Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil

by Amy Ragsdale

  People we didn’t know—skateboarders, little girls, parade participants (Brazilians love using parades to advertise, to celebrate)—were knocking on our door asking for water, throats parched by the relentless heat.

  People we did know—Skyler’s friends, Peter’s soccer buddies, the neighbor boys—asked to borrow soccer balls, swimming masks, paddle ball sets. We began to insist they bring them back the same day, as we found ourselves more and more frequently cleaned out and clueless about where things had gone.

  Then people started knocking on the door for food. First Ryan, which they pronounced Heon, a bony, taut boy from capoeira, who made that fluttering gesture in front of his mouth—palm down, fingers digging toward his lips—as he waited for Skyler to change into his capoeira clothes. He crouched in a corner of the kitchen on the floor, turning down my offer of the couch, and inhaled a plate of rice and meat.

  Two days later, a pregnant woman appeared, dangling a small boy by his wrist, asking for water and comida. She sat on the front step, leaving the door open—half in, half out. Eyes drooping with exhaustion, she was gentle with the boy, cajoling him into drinking water while she picked through cold stew. She left the empty dish on the floor and thanked me quietly before hefting the boy onto her hip and heading back out into the beating sunshine.

  A few months earlier, around Christmas, Aniete had gotten a job working in a clothing store down in the baixa. Sorry as we were to lose her, we’d let her go, knowing it was a good opportunity. But by March, Aniete had started using our house as her lanchonete, as we were within walking distance of her work. I’d find her on the bench by the back window just when I was ready to take a break and gaze out the window myself, and then hunkered over rice and beans at our dining table, chattering with Shirley, Aniete’s cousin and our new empregada, just as I was ready to sit down for lunch.

  Things were falling apart at home in the States as well. Our cat got shot with a BB and stopped eating. Our dog tore her leg on a fence and needed stitches. My mother had to put her dog to sleep.

  “This is the longest month.” Skyler groaned.

  March was rough.

  Peter banged through the front door into the garden room.

  “I’ve just been informed I’ve been telling nurses all over town that I’ve been playing soccer without my shorts.”

  He was returning from his Portuguese lesson with Giovanni.

  “At all those clinics, I’ve been saying calções, shorts, when I should have been saying calçados, shoes.”

  Molly and I laughed uproariously.

  I felt as if my Portuguese were falling apart. I’d probably hit my peak in about November; after that, all our English-speaking friends had begun to arrive.

  “That’s a beautiful expensive!” I called out to Elizia as I crossed the praça on my way back from the stationery store. She was sitting in front of the school in her sleek new silver Fiat.

  Oh, jeez, I thought as I waved cheerfully and realized I’d said “expensive” instead of “car,” the two words separated by one r in Portuguese. God, they’re tolerant.

  April passed much like March, rather the way months did at home, mostly indistinguishable one from the other except for the markers of holidays—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas—and, where we lived in the north, the change of seasons, though even those were mostly indistinguishable from year to year, one winter being much like another. Looking back at my childhood, it was the years we lived abroad that I really remembered. The others were the filler in between.

  It made me think that it was probably time to go home, that Penedo was losing part of its great value, the power of the new and different to open one’s eyes.

  One night, Skyler wrangled open the front door, slammed some things around in the kitchen, then dropped into his chair at the table. The rest of us had just finished dinner.

  “How was the roda?” I asked. Too tired, I’d stayed home from capoeira.

  “Fine.”

  “So what’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Then, a few minutes later, “It’s what happened after the roda. Can I be excused?”

  An hour later, he flopped down on our bed.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be Ricardo’s friend anymore,” he announced.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He gets in so many fights.” Then it all spilled out. Ricardo had run after Pedro and kicked him, hard. Pedro had started crying and throwing rocks at Ricardo, and then Pedro’s mom had come out and dragged him away.

  “We could hear him screaming inside and her, you know, hitting him.” Skyler paused then continued. “And Ricardo didn’t even care. He just forgot about it.” The flow of words subsided. “I tried to stop them,” he added.

