Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil

by Amy Ragsdale

  I was glad to retrace that midnight trip in the daylight. The walls of foliage on either side looked as impenetrable in the light as they’d looked in the dark. Occasional tatters of color broke the mass of green: the peacock’s-neck blue of a giant butterfly and bits of orange, purple, yellow—bird-of-paradise and passion fruit flowers, trumpet vines. This was Hollywood-movie jungle. If you scrutinized the wall of green, you could find small openings leading into blackness, a way in. Into what? Now we knew, at least a bit.

  We’d left our Uno cards back in Ariabu, with a child who lived in the hut next to our hammock pad. We’d left our blankets with Adelaide, and I’d given my rubber boots to Anderson. I realized it was impossible for us to visit such a place and leave no trace. Even if we’d left nothing, the mental picture of us in our yellow rubber boots and zip-off pants, reading paperbacks and toting high-tech backpacks, would still be there, along, perhaps, with a new germ of desire, and then maybe discontent. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Nevertheless, I felt guilty, greedy, for buying my way in to look at these people.

  On the other hand, the gate had already been opened. The signs were everywhere: in the bras and T-shirts; in the new form of mandioca, introduced by missionaries; in the TVs and telephone, the generator that brought recorded music and movies, the washing machine and tetherballs. Some were probably improvements, others not. I was glad that the Yanomami were able to exert some control over who got in and at what price. I thought it was probably important, for both sides, that Molly and Skyler should continue on in the world knowing there are people like this living so differently; important that our kids should get a taste of what skill and knowledge these people have; important that they learn that these people don’t always need help, at least not ours, and, if they do, to listen carefully and respect what they are asking for.

  34

  A Long Swim

  BACK IN SÃO GABRIEL, we showered, rented a few more DVDs, found a cozy neighborhood dinner spot, and waged battle against the moucouine, tiny mites. I’d been the first to get them.

  Dressing one day back at the Mamirauá Reserve, I’d looked down to see that anywhere my underpants and bra had been was covered in red bumps—a red-welt bikini. Apparently the mites were attracted to spots where it was warm, hence your underwear lines. I must have been a find—a premenopausal woman with hot flashes. I had to grit my teeth not to scratch.

  By the time we left Ariabu, Peter, Molly, and Skyler were turning red as well. We spread the recommended antidote, the musty-smelling andiroba nut oil, on liberally, forming a layer of glue to which our clothes now stuck.

  “Oh, Mom, I feel so yucky,” Molly said. “I have about everything you could get. I have bites on my butt, pimples on my face, diarrhea, my period. I feel bloated, sweaty, and dirty.” But she was laughing.

  We enjoyed kicking back, waiting for the fast boat that would take us back to Manaus. It would be leaving in two days. Our time in the Amazon was coming to an end.

  The taxi jounced through the ruts and came to a stop by the riverbank. At seven in the morning, a small line of passengers was forming. We suspected this fast boat was not going to be as luxurious as the one we’d taken at the beginning of our trip from Manaus to Tefé—and it was going to take twice as long, twenty-four hours. But we had high hopes anyway. Though smaller, this one still had the sleek, white promise of the first, and to our relief, the air conditioning was less ferocious. It had the same rows of airline seats, and I was glad to see the banks of TV screens, knowing that for Skyler, the nonstop string of action movies would make the time fly. The only things missing were the back deck and the writing emblazoned on the hull: God is in first place. This should have tipped us off.

  Here on the Rio Negro, the bank was very different from that on the Rio Solimões. It was strikingly beautiful—with giant, rounded granite outcroppings and pure-white pocket beaches punctuating a lush tangle of forest. Maybe the rocks were the reason there seemed to be no farming and, as a result, almost no houses. It felt pristine, wilder. Initially there were those jutting peaks in the distance, but gradually the land flattened and spread, earth curving into sky bent around a fish-eye lens.

  We were served a dinner of stewed beef, sautéed chicken, and rice, and then they turned out the lights. It was six thirty and dark. We fidgeted with our seat backs. They were anchored upright. We pulled the plexiglass windows shut against the rain. It was almost cozy, but not comfortable. The woman next to me finally decided to lie down in the center aisle. There we were again, racing through the night in a boat. I thought I might have preferred Anderson’s open-air canoe, with its more visceral feeling of flying through deep space.

