Crossing the River (29 page)

P
ART
IV:
Crossing the River
P
ART
IV:
Crossing the River

MARCH, APRIL, MAY
MARCH, APRIL, MAY

38
38

A Five-Day Orgy
A Five-Day Orgy

W
E COULD SEE IT
coming. First the multicolored plastic fringe, zigzagging pole to pole down the street, thick and shaggy, rustling like dry palms; then the banners on every light post; then the sparkling, harlequin-painted faces like giant eggs grinning down from gazebo pillars; and finally the wiring of the extra-bright white lights. It had been going on for days. Here, finally, was the excited buildup we had for Christmas in the United States, a holiday that had passed in Brazil with a dull thud.

Tired from traveling and ready to settle back into our quiet routine, we didn't find the prospect of five nonstop, sleepless days of jostling crowds drinking and shouting and drinking and singing and drinking too appealing. But finally, even I was finding it hard to resist the insistent gaiety. It was hard not to smile at the burly man in the tutu and clown wig waving from his motorcycle, or the sleek black car spotted with rainbow confetti stickers, or the little band of jiving drummers wandering around town, a flip-flop-footed dancing bull leading the way.

“
Vai a Neópolis?
” my tennis coach had asked me at the end of my lesson one day, as we'd picked up balls strewn around the court and tossed them into an old shopping cart. Everyone said
carnaval
in Neópolis, the town across and downriver in Sergipe, was better. There they brought in name-brand bands at night and hosted the
Mela-Mela
, a major food fight, during the day.

“Do we need to take our own eggs and flour?” I'd asked.

“Yeah, and condensed milk and sugar water to throw.” He'd grinned.

Zeca had warned us to watch out for people putting things in our mouths. Or was it to keep our mouths closed because there would be a lot flying through the air?

On the day we decided to go over for the
Mela-Mela
, Peter and I and
the “gang” (Skyler, Victor, and Ricardo) were strung along one wall waiting for the
lancha
to cast off. We were headed to Neópolis, and we were armed. We'd hidden four supermarket bags full of flour in several backpacks. No one else, however, seemed to have anything. I started to feel very American. Had we supersized it again?

Molly had been largely on her own for the past two days, coming home at 6:00
AM
after staying out all night. (Schools wisely canceled classes for this five-day stretch.) Surprisingly, I felt fine about it. She was good at checking in; had, in her friends, a phalanx of bodyguards; and seemed to know how to handle herself. When I'd asked if men were ever a problem, she'd said matter-of-factly, “Sometimes you just have to pry them off your face.”
Okay, she's immersed
, I thought.

The
lancha
's motor started up, rumbling like a long fart. The little tube of a boat had filled and was listing to one side. I glanced at Ricardo. At age ten, he was crossing the river for the first time, and I knew his aunt was anxious about it given his rudimentary swimming skills. But he was looking cool, relaxed back into the bench, legs wide like all those men who ride the New York subway as if they're the only ones on it. This was day three of
carnaval
in Brazil, day three of sweaty crowds, pumping music, crazy chaos, pre-Lent excess.

Twenty minutes later, we coasted into the concrete landing on the other side. We squeezed our way out of the little boat and followed the crowd trudging up a narrow, twisting street. Neópolis has a pretty central
praça
full of benches and trees. We'd assumed the
Mela-Mela
would be there. But instead, like the sedated castle from
Sleeping Beauty
, it was full of sleeping people, tucked under bushes, on top of market tables. The crowd from the
lancha
was turning, disappearing down a side street. We hurried to catch up.

