by Amy Ragsdale
How many psychotherapists have you heard saying that you need to learn how to just be, that you’re not defined by doing. But where does one find the time as an American adult, or now even as a kid, to stop doing, to see what it’s like to just “be,” when you feel you have to keep your pace on the track or risk losing your spot? When you feel you need to excel in your job, nurture your partner, and provide opportunities for your kids so they can fill their lives with extracurricular activities (chosen for their resume points), get into a top-notch college, stack up those summer internships, and land that dream job, that surefire path to success?
So here I was again, kneeling at the altar of the world, not only hoping to hand down some of the gains from my traveling childhood to my own kids, but also searching for a way out of the hole I’d dug for myself, that limitless hole full of endless striving. Here I was, looking for a way to regain balance and joy. It was time to get myself, and our kids, off the track and into life. I was gambling that living abroad would serve our kids as it had served me, and I was hoping it would give me back some of the perspective I’d lost in my scramble to keep up with daily American life. This is why Peter and I were taking off for Brazil.
The plane rounded the corner of the tarmac, pointed itself down the runway, and began to pick up speed. I put my hand on Peter’s knee.
“This is my favorite part,” I said, as I always do at that moment on a plane, exhilarated by the prospect of adventure.
There’s no direct way to get from Montana to northeastern Brazil. We were on day two, flight four of our scouting trip, returning north after a long detour south to São Paulo. The plane was following the coastline. To our right, jade-green water deepened into slate gray. On our left, one white-frilled beach followed another, fringed by a line of shaggy palms that morphed into rolling green hills.
Ever since we’d thought of living in Brazil, we’d asked anyone who’d been there, or was from there, where they would want to go.
“The northeast,” they’d all said.
“It’s where all the great music and dance is.”
“It’s the African part of Brazil.”
Later, on a good day, Peter would describe it as “like the American Deep South. Laid back, slower paced.” On a bad day, he’d call it a “backwater.”
The ocean suddenly split to the left in a great inland scoop, the Baía de Todos os Santos, All Saints Bay. White buildings were visible ahead on the point. We were coming down into Salvador, a city of two and a half million. Miles of modern high-rises, patchy scabs of tin-roofed shacks, and then sand dunes slid away below us. The tires bumped and skidded onto the runway.
Unlike airports in Africa or Asia, where we’d been funneled into a whirlpool of sweating bodies with something to sell—“Transport?” “A place to stay?”—the airport in Salvador was a breeze. In less than an hour, we’d collected our bags, upgraded our rented Fiat to one with air conditioning, and begun picking our way through knots of highway interchanges onto ever-narrowing streets, from arteries to veins to capillaries, into town.
“Let’s try for Barra,” I said, perusing our guidebook as we slowed for jaywalking crowds. “The Lonely Planet says it’s Salvador’s new happening neighborhood, good nightlife”—something we hadn’t had much of lately—“and close to the Pelourinho. I guess that’s the old historic part of town.”
Old colonial houses peeked out between jumbled high-rises. Billboards advertised “Shopping Barra,” a mall.
“Do you think we can park here?” Peter was leaning on the steering wheel in a tiny cramped street, peering up at a sign with the letter e in a crossed-out circle. “What do you think that means?”
We walked along the waterfront under almond trees, their donkey-eared leaves dipping in a quiet breeze, enviously scanning the prone bodies packing city beaches. We checked into the third hotel we found. The first two had been expensive, American prices. The third was cheap, for a reason. Our room was a dim cubicle that looked as though it were rented out by the hour, but it had a window overlooking the bay. I scanned the kaleidoscopic whirl of beach umbrellas, searching for the source of the syncopated drumming.
“Peter! There’re some guys doing capoeira!”
I squinted through the window, watching a pair of brown, muscled men, bare-chested in white pants, crouch and spin, fanning their legs high to the sound of the drums and the twang of a single steel string strapped to a stick. My body started to rock and shift, in time with their sweeping legs and diving heads.
