Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil

by Amy Ragsdale

  Just as Molly’s friend Karol and her mother, Maria, arrived, the theater opened, an hour late.

  I was so proud of Molly, of the get-involved attitude that had brought her to this moment. She would be looking out at three tiers of curving balconies in dark, polished wood. This nineteenth-century theater reminded me of the nineteenth-century opera houses, so optimistically built, in small towns throughout the American West. In Penedo, the seats filled with ladies in long dresses, men in dress shirts, kids dangling their legs through the balusters. The nuns from Imaculada had come, all five, in their dove-gray habits, clustered in the first tier, near Giovanni and his girlfriend Sheila.

  We’d also bought tickets for Aniete, who had come with her sister Gel, who was visiting from the country. They were dressed in their best jeans and delicate high heels, their black hair woven at the roots with glimmering beads. It was the first time they’d been in this theater, their first time seeing ballet. And I’d invited Zeca. It turned out several of his cousins, aunts, and uncles, including Robson, were there as well; they’d come to see Robson and Shirley’s daughter, Julia, dance.

  The theater was airless and hot, full of hands fanning white paper programs, like a flock of fluttering birds. Then the houselights went out, the chatter diminished, and the red velvet curtain opened, or one side of it did, revealing six bodies curled on the floor, Molly’s blond head prominently in front. The other side of the curtain appeared to be stuck. The curled bodies waited patiently in their red light. After some tugging, the concert began.

  As the dance went on, people in the audience began to chatter. Some sang along to the deafeningly loud forró music that accompanied this first, more modern piece.

  At intermission, people fled the heat to stand outside in the cool night breeze. They drank beer and soda pop, ate popcorn coated in salt and condensed milk, smoked cigarettes.

  There was no announcement of the beginning of the second half. I scurried back in just in time to see the curtain open to reveal a single, tiny dancer in a sparkling white leotard and splash of white netting rimming her bony hips. Opening her elbow-locked arms wide to embrace the audience, she earnestly plunked her foot out to the side. Cameras flashed. She blinked, hazarding a tentative smile but looked immensely relieved when she was joined by a troupe of others, twice her size.

  They were followed by one group of earnestly gawky dancers after another—troops being put through their paces, in sparkling costumes of bright yellow, red, and sapphire blue. Gradually, the long Romantic tutus gave way to those that jut stiffly out from the hips, a delicate woman sprouting from a dinner plate, signaling a shift from the beginners to the more advanced. The steps got harder, and the dancers valiantly struggled through them, smiling bravely. But it wasn’t until Molly and her partner Keyla appeared that one could see the ease and elegance that ballet is known for. Their feet fluttering, they floated through the quick shifts of direction, with the silk-stocking leg extensions that are ballet’s trademark. The steady rumble of audience chatter and scraping of balcony chairs stopped.

  Molly, so confident now, so calm and elegant, took command of the theater. She, too, had started at age six and had moved through the gawky troopings. The little girl I remembered from years of Nutcracker mice and party girls had grown into a queen. Like a Viking, tall, blond, and shining, eyes huge in winged blue eye shadow, she floated above a chiffon sea of tiny ballerinas.

  At the end, the older girls led lines of younger ones out to bow. The audience whistled and hollered. To my surprise, Zeca, who seemed to start most sentences about the arts with, “I don’ really like this . . .” was delighted by the whole thing. After Molly’s duet, he said, “I like that one the second best. The first is that little girl.” He pointed out the six-year-old in the blur of blue netting who had continually turned in the wrong direction and was consistently a count behind. “She is doing it all wrong, but she don’t care at all. Thaz great.”

  After the performance, Zeca went outside to smoke. When Molly was ready, she and I joined Zeca and Robson and his family at an open-air restaurant down the street from our house. Robson looked debonair in a straw fedora, and his wife, Shirley, elegant in a tight black belted minidress showing off shapely hips. Her reddish-brown hair hung down, framing almond eyes. Smart, thoughtful eyes. No one pushes this woman around, I’d thought when I first met her. Once again, I felt totally content, sitting there in the breeze, picking at French fries and fried fish with a toothpick, drinking a Coke.

