snatching phones, backpacks, and wallets. Before going on one of the spectacular hikes around the city, I researched the route to find out whether tourists had been held up at knifepoint there in recent days.
Pouring myself into work had long been my default mode, and a reliable antidote to short-circuiting bouts of melancholy. Work always kept me afloat, it kept me on track, and it was the bedrock of my sense of self-worth. But during my early months in Brazil, I filed stories that sat for weeks without being edited, which made me feel like an asterisk on a map brimming with more urgent news unfolding elsewhere. I began feeling like a fraud, a sense that made it harder to focus on work.
At a hot yoga studio a few blocks from home, I often wept quietly as I practiced, my tears indistinguishable from sweat. While walking home, I stopped by a kiosk to buy a single cigarette, which I would light on my terrace as I took in the view and wondered how someone who seemingly had so much could feel so rotten.
Soon after my slip on the terrace, I went to SUIPA, the city’s largest animal shelter, a teeming compound in a violent favela called Jacarezinho, where vets often treated animals struck by stray bullets. I handed an attendant a stack of profiles of dogs I had starred from those featured on its website. But as she brought them out one by one, I couldn’t connect with any. One was missing a rear leg, and I felt gutted for turning her down and watching her being carried back to the jam-packed kennel, looking resigned. I was about to walk away when the shelter employee asked me to consider one last candidate that wasn’t on the website. When she returned, my heart skipped a beat: she was carrying the traumatized dog I’d met in the park in Copacabana right after I landed. The white splotches on his belly and nose were unmistakable. I remembered his name, Hugo, and scrolled through my phone to show her the photos I had taken when I first considered bringing him home. Within minutes, I had signed all the forms required to take him home, and marveled at the serendipity.
Being responsible for Hugo did, in fact, force me to get out of bed in the morning. Rubbing his warm belly at night while he snored gently made me feel less lonely. His goofy face—he was unable to keep his long, sloppy tongue in his mouth—was one of the few things that made me smile. But he was not an antidepressant. While he imposed a tiny bit of structure on my life, I continued to languish. I slogged through workdays. I dreaded answering phone calls and found fault in every article I managed to get done. I feared it was a matter of time before it became apparent to colleagues that I was unwell—that I was not up to the task that had seemed like a dream come true just months before.
That was when the universe tossed me the loopiest of lifelines. It was shortly after Christmas 2017, which I spent alone in Rio. Howling winds rattled my windows. Sleep felt impossible. On a whim, I reached for my laptop and Googled “ayahuasca retreats in Brazil.” It must have been close to 4:00 a.m.
Copyright © 2024 by Ernesto Londoño and The New York Times Company
