Crossing the River (31 page)

42
42

Floating Anger
Floating Anger

I
WALKED INTO
the garden room to my desk, to be greeted by a giant
FUCK
shining out of my computer screen. I had to laugh. It captured so perfectly how I felt.

It was one of the random photographs on my screen saver. Skyler, the artist who'd meticulously dug the word an inch deep into beach sand during a trip to the coast the previous October, was the reason I'd been ranting that morning to Peter. I was feeling exhausted and out of strategies.

After the lovely, mostly stress-free weekend in Salvador with Molly, I'd wakened that morning to hear Skyler storming out of the bathroom.

“I need to work out more!”

Oh. My. God.
“Skyler, you don't need to work out more.”

“I do. I'm so out of shape!” He was looking really distressed.

“How can you be out of shape when, yesterday, you surfed, played a soccer game, then ran nine miles on a soft sand beach?!” He and Peter had gone to the ocean while Molly and I had made our trip to Salvador. “Out-of-shape people can't do that,” I protested.

“Why am I getting side aches then?!”

“I don't know!” I was at a loss. “Let's research it,” I said finally. After Molly left for school, Skyler and I Googled. With three weeks left of our time in Brazil, we'd given up on pushing Skyler out the door on time.

“The cause of side aches is unclear . . .”

“Let's look at another entry,” I said starting to feel desperate.

“No, I need to get changed.”

“For what?”

“I'm going to school.”

Ten minutes later, Skyler walked out the door, in time for his second class. I collapsed into my desk chair, exhausted and angry.

What do you do with anger that really has no place to land? I wasn't angry
at
Skyler. It was hard to feel angry at someone who was struggling so much that his mind was sprouting strange fruit. I think I was angry
because
of Skyler, and because I couldn't, for this hour at least, hold anything more up. I couldn't think of any more convincing arguments. I couldn't find any more engaging distractions. And I couldn't stand the thought of another three weeks of this.

The thing that kept me forging on that entire year was the conviction that things would surely get better. Had to get better. That as Skyler spoke more Portuguese, he would feel more at ease. As he felt more at ease, he would like school better. As he liked school better, he would have more things to do, more people to hang out with. As he had more people to hang out with, he would feel more connected to Penedo, maybe even come to like it.

But none of this had happened.

Well, he had come to speak more Portuguese. He could rattle away without thinking, sounding like a native Alagoano, even conjugating verbs! Incredible. He was bilingual. But then the rest didn't follow. Why not, God dammit!

In my calm, collected, rational moments, I can see—now—that this year was not a good setup for a twelve-turning-thirteen-year-old boy, especially not one with perfectionist inclinations. This was not a good time in his life for language immersion in a strange, macho culture.

So what does one do with floating anger?

In my case: cry. Sit by the back window and cry and watch the sheets of rain blowing sideways across the valley. We were coming full circle. The torrential rains that had sent me diving for cover when we'd first arrived eleven months earlier were returning.

From our perch on the ridge, the picture was one-quarter land and three-quarters sky. I'd never been so aware of clouds. I felt I was looking down at the whole planet and out into the universe. It was good for perspective. I remembered once thinking—as I strode at high speed across the University of Montana campus, head down, planning my next class—that I needed to remember to look up, both literally and metaphorically. Now was a good time to look up.

When some people look up, they're looking for God. I'd wondered
a number of times about ducking into Nossa Senhora dos Pretos, the church down the street. As a person raised without a religion and little experience of going to church (my foreign catholic school experiences hadn't been encouraging), I didn't know quite what I'd do once in there. Just sit, probably. Its giant open doors spreading into that arching white space seemed inviting and peaceful. Perhaps that arching space would make room for thoughts and feelings that might not be able to squeeze their way in otherwise; perhaps they'd be able to spread out and sort themselves.

But I never did. I felt too watched in this town, and religion is such a loaded subject, like a freighter lying low in the water, waiting out in the harbor for permission to come in. I'd always been afraid to let it in, afraid to let go of my rational grounding in the world, afraid to make those leaps of “faith.” Funny, as there were lots of leaps of faith I was willing to take, like moving to a foreign country, with my kids, to live in a town where we knew no one and couldn't understand what anyone was saying. But then, those leaps of faith were familiar to me from my childhood.