  “I think maybe the same thing happens to Ricardo with his mom. That’s why he lives with his aunt,” I said now to Skyler, lying on the bed. “So maybe for him it doesn’t seem . . . You know, it’s just life,” I ended lamely.

  “Oh, and you know why Bazooka hasn’t been at capoeira?” Skyler continued, on a roll. Skyler and I especially admired Bazooka. We’d nicknamed him “the cat” because he moved with a big cat’s quiet ease but startling strength. “He got shot in the face. He’s in the hospital. He still has one bullet in his face and two in his chest. Fabio told me. I guess he’d been drinking cachaça and got in a fight, and the other guy went home and came back with a .22.”

  I recalled that Giovanni had said that five people had been shot in Penedo during carnaval. Maybe Bazooka had been one of them.

  After a while, Skyler lightened up. “Maybe this could be my job. You know how you’ve started teaching Fabio English and Molly’s started teaching dance at the girls’ orphanage and Dad’s trying to get Junior out of jail? Maybe I could help Ricardo stop fighting.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said, appearing through the door, her physics textbook in hand. “Otherwise, when he starts drinking, he’s going to end up like all these others.”

  The next morning, I picked up the Gazeta de Alagoas from where it had been pushed under our front door. “Capitão P M é assassinado” was the headline. “The Captain of the Military Police Has Been Assassinated.” “Assassinations,” as they called murders, were our daily bread.

  That day at lunch, Aniete limped through the door, looking drained from her climb up the hill. She sank into a chair at the dining table with a plate of rice and beans. “Ontem, as cinco horas . . .”—Yesterday at five o’clock, some young guys in a car shot a guy sitting in a plaza, right by O Laçador. “You know O Laçador?” she asked, referring to the Brazilian grill near her house. “There were lots of people. Everybody ran. The guy they shot, he shot another guy last week.” She shoveled in another mouthful, rolled her eyes, and shook her head. “Muita violência, muita violência.”

  Alagoans seemed to wear their first-place ribbon for highest incidence of violence in the country as a badge of distinction, as though if you couldn’t do anything about it, you might as well claim it. Another nod to fate.

  “Eskyloh!” The afternoon shout came through the front window.

  “Skyler, it’s Ricardo,” I shouted from the front room.

  Skyler ambled to the front door and jangled it open.

  “Oi.”

  “Quer jogar parkour?”

  Skyler loves parkour, the sport of jumping railings, scaling walls, leaping stairs. A few days earlier, after joining a roving band of “park-ouristas,” he’d said, “Mom, I think I’ve found my sport.”

  But today, after a short conversation, he closed the door and ambled back into the house.

  “Don’t you want to go out?” I asked.

  “No.” He sounded dejected. “I told him I couldn’t play with him anymore if he keeps fighting so much.”

  “You did? Wow, that’s hard to do, Skyler. What did he say?”

  “I don’t think he understood at first. But after about three times, he said, ‘Tchau.’”

  As I opened the door to
go out for my tennis lesson, a shout came out of the tree in the praça. “Eskyloh!”

  Skyler looked torn.

  When I came back from tennis, I could see Skyler’s blue-and-orange tennis shoes dangling from a branch. He dropped to the ground, grinning.

  “Ricardo said he would stop fighting,” he told me, clearly proud.

  I wondered what kind of impact Skyler could really have. Whether we were doing the “American thing” that I often objected to: stepping in and telling others how they should behave with the barest understanding of their culture. On the other hand, where was Ricardo headed, with his toothless, drunken mother and stern aunt? Down Bazooka’s path? It wasn’t hard to picture, with Ricardo’s hotheadedness and the inevitability that he’d start to drink. So maybe it was better to try something rather than give into nothing, even knowing intervening might be ineffectual in the end.

  Iracema, the kids’ school guidance counselor, invited us over for Sunday brunch. We asked about the recent spate of violence.

