Crossing the River (11 page)

I woke up at six, unlocked the padlock on the back window, and swung it wide, always an elating moment. They'd started the post-harvest burning of sugarcane stubble, so the air had been notably hazier, but that morning, it was clear to the far hills, and a cool breeze
slid in that brought welcome relief from the increasingly sweaty nights. Eventually Peter emerged, followed by the kids. Our breakfast of scrambled eggs and
linguiça
was relaxed; at least I think it was. It's hard for me to remember now because most of the day was eventually obliterated in my mind by the explosion.

Skyler's first event would be that afternoon, a one-kilometer foot-race over the cobblestones through the middle of town. He had been matter-of-fact about it when he announced it on Friday, but by sometime Saturday morning, he was saying, “I don't want to run.”

Skyler actually loves to run. He'd surprised us when in third grade he ran not only the one-mile Fun Run in a hometown Missoula race but also spontaneously joined the 5K and then the 10K, becoming the youngest that morning to participate in the trifecta.

“Well, you probably don't have to,” Peter mused, barely looking up from his
Alagoas Gazette
, “but you need to go tell Mario”—Imaculada's PE teacher. “He's specially coming to the school at three, to give you a ride to the starting line.”

The morning dragged on, each of us doing our own thing, which meant Skyler was mostly on Facebook or watching reruns of
Friends
, Molly was reading on the iPad, I was writing on my computer, and Peter was writing on his.

At 2:40
PM
, I called out, “Skyler, it's time to get dressed. I've pulled out your shoes.”

“I don't want to go. Why do I have to?” The tired litany.

“Out of consideration for other people who are nice enough to help you.”

“Molly doesn't have to.”

“Molly doesn't have the chance to. Girls here don't get to do all the things that boys do. She'd love to participate more.” It turned out there would be girls running, but none from Molly's school.

I was moving faster now—pulling open his drawers, looking for shorts—not because we were late, but because I was getting frustrated. He was lying on the bed, barely watching the computer screen.

“Turn that off, now. Skyler, it's quarter to three.”

“I don't want to do this.”

“Get up, now!”

He slumped off down the hall to the bathroom and came back, slamming the gate to the downstairs laundry room on the way. I walked over to it.

“Come back and close the gate quietly. I'm going to count to five. One, two . . .” My voice had that low, menacing quality it gets when I'm done negotiating. There is something about slamming doors that has always sent me. “. . . five.”

He didn't come. I sped down the hall, lifted him under the armpits, and shoved him toward the gate.

“I don't know how to close the gate,” he protested.

“Watch very carefully, and maybe you'll learn something.” My voice was louder and more clipped now. “Lift, push, pull, and then this will fit over the top.”

It was ten to three.

“I'm not going.”

Peter chimed in. “Skyler, you have to at least go talk to Mario. Get your shorts on.”

Skyler left his room, walked to the back, and started climbing out the second-story window. I ran after him, grabbed him under the arms, and jerked him back in, dumping him on the tile floor, furious now (and alarmed). “Get in here!”

Molly slipped by. “I'm going for a walk.”

Three o'clock. Peter looked out the front door. “Okay, Skyler, Mario is there. He's waiting for you.”

“I'm . . . getting . . . dressed,” Skyler said miserably.

I crossed the
praça
to go talk to Mario and keep him there until Skyler and Peter arrived. As always, there was really no hurry at all. We Americans can build up a lot of tension around time. Mario was explaining something to me, most of which I couldn't absorb; my mind didn't have the energy to ferret out meaning. Peter and Skyler crossed the
praça
, Skyler dragging behind. Apparently he'd decided to “think” about the race. A
colega
of Mario's came with a car and ferried Peter, Skyler, and me down the street to Diocesano, the other private school in town. The kids would run from one school to the other.

The race that was scheduled to start at three thirty started at four thirty. Kids gathered under a banyan tree in their school pinnies, and
eventually someone arrived with numbers. The two other boys from Skyler's class who'd been selected to run showed up in their Imaculada royal blue. Skyler and Peter went off into a field of banana trees so Skyler could change into the running shorts he hadn't put on. I left with the camera to walk back to the finish line.

What would I be taking a picture of, I wondered, Skyler in his misery? Or would I take a happy picture that would join the other happy pictures in the photo album of our year in Brazil, belying how hard it had really been? Or would he not run at all, leaving me waiting with my camera, wondering what had happened?

