Crossing the River (18 page)

View out the back window

Amy and Peter score a date in Salvador

21
21

Bands of Ants and Silent Horsemen
Bands of Ants and Silent Horsemen

O
NCE, WHILE LISTENING
to a session of British Parliament on the radio in a rented car in England, I suddenly understood the cockeyed humor of Monty Python. Listening to that raucous parliamentary session, I realized context is everything, and when you don't have one, things can seem surreal. I began to understand where the magical realism that Latin American authors are famous for comes from. I had several experiences in Brazil that I'm sure actually happened but that in retrospect seem fantastic.

Like the time Molly got home at 11:00
PM
from watching a
futsal
game with friends. I was half asleep but rousing myself to greet her.

“Mom, are there always this maweee ansheeez?”

“What? I didn't catch that.”

She spit toothpaste into the little sink in the hallway outside the bathroom and jerked her chin up. “Look at the ants!”

Above us, on three walls, wrapping around two corners, were
thousands
of ants, big reddish-black ones. They were up near the ceiling, covering four rows of tiles—a solid band of squiggling black, one foot wide.

“Ohhh.”

We'd been seeing more and more
formigas
, the almost-imperceptible little ants that I'd swipe up by the dozens with a wet rag, during the day. And I'd killed a few of these big ones at night, the only time I'd noticed them. My tolerance for insects is very low in tropical places, where mosquitoes carry dengue fever, flies have been who knows where, and I don't know whether the spiders bite and if they do what that might bring. I was taking no prisoners, practicing the brutality that comes with ignorance.

But this was beyond me. I tried to see where all the ants were coming from or going to but found nothing. They didn't appear to be
moving down, where they could start invading all our food stores in open baskets below. It seemed there was nothing to do but go to bed. I suspected they'd be gone in the morning, and they were. Completely.

One day, I was following Skyler and Victor down an alley when Skyler urgently beckoned to me from across the street ahead, shouting, “Mom, hurry up!” I emerged out of the narrow side street and skittered across the intersection, just ahead of the first of a hundred or more horsemen. They were clicking noisily up the cobblestones, accompanied, of course, by the requisite speaker-mounted car, blaring music at high volume. The surreal part was that until I'd popped out of the side street, I'd heard nothing at all. It was as though they were part of a movie set and had just been given the go-ahead to start moving and turn on the speakers. I happened to be carrying my camera in preparation for photographing Skyler's upcoming game of street soccer, so I stopped to take pictures. Instead of the usual smiling, thumbs-up pose that I got when I pulled out a camera, the riders seemed oblivious, as though I were as invisible to them as they had been to me.

Then there were all the little piles in our house, fine little piles of black. From what? There was no visible trail of falling dust. Was it alive? Aniete swept them up daily, and then they reappeared. The pile by the dish drainer was a little different—a little more in the horror-movie vein. I wiped up a wet brown “accumulation” from behind the dish drainer. While I continued to wash dishes, I saw a drip in the same spot and the brown began to re-accumulate. I could see the drip land, but looking up, I could never see the drip leave. What was dripping?

Once I started to see things this way, there was no going back. The fantastical quality was increased by the fact that, as foreigners, we were so in the dark; we couldn't predict things coming, we didn't recognize what they were, we didn't understand what created them. They seemed to magically appear and then disappear, still a mystery.

22
22

A Viking Queen Floats Above a Chiffon Sea
A Viking Queen Floats Above a Chiffon Sea

F
ROM THE TIME
they were in bassinets, both Molly and Skyler had been residents at the university, tucked into dance studio corners, immersed for years in music and diving, twirling bodies. It was not surprising then that by age three, Molly was looking for a tutu and Skyler was finding ways to spin and flip. While, as a modern dancer, tutus have never been a part of my life, by age sixteen, Molly had developed into an elegant and adept ballet dancer, and to our delight, we'd been able to find a wonderful teacher in Penedo, Fernando Ribeiro. He immediately invited Molly to perform in his Ballet das Alagoas recital. This meant finding new pointe shoes. The pair we'd ordered from the States three months before had never arrived. I'd begun to realize that global American business is global as long as you're in the United States.

