Crossing the River Read online

  We made sure we got back to our little ridgetop house the evening before the kids’ midnight return. When they fell through the front door, dropping their duffels onto the floor, exhausted, Molly’s universe had flipped. “It was sooooo fun! I’m really glad I went. It was craaazy. The two girls I roomed with were great.”

  But Skyler’s had not.

  “It was okay. I didn’t get to play very much.”

  “But Skyler, you made a goal!” said Molly, trying to buck him up.

  “Yeah. But you made two.”

  “Yeah, but we lost. But that was okay. I just felt bad ’cause my team depends on me so much. But your team was great.”

  “Oh, yeah, and there was this guy, he did a rainbow and a bicycle kick. He was amazing.” Skyler’s bad mood was gone, just like that. Pubescent hormones?

  “On the bus home, they improvised songs that were about all of us,” Molly continued. “At first, I was sort of mad about the one they made up about me, but then it was okay. The whole bus was singing, ‘Não, não, não, não quero ficar com ninguem,’”—No, no, no, I don’t want to kiss with anyone—“because I’d said I didn’t want to fica at this dance they had.”

  “Did you guys sing or play guitar?”

  “Skyler played a little guitar. It was really fun.”

  “Fantastic.”

  Progress!

  My hopes raised, I was especially disheartened when Skyler woke up feeling down again. It was Friday morning, two weeks after Pontal, one week after Bahia and time for the big discussion with Skyler about school. Round One.

  We’d been trying to walk the line between letting Skyler make the decision—either recommit to Imaculada or change to homeschooling—and making it ourselves. I’d been wondering whether we were copping out as parents by putting the decision too much on him. Part of our dilemma was that we weren’t feeling clear about what would be best ourselves; there was the social/psychological situation, which was clearly tough at Imaculada, and then there was also the education. While, as teachers and writers, Peter and I felt we could design writing projects about a variety of subjects, we had no formal training in age-appropriate curriculum. On the other hand, we weren’t too worried, as we believed much of the education he was getting, and that we valued, had nothing to do with school.

  That Friday morning, thinking a change of scene might make the discussion easier, Peter and I nudged Skyler out of the house. We were silent for the ten-minute walk down the ridge. After Skyler plowed through two chocolate-and-vanilla swirls, we caught a lancha. This brightly painted cigar-shaped passenger ferry would carry us across the river, a twenty-minute trip, to Carrapichu, a hill town that specialized in making ceramics. We’d thought it would be fun to be on the water, but it wasn’t. Skyler sat across from us on the long bench that rimmed the wall, the coming conversation hunkered down on the floorboards between us. The boat had turned upriver, hugging the far shore of an island to take advantage of the weaker current. I looked past Skyler, through the square openings in the wall, and concertedly examined the water hyacinths caught in the eddy, with their round, juicy leaves and conical lavender flowers.

  As we came abreast of the town, the captain ferried the little tube across the current and nosed it up onto the shore. The fare collector hopped out and slid the gangplank down onto the sand. Hunched under the ferry’s low ceiling, we made our way to the stairs and climbed up into the sunlight. We began the slog up the steep main street.

  Ceramics spilled out of every house—garishly painted vases, cookie-cutter figurines of drunken cowboys, placid farm animals—all laid out on the sidewalk to dry. Our destination was a small plaza with a bougainvillea-draped arbor where we could order a soda pop and sit down at a yellow plastic table. After ordering a couple of Cokes, we sat, stiffly, looking out over the river to the slip of island across the channel. I suddenly realized we’d inadvertently trapped Skyler, literally up the river without a paddle. It didn’t go well.

  “Skyler, you have the power to make a change in your life,” I started. Peter stood by listening. “You’ve been saying it’s your life, so it should be your choice. So now you have a chance to make a choice to change something, probably for the better.”

  “I don’t want to be homeschooled!”

  “Well, that’s not the only option. Let’s talk about all the options. Should we make a list of pros and cons?”

  No answer.