  I was dreaming of dancers when my slumbering body lurched into the seat in front of me. There was a loud bang. People were screaming. “Calma, calma!” someone shouted. Awake in an instant, I wheeled around to find Molly, Skyler, and Peter in their seats behind me.

  “What happened?”

  “We crashed.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was 4:00 AM.

  “If we need to bail, go out the window,” Peter said quietly.

  We all looked out the window. Blackness.

  I thought about what I could swim with, which things we might need could survive the wet: credit cards, eyeglasses, passports.

  Molly and Skyler said nothing.

  I looked down. Our computer was gone. In fact, everything I’d stuffed under the seat in front of me was gone. People were out of their seats. None of the hundred-plus people seemed to want to sit down. There was water on the floor, but it seemed to be seeping, not gushing.

  I flashed back to those tiny paragraphs I used to read at the bottom of some inside page in The New York Times. The ones that matter-of-factly described the sinking of yet another ferry in some faraway place, the tens of lives lost. Was this going to be it?

  I got up and squeezed my way forward. Our computer and several bags had somehow ended up three rows in front of us. I continued to weave my way through the standing people up to the front. It was an astonishing sight. The bow had drilled into a sandbank all the way up to the windshield, which was now missing large slices of glass. Had the pilot really run into the shore at forty miles an hour? Had he fallen asleep? A man was outside standing on the sand, digging the boat out with a blunt two-by-four. I wondered whether this would be like pulling the knife out of someone who’d been stabbed. The person wouldn’t die as long as the knife was plugging the hole. Were we not sinking because the sand was filling the gap?

  I returned to Molly and Skyler, who were still quietly seated. Except for one passenger with a broken arm, no one was severely injured, and people were now surprisingly calm. The man in front of us said the same thing had happened last month.

  It began to get light. We had not run into the bank; we were in the middle of the river! It would be a long swim. I began to think about what might be in the water. Unfortunately, I knew.

  35

  Dark-Skinned Nannies Wheel White-Skinned Babies to the Park

  I WAS LOOKING for a padlock.

  “I don’t know the word . . .” I said in Portuguese, miming a padlock with my hands, and the sales clerk responded, “Oh a lock. Over here.” In English. That was when I knew I was in a different place.

  A couple of weeks earlier, our fast boat, dug out of the sandbar in the middle of the Rio Negro, had been able to limp its way back to Manaus, late, but without further mishap. We’d checked back into our hostel and caught a plane the next day to Salvador, from whence we’d taken the bus to the van to the ferry back to Penedo. A week later, we’d reversed the transport chain back to Salvador to catch a flight to Rio de Janeiro, our last hurrah before the kids returned to school.

  We felt we couldn’t go to Brazil without going to Rio, one of the most visited cities in the Southern Hemisphere. It was immediately obvious why. This city of six and a half million has one of the most dramatic natural settings in the world. Rocky outcroppings rise above a looping coastline trimmed i
n white-sand beaches: Copacabana, Ipanema, names that have been immortalized in film and song. Rio’s carnaval is second to none for spectacle. We’ve all seen the images of samba-dancing women on huge floats, all bare skin and feathers.

  We were meeting Peter’s mother, Judy, and sister Kate, and thanks to them were luxuriating in the hushed comfort of the Ipanema Plaza, a boutique hotel, where glittering cases of H. Stern jewels adorned the lobby and rooms were tastefully decorated in celadon green. Looking out from the fourteenth floor, we saw canyons of white dropping to rivers of green, through which wove schools of yellow taxis and lumbering white buses. Above the canyons, black sea birds soared and dropped, flapping on hinged wings, by the windows of white-upholstered apartments.

  Down on the street, I was taken aback at how American the world outside felt. On the streets of Ipanema, we could have been on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There were the same sidewalk cafés and plate glass window displays of elegant clothing and gleaming kitchen accessories, the same clusters of ficus trees for sale on the sidewalk. There were the same dark-skinned nannies wheeling white-skinned babies to the park. There was even a Citibank. We didn’t have any of this in Penedo.

