The first clear images I have of my stepfather are from the day we moved, when I was four. He lived near the top of a housing project in the South Bronx, in the same apartment where he had grown up. I gawked at the sheer size and formidable brick of the building, and of the buildings that stood around it, throwing down enormous shadows everywhere, and so he too became impressive. He was an overweight but striking Puerto Rican man, with large hands, light skin, and wide, active eyes. With his thick black horseshoe mustache, he was trying to approximate or even surpass Willie Colón, whose face would appear again and again if you flipped through the sleeves of his record collection. I was so impressed, which is to say frightened—by these buildings, by this man, by this new scale of being—that I peed my pants, just as we were about to board the elevator that would take us up to our home.
The projects seemed full of frightened, nervous people like me, because the elevator always smelled of urine. Sometimes you could see where the splashes had gathered into a puddle, and you would ride up or down with your back pressed against the elevator wall, pretending the fresh puddle wasn’t there, pretending that some frightened, nervous person, someone you knew or saw everyday, hadn’t recently been in that elevator relieving himself.
When it wasn’t broken, that elevator took us to and from our home, on the tenth floor, for over ten years. In the first of those years, my mother became pregnant with my brother. I don’t remember anything about his birth or his first appearance in our apartment, but I do remember feeling vaguely indignant that I would no longer be an only child. I also remember that Carlos was a fussy baby, not allowing anyone but our mother to hold him, though later, with no effort or enthusiasm on my part, he suddenly warmed up to me. One of his first words, frequently yelled from his crib, was “Ba-dee,” the nonsensical pet name he had invented for me. There was something antic and skittish about him, however, so I didn’t feel whatever connection I was supposed to. It was from observing him, who was conceived in that tenth-floor apartment and breathed much of his first air from that elevator into his tiny lungs, that I came up with my theory about what the projects could make of people.
Rain from two days earlier had pulled a sweet musk from the soil that seemed trapped below the forest canopy of yellow poplar and Virginia pine. Carlos and Sulay had voiced their worries about bad weather interfering with the conference, but sunny days were in the forecast. It was less humid than it had been earlier in the week, and the clouds had completely spent themselves during Tuesday’s cool rain. Carlos started grabbing our things from the car. Holding Rosa in her arm, Sulay stood in her camouflage pants, leaning on one leg. She pointed a brown finger up at a stand of red maple and then, below it, on the other side of the car, she showed her daughter Solomon’s seal, a flowering dogwood, and sassafras. Sulay’s mouth seemed to caress every syllable. Rosa pointed in wild imitation of her mother and squealed with laughter.
I started to walk off, down a path beneath the maples, but Sulay called after me. I was going the wrong way. We followed the line of parked cars for a while until the high singing of a lone berimbau filled the air and a sign appeared for Camp 5, nicknamed “Happyland.” A few yards past this sign hung a yellow banner with black letters: 6TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CAPOEIRA ANGOLA ENCOUNTER. Above the letters was a simple but elegant picture of a man and a woman facing each other while standing on their heads. After Sulay informed me that she had painted the picture, Carlos kissed the corner of her pouting mouth, which seemed ready to pronounce the names of more trees.
We came to a clearing where people milled around a cabin camp. The berimbau player sat with a few other people on the steps of the largest cabin. In the stretch of grass before them stood a woman pulling lengths of wire for arame from the inside rim of a tire. Without a word, Sulay pressed Rosa into my arms, leaving the camphorous scent of her own hair with me as well. She ran into the grass and smacked the woman’s bottom. After shrieks of recognition and greeting, the two embraced with a long, tight hug and then stood apart to regard each other, holding hands like schoolgirls about to skip around. Abruptly, with a smile still playing on her face, the other woman pulled Sulay in toward her and tried to butt her with her head. Sulay slipped her hands from the woman’s grasp and her body went soft, boneless, and she evaded the cabeçada by melting into a low defensive posture. In a way, she became a part of the strike, pulling herself through and ahead of it in the same sleeve of motion. Without getting hit, she appeared to absorb the attack’s energy and dissolve herself perfectly into its time.