  “Okay. Let’s make a list of pros and cons. What would be the pros of staying at Imaculada?”

  No answer.

  “So does that mean there are no pros?”

  No answer.

  “Okay, what about the cons?”

  “It sucks.”

  “Okay, it sucks. I’m writing down It sucks. Why does it suck?”

  “I don’t know. It just does.” A pause. “I hate Brazil.”

  The conversation went on like this until Skyler, who had already walked off once to jump over the retaining wall onto the grassy hill below, said he needed to take a walk, by himself. “Okay, but come back with some thoughts about what you want to change,” I said. As usual, this wasn’t turning out to be the neat, rational conversation I’d envisioned.

  He stalked off across the street. I felt the town was small and quite safe. Peter wasn’t so sure. “I feel like following him.”

  “I think he’ll be okay.”

  “But it could be hours. The next lancha is at eleven thirty. I don’t think we should do this all day.” He left to follow Skyler up the side street.

  A couple of young men riding bareback came galloping down the hill past me. Earlier, there had been a number of small horse-drawn carts laden with hunks of gray clay. Today must be clay-delivery day. I liked the horsiness of this town; the day we’d come here to pick up our commission of ceramic dinner plates, six horses had been tied up in front of the town library, like horses in the old American West tied up in front of the saloon.

  On our way up, looking at some of the newly fashioned wares drying outside people’s houses, Peter had noted, “They make the ugliest statues.”

  “I don’t think they’re so bad,” Skyler had retorted, eager to oppose.

  “I rather like the one-eared goat,” I said.

  “I think that’s an accident,” Skyler had said.

  “Sometimes accidents turn into the best things. Somehow, with the one ear, he’s more . . .” I searched for the word.

  “Appealing,” Skyler tried, suddenly caught up in the question rather than the fight.

  “Yes, more appealing. More expressive.”

  In the midst of all our turmoil, amid the heels-dug-in resistance, we’d have good moments like these: as long as we didn’t talk about school—about the hours of struggling to understand in Portuguese or of spacing out, crazy with boredom; about the castigations on the futsal court, which no local seemed to take personally but which Skyler had a hard time shaking off; about the unrelenting pressure to kiss girls.

  I had my back to Skyler and Peter when they returned, Peter in the street, Skyler hugging the wall of houses. But I knew they were coming because the woman facing me at another table made that slight lift of the chin that says, “Over there.”

  We walked back to the landing, Skyler ahead of us. Round One: stalemate.

  Watching Skyler struggle with adapting to life in Penedo, and hearing Molly’s realization that it would not be as easy to make friends here as it had been in their English-speaking school in Mozambique, I was filled with awe at what we were doing in Brazil and also wondering how I’d managed not to analyze the situation better before we’d committed to it. We were not as far “out” as some, like missionaries or anthropologists, but we were definitely out there, more than my family had ever been when I was growing up.

  I thought I knew everything there was to know about living abroad as a child, being a three-timer myself as a kid—in Thailand, the Philippines, and Egypt—and having already done it twice with our own children, in Spain and Mozambique.
I was convinced that although the experience was not always fun, one would definitely come out richer for it. I, too, had been dropped, cold, into a school in another language—at the same age as Skyler was now. But there were small differences that may have made all the difference between an experience that was difficult but also fun, and one that was just difficult.

  My family always lived in big cities—Bangkok, Manila, Cairo—which had international communities from which to draw one’s friends. My parents had access to a circle of intellectually stimulating, internationally sophisticated, English-speaking locals. We didn’t have that in Penedo. Though I went to a French school in Cairo, two other students there were native English speakers. They were my friends; in retrospect, they were my only friends. There were no kids like this for Molly and Skyler in Penedo.

  So at the end of September, the kids’ third month in school, Peter and I were asking ourselves: Do we stick this out because we set out to do it, by God, or do we bail? If we’re willing to bail, how long do we wait to see if it gets better? How much better is enough? Do we resign ourselves to a hard year on the theory that in the end it will be a “growth” year? How much do we subject our children to suffering, so that they can learn from it? How much are they suffering? Not only were we in the unknown culturally, we were also in the unknown of our own psyches and, more agonizing for Peter and me, meddling with the unknown of our children’s psyches. Just because living abroad turned out well for me, I couldn’t assume it would for them.