  Molly and I salivated over Panama straw fedoras and gladiator sandals. I hankered after a cocktail dress I had no reason to buy. The off-the-shoulder sheath shimmered through filmy veils of organza, in peach and lime, sequins and beads, epitomizing my image of Rio, the Hollywood city of romance, with Roger Moore, Bing Crosby, and Jean-Paul Belmondo for guides.

  Back in Missoula, on our hanging mobile of wishes for this year in Brazil, soccer had taken second place after “Go to the Amazon.” In addition to wishing to play, Skyler had written, “Watch a live professional game.”

  Rio was home to many of Brazil’s top futebol teams, and, amazingly, our four-day visit coincided with the semifinals of the Guanabara Cup, the tournament pitting Rio’s teams against each other. We would have to forsake our loyalty to our chosen team, Corinthians, as they were based in São Paulo.

  Choosing a team was no small matter. Team loyalties were handed down through generations, and once you had declared yours there was no going back. We’d sworn fealty to Corinthians out of loyalty to Zeca. But as we already knew, Zeca was a maverick. Most Penedenses were diehard Flamengo fans, and Flamengo would be playing in Rio.

  “Flamengo is a team of criminals,” Zeca had said dismissively when first recruiting us as Corinthians fans.

  He didn’t have to argue his case. On our arrival in Brazil, our morning cake and coffee at the Pousada Colonial had been accompanied by grisly TV reenactments of the murder of a model by Flamengo’s beloved goalie, Bruno Fernandes de Souza, better known as Bruno. I intentionally sat with my back to the television so I wouldn’t have to stomach, yet again, her bundled body parts being thrown into a pond as I ate my fried eggs.

  “Que pena . . .”—How sad, what a waste of a life, the clerk in a Penedo furniture store had said, shaking her head, looking more stricken at the loss of the goalie she idolized than by what he’d purportedly done to the mother of his baby.

  However, Flamengo, in an effort to regain lost ground, had recently taken on Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, known fondly as Ronaldinho, luring him back to Brazil from Milan. Skyler had been following Ronaldinho on YouTube in the States for years. It was clear which semifinal we’d be going to: Flamengo v. Botafogo.

  Judy decided she could do without the sweaty, jostling crowd, but Kate, always up for a new experience, came along. Our hotel arranged for us to go in a group with a guide. Part of me wanted to go local, take public transport and find our own way to the stadium. But after seeing the streets swarming with shouting, fist-pumping Botafogo fans, clearly drunk and out for blood, I was relieved to be floating above the fray in the raised dais of our tour bus.

  “We have to be sure we sit in the right section so we don’t get gang beaten,” Skyler had been saying. The appearance of military police walking skulking German shepherds in the no-man’s land between the stands and the field confirmed my sense that things could get ugly.

  Molly wanted to get Flamengo shirts, and fit in with the fans, so we bought a couple as we wound up the switchbacking ramp, almost running to keep up with our guide. We popped out into the stands. It was 104 degrees, and our side was in the sun. The fans from each team got a clearly delineated half of the stadium. Ours was awash in red and black and gargantuan, swooping banners with Ronaldinho’s silhouetted face. An enormous red sheet, forty rows high and fifty people wide, was being passed overhead. You weren’t allowed to bring any liquids into the stadium, and no alcohol was sold inside, but the ban hadn’t stopped anyone from prepping before they got there. The stands were rocking.

  “There’s Ronaldinho.” Skyler was pointing. “The one in the white cleats, with the long hair. See, he’s shaking the refs’ hands.”

  Like everyone else, we stood for most of the two-hour game. I looked at the tattoo in baroque cursive on the glistening, bare shoulder blade of the man next to me: Flamengo. The energy was intoxicating. We rode the heart-thumping din of shouted chants and hoarse songs. Suspecting that the words weren’t totally flattering, I consulted Skyler, our in-house expert on insulting phrases. It turned out the fans were shouting, “Hey ref, go fuck yourself,” repeatedly, in rhythm, at thundering volume—inconceivable in the States.