As a modern dance professor, I’d wanted to study this Brazilian martial art/dance form for years, knowing its upside-down, acrobatic movements had had a huge influence on break dance and hence the current look of modern dance. Capoeira had begun to appear in bigger American cities in the 1970s, but the closest teacher I could find in Montana was five hundred miles away. This was one reason we were looking for a town in the northeastern part of Brazil. That was where the most famous quilombo had been established, a community of escaped slaves, and where capoeira, used by slaves to resist their Portuguese masters, was refined, then banned, then eventually legalized and codified. We wanted to go to the source. I was afraid, however, that at age fifty-two, I might be ten years too late to handle its handstands and head spins.
We spent the next couple of days floating on the warm waves of the South Atlantic, eating seafood and coconut milk stews in outdoor restaurants and downing caipirinhas, the local version of a gin and tonic, made with sugarcane alcohol and lime juice. We poked around the hilly cobblestone streets of the Pelourinho, the historic neighborhood that had been home to Jorge Amado. His books had wowed the world with the colorful, if violent, story of the settling of Bahia, this land of sugarcane and coffee plantations. Peter and I thought we’d love to live in this city of millions with its art galleries, nightclubs, and swank high-rises with names like “Da Vinci” and “Warhol.” We’d enjoy a chance to be part of its glittering international community. But the kids? We remembered our assignment to find a small town. They wanted to be immersed in Portuguese language and Brazilian life. Maybe they knew what they were talking about. After all, they were no strangers to travel.
Getting out of Salvador is a project, no matter how you work it, whether inland by looping four-lane highways, or through the beach crowds along the water, the way Peter and I did. After only four days in Brazil, we missed our kids but were also enjoying our freedom. We dodged our little Fiat—zippier than our used Subaru back home—through barefoot crowds of bronzed bodies. Then we passed a wrecked taxi: up on the curb, bifurcated by a fallen steel telephone pole. The car looked like a crushed soda pop can.
I flashed back to careening through the streets of Cairo when I was twelve, my fingers clutching the squishy backseat of a cab as my father tersely told the driver the one phrase he had learned in Arabic: “I’m not in a hurry.”
Soberer now, we made our way more slowly out of town onto the Linha Verde—the Green Line—the two-lane coastal highway that veers to the northeast and heads out toward the tip of Brazil’s bulge. As landlocked Montanans, we had decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that it would be nice to find a town on the ocean.
The road wasn’t crowded. There were none of the top-heavy trucks, axles askew, moving diagonally down the highway that we’d seen in other developing countries. Rather, the occasional shiny SUV; maybe an air-conditioned, double-decker luxury bus; a pickup or two. The road, although narrow, looked newly paved. The foliage shifted from palms to bamboo to drier pine. We spent the night in tiny Praia do Forte, home to a sea turtle conservation center and weekend condos overlooking a small harbor. Could this be our town? No. Charming, but too small and too touristy.
We crossed the border into the state of Sergipe, cattle country. The walls of thick foliage thinned and gave way to dry rolling hills, humpbacked white Brahma cows, and stunted inland palms. We swung back out to the coast and pulled into Sergipe’s sprawling capital, Aracaju. Though the downtown’s five- to six-story buildings were
more modern, they looked worn out, tired.
“Arajacu? Aracaja? Why is this name so hard to remember?” we said laughing, wondering if we would ever get a grip on Portuguese.
After driving miles out of town along a sand-swept beach highway, in search of a nonexistent hotel listed in our guidebook, we backtracked, checked into another, and crossed the busy ocean drive, lit by nighttime stadium lights. Trekking across a deserted beach, narrowing our eyes against gritty, blowing sand, we tumbled down a steep bank and fell into the ocean for a swim in the dark. The verdict: too big, too windy, too soulless. We crossed Aracaju off the list. At breakfast the next day, we pulled out the map.
“Hey, Peter, this looks good. Penedo, in the state of Alagoas. It’s a small town. It’s not on the ocean, but it’s on a big river, and it’s only . . . maybe . . . thirty kilometers up from the coast.”
We looked it up in the guide.
“‘Colonial masterpiece of the state,’” I read, “and you get to it by car ferry. I love that!” When I was growing up, one could only get to my family’s cabin on the island in Puget Sound by car ferry.
