Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil Read online

  One summer, my dad, recently separated from my mom, came through New York City to scoop me out of my “struggling-artist, Bohemian life” and make the drive across the country. Forty minutes east of Missoula, Montana, we pulled into a gas station. He mentioned that an old student of his had settled there.

  “Why don’t you give him a call on that pay phone over there,” he said, gesturing to the glass booth in the corner of the overgrown-grass lot. “I’ll get gas. Let him know we’re close.” Why should I call him? I don’t know him. I wondered. But I followed instructions.

  A half hour later, my father bumped the Volkswagen van into the dirt alley next to Peter’s tiny house, innocently looked around, and said, “I’m not sure where his house is. Why don’t you get out here and knock on some doors while I drive farther down?” I got out, and he disappeared. At the first house, Peter opened the door.

  We circled each other tentatively for the next five years, spending time in both New York and Missoula, flying to meet each other all over the country, as Peter pursued his budding career as a freelance magazine writer and I performed and toured with a series of small modern dance companies. It was giddy, but I was being careful. I’d been involved in a few overly enmeshed relationships before, or so I felt. I wanted to be sure this time I could keep a clear sense of myself. As we slowly got to know each other through handwritten letters, heart-thumping phone calls, and occasional trysts, I’d hear about his trips to Isle Royale, or Iceland. I began to think maybe he could be the hard-traveling kind, the adventurous partner I had in mind.

  It turned out he was. In fact, he was driven—driven by a fear that the world was so rapidly homogenizing that soon there would be no culturally distinct societies left intact. “We’ve got to go there before it’s too late,” he’d say. We got married in 1987. In the first years of our marriage, “there” would be China, Greenland, West Africa, the Tibetan Plateau.

  On our five-month honeymoon, we traversed China west to east, on foot, by boat, and by bus, negotiating our way through territory not yet open to foreigners. One night on the Tibetan Plateau, after a day of walking behind a horse cart in the rain, I collapsed onto the straw of a horse stable to sleep. I dreamt of a warm pub in Ireland or a sunny sidewalk café in France. A few days later, as I dragged the horse we’d dubbed “Fat Freddy” over yet another barren fifteen-thousand-foot pass, I hallucinated about breakfast at the International House of Pancakes, picturing waffles with melting scoops of whipped butter, greasy sausage patties, and bottles of sticky syrup. Instead, the next day we sat on sheepskins, sipping warm yak milk outside a yak-wool tent. Our hostess, a nomadic Tibetan, couldn’t take her eyes off me. She suddenly erupted in laughter. When it appeared she wasn’t going to stop, we asked our Chinese translator what was so funny.

  “She says she’s never seen blue eyes like yours, except maybe on a wolf.”

  For far-out travel, in Peter, I’d met my match.

  We’ve been lucky. On settling back into Missoula after our honeymoon, I managed to get the only university dance-teaching job in the state. I was hired to head the dance program at the University of Montana, a job with a huge learning curve, as I’d barely taught and had never been part of a university. For the first three years, I just tried to keep breathing, but it was exhilarating. It was a small program, which meant there was lots of freedom to take it in new directions—nothing was entrenched—and my colleagues were smart, open-minded, and supportive. What there wasn’t was lots of money, but no matter; if you were willing to put in the sweat, big things could happen. My cohorts and I created new degrees, added teaching and performance tracks, produced four times as many concerts as had been offered in the past, lobbied for money, and expanded the faculty. Then I began to take stock.

  I missed performing. Had I jumped ship too soon? Left New York before I had a chance to really explore its possibilities and my potential? There were no dance companies in Montana, not one. So a colleague and I decided to start a troupe. That’s the thing about Montana: If you’re willing to put in the work, you can do just about anything. There’s no one—and few institutions—to dictate the rules. That’s how Montanans like it. Over time, I would come to find that along with that freedom comes little structural support, and that can be taxing.

