Crossing the River

by Amy Ragsdale

  I smiled. Just another day in Penedo.

  Moving on, I stopped in at the “workers’” pharmacy, where the pharmacist asked if I knew the price of the medicine I sought. When I shook my head, he smiled with delight and quoted a price outrageously high. We both laughed at his joke. He then instructed the cashier not to put the little box in a plastic bag.

  “A senhora é salvando o ambiente”—The lady is saving the environment.

  By the time I’d moved through the market, I’d had several more good conversations: with Nené, the butcher; Celia, the fruit seller; and Nilda, a relative of Aniete’s, who was manning her vegetable stand. I was feeling elated by my fluency.

  A week later, Peter and I stepped out of the taxi, returning home from Oratorio, the restaurant where we’d been going weekly for our date night, which was also Molly and Skyler’s “date night.” They would go out to dinner on their own and do whatever they wanted; usually that meant watching a movie on the computer. That is, if they could disentangle themselves from all their hangers-on.

  I pushed open the door and was met by Molly on the brink of tears.

  “We haven’t even gone out yet. I am so frustrated. I feel so pissed off!”

  Past her, I could see Karol and then two of Karol’s friends using our computers in the front room.

  “I will be so happy when we go home,” Molly sighed emphatically. “At home we think our house is a refuge, but here . . .” She drifted off.

  People in the United States value privacy and a chance for peace and quiet. Of course, people in the United States need the break from a “grueling day at work,” their “dog-eat-dog” lives. A Brazilian home is not a refuge, at least not if our home was an example.

  “Disturbing the peace” was not a concept in Northeastern Brazil, maybe because there was no peace to disturb. Or maybe the disturbance was the good part—the part with friends and music, the fun part.

  The concept of “this is mine,” so prevalent in our culture—my space, my time, my things, my quiet—was not so strong there. At dinner, Peter routinely swatted Molly’s and Skyler’s marauding hands as they tried to siphon food off his plate. “Dad, here everybody shares their food,” Molly would retort.

  Shares their food, shares their time, shares their space, shares their taste in music.

  It strikes me that this is common to cultures where people have less. They have less space, so they sleep eight to a room (as Sarah, our Mozambican cook, did with her kids and grandkids); they have less food, so they share the hunt (as the Yanomami did); they have no running water, so they share the well (as the people in Aniete’s village did). One would think it could go the other way, but it seems to be the opposite. The lack seems to build a kind of understanding about the need to work together, a kind of empathy that those of us who have more can lose.

  This sharing of space wasn’t an easy adaptation for us to make. In fact, I wouldn’t say we adapted; we more sucked in our breath and tolerated it.

  But I’m trying to hang onto the Brazilians’ generosity with time. For me, time has always been an especially precious and contested commodity. As a child, I was already convinced that I was not going to have enough time in my whole life to do all the things I would want to do. I began to hoard time. So now I’m trying to learn to share time—with friends, family, community. This will be part of my newfound balance. Balance and joy.

  The next day, I wandered into Sportgol, the best soccer shop in town, looking for a Vasco da Gama cap for Giovanni as a going-away present. Vasco was the soccer team to which he’d sworn his lifelong allegiance. I was pleased to have a chance to say good-bye to Sportgol’s owner, a man whose name I’d never learned but who always greeted me, “Oi, amiga”—Hello, friend—and smiled gently from behind the glasses that slid down his nose.

  Usually I’d initiated the conversations, trying to find out where a girl could play soccer, why official team shirts were so much more expensive than the replicas. But on that day, he was full of questions for me.

  “My friend who lived over there,” he said, meaning the United States, “for twelve years, he was married to an American.” It was all spilling out in Portuguese. “When I told my friend about you and your family, he said he didn’t understand how an American could come live here. He said you wouldn’t like it. There’s no organization here. The streets are bad. There, if your child doesn’t go to school, they come to your house and knock on the door, to see if he’s really sick. Here, nothing. It’s all corrupt.”

  I said that our family had traveled a lot, so maybe we were more accustomed to a little disorganization, that maybe some Americans would find it difficult here.

