The first book I ever loved was called The World. It was a 1986 political atlas I used to read on the bus from school, captivating the imagination of this skinny, blond Brazilian kid, too tanned for his own good, and with zero prospects of ever visiting anything outside Rio de Janeiro. I was ten, maybe nine years old when I began to read ‘South America’ (the names were easier), before reaching ‘Africa’, ‘Europe’, and the lands of Stan. By 1988, when Rambo was killing Russians in Afghanistan, I was killing consonants in Kyrgyzstan.
We lived in Niterói, once the capital of Rio, which was once the capital of the country and – because Napoleon had a map too – the capital of the Portuguese Empire. If it weren’t for a Tupi Indian chief, who in the 16th century helped the invaders expel other invaders, my atlas would have been in French.
‘This is Araribóia, son,’ Mother told me when I first saw the big statue of the native who denied Rio from becoming a tropical Quebec (or Conakry). With arms crossed on ample chest, he stood by the ferry terminal, facing the Guanabara Bay and wearing nothing but a loincloth and a cross – sex and pagan soul duly covered in the carnal land of carnival.
To see Araribóia’s back meant I was only two stops away from home, unless shirtless trombadinhas entered and robbed everyone at gunpoint. Last time this happened they didn’t care so much for my atlas as they did for my brand-new Reeboks. Mother wished otherwise, so I started to ride the bus barefoot, hiding my sneakers under the seat. My camembert feet were my contribution to the mix from armpits, cheap cologne, and exhaust pipes, sometimes topped with a whiff of feijoada. It takes art to see the world in a pressure cooker on wheels, and bean stew will always leak from the tightest Tupperware, leaving you either sick or hungry. To this day, Patagonia smells like bacon.
At each major stop the bus would deflate and inflate like an asthmatic lung, hissing loads of passengers on and off through the pneumatic doors. It stopped by the Plaza, where E.T. had taught me how to use the phone; the sandy Icaraí Beach, where topless mulatas had played with my six-year-old curls, before Mother slapped my six-year-old butt for wandering off; and the local prison, where Father was paying his debt to a society we didn’t belong to, as we never got any cheques. This last stop was like a Checkpoint Charlie and I could never cross. The world on paper, however, had no walls, no borders, no barbed wires I couldn’t cross with my fingers. It was more diverse, more colourful, and safer than the world that encircled me. But that world was not bound to last. By the time I learned how to say Ljubljana, its country had ceased to exist. And while The Wall blasted on my Walkman another wall came down, making countless obsolete maps and obsolete people overnight.
* * *
Despite the fated inaccuracy of my atlas, it soon aroused the curiosity of other commuters. I had Italian immigrants asking to see Sicily or Naples; some baker’s daughter pointing at the backwater village where her Portuguese grandad was born.
‘Where’s this Chernobyl, anyway?’ a man standing in a monkey suit asked me once.
‘Here,’ I said.
‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘It’s far enough.’ Too bad his booze breath wasn’t far enough away from me.
Of all the pregnant ladies I had to give my seat to, only one ever looked at my atlas. Her belly was as round as a globe, and her skin was so dark that she emitted blue like a neon sign. She talked about history I didn’t learn in History class: Haile Selassie, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko. And she had this big afro, always trimmed and tidy, except for the day she wore sunglasses during the whole trip, even though it was cloudy and rainy. Her hair was messy that day.
Cartography is not for everyone. I never saw a mappa mundi or a chart next to the posters of Kiss and Madonna in my older sister’s bedroom. And in those late eighties, my three little brothers were as young as the new Brazilian Constitution. Others, like my piano tutor, avoided maps altogether. Dona Hella was a small, delicate German old lady who lived alone in the most flowery apartment I’ve ever seen, full of begonias, lady palms, and money plants that worked hard to synthesise the nicotine she puffed continuously. She liked Mother very much, and I always thought she was extremely rich, for she never charged for the lessons. She never talked about her past either, and Mother suspected that Dona Hella had been in a concentration camp before moving to Brazil. One day I saw her gazing at my atlas, as it peeked out of my backpack. I asked her if she wanted to see it.
