by Amy Ragsdale
“Did you?” Molly asked, aghast.
“Yeah. We’d run over to that balustrade to do it, you know, where people are leaning on the railing. He’d also said if we had a penalty kick, I’d take it, and if I made it, Lu would buy everyone beers afterward, and if I missed, I’d buy.”
“Sounds like he figured that one out,” I said, laughing.
Dalan—or Ninguém, “Nobody,” as he’d been nicknamed by the team—was another one who had figured some things out.
“I’m just a walking ATM machine,” Peter would snort some time later.
He soon became the regular funder for a number of people around town, usually men who, shy with me, were unabashedly open with Peter. There was Magrinho down the block, who appeared at the door asking for five reais (pronounced heyice), about three dollars, for medicine for his daughter. There was Iago’s dad, next door, who started out saying he’d pay back the tidbits he borrowed, supposedly for their energia bill—though his habitual lurching walk and reek of cachaça belied that—then shifted to saying he would trade us cheese for the money, then dropped all pretense. Peter finally dropped him. But he hung onto the frail white-haired man with the dapper black felt hat who would rap on the glass panes of our front door with his cane. He wore the same blue-striped shirt, soft from hand-washing, and always asked for money for his wife’s eye drops. And Peter kept Dalan.
“I went down to the baixa to find my watch today,” Peter said as he settled back into his spot one morning at the dining table, his office. (Baixa literally means low and is a common name for both the geographically lower part of a town and the commercial part of town, at least in water-based places where the commercial life develops around rivers or oceans.) “I’d left it with the guys at soccer last night so they could keep timing for dez ou dois.” Dez ou dois means ten or two. When they played pickup games, they frequently played for either ten minutes or two goals, whichever came first. Then they’d rotate in a new team of two to four players. Peter was the only one with a digital watch to keep track.
“Dalan said he’d take care of my watch. He helps out somehow at Gordo’s lanchonete, doing odd jobs, so I looked there, and they just pointed. He was asleep on the concrete floor behind the Coke machine with my watch on his wrist. I think maybe he doesn’t have a home.”
I once identified Dalan’s lean body miraculously asleep on the hard cobbles of the ferry slip, unbothered by the loading of cars, trucks, and backfiring motorcycles. Coach Lu had moved on to running a video game business out of the front room of his house, and Dalan had taken over washing cars. He was dark-skinned, with the sharper nose and small eyes of an African Arab. His speech was barely audible, and he moved like a cat burglar, silent on callused feet. I liked him despite the fact that I didn’t trust him (not because he wasn’t a good person, but because he had some of the do-whatever-you-need-to-do-to-survive desperation of the really poor).
Over time, you begin to sort out those who attach themselves to you because you have something they want (money, soccer balls, some amorphous potential for a better life), and those who hang around because they’re genuinely interested in you. Dalan was probably a little of both.
One morning, Peter and I were sitting at Menezes, an open-air lanchonete near the river, and Dalan sauntered over and sat down. He barely talked. He just sat next to us, which I rather appreciated. It made me feel included. I had the feeling, however, that his body never fully relaxed into the chair, that he was always on alert. That day, one of the “Gypsy” women, in their trademark long, diaphanous dresses, lime green this time, asked to read our palms. I’d asked who these people were, and all anyone could say was, “They’re not from here.” I wondered if they were distrusted the way I’d heard Gypsies were in Europe. As she went on and on, tracing one line, then another in our palms, intoning incomprehensibly, I began to wonder what Dalan, sitting across from us in his muscle shirt and surf shorts, thought about all this.
“É tudo verdade. Elas sabem tudo,” he whispered when she was finished, barely moving his lips. “It’s all true. They know everything.” Too bad we hadn’t been able to understand any of it. In retrospect, we could have used a heads-up.
Sometime later, Peter was musing about Brazilian character. “They have an almost-animal quality. They’re always watching; they see everything.” That was certainly true of Dalan. He never missed a beat. When Peter was open in soccer and no one passed him the ball, Dalan did. When I struggled to swing my baskets of groceries onto the city bus, Dalan appeared to help. Our first week in town, that man who’d run across the praça to tell Peter his son had split his head open? That was Dalan.