The berimbau player on the steps began to play at a faster tempo, with complicated variations, and another man accompanied him with the tapping and slapping of a pandeiro. The two women danced in front of each other as they pivoted counterclockwise, feinted with implied sweeps and kicks, and spun on the heels or balls of their feet, smiling and laughing the entire time. Sulay moved sinuously, like a slick eel swimming through water, and stood tall with her elbows close to her waist as she shifted around. By contrast, the woman’s dance, her ginga, remained consistently low, vigorous, and angular, with heavier footfalls and jabs of elbows and shoulders that declared the power of her thicker body. They went through a series of attacks, evasions, and counterattacks, observing the rule that only hands, head, or feet ever touch the ground. The attacks—spinning kicks and straight kicks—became more intelligent and forceful, many appearing from pockets of just-vacated air. After a particularly fluid and flexible sequence, they both executed slow, achingly beautiful cartwheels. This, holding the inversion, became another kind of contest within the game, so they both settled into steady handstands, Sulay with one leg unbent, pointed skyward, and the other wrapped prettily around it, the other woman with her knees tucked into her chest. They tilted their heads and grinned at each other, comfortable as though on their feet, waiting to see who would lose her balance first.
As always when observing capoeira, I could concentrate on only one player at a time. The experience resembles reading a poem with clever line breaks and complicated syntax: my sense of the dynamic between two players corrects itself retrospectively, deferred until a second or two after the surprise of a noteworthy exchange. Sulay calmly lowered herself into a headstand and then let her legs fall behind her, slowly arcing into a back bridge. I was blind to what the other woman was doing then, and with Rosa starting to fuss in my arms, I missed the end of their impromptu game. Carlos glanced over and heckled me with a laugh. When I set Rosa down, she tottered over to him and grasped the knobs of his knees. And then Sulay was with them, soaked with sweat, shoulders heaving as she breathed, her face like burnished wood. My brother lifted Rosa onto his hip, and Sulay wiped the sweat from her forehead onto his cheek.
Carlos’s father had a game he liked to play, especially during the time our mother was taking evening classes in accounting, when we, the two boys, were alone with him. He began it as soon as Carlos could talk. He would take one of us onto his lap and say, “De quien tú eres?” We quickly learned that the correct answer was “Daddy,” but the speed of our learning was less important than the speed of our response, and we could never respond quickly enough. As soon as he asked the question—even if it seemed that the answer came right away, even if the answer interrupted the question—he would begin relentlessly tickling whichever boy was sitting on him. Countless times, his thick fingers would clamp onto my narrow rib cage, and no matter how many times I screamed the word Daddy, I would be left gasping and nearly crying. Carlos was also a subject of this regime of laughter and filial affection, yelling and thrashing until he slid from his father’s lap and shared with me the mercy of finally making it down to the floor. Afterward we would often be forced to massage his feet. He’d be on the couch and we’d still be on the floor, each of us with a bare foot. I remember the sour smell, the hard skin on his sole and under his big toe.
We were only slightly menaced by this game; if he came home from work and sent us trembling to the floor, then it meant he was in a good mood. On suc
h evenings, he might also play some of his pop records. With this music blasting out of the speakers, he would dance, his brow knitted, his bottom lip sucked into his mouth, spinning and sliding in his thin dress socks. I would join in mostly by jumping up and down. Carlos moved with more grace and sophistication. He understood his limbs and his hips, and he understood time. Even then he was a skilled and intelligent dancer.
At that point, Carlos’s father was working as an officer with the Department of Probation. Once, when my brother and I were out of school for some odd holiday, my stepfather took us to work with him for the first time. The building where he worked, in lower Manhattan, down on Centre Street, was imposing and severe, a place that supposedly handled matters of justice but which nevertheless looked merely like a prison. The three of us went through a metal detector and rode an elevator to one of the highest floors. It was morning, but my brother and I were allowed to get potato chips, red licorice, and soda from the vending machines. As we made our way down the hall, Carlos’s father had us peek into certain offices and cubicles so he could show us off to his coworkers. After we got to his office, a middle-aged white woman with a long neck and her hair in a tight bun came in to chat.