  Peter had moved on to writing books and was working at home, in our three-room railroad apartment perched over the Clark Fork River. He had taken over making dinner, tired of waiting for my late-night arrival. Six years after my start at the university, I was putting in sixty-hour weeks: running a dance program, teaching a full load, producing student concerts, and co-directing a small touring company. I was thirty-five, and it suddenly dawned on me that we might want to have kids.

  On a Thanksgiving vacation, I went for a walk in the dank woods behind my family’s Puget Sound cabin. I came back to a warm fire in the cast-iron stove, flopped down in a wooden chair, and announced happily to Peter that I’d come to a conclusion: I didn’t need to be Martha Graham receiving awards at the Kennedy Center; I wanted to have a more well-rounded life. I told him I thought we should try to have kids. Then I started crying. This was a clue. As I write this, I feel so blessed to have two wonderful children. My heart has expanded in ways I could never have imagined. But I am of the generation that thought that hard-driving career women could, and should, do it all. That struggle for balance, the balance between family and career (an oft-mentioned duo that fails to include time of one’s own) is now an epidemic in America. I dove straight into it.

  Our first child, Molly, turned two in Irian Jaya, then the name of the Indonesian half of New Guinea. We celebrated with a slice of Buche de Noel from a local bakery in Jayapura and gave it to her with a lighted number-two candle and her chopped-up malaria pill. She didn’t quite make the twenty-pound minimum for a full dose.

  My father, then in his eighties, joined us as we took a small plane from the port of Jayapura up into the Baliem Highlands, home to dozens of rural tribes. Our photo album is filled with pictures of my dad in his lightweight “tropical” suit surrounded by nude men wearing penis gourds; of Molly, her hair a cap of platinum blond, squatting in a circle of black kids; of Molly being toted on the back of a village girl, inside a string bag the women use to carry yams; of Molly (still nursing at the time) squealing with delight at all the bare-breasted women. Just the right start, we thought, for our future child of the world.

  Over my twenty years as a dance professor, I’ve been granted a couple of sabbaticals and have had an understanding dean who was willing to give me additional leaves of absence. And Peter, of course, is a freelance writer. As a result, our lives are more flexible than many. Whenever we’ve come into any extra money, such as when a family member has died, the money has gone to travel.

  I applied for my first sabbatical when our second child, Skyler, was due to be born. We left for southern Spain when he was just five weeks old. Start ’em young. Get ’em hooked. That had been my parents’ theory. We chose a place that was not too expensive and had no major diseases.

  Those five months in Andalusia, in the ancient Phoenician walled town of Cadiz, went by in a sleep-deprived blur. But it was worth it. While Peter picked up three-year-old Molly and took her to the bar across the street from her preschool to share a bowl of stewed snails, I carted tiny Skyler to the community center, where I’d rented a second-floor studio to choreograph. On the way, I’d stop at the flower market. Inevitably, stern old women would tell me my baby was going to have a deformed back if I kept carrying him around in that hammock-sling thing and would instruct me to take my germ-infested pinky finger out of his mouth.

  “Use a pacifier if he cries,” they’d say in Spanish I barely understood, but their disapproval was unmistakable.

  I like languages, and I’m pretty good at them. So I’d thought that with a little tutoring in Spanish to prepare before we left home, I’d pick it up in no time when immersed. Who was I kidding? With a three-year-old and a newborn, it wasn’t like I had ti
me to memorize verbs. And the situation was more desperate than I’d anticipated. It’s one thing to figure out how to order at a restaurant and another to try to communicate with your child’s teacher when your daughter’s having trouble making friends at school or with the doctor when your baby’s developing a mysterious rash.