Somehow I could never bring myself to call him “Nobody.”
10
“Quer Ficar Comigo?”
LIFE SEEMED TO BE settling down, if more easily for some of us than others. Before leaving the States, I’d had my share of anxious visions about what could happen to our kids in a small town in Brazil. Among them, I’d wondered whether our beautiful blond teenage daughter would fall prey to sexually predatory men. Would her inherent celebrity status as an outsider protect her, or would she be seen as a special prize, a conquest, a target?
My mind had been filled with the stereotypes one can have before getting to know a place. For Brazil, I’d imagined macho cruising men and scantily clad women. We would find that while the women were scantily clad, they, at least Molly’s friends, were much less likely to hop into bed than her sixteen-year-old American counterparts; that while a Brazilian woman might wear a “dental-floss” bikini, she would never go topless. The statistics on rape and the demoralizing debate about whether a woman, through her dress or behavior, “asked for it” are just as disheartening and confusing in Brazil as they are in the United States, but not any more so. Ultimately, we would get to know many protective, respectful men to whom I would gladly have entrusted my daughter.
Nevertheless, Molly and I had been warned by a Brazilian friend in Missoula that it was a common practice at parties to be asked by someone you’d just met if you wanted to make out. “Quer ficar comigo?” No strings attached. It turns out this is not a prelude for anything more, as it can be in the United States. But still, with a stranger?
So when Molly came home from school one day jubilantly announcing that she’d been invited to her new friend Keyla’s fifteenth birthday party, we thought we were prepared. Molly was excited. She barely spoke Portuguese and, so far, only two people we’d met spoke English, but she could dance, and, at a party in Brazil, dancing would get you a long way.
“Mom, what should I wear?”
“What do you have?”
At ten that night, another new friend, Leila, came to pick Molly up. Molly was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and her favorite multicolored flat sandals. She opened the door. There was Leila—in a beige satin minidress and four-inch heels, beautifully showcasing her mahogany skin and long legs. Molly rushed back into her room.
“Mom, what can I wear?”
She re-emerged in a short black dress and the only heels she owned, two-inches high with a tame strap.
“Have fun,” I called as she slipped out the door. I doubted she’d heard me, or the trepidation in my tone. Molly has never been one to look back, when friends are involved. I remember dropping her off for her first day of preschool in Missoula, age three. I couldn’t get her attention to wave good-bye; nor at the next preschool in Spain, age three and a half; nor for fifth grade in Mozambique, age ten. She faces forward.
Parties in Penedo start at ten or eleven, after our bedtime. We had no car. We’d considered finding a taxi driver to bring Molly home in the wee hours but had thought better of it. After midnight, if they were willing to work, chances are they would be doing it under the influence. In Brazil, the parties are intergenerational, so I knew Leila’s mom was there and would drive them home when the party ended. But if Molly wanted to leave earlier, she was stranded with no way to bail. We kept our cell phones by our bed, figuring maybe we coul
d call Zeca, one of our trio of guides, if she was really in trouble. It turned out Zeca was often at the same parties.
That first time, I woke up at 3:00 AM. It was still dark. No sign of Molly. I’m naturally optimistic and I really trusted her; even so, I wished she were home. I was less anxious, however, than I would have been in Montana. Perhaps because in Brazil I didn’t know enough to know what to worry about. She’d been told to keep her eyes on her drink (in Brazil the legal drinking age is eighteen, but it’s not enforced) and stick with friends, but the U.S. bogeyman, drunk driving, didn’t exist. Lots of people were drunk, but almost no one was driving.
I went to lie down on the living room couch. Not long after, Molly quietly opened the front door.
“How was it?” I asked blearily.
“Oh, Mom, it was really fun, but . . .”
“But what?”
“It was kind of overwhelming, too. There was lots of dancing. It was really cool. Everyone dances. They love to dance. But these guys—”
“How old were they?”