  When the game ended, the teams were tied, one to one. Fantastic, a shoot out! We would get to see Ronaldinho bend the ball into the net. It was interesting how you could feel a player’s personality, even when he was so far away that he appeared only an inch tall. Ronaldinho seemed calm and generous as he offered a hand to pull up a fallen player from the other team or passed off the ball for a teammate to take the shot. He didn’t seem to be the usual chest-thumping, fist-pumping Brazilian footballer, which you’d think he might be when he could pull in a salary of $700,000 a month. But Ronaldinho was last in line to kick, and Flamengo sewed it up before they got to him. By that time, the Botafogo stands were almost empty. On our side, no one had moved. Ronaldinho was last to leave the field, raising his arms to his fans, who roared with approval, including sweat-matted Molly and Skyler, sated and happy.

  That evening, we headed out for more sightseeing. After a taxi fiasco, in which our two taxis split and went in opposite directions, the kids and I stood waiting for Peter, Judy, and Kate at the base of the Sugarloaf cable car.

  “Mom, we’re going to miss the sunset. Couldn’t Skyler and I go up by ourselves?”

  I succumbed. I coughed up my last bits of change and watched as my children disappeared in a dangling box headed to the top of Sugarloaf, a rocky precipice in the middle of Rio.

  “If we don’t show up in an hour and a half, come back down,” I shouted after them.

  Eventually, the others limped up in their yellow cab, tired and frustrated. We’d missed the sunset but in the end got something equally magical. Balanced atop the Sugarloaf, we soared in the soft, cool air. We watched as the city’s night-lights sparked on. The bustle of this six-million-person city settled into a soothing sea of shimmering fairy dust spilling around dark volcanoes. The lights of streaming cars piped a scalloped shoreline. The slums of Rio, the favelas, trickled like silver lava down volcanic gullies. At night, everything looked equally jewel-like, the condominiums of the rich and the shacks of the poor. I remembered what Giovanni had said back in Penedo: “Everything looks good from a distance.”

  I guessed it could also be said, “Everything looks good in the dark.”

  36

  Put to the Test

  I WAS HAPPY to go home to Penedo. We’d been gone for most of five weeks. Molly was eager to start up at Imaculada, where her class would now be the segundo ano, the second-to-oldest class in the school. At the recommendation of Iracema, one of the coordenadors, we’d decided that Skyler would go back and complete the first semester of his seventh-grade year (when we’d arrived, he’d entered into the second). This meant he’d be switching to a younger
class. He wasn’t thrilled, but he seemed to accept it as yet another part of his bad-school-year package. Despite the return of his perpetual postural slump, things actually seemed to be improving.

  “Well, this is a reversal of fortune,” Peter whispered one day wandering into the garden room. “Check out Skyler.” I got up from my desk and looked down the hall.

  “Do you think we can trust it?” I whispered back.

  We’d come to the end of the first week of classes, and Skyler had miraculously settled onto the red couch to do his homework with no resistance. Sitting down beside him, I paged through his multi-subject notebook and was quite astonished. Last semester, it seemed he’d never gotten a grip on which classes he had what days, who the teachers were, or whether he had any homework. We’d engaged Vanessa, Skyler’s English teacher, largely to find out what his homework was.

  “Skyler, I’m so impressed. Your caderno is so much more organized than it was.”

  He leafed through the notebook to show me his history notes.

  “And I actually understand it, too.” He recounted how the barbarians had attacked European cities and how the inhabitants had gone to feudal lords for protection.

  “And here in math, I’ve already done all of this. My teacher, Valmir, he told how good I am to everyone in math. He told them in math how good I am . . . How do you say it?”

  He’d been repeating phrases in English recently, with wonderment and some pride, I thought, that he was getting so much better at Portuguese that it was interfering with his English.

  “He told them I wasn’t held back because I couldn’t do it, that I’m one of the best in math, but because I need to complete the other half of the year for my school in the States and because of the language.” Skyler seemed relieved.

  I was grateful for Valmir’s tact. Along with Mario, the kids’ PE teacher, he’d been exceptionally kind and empathetic, much as the capoeiristas had been.