by Amy Ragsdale
“Yeah, but it seems as though it might be an intimate sort of act,” I countered.
“I know. I wonder if it makes it harder to go into trance if you have all those people watching,” Molly mused.
“I thought it was interesting watching the watchers,” Mike said. “You could see some were buying into it more than others.”
The conversation went on. What part of it was African, what part Christian? Had they really been in trance, or hadn’t they? Had it been authentic or faked? I wondered why that mattered so much—why it was so important to at least some of us to feel we’d seen the real thing, not just something trumped up for tourists. I’ve realized that one reason I travel is to feel connected to people unlike myself, so I’m grateful when they let me in, in any way at all. Performances meant for tourists almost feel like a way to keep you out, to be sure you see only the external trappings, while the heart remains hidden.
The next day in the breakfast line, Adams, a white headband pulling back his voluminous afro, showed me the cowry armband hidden under the sleeve of his polo shirt.
“I don’ tell my parents I do this. They are Catholic. People say Candomblé is not good. But then you go to a ceremony, and you see them there, those same people who just criticized it. It’s racism, you know.” Like capoeira, Candomblé was still associated with blacks, even though people of many other races were becoming practitioners.
I was told there were Candomblé ceremonies in our town, in Penedo. I was curious as to whether they were similar to the ones we’d seen, but I felt hesitant to ask to watch one. In Salvador, they’d been embraced as part of the Afro-Brazilian culture that, along with capoeira, was now being marketed to tourists. In Penedo, when I’d mentioned Candomblé, people seemed a little embarrassed. Their embarrassment made me feel like a voyeur.
We were about to head into the Amazon, where Peter was hoping to meet people from the Yanomami tribe. I imagined if we could, it would be with a guide. Would what we saw be “real” then? I supposed this was part of what drew me to live in places rather than just visit, to find out what they were really like. But even then, a year was not enough.
“We’re not like other hostels, you know.” Russell, the owner of the Barra Guest Hostel, was saying in his still-strong English accent. “We can’t be. It’s not enough to offer just a bed-and-breakfast these days. So we offer a bit more: a bit of fun, don’t you know.”
It was New Year’s Eve, and our hostel was putting on a dinner. I’d been last in line for the shower, so by the time I made it downstairs, Molly and Brooke were ensconced with a couple of rangy Australians. I knew Molly had been self-conscious about being younger than all the other young people, so I wondered how old she was tonight.
“Mom, I said I was seventeen. It was just easier. Okay? I just want us all to be on the same page.” At sixteen, she could easily pass for twenty, so I thought seventeen was quite conservative.
“Mom, Brooke and I just split a caipirinha. Is that okay?” She was heady with excitement.
By now, the tunes were cranked, a mixture of international pop and some American oldies, Men at Work, The Police. The Argentinean girls were trying to coax the Argentinean guys into dancing. Peter and I took a couple of turns. It struck me that this was one of the best New Year’s Eves I’d had in a long time. But Skyler was sad. The Kadas-Newells had left earlier in the day, starting the multi-flight journey home. Skyler had wanted to go, too.
At 10:00 PM, the music stopped and everyone prepared to head down to the beach, to the big sound stage. It was rumored Ivete Sangalo, Brazilian pop star and local darling, would be playing. Skyler didn’t want to go, so he and I stayed behind. Peter and the girls left with the roving party, and the hostel dropped into quiet, as though someone had flipped a switch.
I sat on the bunk bed with Skyler. He didn’t want to talk. I lay down and fell asleep, until I felt someone shaking me.
“Mom, Mom, were you sleeping? Can we play a game and then go to the beach?”
Skyler’s anguish at losing his friend seemed to have passed. We played a couple of games of dominoes and then headed out at 11:00 PM. Everyone was walking toward the water. By the time we turned onto the shoreline drive, the street was thick with people, all in traditional New Year’s Eve white. Being small and quick, Skyler was good at finding the cracks in the crowd. I hung on to the back of his shirt.
“Cuidado,” several women said to me as we passed. “Be careful.”
