by Amy Ragsdale
24
Holidays Unraveling
WE ROLLED INTO Christmas with a bang, starting the night of December 21. First, Brooke’s mom called from the States to let us know that Brooke had missed the first of her string of four flights and would therefore arrive not thirty minutes away in Maceió, the original plan, but ten hours away in Salvador. (We had already moved into the rented beach house in Praia do Francês to be closer to Maceió, putting us now farther away from Salvador than we would have been if we’d stayed in Penedo.) Next, the power in our rental house went out (taking with it the air conditioning, in the middle of Brazil’s steamy summer), and then the vomiting began—three kids, six times by morning.
By the next day, the power had returned and the kids’ vomiting had mostly stopped. We never figured out what had caused it. They spent the day lounging in the living room, plowing through Christmas presents from my mother, DVDs transported by our friends—Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump. We decided to break them out early. Meanwhile, I tried to figure out how to meet Brooke at the airport in Salvador. She would be arriving the following night at midnight. I felt it would be too much to expect a high school student to arrive in a huge foreign city where she didn’t speak the local language and then string together buses, vans, and ferries to make her way to a small town three states away on her own. After fruitless hours at the Internet café trying to book seats on the bus, I reluctantly dug my phone out of my straw bag and dialed the station. I dreaded making arrangements over the phone in another language, but this time I was spared. My phone server was down. Where was this world at our fingertips?
I trudged back to the rental house in the blazing sun, no further toward picking up Brooke.
Then one of those surprising things that happens in Brazil happened. Amid all the technological malfunctions, businesses closing early, and people being out, Peter managed, in about fifteen minutes, to hire a taxi. It was like finding a taxi in our small Montana town to drive us 1,200 miles to Seattle and back, nonstop, on Christmas Eve. At home, that would never happen.
Fifteen minutes after Molly and I climbed into the car, the driver and his pal announced they’d never been to Salvador, or in fact to the state of Bahia. We would eventually discover, as we wandered blindly through highway interchanges, that they had no map. I’d considered phoning Peter with their license plate number, in case we mysteriously disappeared into one of the “love” motels out in the middle of nowhere with names like Le Plaisir, Eros, and Korpus. But as time passed, I began to relax.
In fact, I must have dozed because I jerked awake as the car lurched to a halt and opened my eyes to see that we were backing up an exit ramp in the dark. We just made it back to the highway before another car shot down the ramp. Two U-turns later, it turned out that had been the right exit after all, and we found ourselves shunted onto a four-lane highway. As we cruised along in the left lane, ignoring the car behind us flashing its high beams, it occurred to me that maybe our driver had never driven on a four-lane road.
Nevertheless, we made it to the airport before Brooke appeared out of customs, hit the Subway in the food court, then found our driver in the airport parking garage, asleep. Remarkably, we arrived in Penedo at our front door at 8:00 AM on Christmas Eve. The trip cost about $800, which Brooke’s parents gladly reimbursed.
Peter and I threw our feet out of bed. “Is someone throwing up?” he whispered. I opened the door to see Skyler precariously perched on Molly’s shoulders in stifled hysterics at the end of the hall. “Go away. Go back to bed,” they hissed.
“You can’t come out!” they shouted an hour later when Peter tried to get up to go to the bathroom. It sounded now as though all five kids were awake.
“Okay, we’re ready!”
We emerged from our refrigerated cell into the startling heat and bright whiteness of the hallway. Snowflakes dangled from the ceiling. Hundreds of pieces of cut-up white paper were strewn around the floor. Molly cranked the tunes on her computer: “Rock around the Christmas Tree” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” We sang along with Bing Crosby.
“Want to trim my tree?” I batted my lashes at Peter. Finally, it felt like Christmas.
Just as we began to open presents, we heard a shout through the front door. “Petair!” Dalan was leaning up against the side of the house. “Minha mãe está morrendo”—his mother was dying in Maceió. Could he borrow some money to go see her? As Peter gave him the hundred reais, he said, “Dalan, você precisa trabalhar”—work to make some money. Dalan explained shyly that he couldn’t read. He’d dropped out of school after second grade.
