Surrealism on the Road

I'm in a car with two men. They are arguing loudly in a language I don't know. I can decode some of the words, but not enough find meaning, and I am awash in their anger. Their voices rise as their shouts overlap, but suddenly they dissolve in laughter. It makes no sense. One of the men is my husband. 

We are in a strange city, too, surrounded by mountains. We head into the hills and begin to drive up a steep road, mottled with green and gold light. The foliage is foreign, dense, vines dropping down from branches, taking root in the ground and rising up to become swift growing trees. All are broad-leafed, no firs or pines. Some have enormous brown fruit the size of watermelons growing out of the trunks, like warts on an elephant. 

The car's engine keeps dying and the driver laughs, glancing back at me with a  mischievous smirk, as he tries to restart the car.  The car whines, then dies again, wheezes and then clicks on. We charge up the hill with a puff of blue smoke. It's then I see people emerging from among the trees. Their eyes are soft and dangerous. We should not be here. 

At a sudden turn in the road, a crowd has gathered. The driver screeches to a halt, the engine dies, and he gestures for me to get out of the car and see what they are looking at. I don't want to, but I skirt the edges of the gathering and see that a three-toed sloth is crossing the road. Everyone pulls out cameras, and I do too, even though I'm nervous to be outside the car.

The sloth has a face like a smiling coconut, but its claws longer than my fingers. This is his road, and he takes the time he needs to drag himself from one ditch to the other, arm over slow arm.  I am mesmerized. 

Suddenly, whispers of  "Autoridades, autoridades!" ripple through the crowd. Even I can tell that the cavalry has arrived. I see their uniforms: park rangers? But they carry AK-47s. I hurry back to the car and slide into the back seat. "Is it safe to be here?" I ask my husband. "What do you think?" he answers. "You saw the rangers. Imagine what the tourists are carrying." 

We continue to drive. The road slants almost straight up like a kid's drawing of a mountain. Just before we reach the top, the car dies again. My husband yells at the driver who gets out slowly and looks under the hood. I can see eyes in the trees and figures shifting among the branches. The hood slams down and we start again, gaining the crest and starting down to where the road ends at a Pagoda-like building with dragon heads at every corner. It is stunning against the blue sky. Below, islands float on the turquoise water. One of the islands is shaped like a whale. . .

This isn't a dream. It's a memory.  Much of what I experienced during my recent visit to Brazil retains a dreamlike quality.

Part of this is the fault of technology -- or rather, the lack of it. We stayed in the apartment of my late mother-in-law, Dona Roberta. It was elegant, enormous (only two apartments per floor, each with its own elevator) and airy. But there was no television. That was fine, for the most part. However, the third day of our stay, my laptop died. No mail, no blogs, no Facebook, no solitaire! Then I found that my Kindle wouldn't connect from the below the equator. There were thousands of books but all in Portuguese, except for a copy of Lincoln, by Gore Vidal, and, thankfully, over 800 pages. It was my link with the English language.

Much of our concept of the world rests in language, and therefore, our self-concepts and those of people we encounter. Most of the lovely people I met spoke some English, but only a few conversations went deeper than pleasantries. My shallow understanding of the world where I was a temporary inhabitant was both crippling and revealing. I paid more attention to what I saw than what I heard.

Brazil was nothing like I expected. I pictured bright colors and laughter, sounds of the samba, rare birds dropping like jewels from the sky, monkeys in every tree, buildings from the Colonial era, gilt-edged and crumbling. There was some of that, but everywhere interspersed I saw the tired clothing and faces of people who worked hard every day-- harder than I ever have -- and whom only the night brings alive with a sort of desperate hysteria. I'd also expected danger, and had been warned by everyone to look as if I had nothing to take. I knew that Brazil was a country where the gap between rich and poor was not only enormous, but I also learned that it was clearly visible to everyone. In the U.S.,  poverty, like racism, is less obvious and, somehow, less honest. 

