Flying Down to Rio

We boarded the huge Varig jet late at night. A stewardess in a blue suit with a red and white kerchief around her neck walked down the aisle with a bowl of tropical fruit flavored candies; guava, pineapple, coconut. Another stewardess came down the aisle handing out little plastic cases that were clear on the front and solid brown on the back. I took out the small, fine toothed comb, the toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste and lined them up on the table that I had already pulled down. I combed my bangs into a point in the middle of my forehead and opened the toothpaste. It smelled just like the toothpaste in my grandfather's bathroom. And suddenly mixed with the murmur of settling passengers and the gentle rumble of the idling jet engines was the sensation of cold green tile under my bare feet, the unfamiliar smell of shaving cream and used toilet paper with a pineapple candy dissolving in my mouth.

The airplane was half empty so I got my own row of three seats. I laid down, allowing myself to be tucked in under a blanket by a smiling steward who told me it was time to "be quiet and go to sleep." I gazed up at the ceiling where constellations of stars lit up as the cabin lights dimmed. When I was very young I thought the ceiling of the plane was a huge window and that I was looking up at the real nighttime sky. When I was eleven I realized that it was just a painting but I still loved it and as a young woman, before Varig got taken over by the more practical Tam Airlines and the constellation paintings disappeared, I loved the ceiling for the sense of wonder it expressed that so perfectly mirrored my own feeling whenever I made that trip.

Once in the middle of the night when it seemed like I was the only one awake on the whole plane I saw a city glittering like an enormous jewel in the inky blackness far below. I had heard about the Bermuda Triangle and somehow connected the mysterious golden lights to the stories I had heard of vessels and airplanes disappearing. We kids also talked a lot about Cuba a lot and how airplanes were getting hijacked and we all hoped that coming back our plane would get hijacked so we wound't have to go back to school and then when we finally did get back we could brag to all our friends about how much danger we'd been in.

As the sun rose above the blanket of pink clouds below us we were awakened from our uneasy sleep and given soggy eggs that Gail and I never touched. Clouds rose up billowy out of the dawn and to me they looked like houses. Once I saw a particularly grand palace with turrets and huge doors and asked my mother if that was where God lived.

The airport in Rio smelled like disinfectant and my mother's heels clicked loudly on the shiny floors as we made our way through corridor after corridor to finally stand in a long snaking line, under the hum of wooden ceiling fans, waiting to clear customs so that the final leg of our journey could begin. We would board a small propellor plane that would take us across the Serra do Mar mountains range to São Paulo. The plane bounced around a lot and my mother was terrified but she never said anything. She just grasped the arms of her seat and closed her eyes while Harry threw up eggs into the air sickness bag.

When we finally got to São Paulo there were lots of shouting relatives waiting to claim us. They had come in various cars. They all knew me but I couldn't tell one jewel-bedecked aunt from another, nor one cigarette-smelling, cologne doused uncle from another. Tia Zaza, Tia Edith, Tia Nade, Tio Luis, Tio Pepe. They passed me around, kissing me once on each cheek, hugging me tightly, exclaiming how much I'd grown and how green my eyes were! Que linda! Que beleza! When our baggage was finally collected and porters had loaded it on to a big wagon we would go out into the dazzling sunlight and into the big waiting car where Chauffeur Luis, curved back, glasses perched on his hook nose, sat turtle-like at the wheel.

I was only dimly aware of the stench of the canal that ran alongside the highway that led away from the airport and of the "favelas" built along its filthy banks. As much as I always fought for a window seat anytime we were in a car I wasn't always successful and anyways after almost twenty-four hours of travel I was happy to snuggle up against my grandmother and fall asleep.

Ghosts

My mother’s grandmother, Vovó Alice, was our family’s guardian angel. When Vovó Alice came back from the dead she always wore white. Around her emanated a strong odor of lavender.

Of all the people Vovó Alice visited after her death she visited my mother’s younger brother the most. Like the time she showed up at a party my uncle was having when he was eighteen. A friend came up to him in the midst of the throng of drunken teenagers and said “Hey! I thought you said your parents were out of town!”

My uncle laughed and said, “Of course they are!”

And his friend said,  “Who is the old lady in the the white dress sitting in the hallway then?” and described Vovó Alice. She was a large woman who had a distinctive nose that would be difficult to mistake for anyone else. She was sitting in one of the armchairs in the foyer just inside the front door where my grandfather’s patients would wait for their appointments.