“Oh, and by the way,” he said as he left, “Junior is in jail. He knifed a man.”
By midafternoon, we managed to straggle out into the heat and head down to the river for a family game of soccer. We aimed for the campo, the field of lumpy dirt and sad grass where the grown men played. As we passed their houses, Ricardo and Victor joined the group.
I loved these games of family soccer. They were the only time I played. Aniete and Gel came along. They hadn’t been able to go home for Christmas because no buses ran to the country that day, and Aniete declined to take the longer vacation we’d offered. They found it amusing that we were all going to play, even Martha and I, being not only women but also old when it came to Brazilian sports.
Afterward, dusty and sweaty from a hard hour of running after the ball, we waded through a lagoon to get to the river, the sun disappearing fast behind the ridge across the São Francisco. Gel and Aniete stood, feet in the water, while the rest of us peeled down to swimsuits or underwear and drifted out into the current. Neither one of them knew how to swim.
The bottom was sandy, the water soft. This was the first time we’d swum in the river here, leery of the sewage dump upstream. Keeping my mouth above water, I slipped along in the cool dark, feeling like an otter, dark wet head skimming along the surface.
We pulled on our rumpled clothes and began the trek back up the ridge. Skyler and I fell behind.
“It just doesn’t feel like Christmas,” he said a little wistfully.
He’d had a hard day. I wondered if part of it was because since Brooke’s arrival, his friend Carson had shifted to the older kids, Molly, Brooke, and Bowen, who liked to just lie around and talk. Lying around and talking was the last thing Skyler wanted to do when you could climb trees and jump off walls.
It reminded me of myself at the same age, living in Cairo and receiving handwritten letters from friends at home. Somewhere during that year and a half of middle school, the letters changed. Suddenly my friends wrote about kissing boys. I’d felt bewildered, left behind.
We walked along in silence. “I know,” I ventured. “This does feel weird; all wrong.”
Despite the businesses in the baixa festooned in white lights, and the cashiers at Ki-Barato in red Santa hats, it was hard for us Northerners, used to snow and cold and Santa arriving in a sleigh, to wrap our minds around this hot, sweaty, fans-whirring, people-asleep-in-hammocks day.
“Still,” I reminded him, “it was pretty fun, all the same.” I put my arm around him. “There will be lots of other Christmases. This one is just different.”
25
New Year’s Eve in Salvador
AFTER A FULL DAY of van and bus rides, the nine of us made it to Salvador, checked into the Barra Guest Hostel, and headed up to the Pelourinho, the historic neighborhood. We were in search of Afro-Brazilian music. The place was rocking. The sounds of drums and electric guitar ricocheted down narrow, stony streets. There were lots of talking hips and rapidly shuffling samba feet, hundreds of witty and flirtatious conversations, all spoken through the pelvis. We said the kids could wander around as long as they stuck together. I was happy just to sit and survey the scene. I had all of our credit cards, cash, and iPods and was leery of the tight crowd. From our vantage point at one end of the Terreiro de Jesus plaza, we heard several competing bands.
Skyler came running back with Carson. “Watch the guys
in the back,” he said excitedly, pointing to ten or twelve guys with big round drums threading through the crowd on the right. In the back, the biggest red, yellow, and green striped drum was flipped up into the air above the drummer’s head each time before he hit it. I was entranced, but I could feel my mind being pulled away. Something was happening over on the left.
Molly and Brooke suddenly appeared out of the crowd. Molly was clearly flustered. The story poured out of her.
“I didn’t think I would be that scared. But it was scary.”
Big breath.
“But I’m okay. I’m okay.”
She was stoically holding back tears.
“This boy, he wasn’t very old, maybe like Skyler’s age? He was hanging out with us—you know, ‘Hey, amigas.’” She dropped into one hip in a casual, hanging-out way. “Then he just grabbed my necklace and ripped it off!”
For her sixteenth birthday, my mother had given her a gold chain with a teardrop pendant of small rubies.
“I grabbed his arm and was yelling, ‘Cadê, cadê?’”—Where is it?
