Tobias Hecht is a writer living in Claremont, California. His first book, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil, won the 2002 Margaret Mead Award. Hecht is the editor of Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society and the translator of The Museum of Useless Efforts, by Cristina Peri Rossi. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University.

AFTER LIFE

an ethnographic novelBy TOBIAS HECHT

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3750-8

Chapter One

HAVING SWALLOWED three tiny capsules of Serax before boarding, she can take it all in as if it did and did not have to do with her: the plane rocking gently as one of the cargo bays is closed, the safety instructions card rising crooked from the seat pocket in front of her, the flight attendants demonstrating what to do IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF A CHANGE IN CABIN PRESSURE, and her own surprise at the sudden urge to leave her seat, make her way toward the aircraft door, back into the terminal, back to solid ground.

“Will this be the first time you have been to Brazil?” the man in the window seat startles her.

Zo forms a reluctant smile and shakes her head before reaching for the onboard magazine. She wonders if anyone else can hear the thrumming in her chest. Despite that, despite the heat at her temples and throughout her intestines, the man’s question returns her to the first time she set foot in the country. Although more than twenty passengers had gotten off the plane with her in Recife during the stopover on a So Paulo-bound flight, no one had accompanied her in the customs line reserved for foreigners.

Soon after collecting her bags, she was adrift a boisterous crowd of welcomers: little girls in starched blouses, men with crosses nestled in the V of a bushy neckline, ladies made up at a time of night when the infirm give in. She liked the feeling of arriving in a city where she knew no one.

She had made her way toward the yellow sign marking the exit, past the doors that wheezed open as she stepped on the black rubber pad and into a night pierced by a row of street lights just beyond the terminal.

There were two boys playing a game with stones, one moment crouching on the pavement, the next darting toward her, running. She remembers lowering her gaze: a pair of heads that barely met her waistline. Unable to reconcile the diminutive proportions of boys with the weary eyes of men, she said nothing. One child whose taut skin barely disguised a miniature skeleton tried to wrest the suitcase from her hand, his small fingers scaly, dry. Zo shook her head and smiled a decline that was also something like a wish for forgiveness, but the men writ small were already dragging one suitcase each. She lit a cigarette and followed them to the taxi. It had been boys like those that she had gone to write about in Brazil. A dissertation on street children.

“So you must like it,” says the man, ignoring the noise in Zo’s chest. He speaks an English inflected by Portuguese and a drawl picked up somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon. It would be hard not to notice the telegenic quality to his gaze. A missionary returning to the native land, Zo hazards.

“Yes,” she murmurs.

The truth would have been more complicated. She has been only once, though she stayed for more than a year. As she sees it, Brazil is a place of too much joie de vivre and misery to be taken in by one spirit. On her previous trip, she had spent her days in different spots around the city of Recife, places where street children congregate. A believer in something called participatory research, she had tried to think of the children as protagonists in her work, defining the terms and limits of her writing. Yet in the end she found herself subject to a sort of crass exchange: she wanted to know how the children spent their days, where they slept, what circumstances had led them to live in the street, how they saw the world in which, precariously, they lived; the children, on the other hand, wanted fizzy drinks, sandwiches, old T-shirts, cigarettes, spare change. Objects and money for information. She had been warned by one of her professors that no matter where you go in the world, some people will think you are a spy. That is one of the problems with being an anthropologist. As it turned out, that wasn’t really true in her case. The children spoke with ease about theft and rape, violent stepfathers, what they smoked and how the small white pills made them feel. It was Zo who had thought of herself as the intelligence gatherer.

She would carry a handbag that typically contained a checkers board, a notebook, Band-Aids, and a tape recorder. The checkers game was a ruse. As she played against one boy or let the children play among themselves, she would concentrate not on the game but on the children’s conversations: “Jamais comi uma rapariga to gostosa como tua me … Your mother is the best lay I ever had.”

“What did you say you filthy goat?”

“I said I tasted your mother.”

“With that tiny thing between your legs?”

“That isn’t what your mother said.”

“My mother would chop you up and feed you to my stepfather for breakfast.”

“Your stepfather likes your flavor.”

“Watch out or you’ll wake up with a mouth full of ants.”

And then they would be pushing, spitting, threatening until the moment came when they had forgotten what all the trouble was about or until one or the other would stumble away, kicking stones. From time to time she would scribble a brief mnemonic phrase in her notebook but for the most part she would not write in the presence of the children. When she did, it was generally as their backs were turned or when they were somehow distracted.

