Crossing the River (35 page)

          
   
Bentinho, Fabio, Azul, Elton, Tijolo, Pirulito, Sombra, Ningo, Lampião, Taciana—the Grupo Pura Ginga do Capoeira

          
   
Zeca, Aniete, Giovanni, Katia, Elizia, Robson and Shirley, Irma Joanna, Iracema, Mario, Pedro, Dalan, Fernando, Victor, Ricardo, Breno, Karol, Italo, Junior, Maria, and Celia

          
   
Brazilian patience, Brazilian pace

          
   
a quick white smile in a dark face

Epilogue
Epilogue

W
E PACKED OUR BAGS
and sold our furniture at half price, mostly to Aniete, who had decided to leave Aunt Laura's and move out on her own, something Brazilian women her age never did. Then we moved back into the Pousada Colonial, the B and B where we'd started, coming full circle.

The next day, we would throw our two bags each into the back of a hired pick-up and make the three-hour trip up the coast once more to Maceió, where we'd catch the first of five flights back home.

Molly's friends and Skyler's gang were all there, little Pedro hugging Skyler, his eyes beginning to tear. The staff of the
pousada
was lined up at the balconies to watch us leave. They hugged us and whispered a now-familiar litany of good wishes.

“
Vai com deus . . .
”—Go with God.

The one I really loved came from Maria, Victor and Karol's mom. “God will lift you up and bring you back here once again.”

We stopped in at Robson's, on our way out of town, to wish him a happy birthday and say good-bye to Zeca and all his family. The women were seated under the songbird cages in the arcade, and the men were lounging out back under the bougainvillea arbor, just as they had been seven months earlier, on Zeca's birthday.

I slipped Zeca an envelope and told him, “This is to pay for Fabio, so he can take English lessons at your new school. Call him when you open.”

“And if my school doesn't work,” he said, taking it, “maybe I'm going to be a criminal lawyer. It feels so good to help people like that.” He was referring to Junior, who'd finally been acquitted and released from jail.

Zeca walked us back out to the pick-up, closing the door as we climbed in and the car pulled away. We passed the Centro Cultural
next door, where I'd taught dance to the daughters of sugarcane factory workers; circled through the roundabout; sped down the stretch past Natalia's house, where Skyler had gone to his first birthday party; and circled the next roundabout around
Christ in a Boat
, our nickname for the towering bronze statue of Jesus standing in a canoe, which had been one of our early markers as we'd sought to learn our way around town. Then we were speeding out of town, toward the ocean, toward the beaches.

We shuffled off the plane in Miami at six thirty in the morning, our stream of passengers merging with others all flowing toward baggage claim and customs. We entered a wider portion of the hall, the river splitting around large armed men scattered through the crowd, scanning for people to pull aside and question.

“Wow, not too warm; not even a smile,” Molly noted.

“Pick up the ball! Pick up the BALL! PICK. UP. THE. BALL!” It took Skyler a minute to realize the uniformed man with the rearing German shepherd was talking to him. Chagrinned, he snatched up the soccer ball he'd been dribbling with his feet.

“Don't worry, Skyler. The dog just wanted your ball.”

We managed to find all our bags, make it through customs, recheck the bags, and enter security. There we stood, one by one, in the beam-me-up-Scotty “imaging station,” our hands raised over our heads, while our bodies were stripped to their bones.

I wondered what Bentinho and the other
capoeiristas
would make of all this if I managed to bring them to the United States to visit as I hoped to do—this and the self-flushing toilets and automatic paper towel dispensers.

As we were repacking and dressing (the TSA agents had even scrutinized our flip-flops), we were put through not one but two episodes of shouted, “Halt! Everybody, don't move . . . Okay, you can go, just a drill.”

We were definitely
not
in Brazil.

“Whew, this is intense,” Skyler said. “Let's get out of here, before they do another one.”

Things had gone smoothly until we hit the first world. Then things
began to go awry. When we finally made it to Chicago, two hours late, after a delayed flight from Miami, we discovered our bags had somehow been put on three different flights, arriving several hours apart. Luckily, we had a long layover.

As we were waiting at the baggage carousel for the third flight, an overweight woman with dyed blond hair walked up to the man next to us.

“Honey?” She sounded tentative.

“I can't hear you,” her husband snapped.

“They've lost our bag,” she almost whispered.

“What!” His voice rose. “Fucking hell!” He kicked their red carry-on. “Where the hell is it!” he shouted as he stomped off to the help desk.

Okay, we were definitely not in Brazil.

Back in Missoula, Tom—the Verizon man—convinced Peter that he didn't really want an iPhone because, after all, it was going to take ten days to hook up the Internet at our house and God forbid we should be without Internet for ten days. But never fear, the Droid was here, and we could “tether” it to our computer to go online. So Peter bought it.

It used to be that you tethered horses, but now you tether yourself—to the communications network. And the communications network is like a cancer that keeps dividing, requiring more and more vigilance to keep up, not just via email but via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter . . . you know the list. And the time it takes to stay “checked in” threatens, like that cancer, to take over one's life. At least, that's the way it feels to me.

Peter and I ran into a friend walking his dog in the park across from our house.

“Can you come on Sunday?” he asked. “Oh, Facebook,” he said, seeing our confusion. “My housewarming? The invitation was on Facebook.”

