My Trip to Brazil: a Lesson on Love and Family

It had been eight years since I had last been to Brazil. The truth of the matter was that I was a little nervous. Nervous about flying overseas (I had gripped my armrests for sheer life as we experienced some stormy turbulence). Nervous about straying out of my comfort zone, and nervous, above all, about going back to a Brazil that had changed dramatically.

When I last left the US to go visit Brazil, back in 2012, its economy was strong. So strong, in fact, that we saw plenty of Brazilian tourists arriving in Miami with empty suitcases, determined to satisfy every expensive craving, their carry-ons fit to bursting.

But over the years, Brazil’s economy had taken a nosedive. Currently, the real is 4 to 1 when compared to the dollar.

Not only that, but Brazil had shifted from a democracy to an intense right-wing government, with little care for marginalized groups or the environment.

Stories of break-ins were common. We’d had several Brazilian friends in the States who’d had a family member detained at gunpoint. Many were forced to give their burglars their home address, where they’d be trussed up and left there, hearts beating as fast as a rabbit’s.

So yes, I had some misgivings.

On our first day, we made a quick stop for breakfast in São Paulo before boarding our bus to Riberão Preto, deciding to meet up with an old friend of my mom’s. Mimi walked me to the bakery down the street, chatting casually about how she loved the convenience of the location. When I ordered four small baguettes, I had only big bills with which to pay.

The baker put his hands out in front of him, shaking his head, wide-eyed.

“Sorry, I don’t have change. That’s too much.”

Sheepishly, I put my wallet away as Mimi took out ten reais. She had mentioned that the bakery was expensive, but now that I was doing the mental math, I realized with horror that $2.50 was a lot of money to her. As soon as we arrived back at her house, I took ten reais from my little brother on the promise that I would return it to him once I broke down my bigger bills, and left them on her coffee table.

When we arrived in Riberão Preto, there was a feeling of disconnect. No one had come to pick us up. Since we were relying purely on WhatsApp and public wifi (something we came to regret) our connection at any given time was spotty at best, and we had no way of getting in touch with my aunt.

When we did see our relatives, the sense of family I gathered was murky and vague, despite its friendliness. My mom had left Brazil twenty five years ago in search of a clean break from a bad marriage and strained, unstable family relationships. She had come back looking for a bond, I think, searching to relive some childhood nostalgia and hometown pride; but it, like we, had become something else entirely.

Riberão Preto was no longer a mid-sized town. It had developed at a dizzying rate, and it now swelled with a population that teetered over 750,000. My mom, who always spoke of how clean the water was here, and how red and fertile the earth was, was shocked at how some parts of the city had changed.

The place where she’d had her first beer, O Pingüim (meaning The Penguin), was still standing, but the plaza and theater surrounding it had become grimy and dilapidated. As we approached, we saw two homeless men sleeping on the steps of the closed theater, the faint smell of urine in the air.

She’s always insisted that O Pingüim was the best beerhouse in all of Brazil, because the water in Riberão is so good, that it adds to its flavor. She says the same thing about the coffee, and I second this. Walking to the café A Unica (meaning The Only One) to drink freshly brewed coffee and eat some warm pão de queijo (cheese bread) was one of my favorite things while there, and in many restaurants, the traditional method of cloth-strained coffee is still used.

But my mom was uncomfortable while in Riberão. She felt as though she fit in like a misaligned floorboard. When we went to her high school reunion, she was crushed by how her high school, Tomás Alberto Whatelly, had slowly fallen apart during the last forty years. Not so much as a fresh coat of paint had been added to the school since my mom’s graduation. The school had gone from being one of the most prestigious in the area, to being put under threat of disbandment.

The buildings stood peeling and bare, but a picture of all of the reunion goers was snapped in the volleyball courtyard as we all stood in a circle, hands linked in a show of unity.

The high school reunion then moved to a villa that had been rented out for a party. Beer in hand, my mom tentatively tried to reconnect with some old classmates, most of them hard to recognize after so many years.

But when she ran into a friend who had been close to her sister, back when she was alive, my mom burst into tears. She also cried when she saw her brother. He met us after the party at O Pingüim with his wife. My mom was delighted to have him so close. During conversation, she kept turning towards him, beaming, just happy to see him. He was always so distant and laconic, that she hadn’t known if he would come. Even though he was there, he seemed superficial, pleasant but not fully present.

By the third day in Riberão, my mom’s face, feet, and wrists were puffy and swollen. Stress and my aunt’s salty cooking had made my mom’s high blood pressure skyrocket.

For days, the continuous sense of alienation, as well as the unnecessary comments about her age and emerging wrinkles, pushed my mom’s body into a state of anxiety. She frequently snapped at me, completely on her guard. When we attended a feijoada hosted by my aunt’s side of the family (my aunt is my mom’s sister-in-law), we felt like outsiders. And when they prayed to say Grace, we were made painfully aware that we did not belong, our mouths attempting to shape themselves around words we had never been taught, as my family and I aren’t Catholic, or religious at all for that matter.

