Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil Read online

  In minutes, it would be dark. We sped off over the cobbles, houses and shops on the left like some kind of dimly lit cubist jumble, and weedy, open fields meandering down to the river on the right. Lighted shops gaped through raised garage doors. Already people along the side of the road were difficult to see, their dark skins blending into the blackness.

  Night driving in foreign countries is like getting ready for a race—part adrenalized excitement, part dread. I try to relax into what seems to be an inevitably wild ride and quell the anxious anticipation of what could go wrong. It was easier when I was younger. I remember, when I lived in Cairo as a child, loving this feeling of speeding through the darkness, the temperate breeze washing over my face through open windows. In Cairo, the only time a car could fly was in the predawn, when we’d be racing for the airport. Then the otherwise perpetually crowded streets were surprisingly empty.

  Later, just before Molly was born, Peter and I had flown by airplane from morning till night in a great looping arc from Cairo, near the Mediterranean, to Ghana, in West Africa. By the time we approached the airport in Accra, we’d been sucked into an ocean of darkness. This great city appeared to have no lights. On the trip into town, the airport taxi driver opted to use his headlights sparingly, suddenly flipping them on at inexplicable moments, for example, just in time to blind an oncoming car.

  That same strange combination of exhilaration and anxiety came back when we lived in Mozambique and would find ourselves racing for the South African border, a couple of hours away from our house in Maputo, for a wild-game-viewing weekend in Kruger Park. We’d been warned that we did not want to be out on the roads after dark. We’d quickly gotten the picture from Maputo’s expat community. Lock your doors when you’re in your car, so people don’t reach in and pull your purse—or you—out. Travel in convoys. Travel in daytime. And don’t break down, especially in South Africa. “There,” we were told, “they don’t just rob.”

  Ten-year-old Molly had been pressuring us to go to the South African town of Nelspruit, just across the border, a three-and-a-half-hour drive. She wanted to go to the mall.

  “We didn’t come to Africa to go to a mall!” was Peter’s response.

  But I caved. All her friends went. It was important for her to fit in. I started asking around, looking for a convoy. No? Okay, let’s get a grip on the statistics, confront this amorphous fear. How many people have really been hijacked on the road? No one knew. I was aware of how easily fear can take hold without much actual grounding. So—conscious that I didn’t want unsubstantiated fear to dominate my decisions and as it appeared there were no statistics and few personal stories—I decided to go for it. The claptrap Suzuki jeep we’d bought a couple of months earlier from a Pakistani used-car salesman was already in the garage for repairs. In the meantime, we’d been given a loaner.

  Early on a Saturday morning, Molly and I backed through our gate in our borrowed white sedan, passports and a reservation for a recommended guesthouse in hand. An hour later, we were at the hilltop border crossing, an unassuming clapboard building. Passport control was its usual confusing jumble of people pressing forward to get the required stamps, but we made it through. We began the descent into South Africa. The countryside was bucolic, rolling hills with orange orchards, rock outcroppings, and trout streams—somehow immediately lusher than dry, hardscrabble Mozambique. But I was on the alert.

  And then it happened. The steering wheel jerked. The rubber slapped. I swerved to the side of the road. We had a flat tire.

  I pulled over and jumped out, hoping for a spare and a jack. Within a minute, a white pickup truck with two black men pulled over in front of us.

  “Molly, get out of the car!” I shouted as I raced around to the back and opened the trunk. I wanted her to have a chance to run.

  I was screened by the raised trunk. Should I pick up the crowbar lying in front of me?

  And then the man appeared next to me.

  “May we help you?” he asked.

  Before I could answer, they were fishing out tools and had the tire changed. It turned out one was an English-speaking South African. They were returning from a visit to the home and family of the other, a Mozambican man, and were headed back to their jobs in a South African toilet paper factory. Before I could offer to pay them for their help, they’d gotten back into their truck, where they waited for us to take off, then followed to be sure we were all right.

  So much for getting killed by the side of the road.