Skyler managed to sneak us right up to the lip of the stage. The banks of speakers throbbed in our throats. Five feet above us, a man in tight jeans, long dreads, and a knit Rasta hat was shouting into a mic, his foot stomping, pelvis grinding, one hand pumping the air. TV cameras projected the scene onto large screens. Despite being at the center of the sound vortex, I couldn’t make out a word, but the people around us were singing; as always, they knew every song. They began to jump, both arms in unison, slapping the air above their heads. Skyler was jumping, too. The camera zoomed down. Skyler was waving, giving the cameraman the thumb-and-pinky-finger sign, hang loose. Now everyone’s arms were overhead, waving side to side to the beat.
Bidda, badda, badda, boom. Fireworks burst all around us. It was midnight. We’d never seen so many, so many kinds, all at once. Gold bursts of weeping willow dissolved into sparkling cauliflower florets; a silver ball split into dangling earrings. The woman next to me pulled me into a jubilant hug and kissed me on both cheeks.
Around 1:00 AM, Skyler and I began to wend our way back. We looked down at the beach as we passed. People were in the water in their clothes. A boney, nearly naked man was standing on a rock, awash in white waves. He punched triumphant fists at the dark sky. Made it through another year!
And we, I thought, have made it almost halfway through ours.
26
Home
AFTER SIX MONTHS I am still struggling with:
watching Skyler struggle.
how to, politely, ask the rafts of kids to leave our house so we can have a little alone time as a family.
how to tactfully train them not to turn on every piece of electronic equipment in our house as they flow through.
what I might do to be helpful in this town.
But I have learned:
more of the small words, the ehtas and nehs, those expressive grunts that make you sound like a local.
to get the phone numbers of particular van drivers to reserve seats for trips to the coast.
to understand every fifth word when Bentinho is speaking.
to drop to the floor to dodge kicks in the capoeira roda.
that in the summer, it’s best to get up at five, or stay at home until late afternoon to beat the heat.
that there are more kinds of mangos than I’d ever imagined: rosa, vermelho, commun, espada, tommy, maria . . .
that cynical Zeca has a soft heart.
that Eeyore-like Giovanni can be playful and lively.
that hesitant Aniete can be silly and coquettish.
that I am beginning to call this place home.
PART III: Widening the Circle
JANUARY, FEBRUARY
27
The Dividing Line
THE DAY AFTER we got back to Penedo, Peter flung some groceries through the front door and panted, “I’m going back down to the baixa, to see if I can do something for Junior.”
Peter’s soccer buddy had been in jail for over a week. Dalan said Junior was waiting for the judge’s decision, and the decision had been delayed because the judge was on vacation.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked when Peter clanged back through the front door a few hours later.
“Find out his last name.”
Peter had found Dalan at Gordo’s Lanchonete, and he knew the name but, being unable to read or write, couldn’t tell Peter how to spell it. Peter walked a few blocks farther down and ran into some of the guys at the soccer field. The word was out.
“Você vai pegar Junior”—You’
re going to get Junior out of jail.
Peter explained he wanted to hire a lawyer, but he needed Junior’s last name. They didn’t know it. They offered to take him to Junior’s mom.
Peter stood outside the small yellow box where she lived. Junior’s sister came to the door, wrote out their last name, and invited Peter in. Built like a block and missing a few front teeth, Junior’s mother ran a bar, inside her house.
Earlier in the day, Peter had read me an email from Zeca, whom he’d enlisted to check into Junior’s case along with Zeca’s dad, a retired criminal lawyer who knew the judge. “It doesn’t look good,” Zeca had written. “In the police file, it says it wasn’t just a bar fight. It says he wanted to kill the man.”
I remembered watching Junior deftly bend the soccer ball into the goal at one of Peter’s games. After that, he’d graciously dropped out to let another player play and had gone to sit in the stands with his young wife and baby daughter, happily nosing his face into hers.
Peter had latched onto Junior after it became clear he was by far the most talented with his feet. Junior had taken Peter under his wing, always choosing him for his team, giving him tips, picking him to take the penalty shots, teaching him to dance the victory dance.