Really, in Portuguese! I was impressed. I didn’t think my mind would have jumped to a foreign language in an emergency.
“You were like a ninja,” Brooke said excitedly.
“I was hanging onto him so hard, I think I really wanted to hurt him.” Molly’s mind was replaying the scene. “I’ve never felt like that before.”
She seemed a little alarmed.
“Then this woman found it on the ground and gave it back to me. People were so nice and helpful. The boy was scared. Can you hold these?” she asked me as she pulled her crystal studs out of her ears. “I don’t want to wear them.”
It was clearly time to leave.
“I never thought it would be that scary,” Molly mused as we searched for a taxi. “I always thought I’d just give over my cell phone or whatever.”
We squeezed five into a car, Molly squished in between Skyler and me.
“I hope they didn’t hurt the boy,” she said, her voice fading. She sounded exhausted.
As I sank back into the cushioned seat, my own complicated net of emotions started to surface: pride in my ninja daughter, relief that nothing worse had happened, and the oddly analytical parenting thought that it was good to have a few scary things happen—as long as there was no lasting harm—to help your children brace for the less nurturing parts of the world.
Northeastern Brazilians are known for their practice of Candomblé, a religion brought by the slaves that blends pantheistic beliefs from Africa with Catholicism. When Peter and I had scored our date in Salvador by ourselves three months before, we’d hired a guide to take us to a Candomblé ceremony, some of which were now open to tourists.
Our guide, Luis, was a slender, balding man, wearing white pants and a pressed button-down shirt. He led us to a van full of other tourists, which would take us, after many stops to ask directions, to a house in a hilly, dirt-road neighborhood, about thirty minutes away. I couldn’t tell if someone lived there or if it was used only for Candomblé.
That night, they would be invoking Logun Ede, one of many orixás, or ancestors with connections to the spirit world. People arrived, dressed in blue and yellow, the colors of this particular orixá. The men wore collarless African tunics and brimless caps, the women loose blouses, ankle-length ballooning hoop skirts, and wrapped headscarves—Aunt Jemima, of American-syrup fame, in brocade. Everyone shone, with sequins, satin, and borders of lace.
Inside a large room, people in everyday clothes sat in white plastic chairs set in rows at either end—women to the right, men to the left. Peter and I seated ourselves at opposite ends of the room. Leaves were strewn over the concrete floor. Fluorescent lights gave the room a bright, flat light that seemed a little surreal under the circumstance.
Three men entered and took their places behind the drums. The resounding, repetitive beat began. A stocky man sang out, and the people in the chairs responded. The others, dressed in their Candomblé clothes, began a circular dance that would go on for the next hour, step-touching in unison. They, too, sang. Each song seemed to have its special hand gestures, gestures Peter and I had seen many years before at a durbar, a gathering for chiefs, in Ghana, West Africa: a faint wave with the right hand, then with the left; stacked fists paddling right then left, all floating, dreamy.
Seamlessly, the trances began. Hands behind the back, knees buckling, a person would double over, emitting a groaning shout or several quick yips. Some shook. Those not in trance took care of them, placing a gentle hand on a shoulder, helping them to rise. All of a sudden, the whole group filed out through gold curtains into a long back hallway. The drummers took a break. Platters of savories and sweets and plastic cups of soda pop appeared, passed by some of the dancers who had just been in trance minutes before.
When the break was over, the drums started up, faster now, and out of the back hall came one man, then two, their shirts gone, their eyes closed. They danced with renewed energy, wildly spinning, step-cross-jump, chests pumping. The onlookers clapped, faster and faster, driving the dancers. The curtains parted, and Oxum, the mother of Logun Ede, appeared, several of her, in fact, in ballooning skirts and armbands of glittering gold. Sparkling tiaras sat atop their gold head wraps; veils of beads hid their faces.