  I felt chagrined at my susceptibility to prejudice and relieved to be reminded of the real goodness of most people. Constant distrust is exhausting, but it’s so easy to fall prey to fear, especially if the safety of one’s children might be at stake. On the other hand, over the course of our year in Mozambique, a family we knew did get hijacked on this same South African road and escorted at gunpoint into the bush; robbers tied up the French teacher from our kids’ school and her children in their house in Maputo; and a Belgian acquaintance of friends was shot in her car. So maybe we were just lucky.

  I was hoping we would have the same luck here in Brazil as our taxi picked up speed on leaving the cobbles and hitting asphalt. The stretch paralleling the Rio São Francisco was long and straight and unusually free of potholes. The headlights of an occasional oncoming vehicle would start as a distant glow, then tree trunks would pop into silhouette as it rounded the soft curves, until finally its lights appeared head on; each time it seemed we were about to collide, but somehow the car would skim past. Occasional clumps of people would appear by the roadside, evanescent visions in sudden Technicolor, flashing up on a screen and as rapidly disintegrating back into nothingness.

  Once we hit the coast, the terrain changed. Now spindly coconut palms in orderly rows reared up into the headlights, marching along like fence posts—plantations extending for miles. The land began to dip and rise, diving into tangled draws and cresting into the sudden openness of sugarcane fields, their densely packed spiky grasses forming a canyon that our little car sped through under a wide, moon-shot, cloud-filled sky.

  As we approached the town of Coruripe, traffic picked up, and we began the high-speed game of “tailgate, duck out, and dash.” Soon after, we cleared town and reached Pontal, a small oceanside village on a point.

  We arrived just in time for dinner at Pousada da Ada, after flying down a steep hill through a gauntlet of small houses, turning left at the praça, then right at the Frango Vivo e Abatido sign, and right again where the arrow dimly painted on the side of a house pointed the way.

  The warm eating room glowed through open windows overgrown with hibiscus, oleander, and bougainvillea. From inside, we could hear the clink of glasses and silverware. Ada appeared in the doorway.

  “Ahh!” Her voice was low and rasping. “You made it!” she said in English. “Excellent. How was the ride? Not too fast?” She chuckled. “These drivers, they are crazy here in Brazil. Come.”

  She ushered us along the veranda—past casually scattered conch shells, a low-slung hammock, and a windowsill lined with empty blue and green bottles. Skyler brushed a coconut-shell chime, setting off its lackadaisical, hollow clatter. We crossed a walkway to a white stucco bungalow. It was partitioned into several rooms, each without a ceiling, open to the clay roof tiles. Someone perched on a beam could spy into each room, as if looking down into a dollhouse. We threw our bags onto the gray stone floor and returned to the main house, where we joined the other guests at one large table.

  A couple, both social workers from Germany, two young Austrian architecture students, and a ruddy-cheeked, white-haired Austrian banker greeted us jovially. The table-wide conversation meandered along pleasantly in English, German, and Portuguese. (Italian-born, Portuguese-raised Ada could speak all of these and more.) Ada zipped in and out, cigarette in hand. Petite, tan, and wrinkled, with short salt-and-pepper hair and alert dark eyes, she monitored the continual flow of dishes: creamy yam soup, fried fish dumplings with salsa, buttery vegetable st
ir-fry, and scalloped potatoes. I gratefully slugged down the caipirinha waiting at my place, decompressing from the high-speed ride and the daily strains of trying to speak Portuguese. It was such a relief to finally feel I didn’t have to be “on,” as we all did in our spotlighted existence in Penedo.

  Finishing off our guava ice cream, the kids and I retired to our bungalow to settle in for our nightly ritual of listening to Harry Potter on an audiobook. Peter stayed to talk to the other guests, basking in the chance to have a more complex conversation, to use words that just spill off your lips.

  I stared up through the sweeping white folds of the mosquito net into the underside of the clay roof tiles and watched a white rat run the length of the central beam. In my newly relaxed state, a state I hadn’t experienced in months, the rat seemed magical. I wanted to believe it brought good tidings. I felt very content.

