I smiled because I loved everything that had to do with clouds, and Camile knew it. Here is the story she told me:
The Cloud People
by Camile
In a world above the ground, somewhere between the earth and the sky, lived the cloud people. What you need to know about the cloud people is that they were all good. They did not discriminate based on skin color, since they themselves were made up of all the colors of the rainbow, and they called themselves the Colored Ones. Hatred and pain did not exist in their world, but tears did. This was how they could still distinguish the good from the bad that people did to one another. When they saw someone do something terrible, it made them so sad that they cried. When they saw someone do something nice, they all came together and held hands, and they formed the most beautiful thing they could—a rainbow.
One day, two of the cloud people’s sons climbed down to the earth. One was yellow and the other was blue. Their assignment was to study the humans. The yellow one was going to investigate the good side, whereas the blue one’s assignment was to investigate the bad side. The yellow one was sent to the people in the forest, an Indian tribe who lived in harmony with the woods and the animals. The blue one was sent to the city of São Paulo, where he would live with a street gang. The Indians helped the yellow one find their little hamlet, and they took care of him, fed him, gave him a little shack to sleep in, and told him he was welcome to stay for as long as he wanted. The yellow one lived there happily and experienced all the joy these humans had to give. And this caused him to begin to glow. Around his head, he really shone. The chieftain asked who he was, and the yellow one told about his people and the purpose of his visit. The chieftain asked if his tribe had disappointed him, and the yellow one replied, “We only shine when we’re surrounded by joy and love.” The yellow one thanked the Indians and rejoined his own people, but before he disappeared, a luminous rainbow, brighter than ever before, shone over the Indians.
The blue one went looking for the bad people in São Paulo. He intended to make the hearts of the wicked shine with love again. He found a gang and watched them. The more bad deeds the gang perpetrated, the more he despaired. He realized that to get close to them, they would require him to do something abominable. One day, the leader told the blue one that if he killed a little boy who had stolen something, he could join their gang. The blue one felt something bad growing inside him with every day he remained on earth. One day, he went up to the little boy and killed him. Then he sat down and cried. He cried all night long. It was as if something inside him had died, as if a light had been extinguished. Finally, the day came when he was supposed to return home. When he got home, he saw that everyone was staring at him with contempt. They were so disgusted at him for what he’d done that as punishment, they trapped him in a cloud and stationed ten guards to keep him there. He started to hate, and with every day that passed, his hatred grew even stronger until there was nothing left in his heart but hate. He spread darkness to the guards’ hearts and managed to convince them to let him out. The cloud was now so filled with hate that fire came out of it. Finally, the Colored Ones recognized the danger and were forced to learn to protect themselves. Even today, an unending battle is going on between the Colored Ones and the evil cloud people.
“That’s why we see both light and dark clouds in the sky,” Camile said. And with that, yet another wonderful story came to an end.
“Camile?” I asked.
“Hmm,” she replied, as if ready for me to start peppering her with a hundred questions.
“It must be weird not to have a name, to just be called the yellow one or the blue one. How would anyone know who anyone is? How would you know who I am? How would I call to you if I lost you?”
Camile smiled and then answered me with another question: “Why would you lose me?”
“Because maybe we got separated.”
“Christiana, do you think the Indians forgot the yellow one?”
“No!”
“Well then, they haven’t lost him, have they? And that’s why we’ll never lose each other.”
Camile was a miniature copy of my mother, and sometimes it annoyed me that she was smarter than I was. She wasn’t that much older. She was like a wise little old lady, an old soul. She would give me a ton of riddles that often took me way too long to figure out, and I would just feel dumb.
“Are you and I the yellow one and the blue one?” I asked her.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you usually tell stories that are about two people, and it feels like you’re talking about us.”
“No, this wasn’t about us. If it had been about us, we’d have both been yellow.” She smiled and took my hand. And that night we slept as we often did, on top of flattened cardboard boxes, our arms around each other.
When I think about Camile now, I realize that it’s not a coincidence that I like fantasy books. I read them to feel Camile’s presence and to sink into a world of magic where anything is possible, but also because the stories make you think about life and people. Patrick Rothfuss’s fantasy book The Name of the Wind is on my hotel-room nightstand. When I think back to what happened to Camile and to the bottomless pit I fell into even as a child, his words comfort me. He says that we have an unparalleled ability to face pain and that we can do it by going through four different stages. The first is the sleep that gives us protection and distance. The second is forgetting, because some wounds are too deep to heal. The third is madness: when reality is only pain, you must escape it. The fourth is death. Nothing can harm us after death.
I know exactly what it means to go through the first three stages that Patrick Rothfuss describes. I have no experience with the last stage, but there have been times when the pain was so great that death didn’t feel so far off.