Our
praça
was transformed. There were escort police on motorcycles, an announcer extolling the virtues of the spring games for the health of our youth, and the ubiquitous music blaring. Then, as we saw the first runner crest the hill, a man in a lime-green jersey extended a mortar high and shot the deafening firecracker. I squinted to find Skyler.

The first boy wore pink and white, not Imaculada's colors. Then a barefoot boy in light blue, an Amazonian-Indian-looking girl in yellow, and then Skyler.

“Go, Skyler! Go!” I shouted, trying hard to keep the tears out of my voice. “
Eskyloh
,
Eskyloh!
” chanted some other Imaculada parents, beginning to clap.

By the time he crossed the finish line, first for his school, tears streamed down my cheeks.

Sweaty and exhausted, Skyler seemed pleased. He even smiled for the picture.
Skyler with Carlos and Mario, after the 1 km race
, the album caption would read. They guzzled water from cups handed around by volunteers and poured it on their heads. Lots of other boys from the race, boys Skyler didn't know, were coming up to him and patting him on the back.

“
Obrigado, obrigado
,” he said shyly, nodding. “Thank you.”

The next morning, when we brought up Skyler's school situation, he readily agreed to a compromise—three days each week at Imaculada, two days at home with Peter and me. He'd found the courage to make a change, to get off the track, that peer-created treadmill that dictates what's right for everyone, except perhaps for you.

13
13

On Learning to Be a Man
On Learning to Be a Man

S
KYLER AND
I attended the capoeira salon three nights a week. I don't know why I want to call it a
salon
, except that somehow it wasn't exactly like a class, more like a place of sharing—a place to learn a sport, an art, but also a place to celebrate Afro-Brazilian identity, to play, to compete, and to grow into a man with the guidance of elders. (Women practicing capoeira is a new twist. But there were usually at least a couple of us.)

“
Quer jogar?
”—Want to play?—they'd say gently as they invited you into the
roda
, the sparring ring.

Capoeira, a martial art, was brought to Brazil five centuries ago by black slaves imported to the Portuguese colony from Africa. As it is clearly a powerful training tool for fighting, the Portuguese slave masters outlawed the practice. At this point, it went underground. The
capoeiristas
disguised it by transforming it into an “innocuous” dance accompanied by music, so they could continue to train. But even after Brazil gained independence from the Portuguese in 1822 and slavery was abolished in 1888, it continued to be illegal under the new regime. As a form that had been developed to enable an escaped slave to fight, one against many, unarmed against armed, capoeira continued to scare those in power, now that it was in the hands of the newly freed slaves, newly unemployed and marginalized. Hundreds of
capoeiristas
were arrested and imprisoned on Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago of islands 220 miles off the coast, and thrown into jail in the new urban centers like Rio de Janeiro. Now their own people found it threatening. No wonder. The power of the form is palpable.

Skyler and I would leave our house at the “blue hour,” as my father used to call it, when the sky becomes deep and, in Penedo, the mystery planet appeared. (None of the constellations in that Southern sky
looked familiar.) We'd saunter down the narrow sidewalk, hugging the wall of houses, the lumbering buses passing so close they'd raise the hair on your arm. The old were leaning on their windowsills; the young were in doorways or paired in the shadows.

We reached the open door of the capoeira salon, housed in a peeling pink building dating from 1843. Along the roofline sat busts of bearded, European-looking men. Below the busts, the pink paint peeled to reveal successive layers. Black graffiti tied it all together. The salon's huge blue shutters would be closed, but the door would be open, and often Pirulito would be standing there, surveying the street. He was small, with pale, pocked skin and a curl of brown hair on his forehead. His ready laugh revealed braces. I guessed he was about eighteen.

“
Boa noite. Quer jogar?
”—Want to play?—he'd ask, twirling his pants cord.

“
Talvez hoje
”—Maybe today. I smiled.

I especially appreciated him because he was one of the first to invite me to spar, hesitant and clumsy as I was. We entered the high-ceilinged room and removed our flip-flops before going up the short set of stairs. A bat swooped through. The room's wooden ceiling was beginning to cave in.

“
Salve
,” we shouted.

“
Salve
,” we heard back.

I could never get a grip on what this meant, but I gathered it was important to announce one's arrival and for those already there to acknowledge it. Maybe it was a throwback to times when the newcomer might not have been so friendly.