  “It’s the police, too,” Iracema said. “Sometimes it’s easier to just shoot a repeat offender than keep throwing them in jail.”

  We thought about Junior. We knew this wasn’t his first offense.

  “Don’t get involved,” her husband Alexandre, a fisheries engineer, said, when we told him about Junior’s case. “You don’t know our culture, how things are done. You say he’s a boa pessoa, but you don’t know. They aren’t all good people.”

  We felt like children, being told to stay out of trouble.

  Junior was still in prison in the neighboring town of Igreja Nova. It had been three months. Peter and Zeca had been to visit him.

  “If you can say you were employing him, that could be good. It will look better if he has a job,” Zeca had told Peter on the way to take a deposition.

  “I felt so sad saying good-bye,” Peter told me on his return, “seeing him there, behind bars. We went down to the store to get him some other things to eat. They just get rice and beans and salami. He’s gaining weight because he’s not playing soccer.” Peter put his backpack down on the wicker couch and pulled something out.

  “He gave me this.” On the palm of his hand sat a delicate swan, fit together from origami-like pieces of folded newspaper. “Another guy in there taught him how to make them.”

  40

  The Sensitive Cross-Cultural Approach

  I CALLED SKYLER to the window. The sanguin, the little monkeys, were climbing the tallest coconut palm in our neighbor’s yard. There were five of them, including a mom with her tiny baby burrowed into the fur on her back. The palm must have been fifty feet high, but they walked up it as though they were going upstairs to bed.

  “How do they hang on like that?” Skyler exclaimed with admiration.

  As the last one reached the fronds, a light rain began to fall. It looked cozy up there under the palm thatch.

  A couple of days later, Peter walked into the garden room.

  “A guy’s in back climbing the big coconut,” he announced offhandedly.

  Skyler and I hurried to the back window. A man was squatting in its top, hacking off the lower fronds. They’d turned orangey-brown in the last few weeks—the palm’s way of shedding as it put out new fronds above to continue its upward climb. The man hopped himself down the long skinny trunk, placing his left hand, fingers pointing down, between his squatting feet, to hold his weight as he jumped his feet down—like a monkey. He repeated this—hand, feet, hand, feet—until he landed lightly in the weeds at the bottom.

  Skyler was an intrepid tree climber, but coconut palms were in a category all their own. There wasn’t much to hang on to except that snake-like trunk.

  “Could you teach our son to climb the tree?” I shouted in Portuguese to the man below.

  He looked up at our window, surprised, but nodded tentatively.

  “Do you want him to show you how he climbs?” I asked Skyler.

  “Sure. I guess so,” he replied.

  He left to put on a T-shirt, then sauntered down our back stairs, through the laundry room, and out into our overgrown backyard.

  The man demonstrated walking up the tree. He looked as casual as the monkeys had. Hands looped around the trunk like a tree climber’s belt, he just walked up it, hips jutting out into the air, taking big steps so his feet were always in front of him, not below, where they could slide down. Skyler tried. He made it about ten feet, once, twice, three times, then would get too tired and back his way down. Skyler thanked him and reemerged up the stairs.

  It turned out the man was doing more than trimming our neighbor’s palm trees. A couple of hours later, he’d uprooted the entire yard’s entanglement of green, revealing an astonishing amount of trash—plastic pop bottles, cans, white Styrofoam takeout boxes. Our neighbor, a bachelor who’d had a hard time pulling his eyes out of Molly’s cleavage, must have been chucking his dinner “dishes” out the window. Peter, Aniete, and I peered out the back, surveying the destruction.

  Aniete explained that our neighbor had killed a big, venomous spider in his house and thought it had come from outside. So this: Aniete waved at the denuded plot.

  Peter shouted down to the tree climber in Portuguese, “Are you going to clear the trash as well?”

  “Sim, sim.”—Yes.

  We looked out the window that evening; the plant “trash” had been assiduously cleared, leaving nothing but bare ground and the human trash that had been left behind.

