Crossing the River Page 13

  A few weeks later, he brought it up again. He was really trying to figure this class thing out.

  I remembered that in first grade in Mozambique, he’d asked, “Why are all the poor people black and all the rich people white?” At six, he was sussing out possible connections between class and race. A few months later in Maputo, I’d picked him up after school in our claptrap jeep. “Mom, would you love me if I was black?” he asked as he climbed in. I wondered if the question was connected to his observation that Tunji, a black West African boy in his class, was the fastest runner. Skyler had always been a fan of speed. Whether by land, sea, or air, maximum speed had been the unifying characteristic of each of his favorite animals—the cheetah, the sailfish, the falcon. So if being black meant speed, it might be worth it.

  Soon after our arrival in Penedo, we’d been invited to join the tennis club, where we’d first met Zeca. It wasn’t cheap, by local standards, but we were happy to join. It was just a block from our house, on the other side of the ridge, and had a pool. When we joined in August, it was still winter and was considered by the other members far too cold to swim, so I had the pool to myself. Sometimes Molly would join me and we’d swim our laps, then climb our elbows over the pool’s edge and, legs dangling, soak in the expansive view, our eyes tracing it down into the lime-green valley below and across the Rio São Francisco to the white, tumbling hill town of Neópolis and the glimmering Peixoto-family textile factory.

  I loved taking tennis lessons. This was the second time in my life that I had. The first was as a twelve-year-old at the Gezira Club in Cairo. I still remember crossing the open expanse of golf course to reach the tennis courts, early Saturday morning mist rising out of coarse crabgrass. I felt then that this grassy opening was like a special wet, green secret in the middle of Cairo’s dusty maelstrom. The clube de ténis in Penedo offered a similar feeling of retreat, at least for me.

  For Skyler, it was different. As it turned out, a bunch of his schoolmates also belonged. Initially I thought this would be great, a way for him to connect outside school. But it was immediately awkward.

  “Mom, do you think we can go swimming at the pool?” Skyler was standing in our front hallway and swept his arm over Victor, Breno, and Ricardo. The three neighborhood boys had become Skyler’s primary friends, his gang. Ricardo was ten, short and brown, with the muscled back and arms of a grown man. He had a lot of energy and a short fuse. Like Victor, he was part of the capoeira salon. The boys were faithful regulars, appearing unfailingly at our door every day after lunch. I’d come to recognize Victor’s stretched silhouette through the frosted glass, as he leaned there waiting. There were no doorbells, and they rarely knocked; instead they shouted, “Eskyloh!” a system that worked well in a place where houses were small and windows usually open.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I replied, contemplating the pool question. “Maybe. I think you can bring guests. Let’s go ask.”

  The answer was no. Skyler was in; they were out. Despite this first rejection, Skyler’s neighborhood friends continued to come find him at the club, sending the pool cleaner to pull Skyler out of the water or off the tennis court. It couldn’t have been much blacker and whiter. Them or us?

  While the population of northeastern Brazil is primarily darker skinned, especially compared to southern Brazil, where most of the white European immigrants settled, there are still class distinctions based on race, and blacks are clearly at the bottom of the economic scale. There has been so much intermarrying that ferreting out classifications is complicated on the ground. Nevertheless, there are racially based cultural practices that separate groups and create hierarchy. Two of the ones I was most interested in—capoeira and Candomblé—were clearly connected to Africa and blacks and as a result tended to be looked down on by those who didn’t want to be associated with those groups. The upper classes in Brazil would play soccer or tennis or practice an imported martial art like taekwondo.

  When you’re traveling, you’re more likely than at home to mix with economic classes lower than your own. You don’t know which neighborhoods are rich and which poor, so you blindly stumble into ones you might normally avoid, and the residents of those poorer neighborhoods don’t question why you’re there because your foreign appearance immediately excuses you.

  Or maybe when you travel, you automatically change your frame of mind; you’re traveling because you want to see how other people live, so everyone’s interesting. In fact, the more different, the poorer, the better; whereas in comparable situations at home, you feel guilty or somehow threatened. At home, that means crossing the street when you see that “strung-out guy in the hoody.” That guy you actually know nothing about but think you do.

