around and do nothing!” she tells them, locking each one’s gaze, in
turn. “What makes people happy is to produce and take initiative!
Otherwise, people turn to bad ways.” She pauses for effect. “Every
night 137 people are killed in São Paulo and Rio. But here in Alto
Paraíso there is peace.”
These kids know both too little and too much. They don’t know
how to read a thermometer or type on a laptop. They don’t know
about Facebook or Wikipedia or trigonometry. They can find Goiás
on a map, but not the United States, and some, at eleven or twelve,
can barely capture a few consonants during dictation. They do know
how to avoid beatings and rape, how to visit someone in jail, how to
sleep on a floor, and how to hustle a few reals for cane juice. And
they know, with varying degrees of competence, Esperanto.
After the kids run off, Ursula invites me to stay for tea. I’m about
to comment that most geography lessons don’t include murder
statistics; instead I say, “I had a strange dream last night.” From
where, this impulse to tell her my dream?
“I was walking through a parking lot at night and saw our two
family cars parked next to each other. As I was walking toward
them, they each pulled away in separate directions. I just stood there
on the asphalt, in the dark, orphaned.”
Shrink-like, she nods her head gravely, indicating for me to go on.
“It’s these kids, abandoned by mothers, fathers, grandmothers,
aunts … so many ways of being orphaned. Now I’m dreaming that
I’m the orphan.”
“Your marriage,” she says, gently slipping in the corner piece of
the puzzle.
I thought I’d left my marriage, but no; a husband and wife have
died, leaving a middle-aged orphan in care of the night.
5. Tia Carla
“Tia Carla” (pronounced “Chia Carla”) is a petite forty-year-old with
a pretty-mom smile, but when disapproval darkens her eyes and
dissolves the smile, her grave beauty emerges. To the children, she is
all-seeing and all-knowing. She puts them through their daily chores
—showering, sweeping their rooms, checking the rice for stones,
stacking dishes in the dishwasher—and prepares their breakfast and
lunch. Then, promptly at 1:00 p.m., when they’ve donned their
green-and-yellow uniforms and lined up outside the classroom in
four neat columns, she miraculously morphs into their schoolteacher,
leading them in a daily prayer (“We thank you, God, for our school
and our teacher”), and running them through five hours of spelling,
grammar, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Weekends, she takes
them hiking, and in the evening shows videos and makes them
popcorn. At night she sleeps under the same roof, and on their
birthdays, she bakes them cakes. To each child, she is like a birthday,
precious and rare, and somehow, yours.
Ursula, sitting on her veranda beside a climbing pink rosebush,
tells me how Carla came to Bona Espero. Thirty-three years ago, on
Ursula’s forty-first birthday, a small girl was handed to her through
the open window of the Jeep. The child wasted no time to announce
that she was hungry.
“‘What did you eat today?’ I asked. The child: ‘Nothing.’ ‘For
breakfast?’ I asked. ‘Nothing to have for breakfast.’ ‘For lunch?’
“Nothing to have for lunch.’ She broke my heart.” Ursula imitates
the frightened child shaking her head to each question. Her eyes are
moist, and I’m not sure whether these are the child’s tears or hers.
Back at Bona Espero, Carla clung to Ursula, unwilling to let her
last, best chance at survival out of sight. From the start, the child
showed a commanding intelligence; she quickly became fluent in
Esperanto, traveling with the Grattapaglias to congresses in Brazil
and abroad. When it came time for secondary school, she was sent,
along with Guido Grattapaglia, to an agricultural high school in
Brasília. Among the legends of Bona Espero recorded by Dobryzyński
is the story of Carla and the sow. Giuseppe, who had raised the sow
from pigletcy, couldn’t bear to slaughter it. But seventeen-year-old
Carla, barely five feet tall, announced that she had just recently
learned how to slaughter a pig. Without further ado, she plunged a
butcher’s knife into the pig’s heart.
Two years later, Carla was one of eighteen teachers in the state
accepted for an accelerated, on-the-job training course to earn her
teaching certification. Bona Espero paid her tuition. Every Friday
the teachers were bused about two hundred miles to Formosa, where
they studied all weekend and slept on the floor, six to a room. And
twenty years later, thanks to some distance learning, she’s about to
complete a master’s degree in educational psychology.
What else she might have accomplished, had she not become a
single mother at twenty-five, is anyone’s guess. Pregnant and
unmarried, she did the only logical thing: stayed at Bona Espero to
raise her son. Nestor is now a fifteen-year-old, slim, smart, and boy-
band handsome, who attends the high school in Alto Paraíso. Several
afternoons a week, shuttled home on a worker’s motorbike, he’s
Carla’s teaching assistant, checking the kids’ classwork, keeping
them on task. In the evening, when he’s not doing physics
homework, he puts on Raven-Symoné CDs and dances hip-hop with
the kids. On the dance floor, at dinner, on the trail that runs in the
shadow of Whale Mountain, Nestor becomes the eldest of fifteen
children. If Carla is their world’s axis, the dashing Nestor gives it
some tilt. Not everyone wants to go to high school in Alto Paraíso
and then to university to study journalism. But everyone wants to be
Nestor.
* * *
In 1976, Giuseppe, Ursula, and three other Bona Espero teachers
began to volunteer, in a sort of teacher tag team, to teach
elementary school in the town of Alto Paraíso. Five years later,
Giuseppe was refused teacher certification on the ground that he
was not a Brazilian citizen. According to Dobrzyński, Giuseppe was
asked for proof of military service, to which he replied that he was
an Italian citizen; months later, he was asked if he’d voted in the
last national election, to which he replied that he was an Italian
citizen. Then one day a car pulled up to Bona Espero with
commissioners from the Labor Ministry demanding to know where
the charcoal furnaces were. They were combing the entire charcoal-
producing region to find infractions of the child labor laws. When
they were told—and shown—that Bona Espero does not produce
charcoal, the inspectors came up with another infraction to report:
the children were rinsing dishes.
The Grattapaglias knew they were being targeted; how could they
teach the core values of family life without expecting children to
help with daily chores? This conflict with the authorities had that
blend of absurdity, opacity, and menace that is called, in other
hemispheres, Kafkaesque. Ursula spent the better part of a day
driving to Brasília, where she met with officials in the Labor
Ministry. The examiners, she was told, had reported that since