Leaving Aracaju, we headed inland and poked along the main two-lane highway. It was clogged with earth-moving equipment. The operators seemed to have torn up the road and then left for a permanent coffee break. Finally, we pulled off onto the route that cut down to the Rio São Francisco. The view suddenly improved, as though we’d flipped to a prettier calendar page. The fields were greener. Ample, spreading trees stood alone, blooming white. A hill town rose to the left, its entrance drive lined with geometrically clipped bushes. Fluttering stands of eucalyptus flanked another rise. The road dropped. There was the river.
“Whoa, it’s wide,” said Peter, a canoeist, eyeing the whitecaps on cobalt blue.
We pulled into the slanted cobblestone ferry slip. Ramshackle buildings squatted on either side. There were no lines, no designated places to park. A couple of men ambled out of the building on the right, a brightly painted yellow bar with the image of a giant beer bottle on its wall. It was labeled Nova Schin. We looked out at the river. The ferry was still out in the middle, a matchbox in the distance. Peter walked up to the window to order. “Um novo shin?” Months later, we would learn it was pronounced “nova skeen,” but the man gave Peter a thumbs-up and cheerfully retrieved a cold, wet bottle of beer.
The little ferry scraped its metal gangplank up over the cobblestones. A truck, a few cars, and several motorcycles inched their way off the boat. No one seemed in a hurry. I watched, mesmerized. What would that be like—to not be in a hurry?
Once on board, we left our car to go stand at the bow. Penedo glimmered white across the water, church towers poking up like little exclamation points. A big blocky building had been dropped in the middle of what was otherwise a perfectly preserved nineteenth-century town. We passed a brushy island on the left and looked upriver, then down, to open hills spreading away on either side. We were crossing over from the state of Sergipe into Alagoas. Splashes of red flame trees and swishing palms came into focus as we drew closer to the far shore.
“This could be it.” Peter said, glancing at me. We felt a rev of excitement. “If we live here,” he said, pulling himself up a little taller, “I’ll need to bring a rumpled white linen suit.”
As the ferry docked, we squeezed back into our little Fiat, and Peter carefully backed it down onto the cobbles of the landing, which expanded into a riverside plaza. Despite the lack of signage, we found the Pousada Colonial, a B and B in an eighteenth-century house on the far side of the square recommended by our guidebook. Katia, the pousada’s small and bustling manager, led us up a dark wood staircase and opened a door into an airy, third-floor room. We swung open the heavy wooden shutters.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” I sighed, propping my elbows on the two-foot-thick windowsill. I looked down onto the spreading scarlet of a flame tree and across the plaza to a broken balustrade rimming a now-languid Rio São Francisco. It had been a long time since I’d had the time to just look out a window—fifteen years to be exact, since I’d moved from twelve-hour days for my teaching career to that plus two children. We stowed our bags and clumped back down the wide stairs to interrogate Katia at her old rolltop desk by the front door.
“O mar é longe daqui?”—How far is the ocean? Is there a hospital? A school?
She assured us there were two schools: private, Catholic, one run by nuns, one by priests.
“I’m not sending Skyler to a school run by priests,” Peter said. Thinking of my cute, blond, eager-to-please little boy, who would be unable to understand the local language, I had to admit, after all the scandals, I kind of agreed.
Both schools were K-12, which was a relief; Molly and Skyler could be in the same building. While I didn’t expect supremely social Molly to have any major problems adjusting, I was more concerned about Skyler. He, too, could be socially adept but was initially more reticent. It would be good for them to pass each other in the hall, especially in the beginning when, without Portuguese, they’d be unable to talk to anyone else.
We ducked through the stone-walled restaurant on the pousada’s ground floor and headed up the hill to check out the school with the nuns. Half refurbished and half falling apart, Penedo’s narrow cobblestone streets were lined with mostly nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century row houses—in oranges, pinks, blues, and greens—which chugged, like strings of sorbet-colored train cars, up fingerlike ridges that stretched away from the river.