  We would eventually discover that our state of Alagoas has three kinds of beaches: highway beaches, where people drive their cars into the shallows, unfold chairs, and sit in the ankle-deep water; party beaches, where no cars are allowed but the sand is studded with umbrella-shaded flesh and a parade of vendors; and classic postcard stretches of deserted, palm-lined white sand. Pontal is the latter.

  Our first morning, we picked our way through an empty lot, climbing down a rock bulwark to drop onto a vast arc of sun-soaked sand. A luminescent jade ocean broke white over rock reefs. On our left, a sandy bank rose to an airy coconut plantation, trees aligned in rows like elegant couples engaged in some aristocratic dance, fronds bowing and curtseying in the light breeze.

  “Do you think I could flip off that?” Skyler asked, pointing to a dip in the sand bank. After splitting his head on the stone wall in Penedo, he’d been plagued by doubts. “I’m never going to be able to flip again,” he’d mumble periodically, a remark that half wanted a response and half didn’t, sure that the verdict could only be bad.

  Peter and I, both physically oriented people, had consciously let our kids to take some physical risks as part of our child-rearing strategy. By risk, I mean things like walking on a railing a few feet off the ground, jumping off a wall, climbing trees. We felt that ultimately, our kids would be safer if they developed their physical abilities and had practice calculating the risks. Our guideline for risks was: A broken leg is tolerable. Paralysis is not.

  Peter studied the bank. “Yeah. I think you could.” We knew it would be good for Skyler’s confidence if he could “get back on the horse.”

  Skyler climbed the bank, adjusted his feet, looked back over his shoulder, threw his arms a couple of times overhead, then jumped and landed. He ran over to us, talking fast now.

  “How high was my head? Do you have your camera? Did you get a picture? I’m going to do it again. Are you ready?”

  It was so good to see him excited about something. I had that same feeling of relief I get when a nagging background sound—a generator, an air conditioner—suddenly disappears. In perpetual coping mode, I hadn’t allowed myself to recognize how much tension I’d been carrying around, like a lead weight in my pocket.

  Molly, Skyler, and Peter are much gutsier body surfers than I am. They look eagerly out to sea, watching for good waves to catch. They don’t seem to mind the smashing and grinding on the sand when the wave deposits them on the beach.

  “Mom,” Skyler suggested, always eager to include me, “if you feel yourself starting to roll forward, just do this”—he covered his face with his forearms—“so you don’t break your neck.”

  “Whoa, did you see that one?” said Molly, head popping up through warm foam. “I flipped all the way over!”

  “I almost lost my suit,” Peter laughed.

  I, too, stood chest-deep and faced the great waves, rolling milky green, a smooth wall rising five or six feet in front of me. But inevitably, I chickened out and dove through rather than surfing in. Miraculously, no matter how big they were, even if I was late and the wave was already crashing, I popped out the other side unscathed. If I timed it just right and dove through the glass wall, my body would ripple out behind with a luscious, almost disembodied feeling, as though I were a paper doll fluttering, head toward a fan.

  I loved the feeling of just floating on my back, out beyond where the waves broke; of feeling my body, so light, being carried high on a swell and then sliding down the back side; or of letting my legs dangle down, the wave gently lifting me off the sandy bottom before setting me lightly down again. Sometimes I tried leaping toward shore with the wave as it rose and was lofted up, suspended on a cushion of water, better than dancing with any human partner.

  I loved the feeling of being so connected through my senses. For once, my mind was in storage. I wasn’t worrying about my family trying to adapt to a foreign country; I wasn’t in hyperdrive, preparing for a dance performance; I wasn’t plotting out the next step, checking things off the list.

  As an academic, I’d had long vacations and always marveled that, even then, I could never completely relax. The first time I’d managed to, it had required leaving the country—setting up house in Maputo; establishing a simple, daily routine of coffee on the balustrade-rimmed terrace of an old colonial hotel; gazing blankly for hours at the turquoise pool and the vastness of the Indian Ocean beyond—before my mind would release its grip. This was the second time, finally, at the end of September, almost into month four. It made me wonder how one lets down in the States when one doesn’t have so much time and what happens to a body that’s continually revved.