Of course, this was no fault of my relatives. They were incredibly courteous and helpful, took us out to dinner; and my aunt, as always, was an excellent host. At night, lying in the guest bed, I was grateful that the portrait of the bleeding Jesus Christ that used to hang above the bed had been exchanged for something a little less bloody — a glow-in-the-dark Christ on the cross. I smiled to myself in the dark at my relief. How I had cringed at the sight of the pierced, exposed heart, the bloody crown of thorns. But it was about more than the portrait, everything had changed. A generational shift was beginning to take place, and my mom’s ties to the family were no longer front and center.

When we left Ribeirão Preto, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. It had been odd to go back, like learning to walk again after an accident, all stumbles and hiccups.

Our last stop during our trip was in São Carlos, where my mom had gone to university. Many of her friends, physical therapists or college professors, still lived in the city. We were picked up by her friend Valeria, a plump, short woman, with a cascade of thick brown curls. Her smile was intoxicating, as if she were letting you in on a prank that she was going to play on everyone else.

Incredibly kind and intelligent, I was blown away by her generosity. Valeria had inherited a large tract of land hidden by way of a nondescript entrance near the highway. Here she grew fruits, vegetables and other plants, allowing others to build and live on her property in exchange for communal work and maintenance.

There was a couple with a little girl who baked bread and taught capoeira for a living. An old speckled dog named Pipoca (which translates to Popcorn) and her grown litter also lived there, strolling around the farm lazily. Being out in the backwoods, the farm and surrounding area would grow instantly colder as the sun set, and it was exhilarating to breathe the fresh air, to feel the stiffness of the earth as it hardened underfoot. Never have I seen such a clear blanket of stars. You could see the beginnings of houses that had never been finished in the distance — lives that had been uprooted as quickly as they had been planted.

Sitting around a small fire we had made, the bakers’ little girl and her friend told me of their obsession with s’mores, the American dessert they’d always wanted to try. Pipoca sat a little too close to the fire, not realizing that the very tip of her tail had been steaming in the embers.

“Pipoca! Your tail!” cried one of the bakers.

Pipoca got up, alarmed, and looking somewhat ashamed at her carelessness, began to trot away. She was clearly sulking and had a few singed hairs on her tail. The girls giggled with their hands over their mouths.

“Careful Pipoca,” I said. “If you get too close to the fire you might pop, and then we’ll have to put butter on you and eat you.”

Pipoca gave me a quizzical, nervous look.

Inside, Valeria’s house was rough, warm, and open. It was also colorful, full of indigenous art that she had collected on her various trips to the Amazon rainforest. She’d worked with nonprofits to help teach Portuguese literacy to the various indigenous tribes that lived there.

Not only that, but she was working on her second PhD in Pedagogy, knew how to play the saxophone, and had an amazing library full of Brazilian authors I wanted to read. She’d never had any kids, but that seemed like a small price to pay to live life so fully and freely.

It made me giddy to see how much she knew about plants and animals. I felt so out of touch with my own environment back home. I had no idea what plants or animals I could eat or use for medicinal purposes, and yet she knew the animals so well that she treated them like neighbors.

Showing us around the farm one day, she pointed to a deep burrow.

“That’s where the tatu lives,” she said. “You see all of these avocado seeds? He’s eaten all of the avocados that fall from this tree. The seeds just keep piling up.”

That first night, sitting outside on Valeria’s porch as she readied a vegetarian dinner of wild mushrooms (which she had, of course, picked herself), and homemade veggie ravioli and yucca, there was a feeling of deep security and peace. It was the connection my mom had been looking for. The quiet stillness of the nights on the farm, which removed us far away from the distracting noises of the city, tinged the end of our trip with a wholesomeness we hadn’t encountered up until then.

There isn’t much that we need in this life other than good health, love, and an open mind. What was most relaxing about the farm was how the place and people were irrevocably themselves. They didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t, as we felt we had to do when staying with family in Ribeirão. Here, truths were laid bare.

My mom confided in me that despite her charisma and pep, Valeria had already lost most of her family.

“We’re the same,” my mom said. “Valeria and I have no true family left.”

I stared at her, confused, both joking and pressing. To be honest, I was a little hurt that she hadn’t considered my brother and I.

“Oh!” my mom cried out. “Well that was awful of me to say, you’re right. But what I meant is, family such as parents, brothers or sisters. My generation. Most of my relatives are gone, or we don’t really keep in contact. It’s sad.”

It was something to consider.

Soon it would be me becoming a part of the fully-fledged adult ranks, me becoming the aunt, the mother, the wife. In a lot of ways, I welcome this. I crave that status, that power of generational stability where I know that I’ll be in a place where I can take care of things and help my mom retire. I saw how lost she seemed in the country where she’d spent the first half of her life, and I don’t want her to ever feel like she’ll be a nomad forever. She has roots, my brother and I prove that. We have a home here in Miami, and however small our family circle, I know that our bond is unbreakable.