Catching the van in Penedo, Molly and I made the three-hour trip to Maceió in a last-ditch effort to find the shoes. We took a cab from the van stop to Maceió's downtown shopping district, where streets were closed to traffic. Entering the flood of people on foot, streaming around sidewalk racks, squeezing into dark doorways, we found the fabric and notions store where we hoped to find shoes that would fit.

In Maceió, there was one brand of pointe shoe, and you chose a size. In the United States, there are many brands, as well as four toe widths, three shank lengths, and narrow heels versus wide. In the United States, when one is fitted, the sales person will pinch the heel, stick his or her finger inside the curve of the toe, and peel back the outer layer of shoe as you stand flat, then on demi-pointe, then on full pointe. It was a scientific operation with many variables. In Brazil, they asked, “Do you want to try it on?”

It seemed that in Brazil, shoes were something to cover your feet, not a high-performance device meant to help you better feel the floor,
or touch the ball, or cushion your joints. Peter had bought Dalan a new pair of white soccer shoes.

“Did he just ask you to buy him a new pair of shoes?” I'd asked.

“No, not exactly. He told me that his shoes were broken.”

“Did he choose the store?”

“Yeah. We went to Sportgol. I think he may have chosen the shoes because he liked the color. He didn't even try them on.”

Nevertheless, we found pointe shoes for Molly that looked as though they would work.

Molly had been taking ballet twice a week with Fernando, who traveled every week from Maceió to teach dance in Penedo. With the lifted chest and rodlike back of a ballet dancer, he'd stride into the tiny studio at Imaculada, where the students were chatting in clusters, wearing board shorts, muscle shirt, and baseball cap, bare legs and feet in leg warmers and jazz shoes. “Molly, we going to dance,” he'd say, forearms circling from the elbows as he talked, like a flower girl tossing petals.

He was warm and interested in us from the start and clearly enjoyed trying out his spattering of English. Neither Molly nor I told him that I, too, was a dance teacher, but he sniffed it out. Maybe it's in the way we stand, a little taller when we're around each other. One day he bent my ear about how pulling work out of these students here at Imaculada was like “squeezing blood out of a cockroach.”

“
E as baratas não têm sangue
”—And cockroaches don't have blood, he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

December 10. The Ballet das Alagoas performance was to start at 6:30
PM
. Molly had already left to walk down the ridge to the theater, carrying her green tulle tutu hooked over her forearm like a wreath. Peter and Skyler had watched the dress rehearsal the night before because they'd had to leave that morning to meet friends from Missoula who were arriving that night in Salvador, eight hours away.

I decided to dress up for opening night. Sweating despite my cold shower, I ran down to the washroom, blouse and skirt in hand, to iron them. I never iron at home, but in Penedo, I felt compelled to, knowing I'd inevitably be on show.

I stepped out of the house in my new platform shoes—my concession, along with red toenail polish, to Brazilian womanhood—and struggled not to twist my ankles on the cobblestones.

At the theater, the doors were still closed. I stood outside in warm, heavy air, watching the sky slide from light blue to slate to black. I thought about buying a beer from a vendor with a Styrofoam cooler, despite the fact that I don't drink beer. A half hour later, Skyler's teacher Vanessa sauntered up with one of her daughters and her mother.

Vanessa was Skyler's English teacher at Imaculada, though she was so shy about speaking, you wouldn't have known. We'd recently hired her to tutor him privately as well. We had rapidly abandoned our homeschooling experiment, finding ourselves unable to engage Skyler in any constructive way. He was back at Imaculada full time, and we were now trying option three: the keep-up-with-homework-because-maybe-you'll-find-it-more-interesting-if-you-know-what's-going-on option.

That evening, Vanessa's habitually slow movement was overlaid by agitated conversation.

“
Os ladrões
—robbers—broke into my brother's house. They had a gun,” she told me when I asked if she was all right. No one had been hurt. Like so many, while Vanessa was distressed, she seemed to shrug it off—nothing to be done.

Just as Molly's friend Karol and her mother, Maria, arrived, the theater opened, an hour late.

I was so proud of Molly, of the get-involved attitude that had brought her to this moment. She would be looking out at three tiers of curving balconies in dark, polished wood. This nineteenth-century theater reminded me of the nineteenth-century opera houses, so optimistically built, in small towns throughout the American West. In Penedo, the seats filled with ladies in long dresses, men in dress shirts, kids dangling their legs through the balusters. The nuns from Imaculada had come, all five, in their dove-gray habits, clustered in the first tier, near Giovanni and his girlfriend Sheila.