  Live music floated in from somewhere in the back. “Wait, listen.” Zeca had his finger in the air and craned his head.

  “Para Amilie e Mohlley,” said the voice over the mic.

  Zeca grinned. “It’s for you.”

  The song seemed almost wistful, not what I associated with Zeca’s love of acid rock.

  He drove us home at 1:00 AM, down the middle of the unlined street. Now, in the silent deserted night, it all seemed a dream—unlikely that there’d be an elegant little theater, full of ballerinas in gauze, in a backwater town up a river in Brazil. But then, Penedo was full of surprises.

  23

  Compatible Travelers

  WE WERE GEARING up for the arrival of our American friends, the Kadas-Newells, whom Skyler and Peter had gone to pick up in Salvador, and Molly’s friend, Brooke, who would come a week later. Maybe this would help Christmas feel a little more normal, a little more celebratory. While I loved the white-light-draped gazebo in the praça in front of our house and the flame tree branches wrapped in twinkling color, it still felt strange; the lights melted in the sun rather than sparkled in the snow.

  But we were apprehensive about our friends’ arrival, too. I wondered whether it would interfere with our efforts to adapt to life in Penedo. It would be exciting to share all that we’d learned, and perhaps their excitement would bring back our feeling of adventure. Peter and I missed my father in this way. He’d joined us almost everywhere in the world, and his affirmation, his pleasure in our traveling, had helped us get through the rough parts.

  But were we going to have to adjust all over again after our friends left? Especially Skyler. Carson Kadas was one of his best pals. But it might be hard for Peter and me, too. It would be exhilarating to talk politics and compare cultures in full-length sentences, maybe even reeling off paragraphs. It would be a relief to have the ease that comes with shared backgrounds, to not have to explain the inside jokes.

  Martha, Mike, Carson’s older brother Bowen, and Carson arrived from the Estados Unidos, as we would repeatedly explain to everyone in Penedo. It had been a while—basically since we’d left the States—since I’d heard Skyler laugh with such unabashed hilarity as he did with Carson. I soaked in his laughter, like refilling a sponge that had been squeezed dry. Skyler and Carson made a good pair in their physical daring and their total willingness to sacrifice their bodies at the altar of soccer. Carson’s bare feet were skinned and blistered by the second day, just as Skyler’s had been five months before.

  Wanting to treat our friends to something special, we’d waited for their arrival to explore the inland part of our state, the towns upriver along the Rio São Francisco. We caught a van to Arapiraca, the town with the trauma center, then clambered into the back of a pickup truck, the only conveyance available for transport to the smallest towns. Once in Piranhas, a picturesque town strung like beads up and down a couple of hillsides, Peter spontaneously contracted with eight moto-taxi drivers to take us to view the Xingó Dam. Martha, tan and blue-eyed, with her graying hair in a braid, laughed out loud. “This is why our families work so well together. I don’t know how many moms would be so cool about seeing their kids go off on motorcycles, in Brazil!”

  I’ve often thought an important requirement for good traveling companions is a matching tolerance for risk, discomfort, and unpredictability, which may be one reason Peter and I manage so well. Peter and I had thought through our worst nightmares before every trip abroad. But when it was just the two of us, our pe
rception of the risks was different. Hiking across China for our honeymoon or crossing borders into small African countries on the brink of revolution didn’t feel particularly risky. We had that youthful sense of invincibility. But then we had kids.

  “Having kids opens you up to death in a whole new way,” our birth-class instructor had said. When we were choosing where to go with newborn Skyler, we’d said no malaria; we chose Spain. When the kids were six and ten, we chose the capital city of Mozambique, close to Johannesburg and good medical care. Traveling with kids, Peter and I have both imagined our children stuck in the outback, bitten by a snake, too far from the anti-venom; or our children, without sufficient language skill or cultural understanding to stand up for themselves, being sexually abused by adults; we have both envisioned dengue fever, typhoid, cholera, malaria, hepatitis A, B, and C. And together we have redrawn our plans accordingly, but gone ahead. Peter decided we should try to float home, from the town of Piranhas down to Penedo, one hundred miles. Few locals seemed to have done this. Asking around, he’d found Hugo, a fisherman.