  So then came Saturday. It was the first day of the Jogos da Primavera—the spring games, spring starting in October in the Southern Hemisphere. As we understood it, all the schools from town and the surrounding communities would participate in fifteen days of sports competition, including futsal, vôlei, handebol, swimming, and running races. And there were some big competitors, like the public school down the street with its student body of six thousand (three five-hour shifts daily of two thousand students each, morning, afternoon, and evening). Being good all-around athletes, Molly and Skyler had been invited to do just about everything.

  I woke up at six, unlocked the padlock on the back window, and swung it wide, always an elating moment. They’d started the post-harvest burning of sugarcane stubble, so the air had been notably hazier, but that morning, it was clear to the far hills, and a cool breeze slid in that brought welcome relief from the increasingly sweaty nights. Eventually Peter emerged, followed by the kids. Our breakfast of scrambled eggs and linguiça was relaxed; at least I think it was. It’s hard for me to remember now because most of the day was eventually obliterated in my mind by the explosion.

  Skyler’s first event would be that afternoon, a one-kilometer foot-race over the cobblestones through the middle of town. He had been matter-of-fact about it when he announced it on Friday, but by sometime Saturday morning, he was saying, “I don’t want to run.”

  Skyler actually loves to run. He’d surprised us when in third grade he ran not only the one-mile Fun Run in a hometown Missoula race but also spontaneously joined the 5K and then the 10K, becoming the youngest that morning to participate in the trifecta.

  “Well, you probably don’t have to,” Peter mused, barely looking up from his Alagoas Gazette, “but you need to go tell Mario”—Imaculada’s PE teacher. “He’s specially coming to the school at three, to give you a ride to the starting line.”

  The morning dragged on, each of us doing our own thing, which meant Skyler was mostly on Facebook or watching reruns of Friends, Molly was reading on the iPad, I was writing on my computer, and Peter was writing on his.

  At 2:40 PM, I called out, “Skyler, it’s time to get dressed. I’ve pulled out your shoes.”

  “I don’t want to go. Why do I have to?” The tired litany.

  “Out of consideration for other people who are nice enough to help you.”

  “Molly doesn’t have to.”

  “Molly doesn’t have the chance to. Girls here don’t get to do all the things that boys do. She’d love to participate more.” It turned out there would be girls running, but none from Molly’s school.

  I was moving faster now—pulling open his drawers, looking for shorts—not because we were late, but because I was getting frustrated. He was lying on the bed, barely watching the computer screen.

  “Turn that off, now. Skyler, it’s quarter to three.”

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Get up, now!”

  He slumped off down the hall to the bathroom and came back, slamming the gate to the downstairs laundry room on the way. I walked over to it.

  “Come back and close the gate quietly. I’m going to count to five. One, two . . .” My voice had that low, menacing quality it gets when I’m done negotiating. There is something about slamming doors that has always sent me. “. . . five.”

  He didn’t come. I sped down the hall, lifted him under the armpits, and shoved him toward the gate.

  “I don’t know how to close the gate,” he protested.

  “Watch very carefully, and maybe you’ll learn something.” My voice was louder and more clipped now. “Lift, push, pull, and then this will fit over the top.”

  It was ten to three.

  “I’m not going.”

  Peter chimed in. “Skyler, you have to at least go talk to Mario. Get your shorts on.”

  Skyler left his room, walked to the back, and started climbing out the second-story window. I ran after him, grabbed him under the arms, and jerked him back in, dumping him on the tile floor, furious now (and alarmed). “Get in here!”

  Molly slipped by. “I’m going for a walk.”

  Three o’clock. Peter looked out the front door. “Okay, Skyler, Mario is there. He’s waiting for you.”

  “I’m . . . getting . . . dressed,” Skyler said miserably.

