The novel Macunaíma, written by Mário de Andrade, is considered the great book of Brazilian modernism. It provides a new discovery and critical re-reading of Brazilian geography, identity and language. This crucial nexus of space and writing comes to terms especially in Macunaíma’s re-construction of the metropolis São Paulo, which provides the main focus of this article. Arriving in São Paulo, Macunaíma is not able to read the city, which reveals his analphabetism, meaning him being the ambiguous hero without any character. As he adapts to the powerful instrument of written language by staging himself as colonial emperor in the “Letter to The Icamiabas”, the protagonist playfully exposes discursive strategies of colonialism and modernity as fiction, that manifests itself in the idea(l) of São Paulo. And so São Paulo turns to be an imagined, an invisible city after all.