Never Stop Walking_A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

by Christina Rickardsson

  I started to realize I was going to have to give in. I was going to be forced to play a role. I stopped contradicting the other children, and sometimes I agreed with them to avoid trouble. The orphanage was too dangerous for me, both physically and mentally, if I didn’t conform. I couldn’t risk losing my spot in the pecking order. I cried at night and prayed to God for forgiveness, and during the day I played along. I just couldn’t fight it anymore. I couldn’t take being beaten up all the time, and I couldn’t take watching my friends being beaten up and leaving me one by one. I started playing a convincing part, a part that was based on agreeing with all the kids that my mother was crazy. I started feeling embarrassed in front of the other kids that my mother was standing outside the gate yelling. Only Patricia knew how I really felt and how sad I was. There’s a limit to how many beatings and how much pain and sorrow one person can handle. Maybe it was weak of me to give in, but I realized that I couldn’t stand up for my mother anymore.

  What was even worse was that just not defending her anymore wasn’t enough. I went farther and pretended I agreed with them that there was something wrong with her. I knew better, but I couldn’t take any more. I realized this was a battle I was never going to win, so I decided to always hold on to the truth in my heart while false words about how bad my mother was came out of my mouth. From the beginning, every unkind word I said pained me. I said them only when I was backed into a corner. After a while, I learned to build a strong wall around my heart, one that prevented those wicked words from penetrating. I started satisfying the orphanage staff’s need to know how much I didn’t want to be with my bad mother and how they were doing the right thing. On some level, I began to understand that people, especially grown-ups, weren’t interested in the truth but rather in a truth that suited them. They only wanted to know about things that made stuff easier for them. It didn’t matter that I was walling off parts of myself, that I was turning into someone else, a worse person. It wasn’t important to them whether I was happy, or whether I cried myself to sleep each night. No one saw it. For the first time in my life, I started to question why I existed, why I should even care about existing. After all, no one seemed to be interested in what I thought and felt, so why should I?

  Apart from my friends at the orphanage, the people who cared about me were either dead or had been cast out of my life. I thought again and again about why this was happening to me. What had I done to deserve all this? I prayed to God for forgiveness every night. I prayed to God to protect my mother and my little brother. After a while, I stopped praying to God for forgiveness and instead just prayed for my mother and my little brother to be all right, for them to be happy. I started to realize that happiness wasn’t something for me. It was a strange sensation to have at the age of eight, the feeling that I wasn’t worth anything. I couldn’t show who I was, and wasn’t supposed to feel what I felt. And now I didn’t have my mother’s love.

  Up to this point, I had always been able to be myself. It didn’t matter if I was with my mother, with friends, or with people I didn’t know. I had always been able to be myself. This new realization that my feelings, thoughts, and desires should be suppressed was very uncomfortable. As if it were yesterday, I remember the sensation of a warm, humid, sticky fog closing in around my body, as if I were being wrapped in plastic wrap. Even though the fog was uncomfortable, it had its advantages. One thing that’s quite certain is that while I was at the orphanage, although I had already begun to build a façade, I tenderly and adamantly held on to the core of myself inside the fog. Christiana was lost in the fog, but she wasn’t dead; one day the fog would burn off, and she would find her way home again.

  Two strong survival strategies, which for a long time came to be the most important in my life, were established at the orphanage. They both began on the streets, but it was at the orphanage that they evolved. Strategy number one was my façade—my ability to adapt and lie. The second was the ability not to lose the joy and beauty that was in me—not to become a ghost. Of course, these strategies have had their pros and cons. They were what so obviously cleft my soul and my self in two. Christiana was hidden in the fog, and a new person emerged, the girl who eventually came to be called Christina.

  Later, my Swedish parents and I learned from a Brazilian teacher that many children adopted after a certain age couldn’t handle the adjustment. They became, in his words, either crazy or unresponsive. I think the only way for me not to go insane from everything that happened was to form a kind of new me and at the same time preserve the old me inside myself. I couldn’t be both at the same time. When I was adopted, when I came to Sweden, there was no one who could show me the way or help me process everything that had happened to me on the streets and in the orphanage. I wasn’t ready to share that with my new parents or friends. Life had given us experiences that were far too different for me to dare to reveal my soul to them.

  One day, the matron summoned me to her office. I was afraid that I’d done something wrong, something that had made her angry. On my way there, I tried to come up with a list of things I’d done wrong, but I couldn’t think of a single one. When I stepped into the room, I was polite but on my guard. The matron smiled and asked me to come in and sit down in the brown chair in front of her desk. I relaxed a little. If I’d done something wrong or she was angry with me, she wouldn’t have been so nice.