  “But you should tell your friend,” I continued, “that there are things that are more important than organization—there are people. And here in Brazil, the people are open and kind; they know how to relax, how to have fun, how to take time with their friends, their family. This is what you have. This is why Americans should come to Brazil.”

  As the word got out that we were leaving, all the “wavers”—the people stationed along our daily paths who always smiled and waved—suddenly wanted to talk, to find out where we were from before it was too late.

  “Vai embora?”—You’re going away?—they asked, suddenly finding their tongues.

  One was the elderly woman who lived down the ridge in the cream house with the sage-green shutters. She waved me over a few days before we left.

  “Onde vão?” she asked in a whisper of a voice. “Where are you all going?”

  “What is your name?” I finally asked.

  “Mafalda,” she replied, her eyes twinkling.

  Of course! The kindly, diminutive witch who saved Harry Potter from the soul-sucking dementors, then faded back into her little English cottage to watch protectively through the cracks in her shutters. I knew she’d always been there for me.

  44

  The Long Stutter of Good-Byes

  LEAVING WAS EXPENSIVE. First there were the parties, then the thank-you presents, then finally the eight hundred reais for each of us at the airport for overstaying our visas.

  Peter, Molly, Skyler, and I sat around the dinner table one night and debated whether to throw a going-away party.

  “Well, Lu’s already talking about having a soccer-team party at Janela’s. He’s already figured out how much beer and cachaça I should buy,” Peter laughed. “But another idea would be to have a cocktail party,” he suggested. “We could say this is how we do it, in our country.”

  “No music, no dancing,” I said, thinking of what we do at home.

  “And it ends,” Molly added.

  “Yes, it ends. Talk for a few hours, just talk, then it’s over,” Peter said soberly.

  “A little to eat, but not much, and a little to drink, but not so much that you can’t talk or stand,” I chimed in.

  “Could be good,” Peter concluded.

  “They’ll hate it,” the kids said. We laughed in agreement.

  After mulling it over, we decided to go ahead, to invite 175 of our best friends to a final bash at the tennis club.

  Some might think Northeastern Brazilians are slackers when it comes to work, but when it comes to organizing a party, they are on it. Half the fun, I realized, was the planning. I visited Shirley and Robson at their beverage store down in the baixa almost every day for a week. Shirley helped me calculate quantity, told me whom to contact for coolers and ice, arranged for all the drinks to be delivered two days ahead of time.

  When I started handing around invitations at capoeira, Bentinho offered to hold a roda at the party. Peter consulted with Eduardo, the president of the tennis club, to see if we could use the pool and the futsal court. Everyone was excited.

  A friend of Skyler’s, Francisco, asked if he could be our DJ. I was dubious. A thirteen-year-old DJ? But we said we’d try him out.

  I handed Skyler’s classmate Mateus an invitation and realized, as his face lit up, that instead of saying, “You need
to present this invitation to enter,” I’d just said, “There will be presents at the entrance.” Oh well.

  By the time we’d rented the club; hired five servers, a sound system with disco lights, and Francisco as DJ; ordered a thousand savories and five hundred sweets; bought ten cases of beer and seventeen cases of soda pop; and printed out invitations and photos of our friends for a display, we’d spent $2,000, more than we’d ever spent for a party.

  But what a party.

  It started at four on a Sunday afternoon with small-court soccer on a cracked cement court. The gals watched, chattering excitedly. The guys subbed in and out, even Robson and Zeca.

  “When I got my nose broken playing soccer, I quit,” Zeca had told us when we first met. But not surprisingly, he hadn’t forgotten how to play.

  The capoeiristas were in there, deftly weaving with the ball, and Victor and his older brother Italo and his friends and of course Peter and Skyler. Then the party moved on to a treasure hunt we’d set up ranging all over the top of the ridge, then an exhibition roda, forró dancing for young and old, and finally lots of eating and drinking until it was dark outside and people stumbled out the door seven hours later.

  As the last people left, Skyler and I stood with Zeca in the vestibule.

  “No, but you know, I jus remember,” Zeca was saying, his speech a little slurry and his eyes beginning to droop, “I was thinking, it was you and Peter. You remember the time we were at the pousada and you were telling me I should do now what I want, that I can do it if I want it enough? I needed someone to tell me that. So now I am going to open this English school, and I am so happy. I have no money in the bank; I can’t buy underwear, but it’s okay.”