  Hugo was a football player of a man with a sensual mouth and soft brown eyes under thick black brows. He said we should leave at five thirty in the morning to get to Penedo well before dark. He showed up at six. The trip would take nine hours, or so he said.

  Hugo clearly knew the river, “stone by stone,” as we’d been told by one of his boating comrades that he would. We slid past dry, knuckled hills, river water boiling around us, Hugo’s double-wide canoe with its canopy top surprisingly comfortable, even for nine. He steered the green-and-yellow craft, with its tiny propeller the size of my hand, close into steep-sided sand banks, out into the roiling middle, and around copper rocks—going wherever he needed to make maximum use of the current.

  After an hour, we stopped at a settlement with an open-air restaurant and a log cabin. We wanted to hike up into the mata branca, the white forest, to visit the former hideout of the bandit Lampião and his gang. Following a red-dirt path over rocks, we climbed through the low scrub of small-leaved caatinga bushes and long-fingered cactus. We followed Valkyrie, a guide we’d picked up at the restaurant, to the site of the shooting of Lampião and ten of his gang, including his wife, Maria Bonita. I was struck by how Wild West the story was. Despite the abolition of slavery in 1888, wealthy landowners, popularly dubbed the “colonels,” had continued to exploit laborers and amass fortunes in cattle and sugarcane. A white man, Lampião, had emerged as the strongest leader of the Robin Hood–like bands rebelling against them. Leaving their children in town to be raised by others, these bandidos and their women hid out in the hills, in places like this rocky draw, where they’d been surprised one early morning in 1938 and shot. Twenty-four had escaped, but the colonels’ police carted away the severed heads of eleven others, to parade them around the region. We picked our way back down the rocky path.

  Back at the restaurant, we went swimming in the cool teal of the river, waiting to be summoned for our lunch of fried fish. This spot, now inhabited by descendants of Pedro—the man who’d been sent to town to buy food for Lampião’s band, who was captured, tortured, and threatened with the death of his pregnant wife into revealing the band’s whereabouts—seemed idyllic. The restaurant perched high above the riverbank, surrounded by groves of mango, cashew, and papaya trees and a thriving vegetable garden, watered by a solar-powered pump that floated on the river like some strange metallic insect. Several women stitched with embroidery hoops; a couple of young men taking a break from an excavation project played dominoes under a tree. Zooming out to an aerial view of their small oasis, one would have seen miles and miles of empty hillsides, turning white in the summer as the catingueira lost their leaves.

  I felt lulled, caught in some timeless twilight zone, though somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I knew we should probably get back on the river. When we left, we bought lumps of jellied cactus wrapped in foil to suck on as we continued our journey.

  Skyler and Carson stretched out on cushions in the bow to sleep. Molly read. Bowen wove backpack pulls out of strands of plastic. I was grateful for the relaxed camaraderie of old friends. Having them there made me feel proud of the life we’d managed to fashion, of our fluency in Portuguese, of the Brazilian friends we could now share.

  Floating along, we listened with a mixture of delight and distaste as Hugo imparted, and we translated, the local lore. Such as the bit about a black snake that crawled into houses at night and found the nipples of nursing women to suck out the milk.

  “É verdade.” He nodded seriously. “It happened to my wife’s mother. They killed the snake, and when they cut it open, it was full of milk.”

  I shivered with distaste.

  “Cliffs!” Skyler exclaimed a few hours later, scanning the riverbank. “Look at those cliffs. They’re perfect for jumping. Can we stop? Can we?” He pointed eagerly at the sheaves of rock rising above us.

  Shortly after, Hugo pulled into a prainha. This little beach was tucked behind a set of rocks, under a tree. I threw my legs over the canoe’s side and unexpectedly dropped into water up to my ribs. It turned out the river reached depths of ninety meters in places. Skyler and Carson clambered out, shedding their shirts. Molly joined them, then Peter, then Mike, all flying off the fifteen-foot-high rocks in ecstatic shapes—tucked, splayed, arched—before splashing into the current and drifting down to a landing spot.