“Oh, I dunno. Twenty . . . ish? But they made a big circle around me and they were shouting, ‘Mohly, Mohly, I love you. I love you.’”
“In English?”
“Yeah. In English. For a long time. It was really loud. And they wanted me to dance. And they kept asking me to fica”—to make out—“with them.”
“Wow, Molly. What did you do?”
“Well, my friends were trying to protect me. But finally, I gave in. I told Felipe, you know, the guy who worked at the desk at the pousada, that I would, cuz at least I kinda knew him.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said, ‘Okay, one.’” She brandished her index finger. “One quick one. Then he stuck his tongue down my throat.”
“Oooh, yuck. What did you do then?”
“I retreated into the kitchen. They were really nice to me. Everyone was so nice to me.”
Well, we’d been warned this would happen to Molly. But to Skyler? It turned out that at age twelve, our tan, blond, blue-eyed son had an impassioned female following, both his age and older, acquaintances and total strangers. Brazilians aren’t shy, and they start young. They’d regularly ask him to kiss them, at school or on the street. Anywhere would do.
“Mom, what do I do? I want to go play tennis, but there’re all those girls out there!” And there were—a little tittering clutch eagerly watching our front door from the concrete benches in the praça. He was trapped in our house.
“Can you just say we don’t do this in the States? That we don’t kiss strangers?”
“I’ve tried that. They just say, ‘But this is Brazil.’”
In Skyler’s first few months in school, we received several love notes a week, surreptitiously slipped under our front door. Once I heard it and whipped the door open, mischievously hoping to catch the author. She’d vanished. On purple or pink paper, with heart or rainbow stickers, in a combination of Portuguese and broken English, they ranged from the fairly innocent (and somewhat inscrutable), “Never get out of Brazil that is a rock. I’ll die,” to the racy, “Just want your baby well,” or “I’am Prostitute and you is my Bum,” or better yet, “Fuck! Te Amo!”
One Saturday, Skyler took part in a capoeira demonstration at a school. He and I had recently begun to take lessons in this Brazilian martial art/dance form. As soon as Skyler and the other capoeiristas arrived at the school, he was swamped by girls wanting to pose for pictures with him, which he dutifully did. The California surfer: shaggy blond hair, clear blue eyes, a big white smile painfully frozen on his face. Theoretically, this should be a boy’s dream, but it wasn’t.
11
The Table Goes Silent, Time for a Break
WE DECIDED it was time to blow town, at least for the weekend; our fishbowl existence was becoming a little wearing—okay, somewhat exhausting . . . all right, just plain frustrating, at least for some of us. I was feeling guilty. Compared to Peace Corps workers or anthropologists out in the bush, what did we have to complain about? A clean house with tile floors and windows, kitchen help, lots of friendly people with arms wide. What was so hard?
A lot. The effort to express myself clearly in a new language, speaking at a kindergarten level when I had fifty-two-year-old thoughts, was surprisingly exhausting, as was the need to have all antenna fully extended all the time, so I could have a shot at understanding the response.
Every morning, I’d visit the dictionary before I made the day’s foray into the world and build up my armament for some anticipated conversation. Prego, massa, cabo—nail, plaster, computer cable—and my favorite, liquidificador, blender. Then there was the constantly being caught off guard because it turned out that though I thought I’d been understood, I hadn’t, or I’d said something I hadn’t meant to.
Even our minimal social life was wearing. Early one Sunday morning, Zeca’s uncle Robson (they say Hobson) had showed up unannounced, his family peering out the windows of their sleek gray sedan, inviting us to come out to the family farm, para andar os cavalos—to ride horses—around the fishpond.
Zeca would come pick us up, he said. I asked what time.
“Meio-dia”—Midday.
Good, that would still give us part of the day to ourselves. So I was confused when Zeca arrived half an hour later.
“But it’s only ten. Robson said midday.” I was quite sure. I persuaded Zeca, accommodating as always, to come back later.
By the time we bumped down the rutted mud road to the fishpond, the horses were grazing listlessly.
