Text copyright © 2016 by Christina Rickardsson
Translation copyright © 2018 by Tara F. Chace
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Sluta aldrig gå - från gatan i São Paulo till Vindeln i Norrland by Bokförlaget Forum in Sweden in 2016. Translated from the Swedish by Tara F. Chace. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781503901612 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503901610 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781503900967 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503900967 (hardcover)
Cover design by PEPE nymi
Cover photo used with permission of Helén Karlsson 2016
First edition
I dedicate this book to the three women
in my life who made all the difference,
who gave me the light to find my way in the dark.
You gave me love to handle the hate.
You taught me to laugh so I could always find comfort.
You gave me sense when I didn’t understand.
During our short time together,
you gave me enough love
to know what love really is.
This book is dedicated to you,
Petronilia Maria Coelho, Camile, and Lili-ann Rickardsson.
Wherever you are, know that I am always with you.
This book is also dedicated to all the street children in Brazil and around the world.
You are magical and deserve so much more than society gives you.
CONTENTS
MAP
NEVER . . .
Foreword
The Journey Begins
Cave Girl
My Bag Is Packed
A World Without Shelter
Returning to Another World
Some Scars Never Leave the Body
Thoughts Aswirl
Camile, My Very First Friend
The Plane Touches Down Gently
My Best Friend Saves My Life
Up There in the Clouds
The Story of the Cloud People
The Favela
Birthday in Brazil
The Orphanage
With Thirty Boxes of Chocolates in My Arms
Eight Years Old and Alone in the World
Visit to the Orphanage
The Fairy-Tale Land of Sweden
The Information I’d Waited Twenty-Four Years For
Everyday Life in Vindeln
One Day in the Favela
With Mama in the City of Angels
Mamãe Petronilia
Learning to Breathe Again
On Top of It All
Back to Northern Sweden
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
NEVER
from the streets of São Paulo, Brazil
STOP
to the village of Vindeln in northern Sweden
WALKING
Foreword
This is the story of my childhood in Brazil, about the culture shock I experienced when I arrived in the forests of northern Sweden and about the loss of the people I loved most. It’s about what I remember of my childhood in the Brazilian wilderness, on the streets of São Paulo, in the orphanage. And it’s about my early days in Sweden, when I found myself dropped into a place and life that couldn’t have been in sharper contrast to what I had known. My memories are scattered, but the ones that remain are very clear. I have tended them carefully, repeated them to myself, and written them down to try to preserve the person I was. I created this story, my story. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when each thing happened, or how long I stayed at each place. What is time to a child living in the streets? Why would we, I, need to know anything about time? We weren’t part of society. We existed in a world that had no time for us, that didn’t care whether we received an education, whether we lived or died.
Do you ever want to stand on a mountaintop, look out over the woods and the water, take in all the beauty at your feet, and then scream as loud as you can? Scream until you run out of breath, until your throat hurts and your lungs burn? A scream that cleanses the soul, a scream that lets you grieve and release the pressure of everything you’ve hidden away, all the pain you’ve amassed, all the adapting you’ve had to do. I have always adapted—to the laws of life on the streets, to the rules at the orphanage, and then to my new surroundings in Sweden. There are two me’s: Christina from Sweden and Christiana from Brazil. It hasn’t always been easy to combine these two me’s. Several times I’ve stood on the top of that mountain, desperately trying to scream, to rid myself of some of my frustration and grief. I open my mouth to let it out, but no scream comes.
The pages you turn here are my scream, the words my amplifier. But most of all, the pages of this book are my truth, my story—of my struggle to survive, of the courage it took to return home to Brazil to look for my biological mother and to find joy in this life. And of the love of mothers, which stretches to infinity and then back again to warm my whole heart.
The Journey Begins
UMEÅ, SWEDEN, WINTER 2015
One sunny day three years ago, I woke up afraid. Terrified is more apt. I was terrified of living. I’d hit the wall. Everyone knows about that wall. You can hit it at different speeds. You can run, jog, or trudge into it. The faster you’re going, the more it’s going to hurt when you hit it, and the greater your injuries will be. It’s simple math, an equation that makes altogether too much sense. I had run straight into that wall at peak speed, as if I were running a four-hundred-meter race.
How did it happen? If you’d asked my colleagues—my bosses and friends at work—none of them would have been surprised. I gave 120 percent to whatever I was doing. The truth, though, was that my life was in chaos. I was having a tough time with my family, relationships, friends, and with myself. So, I tried to focus on what I could control. How to explain an I’m-afraid-to-live chaos? Afraid to authentically feel? Afraid it would hurt? Afraid the people I cared about would leave me or die? Afraid that if I stopped running, I’d collapse? Afraid of who I was?
