The Believers

As I wandered amid the pews, savoring the calm of the room, the church's pastor, Theodoros Daoud, came along and said, "Greetings, my brother." It was the sort of line that typically sends me running for the door, but Daoud, who is middle-aged and from Lebanon, has a dignified and unhurried presence. His voice is high and reedy, and his fumbling efforts at English carried an unimpeachable earnestness. I chatted with him, our voices half-hushed, and eventually Daoud told me that the building was "the perfect place for man to meet God. There is no need for a microphone," he said. He clapped his hand. The sound echoed splendidly, and I felt a certain shiver of rightness.

I accepted Dauod's invitation to return Sunday morning, and when I did, he seemed like a different person -- a divine conduit more than a man. Up on the altar, he wore a robe as golden and shimmery as the egg tempera paintings. He was somber as he held the Eucharist up to the light, and as he turned his back to the people and whispered inaudibly over the wine and the bread.

I had arrived late, and I stood behind all the pews. I saw little more than the backs of the worshipers. They chanted in Portuguese, and when Daoud came down the aisle, they did not smile or stir. They remained immersed in measured chant. I was watching a majestic ceremony, I knew, and one that seemed essential to Brasilia. The capital is a magnet for newcomers -- a cosmopolitan place where an international crowd gathers to do diplomacy amid shimmering architecture. Here in the pews were the well-heeled and erudite immigrants, the transplants who had arrived from Lebanon and Syria and found a comfortable home. I was aware of the light shining in the room and of the life in the chant. But still this was a very formal

ritual I was beholding, with its meaning encoded in words and gestures I did not understand. The people sitting around me, across the rich clouds of incense, seemed to inhabit a separate universe. I was an outsider, a tourist, and so I declined to stay for the coffee hour downstairs. I just stepped outside, into the flat midday sun, and walked on, over the sidewalk, still searching.

Eventually, I met a young architect, Andre Catelli, who spoke impeccable English. Andre, 34, is 6-foot-5, with piercing blue eyes. Over a lavish luncheon one day, he made nimble digs at his native city. Brasilia, he said, "is like Fantasy Island. Inside the airplane shape, you are insulated from the troubles of the world." Andre pointed skyward now and spoke with mock urgency: "Zee plane! Zee plane!" He lambasted Brasilia's shopping malls, and at one point he broke into singing the lyrics of the Dead Kennedys song "Let's Lynch the Landlord."

But Andre's pop cultural flourishes were less snide than exuberant. He was playing the gracious host, making the American guy feel at home, and in fact he was a regular Catholic churchgoer -- a "good believer," as he put it -- and a true fan of Brasilia. What he liked most was the city's open spaces and how they afforded residents both freedom and access to natural beauty. "There are no fences here," he said. "In the heart of Brasilia, you can walk in any direction: You just choose a direction and go."

Andre said that a colleague of his always feels, upon visiting compact Sao Paulo, that the buildings are going to fall down on him. "He craves the pure air of Brasilia," Andre told me, before adding, "I'm the same way. Whenever I leave, after two weeks, I want to be home."

We paid for our meal, and then Andre put on his Giorgio Armani sunglasses and gave me a ride to the shore of Brasilia's sprawling man-made Lake Paranoa, so I could indulge my daily habit of swimming a mile or two. Using makeshift sign language, I persuaded a snack bar owner to let me store my clothes in his shack and then changed and waded out into the warm lake. It was windy, and the water was shallow, so that tiny whitecaps formed on the surface. The swimming was choppy, and I could taste the fine clay silt from the bottom in my teeth.

I swam parallel to the shore. Costa had envisioned the edge of Lake Paranoa as a preserve lined with "woods and fields in a natural and rustic manner, so that the urban population can enjoy its simple pleasures." But the shoreline has been colonized by the wealthy. Brasilia has what may be South America's largest inland yacht fleet, and I swam by myriad docked boats and private homes riddled with gates and walkways: gleaming barriers to the impoverished masses. For a long time, I saw not a single other person. Then, finally, a stylish motorboat swooped along toward me, the driver cutting the engine only when he was within striking distance. "Tranquilo?" he shouted down at me as I bobbed in the water. Is everything cool?

"Tranquilo," I said, and then he nodded and left, and I felt very alive out there, alone in the waves, beneath the broad blue sky, with motors churning vaguely in the distance.

A couple days later, I met Andre and his wife, Laila, for a driving tour of Brasilia. Laila was gorgeous -- demure, with olive skin and black hair and almond eyes -- and, in her presence, Andre was the quintessential gentleman. He held car doors open for her, and pointed out the charms of Brasilia with the precision and reverence of a museum docent. He reveled in the decorative clay tiles that Brazilian artist Athos Bulcao had created in a particular breezeway on Block No. 308, and was very careful as he explained why, exactly, Costa had appointed Brasilia with low backless park benches made of concrete: "It has to do with the angle of the knee . . ."

Laila, meanwhile, spoke of how Brasilia residents are often faced with a dilemma when they want to cross an "X," or large intersection: Either they sprint across six lanes of traffic, without benefit of a crossing light, or they brave the criminals lurking in the unpoliced pedestrian tunnels undercutting the street. "When I was 15," said Laila, also an architect, "I wasn't paying attention in the tunnel, and this guy -- he was already over me. He didn't want my money. He wanted -- I don't know what he wanted." Laila screamed; the man fled. "Now," she said, "we try to stay on our side of the X. But the whole city is familiar to me. Because it is so Cartesian. You know how to get to a place even if you have never been there."