She pointed to my brother and said, “Oh my god, is this your son?”
“They both are.”
“Well, this one looks just like you—the same smile, the wavy hair … Look at his adorable baby fat!”
“These are my boys,” he said.
“But this tall guy, he isn’t your biological, right?”
He looked at her then in that familiar way, his eyelids parted as far as they could go, the orbs themselves seeming to have moved a full inch out of their sockets. She appeared to be the sort of person who walked around the office saying things she shouldn’t say. If he’d had the proper authority, he might have fired her on the spot. Instead, he stood behind me and put a strong hand on each of my shoulders.
“Yes, he is,” he told her calmly. “They both are, like I said.”
Everyone in that room, except maybe Carlos, who was very young—though even he may have sensed it—knew this was a ridiculous statement. My stepfather’s colleagues had to be at least somewhat familiar with the basic facts of his home life. Also, I looked nothing like him, and at the time, I looked nothing like Carlos. His hair was curlier and softer, mine lighter by a few shades; only later would a few similarities of nose and cheek from our mother become apparent. It was possible, and less absurd, that I had been grabbed off the corner of Centre Street for the purpose of an office gag. The woman pinched her mouth shut and then went out the door, leaving us alone in the room with my stepfather’s lie.
“You are my son,” he said, not gently. “You know that, right?” The look on his face wasn’t very different from the one he had given the woman, and his voice was a double voice. I heard the unmistakable command in the lower one, so I nodded. He sat down in the chair next to his desk and made Carlos and me stand together before him. A distance from my brother opened suddenly, as if each of the years between our births were a tract of desert now stretched between us.
“De quien tú eres?” he asked us. There was no threat of tickling this time, which somehow made things worse.
“Daddy,” we said.
People, mostly men, sat on the steps of the big cabin, where we would all eat our meals at Happyland. People kept busy inside, carrying kitchen items and hanging decorations and signs from the exposed beams. The berimbau player was a middle-aged Brazilian, his hair stippled with gray and cut in an outdated flattop. He smiled often but still looked malicious. He turned out to be a famous mestre I had seen in photographs and videos, a capoeira angola teacher lauded for his mastery of the form’s movement, music, history, and philosophy. The people sitting with him, other mestres and teachers, spoke in lilting Portuguese, a teasing song directed at Carlos and Sulay. I couldn’t comprehend most of what they said but detected something almost flirtatious in it, a longing heard in the way their mouths massaged the vowels. Most of the attention focused on Sulay, maybe praising her for the beauty of the game she had just played, or for her own beauty, restored and even augmented so soon after pregnancy. They praised the beauty of Rosa, shy behind my brother’s legs, as well. From the way a couple of the men stroked their chins, it was obvious they were poking fun at Carlos’s beard. He’d been growing it out, and it was patchy and unkempt on his face.
After recognizing the famous mestre, I muttered his name to myself in surprise. Carlos glanced at me and chuckled. He stroked his own chin and then introduced me to the mestre, speaking slowly in Portuguese. I caught the first words. He said that I was his “irmão de Nova Iorque” and that I had been “treinando na capoeira angola por um ano, mais ou menos.” But then the pace of his speech quickened and he kept gesturing at me, with a conniving look on his face.
The mestre seemed bemused. He turned his flat, brown face at me, sizing me up, as Carlos spoke. With an expression almost like a sneer he shook my hand and held on to it as he said, “Você quer jogar comigo, rapaz? Hm? Eu acho que pode acontecer.”
The other people sitting on the step hooted and snapped their fingers, waiting for me to respond. I understood what my brother had done. It was an impossible situation. Neither yes nor no was the right answer, so I said nothing. I just shook his hand again and smiled.