Having heard so many stories of the children’s abuse at the hands of the police, she had been reluctant to work with the tape recorder. Yet to her surprise, when she finally decided to put it to use, she found the children would speak into it as if it were a toy, jostle for control of the microphone, imitate radio hosts, interview one another, laugh at hearing the sound of their own voices played back to them. “Estamos aqui com o reprter … We’re here with the reporter Amaro Souza da Silva, who was once a minor wandering around in the streets and who today has a job to do, who’s here to conduct an interview about the events in the larger metropolitan area of Recife. Tell me, Adriano, tell me something about your life.”

“Minha vida? Minha vida … My life is the only thing I have. My life, my mother, God … I walk alone, alone with God. I’ve roamed different cities, under different skies, been beaten up by the police, by other people too. When I was little, I got beaten up a lot. Now, for someone to hit me, they have to get hit back because I won’t let anyone beat up on me.”

“What was it that led you to live in the street?”

“It was my father hitting my mother, so when she decided to leave, I went my own way. I left for the street, with my brother. Now he has a job and I’m still living this life. My mother went to Macei, to her sister’s house.”

“What do you expect from your future?”

“O meu sonho … What I hope for … I hope to have a house, to help my mother, to not wake up floating facedown in the river.”

Zo had come to see herself not merely as an intelligence gatherer but also as representative of something like an extractive industry-a world of researchers, journalists, students, and do-gooders all wanting to test theories, advance hypotheses, or simply add a gloss of immediacy and human pathos to otherwise distant arguments. She had led a double existence: during the days in alleys that smelled of human waste and where squalid dogs napped fitfully, at night protected from the insects, the dirt, the smells of a decaying city. When she would return to her rented apartment each evening before sitting to write her field notes, she would take long showers.

Like a doctor steeled to the suffering of his patients, she had maintained an emotional distance from the street children, feeling more, feeling less for different ones but always with the safety that comes with thinking that she, in any case, could do little for them. You have that option when the odds are overwhelming, when you know that if you buy lunch for a girl she will be hungry again in a few hours and that while you can buy lunch for this one, you cannot do it for all of the dozen or so children sniffing glue on the corner; or suppose you could-it isn’t so difficult-you still won’t be doing anything to dampen the hunger of their siblings, cousins, mothers, and grandparents. There is safety in numbers, overwhelming numbers of hungry, ill, abused, abusive children, entire favelas inundated by the tide of a contaminated river, a rain and wind so violent that not one shack fails to leak, countless mothers unable to afford milk let alone the pills that will kill the parasites in their children’s distended bellies. When this is what one sees everywhere, one can come to live, if not with indifference, at least with the reassurance of knowing that all of this is larger than the possibilities of the individual. It was that reassurance that failed Zo one day when she saw a boy crouched at the foot of what had been the front steps of an abandoned house not two blocks from her apartment. A bewildered head of thick black hair contained his gaze.

But she could see plainly, and perhaps on that day she was looking with a different set of eyes, eyes reserved for empathy rather than study, eyes that shelter rather than scrutinize. A stray dog (the outline of ribs visible beneath thinning fur) was curled up near the boy. Everywhere there are street children, you will find street dogs.

In the collected sand, dust, and dirt of what had been a patio, the boy was drawing with a finger: the contours of a woman whose simple beauty was as fleeting as the life of a waif.

“It’s a woman,” he murmured in a tiny voice, as Zo bent over to look.

“She is a beautiful woman.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Does she have a name?”

“Iemenj.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to draw goddesses.”

“You can, you just can’t show their faces.”

“Would you like to draw her on paper?”

“No,” he said, “but I’ll draw something else.” Zo removed a sheet from her notebook and gave him a pen. For a long time, the boy looked at the piece of paper in silence. Then, with distant concentration, he sketched a woman with what looked like an ancient Egyptian hairdo. She wore a dress with shoulder pads extending far beyond her body, and a sinuous cutout revealed parts of her belly. Next to the figure there appeared two amplified sketches of the dress, from the front and the back.

“I would like to wear this,” Zo said truthfully.

“I would too,” the boy said, smiling.

“What’s your name?”

“Beto.” He looked up. His irises were many shades of brown, and his pupils reflected Zo.

“Beto … Beto, I think you could be a fashion designer,” she said. Then she wondered if he would know what that was.

“That’s what Arruda Jnior told me.”

“Who?”

“A man who makes clothing for rich people. He saw me in the street once, in the city, outside his studio. He gave me a piece of fried chicken and said I should be a designer.”