  She started chatting about life at the orphanage, about how it was hard for children who grew up in an orphanage to be successful in life. She chatted about life on the streets and how hard that was. She was fishing for me to confirm that I understood what she was saying, so I nodded and murmured my agreement to all of it. That seemed to please her. I thought it was strange that we were having this weird little chat. She usually only summoned me to her office when I’d done something stupid or been extra nice and helpful. But here she was, chatting away. She was talking to me as if I were a grown-up, as if I were someone else and not one of the kids from the orphanage at all. She took out a white photo album. I’d never seen a photo album before, but I knew what photos were, and this album looked surprisingly thick. Before she let me look at the album, the matron asked me if I would want to leave the orphanage someday. I said yes, without even thinking about it or hesitating, and slightly too enthusiastically. I didn’t want to leave the orphanage because it was a bad place. It was a thousand times better than life on the streets. And even though there were sometimes arguments or trouble between us kids, I have an astounding number of funny, happy memories of my time there. But for me, leaving the orphanage would mean that I would get to be with Mamãe. I missed her so much. The matron smiled and looked pleased. She told me to open the photo album. She came around from behind her desk and pulled up a chair so she could sit beside me while we looked at the pictures. On the front of the album, it said Fotoalbum along with several weird, long words. The matron told me it was written in a language called Swedish, that Sweden was a country far, far away. People spoke a different language there, and a lot of other things were different. I asked her if Sweden was like a place in a fairy tale. She gave me an odd look; then she smiled warmly at me and said that Sweden was like a place in a fairy tale. I liked fairy tales.

  “Is Sweden a good fairy-tale place?” I asked the matron.

  “I would say that it is,” she replied.

  “Are there magical creatures there?”

  “There are many different animals there that we don’t have here in Brazil,” she replied.

  “Are the animals there nice?”

  “Just as nice as they are here in Brazil.”

  “But all the animals here aren’t nice!”

  “And they’re not in Sweden, either,” she replied, amused.

  I liked the matron when she was nice and jovial like this.

  “Do you want to go to Sweden?” she asked me.

  I contemplated that for a moment. I’d always wanted to travel to one of Camile’s fairy-tale lands and get to experience all the new and e
xciting things. Maybe I could be a princess in Sweden, and wear a long, white frilly gown, a crown on my head, and beautiful white shoes with heels. Maybe I could eat large amounts of candy. Surely Mamãe and Patrique would like this fairy-tale land of Sweden. Sweden might be the best fairy-tale land, and I was going to get to go there.

  “Yes, I want to go to Sweden! But how do I get there?” I asked.

  “On an airplane,” the matron replied.

  An airplane?! I thought. Wow, how luxurious! Only rich people got to travel in those big metallic birds that flew back and forth in the sky.

  “Are the other children in the orphanage going to Sweden, too?” I asked.

  “No, Christiana, only you. And there’s one more thing I want to ask you: Do you want your little brother to go with you?”

  What a stupid question. Of course I wanted Patrique to go, too! I would never leave him, not for anything.

  “I’m not going anywhere without Patrique!” I said firmly.

  The matron smiled and replied that she had suspected I would say as much. She asked me to open the photo album and look at the pictures. Before I opened it, I saw that at the bottom in the middle there was a bunny rabbit. It was a little comical. I wondered if someone had drawn it there just for me, because my last name was Coelho, which means rabbit in Portuguese. The rabbit looked happy. I wondered if they had rabbits in Sweden. I opened the album, and there were so many pictures inside. I saw a white lady and a white man standing in different places in the house and the yard, and everything looked very strange. I saw a bunch of little slips of white paper with black writing in Portuguese. I started reading what they said:

  Sture na cozinha (Sture in the kitchen)

  Sture no nosso quarto (Sture in our bedroom)

  Lili-ann ocupada no nosso escritório (Lili-ann busy in our office)

  Lili-ann jogando badminton no jardim com Sture (Lili-ann playing badminton in the yard with Sture)

  And it continued like that throughout the entire photo album. I thought it was a little odd that they were just standing there and smiling in all these different nice rooms in the pictures. But maybe that was the kind of thing rich white people did? The matron started pointing to the pictures and explaining.

  “Christiana, this is going to be your new home.” She pointed to a picture of a red house with white trim around the windows. It looked like a nice house; there was a lot of grass around the house, and the grass was cut short. Only rich people had nice grass. In another picture, I saw a white room with white furniture, pink curtains, and a pink bedspread on the bed. I flipped to the next page in the album. I was astonished by what I saw: a big white bed with stuffed animals and a doll on it. The white lady, Lili-ann, was sitting on the bed, looking happy. There was a canopy over the bed. I had always wanted a canopy bed. Was I going to get my own canopy bed? That sounded too good to be true.

  “Is this my bed?” I asked the matron, pointing at the picture in front of me.

  “Yes, Christiana, it is. Do you like it?” she asked, smiling.

  “I love it! Is it mine for sure?” I asked, feeling very skeptical. I’d learned on the streets that nothing is free.

  “It’s yours, along with everything else you see in the pictures,” she said.

  Something was wrong.

  “Why would Patrique and I get to travel to the fairy-tale land of Sweden?” I asked.

  “Because I want things to improve for you. I want you to have all the nice things you see in these pictures. Don’t you like it?” she asked, and I felt like I must sound ungrateful.

