native Spanish-speakers, but he’s fluent in English, so we mix it up.
These days, he’s chanting Sanskrit instead of singing Esperanto,
wondering how to make a living at this: mantras for pesos. In the
affluent neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, as in Park Slope or Pacific
Heights, the ratio of well-heeled women to yoga mats is about one to
one. He’s planning to record his mantras, then sell his CDs at yoga
classes, where he’ll perform for donations. Five times a day, while
Paulo is “canalizing” energy in the fields, Sebastian repeats one
hundred and eight sets of mantras, one for every channel of the
body. With a long track record of New Age pursuits, including
Gurdjieff groups, Kundalini yoga, and EFT (Emotional Freedom
Technique), Sebastian is what my father would have called a
“seeker,” my mother a luftmensch.
When I ask Sebastian if I can hear some of his music, he’s aloof.
“Sure,” he says coolly, “later on, this evening.” I’m expecting an
invitation to his cabin, but instead, he hands over a thumb drive
containing his three Esperanto CDs and 493 other Brazilian songs.
That evening I start with Sebastian’s ear-candy make-out songs with
titles like “Tuj” (Immediately) and “Ador” (Adoration); then the
soaring paeans about world peace; finally, thumping techno beats
about clones, druids, and penguins. One of his songs, written for
rank beginners, is posted on the lernu! website. It’s probably the
first breakup song ever with no direct objects; it’s certainly the
sexiest:
Jen la suno, jen la luno
Jen du malsamaj astroj
Jen vikingo, jen urbano
Jen la plej malsamaj homoj
Jen vi kaj mi, akvo kaj oleo
Here’s the sun, here’s the moon,
Here are two different stars
Here’s a viking, here’s a city-guy
Here are two different people
Here are you and me, water and oil
The next evening I hand the thumb drive back to him and invite
myself over to his cabin.
“The telenovela isn’t over till eight fifteen,” he says indifferently.
“So I’ll come at eight thirty.” His shrug says, “Suit yourself.” We’re
the only two unattached adults for miles around, if you don’t count
the ayahuasca addicts, and I can wait out his telenovela habit.
I do, and for the next two weeks, we spend the evenings together,
singing, alone and in harmony, and listening—to Esperanto
Desperado, Morphine, Cyndi Lauper, Ravi Shankar. We snack on my
dwindling supply of raisins from Target and drink passion-fruit juice
from his miksilo (blender). Sometimes Samba comes to the door, and
Sebastian, in a weird falsetto, cries “Sambacita!” and swings the door
open. Samba quivers, knowing it’s verboten to go inside, but
Sebastian coaxes her in and calms her with mantras. We end every
evening standing under the night sky amid his pineapple plants,
counting shooting stars and laughing giddily. Then he walks me
chastely back to the guesthouse, our flashlights scanning the brush
for snakes.
* * *
“Could you see living here, in Bona Espero?”
It’s a Wednesday morning, and Sebastian is showing me what’s
left of the arbidoj, five hundred tiny seedlings planted in 2008 during
the UN’s International Year of Planet Earth. Only half of them took;
those that didn’t have left dark spaces among the two-foot trees, like
missing teeth. “It’s beautiful here, and the climate’s much too cold
for parasites; you’ll sooner die of boredom than bacteria. But live
here? No. I don’t have money and I don’t have a woman. Don’t
misunderstand,” he adds quickly. “If I needed a woman to cure me
of loneliness, I’d be in a lot of trouble. You can’t expect another
person to solve your loneliness.” The advice hits hard.
“Lately I’m spending a lot of time alone,” I say, “since I separated
from my husband, and—”
“Where is he, your ex?” he asks.
I’m taken aback. “My ex? No!—He’s still my husband.”
He wasn’t expecting to step on a mine. “Well, sorry!” he says,
rolling his eyes.
“No, I’m sorry, but you’re the first person ever to do that, turn my
husband into an ex. Have you ever been married?”
“No, but maybe I’m ready to get married now,” he says drily,
“because I don’t give a shit about anything.”
It’s funnier than it would have been a year ago. “Oh, I get it.
You’re the ideal husband?”
“Well,” he says, “maybe I’ve never been married, but I know one
important thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Love always pays.”
9. Mosaic of the Future
Scratch Ursula’s reasonable, world-weary veneer and you’ll find a
raving finavenkistino. “English is John the Baptist for Esperanto,” she
tells me. “Global English shows how sorely the world needs a
common language. Let’s face it, we Esperantists are pioneers, and
pioneers are always considered mad. When they invented the
electric bulb, people said, ‘That’s crazy, what will happen to the
candles?’ When they invented cars, people said, ‘That’s crazy, what
will happen to the horses?’ In the nineties someone said, ‘Soon you’ll
be able to send letters by wires,’ and people said, ‘That’s impossible!’
Technology is now making it possible for Esperanto to win; all we
lack are human minds and spirit. The question is, can people really
recognize what progress is? Esperanto is not a philosophy; it is a
stone in the mosaic of the future.” The awkward chips of white and
green on Zamenhof’s tomb, the five-pointed star: a mosaic of the
future, set by the hand of the past.
One thing about the future of Bona Espero is clear; it does not lie
in the hands of the Grattapaglias’ sons, who live in Brasília with
non-Esperantist wives and children fluent in Portuguese and Italian.
What it was like to cart two middle-class Italian teens off to rural
Brazil is a complicated story. Ursula has told what she’ll tell of it to
Dobrzyński: the ordeal of sending her two sons to school fifteen
hours away in Brasília, the nightly radio calls to check on them, the
monthly drives to see them. The nights she cried, missing them. This
much she’ll review with me, but no more. “Every family has its
drama,” she says, rising.
Giuseppe wants the story to end in a major key, more for his sake
than for mine. “They admire what we’ve done here, but they
suffered for it. On balance, it was good. We never had those
adolescent quarrels between parents and kids. When we saw them
each month, it was joyful. The experience of independence
strengthened them. And the opportunities in Brazil are vast. Their
friends in Italy have all had to settle for part-time jobs here and
there; it’s so hard to start a career there. But here everything has
been open to them. Take our son the plant geneticist. In Europe
there are forty trees, exhaustively studied. Here there are four
hundred trees, most of which have never been written about. He has
become a world expert on eucalyptus, he runs an institute that pairs