And now this. Would the real Junior please stand up? I guessed he was all these things: the tender father, the patient coach, the man curious enough to befriend a foreigner, and the drunken brawler.
I wondered what had really happened, what the future held for Junior, his wife, and six-month-old Bianca. Where was the dividing line that separated quick-footed, fun-loving Junior from quick-footed, fun-loving Marcelo, our friend who moved from the Penedo soccer team to Barcelona to coaching teams in Saudi Arabia and Dubai? I realized I didn’t know much about Marcelo’s background, what class he’d come from. My impression was that the professional Brazilian futebol leagues were not combing the poorer neighborhoods to fill their ranks. Too bad. There was a lot of talent there.
28
Balance and Joy
MY BIRTHDAY IS in January. I’ll be turning fifty-three. I’d quit my full-time job as a university professor when I turned fifty, looking for more time at home with Molly and Skyler and time to promote my dance company, Headwaters. I’d been excited about this new chapter, though nervous, too, knowing it could throw our family into financial disarray. While I gained flexibility in my schedule, I didn’t gain time. I was my own worst taskmaster, each week falling short of my oversized list of things to do.
Before the Kadas-Newells had left us in Salvador, Martha had initiated a New Year’s activity for our families that involved spreading cards with words printed on them facedown on a table and asking each of us to pick two. We had the option to put the cards back if we didn’t like them. My words could not have been more apropos.
Balance was the first. That was part of what I had been hoping to find in Brazil and what I couldn’t seem to hang on to in the United States. Joy was the second—another thing I found easily disappeared into the maw of work at home but seemed to be exuded here by every boom-box-jiving, capoeira-flipping, surf-diving, market-chatting, cachaça-drinking, futbol-kicking Brazilian. Interestingly, the only word that got returned to the pile, and repeatedly, by several different people, old and young, was responsibility. That’s one we took seriously in the States, one we’d been telling our kids more about lately. (“If you want to drive a car, it comes with responsibilities . . .”) It was a word that, by our standards, Brazilians were a little more relaxed about. The van might fill, bumping your carefully made reservation; class might start an hour late; the repairman might never show up.
I was pleased with my picks. Balance and joy would be great gifts for turning fifty-three. I immediately had a chance to practice hanging on to them.
While in Salvador for New Years, I’d received an email from the U.S. government department that administers the grants that my dance company receives, called Grants.gov. It said I needed to go online and change my dance company’s password before it expired, in the next seven days. I didn’t have the list of numbers—the MPIN, TPIN, CAGE, NAIC, SIC, and DUNS numbers—that might be required to do this with me in Salvador. When I got home to Penedo, I’d have four days left. Judging from past experience, this would be cutting it close. When we got back to Penedo, I tried to log on. The error message told me my username didn’t exist. When I clicked on I forgot my username, I got an email giving me the same nonexistent username. And so it went. I emailed support. No one answered.
“What happens if your password expires?” Peter asked, standing behind me in the garden room as I continued to hit the same keys over and over, trying to physically force the correct window on my computer to open.
“I don’t know. I’ve never let it happen.”
I tried again the next day. Nothing had changed. No one had responded to my questions, and then our Internet went down. Balance, joy. The day after this, we would be leaving for Pontal to stay at Ada’s pousada and celebrate my birthday. There, the Internet would be sketchy at best. I bought extra cell phone time in case I had to call the United States, and then, amazingly for me, I decided to stop worrying.
On the morning of my birthday, I went down to the baixa to try my luck at the ATMs and reserve seats on a van for the kids and myself, a process that turned into the usual maze of misinformation and misunderstandings. I felt as though I were caught in an M.C. Escher painting, the one where the stairs lead up, down, and nowhere all at once, rather like my online username nightmare.
Five hours later, we managed to climb into a van. I should have found this trying, but in fact, it had been nice just to hang out and chat with the kids while we waited. Maybe I was learning to channel Brazilian patience. A patience one could call “resignation” or, with a better spin, an ability to enjoy oneself no matter what.