  “I really like it a lot!” I told her with a smile.

  The truth was that I really, really, really liked it. I would get to fly in an airplane, travel to the fairy-tale country called Sweden, and I would have the most beautiful bed, eat candy, and get toys. There were a lot of rooms in my future house, and there were happy bunny rabbits there. What child wouldn’t like that? The matron stood up. She said that I could take the album with me and show my friends, that it was mine now and that I should take good care of it.

  “Are you sure my friends can’t come to Sweden with me, just for a little while? Patricia could come, couldn’t she?” I asked.

  “If you could all go, Christiana, I would definitely send you all! Be happy now for this opportunity. Make the most of it. You can be whatever you want in Sweden. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, whatever you want. You’ll have an opportunity that many children would love to get. You and your brother will be happy there, and you’ll have two people who will take care of you and who will care about you very much. Aren’t you glad?” she asked, and her eyes and body language warned me not to say anything other than yes.

  “Yeah!” I said with a smile.

  It didn’t take long for the children at the orphanage to find out that my brother and I were going to be adopted, that we had gotten a family. This, getting a family, was always a big topic of conversation among the children. Many of them were orphans, and the dream of receiving love and warmth from a grown-up was strong. We all wanted our own rooms with toys and candy, to get to go to school and come back to a proper home. The other children were jealous that we’d been picked, and I liked that, liked the feeling that I was going to get something that everyone coveted.

  Like all the other children in the orphanage, I had dreamed of living in a house. But I never had any doubt about where my home was. My home was wherever Mamãe was, near her and her warmth. I had also learned early on that you could dream and fantasize, but that reality was something completely different. Life was what it was, and it was no use spending much time thinking about it when you were eight years old and taking things one day at a time. Some days were fun and happy; others were painful or boring. But I started noticing how the other children whispered about me and peeked over at me with more and more loathing. I knew they were jealous. I knew it was just a matter of time before some of the kids took action.

  It was always like this at the orphanage. We had so much fun together, all of us kids, but there was always a flip side. I tried to show that I wasn’t afraid of them, which mostly I wasn’t. I was afraid of them feeling sorry for me and pitying me, because I didn’t want anyone to see me as weak. After I’d found out that my brother and I were going to be adopted, I was walking down the upstairs hallway in the orphanage, near the showers. That was when it happened.

  Four or five kids from Gabriela’s clique pulled me into the showers and started hitting and kicking me. I fought as hard as I could, hurled myself on one of the girls, and got her down onto the floor. Before I was able to punch her, the other kids were on top of me. I didn’t stand a chance, and I knew that the more I fought, the harder they would wail on me. I’d learned on the streets that sometimes you had to take the pain, swallow your pride, and accept: It’s going to hurt, but they’re not going to kill me. And if they did kill me, boy, would they get an incredible beating. I got into a fetal position, curled up as much as I could, and let the kids kick and hit me. I tried to protect my head. I don’t know how long it went on for. I just know that somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought I deserved it. It was the least I could endure for having let down my mother. I deserved pain. The pain would pass; what I’d done, though, that would never pass.

  I don’t know if I came around when the beating ended, or if I lay there on the cold floor for a long time. I only know that my body hurt, but not as much as my heart. I had been given preferential treatment, and for that I had to be punished. That’s how life worked at the orphanage. I don’t remember how I got up or where I went. I only know that I found Patricia, who knew right away what had happened. She asked how I was, and I said, “OK.” I didn’t need to say any more than that. If anyone could understand, she could. Whenever I was sad, Patricia was always there, and whenever she took a beating, I was always there for her. It didn’t matter if I was physically there when it happened. I would always go search out the guilty party and give them payback. I wish that I could say that I alwa
ys won and that the children stopped attacking her, but the truth was that I lost more fights than I won. And they came after me more than if I hadn’t avenged her. But it was a matter of principle.

  When it was time for dinner, Patricia stood up and held out her hand. I took it and tried to get up. I was in pain. Patricia said she was going to go get help; I quickly got up and said that wasn’t necessary. She went for help anyway. She knew what would happen if she told, but she still went. I let her go. I know I would have done the same for her. The only difference was that I could stand up for myself so much better than she could. And now I was going to be leaving the orphanage, and Patricia was going to get beaten up because of me. It was her final gift to me. I know that she knew that I was going to pull through, but by going to get help, she gave me her friendship forever. That was her way of showing it, and I understood, so I let her go. I was eight years old and understood that pain can be beautiful, that it can be brave. I was already injured and Patricia knew that, but it wasn’t the external wounds she wanted to take care of; it was my internal ones. Treating them required friendship, thoughtfulness, and love.

  After Patricia, there was no one who looked after these wounds, no one I let get close enough, not for a very long time. Everyone who meant anything to me, everyone I loved, disappeared from my life.

  The decision I’d made, at the age of eight, was not to let people into my life, not to love them from my heart. The pain when they went away or were taken from me was too immense.