Skyler crossed the room to exit into the open-air courtyard, where the players change into the capoeira uniform: white polyester pants held up with a cord, and a white shirt with the blue logo of Pura Ginga (the name of the local group, which has since changed to Mandingueiro). I asked Skyler if that felt awkward.

“Well, it did the first time when I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing there and all of a sudden these guys start dropping their pants! But now it's okay.”

The cord's colors (there are sometimes two) indicate the level of the player. Skyler immediately tuned into the hierarchy and figured out which colors meant what.

Often when we arrived, there were already people working on something in a more or less organized fashion. But people would continue to arrive, and leave, over the next hour and a half. As a result, we never really knew when the class started or when it ended.

The sessions did have a teacher, Mestre Bentinho, the man from whom we also bought chickens, which he'd freshly slaughtered behind his house. Tall, slender-hipped, his arms bulging with muscle, he had a quick, charismatic smile, bright in his chocolate-brown skin. He made us warm up with jumping jacks, bouncing stretches, repetitive lunges, and abdominal crunches. He then moved into teaching us combinations of lunges, squatting spins, and kicks, which jab, fan, and whack, all linked together with the glue of the
ginga
, a triangular step—side, rock back, rock front—used as a brief moment to reassess before the next attack.

Or this was mostly how it went. Frequently people would walk through the open door behind us, and Bentinho would begin a long, shouted conversation, finally sauntering away altogether to sit down and chat. Either someone else took over, so that we'd repeat whatever we'd been working on, over and over and over, until Bentinho noticed, or things gradually dissolved. This is when Skyler and his pals would start practicing aerial flips and slow-motion cartwheels (moves you were just supposed to pick up by osmosis), the older guys would start sparring in pairs, and I'd flop down on the floor to rest. I could feel my fifty-two-year-old legs getting sore right in front of me.

As a dancer, I could pick up the sequences, the order of movements, easily, which is different from being able to actually do them. I had no problem figuring out which way to turn or which leg was threading through what, and I could swing my legs higher than anyone there, which I did with gusto, mortified that I might accidentally hit someone ducking underneath me. But when it came to supporting myself upside down on my arms and, more significantly, knowing which way to dodge, I was lame. I seemed to have no instinct for self-defense, continually dropping my head
toward
a fanning leg rather than away.
And this was not a lackadaisical, summer-afternoon fan; this was a slashing blade ready to lop my head off.

Those were Mondays and Wednesdays. On Fridays, the instruments came out—the
berimbau
,
atabaque
, and
pandeiro
—to be played in rotation by anyone who volunteered; the
roda
, the circle of participants, twenty or so, was formed to contain the energy, and two by two, we'd enter and spar. My stomach always tightened in nervous anticipation, but this was clearly Skyler's and the other young men's favorite part.

The
berimbau
is like an archer's bow with a gourd attached near the bottom. It's not easy to play. The first problem is balancing the string where the gourd connects to the bow, which is heavy, on your pinky finger, then pinching a round, flat stone between your thumb and index finger with that same hand, to tamp and untamp the string, in order to change the pitch. In the other hand, you hold a delicate stick, which you tap on the string to beat out various rhythms. It makes a twangy, metallic sound with a two-pitch range. When you've managed to coordinate all of this, you learn to dampen the gourd by bouncing it on your stomach. By the time we left Brazil, I was still trying to get the stone to hit the string.

The
atabaque
is a long drum on a stand, and while the rhythms the others played on it seemed fairly simple, I could see in their faces that when I tried them, something didn't sound right. It seemed I couldn't even master the
pandeiro
, a sort of tambourine. I had rather hoped I could play an instrument as a way to contribute and avoid having to go into the ring. But I found I could also happily just stand and clap, helping to hold the energy of the circle. I could barely understand the improvised singing but would try to join in the call-and-response, desperately catching up to the gooey mass of vowels I could make out only after they'd been sung. Bentinho usually led these, with that driving, semi-singing, semi-shouting sound—a style that lends itself to singing outdoors, where capoeira would have originated.