From the windows of the apartment I could see both Sugarloaf and the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. There was  also a view of Santa Marta, a favela that cascaded down the mountain like a waterfall of displaced humanity. I first came across the word when I read Robert Coles', The Moral Life of Children. He calls the favelas "a collective tragedy" (p.96). And, indeed, the tragedy of  favelas seems to be public property in Brazil. There's no escaping them. Turn away from the ocean a moment, and the view becomes the mountains with their rivers of poverty. The poor look down on the rich and make their way down each day to eke out their livings from industriousness or crime. The cocaine trade makes its home in the favelas. Drug lords rule and shootouts are common. Children, though vulnerable to the ills that accompany poverty, are dangerous as well. It is a part of their survival.

In Rio, the rich prefer to live within walking distance of Ipanema and Copacaba beaches. The poor have the view property. These favela neighborhoods grew up, building by building and shack by shack, on the steep hillsides surrounding cities so that those who worked in the cities were close to their employment. There were no roads, and, until recently, little access to power and water.

From the window of the apartment one night, we looked through a pair of opera glasses we had found at the beginnings of a fire on the rooftops of Santa Marta. My husband told me it would simply burn because, without roads,  no help could get to them. We watched as the flames leapt from one dwelling to another, the night-time silence uninterrupted by sirens. Against the glare of the flames, however, we could see help coming. The denizens of Santa Marta came with buckets and pumps to fight the fire and, by morning, only a black scar remained. What seemed a lost cause was rescued by community with deep ties and mutual responsibilities.

I don't understand Brazil -- but I don't understand my own country either. Experience continues to teach me this, but so did the book I read on my trip: Lincoln.  The story in my head of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation was pure and generous, but the facts -- moral pragmatism, cronyism, corruption, politics as usual -- tempered my vision of my homeland, as well as the one I was visiting.

Even as I write, I know I'm making a fiction of experience. Putting images and impressions into words skews them past recognition. A trip up the side of a mountain becomes a surreal nightmare, while visions of a city become code for both fate and possibility. Always, truth runs faster than I can chase it, fleeting and ephemeral as dreams.

Reunion in Rio

I have been neglecting this blog lately, partially because summer leaves me so uninspired -- I prefer the cold and gloom for blogging. In fact, the word blog might even be an etymological offspring of blustery+fog (except that we all know it's short for weblog). So, what's up with me? Oh, not much. Just flying down to Rio de Janeiro tomorrow morning.

In Rio, everyone dances on the wings!

Rio! Yes! The one in South America! The Rio that inspired that satisfyingly silly 1933 film I watch whenever it's on Turner: Flying Down to Rio. According to the film, which stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and, of course, Dolores del Rio (after all, Mexicans are almost the same as Brazilians), Rio is all about dancing and flirting and parodying the local culture. They dance all over the place, including the wings of a plane. This is the film that brought us that catchy tune, "The Carioca "-- which will be running my head until I get back from Rio. 

 Rio de Janeiro. I might just as well be going to the moon.

I have never been to Brazil before, but I have been headed there for fifteen years. My husband, Jose, is Brazilian, and even though I've been eating Brazilian food, listening to one-sided telephone conversations in Portuguese and interacting with Brazilian guests for that long, life interfered as it so often does and I was never well enough or had time enough to go with him. I've built mental pictures, of course, some spawned by bad movies, Blame It on Rio, Jose's stories of working with early bossa nova artists (Gilberto Gil, Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto), good movies about the crime that arises out of poverty (City of God  and Central Station) the entrancing and frightening practices of the voodoo-like candomblé. More than that, though, my conception of Brazil springs from the stories of Dona Roberta.

Jose's mother was born at an interesting time (only 40 years after slavery ended in Brazil and echoes of the old empire were still reverberating) into an interesting family (all diplomats except for my black sheep husband, who is an audio engineer). She grew up on an estate when that meant having a chauffeur, butler, nanny and gardeners.  From her bedroom window she could see the laundresses, former slaves and the daughters of slaves, coming up from the riverside, back from where everything had been washed by hand and spread to dry. They carried the baskets on their heads, the linens heaped with jasmine blossoms. "Ah, it was so fragrant!" she said.