The van trip took longer than usual. We detoured through small villages. At Peba, we drove through town and right out onto the hard-sand beach, circling back to the highway through the high tide. When we got to Pontal, Ada was waiting. Cigarette in hand, she announced in her whiskey voice that our usual bungalow was ready. She’d left a small bouquet of hibiscus and bougainvillea on the table, for me.
While the kids changed into suits, grabbed the boogie board and flippers, and headed to the beach, I borrowed the modem from Ada and checked to see if “support” had contacted me. They hadn’t. Okay, time to call. In Brazil, one had to buy minutes on cell phones, so it tended to run out. I’d bought the biggest increment I could, but as soon as the message came on—“your wait will be at least three minutes”—I knew it was going to be a gamble. I could envision the phone dying as the support-staff person was asking, “May I have your DUNS number?” Thirty-five dollars spent for nothing. I left a message, “I’m in Brazil . . .” and headed to the beach. Balance, joy.
While I was grappling with my phone situation, Skyler had shown up panting.
“Mom, the tide’s high, but you know that empty lot, how there’s a wall on the other side? You can kind of go along this little ledge, then climb the next wall and walk along the top, and you’ll get to where there’s still beach. Okay? Bye,” and he’d ducked back out under the veranda roof and disappeared.
When I got to the first wall, I looked over and down the other side. There was the little ledge, a half inch wide. White-fingered waves hurled themselves hungrily against it. Was that where they’d gone? I looked down the beach. No one. The waves, the wall? I looked uneasily out to sea.
I remembered we’d seen a rickety gate in a sand dune farther down. I crossed back through the empty lot and circled around through town.
Pontal do Coruripe is a fishing village on a point that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean, forming one end of a large bay. Its sweaty, slow pace makes Penedo feel like Manhattan. TV screens flicker behind sheets hung over open doors, revealing inhabitants asleep in their chairs. Birds hop lackadaisically in cages suspended over front verandas. Hole-in-the-wall shops sell biscuits, w
arm Coke, and ouricuri, the palm-frond handicrafts this village is famous for.
I ended up on a road where I’d never been, paralleling the beach. A large lagoon full of mangrove bushes ran along my left. The inhabitants of a fancy walled house on the right had dug holes in the concrete and planted spiky agave plants in the middle of the sidewalk. At home, one can’t willfully block the sidewalk. At home, if you don’t shovel the snow by ten in the morning to clear the passage, you can be fined. I shifted into the street.
I suspected the rickety gate was attached to Pousada Paradiso, so I asked permission to thread through its stucco bungalows. Standing at the flimsy gate wedged open in drifting sand, I looked out at the vastness of ocean then down the beach.
There they were, Skyler, Molly, and Brooke, three ecstatic figures jumping the waves, freeze-frames caught in silhouette against the shimmering water. I felt a flush of relief. Except for them, the great curve of beach was empty. Palm groves waved in the breeze. It was suddenly looking good: fifty-three, on a deserted Brazilian beach with happily cavorting kids, government password or no.
We ambled back hours later as the sun disappeared behind the trees. Peter, who’d stayed behind in Penedo to continue his research on a new book proposal, had arrived. Ada had set dinner under the arbor on the back patio, clay dishes of sweet sautéed vegetables, garlic beans, tomatoes with basil, and steamed dorado. Then came the mango cream and then the surprise, a chocolate cake with fresh strawberries. Peter must have called ahead. I was wearing my birthday presents from the kids, gold flip-flops and sparkly dangling earrings. I was feeling more Brazilian by the day.
Peter and Ada were talking about whether the villagers were going to succeed in thwarting the state’s effort to put in a massive shipyard. Oil had been discovered seventy miles off the coast, and the government wanted a shipyard to service the offshore rigs. They’d offered each fishing family one hundred reais a month to go along with the plan, though they hadn’t made it clear how long they’d continue to pay. At first, the fishermen had thought that sounded good, but then they’d begun to wonder how it might affect the fisheries and had started to organize against it.