Crossing another praça, a plaza, at the top of the hill, we rang a buzzer outside tall metal doors and waited to be admitted to the imposing block of building that was Colegio Imaculada Conceiçao. Once in, we peered into the front office through a bank-teller-like barred window. Elizia, the school’s bookkeeper and general manager, peered back.
“Vocês vem de onde?!” she asked. “You come from where?!”
Tall and black, with 1950s glasses, she wore a form-fitting T-shirt emblazoned with the Virgin Mary—in sequins. We suspected the school might not be what we’d anticipated. Then her stern face unexpectedly exploded into laughter.
“Vêm por aqui!”—Come here!—she commanded, and she led us into the cavernous office of the school’s director, Irma, or Sister, Francisca. Tiny and white, with a broad smile, twinkling eyes, and gray hair poking out from under her habit, Irma Francisca sat behind a broad, immaculately shining desk backed by Christ bleeding on the cross. Peter and I sat down across from her. Peter was beginning to sweat through his shirt, apprehensive about the sure-to-be cryptic conversation ahead. We bore in, trying desperately to understand what she was saying and to make sure she understood us. That she understood that we had two kids who wanted to come to her school; two non-Portuguese-speaking kids who would come sit in class and understand nothing.
I realize one could wonder why we thought this would be a good idea; one might think that from an educational standpoint, the request sounded absurd. But Peter and I hadn’t thought twice about it, nor had our kids. After all, my parents had done this to me, and I had been the same age as Skyler. I had attended Franciscan de Marie, a small French school in Cairo. It catered to the kids of diplomats. In those first few months, as I sat blankly listening to the sounds of this foreign language washing over me, one might think I would have been bored, or distressed. But I don’t remember being either. I suppose it’s like being a toddler, or a dog, trying to figure out what sound or word goes with what, whether the teacher or your fellow students are happy or upset, and whether they’re upset with you. I remember walking up, one by one, to stand next to our teacher, Soeur Marguerite, to recite a memorized poem or paragraph out of our science text. I’d deciphered the content from a dictionary and the pictures—this must be about the measurement of liquids; this about solids and gases. The fact is, you begin to ferret out meaning almost immediately with any tools you have, interpreting body language and actions—everyone is getting up and leaving; it must be recess. Peter and I knew our kids would miss s
ome content areas like seventh-grade social studies. But we weren’t worried. Whatever they might be missing was likely to be covered again in high school. The one high school course Molly had to take that year in order to graduate was U.S. History. She could take it online. Nothing felt irreplaceable. In our family-value system, the advantages of learning to be fluent in another language, of learning that one could start from scratch and successfully navigate another culture, would far outweigh the disadvantages. But no one said it would be fun or easy. I’m not sure Molly and Skyler quite understood that.
Elizia and Irma Francisca were quite the odd couple. But they seemed curious about us, kind, and, by the end of our conference, open to taking us in.
Penedo seemed to fit the bill: not too big, not too small; not on the ocean, but close to the ocean and on a big river; a charming hill town with colonial architecture, a lively market, friendly people, a possible school. In the end, we chose Penedo largely for its aesthetics.
Well, not only aesthetics. We also wanted a place that felt safe enough for our kids to have some freedom, not like Maputo in Mozambique. There our house had had bars over the windows, walls around the compound, twenty-four-hour guards. Our kids were now teenagers. Our lives would be a lot easier if they could move around on their own.
So far, as a family we’d lived in Cadiz in Spain—also a small town, also in language immersion—but only for five months, and the kids were so young that their regular vocabulary was half sign language anyway. We’d tried Maputo in Mozambique, a big city with a big international community. Although we’d been disconcerted by the underlying class tension and high rate of crime, it had been a blast. Within the ex-pat community, we’d just had to “add water and stir” for a social life; Peter was engrossed in a book project, and I was blissfully taking my first break from my overwhelming work life at home. I could feel, however, that this year in Brazil was going to be different. With older kids and total language immersion in a small town, it was going to be the real test of our resilience and adaptability. But I was already falling in love with Penedo and felt confident we could hack it—maybe too confident.