  When we regathered at the canoe, Hugo was whacking at a brown coconut with a large machete. He drained the water, chipped off the shell, and broke the moist, white meat into pieces. He handed them to us with chunks of rapadura, dark brown raw cane sugar, miming one bite of coconut, one bite of sugar, and gave it the thumbs-up. “A comida dos pescadores”—The food of fishermen. It was fabulous—sweet, moist, and crunchy. This was hour five, theoretically more than halfway.

  We’d left the rocks and swirling currents behind. The small wattle-and-daub farms in their desiccated draws were starting to be replaced by towns. Colorful houses lined the bank like a parade leading to the ubiquitous church with flanking towers. A clutch of boys tossed a volleyball over a line strung above the water.

  By hour ten, we wondered if we would really make it home before dark. Remarkably, no one was restless, no one was getting irritable from claustrophobia or hunger. We’d all fallen into the soothing lull of the current. Peter and Mike examined a map, measuring distances and calculating time passed. It looked unlikely.

  The rolling land was subsiding, and greening meadows swept away to the horizon, weeping green trees replaced scratchy scrub. Black cormorants yielded to white egrets lazily grazing with cattle.

  “Maybe we should pull over in Propriá, since there’s a bridge there and a road, and take stock of where we are,” I suggested an hour later. It was now five and would get dark at six, like the curtain closing on a play.

  Propriá loomed larger, its city lights beginning to sparkle as the sky grew dark. It was by far the biggest town we’d come to and had the first bridge we’d seen in twelve hours. Hugo headed toward shore.

  There was the Maravilhosa moored at the bank. I’d seen this rental boat, a double-decker like a Mississippi paddle wheeler, next to the ferry slip in Penedo. Before we knew it, Hugo was lifting our backpacks out of the canoe and handing them over to the crew of the larger boat. Told we’d be traveling the rest of the way with them, we obediently filed up the gangplank. There was no one on board but the crew and their kids. They’d tow Hugo’s canoe behind. Inside, they put out rolls and cheese, a thermos of sweet, black coffee, and beer. “Just the ticket,” as my father would have said. Our kids ran up to the top deck to watch as we passed under the bridge, then retired below decks to the hammock room to play Uno. The rest of us stayed above, surveying the oily dark river under a full moon.

  “My son said, ‘It’s the woman and boy from capoeira!’” Anterior, the riverboat captain, told me in Portuguese. Our capoeira group had given a demonstration at this boy’s school in Penedo, and, a
s usual, Skyler and I were hard to forget.

  We slowly zigzagged our way downriver. “How do you know where to go?” I asked the captain.

  “Prática,” he said. Practice? They were steering this huge boat, around shifting sandbars in the dark, from memory?

  Peter, Mike, Martha, and I stood at the top rail, faces to the wind, and peered lazily into the dark water and shadows of overhanging trees. I marveled at the fortuitous turn of events and how often this kind of thing happened to us. A month earlier, we’d taken a similar motorized covered canoe to the “foz,” the mouth of the Rio São Francisco, where it emptied into the Atlantic. There, the canoe’s motor had broken down out at the ocean, and it looked like we’d get home long after dark; we’d been saved that time by a high-tech catamaran and had been invited to join their gourmet buffet on deck. It felt like we’d jumped from backwoods Mississippi to the Riviera.

  The trip to Penedo took not nine but thirteen hours. We gratefully lumbered down the gangplank and headed for an outdoor restaurant, hungry but pleased by our adventure.

  There are lots of ways to travel. My mother prefers advance planning and lots of preparatory reading. My father preferred wandering on whim. There’s something to be said for both. But either way, things inevitably go awry, especially when traveling off the beaten path. It helps to believe—believe things will turn out all right. I think that changes not only one’s perception of the experience but maybe also what actually happens. One of our Penedo acquaintances had introduced us to a visiting friend, an Uruguayan professor teaching in the United States. He’d said he comes to Brazil to write because he finds there’s more inspiration in the unpredictable. I understand that. There’s something magical in not knowing. We’ve been surprised and delighted by what we’ve pulled out of the hat.