So instead, I went to the back window and looked up, out into the sky—the infinite, ever-changing, expanding sky—and it calmed me down. By the time Skyler clunked back through the door at eleven thirty, I was able to be half civil.

“How was school?”

“It was okay.” He cocked his head, assessing the morning. “It was actually pretty good. Hey, you want to see my drawing? It started out abstract. Guess what it is.”

I looked at the paper he held out. On it in pencil was an intricate mandala of tiny puzzle pieces.

“Well, it looks like a city.”

“It's the planet. You know, how it seems really full, but really varied. That could be New York or Paris,” he said, pointing to a skinny rectangle with a spiked top. “This is a forest, these are the Himalayas or the Andes . . .”

I felt so much relief hearing him prattling away and so much love for this boy who kept getting knocked down, by the place, and by his own brain, but kept getting back up, over and over again.

Maybe this was all going to end up all right after all. Maybe he'd end up loving this planet, his planet, with its confusion, its challenges, its infinite variety.

43
43

More Important Things
More Important Things

I
WOKE UP EARLY
on Good Friday. Peter had his back to me, his bare shoulder poking out from under the soft white pile of our blanket. It was only 5:45, but it was light. I padded barefoot down the white-tile hallway to the back window, slipped the key into the padlock, and opened the windows wide. It was like letting your breath out, a huge sigh of relief spreading down the hill, across the meadow, up through Bairro Vermelho, and out to the river and hills beyond.

There was the usual morning rooster orchestra. It didn't change in pitch so much as shift in density and location, a sudden clatch to the right, a pair below, pulling to a chorus in the distance, spraying left. A furry clump of
sanguin
picked through each other's fur on a palm frond at the bottom of our yard. Half-clothed people appeared in open doorways, tiny across the valley, wandered aimlessly into the dirt streets to stand for a minute before disappearing back into the dark maws of their houses. Nothing moved quickly.

A church bell began to clang. It had a hollow, toneless sound that said,
This is a practical bell
—announcing the time, calling people to prayer—not some highfalutin musical thing. It reminded me of the procession Molly and I had run into the night before with monks and nuns in robes of brown or white stepping slowly in time down the cobblestone street. Their somber chant, “
Nossa senhora
. . .”—Our mother full of grace—filled the darkness.

I poured cold coffee, milk, and a lot of sugar into a glass and folded myself onto the bench by the window. It was overcast, but not that taut, Saran Wrap sky—rather pillows of jostling cloud. One burst, and the rain came in a gushing drop. Within minutes, it was pinging on the PVC ceiling in the dining room. There must have been another hole in the roof tiles. I felt so grateful that the rains had come, to beat back the heat.

The isolated thunderstorms brought a little relief after the sodden
lethargy of March and April—a lethargy that I'd begun to feel might never go away. I think this tendency to wonder whether this is it, whether
this
, whatever it is, is now for the rest of my life, started at about age forty, when it suddenly felt like my body was falling apart and like Humpty Dumpty wasn't fitting back together again, at least not “good as new.”

Finishing my coffee, I headed out to the market, squeezing onto the bus just before the rain hit again. By the time I got off, the streets were flooded, ankle-deep by the curbs. I carefully hopped from bit to bit of visible sidewalk. Somewhere along the way, I'd learned not to flip my flops when it was wet. Just as somewhere along the way, I'd stopped saying everything in my head in English and had jumped directly to Portuguese.

This was a day for circling crowds in the
praça
near the ferry slip. Some things are timeless, like snake-oil salesmen with a good patter. A group pressed in to see the burly bare-chested man, who was putting screwdrivers and kitchen knives up his nose. For the finale, he dove through a lethal-looking bicycle rim spiked with inward-pointing machetes. All the while, he sold small tins of salve, guaranteed to cure everything: headaches, sore throat, back pain, and even your crotch (whatever ailed it).

I smiled. Just another day in Penedo.

Moving on, I stopped in at the “workers'” pharmacy, where the pharmacist asked if I knew the price of the medicine I sought. When I shook my head, he smiled with delight and quoted a price outrageously high. We both laughed at his joke. He then instructed the cashier not to put the little box in a plastic bag.

“
A senhora é salvando o ambiente
”—The lady is saving the environment.

By the time I'd moved through the market, I'd had several more good conversations: with Nené, the butcher; Celia, the fruit seller; and Nilda, a relative of Aniete's, who was manning her vegetable stand. I was feeling elated by my fluency.

