Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil

by Amy Ragsdale

  At the capoeira salon that Monday, I mentioned to Bentinho that Skyler’s birthday, his thirteenth, was coming up.

  “Podemos celebrar . . . ?”—Could we celebrate on Wednesday, with cake?

  “Certo.” Bentinho seemed pleased.

  When Wednesday came, I was on alert. I’d been anticipating this evening for four months, since we’d witnessed the other boy’s thirteenth birthday, and I’d begun to hope that Skyler might be put to a similar challenge, have the fortune to be part of a male rite of passage, so rare now in the United States, and pass the test. I knew I was hoping that somehow this rite would ease his fraught journey through adolescence, instilling him with the deep confidence that I hoped would eventually ground him as a man. I knew it was a lot to ask, more than this one event could really deliver, but still . . . Now I was nervous.

  I’d been vigilantly guarding the remains of the last of three cakes from a surprise birthday party that Skyler’s friends had thrown him the night before. Victor and Ricardo had been eager to mount a surprise party at our house, not easy to do when punctuality is about as foreign to Brazilians as patience is to Americans. But they’d pulled it off, enlisting neighborhood friends to blow up balloons and string crepe paper above our dining table in a delicious frenzy of secret plotting.

  Considering the number of times we’d trudged up and down the ridge carrying cakes and platters of brigadeiro, cloyingly rich balls of condensed milk and cocoa powder, made by Karol and other friends, everyone in the neighborhood must have known by then that it was Skyler’s birthday. This time, on my way down to the capoeira salon, I was carrying a heavy platter of watermelon, so I was walking fast.

  “Cadê Eskyloh?” The standard greeting rang out every few meters.

  “Lá.” I jerked my head back to where Skyler was slowly making his way down the hill, surrounded by his friends.

  “Salve,” I shouted as I entered the salon and shook off my flip-flops.

  “Salve,” they shouted back.

  I put the watermelon and pop on one of the tables that had been pushed to the side, and I headed into the back courtyard to change. I’d recently managed to overcome my self-consciousness enough to start wearing the capoeira white. By the time I reentered the salon, Skyler and his entourage were coming through the door.

  Bentinho smiled and nodded his head as if to say, Ah, here he is, the sacrificial lamb.

  More and more people kept arriving throughout the warm-up, which was unusually strenuous. Recently, Bentinho had lectured the advanced students, telling them they couldn’t just show up to “play”; they also had to continue to train. I hoped Skyler had caught that life message.

  By the time we broke for the roda, there were nineteen people besides Skyler. Nineteen people he’d have to spar against, nineteen people who were going to try to trip him up. Peter had arrived with the camera.

  Skyler didn’t look the least bit uneasy. Maybe he didn’t realize what was coming. Or maybe he did and was eager to see if he could meet the challenge. I’d begun to notice in him an almost-reckless desire to prove himself, as though testosterone had taken the helm.

  The drumming was starting, and the circle was beginning to form. When everyone had gathered, they all fell silent. Bentinho was smiling. “It’s Skyler’s birthday,” he began in Portuguese. “He’s twenty-three.” Everyone laughed. Skyler nodded, going along with the joke. “No, he’s thirteen,” Bentinho continued. “We’re going to play with him. Right?” An image of panthers batting around a mouse flashed into my head. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The berimbau player began to sing. “Parabéns para você . . .”

  I laughed. It was “Happy Birthday,” but stretched out and syncopated to fit the capoeira rhythm. Then, suddenly, they shifted into our birthday song in English fit into the capoeira call-and-response mode. Everyone joined in, “’Appy birtday, ’appy birtday . . .” grinning at their own attempts at the language.

  I think then it began to dawn on Skyler what was going on. Bentinho invited Skyler into the circle. As usual, the tempo was slow, at first. They circled each other, crouching and rocking, almost in slow-motion, both pairs of eyes fixed on the other—the tall, powerful black man, the small, slight blond boy. Then Bentinho’s foot swept out, almost hooking Skyler’s, but Skyler dodged and spun. Bentinho regrouped. Skyler tilted and kicked toward Bentinho’s head. Bentinho’s arm darted into the space under his leg, but he didn’t grab the leg and flip Skyler to the ground, not this time. Instead he flipped over onto his head and waited, legs bent, ready to shoot forward should Skyler advance. Skyler lunged sideways, switched his legs, killed time. Then Bentinho was up, sweeping one leg behind Skyler’s knees, the other leg in front, and Skyler was down, his legs locked in a scissor grip. Skyler laughed, surprised, and squiggled out of Bentinho’s hold, rising and darting away. Bentinho smiled.

