=== Passage I ===
The passage is set in Porto Alegre, the largest city in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. My car had been out of action for some time, under a silver waterproof cover, like a big secret you just can’t hide or a child trying to disappear by putting her hands over her eyes, surrounded by junk in the garage at my mother’s house. Initially, my mother was desperate to resolve the situation. It’s a bad business leaving a car off the road for so long, she would say, although she understood very little about business and even less about getting rid of things. She lived in a very house that already seemed too big when there were still three of us. When you opened certain wardrobes in that house, you could see the entire evolution of ladieswear from the mid-sixties onwards. Lovely jackets, pretty dresses that didn’t fit my mother any more. I was direct about the car. I said: ‘Maybe I’ll come back.’ I could sense her breath crossing the ocean and almost capsizing before returning to dry land. Perhaps it was a mistake to offer hope to a single mother, given that I wasn’t even considering the possibility of moving home at that point. We never spoke about the car again. Three years later, I was back and found the garage fuller than ever, so much so that I could barely see the terracotta floor tiles for the bags full of papers, the boxes of all sizes. There were balls of dust, an electric heater, a small bicycle, a minibar missing a leg. I got the impression I could have written WASH ME in the air with my index finger. I pushed open the wooden concertina doors and let in the light. I stood looking at the street for a while. It was no longer the same street, I mean, it was the same street, but in place of the houses belonging to my childhood friends—where were they now?—an apartment block had been built. It scared me to think that one person’s aesthetic preferences could be summed up in that white, seventeen-floor mastodon. Apart from that, there were other subtle changes to that section of the street. They did not date from the last three years, however, the three years I had spent away from Porto Alegre and that house, during which time I had rarely imagined my return and the exhausting list of comparisons that would almost certainly stem from it. We agreed that it probably wasn’t anything serious, nothing a mechanic couldn’t sort with the turn of a wrench. We stayed standing there. I looked around me. Funny I couldn’t remember that tiny bicycle. No one other than me had been a child in this house.
=== The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World ===
This passage is from the book The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World by Roger White.
=== The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration ===
This passage is from the book The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration by Bernd Heinrich.