  I’m not as afraid when I’m traveling—maybe because in my ignorance of my surroundings, I’m freed of the assumptions I might otherwise make. I find I’m more willing to jump the class barrier, despite knowing that I’m vulnerable—I know I have things others could want, and I’m particularly obtrusive so maybe more of a target, though maybe less, too, protected by my celebrity. I realize that vulnerability may make others feel more afraid when traveling, precisely because they don’t understand the cues. But for me, my childhood abroad reinforced my confidence in basic human kindness and the feeling that we have more in common than not.

  When living abroad, on one’s own without job connections, one is totally dependent on the knowledge and kindness of strangers. The power table is turned. Suddenly one’s cleaning woman, or that fruit seller, or the man who drives a taxi are enabling me to feed my children, find them healthcare, and are giving me a community, a feeling of belonging. It doesn’t matter what socioeconomic class they come from. I’m grateful.

  When I’m abroad, I want people to like me, in a different way than I do at home; I want them to like me and to like Americans. In Penedo, I wanted to imagine them saying, “The Americana, she’s a nice lady. Those Americanos, they’re so friendly.” So I smiled. “See, she’s not stuck up. She smiles at everyone.” I smiled more. Maybe I thought smiling would help erase our differences.

  One day, Molly had folded herself into the wicker couch by my desk and said we needed to find some service work for Brooke. Brooke, an American friend of Molly’s who was going to join us for Christmas, needed to fulfill the community service hours required of all seniors in their Missoula high school.

  “You know, it’s not that easy. It’s not like she can just show up, find an orphanage, and help out. She doesn’t speak Portuguese; she may not have any particularly helpful skills. There’s no school to build, you know.” I was feeling a little resentful of this seemingly popular answer to American do-gooder impulses.

  It’s hard to know how to help, to know what is actually helpful. Of course, this is true in the United States, too, but there I can at least give money to my chosen charities. In Brazil, there are no solicitations in the mail—at least there weren’t for us.

  In Mozambique, the company of a German friend had built a well for a village that had no water. The women of the village had been walking twenty kilometers, roundtrip, to a river each day, toting water on their heads. Who wouldn’t be grateful for a well near home? The village women, as it turned out. They enjoyed the social life that revolved around the walk to the river. And what productive things were they going to do with the time saved? Make things for sale to raise their income? To buy what? Time? Time with friends? They already had that. The Germans were confounded when the well went unused.

  While we were in Mozambique, we’d purchased land, with help from our relatives, dug a well, and bought building materials for a house for Sarah, our cook. She’d been living in two rooms with her two daughters and six grandchildren, with no electricity and no running water. But two years later, though the house had been built, she still hadn’t moved in. We didn’t know why. Figuring out what’s really helpful just isn’t that easy.

  18

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

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bsp; MOST MORNINGS, I pulled out my straw bag, with its stash of plastic bags inside, and headed down the ridge to the market.

  One day, I passed the woodcarver whose shop was under the radio station at the near corner of our praça. Sitting on a stump in his doorway, American pop music throbbing behind him, he whittled, exuding a smiling contentment with life. He waved to me, and I gave him the thumbs-up (a ubiquitous gesture here) and moved on down the hill.

  Around the corner, I raised my thumb, a hopeful question, to the man across the street in front of the unmarked garage door that was our bakery. I was too late. The bread was usually sold out by nine. The bread, of which there were two types, leavened and unleavened, was disappointing in its bland squishiness but was better when fresh.

  We briefly tried the home-delivery option, buying from the man who would randomly show up with bread in a cloth-covered rack on the back of his bike, squeezing his turkey-baster horn to announce his coming. But our needs and his schedule were too unpredictable. He brought back good memories, however, of the conveyor belt of fresh ingredients that used to pass by our walled house in Mozambique, of the way Peter used to bargain with the woman who’d come by with squid in a bucket one day and random vegetables in a cardboard box the next.

  “Pode encontrar um peixe vermelho?”—Can you find a red fish? Peter would ask. Sure enough, the next day she’d show up with one, which she’d probably bought from the fishermen who would stand by the side of the road like hitchhikers, holding out their thumbs, sporting a dazzling silver fish dangling there by its gills.