A block later, we were in it, carried along by the crowd through a canyon of sound. A guy who reminded me of the Michelin Man, with his skin painted silver the better to showcase his bulging biceps, stood on a stoop. He held his arms high to show off his tiny, Speedo-clad hips, slowly gyyyyyyyyrating to the upbeat brass of the
frevo
music (a northeastern Brazilian folk music that's especially popular around
carnaval
time). On a rooftop, a man in a black jumpsuit painted with a Day-Glo Halloween skeleton stepped side to side to the chest-
throbbing beat, then gave a powerful pelvic thrust to the front, a thrust to the back, and a slow, juicy grind. A line of four men in swimsuits step-touched in unison, like backup dancers, then spread their legs wide and dropped their hips in a come-and-get-it, side-to-side swing. Much as I think I am, as a dancer, unusually comfortable in my body for an American, in that crowd, I felt like a buttoned-up, Bible-toting Calvinist.

We sidestepped deadpan grandmothers, holding flaccid water hoses out living-room windows. A few hours later, we'd be grateful for the service. As we moved deeper in, we began to see people with faces patched with white, hair matted with flour. We scooped flour out of our bags, eager to join the fray—but how? A slimy hand swept over my face; its wet fingers seemed to be trying to crawl into my mouth. I squirmed away and instinctively flung my fistful. The man behind me laughed. In minutes, Peter's face was dripping with green and red. Skyler had clods of something pink stuck to his eyebrows. A tall man in an oversized diaper rubbed a goopy hand in Ricardo's hair. Ricardo didn't look amused. I wondered if, in Ricardo's mind, this would come to represent what was “across the river.” People stuck their hands in our flour bags as we squeezed through the increasingly dense pack of pulsing, flour-and-slime-coated flesh. Earnest vendors sold beer from Styrofoam coolers, looking as though they were wondering if the great sales were worth the sprays of shaving cream and beer. Two tank trucks were parked at a street corner, manned by bands of bare-chested studs pelting the crowd with a fire hose. The
Mela-Mela
continued as far as we could see.

Several hours later, we wound our way back past the expressionless grandmothers, the sleeping square, and down to the river.

“That was fun!” Skyler exclaimed. Ricardo was eager to wash off. I wandered into the water in my clothes and dunked. It would take me a week to pick the hardened scabs of flour out of my hair and a month to clean up Skyler.

At home, we found Molly, who'd gone to the
Mela-Mela
with her friends.

“I . . . have . . . never had,” Molly was saying emphatically, “so many disgusting things put in my mouth. I have had flour, eggs, butter—oh
my God, I was so glad I was wearing my sunglasses. This huge hand just smeared my whole face in butter. I was dripping.”

“Was it fun?” I asked her.

“Yeah, it was really fun. They would tell you to say a word, like
chuva
—I said that one twice—and then, WHAM, in the mouth.”

I flopped down on the couch, mentally preparing for the last two days of the festival. Our house was located at
carnaval
central. We just had to open our front windows to watch hours and hours of
blocos
—the slow-moving masses of bouncing people in their matching fluorescent T-shirts, following a little brass
frevo
band or a blast-you-out-of-your-seat
equip som
car. But Day Four turned out to be a rest day.

On the last night, we stood on our wicker couch in the garden room, propping our elbows on the windowsill. Each
bloco
seemed to have a designated route. Many were accompanied by towering
bonecas
, swirling, swaying puppets with gaping teeth and wild hair on oversized heads. The blue satin skirts of an eight-foot-tall woman with enormous white teeth leering out of glossy red lips split open to reveal Victor's dark head.

“
Oi, Eskyloh!
” he shouted up to us from under his precariously balanced ward.

Bentinho passed by, twirling his teenage daughter from the end of a raised finger. The lovely white-haired woman who lived down the block bounced by in a gold tutu and angel wings. “
Vem!
” she called, waving her wand at us. “Come!”

Our perpetually drunken neighbor tilted by, careening from one side of the street to the other. A woman in a platinum wig, cow-print skirt, and cowboy boots passed out condoms. Or was her low, hoarse voice a man's? A clutch of Peter's soccer buddies, their cheeks rouged and eyelids painted blue, had squeezed their muscled bodies into slinky polyester dresses. They raised their beers to our window as they went by.