  The solo I ended up choreographing was called “First Position.” There are five positions for the feet in ballet, and in those days, I felt as if I couldn’t even make it to first. In the mornings, in our rooftop apartment, I struggled to persuade Molly to get dressed. The twos had been fine, but the threes, the terrible threes. Are they usually that bad? Or was it worse because of the advent of a baby brother, or because of living abroad? I finally gave up and let her choose her own clothes, clashing reds and purples, let her do her own hair. Who said there was anything wrong with five sprouting pigtails? The Spanish, that’s who. The perfectly coiffed children with their perfectly coiffed mothers—in their neat but somehow so sexy business suits, with their matching mother-daughter tucked ponytails clipped with starched bows—looked at us appraisingly, or so I imagined, as I raced up to the school door each morning, dragging my crazily pigtailed child and carrying my about-to-be-deformed baby. Here we are, the Americans, a disheveled heap.

  But in the end, Molly zoomed past us in Spanish, spitting out perfect Andalusian th’s and ordering lollipops at the ubiquitous candy shops using mysterious local slang. In that astonishing way that kids can subconsciously absorb and sort out language, Molly had found the key and unlocked the door just by osmosis, slipping in and bypassing all those torturous years of masculine/feminine nouns, single and plural agreements, past participles, conditionals, pluperfects and subjunctives.

  Skyler became a great travel baby, happily carted onto buses to visit picturesque hill towns, onto boats to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, into oven-hot cars to trek into the dunes of the Sahara, and onto the string of planes to return home five months later.

  I returned to my job, heading the dance program at the university, and Peter continued writing. I had happily moved from New York City to Missoula—which turned out to be a vibrant, outdoorsy college town in the mountains—on the understanding that it would be fine as long as, periodically, we could leave.

  Looking for a way to keep our family (and myself) traveling and for my dance students to experience a culture that truly integrated the arts into everyone’s lives, I developed a three-week winter-session course to take students to Bali in Indonesia. It was in Bali that Skyler learned to walk. The Balinese have a strong sense of spatial hierarchy, which they apply to architecture, geographic location, and even one’s own body, meaning you don’t ever want your head below your feet—so no handstands, no cartwheels, no falling down for toddlers like Skyler, newly investigating their watery ten-month-old legs. Babysitters snatched him up as soon as his pudgy knees began to buckle.

  At four and a half, Molly learned to flick her eyes and angled elbows side to side to the metallic ripple of gamelan music like a Balinese dancer, while I shepherded my mildly culture-shocked American students around town. Three years in a row we arrived, with a new batch of students, in the artsy town of Ubud, always on my birthday. I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the passing of another year. Then came 9/11 and the terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002, and the program got shot out of the water.

  Peter and I began to plot our next adventure. By the time Molly was seven, we’d managed to go to Indonesia four times and live in Spain, but the trips had been short, three weeks to five months. It was time for something bigger. When I had the opportunity to apply for a second sabbatical, we decided to look for a place that met our criteria for raising globally comfortable, globally tolerant kids. This would be the real beginning of our traveling-family experiment.

  The criteria were:

  a place where English was not the primary language

  a place where white was not the primary race

  a place where people were less affluent

  Well, that left most of the world.

  Our theory was that if our kids were to feel at home in that world, they would need to understand that people do not speak English everywhere, but that one can still communicate. They would need to feel comfortable being in the minority, in part so they could understand what that feels like and empathize with those in the minority at home. And it would be good for them to see how much less, materially, most people in the world have.

  Molly was at the incipient mall-rat stage. “I need to have . . .” was becoming her standard opening salvo. Every time I heard that opening line, I remembered the ingenuity of the Tibetan nomads in Qinghai, China. They seemed able to glean everything they needed from a yak: wool for tents, dung for fires, milk for yogurt, meat for their bellies. But their needs weren’t great. How much do we really “need”?

  Looking for a place for our next adventure, Peter and I took the Times Atlas and headed for our favorite Missoula oyster bar. We slid onto stools at the counter. Flipping through the atlas, we rapidly ruled out Asia, the continent we’d visited most. We wanted to try something new. Then we practically threw the dice.