Then there was the time he was racing through the fog that blankets the mountains between São Paulo and São Sebastião, driving drunk as he always did, fighting with his with his second and most beautiful wife who was begging him to slow down “pelamor de deus” (for the love of God) and the car filled with the scent of lavender. When our aunt told that story she said if it wasn’t for Vovó Alice coming they would have died that night for sure. They would have died the way Tio Ton’s best friend Carlos had died when they were both eighteen. In fact it was the spirit of Carlos that came back into my uncle’s body and made him wild and violent when he drank. The angry spirit of his best friend who died in a car crash on a night my uncle was supposed to have been with him but for some reason didn’t show up. Vovó Alice was that reason. For sure. None of us doubted that.

But in this life Vovó Alice was a manic depressive and would sink into catatonic states and have to be taken to a mental hospital where they would give her shock treatments. My mother always said her grandmother had been her best friend when she was growing up, her chaperone when she was a teenager, going with her on dates because young women weren’t allowed to be alone with men until they were engaged. But sometimes her grandmother would have to be hospitalized and my mother would have to go visit her. My mother wouldn’t talk about those visits very much and I only found out about Vovó Alice having to be hospitalized for depression after the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest came out and we went to see it. My mother was so upset afterwards and wouldn’t watch anything Jack Nicholson was in after that. At around the same time she told us about Tia Zenith, one of my grandmother’s sisters who had become schizophrenic in her thirties. How her husband packed her bags up and dropped her off at the big house on Rua Avaré telling my grandparents he couldn’t deal with her anymore and either they had to take her in or he’d take her to a mental institute.  My grandfather would talk about how she would sing and dance around in circles in the foyer where years later her mother would return from the dead and frighten a bunch of teenagers.  I was in Grade 8 when I found out about all of this history of mental illness in my family and I wrote an essay about schizophrenia that I got an A on. I found a picture of people dancing in a circle and included it, labeling it “schizophrenic people dancing.”

The  ‘ghost’ stories were told over and over mainly because we took such delight in them even while they chilled us to the bone. My uncle loved to loosen the lightbulbs in the bathrooms before we went up to bed knowing we’d go in there to brush our teeth. Because when spirits came back the lights would always flicker. The house on Rua Avaré was dark and shadowy and the lightbulbs were bare so when they flickered like that it really scared us. But then he would laugh that low laugh of his “harharhar” and tousle our hair and we would laugh too.  

Then there was my grandmother’s youngest brother, Tio Ernani, who was a medium through which spirits of the dead relatives would attend family celebrations. Suddenly, usually towards the end of the evening after spirits of a more earthly nature had been consumed,  he would start to jerk around uncontrollably. The spirit of one of the deceased relatives was entering his body and soon he would begin to speak in a muffled voice. At one of my birthday parties two of the aunts started to fight over whose dead husband was in Tio Ernani’s body. We kids had been sent upstairs to go to sleep, only we didn’t go to sleep but were lurking at the top of the stairs listening to the grown-ups down in the living room. Suddenly we heard moaning and people yelling “Ernani, Ernani! O que passa com você?”  “What’s happening with you?” “Você está doente? Are you sick?” Everyone was talking at once.  Above all the other voices we could hear Tia Daisy and Tia Nair, their voices shrill and loud. We were on our way down the stairs when our mother burst out of the living room, slamming the heavy door behind her. She yelled up the stairs at us to get to bed and that the aunts were fighting over whose dead husband was in Tio Ernani’s body and that we were not to have any part in the nonsense. She didn’t go in for spirits coming back from the dead.  

Rua Avaré, São Paulo

Rua Avaré

When I was a child my grandparent’s had an English Tudor style house on a hill overlooking the city of São Paulo. Protruding from the rather somber facade of this house were several balconies that had gargoyles carved into them. The floor of the balcony outside of my grandfather’s bedroom was always lightly coated with the dust from the city that made the bottoms of my feet black. In the distance, white skeletons of partially built high rises and building cranes rose into a smudgy sky. São Paulo was booming.

We would always spend a few weeks at the house on Rua Avaré before going to the beach house in São Sebastião. The weather was damp and cold when we were there because it was winter in São Paulo when we had our summer vacation in Canada. There was no central heating but we had electric heaters and brand new scratchy wool blankets.

The house was dark and quiet and had cavernous rooms. I still have bizarre dreams about that house where it becomes a labyrinth of endless rooms and I am searching for my grandparents because it turned out they never died.

My mother used to tell me how in the months right after they moved into the house, her little brother who was just a toddler would stand in the hallway at the foot of the stairs and cry out for her, utterly overwhelmed by the size of their new home. He would cry out “Pipia! Pipia!” until she ran down the curving staircase from her bedroom and reassured him them neither one of them would get lost in those big empty rooms.