The kaleidoscopic color, the pop-your-ear-drums volume of the music—the energy—had been maintained for almost five days. During
carnaval
, as on other occasions, it seemed that Brazilians had an insatiable appetite for fun.

Molly showed up with her school friends Leila, Larissa, and Keyla,
her carefully pre-torn
bloco
shirt falling off one shoulder. Breathless, she ducked into her bedroom, slipped on her blue flower-print dress, and slid out the door, geared up for one more all-night trip to Neópolis, one more night of rapid shuffling feet talking to the music, dancing hip to hip under a dark Brazilian sky. Peter, Skyler, and I propped our eyes open for another hour, then battened down the hatches and hoped for sleep.

39
39

The Doldrums of March
The Doldrums of March

O
NCE
CARNAVAL
ENDED
, March quickly degenerated into a scene by Tennessee Williams—stagnant, sweaty, and seething. Even the water hyacinths floating in the river had come to a standstill. Tensions were running high. Molly slapped Skyler, then burst into tears; Skyler was in our faces, then retreated, refusing to talk; Peter and I hid in the “cooler,” our windowless, air-conditioned cubicle of a bedroom. My patience declined as the heat rose. We all just wanted to go home. Peter was the only one who seemed to be handling it all with equanimity.

The sugarcane fires burned. Though illegal, the practice continued. It made the cane easier to cut, and most companies were still hiring laborers to harvest by hand—laborers, like Fabio from capoeira, whom the company would perennially underpay, “somehow” never delivering what they'd promised. The factory bus lumbered by with a limp dummy of a man tied to the front grill. I was surprised the company would allow such a protest. In the afternoon, great spirals of smoke appeared upriver. At night, we'd see the fields alight, distant flames orange against black. By morning, the far hills had faded into brown haze. This had been going on for six months, though common wisdom said it should have ended by now.

Skyler, like any kid running barefoot, had three cuts, swollen red and oozing pus around his ankles. Peter ended up in the emergency room, having punctured his foot with a kebab skewer that was lying in wait on a soccer field that had supposedly recently been cleaned. Peter had paid for the cleaning.

The ants were multiplying. The smaller ones had established regular highways—by the dish drainer, under the bathroom door—while the big ones were descending from their ceiling perches and now appeared disconcertingly out of the trash, on the food shelves, underfoot—like
one-night stands, still there rummaging around in the morning, overstaying their welcome.

Our house was turning into a clubhouse-cum-sports-equipment-outlet-cum-soup-kitchen-cum-Internet café.

Gangs of boys, Skyler's friends, swept through every afternoon, sometimes settling in for hours, taking careening rides in the hammock, walking on their hands down the hall, juggling soccer balls. Some days I'd walk in and find all four of our computers in use by magnetized boys, bodies frozen, eyes flitting, fingers jerking spasmodically. They devoured
biscoitos
and peanuts and drained our water jugs.

People we didn't know—skateboarders, little girls, parade participants (Brazilians love using parades to advertise, to celebrate)—were knocking on our door asking for water, throats parched by the relentless heat.

People we did know—Skyler's friends, Peter's soccer buddies, the neighbor boys—asked to borrow soccer balls, swimming masks, paddle ball sets. We began to insist they bring them back the same day, as we found ourselves more and more frequently cleaned out and clueless about where things had gone.

Then people started knocking on the door for food. First Ryan, which they pronounced
Heon
, a bony, taut boy from capoeira, who made that fluttering gesture in front of his mouth—palm down, fingers digging toward his lips—as he waited for Skyler to change into his capoeira clothes. He crouched in a corner of the kitchen on the floor, turning down my offer of the couch, and inhaled a plate of rice and meat.

Two days later, a pregnant woman appeared, dangling a small boy by his wrist, asking for water and
comida
. She sat on the front step, leaving the door open—half in, half out. Eyes drooping with exhaustion, she was gentle with the boy, cajoling him into drinking water while she picked through cold stew. She left the empty dish on the floor and thanked me quietly before hefting the boy onto her hip and heading back out into the beating sunshine.