A year earlier, I’d started taking capoeira classes in Harlem, with an old, shrunken Brazilian nicknamed Big John. I was drawn to the art’s historical and philosophical elements, and I wanted a dynamic form of exercise to counter all the hours spent immobile at my writing desk. I supposed it would also give Carlos and me something in common to talk about, but we hardly talked about it. While the training was hard on me, it was much easier than exchanging words with my brother. Not long after I first started, I was in the men’s dressing area one evening after a strenuous class. The movements had been full of twisting backbends and headstands that made me dizzy. I had changed out of our white uniform and was bending, slowly, to tie my shoes. In the hair of time it took me to blink, there was an extended foot an inch away from my face. The foot belonged to a longtime student, a Rastafarian from Jamaica whose long, thick locks of hair filled an immense tam. He stood over me and pointed to his eye. “You gotta watch,” he said, “or else you get a foot in your mouth.” In most contexts this would have been cause for a fight, but on that same evening, after we dressed, the Rasta offered to treat me to a vegetarian dinner. En route to the restaurant, he scolded the way I walked and shared a bit of our mestre’s wisdom. “Slow down,” he told me, “stay alert, make wider turns on the sidewalk. You never know what could be around the corner.”
Part of entering the world of capoeira angola is a constant training in vigilance, and not just during the actual playing of the game. Feints and trickery are generalized into a capoeira player’s worldview such that they are revealed to be an unavoidable part of the texture of life itself. I realize now how strange it is to exist otherwise, especially in a big city, and I marvel at people rushing, rushing, headlong into things, how full of trust they are, how they can’t see what often lurks behind the floating vapor of a smile. But isn’t the family the first arena of such knowledge? Isn’t it family that, in so many ways, determines our approach to life’s deceptions?
After Carlos’s father insisted in his office that he was my father too, I warped my laughter into screams whenever he tickled me. I no longer looked him in the face when I answered, “Daddy.”
In addition to taking evening classes, our mother had also started a day job, which meant that I had to walk Carlos to and from our nearby school and babysit him until an adult got home. In those unsupervised hours after school, we never had much to say to each other. We played, however, and I began to play rough with him. Back then we watched professional wrestling on television, and it was easy to persuade him to let me try out the moves. When we played this way, I always took on the role of the villain, the heel. I’d pick him up and slam his body onto ou
r dingy couch, bend his spine against my knee, apply various choke holds, pretend to smash his head into the wall. We both knew that pro wrestling was fake, at times barely on the threshold of convincing physicality, and we played in the same spirit. This usually extinguished the aggression that flared within me.
One day, when I was in eighth grade and Carlos was in third, we wrestled for a long time, until I had him in a choke hold called “the sleeper.” I was behind him with one arm wrapped around his neck and the other cradling the side of his head. This was routine for us. I would pretend to squeeze his windpipe and he would pretend to gasp for breath, swinging his arms stiffly in the air until he feigned unconsciousness. But this time all I saw in my mind was my bicep. Carlos flailed as I kept flexing it, and I was fascinated by the way a part of my body could be hardened into stone. Even when his weight sagged against me and he stopped flailing, I kept on with the routine, now acting as the referee. I let him slump against the front of the couch, then lifted his arm by the wrist and let it drop. I lifted it again and it dropped, and he fell onto his side. If his arm dropped a third time it would mean I had put him to sleep and that I had won the match. But I never won this way. Carlos had never let his arm drop a third time. He’d hold it in the air to signal consciousness and his eyes would pop open, and then he would go on the attack. That afternoon, however, his arm did drop a third time.
I raised my fists in victory and stomped around the living room, jeering at the imaginary crowd that surrounded us as my brother lay on the floor. Full of uncaged power, I laughed and pointed at him to show the crowd how weak their hero was. I planted my foot on his hip and raised my fists again, but when he didn’t move I began to get scared. His fingers were curled like shriveled leaves, and one of his legs was bent at an unnatural angle. I nudged him with my foot. Was he breathing? I squatted beside his heaped body and began to shake him. Tears ran down to my nostrils and my jaw. “Carlos, I’m sorry, please wake up,” I kept saying. “Carlos, wake up. I’m sorry. Please wake up. I’m so sorry.”
A Lucky Man Page 9