  Ningo cut in. He and Skyler touched hands, and the bout started anew, over and over, eighteen more times. Fabio was the last. By this time, the tempo had picked up and the “game” had moved into the realm of fast-spinning high kicks, and Skyler was doing well, holding his own, but Fabio could see he was exhausted. After a few slicing fan kicks, Fabio held out his palms and put an arm around Skyler’s shoulders to lead him out of the ring. Skyler bent over, hands on his knees, and filled his lungs with air. There were quiet nods as the players looked his way. He’d done it.

  Bentinho started speaking, and, as usual, I could only catch a few words: “rapaz de treze”—boy of thirteen; “agradecido para seu participação em capoeira”—grateful for his participation in capoeira. He looked my way. “Do you want to speak?”

  I nodded and started haltingly, “Estou orgulhosa dele”—I’m proud of him—“porque eu sei . . . ”—because I know it’s not easy to come to another country where you don’t speak the language, where you know no one. It takes courage. But he has this courage. We are—“agradavel?”

  “Agradecido.”

  “Agradecido,”—grateful—I continued, “for all of you because you help us a lot.” I was starting to tear up.

  They clapped. Bentinho nodded to Skyler. “Fala?”—Speak?

  Skyler looked uncertain then came out with a simple “Obrigado”—Thank you.

  Yes, thank you, I thought, for taking my small, uncertain, stumbling boy and helping him to find his strength in this time of insecurity. Thank you for your generosity, your willingness to take in this boy who is richer and more privileged than any of you and offer him something that is more valuable than anything he could buy—the knowledge that he can walk into the unknown and come out the other side, stronger for it.

  They all smiled and burst into applause.

  37

  Gratitude

  IN NINE MONTHS, I have found:

  friends I would never have in the United States.

  patience with myself and others.

  a new language that I can now converse in with people of my own age.

  a feeling of belonging in a culture very different from my own.

  immense gratitude for the generosity of the people in this town.

  PART IV: Crossing the River

  MARCH, APRIL, MAY

  38

  A Five-Day Orgy

  WE COULD SEE IT coming. First the multicolored plastic fringe, zigzagging pole to pole down the street, thick and shaggy, rustling like dry palms; then the banners on every light post; then the sparkling, harlequin-painted faces like giant eggs grinning down from gazebo pillars; and finally the wiring of the extra-bright white lights. It had been going on for days. Here, finally, was the excited buildup we had for Christmas in the United States, a holiday that had passed in Brazil with a dull thud.

  Tired from traveling and ready to settle back into our quiet routine, we didn’t find the prospect of five nonstop, sleepless days of jostling crowds drinking and shouting and drinking and singing and drinking too appealing. But finally, even I was finding it hard to resist the insistent gaiety. It was hard not to sm
ile at the burly man in the tutu and clown wig waving from his motorcycle, or the sleek black car spotted with rainbow confetti stickers, or the little band of jiving drummers wandering around town, a flip-flop-footed dancing bull leading the way.

  “Vai a Neópolis?” my tennis coach had asked me at the end of my lesson one day, as we’d picked up balls strewn around the court and tossed them into an old shopping cart. Everyone said carnaval in Neópolis, the town across and downriver in Sergipe, was better. There they brought in name-brand bands at night and hosted the Mela-Mela, a major food fight, during the day.

  “Do we need to take our own eggs and flour?” I’d asked.

  “Yeah, and condensed milk and sugar water to throw.” He’d grinned.

  Zeca had warned us to watch out for people putting things in our mouths. Or was it to keep our mouths closed because there would be a lot flying through the air?

  On the day we decided to go over for the Mela-Mela, Peter and I and the “gang” (Skyler, Victor, and Ricardo) were strung along one wall waiting for the lancha to cast off. We were headed to Neópolis, and we were armed. We’d hidden four supermarket bags full of flour in several backpacks. No one else, however, seemed to have anything. I started to feel very American. Had we supersized it again?