  Then of course there were all the other itinerant Mozambican vendors whistling to pull someone out from the inner recesses of the house, their dark faces looking hopefully through the barred gate. They bore carts of fruit, handfuls of brooms, armfuls of shirts or woven baskets. The brooms and baskets now sit unused in our Missoula basement because the buying was about supporting the vendor, not about the need for the goods. About saying, “Thanks for giving me a way to have a relationship with someone local.”

  In Penedo, I was grateful for my relationships with the market vendors. They provided a window into local lives and helped me feel part of the community. They were my social life.

  Beyond the bakery were the rows of rickety stalls, temporary structures made out of one-by-twos with a shelf for wares. Black plastic stretched over the top for a roof. The vendors had been out on the street for two years while the 1890s market building was renovated. By October, they were painting its scalloping arcade and high-ceilinged rooms peach and white. I hoped it would be finished before we left.

  “Quando vai estar pronto?”—When is it going to be ready?—I’d ask Celia, my favorite fruit woman, a rotund mother of eleven who looked like she was melting into her fraying wicker chair.

  She’d laugh and roll her eyes. “Ninguém sabe”—No one knows.

  Among the stalls, there were the specialists, with eggs or cheese or grains or fruit and vegetables, medicinals and spices, or non-perishables like watches and clothing. Then there were the generalists. Stands that carried everything from batteries and joysticks for video games to stickers of Jesus and Mary, pet collars, and cigarettes.

  That day, I bought eggs (you counted them out at ten cents apiece into a custom-made carton), butter (ladled out of a bin by the half kilo with a wooden spatula), a pineapple, a papaya, and a bunch of mini-bananas. I happened to look down, as I was disentangling the bananas, to see a live goat, lying in a wheelbarrow at the level of my right thigh. Live animals were a common sight. Earlier, I’d passed a man pushing his bike, his right hand holding a live chicken dangling by its red feet and a bunch of writhing green crabs, bound in a plastic net bag. Next to Celia was Edivaldo, a medicinals and spices man. I counted eight types of sticks or bark, for making tea.

  I continued on to my favorite butcher. His corrugated garage door was rolled up to reveal a row of succulently plump chickens on a marble counter and great hunks of red meat hanging on huge hooks above them. My butcher often had a whole pig’s head, very white, hanging there as well, with its severed feet on the counter below. Brazil is definitely a meat-oriented country, with numerous cuts we could never identify. The one thing we figured out was that you could get your carne either mole (soft) or duro (hard). That day, I was looking for pork tenderloin. Nené, the assistant butcher and a member of Peter’s soccer team, said they were out.

  I continued down a small side street toward the main praça by the river, passing metal wheelbarrows full of fish, shining silver and gold, slender and wide, smooth and scaly, river fish and ocean fish, many with numerous parallel incisions, for marinating.

  Reaching the praça, I headed for one of the many food kiosks. As I sat in one of the white plastic chairs sipping Coke from an old-fashioned glass bottle, a woman dropped a small political flier in my lap. It was a list of candidates to vote for in the upcoming state and federal election. But it didn’t list the candidates’ names. Instead it just listed their numbers, the numbers that the voters would enter into the computer when they voted. This suddenly made sense of the numbers we were constantly hearing as part of the songs for each candidate that continually blared from passing vehicles. The election was soon, and the campaigning was amping up, literally. It occurred to me that one could just follow this list and have no idea who one had just voted for. But then maybe that was no different from voting for a name in the United States just because one had heard of it.

  I downed the last bit of my now-warm Coke and crossed the rest of the praça to enter Ki-Barato, an actual grocery store. Checking my market basket, I got a cart and zipped through the rest of my list: unrefrigerated cartons of milk; eighteen tiny, speckled codorna eggs; yogurt drink; frozen juice concentrate in square plastic packets (graviola, acerola, pinga, and more familiar ones: açai, pineapple, mango, passion fruit); and the Brazilian cook’s mainstay, condensed milk. The young cashiers would smile as I pulled out my bundle of plastic bags for reuse (whether with admiration or benevolent tolerance of my eccentricity, I was never sure). The first time I did this, they nodded knowingly: “Ahh, melhor para o ambiente”—Ahh, better for the environment. Judging from the plastic bags, pop bottles, and Styrofoam washed up on the beaches, the litter in the streets, and the lack of recycling, I was surprised they knew the concept.