  I crossed the praça to go talk to Mario and keep him there until Skyler and Peter arrived. As always, there was really no hurry at all. We Americans can build up a lot of tension around time. Mario was explaining something to me, most of which I couldn’t absorb; my mind didn’t have the energy to ferret out meaning. Peter and Skyler crossed the praça, Skyler dragging behind. Apparently he’d decided to “think” about the race. A colega of Mario’s came with a car and ferried Peter, Skyler, and me down the street to Diocesano, the other private school in town. The kids would run from one school to the other.

  The race that was scheduled to start at three thirty started at four thirty. Kids gathered under a banyan tree in their school pinnies, and eventually someone arrived with numbers. The two other boys from Skyler’s class who’d been selected to run showed up in their Imaculada royal blue. Skyler and Peter went off into a field of banana trees so Skyler could change into the running shorts he hadn’t put on. I left with the camera to walk back to the finish line.

  What would I be taking a picture of, I wondered, Skyler in his misery? Or would I take a happy picture that would join the other happy pictures in the photo album of our year in Brazil, belying how hard it had really been? Or would he not run at all, leaving me waiting with my camera, wondering what had happened?

  Our praça was transformed. There were escort police on motorcycles, an announcer extolling the virtues of the spring games for the health of our youth, and the ubiquitous music blaring. Then, as we saw the first runner crest the hill, a man in a lime-green jersey extended a mortar high and shot the deafening firecracker. I squinted to find Skyler.

  The first boy wore pink and white, not Imaculada’s colors. Then a barefoot boy in light blue, an Amazonian-Indian-looking girl in yellow, and then Skyler.

  “Go, Skyler! Go!” I shouted, trying hard to keep the tears out of my voice. “Eskyloh, Eskyloh!” chanted some other Imaculada parents, beginning to clap.

  By the time he crossed the finish line, first for his school, tears streamed down my cheeks.

  Sweaty and exhausted, Skyler seemed pleased. He even smiled for the picture. Skyler with Carlos and Mario, after the 1 km race, the alb
um caption would read. They guzzled water from cups handed around by volunteers and poured it on their heads. Lots of other boys from the race, boys Skyler didn’t know, were coming up to him and patting him on the back.

  “Obrigado, obrigado,” he said shyly, nodding. “Thank you.”

  The next morning, when we brought up Skyler’s school situation, he readily agreed to a compromise—three days each week at Imaculada, two days at home with Peter and me. He’d found the courage to make a change, to get off the track, that peer-created treadmill that dictates what’s right for everyone, except perhaps for you.

  13

  On Learning to Be a Man

  SKYLER AND I attended the capoeira salon three nights a week. I don’t know why I want to call it a salon, except that somehow it wasn’t exactly like a class, more like a place of sharing—a place to learn a sport, an art, but also a place to celebrate Afro-Brazilian identity, to play, to compete, and to grow into a man with the guidance of elders. (Women practicing capoeira is a new twist. But there were usually at least a couple of us.)

  “Quer jogar?”—Want to play?—they’d say gently as they invited you into the roda, the sparring ring.

  Capoeira, a martial art, was brought to Brazil five centuries ago by black slaves imported to the Portuguese colony from Africa. As it is clearly a powerful training tool for fighting, the Portuguese slave masters outlawed the practice. At this point, it went underground. The capoeiristas disguised it by transforming it into an “innocuous” dance accompanied by music, so they could continue to train. But even after Brazil gained independence from the Portuguese in 1822 and slavery was abolished in 1888, it continued to be illegal under the new regime. As a form that had been developed to enable an escaped slave to fight, one against many, unarmed against armed, capoeira continued to scare those in power, now that it was in the hands of the newly freed slaves, newly unemployed and marginalized. Hundreds of capoeiristas were arrested and imprisoned on Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago of islands 220 miles off the coast, and thrown into jail in the new urban centers like Rio de Janeiro. Now their own people found it threatening. No wonder. The power of the form is palpable.