  “Yeah, who needs underwear?” I said. “You can set a new trend.”

  “Yah, in ten years, no one will be wearing it anyway.” He smiled, turning to Skyler. “Do you wear underwear?”

  The next day, Francisco, our DJ, appeared in our garden room, come to collect his payment. He’d done a great job choosing music and keeping it moving. His eyes widened at the sight of the bills. He confided quietly that this was the first time he’d ever been paid. We’d launched a career, and sure enough, I now follow it weekly on Facebook.

  Saying good-bye felt like one long stutter.

  Only when we began to pull the duffel bags out from under our beds did our imminent departure begin to seem real.

  “This is our last Tuesday in Brazil,” Skyler said with wonder.

  How strange. You create a whole life, and then it evaporates, as though you’d just conjured up a town, full of people and houses, a river and a ridge, ferry boats and horse carts, school kids in uniform, capoeiristas and futebol players, coconut palms and mango trees, buzzards and egrets, cachaça and beer, holidays with parades and bouncing crowds behind frevo bands and equip som cars, people getting drunk, young men getting shot and friends going to prison.

  Before leaving, Molly wrote a note to each of her friends. To Karol she wrote, I know this is not the end of our life together. You will visit me, and I will return to Brazil. We will be friends always. You were like a sister to me this year, Karol. I don’t know how we did it, but we always talked even when I couldn’t speak Portuguese . . .

  Skyler exclaimed, “I don’t know if I want to leave now. We might never come back. Are we going to come back?”

  “Maybe we could come back in three years for the World Cup,” Peter threw out. We all seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the suggestion, relief at not having to confront a leave-taking that was suddenly feeling so final.

  “Our struggles make me proud,” Molly said as we walked back up the ridge one night. “Like, through our struggles, we’ve really dug ourselves a place here, each of us.”

  45

  Crossing the River

  THE FLEET OF LADIES was lined up on the shore—Renata, Valeria, Liziane, Elizabeth, Vitoria. I stood on the grass bank, sucking a stream of cold sweet juice out of a green coconut, and surveyed these brightly striped lanchas. It was still unclear to me how anyone knew which ones were going where and when, just as I could never figure out where to catch the bus when there were no clues, like signs or benches.

  “Qual está para Carrapichu?” I asked the man lazily stirring ropes in the water.

  He pointed to Vitoria, a slim white boat with splashy stripes of red, yellow, and green. It would be the next to head to Carrapichu, the mound of town across the river that I’d chosen for my weekly getaway.

  I bounced up the gangplank and boarded. I liked being on the water and had decided I was going to take advantage of these floating ladies being so convenient in my last few months in Penedo. I was also running an experiment: Could I break out of my everything-must-have-a-purpose, must-lead-to-an-achievement pattern and give myself time just to think random, free-floating, non-pragmatic thoughts? This was not something I’d given myself time to do in my adult, working-mom life. Besides, I had a decision to make. I designated Thursday mornings.

  I loved that twenty-minute trip—the initial cross to the island, jockeying for position with the car ferry, then hugging the island’s far shore to sneak upriver through the currentless eddies, and the final cross to the other side with the blast of welcome breeze through the lancha’s open windows. Slowing as we neared the shore, the captain killed the engine, and the little boat nuzzled up onto the sand.

  Carrapichu was a busy place. Fully clothed women in floppy sun hats sat semisubmerged in the water, beating laundry on flat rocks; others cleaned fish. Clutches of glistening boys dove off rounded boulders, shooting sprays of shining water. Men backed their motorcycles into the shallows for a wash or stood on carts like Roman charioteers, urging their horses into the river. After their bath, the unhooked horse and rider went for a friendly swim. Then the dripping horse cantered out of the water, jubilant, electrified, exuding virility, its rider glued to its bare back. I envied the ease and companionship these horses and their riders seemed to feel.

  My routine was to cross the road to the Pousada Terrazo and retreat into its quiet courtyard. There I sat under the potted palms, next to the pile of construction scrap and a murky goldfish pond, and helped myself to a thermos of dark, sweet cafezinho. I opened my newly purchased notebook, the one with the word Happy, in English, printed on the front. Now for the decision: to move forward with my dance company, i.e., stick to my old life, or chuck it and jump. It had taken me eight months to be able to even confront the question.