  “Mom, we don’t know what to do. Our friends just drop their wrappers on the street, or in the courtyard at school.” Both Molly and Skyler had wondered how to fit in when they couldn’t quite bring themselves to just drop paper on the ground.

  As I waited to retrieve my market bag from the grocery checker, the old beggar woman found me, as she always did. She’d tell me a story I rarely understood. But I didn’t need the story to give her money. It just took her sunken breasts in the same loose shift over too-short pants, her bare swollen feet, and her rheumy eyes to make me want to help her. She wore a brown crocheted cap over her white hair that always had interesting things stuck into it. That day, there were two plastic spoons and some toothpicks. I wondered whether it was some sort of amulet or just storage. Around her neck she’d tied a clump of beads, a dried flower, and two tiny plastic babies on a string.

  Ever since I’d lived in New York City in the eighties, where I’d felt both beleaguered by beggars and guilty, my policy had been to give to old men, women, and children, feeling somehow that they were the most helpless. Although really, anyone reduced to asking for money that way needs help. Abroad, I feel especially concerned about the children. I’ve never forgotten my sense of guilty privilege as I sat, when I was twelve, in the backseat of a taxi in Cairo, windows rolled down in the heat. We were stopped at a traffic light when a barefoot girl in a flower-print dress, worn thin with dirt, limply reached her arm through the window, dangling pungently fragrant strands of jasmine for sale. She looked to be my age. We paid her a few piastres, and as she drifted onto the next car, the little boy following her, his potbelly poking out from under his too-small shirt, held his cupped hand out to me, his
eyes encrusted with flies.

  Rather than making a living this way, it would be far better for children to be in school. However, I know school isn’t always affordable. (Even the “free” schools in Mozambique required a uniform and close-toed shoes, more than many could pay.) I’ve also heard too many Oliver Twist stories, children being manipulated by adults into begging for them. Fearing what Fagan might do when the kids come back empty-handed, I mostly just give money all the time. If I have it with me, I also give food.

  In Penedo, there weren’t many beggars, just a few regulars: the old woman at the grocery; the blind man sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, singing in his hoarse, tuneless voice; and the other man, shirtless, in a turban and ragged shorts, who sat in the doorway across the street from him. I never saw anyone else give them money.

  Done with my shopping, I caught the bus. An alternative to the bus would have been to hire a man with a wheelbarrow to walk me home with my purchases. They hung out at the market and charged about six dollars to walk up the hill. For some reason, I was self-conscious about it; I guess it felt too much like a servant-master relationship. At the same time, I recognized my own hypocrisy: I was the upper class here and as such was expected to help out the lower classes by employing them.

  “Oi da casa!” I shouted as I slung my bags through our front door. “Hello to the house!” Aniete came running.

  “É muito pesado!” she cooed sympathetically, scooping up my straw bag. “It’s so heavy!”

  I was sweaty and tired but felt better for my daily ritual. The small talk with my market regulars had reinforced my connections to our chosen town.

  19

  Surfing Through the Presidential Election

  LEARNING TO SURF had long been a goal of Peter’s, one he set in Bali almost twenty years ago. At Jatiúca Beach, three-hours away from Penedo in Alagoas’s capital city of Maceió, we found the ultimate surfing instructor, Disraelle. Once we learned how easy it was to use the van system, we’d begun going to the ocean a couple of weekends a month. We’d been sampling the smorgasbord of Brazilian beaches: the beach as highway and twenty-four-hour tailgating party at Peba; the itinerant-food and dental-floss-bikini flesh buffet at Praia do Francês; the classic Hallmark card of deserted beach and breeze-flushed palms at Pontal do Coruripe; and finally Jatiúca, a city beach along a busy drive, backed by ten- to twelve-story buildings.