When I look out at this concrete city now, where for a part of my life I experienced pain and grief, joy and friendship, it comforts me to think that if I talk about our time together, Camile doesn’t just live on in me. Instead, she lives forever. While so many children disappear, die, and are forgotten, her name will live on, and a part of her story will live on through me and my tale. I know that she would have wanted the truth to come out. And the truth was that the military police, the ones who were supposed to protect the people, cleansed the neighborhoods of street children. Hearing about it today, you might think it sounds like a wicked fairy tale. Unfortunately, it was real. And unfortunately, it’s still happening.
For a long time, I was ashamed that I hadn’t been brave enough to step out around that corner, where I had hidden. I regretted not going to Camile and holding her hand and accompanying her on what would have been our last journey. Sadly, our biggest regrets are also the ones that follow us the rest of our lives. I know it’s irrational. There was no point to Camile’s death, and there wouldn’t have been to mine, either. But you just don’t abandon your friend and sister. And yet that was exactly what I did. The absurd thing is that for so many years, I’ve felt bad and blamed myself for someone else’s evil deed. It makes me mad, but above all unbelievably miserable, that at the age of six or seven, I was put in a situation where I was forced to choose between dying with my friend or living with the consequences of not doing so.
We can put all sorts of different labels on what we do and who we are, but they’re just words, and words aren’t actions. Our actions are what define us. There’s a saying that if you love someone, you should set them free, and if you’re lucky, they’ll find their way back to you. I contend that the same approach works for hate; when you let go of hate, you set yourself free. Hate consumes you. For so many years, I hated those men for what they did to my best friend and to me. They took Camile’s life, and they took a piece of mine. They’re not worth any more of me, of my life.
Children Give Words Wings
Camile meant and continues to mean so much to me, even today. We shared adventures and painful experiences during our childhood. I will remember her and o
ur time together with joy, laughter, and warmth. She was a clever little girl who had a gift for storytelling, and she gave so much warmth and happiness to those who knew her. So instead of only remembering the dark and terrible, I also carry this memory of Camile with me:
One day, Camile looked at me, picked up a pebble, and threw it at me.
“What are you sitting around moping about now?” she asked provocatively.
“I’m wondering why it’s so hard to understand the words grown-ups say. Why do they always seem to understand one another, but sometimes it’s hard for me to understand them? Am I dumb?”
“You’re a little dumb,” she teased me with a grin. “But I think what you mean is that it’s not their words, but what they’re trying to say that is hard to understand.”
“That’s what I just said!”
“No, Christiana, you said their words were hard. Those are two different things.”
“That is, too, what I said!”
“Now you’re being dumb!”
“No, you’re being dumb!” I snapped back, and stuck my tongue out at her. She rolled her eyes. I picked up the same pebble she’d thrown at me and threw it back at her. Camile started laughing. We were both sitting cross-legged on the ground. We weren’t sitting far from each other and were playing in the red dirt, building little houses and trying to shape small mud animals. Camile kept laughing, and I told her that wasn’t cool. I could tell she was trying hard to stop laughing, but that just made her laugh even harder. I tried to look mad, but it got more and more difficult not to be caught up in her contagious laugh. In the end, we were both writhing with laughter.
When Camile finally stopped laughing, she said, “God gave us words.”
She gesticulated with both hands, making a big circle to show how monumental this was.
“Grown-ups try to understand them”—she pointed to her head with her right pointer finger—“but we children are the ones who give them wings.”
She flapped her arms as if she were a chicken.
“And we make the words fly.”
She stood up and held out her hand to me.
I took it and got up. She started running, her arms stretched out like the wings of an airplane. She tilted her body to the right and then to the left, and I followed her and did the same thing. We were both laughing, and she looked back at me and smiled a huge grin. And then she ran right into a signpost and fell on her butt.
I stopped. I was a little shocked at first, but when I saw that she was OK, I started laughing at her. She gave me a grumpy look, and I managed to get out a few words between laughing fits. “Apparently, God thinks you should be down on the ground; otherwise he probably wouldn’t have knocked you down so hard.”
Camile stuck her tongue out at me, and I kept on laughing. Then she laughed.
That’s the kind of person she was.
The Favela
SÃO PAULO, 1989–1991
Mamãe had taught me how to make a slingshot when we lived in the caves, what to consider when you picked the wood and rubber to achieve a stable, accurate, good slingshot. Santos already had a slingshot, and I taught Camile how to make one and tried to teach her how to aim to hit her prey, which in the favela was usually other kids, animals, or just something on the street.
I don’t know whether it was a failure in my teaching or whether Camile just had no aptitude when it came to the slingshot, but she was a shockingly bad shot. One time when she was aiming at a bottle, she managed to shoot the stone 180 degrees in the other direction, hitting herself in the eye. To this day, I still haven’t figured out how she did that.
Santos and I always had our slingshots stuffed into the back pockets of our shorts. We used to take them out and play with them when Camile wasn’t around. That way, no children would be at risk of going blind.