Outside the gated driveway, the narrow sidewalk hugged a craggy stone wall out of which grew ferns with hanging tendrils and brightly colored flowers. Accustomed as I was to the tidy lawns of suburban America, the trees on Rua Avaré were startling. Arching over the street high above me, these strange trees dropped red flowers and long hard pods that made a scuffling sound when they were swept up by the maid. Their enormous leaves made pools of shadow, places of respite from the hot sun by day and at night private places where lovers would meet. I would hear murmurs and giggles coming from the darkness and sometimes, driving home after visiting relatives late at night I would make out shapes that were too big to be one person but not two either.  It was in those same shadows that my mother’s fiance had lurked and spied on her in the months before she finally decided to break off her engagement and admit to her parents that he had been threatening her life. More about that later.

Inside the massive front door there was a telephone booth with an accordion door. I would go in there, slide the door shut and sit on the wooden bench worn smooth by years of people talking on the phone. How many phone calls? What news, good and bad had came over the wire into that booth in the hallway of my grandparent’s house? I would lift the receiver and in the still, semi-darkness, suddenly removed from the bustle of the house, pretend to call someone.

My grandfather’s medical office which we crept around when he had patients smelled mostly of books, but also of rubbing alcohol and cigars. On his desk was The Paper Weight; the smoothest thing I ever felt, shot full of glass bubbles. Everyday he would sit me up on the examination table and test my reflexes with his little rubber hammer and let me listen to his heart with the stethoscope he kept in a black, shiny leather bag. The bag made a definitive clicking noise when he snapped it shut after the game was over and I had to leave him.

Upstairs between the bathrooms there was an armchair where my grandfather would sometimes sit while the three of us stood around him and we would play a silly hand game he had made up called pingapinga. He would rest one of his hands, palm down on his knee. Then one of us would pinch the top of his hand and then someone else would pinch their hand until all of our hands were used up and we had created a tower of hands on his knee. Then he would start to jiggle his knee eventually making it go up and down, up and down, so that we had to pinch each other tighter and tighter to not let go. Then, when the knee jingling and hand pinching reached a pitch so painful that we could no longer hold on we would all throw our hands up and yell pingapinga! Then we would all yell  “again” as we took his hand and put it back on his knee.

When it was cold and rainy Gail and I spent our time going through my grandparent’s closets. My grandmother kept all kinds of boxes; beautiful fabric covered blue, white or red silk lined, some with things like tiny teacups for cafezinho or sweet-smelling leather wallets in them. She would receive these little gifts from distant relatives or minor acquaintances and store them away unused, in the closets steeped in the pungent composty smell of the wood of jacaranda trees and cigar boxes. Sometimes the gifts were still wrapped and we had the added thrill of ripping off the paper, pulling away tissue to reveal a small treasure of no intrinsic value beyond the moment of its discovery.

In my grandfather’s cavernous bedroom, dark and shuttered against the hot sun,  there was sometimes this startling revelation; my Grandfather’s teeth in a glass of water! Those were acrobatic teeth. Teeth that slid around my Grandfather’s mouth. Teeth that made us scream hysterically when he pushed them off his gums to the front of his mouth and made them chatter. We would run away and then circle back, begging him to do it again and again.

The bedroom my sister and I slept in had red tile floors and heavy brown shutters; there was no glass to block either the night sounds of tree frogs and distant honking horns or the early morning racket of birds; no screens. My grandmother would tuck the mosquito net tightly around me, lift a corner and kiss my cheek…até manha. The rectangle of light from the hallway narrowed to darkness as she shut the door. I fell asleep to the soft buzzing of mosquitoes that couldn’t reach me feeling safe despite the smudgy handprint on the wall that had been left by a burglar. “He took only the television set,” my grandmother had explained to me.

My favorite part of the house though was the área de serviçio; the ground floor that you reached by going down a narrow, red tiled staircase;. The walls were both smooth and bumpy under trailing fingertips, chasing your brother and sister downstairs; past the kitchen that exhaled the smell of cooking beans, toward the view of distant high rises; hazy in the smog, into the courtyard; Juraçei hanging laundry. The staircase curved at the bottom and gave out onto a hallway that led left to the maids’ bedroom and right to the kitchen and the big wooden doors that were always open and led out to the backyard, paved with tan stones, sloping down to a cement curb beyond which a grassy area sloped steeply down to back of the property where banana trees huddled in the corner.

