Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil Read online

  Crossing the River

  Copyright 2015 Amy Ragsdale

  Seal Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  1700 Fourth Street

  Berkeley, California

  sealpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is pending.

  978-1-58005-587-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover and interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

  Photos courtesy of the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  For my parents, Jane and Wilmott Ragsdale, who led the way

  For my intrepid family,

  Peter, Molly, and Skyler

  “As you set out for Ithaca, hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery.”

  —C.P. Cavafy

  Contents

  List of “Characters”

  Prologue

  PART I: CRASH COURSE: July, August, September

  1. The Family of Man

  2. Not Too Big. Not Too Small.

  3. Flies

  4. We Make a Friend: Zeca

  5. A Tenuous Foothold

  6. “I Hate Brazil”

  7. Finding Our Guides

  8. Time to Watch and Listen

  9. A Gringo Befriended

  10. “Quer Ficar Comigo?”

  11. The Table Goes Silent, Time for a Break

  12. Running the Race

  13. On Learning to Be a Man

  14. Relax

  PART II: HOME: October, November, December

  15. A New Start

  16. Forró Dancing with Zeca

  17. Why Are All the Poor People Black and the Rich People White?

  18. My People: The Butcher, the Baker, the Furniture Maker

  19. Surfing Through the Presidential Election

  20. Hitting the Wall

  21. Bands of Ants and Silent Horsemen

  22. A Viking Queen Floats Above a Chiffon Sea

  23. Compatible Travelers

  24. Holidays Unraveling

  25. New Year’s Eve in Salvador

  26. Home

  PART III: WIDENING THE CIRCLE: January, February

  27. The Dividing Line

  28. Balance and Joy

  29. Walking Tall

  30. Surprising Finds

  31. Guests in Their House

  32. On Maintaining Respect

  33. Conflicting Worlds

  34. A Long Swim

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

  36. Put to the Test

  37. Gratitude

  PART IV: CROSSING THE RIVER: March, April, May

  38. A Five-Day Orgy

  39. The Doldrums of March

  40. The Sensitive Cross-Cultural Approach

  41. The Long Arm of American Ambition

  42. Floating Anger

  43. More Important Things

  44. The Long Stutter of Good-Byes

  45. Crossing the River

  46. A Quick White Smile in a Dark Face

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  APPENDICES

  Where Are They Now?

  Portuguese Vocabulary

  Maps

  List of “Characters”

  Ada: owner of Pousada da Ada

  Adelaide (pronounced Adeligee): wife of Yanomami Headman Julio

  Ana Licia, Keyla, Larissa, Leila, and Sara: Molly’s good friends from school

  Anderson (Ahndehsohn): son of Yanomami Headman Julio and Adelaide

  Aniete: our first empregada and Katia’s cousin

  Bentinho: master teacher of the capoeira salon

  Berto: son of Yanomami Headman Julio and Adelaide

  Breno, Paulinho, Pedro, Ricardo (Hicardo), and Victor (Vito): Skyler’s neighborhood gang

  Brooke: Molly’s friend from Missoula

  Dalan, Junior (Junio), and Lu: soccer teammates of Peter’s among many others

  Elizia: the bookkeeper at Imaculada Conceiçao and mother of Giovanni

  Fabio and Pirulito: members of the capoeira salon

  Fernando: Molly’s ballet teacher

  Giovanni: our good friend and Portuguese tutor

  Ilda: our landlady

  Iracema: family friend and guidance counselor at Imaculada Conceiçao, the kids’ school