We'd also bought tickets for Aniete, who had come with her sister Gel, who was visiting from the country. They were dressed in their
best jeans and delicate high heels, their black hair woven at the roots with glimmering beads. It was the first time they'd been in this theater, their first time seeing ballet. And I'd invited Zeca. It turned out several of his cousins, aunts, and uncles, including Robson, were there as well; they'd come to see Robson and Shirley's daughter, Julia, dance.

The theater was airless and hot, full of hands fanning white paper programs, like a flock of fluttering birds. Then the houselights went out, the chatter diminished, and the red velvet curtain opened, or one side of it did, revealing six bodies curled on the floor, Molly's blond head prominently in front. The other side of the curtain appeared to be stuck. The curled bodies waited patiently in their red light. After some tugging, the concert began.

As the dance went on, people in the audience began to chatter. Some sang along to the deafeningly loud
forró
music that accompanied this first, more modern piece.

At intermission, people fled the heat to stand outside in the cool night breeze. They drank beer and soda pop, ate popcorn coated in salt and condensed milk, smoked cigarettes.

There was no announcement of the beginning of the second half. I scurried back in just in time to see the curtain open to reveal a single, tiny dancer in a sparkling white leotard and splash of white netting rimming her bony hips. Opening her elbow-locked arms wide to embrace the audience, she earnestly plunked her foot out to the side. Cameras flashed. She blinked, hazarding a tentative smile but looked immensely relieved when she was joined by a troupe of others, twice her size.

They were followed by one group of earnestly gawky dancers after another—troops being put through their paces, in sparkling costumes of bright yellow, red, and sapphire blue. Gradually, the long Romantic tutus gave way to those that jut stiffly out from the hips, a delicate woman sprouting from a dinner plate, signaling a shift from the beginners to the more advanced. The steps got harder, and the dancers valiantly struggled through them, smiling bravely. But it wasn't until Molly and her partner Keyla appeared that one could see the ease and elegance that ballet is known for. Their feet fluttering, they floated through the quick shifts of direction, with the silk-stocking leg
extensions that are ballet's trademark. The steady rumble of audience chatter and scraping of balcony chairs stopped.

Molly, so confident now, so calm and elegant, took command of the theater. She, too, had started at age six and had moved through the gawky troopings. The little girl I remembered from years of
Nutcracker
mice and party girls had grown into a queen. Like a Viking, tall, blond, and shining, eyes huge in winged blue eye shadow, she floated above a chiffon sea of tiny ballerinas.

At the end, the older girls led lines of younger ones out to bow. The audience whistled and hollered. To my surprise, Zeca, who seemed to start most sentences about the arts with, “I don' really like this . . .” was delighted by the whole thing. After Molly's duet, he said, “I like that one the
second
best. The first is that little girl.” He pointed out the six-year-old in the blur of blue netting who had continually turned in the wrong direction and was consistently a count behind. “She is doing it all wrong, but she don't care at all. Thaz great.”

After the performance, Zeca went outside to smoke. When Molly was ready, she and I joined Zeca and Robson and his family at an open-air restaurant down the street from our house. Robson looked debonair in a straw fedora, and his wife, Shirley, elegant in a tight black belted minidress showing off shapely hips. Her reddish-brown hair hung down, framing almond eyes. Smart, thoughtful eyes.
No one pushes this woman around
, I'd thought when I first met her. Once again, I felt totally content, sitting there in the breeze, picking at French fries and fried fish with a toothpick, drinking a Coke.

Live music floated in from somewhere in the back. “Wait, listen.” Zeca had his finger in the air and craned his head.

“
Para Amilie e Mohlley
,” said the voice over the mic.

Zeca grinned. “It's for you.”

The song seemed almost wistful, not what I associated with Zeca's love of acid rock.

He drove us home at 1:00
AM
, down the middle of the unlined street. Now, in the silent deserted night, it all seemed a dream—unlikely that there'd be an elegant little theater, full of ballerinas in gauze, in a backwater town up a river in Brazil. But then, Penedo was full of surprises.