When I was three years old and Harry just seven, the three of us were playing at “house” in the backyard. We didn’t play on the grass but stayed on the stone patio because once long before I was born when my mother was a child, a poisonous snake had been seen. My grandmother’s sister, Tia Zenith, was the only one brave enough to go near it and she grabbed a machete out the kitchen, the one used to kill chickens and the Christmas turkey, and lopped the snake’s head off.

I was playing the Child, Harry the Father and Gail the Mother. I was throwing a ball and then running after it while my sister “got dinner ready” and Harry watched a make believe television set. I tripped on the edge of one of the paving stones and fell, hitting my head on the curb that separated the grassy part of the yard from the patio, splitting my forehead open. Harry ran over and picked me up in his arms and carried me bleeding all over his white little boy’s shirt, up the steep stairs to the main floor, past the telephone booth, and up the curved staircase to my grandfather’s room and laid me down on his bed; the mosquito net, a gauzy knot hanging above me, my grandfather leaning over me, Gail sobbing.

But the big house on Rua Avaré was robbed countless times over the years and finally sold after robbers chopped the back door down with an ax and destroyed everything they couldn’t take. The gargoyles carved into the cement of the bedroom balconies that my grandfather told me were there to frighten intruders had apparently been ineffective.  Ironically, the house is now a police station.

Arriving in São Sebastião

Giant leaves, vines crawling up every tree. People would be collecting water where it came out of the mountain, by the edge of the road, a sudden flash of light in the shadows, the flash of a red shirt or yellow trousers in the greenness.

The earth was red and if it had rained heavily there would be streams of red mud, like slightly congealed blood running down the mountain. There would be the of smell burning vegetation that now in my memory mixes with the taste of chocolate cream cookies sprinkled with tiny, hard granules of sugar that we ate in the car.

We also ate tangerines and bunches of tiny sweet bananas that Vóvó, calling for the driver to pull the car over and reaching her tiny hand out of the window, bought from scantily clad, barefoot boys by the side of the road as we made our winding way down the mountain.

There would be eight of us in my grandparent’s car; my grandfather, my mother, my brother, my sister, Elsa the maid, my grandmother, the driver Chauffeur Luiz (called such to differentiate between him and one of my grandmother’s brothers) and myself. I would put my head on my grandmother’s lap and she would comb her long nails through my hair.

When we arrived at the beach house it would always be dark. Chauffeur Luis would leave the headlights on, shining a cold streak of white across the pitch dark of the Atlantic rainforest until my Grandmother opened the front door and switched on the veranda light.

Stepping out of the car, half asleep, unsteady on my feet, I would be greeted by: the buzz of mosquitoes, the acrid smell of burning brush, the sweet salty smell of the ocean, the chirping of tree frogs, screech of night birds, the smell of rain lingering in the red earth from an earlier shower, the plant smell of tangled vines, hibiscus flowers half visible now in the glow from the windows as my grandmother went from room to room turning on lights.

I would follow the others inside and squinting my eyes against the harsh blue of the fluorescent bulbs, complain that I was tired and hungry and that my stomach still hurt from throwing up pineapple in the car hours earlier. The furniture would be covered in sheets and the house had the smell of salty mustiness that blended the Atlantic rain forest with the ocean.

Green coils that made chokey smoke would be lit. Bedding would be taken out of closets, shaken, carefully checked for insects; mosquito nets would be hung. And after hot “Nescau” and more cookies my Grandmother would tuck my sister and I carefully into our beds.

In the morning we would run out into the sandy yard behind the house and pick limes that Elsa would twist against the ridges of a pale-pink plastic juicer extracting sour juice that was mixed with filtered water and lots of sugar that sank to the bottom; the clink, clink of a wooden spoon against the sides of the pitcher when my grandmother stirred it before pouring it into amber colored glasses.

The limonada was sweet and tart and pulpy and made the inside of my mouth ring clear like a bell. Little bananas called banana ‘ouro’ grew on a short stocky tree in the far corner of the yard and the taller trees that formed a green canopy over our heads dropped large flat leaves with thick veins and long, dark brown seed pods that made a dry raspy noise when you kicked them along the sand.

There were also trees that grew unappetizing looking fruit covered with bumps and nodules that we stayed away from and palm trees, tall and slightly bent that swayed high above us. Every day the sand in the backyard would be raked and the dead leaves would be heaped in a corner to be periodically burned. The air always smelled of burning brush and to this day I go back to that house on the edge of the Atlantic rain forest whenever I smell the acrid scent of burning leaves.