A few months earlier, around Christmas, Aniete had gotten a job working in a clothing store down in the
baixa.
Sorry as we were to
lose her, we'd let her go, knowing it was a good opportunity. But by March, Aniete had started using our house as her
lanchonete
, as we were within walking distance of her work. I'd find her on the bench by the back window just when I was ready to take a break and gaze out the window myself, and then hunkered over rice and beans at our dining table, chattering with Shirley, Aniete's cousin and our new
empregada
, just as I was ready to sit down for lunch.

Things were falling apart at home in the States as well. Our cat got shot with a BB and stopped eating. Our dog tore her leg on a fence and needed stitches. My mother had to put her dog to sleep.

“This is the longest month.” Skyler groaned.

March was rough.

Peter banged through the front door into the garden room.

“I've just been informed I've been telling nurses all over town that I've been playing soccer without my shorts.”

He was returning from his Portuguese lesson with Giovanni.

“At all those clinics, I've been saying
calções
, shorts, when I should have been saying
calçados
, shoes.”

Molly and I laughed uproariously.

I felt as if my Portuguese were falling apart. I'd probably hit my peak in about November; after that, all our English-speaking friends had begun to arrive.

“That's a beautiful expensive!” I called out to Elizia as I crossed the
praça
on my way back from the stationery store. She was sitting in front of the school in her sleek new silver Fiat.

Oh, jeez
, I thought as I waved cheerfully and realized I'd said “expensive” instead of “car,” the two words separated by one
r
in Portuguese. God, they're tolerant.

April passed much like March, rather the way months did at home, mostly indistinguishable one from the other except for the markers of holidays—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas—and, where we lived in the north, the change of seasons, though even those were mostly indistinguishable from year to year, one winter being much
like another. Looking back at my childhood, it was the years we lived abroad that I really remembered. The others were the filler in between.

It made me think that it was probably time to go home, that Penedo was losing part of its great value, the power of the new and different to open one's eyes.

One night, Skyler wrangled open the front door, slammed some things around in the kitchen, then dropped into his chair at the table. The rest of us had just finished dinner.

“How was the
roda
?” I asked. Too tired, I'd stayed home from capoeira.

“Fine.”

“So what's bothering you?”

“Nothing.”

Then, a few minutes later, “It's what happened after the
roda.
Can I be excused?”

An hour later, he flopped down on our bed.

“I don't think I'm going to be Ricardo's friend anymore,” he announced.

“Why not?” I asked.

“He gets in so many fights.” Then it all spilled out. Ricardo had run after Pedro and kicked him, hard. Pedro had started crying and throwing rocks at Ricardo, and then Pedro's mom had come out and dragged him away.

“We could hear him screaming inside and her, you know, hitting him.” Skyler paused then continued. “And Ricardo didn't even care. He just forgot about it.” The flow of words subsided. “I tried to stop them,” he added.

“I think maybe the same thing happens to Ricardo with his mom. That's why he lives with his aunt,” I said now to Skyler, lying on the bed. “So maybe for him it doesn't seem . . . You know, it's just life,” I ended lamely.

“Oh, and you know why Bazooka hasn't been at capoeira?” Skyler continued, on a roll. Skyler and I especially admired Bazooka. We'd nicknamed him “the cat” because he moved with a big cat's quiet ease
but startling strength. “He got shot in the face. He's in the hospital. He still has one bullet in his face and two in his chest. Fabio told me. I guess he'd been drinking
cachaça
and got in a fight, and the other guy went home and came back with a .22.”

I recalled that Giovanni had said that five people had been shot in Penedo during
carnaval
. Maybe Bazooka had been one of them.

After a while, Skyler lightened up. “Maybe this could be
my
job. You know how you've started teaching Fabio English and Molly's started teaching dance at the girls' orphanage and Dad's trying to get Junior out of jail? Maybe I could help Ricardo stop fighting.”