The boy had small fingers. He was small in every way. Nine years old? She still found it impossible to judge the ages of the children she encountered. On the one hand, their sizes always seemed impossibly diminutive for their purported ages-children ten years old, impish, who scarcely reached her waist. On the other, their eyes would often betray a sort of world-weariness that might appear long before the first signs of puberty. She later learned that he was twelve.

At one point the boy turned to her and said, “You don’t know how to speak our tongue?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know how to speak our tongue?”

“Isn’t that what I’m speaking?”

The boy, who had evidently never heard someone speak with an accent, looked puzzled.

“I’m speaking your tongue, only I don’t speak it as well as you do,” she smiled. “Where is your house?”

“Bomba de Hemetrio,” he said.

“That’s far.”

“Usually I am in the city, but I am here now.”

“Why aren’t you at home?” she said, regretting the words as soon as she had said them.

“Because I want to be here.”

She knew he was lying, and that was enough. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to be in the street. Zo was certain of that.

There are different ways of falling in love, she knew. You can fall in love with a person and you can fall in love with the idea of a person. Zo had fallen in love with the idea of a boy, of this boy: the idea of Beto as a son.

She had returned home that afternoon thinking only of him. She wondered to herself what would lead a parent to allow a child like that to live in the street.

Over the weeks that followed, she had sought him out regularly. She gave him a box of chalk so he could draw on the crumbling walls of the abandoned house. Usually, if she was persistent, she could find him. He might be a few blocks away staring at the dresses in shop windows. Other times he was watching the bathers at the beach, wandering slowly. Still other times she would find not him but his drawings. On the walls of the old house she might see the image of a woman with flowing hair standing on a street corner. Often Zo would have food with her-milk, rolls, or sandwiches, a yoghurt or a piece of fruit. When she managed to find him, they would stroll together or she would sit down next to him and they would play checkers, or she would watch him draw. He never asked why she visited him, where she came from, why she seemed to have no place of work to go to. He was a child who observed everything but asked nothing. Quietly, as if he were trying to hear her thoughts, he took note of the way she waxed her legs only to the knees, how she rarely wore make-up, that she bought yoghurt in plastic containers as casually as if it were a loaf of day-old bread. He watched to see what would prompt her to take out her pen and scribble a note.

She once found him at the beach wearing a filthy T-shirt and it struck her that she should ask him to let her take it to her apartment and wash it. Puzzled, he said he didn’t mind it being dirty.

A friend who worked with street children and knew Bomba de Hemetrio had promised to go to Beto’s house, to speak with the boy’s parents. But the meeting never took place, and Zo didn’t pursue it. Another idea was quickening in her mind. Salvation is a form of creation. She wanted to save the boy.

For months, she thought about what it would be like if Beto were her son. There were a lot of practical details to consider. Would his parents, if they could be found, give him up for adoption, or would they rather see their child living in the street than surrender their claim to paternity? She would need a lawyer and an abundance of patience. But most of all, she thought about what it would be like for him to have a mother who loved him, a mother who had chosen him rather than acquired him through the accident of birth. She felt she could no longer hide behind the notion of her own impotence.

That, as she saw it, was why she decided to invite him to her apartment one day. He was amazed by the elevator, because he had never been inside one, and by the heated shower, because he didn’t know they existed. He showered for the better part of an hour and then put on one of Zo’s T-shirts.

She had prepared lunch in the meantime. The idea of an avocado in a sandwich was strangely repellent to the boy. She had forgotten that in Brazil an avocado is a dessert if mixed with condensed milk and frozen. But he liked the fried cheese and the strawberry yoghurt. After drawing for a while, he fell asleep in a hammock on the terrace and as the afternoon sky grew darker Zo sat there with no idea what to do, either with the boy or with the sort of love she felt for him.

The immediate problem was whether to allow him to sleep there all night or to wake him up and send him back down to the street. What would the neighbors think? she had wondered. A foreign woman alone, that was enough. A barefoot boy spending the night in her apartment was beyond the pale. Would they leave the building on the main elevator or the service elevator? Would they take her for a pedophile?

When the sun was only a sliver over the sea, she wakened him and said that she must leave for an appointment. He offered no sign of surprise that she was sending him back to the street. Later she would have him come again. On the next visit she discovered the lice in his hair. She left him alone in the kitchen as she went down to the corner pharmacy to buy some special shampoo.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from AFTER LIFEby TOBIAS HECHT Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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