  “What about Mozambique?” Peter had just been to Mozambique for an Outside magazine assignment. “There’s a crashing third-world economy, just what we need.” He smiled.

  Peter and I are well aware of the privileged lives we lead as people able to pick up and move to another country just for the adventure of it, but we can’t actually just go anywhere; the reality is that to stay within our budget, we have to find somewhere substantially less expensive than home.

  “We could probably afford it then, but wasn’t there just a civil war?” I asked with some trepidation.

  “Yeah, but it’s been over for a few years,” he said cheerily. “Things are looking up.”

  We’d loved our time in West Africa on an earlier trip, before kids; we’d loved the way the vendors in Ghana beat rhythms on their coolers to announce their presence, the way strangers would call out to us, “Hey, Mr. White!” But we’d never been, as a family, farther south.

  We finally settled on Mozambique, but reluctantly. As a former colony of Portugal, the country’s official language is Portuguese. Between us we spoke Spanish and French, but Portuguese? After six or seven months of finding our minds continually returning to Mozambique, we said, “Okay, Portuguese.”

  We arrived in June of 2004, deplaning onto broken tarmac. We filed into a single airport building that looked awfully small for the country’s capital, a city of millions. In Maputo, Skyler attended first grade and Molly fifth at the American International School of Mozambique. There was nothing very American about it. The teachers were British, South African, and Mozambican, and the system, as far as we could tell, was largely South African. The students came from all over the world—mostly Europe and Africa—and many spoke not one or two, but three or four languages.

  “Mom, why do I just speak English?” six-year-old Skyler came home asking. “Mikas”—his Lithuanian/Danish friend—“speaks four languages.”

  By the end of our year abroad, Peter and I could speak pidgin Portuguese, but the kids could barely speak any.

  When we decided to live abroad again, we agreed to continue to pursue Portuguese. That narrowed our choices right down. There are five countries after Mozambique where Portuguese is the official language: Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Portugal, Angola, and Brazil. We’d barely traveled in South America despite it being our continental neighbor, and Brazil, as a BRIC country, was poised to make its entrance onto the international stage. We thought it might be good to have a firsthand understanding of this fifth-largest country in the world. Brazil it would be.

  My father had recently died and left me a little money. It would go to funding our next year abroad. And this time, the kids had made a request: to find “a small town, with a local school.” They wanted to be bilingual. They wanted to be immersed. Peter and I wondered if they understood how challenging that might
be.

  2

  Not Too Big. Not Too Small.

  ON NOVEMBER 28, 2009, two days after Thanksgiving, Peter and I stood at the railing of an airport balcony. We looked down at our kids on the other side of the maze of conveyor belts, plastic barriers, and uniformed TSA agents. They were standing with my mother, who had moved to Missoula to be closer to her grandchildren. We waved good-bye, bought a last latte, and boarded a plane. Our sights were set on Brazil. We would have ten days to scout the northeastern coast in search of a town, a place to live for a year.

  Our plan was to land in Salvador, Brazil’s first colonial capital; rent a car; and drive to the port city of Recife, three states away. We were searching for the perfect spot for round two of raising global children. I don’t think Peter and I had spent this much time alone together since Molly had been born, fifteen years earlier.

  I’ve always liked these long airplane trips and, since having children, have come to especially appreciate the enforced time in limbo: the time to read random magazine articles just for fun, the time to let my mind skip as I gaze out the porthole of a window. It seems that, as a working mother, these wiled-away hours sitting on planes are the few hours I’ve found that are just for me.

  For years, I’d felt overwhelmed at work, overwhelmed at home, and my kids had been catching it, from me and from everyone around them. When did we Americans start having to be so good at everything? How many times have you heard someone say that if your kids don’t start soccer at age six, they won’t be able to play in high school? When did sports seasons start overlapping, because if you don’t hit the ice rink while the summer sun is still burning or start indoor soccer training before the snow melts, your team won’t win? When did winning become the primary goal?