  We’d been caressed by this all-encompassing warmth on other visits to the tropics. Chubby-legged Molly had run naked on the beaches of Bali; baby Skyler had nestled into a soft Spanish breeze; waves had launched our bodies off the shores of Mozambique. It’s easy to understand why, in these climates, the drive to “do” just slips away, why the faces of people in these places look so relaxed, so soft. They have none of the pinched tension, the clenched muscles I see in most of the places I’ve lived—Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New York, Montana—the frigid north, where people have to “do” just to stay warm.

  An afternoon passed, and the next morning; then we had to catch the van back to Penedo. We’d thought of nothing but crashing waves, the great spread of sky, the gentle swivel of palm fronds, the amniotic warmth of the water. We slipped back into Penedo, skins crusted with salt, muscles warm with sun, limp and relaxed.

  12

  Running the Race

  TWO WEEKS LATER, the distress was back.

  “Why do I have to go to school?” Skyler wanted to know again. Clearly the question was rhetorical, the vent through which blew his general anxiety and frustration.

  It was late September. Both Molly and Skyler had been chosen to play on Imaculada’s futsal teams and had just returned from a five-day competition in Bahia, ten hours and two states away. Hoping that a few months of language immersion would improve Skyler’s school situation, we’d asked him to stick it out at Imaculada until the Bahia trip, after which we would reconsider his options; maybe homeschooling would be better.

  When they’d left for Bahia, we had watched them standing alone amid the swarm of classmates and teachers. They’d bravely marched forward, their small bags (Skyler’s old Missoula soccer bag and Molly’s carpet bag from Bali) looking unlike anyone else’s, and handed their luggage over to be loaded into the belly of the bus. Skyler was armed with Rubik’s Cubes, number puzzles, and Uno cards. Molly had a book. Many of the guys had brought drums. Skyler’s math teacher had a guitar. I was so proud of my kids. If I’d had to spend five days in nonstop, Portuguese-speaking company, I would have bolted.

  During their trip, Peter and I scored a much-needed date, our own five-day trip, to Salvador, for a dose of fine dining, English-language bookstores, big-city museums, and art—a chance to check in with each other, assess our situation.

  What I mostly remember from that trip was the evening we spent on the deck of a yacht club restaurant on the Baía de Todos os Santos, sipping a col
d Riesling and eating artisan cheeses under the overhanging arm of an enormous plane tree. The light shifted from pale blue to aquamarine to cobalt as the boats—two-masted schooners, enormous motor cruisers—gentled into their slips. It was even romantic—a feeling that had become sadly alien during the logistics-filled years of work and parenting.

  In Salvador, I felt I was floating on the cushion that comes with money and international sophistication. I sank into the lushness of it all, thinking it doesn’t take much. I was reminded of the time during our honeymoon crossing China, when Peter and I had emerged from weeks of walking across Qinghai Province, into the polished gold lobby of a twelve-story hotel in Chengdu. That evening, we’d sat in the rooftop garden, savoring a gin and tonic imported from England. It had seemed the ultimate luxury.

  There in Salvador, Peter kept saying, “Penedo is so small,” as though he were wondering what to do with it. I was afraid to pursue the remark, afraid to delve into what I feared I’d find—that he was feeling purposeless and unhappy, that he wanted to go home. To me, turning around now felt daunting and like admitting defeat; and what would that do for the kids, for building their confidence?

  I was also beginning to wonder if there was a gender divide. I had noticed before, among older retired friends, that the women often began to travel, sometimes almost obsessively trying to see the rest of the world in the time they had left, while the men tended to stay home. I was beginning to see the same divide in our family. While no one was finding it easy, Molly and I were more readily embracing the experience. Granted, our experience as females was different than Peter’s and Skyler’s as males, not just because of who we were but also because of the difference in male and female worlds in Brazil. Molly’s friends weren’t yelling at her when she made a mistake or pushing her to do things socially that made her uncomfortable. I didn’t have to prove myself on a soccer field the way Peter did. But I did seem to be trying to prove that we could do this, live immersed in a very different culture than our own. I didn’t want to feel I was forcing everyone else in my family into my experiment, however, so when Peter repeated, “Penedo seems so small,” I let the observation hang.