Arrival: when the house breaks the glass slippers

My host mom flipped the switch to turn on the GPS, commenting, “a gente não precisa usar ela pra chegar a Cabo Frio não, mas queremos ver como ela funciona.”  Gunning the engine to make it up the steep incline, we squeaked through the parking garage exit and began the drive from Rio de Janeiro to Cabo Frio.  My host family owned an apartment in the town, a popular beach vacation spot for cariocas or people who live in Rio city.  At the awful hour of 8:00am, my  host-sister was conked out in the seat next to me.  She had wrapped herself around the “I Love You” teddy bear her boyfriend had given her before returning to Brasilia.   Since I had only arrived a week earlier, I stared with my face more or less pressed up against the glass as we potholed and beeped our way out of the city, Juca Chaves crooning acridly in the background.

Unfortunately, he was interrupted incessantly by Gypsy.   She was pleading for my family to turn left in 150 meters or turn right in 1000 meters or make a U-turn in 300 meters.  “Ah minha filinha, ‘Gypsy’ não sabe nada querida,  não,” my host mom consoled her.   In spite of her advice, we made it past the gleaming cruise boats parked awaiting Carnaval and crumbling infrastructure of a favela to the Niteroí bridge.

 As we passed the slum, my host dad pointed out the window, “A favela mais velha no Rio tá à esquerda. They [favelas] started here when slavery ended and the ex-slaves fled to the capital but didn’t have any money so they just started up the shantytowns.  And they’ve been here ever since.” 

The new name for favelas, according to the government, is comunidade.  The intent is to restore the dignity of the people who live there by removing the denegrative label.  I remember the Paul Farmer book I am reading for my classes in Salvador and wonder what a difference changing the name can make without resolving fundamental problems of societal injustice.   The music has changed to Cazuza. “Estranho o teu Cristo, Rio/Que olha tão longe, além/Com os braços sempre abertos/Mas sem protejer ninguém.”  How strange your Christ, Rio.  That watches from afar, with his arm always open too.  But without protecting anyone.  

Two hours later, we arrived in Cabo Frio to set up camp on the beach.  All on Brazilian time, of course.  That means, we strolled into the apartment (gorgeous view of the city), met up with some of their old friends to talk for a few hours (nossa! Cê já fala um pouco!), played pumpich at a beachside Arcade with my host-sister (their pronunciation of PumpItUp, the insane version of DDR), ate lunch (at a restaurant where you pay based on the weight of your food), and eventually made it to the beach.    With the brilho do mar glistening and vento do litoral aleviating the intense heat,  I threw myself into the surf.  

The next two days on the beach, my bottom firmly planted on my kanga, gave me time to reflect on my first week in Rio de Janeiro.    In appearance, it was completely and utterly unlike any other Latin American city I had ever been in.  It lacked the helter-skeltered, multi-colored, delabidated charm of Guatemala City.    And despite the physical analogue of the mountains to Cusco, it was far to big, metropolitan, and beach-y to feel the same.  In fact, more than anything, Rio reminded me of Miami.  Portuguese replacing Spanish aside.   The day after I had arrived, I was visiting with a friend who I had met in Peru.  We ended up at Botafogo shopping mall.  Between speaking English, the parking garage, and the near identical structure of the mall, I had doubts that I had left the U.S.  

Aside from physical appearance, another contribution to the sentiment of U.S.ism are my wonderful new school friends.  Every day in Rio, I primarily hang-out with my classmates from the Linguatec Portuguese School.  We are the Gringo Squad, with occasional Brazilian friends tagging along.  We all try to speak Portuguese whenever possible, which is about 60 percent of the time. However, the culture and the topics of discussion are maintained from a typical conversation  for university students back home.  As the other American girl who lives with my host family said, it provides a smoother transition into our eventual study abroad full-immersion programs.   And it´s true that despite hilarious, linguistic misunderstandings (molestar is not, incidently, like Spanish. It is much more like English.  This means you should not ask your host family lhe molesta se…?), I feel quite at home here.

Of course, the danger of feeling like you have not left your country is that tend to expect that things will be the same. For instance, telephone prices are definitely not the same, I discovered, and it’s about double for anything imported.   And after 30 minutes of waiting in the heat for the metrô, I began cursing under my breath in (bad) Portuguese.   Worse was getting into the metrô car with the hundreds of other people who weren’t going to wait any longer either.    Smothered by sweat that wasn’t my own, mesmo començando me sentir um pouco brava, I had to take a breath and remind myself.  You’re not in Kansas (Yorktown) anymore, Dorothy.  

This is largely a good thing.  Not much is riveting about Kansas (Yorktown).   You can’t meet random people on the beach there and play intense games of sand soccer.  Nor can you go out on a Wednesday night to a ferina on the seaside.  Or to the top of a hotel with friends to drink a caipirinha—only for cultural purposes, of course—and take photos of the city lights, the sea and the mountains all together in a fantastic mirage.   Dancing  my own samba in the street bloco, feeling the music vibrating up from the Portuguese  rocks to my toe-tips, I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. 

One of my friends has recently taken to calling me gitana [gypsy] due to my seeming inability to stay put.   And I can think of no word that better describes how I aspire to live.  Being in one place too long feels emotionally and intellectually deadening to me.  Despite loving my friends or family who surround me, despite enjoying daily life, I feel trapped by sameness.  But by moving!  I am the filinha Gypsy of my host mother.   I am almost always wrong, unintelligible, disoriented and lost. The vertigo of the tornado intoxicates me.   

If I were Dorothy, I would break those glass slippers so that no one could force me to return.

For me, there is no home but the present.