  Molly had been largely on her own for the past two days, coming home at 6:00 AM after staying out all night. (Schools wisely canceled classes for this five-day stretch.) Surprisingly, I felt fine about it. She was good at checking in; had, in her friends, a phalanx of bodyguards; and seemed to know how to handle herself. When I’d asked if men were ever a problem, she’d said matter-of-factly, “Sometimes you just have to pry them off your face.” Okay, she’s immersed, I thought.

  The lancha’s motor started up, rumbling like a long fart. The little tube of a boat had filled and was listing to one side. I glanced at Ricardo. At age ten, he was crossing the river for the first time, and I knew his aunt was anxious about it given his rudimentary swimming skills. But he was looking cool, relaxed back into the bench, legs wide like all those men who ride the New York subway as if they’re the only ones on it. This was day three of carnaval in Brazil, day three of sweaty crowds, pumping music, crazy chaos, pre-Lent excess.

  Twenty minutes later, we coasted into the concrete landing on the other side. We squeezed our way out of the little boat and followed the crowd trudging up a narrow, twisting street. Neópolis has a pretty central praça full of benches and trees. We’d assumed the Mela-Mela would be there. But instead, like the sedated castle from Sleeping Beauty, it was full of sleeping people, tucked under bushes, on top of market tables. The crowd from the lancha was turning, disappearing down a side street. We hurried to catch up.

  A block later, we were in it, carried along by the crowd through a canyon of sound. A guy who reminded me of the Michelin Man, with his skin painted silver the better to showcase his bulging biceps, stood on a stoop. He held his arms high to show off his tiny, Speedo-clad hips, slowly gyyyyyyyyrating to the upbeat brass of the frevo music (a northeastern Brazilian folk music that’s especially popular around carnaval time). On a rooftop, a man in a black jumpsuit painted with a Day-Glo Halloween skeleton stepped side to side to the chest-throbbing beat, then gave a powerful pelvic thrust to the front, a thrust to the back, and a slow, juicy grind. A line of four men in swimsuits step-touched in unison, like backup dancers, then spread their legs wide and dropped their hips in a come-and-get-it, side-to-side swing. Much as I think I am, as a dancer, unusually comfortable in my body for an American, in that crowd, I felt like a buttoned-up, Bible-toting Calvinist.

  We sidestepped deadpan grandmothers, holding flaccid water hoses out living-room windows. A few hours later, we’d be grateful for the service. As we moved deeper in, we began to see people with faces patched with white, hair matted with flour. We scooped flour out of our bags, eager to join the fray—but how? A slimy hand swept over my face; its wet fingers seemed to be trying to crawl into my mouth. I squirmed away and instinctively flung my fistful. The man behind me laughed. In minutes, Peter’s face was dripping with green and red. Skyler had clods of something pink stuck to his eyebrows. A tall man in an oversized diaper rubbed a goopy hand in Ricardo’s hair. Ricardo didn’t look amused. I wondered if, in Ricardo’s mind, this would come to represent what was “across the river.” People stuck their hands in our flour bags as we squeezed through the increasingly dense pack of pulsing, flour-and-slime-coated flesh. Earnest vendors sold beer from Styrofoam coolers, looking as though they were wondering if the great sales were worth the sprays of shaving cream and beer. Two tank trucks were parked at a street corner, manned by bands of bare-chested studs pelting the crowd with a fire hose. The Mela-Mela continued as far as we could see.

  Several hours later, we wound our way back past the expressionless grandmothers, the sleeping square, and down to the river.

  “That was fun!” Skyler exclaimed. Ricardo was eager to wash off. I wandered into the water in my clothes and dunked. It would take me a week to pick the hardened scabs of flour out of my hair and a month to clean up Skyler.

  At home, we found Molly, who’d gone to the Mela-Mela with her friends.

  “I . . . have . . . never had,” Molly was saying emphatically, “so many disgusting things put in my mouth. I have had flour, eggs, butter—oh my God, I was so glad I was wearing my sunglasses. This huge hand just smeared my whole face in butter. I was dripping.”

  “Was it fun?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, it was really fun. They would tell you to say a word, like chuva—I said that one twice—and then, WHAM, in the mouth.”