“Meia hora, Amy, não meio-dia! Meia hora!” Robson laughed. “Not midday, half an hour!”
He and his wife, Shirley (pronounced Shelee), and their two kids, Julia and Mateus, had been waiting for us, out of cell phone reach, for two hours. But they graciously served us olives and urged cachaça on Peter. The kids in their swimsuits rode the pokey slow horses, skinny legs dangling toward stirrups out of reach. Eventually Shirley asked, “Já almoçado?”—Have you already eaten lunch? Lunch is the big meal in Brazil. Dinner is more like a snack. We drove the few miles back into town to a local sports club, where another couple, friends of Robson and Shirley’s, joined us. You might think that I’d already dispensed with my language mishap for the day, but no.
That was when I thought I heard the fat-bellied, bare-chested husband in the other couple use a word I’d heard and wondered about before.
“Que significa arrobar?” I asked the table, repeating the word I thought I’d heard.
It went silent. Then, slowly, Zeca, said, “Well, it can be like a, what is this?” he was miming wrenching at something.
“A crowbar?”
“Yeah, but more, it’s . . .” He’d been choosing his words carefully and had now come to a complete halt. “Not a good word. When you are angry at someone, maybe you say this.”
“Oh, asshole?” I asked.
Zeca nodded his head vigorously, seeming relieved that I’d gotten it on my own. The wife of the man who had said it—or at least I thought he had—watched me intently, her painted eyebrows raised, her wilted smile unmoving.
It was definitely time for a break, for a little time on our own, for some English-language immersion. We’d chosen Penedo partly because it was only thirty minutes from hundreds of miles of ocean beaches. That weekend, our destination was Pontal do Coruripe, a deserted stretch of sand with a funky pousada we’d read about in the Lonely Planet guide. This B and B was run by Ada, an Italian woman who spoke English and had a library of books in multiple languages. Heaven.
We’d been told we could flag down the little vans that provided daily transportation to towns around the state of Alagoas. So we were leaning against the iron bars that surrounded the baroque pink mansion across the praça from our house, our motley collection of umbrellas, backpacks, soccer ball, and boogie board arrayed at our feet. As it turned out, we had lots of time to look through the bars and study the bulging presence of the pink Peixoto family house, w
ith its curving lines and romantic murals in blue tile of sailing ships from another era. Of Portuguese descent, the Peixotos remained one of Penedo’s premier families. In the early 1900s, they had built the textile factory we could still see, shining picturesquely white, across the river. In the 1950s, they’d built the Hotel São Francisco, the “modern,” anvil-like block plopped down in the middle of the tiny commercial district.
“Skyler, just kiss Mariana. Then maybe we can get into that house!” Molly pleaded, only half joking. Mariana Peixoto was a tall girl who’d just beaten Skyler at arm wrestling. Skyler had been under pressure from his classmate Mateus, Mariana’s annoyingly pushy cousin, to kiss her.
Mateus was Skyler’s nemesis. He was one big mixed message, solicitous one moment, taunting the next. “It’s not even that he’s so mean to me,” Skyler had said one day. “But he’s mean to others. It makes me uncomfortable.” When it came to sex, Mateus was claiming king of the hill.
“He says he’s done it with girls,” Skyler said one day, sounding dismayed.
“Do you believe him?”
“Yeah. I bet he has.” Skyler was beginning to sound desperate. “He’s always pushing me to kiss girls. When I say I don’t want to, he says it’s because I’m afraid.”
Mateus had settled on Mariana for Skyler’s proving ground. Mariana lived in the pink house. If only Skyler would kiss Mariana . . .
More vans passed, but not the one to Pontal. Either because of our sketchy understanding of Portuguese or general Brazilian vagaries about time, we hadn’t been able to get a clear sense of the schedule, and now it was getting dark. We decided we’d better schlep our gear down the hill and find a taxi. We found a willing driver down by the ferry slip.
“This is a seatbelt situation,” I said. But the belts were missing parts. This is when you let go of all the precautions you’d take at home and just hope your guardian angels aren’t asleep on the job.