I was so tired, so worn out. I couldn’t think anymore, and didn’t want to. Thinking just led to anguish. I wasn’t up to being human. I experienced something I never had before. My body and my subconscious took over, as though my soul had decided it was its turn to take the reins. That was when the nightmares came: I was seven years old again and running for my life; I relived it over and over. If only I were dreaming about scary monsters under my bed. Unfortunately, the recurring images were real. I was dreaming about what had happened to me when I was little.
I realized that I couldn’t continue to handle this on my own. I understood that I had two choices: to give up or get myself out of this state. I remember walking into my bathroom and standing in front of the mirror. I looked deep into my eyes. I looked inward. I watched my eyes fill with tears as I realized that the little girl who had run for her life had just kept on running. I needed to stop running and once and for all, for my own sake, process what had happened. I said it out loud: “I can’t run away anymore. I don’t want to run away anymore. I don�
�t want to live like this.” And for the first time in my life, I asked for help. For real.
I’m sitting on my sofa in my apartment in Umeå. I go through all the paperwork I’ve received from my father about my brother’s and my adoption. It was quite a bundle, and now it’s spread across the coffee table. Half the documents are in Swedish and half in Portuguese. In all the twenty-four years these papers have been locked in my father’s safe, I have never asked to look at them. I’ve never felt the need. There shouldn’t be anything in these papers that tells me anything about myself that I don’t already know, that tells me anything about my life in Brazil that I don’t remember. I’ve never felt the need to find out who I am, where I come from, or why I was abandoned. I know who I am, where I come from; most of all, I know that I wasn’t abandoned. Kidnapping might be too strong a word to use for how our adoption transpired, but sometimes that’s what it felt like.
My brother Patrick, or Patrique José Coelho, which was his real name, the one our biological mother gave him, was too young when we came to Sweden to remember anything from our time before. In our Swedish family, that time was rarely discussed. There were surely many reasons for this, but I know only my own. I do know, though, that my brother remembers only one thing from his time in Brazil: he slept in a cardboard box. I confirmed this for him, because I was the one who put him in a cardboard box to try to get him to go to sleep. What’s so fascinating about memories is how certain ones are saved and others are not; some vanish for good, and some can come back. I’ve tried, but I can’t remember my mother being pregnant with Patrick. It feels like something I would have remembered as a kid—my mother’s tummy growing, and my knowing that I was going to have a brother or sister. I don’t know whether I have no recollection because I spent most of my time on the streets without my mother, or whether I quite simply can’t remember. I only know that one day Patrick, my little brother, was in my life, and that I loved him from the very first moment. I recall how I took care of him on the streets, how I fed him and changed his cloth diapers and made sure he slept sometimes. I remember that he wasn’t a fussy baby, and he didn’t seem to cry very much.
I was eight years old when I came to Sweden, and my brother was twenty-two months. We are half siblings. We have the same mother but different fathers. In the adoption papers, I can read who Patrick’s father is, but in mine, the line for father is empty. I wonder if that means I’ll never find out who my biological father is. It feels weird to say that Patrick and I are half siblings. Maybe that’s because I didn’t know my father or Patrick’s. Because our fathers were absent, I’ve always viewed Patrick as my full brother. Maybe being adopted and getting a new mother and father also strengthened the bond between us as brother and sister. We became a family, a family defined not by blood, but by circumstances, by chance and, who knows, maybe by something inexplicable. But a family was what we became. Patrick was curious and asked questions: “Where do I come from?” and “Who are my biological parents, and why did they give me up?” I’ve never had those thoughts. I’ve wondered who my biological father is, but I’ve never felt that knowing his identity mattered. He was never there. That was normal for me. My brother and I have had different lives. Whereas he’s basically only ever lived a Swedish life, I’ve lived both a Brazilian and a Swedish one. Which of us has had it harder or easier doesn’t matter. We’ve each had our share of sorrow, pain, joy, and happiness, just in different ways.
Emotions aren’t always easy to understand or deal with, and my rational mind isn’t always enough to quiet the storm that sometimes rushes through me. Now is one of those times, as I sit here studying all this paperwork that tells the story of our adoption.
It’s fascinating to read about what my adoptive parents had to go through to adopt and finally bring home the children they had fought so long for. They tried to have children for ten years but finally decided to adopt a child between the ages of one and three. In the end, they wound up with two children. There’s so much paperwork: paperwork from the Swedish courts, the Swedish government agency that handles public health and social services, the court in São Paulo, and letters of recommendation from my Swedish mother Lili-ann’s and father Sture’s closest friends and colleagues. There’s a letter that Mama wrote, and reading her words makes me both happy and sad. Happy that I can know some of her thoughts and feelings, but sad that she’s no longer here with me. I wish she were, now that I’m about to start my search into the past. I’m a grown woman, an independent woman, but I doubt I’ll ever outgrow the child inside me who misses her and needs her every day. Over the years, I’ve learned what it really means to miss someone. Missing someone doesn’t have anything to do with how long it’s been since you last saw each other, or the number of hours that have passed since you last spoke. It’s about specific moments when you wish they were there by your side.
