a time, which usually means wandering from neighbor to cousin,
aunt to neighbor. Grandmothers rarely take up the slack; how could
they? Many are barely out of their thirties, with their own young
children to care for.
Women are abused, as well. Sometimes they fail their children
because they fear for their own lives. Such was the claim of Ana, the
prisoner-maid, who’d stood by while her eight-year-old daughter was
raped by the girl’s father. When an older son reported the rape, Ana
was arrested, taken from her riverside shack to the prison in Alto
Paraíso, and barred from access to her children. There was no
women’s prison, so she slept on the floor of the prison kitchen. Since
Bona Espero had educated some of Ana’s children, a social worker
phoned Ursula and proposed that Ana serve her sentence as a maid
at Bona Espero. Ursula gave her customary reply: she would try it. It
seems to be working, though Ursula has had to teach her how to
clean a toilet and wash a window, since Ana had never lived with
either. While Ursula is not permitted to pay Ana, she pays a monthly
sum into a pension for her; together, they opened the first bank
account Ana has ever had.
* * *
Any hour of the day, Ursula looks as if she’s en route to a swanky
French restaurant for lunch. This morning, sitting in her book-lined
salon, she’s in a two-piece, flowing cream-and-blue ensemble, her
hair in a blond upsweep, not a strand out of place. She’s ready to
start the interview, smiling, her hands clasped as if she were a sign-
language interpreter awaiting my first sentence.
I’m a little nervous. I haven’t spoken Esperanto much lately, so
I’ve prepared my opener. “Most people use Esperanto as a bridge
between cultures, but here you’re teaching Esperantist values to
kids. What are they, and how do you teach them?”
Her hands become windshield wipers, sweeping aside my
question.
“Esperanto,” she says, “is for people who aren’t hungry. For
educated, literate, comfortable people. One percent of the world’s
people live this way. What we deal with here are basic problems:
hunger and illiteracy. Every person is entitled to dignity and civility,
and Esperanto is a tool for us. What we do here, we do through
Esperanto; it’s not our goal.”
This is a little pat, and she feels it herself, starting over. “After
World War II, we were people who wanted peace,” she says, “and
we were pursuing peace through Esperanto. These were hard days in
Berlin. But we were living in the American sector, in love with
American culture, watching American movies, listening to American
music; we were colonized by the American soldiers. When they
offered free Esperanto classes at the American culture house, I took
two courses at once and was fluent within three months. Esperanto
was my passion,” she says, warming to her subject. “My father
wouldn’t let me go out dancing, but I hitchhiked in 1956 all the way
to Italy to the Esperanto encampment Giuseppe organized. All day I
worked as a secretary at a department store; at night I was trying to
finish high school. All my money went to feed my mother and
siblings, and everything there was to eat I had to divide into seven
parts. I had only my clothes,” she says, tugging at the shoulders of
her dress, “nothing else.” Her engagement photo, she tells me, shows
her in a dress donated by an alumna of her Franciscan high school,
an older Jewish girl who had escaped to England on the
Kindertransport. When Ursula learned the origin of the dress, she
wrote to her benefactor to thank her. Twenty years later they met in
New York, and they’ve been friends ever since.
Ursula doesn’t forget much.
Yesterday, on the long drive from Brasília, she had rattled off the
goals of Bona Espero: First, to live off the land, with pure air and
clean water, “which you’ll be drinking krane”—from the tap. (“Don’t
worry,” she added, “we’ve tested it and it has never made anyone
sick.”) Second, they are there to help the local community. Third,
they are there to be a bridge between rich and poor, via the world of
Esperanto. It’s a mission statement, ready for recitation at any time.
But this morning her tone is more confessional. “Esperanto is not
really why we came here. We all have motives for what we do. I was
forty years old with a family, two kids in good schools, a good job,
pouring myself into Esperanto and it came to me, this uneasiness,
this distaste for materialism, this desire to do more. There must be
something else, some other way.” She’s singing in the key of midlife
crisis, a tune I recognize.
“People look outside themselves,” she says, leaning close to me on
her elbow, “and some turn to religion. Brazil is a supermarket of
religions: Catholicism, spiritualism, magical cults—and everyone is
shopping. I’ll take this religion, and that one, and that one.
Religions all promise to connect you, they know that much.” She
looks me up and down as if to ensure that the next pearl will not be
wasted. “But perturbation of spirit leads to spiritual evolution.
“Everyone is searching for something,” she continues, searching
my face. “Look around you, at Paulo, at Sebastian. Even you,
coming here, all by yourself.”
Is she fishing for information? Or can she read it in my eyes?
“I’m … in transition,” I said, transition from weeping daily
(sometimes most of the day) to weeping every other day. Here in
Brazil, I’d left behind, in a rented apartment on a man-made lake,
the few things I’d taken from my marriage of nearly thirty years—a
crate of majolica dishes, a drawing of Bologna, photos of the kids.
And, to save my life, left behind the man I thought I’d give my life
for—kind Leo; funny, brilliant Leo—back in Princeton, bewildered,
grieving.
“Your marriage,” she says without hesitation, though we’ve never
discussed it.
“Yes, my marriage … especially here, I sometimes forget I’m
alone now, and it whacks me from behind.”
“So your hands are empty,” she says, stipulating a fact. “How are
you doing?”
“Tago post tago”—it’s day by day.
Tears are welling up; I’ve said all I’m going to say, for now.
She goes to the bookcase and returns with an English-language
paperback called The Subterranean Gods. “Do you read science
fiction? There’s a novel by Cristovam Buarque—a Brazilian senator!
—that accounts for it all. God creates human beings, but an era of
disasters leads them to go underground. So they have to create
substitutes for themselves: androjdoj. And these androids, they’re
coarse, imperfect, dim, dense. They bumble around the earth, they
don’t get what they’re doing there, they don’t get one another, they
don’t get anything.
“And they’re us. Androids, that’s all we are.” So that’s why I’ve
been numb since November, stumbling through errands, not
returning calls. I’m not really human at all.
She pauses, then resumes. “And given that we are androids, what
is amazing is that my husband and I both felt it at the same time, the