  I’d spent twenty years of my life the American way, making my job my life—early mornings, nights, weekends. At least, that seemed to be the way for ambitious, career-oriented Americans on the track to “success.” I had loved teaching dance and running the dance program at the University of Montana: the openness of new students, the stimulation of old ones who’d become friends, the camaraderie of shared passions with colleagues, the exhilaration of putting on dance performances. But it was hard, too, especially when Peter and I became parents.

  When Molly was born, we split the days. I stayed home with her in the morning, working of course, and Peter stayed with her in the afternoons. We thought we’d figured it out. But it only took watching the top of her little blond head bobbing along inside the picket fence, wailing, “Mommy, Mommy!” as I drove away, to make me dissolve. Ten minutes later, I’d stand in front of my class, trying to hold myself together.

  Then Skyler was born. At first, it was great. I had a sabbatical. We carted our five-week-old little boy and Molly, now three and a half, off for the five-month stint in Spain. I rented the dance studio and made a bed for Skyler on the floor, as I had for Molly in studios at home. My muses. But when the sabbatical ended and we returned home, our earlier system didn’t work so well. Molly, a highly social being, was enrolled in preschool in the mornings, while I was home with Skyler. By the time I got home at night, she was often asleep. I’d barely seen her.

  I started the long process of divesting. That was hard, too. The dance program felt like my other
baby. But by the time I could apply for a second sabbatical, I’d managed to hand over the helm and was lobbying for a teaching schedule that would free me up in the afternoons—free me up to work, but at home. That sabbatical felt like a reprieve from a situation I knew in my heart wasn’t working.

  We headed to Mozambique. This time, when we returned to the States, I was determined to learn how to say no: no to 7:00 AM faculty meetings, no to more university committees, no to students wanting me to figure out their schedules and proofread their papers. My student evaluations went down. Ms. Ragsdale seems distant, they said; they didn’t understand that my veins had run dry.

  A friend had suggested I look at the world in terms of “breathers” and “suckers,” that I look at situations and people and assess whether they are breathing life into me or sucking it out. After twenty years and the addition of two children and a dance company, my job at the university was falling hard into the sucker category. It was, however, our family’s primary means of support.

  I asked Peter for a meeting on “the rock,” the rock by the creek across from our house—neutral ground, a calm setting. I wanted to quit.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Just like that? Okay? But how, I wanted to know. How were we going to make it work—financially? He’d been freelancing for the last twenty years. So for him, somehow was a sufficient answer. For me, it was unnerving. We had a piece of land we could sell. The neighboring plot had sold for a lot. Maybe we could sell ours and buy a rental for some regular monthly income.

  Okay, I’ll make the jump. I quit.

  Three years later, sitting between the construction scrap and mouthing goldfish, sweating over a cafezinho, I decided it was time to assess. How was I doing?

  I watched the water hyacinths float down this slow, winding Brazilian river, the horses and their young men, the laughing women, and a brightly striped lancha swinging out into the current. I thought about Molly and Skyler, sitting at desks in a Portuguese-speaking classroom, now able to understand almost everything. I saw Molly’s brilliant smile as she posed for photographs with her Brazilian friends and heard Skyler’s rapid-fire voice debating in Portuguese with his. I remembered Molly performing with the Ballet Alagoas, tall, blond, and elegant, and Skyler, barefoot, deftly zigzagging with a soccer ball through his black-haired friends down a cobblestone street. I thought about how the capoeira men hadn’t blinked when this fifty-two-year-old foreign woman and her slight blond boy wanted to join them, how they’d gently guided me into the roda. I heard the phone ring as Lu called Peter for another daily consultation about how to get Junior out of jail and sensed Peter’s pleasure at being asked to travel with the team. I remembered Mario’s smiling, crinkled eyes, a soccer ball cradled between hip and elbow, as he gazed with pleasure at Molly and Skyler running hard, sneakers squeaking, on the futsal court. I saw Aniete and Katia shaking their heads, saying, “Que pena,” sad and disbelieving that we were actually going home.