TRAVEL/MEMOIR

A Piece of My Childhood in Brazil

Looking back on Natal, and what’s changed since we called it home

Photo by Kelly Repreza on Unsplash

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

We moved to Natal, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil, when I was still an only child. My father worked as a public health dentist, and in those first years we lived in an apartment. Looking back, that stretch of time carried an unremarkable safety to it.

My sister arrived a couple of years later, and soon after, we moved into a house with three bedrooms and one bathroom, roomy enough for our growing family. The backyard was poured concrete rather than grass, plain and practical. Behind it stood a small set of maid’s quarters, its own little bedroom and bathroom set apart from the main house.

I went to a local school for half the day and picked up Portuguese quickly enough that I began thinking in it without noticing the shift. A tutor came by daily as well, a sweet young Brazilian girl who helped me with my homework. In the afternoons, my mother worked me through an American correspondence course so my English wouldn’t slip. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we always understood we’d move back to the States eventually.

Life beyond school moved at its own unhurried pace. Strong little cups of coffee, light suppers, afternoon siestas — the day seemed to arrange itself around rest rather than rush. People were warm, and every Sunday our family went to the beach together, often stopping for ice cream on the way back.

I grew fond of the Brazilian soap operas during those years, too, and read plenty of comic books besides. The novelas had an advantage over their American counterparts, which run on for years — the Brazilian ones wrapped up in a matter of months, so there was always a new one to follow.

Tailoring was inexpensive there, so instead of buying dresses off a rack, my sister and I wore ones stitched just for us by seamstresses my mother came to know well. The weather stayed warm enough that there was rarely a reason not to wear them.

My mother also learned to cook Brazilian dishes during those years, feijoada among them, and it’s still a meal our family makes today.

Every so often a circus passed through our small town, a different one each time, and we never missed it. It’s one of those small pleasures that outlasted most of the finer details in memory.

Living there also meant seeing more of the country. We traveled to Rio, São Paulo, Recife, and Fortaleza, and I remember standing at the base of Christ the Redeemer, looking down over Rio from that height.

In our last couple of years there, something in the air began to change. Friends of my parents started giving up their rental houses for apartments instead, trading space for a sense of security houses no longer seemed to offer. The streets near the beach weren’t the same after dark, not the way they’d been when people once walked them freely.

I still take note of what I hear about safety in Brazil now, and it saddens me to think of it appearing on lists of the world’s most dangerous countries. A few years ago, my husband traveled to Rio for work, and his group had security with them at all times, never allowed to wander off on their own. Around the same time, my sister’s friend visited Rio on holiday and came home saying she hadn’t encountered any trouble at all.

Two entirely different experiences of the same city — a reminder that safety in Brazil seems to hinge on where you are, who you’re with, and sometimes plain luck. I hold only good memories of growing up there, and I carry them still, even knowing how much the place has changed.

Did any of you live abroad as a kid in a place that changed dramatically after you left? How did you make peace with that gap between the place you remember and the place it’s become?

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