the land, mentioning the “Polish” creator of Esperanto, and soon
Czerwinski agreed to sell them five hundred hectares for a nominal
fee.In 1963, after Vellozo’s advertisements for a new Esperantic
farming colony fell on deaf ears, he struck a deal with the Brazilian
Justice Department. They designated Bona Espero a “custodial
institution” for delinquents, and followed each child with financial
support. By 1965, disputes over money drove Vellozo and Renato
Lemos apart, but the contretemps did not prevent Lemos from
marrying Vellozo’s daughter. Together the couple had full charge of
the community which, hand to mouth, and quite dystopically,
endured. When Giuseppe and Ursula arrived in 1974, Giuseppe
asked Lemos for financials. “Dear man,” replied Lemos, “we’re
family here!” Lemos—who, as Dobrzyński tells it, sold off his prized
entomological collection to fund the school—had no better aptitude
for management than did the other five Esperantist pioneers, four of
whom had since gone their separate ways.
However incompetent, Lemos remained until, a decade later, he
awoke to learn that three teenage boys had left during the night,
ridden horses to Alto Paraíso, and refused to return. One of the
three, age fourteen, told Ursula and Giuseppe that he had been
covertly having sexual relations with Lemos for upwards of a year.
Lemos initially denied the charge, but when detailed accounts from
several boys tallied, he confessed, claiming that he himself had been
abused as a child. Lemos’s considered suggestion was that he go off
for a month, have some much-needed dentistry, and resume his post.
He was summarily dismissed and the three boys were gradually sent
away.
A second scandal involved a young Esperantist from Brasília, a
hardworking civil servant whom the Grattapaglias had taken under
their wing. “Rosa Maxima,” as Dobrzyński calls her (at Ursula’s
request), traveled with them in 1980 to the Universal Congress in
Stockholm, after which she took up a volunteer post in the Central
Office in Rotterdam. Soon she wrote to Ursula that she and the
British UEA director, Victor Sadler, were in love. Ursula fantasized
that the two would become their successors at Bona Espero, but
when they arrived in early 1983, they surprised Ursula by asking for
separate quarters.
What followed next, Dobrzyński calls a “revolution”; Giuseppe, a
putsch. In a bid for control, Rosa proposed to liquidate the school
and transform Bona Espero, at long last, into a “true” Esperanto
center. The Grattapaglias barely prevailed against Rosa’s
manipulations of Bona Espero’s board of directors. Rosa avenged the
defeat by composing a diatribe accusing the Grattapaglias of beating
the children, exploiting their labor, and profiting from donations
intended to feed and clothe them. By the time Ursula and Giuseppe
read it, Rosa had already mailed the document (at the expense of the
Brazilian government) to three thousand Esperantists. It was a curse
in the form of a pamphlet, as quoted by Dobrzyński:
We now urge that the Fire of Truth consume every brick of
this lie that is Bona Espero, so that out of the cinders, the
only authentic ESPERANTISTS, those who live or sincerely
strive to live out the internal idea … reconstruct the new,
true Bona Espero and to make of it a lighthouse for the
world, a nucleus of this race and culture and ONE UNIQUE
BROTHERLY ESPERANTIST PEOPLE.
In a postscript, anticipating challenges, Rosa offered to have her
mental health certified. The Rosa Maxima scandal, like the Lemos
scandal, had no neat conclusion. Rosa’s rage eventually burned itself
out; Ursula and Giuseppe returned to welcome back the children
after their winter break and begin another school term. Periodically,
they still feel reverberations, to which they are resigned, as if the
echoes simply obtain in the physical laws of the universe. Reflecting
on the ordeal, Ursula quotes proverbs that are agnostic about the
balance of good and evil in the world—proverbs of endurance.
4. Paper Kids
In the dining hall, Leandro strums the opening bars of “Smoke on
the Water” on a guitar—“da da daaaa, da-da da-daaaaa”—over and
over again. When he arrived as an eight-year-old, he told Ursula:
“My mother is a whore.” This is not why he was taken from her.
Leandro was brought here because instead of sending him to school,
his mother had made him her receptionist. He opened the doors to
her clients, seated them until she was ready, and made small talk. I
could see why she’d asked him to do this: a delicate boy, eyes
glinting like schist, Leandro wore an air of authority, minus the
fringe of self-importance. In his three years here, there has been not
one phone call asking after his well-being.
His Esperanto’s strong, and it’s good practice for me to banter
with him. Last Saturday, during our three-mile hike to the waterfall,
he took my hand and asked, “Would you be my mother?” It’s like
being asked to be a summer girlfriend; we both know it’ll be nice
and then it will end. “Would you be my son?” I asked, and the deal
was struck. Today, when we set off for the same hike, I look about
for Leandro, but he’s nowhere to be found. Paulo explains that
Leandro’s being punished. He’d found a weasel in the meadow and
beaten it senseless with a two-by-four. When Carla had moved the
mauled animal deeper into the cerrado to live or die, Leandro went
back to finish the job.
Leandro, along with Clemente and Clemente’s half-brother
Edílson, are the companions of choice for eight-year-old Rafael.
Rafael has a round head of curly hair and saucer-eyes that roll
around to comic effect; with a floppy coat and a horn he’d be a
Brazilian Harpo Marx. He clowns for the big boys and ingratiates
himself by doing their bidding. Halfway through today’s hike, Carla
notices that Rafael is struggling with a heavy backpack. This is odd;
usually Bona Espero’s kids bring nothing but hats—no towels, water
bottles, sunscreen, bug spray, Baggies of grapes, or smartphones.
Carla asks Rafael what he’s carrying and he shrugs: “I’m not sure,
it’s Clemente’s and Edílson’s stuff.” Carla frowns and points to the
dirt; he swiftly dumps the backpack and walks on, knowing Carla
will send his taskmasters back to retrieve it. She does, and we don’t
wait up for them.
Left to right: The author, Ursula and Giuseppe Grattapaglia, Bona Espero staff and children,
2008
[Esther Schor]
Rafael likes to play with Toys That do Significant Things:
yesterday, a bow and arrow he fashioned from bamboo; today, a
tiny plastic tow truck whose string he unwinds to retrieve pods and
seeds. When I let him play with my laptop—a first for him—he
swiftly masters the space bar, shift key, backspace, and delete, then
types the numbers from 1 to 157, leaving off at the peal of the lunch
bell. The next time I let the kids take turns with my laptop, he shows
up with plastic headphones—who knows where they came from—