When I was a teenager, I asked Mama how she and Dad had reacted when they found out they were going to be allowed to adopt Patrick and me. Mama said they waited and waited for the letter that would confirm that they were going to get a child. When they were finally told they could adopt, they found out that instead of one child, they would be raising two. The girl was eight and her brother almost two. Mama said that when Dad found out, he disappeared into the woods for two days. Mama said that she told the adoption agency yes on the spot, though she was a little worried about how Sture felt. When he came back home to Mama and saw how worried she was about how he was going to respond, all he could do was say yes. Sture usually smiles a little when he says that if they’d offered Mama five children, she’d have taken them all. I like that, like that Mama would probably have welcomed a whole soccer team of children if she’d had to choose between that or none. Mama told me that she couldn’t have lived with the thought of separating siblings. And if she and Sture had turned this offer down, she didn’t know if they would have ever been offered a child again.
I read on through the paperwork and feel a stab in my heart. I’ve read something I wasn’t prepared for at all.
There’s a lot I don’t remember, but I know it’s not true that my biological mother abused us. People were awful to us, but I have no memory of my mother being awful to us. We were neglected, yes, that’s true. By Swedish standards, all street children are neglected, even if they have good parents. But I respond most strongly to what it says farther down in the letter—that I had said that my mother was “nuts.” I wish it weren’t true, but I know that I did say that. I know that I said it because it was expected of me. I never thought my mother was different, but who knows, maybe she was. As a child, it’s hard to know what’s strange and what’s not. What I know is that I loved and still love her—and it hurts to read these lines, because I know what we went through together. I wonder who wouldn’t go nuts being forced to fight every single day on so many different levels to survive.
I set down the adoption papers and sort through a bunch of old receipts, airplane ticket stubs, and hotel bills that Mama saved from when she and Dad went to Brazil to come get me and my brother. I’m searching for clues that would lead me back to the orphanage, to my biological mother, and to the neighborhood I lived in. I translate one receipt after another: the receipt from the pharmacy where Mama and Dad bought formula for Patrick, the receipt for clothes they bought us, and restaurant receipts, but nothing leads me in the right direction. São Paulo is a big city with more than twenty-two million inhabitants in the metropolitan area and with numerous favelas, as the slums of Brazil are called. Finding out which favela we lived in seems impossible. Among all these receipts, I find a white sheet of paper that is a little crumpled and folded in half. I unfold it. In the left corner is a stamp from the court in São Paulo. I recognize Lili-ann’s handwriting. She had quickly jotted down a few notes about me: Christina doesn’t want to live like that.
Had I said that? It hits me that if they told Lili-ann and Sture, my adoptive parents, this, they might have told Petronilia, my biological mother, the same thin
g. I feel a crushing weight on my chest. After everything my biological mother and I went through together, after all the love she gave me, the authorities in Brazil might have told her that I’d chosen to leave her, when in truth I had had no say in the matter.
As I read this, I feel I need to try to find her. I want to restore my birth mother’s name and tell our truth, as I remember it, as I remember our time together and the love we shared in what feels like a totally different world, another universe. Because there’s a big difference between choosing not to take care of your children and living in a society that doesn’t give its citizens resources so you can take care of them.
I call the Swedish court and request copies of all the documents from our adoption. The woman I talk to says she’ll do what she can. Three days later, an envelope containing the copies falls through my mail slot with a little note that says Good luck on your journey, Christina.
Cave Girl
BRAZIL, 1980S
According to my Brazilian papers, I was born on April 30, 1983. That was also the thirty-seventh birthday of the king of Sweden, on the far side of the Atlantic from Diamantina, Brazil, where I took my first breaths. When I was little, Mamãe (the Portuguese word for mother) used to tell me that I was born in the woods, that my father was an Indian, so I was half-Indian. I don’t know whether this is true. I don’t know whether she embellished the story a bit, made it a little nicer than saying she didn’t know who my father was, or that he didn’t want anything to do with us. But I’ve always liked her version, and for many years I chose to believe it. A part of me still wants to believe it’s true. What I know and remember is that I spent my first years in the woods and caves outside of Diamantina with my mother.
Even though I was so little when my mother and I lived in the woods, I have many memories of our time together there. I remember that we lived in two different caves. One was near a red dirt road and the other deeper in the woods. I remember how Mamãe used to sit and weave together twigs and palm fronds to cover the mouth of the cave or to use as a mat for us to sleep on. I used to sit next to her, watching her fingers as they worked with the palm fronds to create a wall. I thought Mamãe was so powerful, and I did what I could to learn from her.
Never Stop Walking_A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World Page 1