‘Nein, mein Lieber,’ she said to me. ‘The world I hoped for is not there.’
* * *
‘If you could choose,’ a postman with the beard and hair of Jesus asked me once, ‘in which country would you live?’
While I thought hard on it, others around me voiced their choices: Paris, Venice, Rome, London. Nobody on that bus seemed to know what a country was. America got the most votes, and I knew they only meant the America that speaks English. Finally, I pointed at the huge, red territory that occupied four folded pages of my atlas.
‘Russia?!’ said Postman Jesus.
‘Its name is not Russia,’ I said. ‘It’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.’
‘Why would you want to live there?’ he said.
I shrugged. I guess I only picked the U.S.S.R. because no one else did. In my mind, anything would be better than Brazil.
‘Perestroika!’ someone shouted behind me. Everyone laughed.
‘Perestroika… glasnost… Gorbachev… these are signs of change,’ said a lady teacher from my school a few seats in front of me.
‘Russia is like bear,’ the driver threw in between gears. ‘You cannot change bear nature.’ He had a foreign accent I hadn’t noticed before, or perhaps it was the way he talked under the horns and the sirens.
A political argument erupted, with pro- and anti-Russian rants flying around like nukes in some Armageddon simulation. I couldn’t keep up, and I was glad when my stop came on. Suddenly, there was a crazed Ayrton Senna behind the wheel. He was right about one thing, though. Russia is a bear, one that has hibernated for thirty years. Now the bear is awake, and it’s very hungry.
A few days later, Mother dropped the bomb: we were moving to Portugal. She would go first to settle and save money to send for us. For a few months, we stayed with relatives, the name you give to family you don’t really care about. Meanwhile, I studied the map of Portugal during my last bus rides in Niterói. It wasn’t hard, considering that Portugal is about ninety times smaller than Brazil. On 18 November 1988, my brothers and I arrived in Lisbon. The highway we took to our new home was not on my atlas, but it was as smooth as paper.
* * *
Thirty-five years later, on the last day of 2023, I set foot in Rio for the first time since I left. I didn’t go there because I planned to. It just happened that the ship I worked on as a musician had stopped there. I didn’t go to Niterói either, I saw it from a safe distance, by the foot of the Redeemer that overlooks the Guanabara Bay with open arms. I was a tourist in my own birthplace. Surrounded by hundreds of other tourists, I googled Araribóia’s statue. It was still down there, with arms crossed on ample chest, and I thought it should be him at the top of the Corcovado.
On that same day, by the cruise terminal, I met a ‘relative’ who gave me a piece from a dreamer boy’s past: a letter I’d written to Mother when she was alone in Portugal. She’d never got it. It had been returned because I had miswritten the address.
Niterói, 6 October 1988
Dear Mother,
I’m dying of saudades and I know that you are too. I’m studying very hard. I got a 10 in Portuguese, 8,5 in Science, and 7 in English. I don’t cry because I know you are doing this for our happiness, and so that we can have a better life. Here in Brazil you worked too hard and earned very little. Are you looking after yourself? Have you got another job and another house for us? I can’t wait to go and live there with you. I want you to know that with the money I’ve been saving I’m going to buy toys for my brothers on Children’s Day.
Hugs and kisses from your beloved son.
I didn’t tell her I’d failed in Geography.
Alessandro Devillart
A musician and aspiring writer from Portugal, Alessandro has spent over fifteen years as a drummer and bandleader, performing aboard prestigious cruise lines such as Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises.
He is currently pursuing a BA in Creative Writing and Classical Studies through The Open University in London. Writing in both English and Portuguese, he often finds himself deliberating over pronunciation in both languages, embracing the quirks and challenges of bilingual expression.
At home, Alessandro shares his space with two cacti, affectionately named Spiky Lee and Thorny Bennett, and occasionally ponders whether ‘cactuses’ might have been the better choice.
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