  Irma Francisca: Director of Imaculada Conceiçao

  Gel: Aniete’s sister

  Julio: Yanomami Headman of the village of Ariabu

  Kadas-Newells: family friends from Missoula

  Karol (Karau): Molly’s good friend and older sister of Victor

  Katia: manager of the Pousada Colonial

  Laura (Lowra): Katia’s aunt

  Maria: mom of Italo, Karol, and Victor

  Mario: the kids’ PE teacher

  Molly: our fifteen-turning-sixteen-year-old daughter

  Peter: my husband

  Robson (Hobson): Zeca’s uncle

  Shirley (Shelee): Aniete’s cousin and our empregada after Aniete

  Shirley (Shelee): Zeca’s aunt and Robson’s wife

  Skyler: our twelve-turning-thirteen-year-old son

  Valdir (Valdi): our guide/translator when visiting the Yanomami villages

  Vanessa: Skyler’s English teacher at Imaculada and homework tutor

  Zeca: our good friend

  Prologue

  STILL JET-LAGGED, I was wakened from my afternoon nap by someone pounding on the door of our third-floor room in an old colonial mansion, which was now a bed-and-breakfast. The person’s weight shifted restlessly on the creaking foot-wide floorboards.

  “Eskyloh . . .”

  “Yes? Oi?” I flipped off the light coverlet and sat up on the edge of the bed, alone in the cavernous room. My husband Peter had gone for a run, and our kids had already been swept away by newfound friends. I couldn’t pick apart the rat’s nest of Portuguese coming through the door, but I instantly understood that it was urgent and was something about my son.

  Our family of four had arrived three days earlier in this upriver town in northeastern Brazil, a town of brightly colored nineteenth-century row houses, sunny plazas, and spreading flame trees on an expansive stretch of the Rio São Francisco. We would be living here for a year.

  I swung the door open to find Breno, our twelve-year-old son Skyler’s new acquaintance. Nodding Okay! Okay! I’m coming, I fumbled into my flip-flops and followed Breno as he lumbered down the wide dark wood stairs. What could have happened?

  Our first night in town, Skyler and his fifteen-year-old sister, Molly, had managed to join a game of soccer. They played barefoot on paving stones, on the lowest tier of a stepped-down plaza. That night, Skyler made two friends, Victor (Vito in Portuguese) and Breno. Breno was chunky and light-skinned, with chipmunk cheeks and a way of speaking that always sounded as if his mouth was full of bread. Victor was skinny and dark and almost inaudible. They would turn out to be Skyler’s friends till the end. But now, Breno was here and Skyler was nowhere to be seen.

  As we spilled out the door of the Pousada Colonial into a blast of sunshine, I saw the long crumbling balustrade bordering the wide river across the plaza and Victor standing by a small, unmarked car. Skyler’s orange Crocs dangled from one of his hands. Flip-flops slapping cobblestone, Breno and I panted up to him, sweat popping on my upper lip. Victor’s eyes looked worried. He silently handed me Skyler’s shoes. I peere
d into the car. There was Skyler, sitting in front. His blond hair was dark—with blood.

  “I was flipping,” he choked out shakily, “off a stone wall.”

  Victor and I scrambled into the backseat, leaving Breno behind, as the car started up a steep hill. I’d learn later that it was an unmarked police car. I had no idea where we were going and had said nothing to the driver, nor he to me. I find when traveling in new places, where I’m not fluent in the language, I frequently trust people I might not as readily trust at home, as though, subconsciously, I recognize I’m not in control.

  I reached forward, putting a hand on Skyler’s shoulder.

  “Sweetie, you’re gonna be okay.”

  “It won’t stop bleeding.” His voice began to crack as he turned to face me.

  Peter and I had noticed that, new to town, knowing no one, and bereft of language, Skyler had been pulling out every trick he knew to find a way into a possible group of friends: juggling oranges, solving Rubik’s Cubes, flipping off walls. Five years earlier, when we’d begun our raising “global children” experiment in earnest and lived for a year in Mozambique, Skyler and Molly had attended an international school, where they were taught in English. As a result, though they’d acquired a multinational array of friends, they hadn’t really learned the local language, Portuguese, unlike Peter and me, who had come away with some ability to communicate, if only in the present tense. We were all quickly realizing that for this year in Penedo, a small off-the-track town, we would have to figure this language thing out.