A week later, Peter and I stepped out of the taxi, returning home from Oratorio, the restaurant where we'd been going weekly for our date night, which was also Molly and Skyler's “date night.” They
would go out to dinner on their own and do whatever they wanted; usually that meant watching a movie on the computer. That is, if they could disentangle themselves from all their hangers-on.

I pushed open the door and was met by Molly on the brink of tears.

“We haven't even gone out yet. I am so frustrated. I feel so pissed off!”

Past her, I could see Karol and then two of Karol's friends using our computers in the front room.

“I will be
so
happy when we go home,” Molly sighed emphatically. “At home we think our house is a refuge, but here . . .” She drifted off.

People in the United States value privacy and a chance for peace and quiet. Of course, people in the United States need the break from a “grueling day at work,” their “dog-eat-dog” lives. A Brazilian home is not a refuge, at least not if our home was an example.

“Disturbing the peace” was not a concept in Northeastern Brazil, maybe because there was no peace to disturb. Or maybe the disturbance was the good part—the part with friends and music, the fun part.

The concept of “this is mine,” so prevalent in our culture—my space, my time, my things, my quiet—was not so strong there. At dinner, Peter routinely swatted Molly's and Skyler's marauding hands as they tried to siphon food off his plate. “Dad, here everybody shares their food,” Molly would retort.

Shares their food, shares their time, shares their space, shares their taste in music.

It strikes me that this is common to cultures where people have less. They have less space, so they sleep eight to a room (as Sarah, our Mozambican cook, did with her kids and grandkids); they have less food, so they share the hunt (as the Yanomami did); they have no running water, so they share the well (as the people in Aniete's village did). One would think it could go the other way, but it seems to be the opposite. The lack seems to build a kind of understanding about the need to work together, a kind of empathy that those of us who have more can lose.

This sharing of space wasn't an easy adaptation for us to make. In
fact, I wouldn't say we adapted; we more sucked in our breath and tolerated it.

But I'm trying to hang onto the Brazilians' generosity with time. For me, time has always been an especially precious and contested commodity. As a child, I was already convinced that I was not going to have enough time in my whole life to do all the things I would want to do. I began to hoard time. So now I'm trying to learn to share time—with friends, family, community. This will be part of my newfound balance. Balance and joy.

The next day, I wandered into Sportgol, the best soccer shop in town, looking for a Vasco da Gama cap for Giovanni as a going-away present. Vasco was the soccer team to which he'd sworn his lifelong allegiance. I was pleased to have a chance to say good-bye to Sportgol's owner, a man whose name I'd never learned but who always greeted me, “
Oi, amiga
”—Hello, friend—and smiled gently from behind the glasses that slid down his nose.

Usually I'd initiated the conversations, trying to find out where a girl could play soccer, why official team shirts were so much more expensive than the replicas. But on that day, he was full of questions for me.

“My friend who lived over there,” he said, meaning the United States, “for twelve years, he was married to an American.” It was all spilling out in Portuguese. “When I told my friend about you and your family, he said he didn't understand how an American could come live here. He said you wouldn't like it. There's no organization here. The streets are bad. There, if your child doesn't go to school, they come to your house and knock on the door, to see if he's really sick. Here, nothing. It's all corrupt.”

I said that our family had traveled a lot, so maybe we were more accustomed to a little disorganization, that maybe some Americans would find it difficult here.

“But you should tell your friend,” I continued, “that there are things that are more important than organization—there are people. And here in Brazil, the people are open and kind; they know how to relax,
how to have fun, how to take time with their friends, their family. This is what
you
have. This is why Americans should come to Brazil.”

As the word got out that we were leaving, all the “wavers”—the people stationed along our daily paths who always smiled and waved—suddenly wanted to talk, to find out where we were from before it was too late.

“
Vai embora?
”—You're going away?—they asked, suddenly finding their tongues.

One was the elderly woman who lived down the ridge in the cream house with the sage-green shutters. She waved me over a few days before we left.

“
Onde vão?
” she asked in a whisper of a voice. “Where are you all going?”

“What is your name?” I finally asked.

“Mafalda,” she replied, her eyes twinkling.

Of course! The kindly, diminutive witch who saved Harry Potter from the soul-sucking dementors, then faded back into her little English cottage to watch protectively through the cracks in her shutters. I knew she'd always been there for me.