It used to be you had one landline for the family and called it good. Now Peter was negotiating for a landline and four cell phones. It used to cost thirty dollars a month; now it cost $240, but it was a bargain.
Tom made it all sound so simple. So simple that ten days later, my new cell phone, using my old office number, still told callers it had been disconnected. Likewise, our landline, a simple reconnection of our old number, refused to be reconnected. We had to hurl ourselves down the stairs, skid around the corner, accelerate through the living room, and clip the kitchen door in the hope that we could pick up the phone in the first three rings, before it told the caller we didn't exist.

People were finally able to get through on my new cell phone after I spent an hour and a half on the line with two Qwest and four Verizon agents, several simultaneously as I refused to let them hang up, knowing that if they did, I'd be back to scratch. We knew things took time in the developing world, but this was the first world, the place where we expected efficiency, friendly instant service, convenience—where things were supposed to work. How could we reset the expectations so they would produce contentment rather than total frustration?

So, being home was weird. What could we say to all the people asking, “How was it?” “I bet it was great.” What was the sound bite that would somehow encapsulate our hearts cradling the people of Penedo, the quilt of sherbet colors, the ragged collage of sound—palm fronds clacking in the breeze, horse hooves on cobblestones?

It had been a full year. Full literally of blood, tears, and sweat, exhilaration and discouragement, fearful hearts and bursting hearts—and while we had been eager to return home, we'd also been sad. Sad to leave people who had been incredibly generous, who'd given us their time, shared their families, come by with avocados and mangos, taught us to dart and dodge with a soccer ball, to kick and duck in the capoeira ring—people who'd invited us to the beach, to their birthday parties and weddings, who'd waved and called out to us every day as we passed.

So when questioned, I settled on, “Well, it was really rich and, well, really hard, so I feel relieved to be back but . . . sad, too.” It was lame, but it was the best I could do. Then I'd flip the conversation. “I hear you produced your Christmas play again this year.”

There was still too much to say. It would take months to boil it down. So it seemed simpler to say nothing, turn the conversation
away. Besides, no one really wanted more than that ten-second sound bite anyway.

Home was so familiar. Had we ever left? I resented it a little. I wasn't ready for Brazil to be reduced to a dream. As I rode around on my bike and drove around in my car, I realized we couldn't have chosen a town more the opposite of home. Penedo's hard surfaces and chute-like streets were met with Missoula's sprawling-wide, leafy-soft avenues; Penedo's bright oranges and pinks contrasted with Missoula's muted greens; Penedo's constant scraps of ricocheting sound juxtaposed the quiet, steady susurration of Missoula's water. In both places, the beginning of winter there and of summer here, the rivers were rising. But there, up on our ridge, we watched it at a distance, measuring the spread of green—the influx of water hyacinths. Here, we watched at eye level, as the stream across the street from our house, swollen with snowmelt, started to invade the paths of the park it runs through.

I kept finding myself thinking here—there, here—there.

I wondered if I were going to be able to maintain my effort to get off “the track,” be able to hang on to the slower pace, hang on to the recognition that nothing is so important that it should stop you from spending time with people you love, hang on to the realization that there's real value in doing some things just for fun, even if they don't make you more productive or help you climb a ladder. I knew that to do this, I'd have to wade upstream, against a current that seems only to be building in strength (despite the increase in grumbling)—that work-comes-first, follow-the-prescribed-path-to-success current that continues to sweep us out to sea, that has caused us to lose our moorings.

For her senior project in her last year of high school, Molly organized a fundraiser for the capoeira salon back in Penedo, raising $3,000 for their program to help the street kids in Bairro Vermelho. She slugged her way through an overloaded senior year, and by the time she decided to go to Macalester, a college known for its focus on global citizenship, she was burned out on school.

She decided she wanted to travel abroad, on her own this time. Taking a gap year, she left for Europe: starting with family friends in
Sweden, moving on to work on a fig orchard in southern Portugal, and finally teaching English in a village of one hundred in Nepal. I thought how much more relaxed I would have felt if she'd just gone to college, into a safe, familiar structure, but then I knew, too, that she would know how to find her family wherever she was. That family would take her in and watch out for her.

I wish every American teenager were fortunate enough to go abroad, preferably to a developing country. It would change our relationship to the world, as individuals and as a nation, completely. Those kids would come back with a visceral understanding of why they're so lucky to have been born in the United States, recognizing how precious is their ability to speak out without risking their lives, seeing how well the law works, mostly.

But they'd see, too, that we're not so different, nor are we so far ahead, that our breakneck speed may be breaking us down, that our touted 24/7 access to work may be sapping our energy and stealing time, time we could be spending with others, face-to-face, the way Zeca's family did every Sunday in Brazil. Those kids would learn that maybe we need to look a little farther afield before we claim the bragging rights we seem to cherish as Americans. They would be shocked, as I was, that we have congressional leaders who have never left our shores, who have never been issued a passport but who make our foreign policy.

Some of those kids would decide they never want to leave the United States again, that they're in the place they love. Others might decide, as I did, that the world is their home, and it's both inexhaustibly big and very small—that it's full of people just like them, trying to find their place, their role, their identities, trying to take care of people they love.

I hope that my children will be able to see how they can fit into a larger world—one bigger than nations, broader than race—and feel comfortable enough in it to know they can jump and then look, because they'll know they can cope when they land.

I think they will, and when they do, I hope they take me with them.