  “I did two backflips”—he took a big breath—“no problem. Then I decided”—his voice began to sound squeezed—“to try a side flip.”

  The car skidded under the carport of the tiny hospital’s emergência. The driver still hadn’t said a word. Luckily, early on a Sunday, it wasn’t busy. Skyler was whisked onto a gurney, surrounded by what seemed to be the entire staff of ten. They rolled him through the open entrance of the low concrete building, past a reception desk, through swinging double doors, and into a simple room. Its smudged white walls were lined with cupboards, in front of which were a couple of gurneys and an IV stand. Standing at his feet, I watched as a nurse began squeezing water out of a plastic bottle into his wound, cleaning out sand and blood. He looked so small. A deep gash began to emerge, arcing from the crown of his head down to his left ear.

  Perhaps I looked more aghast than I realized because I was suddenly ushered out into the hall, where I was asked to fica um pouco—wait a little. I sat down in one of the few white plastic chairs scattered along the empty hallway, too dazed to think. I felt as though the little boat cradling our family of four had suddenly been sucked off a calm sea into a whirlpool.

  Before long, an older doctor in a long white coat pushed open the door of Skyler’s room and walked over to me.

  “É profundo,” he said softly. I didn’t need a dictionary to understand that. “Sério.”

  PART I: Crash Course

  JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER

  1

  The Family of Man

  WE FOUND OURSELVES in this predicament largely due to my own childhood. My parents had had a yen for travel, which inspired their approach to child rearing. But this approach had started with my father’s early wanderlust. In the early 1930s, he’d repeatedly dropped out of college in Seattle to hop freighters to South America and China. Then, almost by accident, he fell into journalism, perhaps seeing a way to make a career out of adventuring. Working his way up from writing ads for an Arizona radio station to reporting news in Hartford, Connecticut, he found himself, within a few years, in Washington D.C. covering the State Department for the Wall Street Journal. He then jumped on the first opportunity he had to transfer abroad, this time to cover World War II for Time/Life out of London. After the war, he left journalism to teach and eventually became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, but he continued to finagle work abroad every four years. By this time, he’d married my mom, the daughter of a vaudeville-actor-turned-newspaper-editor and an opera singer. Luckily, she was interested in travel, too.

  I spent my first two years in Thailand, second grade in the Philippines, most of middle school in Egypt. After each adventure, our small family of three would settle back into our home base, back into American life, in Madison, Wisconsin. As an adult, I found that despite losing my best friends every time I left to live abroad, I felt grateful for this exotic, wide-ranging childhood, for the curiosity it gave me, and the ease—the feeling that I could comfortably make my home anywhere.

  My parents never openly articulated why they went to all that trouble—why they risked taking a five-month-old to live in Bangkok, a city with open sewers and snakes in the yard, where I developed chronic diarrhea; or a six-year-old to Manila, where my mother and I cowered beneath our movie seats, hiding from the gunman who’d disrupted the Saturday-afternoon matinee; or a twelve-year-old to Cairo, when Egypt had reached the height of its tension with Israel and our apartment windows rattled from the bombs taking out planes at the airport. But I suspect that deep down, they knew what they were giving me and that the risks would be worth it.

  Those years were exciting and hard. They took work to organize, and they were disruptive, but they pulled us out of our middle-class American lives, and that was good. As a result, I learned to punt when things took unexpected turns. I learned that I didn’t have to speak the same language to communicate or to feel what someone very different from me felt. I learned that our way is never the only way. I came to understand that I belong to something much larger than myself, larger than the world of my family or town or class of people or nation. I came to understand in some subliminal, visceral way that I am part of the family of man. I’m convinced those years abroad gave me the best parts of myself—the parts that can adapt, empathize, connect.