That was when the chic white woman in patent-leather sandals and a strapless hot-pink top slipped out of the chair next to mine and collapsed at my feet. The young Brazilian woman on my other side looked dismayed, but she caught the white woman’s Gucci purse as she fell. The regulars looked bemused. They shook the fallen woman’s shoulders and cleared strands of hair from her face, but she didn’t come to. She was rolled onto her stomach and covered from head to foot with a long white lace cloth. She began to vibrate and shake, pelvis bouncing off the ground. Then they lifted her up and carted her off to the back room. I thought she was a tourist like me, but I never saw her again.
Afterward, as Peter and I trudged back up the festooned driveway, I told him about the woman next to me going into a trance.
“Luis did, too,” he told me. “He kind of fell back into my lap, then doubled over. They took him into the back room.”
As we turned into the dirt street, Luis was there. Peter put a hand on his shoulder.
“How’re you doing?”
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” he said in his quick, efficient manner.
It was eleven thirty at night. People murmured quietly as the van picked its way over the ruts and through the potholes of the darkened neighborhood. I tried to sort out where we’d been—not so much geographically, but psychically. It was as though the rational bolts of my mind had been loosened, and now I wasn’t quite sure how to piece it back together again.
On our return to Salvador in December, Adams, the receptionist at the Barra Guest Hostel, found a guide for us to see another Candomblé ceremony. As a child of our rational, logical, scientific, everything-is-explicable Western world, I find I never tire of seeing trance ceremonies. Here in Brazil would be the fourth time, after Ghana and Indonesia, that I’d sit mesmerized, initially trying to explain what happened to these transformed people—where they “went”—and finally giving up. This time, we had the Kadas-Newells, Brooke, Molly, and Skyler in tow, and, to our surprise, the guide turned out to be Luis.
“This will be a little different from what you saw last time,” he told us confidentially. “It’s a family ceremony. There will probably be more of us than them. They will be evoking Exu, the orixá of the street.”
He was right. As before, the van took us to the outskirts of Salvador and wound through dark dirt streets before stopping outside a house. Not just any house: a burned-black life-size statue of a two-legged being holding a pitchfork stood outside. We filed through a door into a courtyard, where we were each turned in a circle by a man dangling an incense burner.
As before, leaves were strewn over the floor inside the ceremonial room. The ceremony was already in progress, a
nd the thundering pulse of three drummers filled the space. That’s where the similarities ended. This time, there was no separation of men and women, and only two participants went into trance. When one reappeared, he had been dressed in red brocade pantaloons, and his bare torso was wrapped in silver fabric tied in large bows in the back, like a Christmas package.
“Dressed like the Portuguese colonists,” Luis told us.
On his head, he wore a black felt hat pierced with a feather and studded with teeth and cowry shells. Set at a rakish angle, it seemed in keeping with his strutting manner, the cigar he was smoking, and the cane he twirled like a Broadway dandy.
“Exu is open, like the street,” Luis explained. “He leads the way to opportunities. He’s free. He can smoke and drink.”
Sweeping across the space with his eyes closed, he stopped quite miraculously two-inches from the stairs leading out of the room. He whipped up to a seated woman, pulled her out of her chair, kissed her on both cheeks, and proceeded right down the line until he’d kissed all of us, with his eyes closed. This was just the beginning.
Our dandy seemed to be methodically ticking through a list. He proceeded to go down the line of onlookers again, beckoning us to stand, sweeping a sheaf of leaves down our bodies top to bottom, then, taking hold of our pinky fingers, he gave a firm downward jerk. I wondered if the kids would want to laugh, but they didn’t. Molly, with her dancer’s elegance, stood tall and solemn while she was cleansed, front, side, and back. Sprinkling gunpowder in the center of the floor, the dandy lit it on fire, creating a burst of sparking flame. Circus antics for the tourists? He smudged baby powder crosses on our chests and the backs of our necks and poured cologne into the palms of our hands, all with his eyes closed. Plastic cups of Fanta, guarana, and beer were passed, and then finally a basket for donations. The ceremony was over.
Adams, who had come with us, was puzzled. A Candomblé practitioner himself, he said he’d never seen a family ceremony opened to the public.
“Well, maybe it serves everyone,” Peter surmised. “We want to see what they do, and they get some money to support their ceremony.”