  I flopped down on the couch, mentally preparing for the last two days of the festival. Our house was located at carnaval central. We just had to open our front windows to watch hours and hours of blocos—the slow-moving masses of bouncing people in their matching fluorescent T-shirts, following a little brass frevo band or a blast-you-out-of-your-seat equip som car. But Day Four turned out to be a rest day.

  On the last night, we stood on our wicker couch in the garden room, propping our elbows on the windowsill. Each bloco seemed to have a designated route. Many were accompanied by towering bonecas, swirling, swaying puppets with gaping teeth and wild hair on oversized heads. The blue satin skirts of an eight-foot-tall woman with enormous white teeth leering out of glossy red lips split open to reveal Victor’s dark head.

  “Oi, Eskyloh!” he shouted up to us from under his precariously balanced ward.

  Bentinho passed by, twirling his teenage daughter from the end of a raised finger. The lovely white-haired woman who lived down the block bounced by in a gold tutu and angel wings. “Vem!” she called, waving her wand at us. “Come!”

  Our perpetually drunken neighbor tilted by, careening from one side of the street to the other. A woman in a platinum wig, cow-print skirt, and cowboy boots passed out condoms. Or was her low, hoarse voice a man’s? A clutch of Peter’s soccer buddies, their cheeks rouged and eyelids painted blue, had squeezed their muscled bodies into slinky polyester dresses. They raised their beers to our window as they went by.

  The kaleidoscopic color, the pop-your-ear-drums volume of the music—the energy—had been maintained for almost five days. During carnaval, as on other occasions, it seemed that Brazilians had an insatiable appetite for fun.

  Molly showed up with her school friends Leila, Larissa, and Keyla, her carefully pre-torn bloco shirt falling off one shoulder. Breathless, she ducked into her bedroom, slipped on her blue flower-print dress, and slid out the door, geared up for one more all-night trip to Neópolis, one more night of rapid shuffling feet talking to the music, dancing hip to hip under a dark Brazilian sky. Peter, Skyler, and I propped our eyes open for another hour, then battened down the hatches and hoped for sleep.

  39

  The Doldrums of March

  ONCE CARNAVAL ENDED, March quickly degenerated into a scene by Tennessee Williams—stagnant, sweaty, and seething. Even the water hyacinths floating in the river had
come to a standstill. Tensions were running high. Molly slapped Skyler, then burst into tears; Skyler was in our faces, then retreated, refusing to talk; Peter and I hid in the “cooler,” our windowless, air-conditioned cubicle of a bedroom. My patience declined as the heat rose. We all just wanted to go home. Peter was the only one who seemed to be handling it all with equanimity.

  The sugarcane fires burned. Though illegal, the practice continued. It made the cane easier to cut, and most companies were still hiring laborers to harvest by hand—laborers, like Fabio from capoeira, whom the company would perennially underpay, “somehow” never delivering what they’d promised. The factory bus lumbered by with a limp dummy of a man tied to the front grill. I was surprised the company would allow such a protest. In the afternoon, great spirals of smoke appeared upriver. At night, we’d see the fields alight, distant flames orange against black. By morning, the far hills had faded into brown haze. This had been going on for six months, though common wisdom said it should have ended by now.

  Skyler, like any kid running barefoot, had three cuts, swollen red and oozing pus around his ankles. Peter ended up in the emergency room, having punctured his foot with a kebab skewer that was lying in wait on a soccer field that had supposedly recently been cleaned. Peter had paid for the cleaning.

  The ants were multiplying. The smaller ones had established regular highways—by the dish drainer, under the bathroom door—while the big ones were descending from their ceiling perches and now appeared disconcertingly out of the trash, on the food shelves, underfoot—like one-night stands, still there rummaging around in the morning, overstaying their welcome.

  Our house was turning into a clubhouse-cum-sports-equipment-outlet-cum-soup-kitchen-cum-Internet café.

  Gangs of boys, Skyler’s friends, swept through every afternoon, sometimes settling in for hours, taking careening rides in the hammock, walking on their hands down the hall, juggling soccer balls. Some days I’d walk in and find all four of our computers in use by magnetized boys, bodies frozen, eyes flitting, fingers jerking spasmodically. They devoured biscoitos and peanuts and drained our water jugs.