When she was a girl, the family followed her father to his various diplomatic assignments in the Netherlands, Portugal, and finally Italy where he was the ambassador. She remembered disembarking the ship and standing with her parents on the dock as their trunks and other luggage was piled about them. Among these were four cages full of canaries her father loved, and she would blush with embarrassment as he took out his flute and played to make them sing. Then the delegation would arrive, her parents would leave, and she and her brothers would have to wait with the luggage. "So annoying! And all those canaries!"

While living in Europe, her father sent the children to English schools so they could learn another language and told them they had better be perfect. "You are Brazilians," he said, "and no one expects so much of us. Surprise them!"

When I met Roberta (she had come to Portland to visit her son ... and see who this American woman was) she was 84 and still spoke English beautifully -- as well as French, Italian and Spanish. And she told me stories -- simple stories, but with details that made them memorable. Despite her privileged upbringing, her life was not happy. She met Jose's father on the beach at Copacabana. "He was blond," she said. "That was so unusual and exotic to me. And he had green eyes, green like the sea. Our families knew each other -- yes, they were diplomatic corps too -- and soon enough we decided to marry."

It should have been a marriage made in heaven. When she came down the stairs to greet him before the wedding, "... he stood back and clasped his hands and said, 'Ah, I am marrying a princess!'" They were married in the most beautiful church in Brazil, the wedding witnessed by the most important people in the country. The next evening, he went out with friends and did not come back for two days. "I was frantic," she said. "I had no idea what to think or what to do." Can you imagine?

When he returned, he all he had to say was, "I have decided not to be married." He left and she never saw him again. As luck would have it, though, she was pregnant. She heard from him one more time after she wrote to tell him he had a son. He sent a telegram. "It is better for the child to be with you. You will make him a man. You are strong and I am not."

And so, Dona Roberta was left to raise the baby on her own. She named him Jose Augusto (all the men in her family are given the first name Jose because their sugar plantation was saved from a devastating fire on St. Joseph's Day). Divorce was not yet legal in Brazil and her father forbade her to work, so she went to live with her parents again. She and little Jose traveled with them to Europe and her life was subsumed into theirs once more. It must have been odd, uncomfortable and so humiliating. But she was strong. When her father died, she found a job doing social work and took no more money from the family.

She worked, studied art history, wrote stories for magazines, and for the newspaper. She was courted by the poet, de Paiva, and even after Jose's father died, she refused to marry him until her son was grown and out of the house. "I didn't want any stranger to tell him what to do," she said. When she married the poet, though, it was a miserable life. He put a stop to her writing. "One writer in the family is enough," he told her. Jealous? Clearly. "I was so happy when my mother became ill," she told me. "Well, after all, she and I  had never gotten on, but now I was able to tell de Paiva, 'I am sorry, but I must go to my mother. It is my duty.' And off I went."

"What became of the poet?" I asked. "Oh...eventually he died. I was not so fond of him after all."

Dona Roberta was her own woman, rare then and, in many ways, rare now. She was wise, yet still happy to learn and laugh. Kind. She paid for the retirement of all the servants who had been a part of her family -- and paid the education of all of their children.  She was small in size, coming only to my shoulder, and I'm only 5'4". She looked like she had just stepped out of a black and white photo of another time: her long white hair pulled back in a chignon, an elegant uniform of sensible shoes, straight dark skirt with a cashmere twin-set. Pearls, when she was not traveling. She taught at the university until she was almost 90. "The students like to hear my stories," she would say with a shrug.

Dona Roberta died in her sleep more than a year ago, and it has taken me all this while to write about her. And now, time and bureaucracy moving more slowly in Brazil than anywhere else in the Cosmos, we are flying down to settle her worldly goods -- her writing, her books, her collections, and all the odds and ends her family accumulated since fleeing Portugal in the wake of Napoleon. It all came to her, and now to us.

So, we are flying down to Rio tomorrow, and I am excited to see the city, Sugar Loaf, the Christ that looks over land and sea, the markets, the people. But most of all I look forward to sitting in Dona Roberta's home at last,  having a long, long visit and communing with the essence that remains.