At first the tempo was slow. Two players knelt, facing each other, below the musicians. Often they crossed themselves. Then they slowly cartwheeled into the circle, never losing eye contact. That was important. They moved in mesmerizing slow motion, prowling. This “Angolan” style was low to the ground and molasses-like—a continuous
dreamy morphing of forward lunge into retreating crouch, slow headstand-cartwheel, long hooking leg reaching between the other's ankles. The eyes never lost contact as the two players circled, moving forward and apart, upside down and right side up, panthers looking for their moment to attack. I never noticed when the next pair knelt under the musicians, but eventually, the initial pair touched hands and ceded the ground. It was the older men in the group who usually practiced this style, and there was nothing that looked old about them. Their lithe power was totally intimidating.

As the tempo increased, the young bucks started to enter the ring, and the style changed radically, into the
regional
(pronounced
hehgee-own-ow
), a newer, faster form. This was where Pirulito excelled. In this more upright form, legs started to flash through the air in a blur, each player's feet aimed at his opponent's head. The players began to handspring and flip. Feet skimmed by ears, given extra speed and force by spinning or jumping into the kick, but never made contact. That was the point: to have the power to destroy but also the control and judgment to use it only when absolutely necessary. The salon was the place to learn this and how to apply it to life. Needless to say, I tried to get into the circle early, before the tempo sped up. Skyler, however, liked the speed and, to my amazement, was there kneeling by the musicians within our first week.

Another small, eighteenish guy also liked this part, and he often sparred with Pirulito. Both, not even five feet tall, one white, one black, danced nimbly around each other, legs fanning faster and faster, feet skimming by heads, forearms protecting their faces as they got progressively closer. Even though the goal was never to touch, one could still see when one player got the better of another. Usually everyone laughed and the sparring continued or passed to the next pair. But with Pirulito and his dark partner, who seemed to seek each other in the ring, the laughter seemed inevitably to disappear and the tension to rise, like mercury in a thermometer. The intensity of their eyes and the force of their kicks shot upward, until one Friday, they broke the space between them. Just as they started grappling hand to hand, Bentinho and other elders intervened with words and bodies sliding
between. The fiery eighteen-year-olds were separated and pulled to opposite sides of the circle. The sparring stopped. The magic was broken. Bentinho said something about “
Capoeira é respeito
”—Capoeira is respect. The young men started to protest, but not much. They knew they'd lost control.

The
roda
ended early that night, but before it did, the pair was made to shake hands and enter the ring once more. Everyone was careful it didn't go on too long, and the thermometer was not allowed to rise. Afterward, we stood in the circle, feet tightly together, right hands to our hearts, left palms flexed and extended in front of us, chanting a call-and-response after Bentinho: “
Capoeira é . . .
” “
Capoeira é . . .
” “
Capoeira é . . .
” As we gathered up our clothes, the elders gathered in conversation. No cheerful
tchau
s were offered as we left.

That night, Skyler and I walked back up the ridge, enjoying the cool air of the evening, but quieter than usual. He had his capoeira uniform cinched in his cord and strapped to his back like a true
capoeirista
.

“Do you think they have something going on outside capoeira, those two guys?” Skyler asked. “It just seems like every time they get together, there's a problem.”

After that night, Pirulito came back, but his dark partner never did. I was sorry. I missed his elfin presence. “He's like a deer,” Skyler had said once.

I had hoped somehow that the world of capoeira could have helped the two of them overcome whatever their differences were. But maybe that was asking a lot.

I hoped that the capoeira salon might be a place where Skyler could find a gateway into a supportive world of men. Initially, our lack of language was a handicap. I suspected that Bentinho had good things to say about learning to develop and control one's power, about perfecting one's skill but taking care of one's partner, about what it means to become a man and work for the greater good rather than one's own glorification. These would be timely things for Skyler to hear and learn to practice in a safe place at this point in his life. But even without the language, there was a lot one could feel from the aura of the place and the way the
jogadores
“played” with each other—the way
they could play hard but still be gentle, the way their concern for the other came first, even with an adversary, the way respect for each other as humans was at the core.

One night, a Wednesday, an unexpected
roda
was held at the end of class. I was struck by the fact that everyone in the circle cut in to spar with a particular boy. I wondered why they were singling him out. When he was clearly exhausted, they let him stop, and the
roda
ended shortly afterward. We stood, feet together, and Bentinho spoke for a long time. I could pick out “. . .
este rapaz de treze
”—this boy of thirteen. Then he asked a couple I'd never seen before if they wished to speak. The woman had that tight-throat sound as though she were struggling not to cry, but she managed to say, “
Ele é um bom filho
”—he's a good son.