  For days after that, I went over in my mind how I might ask our neighbor to clean up his backyard. It was an eyesore for us, never mind a rat haven. Using my Portuguese dictionary, I carefully planned out the sentences.

  “Did you know men from the city come every day to pick up our trash, right here in front?” Maybe too indirect.

  How about, “O lixo”—The trash behind your house—“não é muito bonita”—is not so pretty. We’d be happy to pay someone to pick it up.” But maybe then we’d become the perpetual pick-up crew.

  How about the sensitive cross-cultural approach, “Nos Estados Unidos . . .”—In the United States, we collect our trash to be taken away by the trash collectors. I know the custom is different here, but . . .” I decided I’d try this.

  But then when I ran into him the next day washing his motorcycle in the praça and the day after that sitting on a plastic chair blocking the sidewalk, I just couldn’t quite do it. Was it because I was questioning whether it was my place, as the foreigner, to ask the locals to change their ways? Partly, and partly I just didn’t want to embarrass my neighbor; but then who’s to say he’d have been embarrassed?

  41

  The Long Arm of American Ambition

  THE LONG ARM of American ambition had finally snaked its way up the Rio São Francisco. Molly, a high school junior, was in crisis over the upcoming SAT, which she was registered to take in Salvador in early May.

  Molly had come to Brazil armed with the Princeton guide to practice tests, which she’d begun to plow through a few weeks before.

  “Everybody quiet. Molly’s taking a test. She’s being timed,” I’d hiss at the parade of people slamming through our front door.

  “Mom, all my friends back home are getting tutors or taking prep courses,” she said, sounding increasingly dejected as she ticked off another practice. I had to admit, her scores were surprisingly low, but not wanting to discourage her, I said nothing.

  “Mom, I feel so overwhelmed. I don’t even want to think about going back to the United States.” Molly groaned. “I can’t fit everything I need to graduate into my schedule next year. It’s ridiculous that I can’t get language credit for Portuguese, when I’m practically fluent . . . And there’s so much I want to do outside of school—The Nutcracker, a play, soccer, the newspaper. At home there’s always so much to do!” she continued. “It’s so much easier here.”

  She was experiencing what my father, giving it the good spin, would have called “an embarrassment of riches.” In the Unite
d States, if one has the means, there are many activities to choose from. In Penedo, Skyler’s street friends do the same thing every day after school: look around for something to do. They house surf, hoping to juggle some lemons here, scare up a ball there. In the States, one can try out for myriad sports, join extracurricular clubs to fit any interest, and suffocate under the load. In the States, the current norm of “I want to do it all”—or is it “I should do it all,” or maybe “everyone else is doing it all, so . . .”—has turned excitement into dread, at least for Molly. In my own life, I’ve often felt relief—relief that I’m done. I check things off the list, and, in the process, I check off my life.

  Molly had been Skyping with friends back home, which you’d think might have established a reassuring and calming camaraderie, but instead they seemed to relish whipping themselves into a stressed-out frenzy, as though the height of the stress were the measure of the import of the situation. And God knows the situation was important. They were suddenly standing at the gateway to the rest of their lives: that gateway to college, the name of which was going to determine everything that came afterward. At least that’s how they seemed to feel.

  Finally I was beginning to worry myself. Watching Molly struggle to pick up her speed on the practice tests reminded me how much Americans value “fast”—fast food, fast answers, fast results. (This is probably why we also value “young.” We don’t have time for the not-so-fast old.) We want things now. This leads to 24/7, to sound bites. If you can’t give me that information, that service, those goods now, I’ll find somebody else who can. So of course, to get into college, our kids need to prove that they are not just smart, reflective, and knowledgeable, but fast.

  Brazil is the opposite. It is the country of “slow,” the country of waiting, the country of patience. The country where you assume you can’t get it now; in fact, you might never get it. So the question becomes: When? And the answer is: “Quem sabe?”—Who knows?