“Yeah,” Molly said, appearing through the door, her physics textbook in hand. “Otherwise, when he starts drinking, he's going to end up like all these others.”

The next morning, I picked up the
Gazeta de Alagoas
from where it had been pushed under our front door. “
Capitão P M é assassinado
” was the headline. “The Captain of the Military Police Has Been Assassinated.” “Assassinations,” as they called murders, were our daily bread.

That day at lunch, Aniete limped through the door, looking drained from her climb up the hill. She sank into a chair at the dining table with a plate of rice and beans. “
Ontem
,
as cinco horas
. . .”—Yesterday at five o'clock, some young guys in a car shot a guy sitting in a plaza, right by O Laçador. “You know O Laçador?” she asked, referring to the Brazilian grill near her house. “There were lots of people. Everybody ran. The guy they shot, he shot another guy last week.” She shoveled in another mouthful, rolled her eyes, and shook her head. “
Muita violência, muita violência.
”

Alagoans seemed to wear their first-place ribbon for highest incidence of violence in the country as a badge of distinction, as though if you couldn't do anything about it, you might as well claim it. Another nod to fate.

“
Eskyloh!
” The afternoon shout came through the front window.

“Skyler, it's Ricardo,” I shouted from the front room.

Skyler ambled to the front door and jangled it open.

“
Oi
.”

“
Quer jogar
parkour
?
”

Skyler loves parkour, the sport of jumping railings, scaling walls,
leaping stairs. A few days earlier, after joining a roving band of “park-ouristas,” he'd said, “Mom, I think I've found my sport.”

But today, after a short conversation, he closed the door and ambled back into the house.

“Don't you want to go out?” I asked.

“No.” He sounded dejected. “I told him I couldn't play with him anymore if he keeps fighting so much.”

“You did? Wow, that's hard to do, Skyler. What did he say?”

“I don't think he understood at first. But after about three times, he said, ‘
Tchau
.'”

As I opened the door to go out for my tennis lesson, a shout came out of the tree in the
praça
. “
Eskyloh!
”

Skyler looked torn.

When I came back from tennis, I could see Skyler's blue-and-orange tennis shoes dangling from a branch. He dropped to the ground, grinning.

“Ricardo said he would stop fighting,” he told me, clearly proud.

I wondered what kind of impact Skyler could really have. Whether we were doing the “American thing” that I often objected to: stepping in and telling others how they should behave with the barest understanding of their culture. On the other hand, where was Ricardo headed, with his toothless, drunken mother and stern aunt? Down Bazooka's path? It wasn't hard to picture, with Ricardo's hotheadedness and the inevitability that he'd start to drink. So maybe it was better to try something rather than give into nothing, even knowing intervening might be ineffectual in the end.

Iracema, the kids' school guidance counselor, invited us over for Sunday brunch. We asked about the recent spate of violence.

“It's the police, too,” Iracema said. “Sometimes it's easier to just shoot a repeat offender than keep throwing them in jail.”

We thought about Junior. We knew this wasn't his first offense.

“Don't get involved,” her husband Alexandre, a fisheries engineer, said, when we told him about Junior's case. “You don't know our culture, how things are done. You say he's a
boa pessoa
, but you don't know. They aren't all good people.”

We felt like children, being told to stay out of trouble.

Junior was still in prison in the neighboring town of Igreja Nova. It had been three months. Peter and Zeca had been to visit him.

“If you can say you were employing him, that could be good. It will look better if he has a job,” Zeca had told Peter on the way to take a deposition.

“I felt so sad saying good-bye,” Peter told me on his return, “seeing him there, behind bars. We went down to the store to get him some other things to eat. They just get rice and beans and salami. He's gaining weight because he's not playing soccer.” Peter put his backpack down on the wicker couch and pulled something out.

“He gave me this.” On the palm of his hand sat a delicate swan, fit together from origami-like pieces of folded newspaper. “Another guy in there taught him how to make them.”