cabin on the premises. She’s a matronly woman with low-slung
breasts and a shuffling gait, probably a decade younger than she
looks. Her gentle, high-pitched sing-song doesn’t hint at the fact
that, while sweeping up after the kids of Bona Espero, she is serving
out a twenty-three-year prison sentence, without bars.
We’ll get back to her.
This evening, the kids sit at two long tables, as at every meal. The
adult table is set for five adults and four languages. Ursula,
Sebastian, Carla, and I speak Esperanto; Paulo and Giuseppe,
Italian; Carla, Paulo, and Sebastian, Portuguese; and Paulo and I,
English. Ursula and Giuseppe alternate among their three common
languages. On the highway, when someone changes lanes without
signaling, they yell out in Italian. They speak to the workers in
Portuguese. And at lunch, they wander from Italian to Portuguese
and back, until they finally hit Esperanto, the clear channel on the
dial.
When Sebastian enters the dining hall, five girls fall on his arms
—“Se-bas-ti-an!”—begging him to sit with them. When I enter, one
small boy, Leandro, catches my eye—Esther! Esther!, he calls out,
patting the place next to him. I sit, humbly, but within a few
minutes they’ve all wolfed down everything on their plates and
shuttled over to the sinks.
The daily routine emerges quickly. A wild, kid-clanged bell calls
us to breakfast at eight: two slices of stiff flaxseed bread, one with
salami and one with mango marmalade. Then, for the kids, chores,
homework, lessons, and play; farmwork for Paulo, Sebastian, and
the laborers; food prep for Carla, who readies a substantial
vegetarian lunch for all, with the ubiquitous rice and beans. At about
twelve thirty p.m. a school bus arrives to disgorge another fifteen
children, town kids who will return to their families when school
ends at six. Around three there’s a break for lunch (Portuguese for
“snack”), and after the town kids board the bus, a simple supper of
soup or sweet rice with pumpkin. At seven thirty, with a modicum of
prodding by Carla, the kids clean up, shower, and go to bed
exhausted. Carla and Paulo watch DVDs in their apartment; Ursula
and Giuseppe watch CNN in their house. For the rest of us, the
plump night sky, with its brilliant constellations and shooting stars,
provides the sole entertainment. It is ravishing, the stars so close
you want to eat them.
But you can’t, and the nights are long.
2. Androids
Most Esperantists never visit Bona Espero, but they all know about
it. For the young and the venturesome it’s a place of pilgrimage,
since the Grattapaglias give volunteers room and board for up to six
months, sight unseen, hoping they won’t make nightly runs to the
taverns or hang out at the nearby ayahuasca commune. (Not a few
marriages have resulted from all this volunteering, and not a few
breakups.) But for the vast majority of Esperantists, Bona Espero is
a living, breathing embodiment of the myth that all Esperanto needs
is a little infrastructure and a lot of commitment and it can save the
world. Supported by Western European Esperantists (largely
Germans) who have full pockets if not deep ones, Bona Espero is the
one place on earth where Esperanto is an immovable feast, an
entire society, a way of life.
Immersed in the mythology of the place, armed with an invitation
from Ursula, whom I met in a noisy, crowded room in Białystok, I
came to Bona Espero with two misconceptions. First, I thought that
the children are raised bilingually, in Esperanto and Portuguese, but
this was not true. Sure, what with daily classes in conversation and
the ebb and flow of Esperanto-speaking volunteers, even the newer
kids can follow simple commands and utter a couple of gentle
insults (“Li estas freneza!”—“He’s crazy!”). At birthdays, they sing in
Portuguese, then Esperanto: “Feliĉan Naskiĝtagon al VIIIIII…” For
those who’ve been here longest, Esperanto is the kitchen language in
which they banter back and forth. But for most of Bona Espero’s
children, Esperanto is a language of tall, white transients, and a tool
for drawing wide smiles of approval from Ursula. In most cases,
when they leave Bona Espero, they leave Esperanto behind as well.
Second, I thought Bona Espero was an orphanage, but not one of
the current group of children is literally parentless. Most of the
“orphans” in fact come from fractured, improvised families. “The
real orphans are easier to deal with,” says Giuseppe. “Because when
these kids come back from home after the school breaks, we just
have to start all over with them. One July I offered a prize for
anyone who would collect garbage around their house and bury it in
a hole in the ground. When they came back, no one had done it.
Sure, a few tried, and their families said, ‘What is this craziness the
foreigners have put you up to?’” The Grattapaglias’ identity as
“foreigners” has become a pretext for all manner of accusation and
scapegoating; almost forty years since their arrival, it has still not
fully abated.
What the Grattapaglias have done at Bona Espero, foreigners or
not, is to take Esperanto to a destination undreamed of by its
maker. I do not mean Brazil; Zamenhof fully expected his lingvo
internacia to flourish in both South and North America. I mean that
Zamenhof, the patriarch of a large Jewish family, built Esperanto on
the foundation of family affections, which in the farms and towns of
rural Brazil are in short supply. Zamenhof’s vision for humanity was
“one great family circle” because he deemed the family a
fundamental source—even a guarantor—of fellow feeling among
people of different religions, ethnicities, nationalities, and races.
But where Zamenhof had seen enough light to infuse his vision of
world harmony, the Grattapaglias had found darkness, guilt, and
shame. Here in Brazil, for the eight million to ten million children
who fend for themselves in the streets, family affections are at best
fragile, at worst, betrayed and travestied. Ursula and Giuseppe have
found no end to the ways parents fail their children. Women often
have five, six, seven children with several different men, who tend
not to stick around to raise their kids. New boyfriends rarely
embrace their partner’s brood. Kids who get in the way of frustrated
parents, or who cross paths with a drunk adult, are beaten. Sexual
assault and abuse are rampant. Girls are raped by male relatives,
sometimes with such force that they require surgery; boys are raped
by boys a few inches taller, goading them to “play trains.”
Because those who should protect them are absent—in mind, in
body or both—boys of eleven and twelve accept protection from
drug dealers, who force them to commit crimes for which the dealers
would be jailed. These kids are proud of the risks they’ve taken—at
least, the ones who elude the juvenile justice system are proud. And
even when their parents are around, children are being deprived of
schooling and health care. Often they’re left on their own for days at