Free Crossing the River by Amy Ragsdale Page A

downcast.
    â€œIt’s hard when you don’t know what people are saying,” I continued, as we stepped off the high curb onto the cobblestones. “It’s easy to think they’re making fun of you when probably they’re not even talking about you at all.”
    In retrospect, for Skyler, this year was terrible timing; not the opportune moment to drop an increasingly self-conscious, prepubescent boy into a competitive, macho culture where he didn’t understand the social cues and couldn’t speak the language. How had we not foreseen it? I had thought about it, but I’d concluded it would be fine. After all, I had been twelve when my parents dropped me into a French school in Cairo, where I, too, couldn’t speak the language. But just because it turned out well for me didn’t mean it would for him. A twelve-year-old girl is not a twelve-year-old boy. Penedo is not Cairo.

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    Finding Our Guides Finding Our Guides
 
    G IOVANNI WOULD BECOME another of our guides, along with Zeca. Also twenty-six, he was the eldest son of Elizia, the school’s office manager, and when we asked for a Portuguese-language coach, the school’s director, Irma Francisca, recommended her assistant’s son.
    Giovanni had graduated from the school some years earlier and was now dismally working his way through law school in Arapiraca, the town with the trauma center, while also working as a technology specialist for a college there. Given his commuting schedule, it was no wonder that he was perpetually yawning. We set up private lessons. Peter, Molly, and I would each have an hour with him once a week in the courtyard at Imaculada. “Don’t you think I’m getting enough Portuguese, sitting in school four hours a day?” Skyler had said, exasperated, when we suggested extra lessons. I didn’t think we could push him any more than he was already being pushed. He was excused.
    Tall and burly, Giovanni was a light-skinned black man. “My great-grandfather was white,” he told me right after he’d said he was proud of his “people.” I had presumed his “people” were black, so I was interested he felt a need to tell me his great-grandfather had been white. We’d just been talking about race in Brazil, all the different terms, as I was trying to understand which were politically correct and which insulting: mulato , moreno , pardo , preto , amarelo , asiático . . . he hadn’t mentioned espânico , which is how I would have classified almost everyone I saw. Brazil is an amazing melting pot, but, as in the United States, the issue of racial prejudice continues to be troubling, and blacks and native Brazilians seem to be disproportionally denigrated. The kids and I, especially Skyler, would continue to try to sort it out over the coming months.
    I came to like Giovanni a lot. At first he seemed like Eeyore. He would sit across from me at the small stone table, perpetually rubbinghis eyes, gaze down, consistently cynical. But after a few months, I found he could tell a very animated story, eyes alight, pausing for emphasis, laughing with delight at my surprise or indignation, and he was suddenly able to meet my eyes, looking for the reaction. He’d been transformed from Eeyore into a round-faced, laughing Buddha.
    â€œReally! Alagoas is at the very bottom?” I asked, having found that Giovanni was a great source for political, social, and economic statistics.
    He nodded emphatically. “We have the worst numbers in Brazil. Lowest income, highest poverty, highest unemployment, and highest illiteracy, although that’s improving.” (And this was the place we’d chosen for its old-world charm.)
    Eventually, however, I learned that Giovanni had a number of passionate interests: futebol —soccer—politics, social justice, and cars. One day, he brought a Matchbox car to my lesson. “These are my passion, and this is my