Camile and Santos asked me one day if I knew how to make a kite. I had watched my mother do it, but had never learned how. We gathered the parts to make the kite: Santos got some bamboo, Camile got string, and I ran off to look for plastic garbage bags. Once we’d found everything, we sat down and got to work. Santos’s job was to make two thin sticks out of the bamboo stalk he was holding. They couldn’t be too heavy because then the kite wouldn’t take off and fly. And they couldn’t be too thin because they might snap in two. Camile was untangling the loose string she’d found. She looped the end and carefully wound it around the middle of a plastic bottle so it wouldn’t get tangled. I ripped little rectangular pieces off the plastic bags. When we were done with the preparations, we started to assemble our kite. Santos, who had made two nice bamboo sticks, started attaching one of the bags I’d found. Camile and I tied the rectangular bits of plastic to three long strings, which would form the kite’s tails. Then we tied the tails to the kite and secured the string, which Camile had so neatly wound around the plastic bottle, to the middle of the kite where the sticks crossed. Santos took hold of the kite and held it up proudly to the sky while Camile and I did a happy dance. It was time to fly our kite. Santos was up first. With the kite in one hand and the empty bottle with the string in the other, he started running. Camile and I ran barefoot alongside him while we watched the kite catch the wind and rise into the sky. I remember thinking that I wanted to be a kite so I could fly, too.
The Ill-Fated Fight
The boy died. It was my fault. I know I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I still have to live with what I did for the rest of my life.
Many nights I have woken up in a cold sweat, seeing his shocked, stunned eyes staring into my own. It’s an unbelievably awful feeling, one that eats away at me, carrying the knowledge that I’ve extinguished another person’s life, a person who lived under the same conditions I did. I see that same look every time I wake up from my nightmares and have the same feeling: if I never achieve happiness in this life, it’s because I don’t deserve to.
People say that the strongest survive, but I wonder if it isn’t the most desperate. I’ve never been as hungry and in such a weakened state as I was then. I think desperation was the biggest reason things turned out so badly. I had lost both Santos and Camile, my best friends, and my mother and I had had to endure so much. I couldn’t take another injustice, even if it came from someone who had also been treated unfairly. Nothing anyone can say to me can make me feel any sorrier or worse than I’ve felt all these years. To get up every morning and look at myself in the mirror and try to ignore everything I see there isn’t easy. It’s there, it’s a part of me, and there’s no way to run from it. In a way, I don’t want to, either; that would be too easy. I could never have imagined that the human body was so weak, so frail, that someone who breathes, talks, smiles, runs, and exists right here in the present, can so easily be taken away, that something we take for granted can vanish so easily. This may be hard for a grown-up to grasp, but to a child, it was completely inconceivable. I was seven years old, and obviously I knew that if I got a cut, it would bleed. If I fell on the asphalt, I would get a scrape and it would hurt. I knew that people died; I’d seen it. But the only thing I knew on this day that meant anything was that I was hungry.
I was used to being hungry and begging for food. I was used to sniffing glue to deaden the hunger, but when the hunger reached a certain level, it could no longer be deadened. I don’t know how long I’d been without food, but I think I hadn’t eaten in several days. I remember that it was a sunny day, one of those days when it was really hot in Brazil, one of those days that made it painful to be out in the sun. I was looking for food, just as I’d done on so many other days. I missed Camile, just as I’d missed her every single day since I’d lost her. I can’t remember where my mother was, but I think she was looking for work. I found myself in an alley behind some restaurants where there were a bunch of trash cans. There was no one in the alley except me, so I started rummaging through the trash, looking for something to eat, anything at all. It didn’t take long before I found a half-eaten piece of flat bread, kind of like a pita bread, w
ith refried beans inside it. I remember being happy, because there was quite a bit of it left. I remember how my mouth watered, and I could imagine what it would feel like to be full after I’d eaten my find.
Startled, I heard a boy’s voice say that it was his, that I needed to give it to him—give him my food! I told him it was my food, because I’d found it. He could go look in one of the other trash cans. I could tell that he wasn’t planning to let me walk away with what I’d found, that there was going to be trouble. I was planning to fight even though he was bigger and older than I was. He walked up to me and tried to take the food out of my hand. I defended myself by kicking and hitting. He took the food anyway, so I bit his hand as hard as I could. He dropped the food, screamed, and punched me hard in the face. We fought, really fought, but it didn’t turn out to be a long fight. Even though I used every dirty trick I knew, he was stronger. He pushed me so hard, I fell over one of the trash cans and pulled it over with me as I fell. I scraped my hands, catching myself from the fall, and pebbles and gravel ripped into my palms. I heard a clinking sound next to me. It was a piece of a glass bottle, a big shard. I got up into a sitting position with my hands behind me, one leg still over the trash can. Tons of trash had fallen out, but all I saw was that piece of glass. I picked it up in my right hand. I was mad, sad, and hungry, but most of all I felt like I was being treated so incredibly unfairly. That was my food! I was going to take my food back. I got up and started running at him. He had picked the bread up off the ground and started walking away. I screamed that that was my food and ran at him with all my might. He turned around, and without thinking, still moving, I jabbed that piece of glass at his belly as hard as I could.
Never Stop Walking_A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World Page 9