  Along with my growing love of travel, I was developing another passion. During my high school years in the United States, I began to study dance. In the summer of 1973, I attended a dance camp at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington. We took four sweaty classes a day from teachers brought out from New York and Seattle; we practiced our tendus in ballet and spiraling down to the floor in modern on the worn hardwood of the old officer’s quarters. In between pliés and pirouettes, I explored the overgrown gun emplacements tucked into the fort’s rocky bluffs and felt the clammy fog rolling in off the Strait of Juan de Fuca; I mostly did this alone. I felt as though I stood at the edge of the world, at the edge of possibility. The only thing I didn’t connect to at camp was my fellow students. It was the summer of Nixon’s impeachment hearings. Each night after dinner, I squeezed into the registrar’s office where less than a handful of teachers, and I, sat transfixed by the twelve-inch black-and-white TV and listened to Senators Ervin’s and Inouye’s stern questions. I was fascinated. In the morning, I tromped to breakfast in the old canteen and listened to the other students bemoaning another serving of pancakes and the devastation it would wreak on the size of their thighs. Is this the world for me? I wondered.

  That fall, when I applied to college, I applied to schools with no dance. I got into Harvard despite my unusual childhood, or maybe because of it. But it wasn’t there that I gained the tools I’ve needed for life. My abilities to get along with people, to stand up for what I believe, to think critically from a wider perspective have come from conversations at my family dinner table and the down-and-dirty trenches of travel.

  One Christmas vacation when I was home visiting, my father, then a journalism professor, held one of his graduate seminars at our house in Madison. He pulled me aside.

  “I have a student I’d like you to meet.” I wondered why. Was my generally reticent father becoming a matchmaker?

  Mortified, I disappeared into the other room, but not before I got a look at the student in question. He sat at the other end of the living room in the old Victorian chair by the picture window. Tan and green-eyed, with a shock of thick chestnut hair, he sat with the muscular ease of an ath
lete, relaxed but alert, like a jaguar draped over a branch.

  “He’s actually kind of cute,” I admitted to my mother, arranging crackers on a plate in the kitchen. I was to learn that he’d grown up not far away on a lake outside of Milwaukee, that he had recently graduated from Dartmouth College and was now a year into a graduate program in journalism.

  But what I really wanted to figure out about Peter Stark was whether he had an interest in travel—and I didn’t mean a two-week vacation in Venice or Acapulco. I wanted to know if he was of the “hard-traveling” kind; this was one of my make-it-or-break-it criteria for marriageability.

  However, that evening in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Madison, I didn’t have marriage on my mind. After all, I had a boyfriend back at school. I returned to Harvard and completed my degree in art history. But dance had stuck with me. As soon as I graduated, I jumped on an offer to dance with Impulse, a modern-jazz company based in Cambridge. Two years later, my boyfriend and I moved to New York. There I navigated the juggling world of part-time jobs, dance classes and auditions, and moving from one rental to another. I finally settled in the heart of Greenwich Village in a fifth-floor walk-up with the bathtub in the kitchen. In the meantime, my boyfriend and I split up, and my father quietly returned to matchmaking.

  Several years had gone by since my first glimpse of Peter in the Victorian chair. On completing graduate school, Peter’s first impulse had been to seek out “someplace remote”—maybe Southeast Asia or Alaska. After finding no openings in the hip, artsy town of Homer, he returned home to Wisconsin, traveling by train through the lower forty-eight. On his way, he passed through Montana. This looks remote, he thought. A former Wisconsin editor suggested he check out Missoula, in the mountainous western part of the state. “It’s a lot like Madison,” he’d said.

  It turned out Missoula was a place I knew. I’d spent every summer of my childhood driving four days each way from our home in Madison, Wisconsin, to our summer cabin on an island in the Puget Sound in Washington State. I’d sat happily in the back of our Chrysler station wagon, gazing out the window and tunelessly singing the signs or anything else that presented itself. “Red door, white window frame,” I’d croon. I’d looked forward to our stop at the Sugar Shack donut shop on Higgins Avenue in Missoula. That usually came around day three. Other than that, I didn’t have much sense of the place.