We did not yet speak English. Little brother would walk out of pre-school so often the police knew him by name. A teacher with rudimentary French tried to lend me a hand on my first day, and maybe I said something, or maybe I stayed quiet, but whatever I did justified the class punishment: a refrigerator box with a little square cutout in front was slipped over my desk. I was left staring at the blondest head I’d ever seen. Green snot ran down his nose and his tongue creeped out to catch it. First grade would introduce me to a new and unfathomable culture of burping in public and talking about farts.
Soon after, my first childhood boyfriend, also blond, would gift me jewelry that belonged to his mother. When the adults figured it out I was made to return all of the treasures, except for a golden anchor pin that I still have to this day. I don’t wear this American anchor, but it has somehow traveled with me.
Back in the US as a graduate student in my twenties, I reclaim this memory in a short animated video of a refrigerator box moving through the opaque hallways of my university. A new blond American boyfriend would help me figure out the cultural shift as best he could, and I have since wondered in amusement if a blond-American fetish nestled in my psyche when I was in that box.
This time around I knew English, but it wouldn’t be easy to swap the poetry of my mother tongue and comfortably make art in another. It would take me years, in fact.
Here’s a map for this story: I was born in Switzerland to a Catholic sociologist and an atheist physicist and mathematician. Having fled a military dictatorship in Brazil, my parents returned when I was six. Things were not easy in Brazil and a year later we moved to the East Coast for Father’s PhD. When I was nine, we drove to the West Coast for another university, and a year later we were back in Brazil. At thirteen, we left for the US once more, this time for Father’s postdoc, and we’d be back in Brazil a year later. And then Father died.
Ten years would pass until my map continued to crisscross, now of my own self-propelled but fuzzy volition. There was a scholarship, there was fleeing Brazilian misogyny or the claustrophobia of traditional family. Or really, just because—so many of us in South America come here if we can. Moving like this can rearrange your atoms. It takes time to re-assemble, and I suspect it might also be a never-ending task.
~
In my Brazilian hometown you’ll find the only particle accelerator in Latin America, a sort of spiritual legacy Father did not have a chance to partake in. Particle accelerators speed up the tiniest charged particles so scientists can study the laws of physics and the origins of the universe. Father had worked with Europe’s first particle accelerator in Switzerland; he’d been thrilled to be in that fortified basement measuring particles. Holding my impatient toddler hand, Mother would come visit and we’d be heavily screened by security. It must have felt important as the world started opening for them. Or perhaps it was closing for Mother, with a child changing the trajectory of her dreams.
After ten years of my parent’s Swiss self-exile, Father decided to teach at a new university in Brazil even if these plans would interrupt Mother’s studies. Father had always wanted to return, and no matter their worldliness, it was a given his career would take precedence. Brazil excels at handing you twists and turns however, most especially of the tragic kind: Father’s advisor would promptly die, pay was not forthcoming, inflation was at an all-time high, and Mother was now pregnant with my brother. She borrowed money from her parents and hid her grief.
A few years later, on the West Coast, Father would play chess with a giant computer as I ran down the halls of a building where the world’s first particle accelerator was conceived. My formative homes have always been close to these machines. Courtesy of a tip from Mother’s friend Yoko of Brazil, we had moved into Mister Cho’s two-story apartment complex in Berkeley, California. There were more of us at Mister Cho’s, from all corners of the globe.
A Japanese neighbor once locked herself out of her apartment with her baby still inside, and fearless Mother jumped from balcony to balcony to open the neighbor’s door. The grateful Japanese neighbor drew Mother a watercolor on the spot with a green branch and the characters for thank you very much. The nuclear bomb dropped in her country was conceived at the university building where Father now worked.
The close-knit comradery of these clutches of international students were an experience I’d thought of as America, though I would later realize our communal diversity only existed in bubbles, often devised as segregation. But still, Berkeley was a dream. Mister Cho would bring us fortune cookies and I’d roller-skate to the shops down the block to buy psychedelic stickers of unicorns and cotton-candy sunsets. No stickers like that existed in Brazil and I collected them with great care. It was a time of Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper, my tedious First Communion at my little Catholic School, and winning a city-wide fourth grade art contest with a drawing about world peace.
I’d roller-skate to campus to observe the polka dot man, in his polka dot suit, laying his polka dot blanket under his polka dot umbrella, and would later learn he was a former Berkeley nuclear physics professor whose daily polka dot presence was to also promote world peace. I was right in line with the times in a place that felt like home. I didn’t know it was to be another short stint.
Father once wrote a letter on the back of a xeroxed Berkeley newspaper, listing the winners of my art contest. He began in English and switched to Portuguese: Dear Mom and Dad, I tried calling this weekend but you weren’t home. He shared how he was trying to finish his PhD and hoped to be in Brazil by August: I am tired of wandering without a point of reference.
If nostalgia is to suffer from an unrealizable desire to return to an idea of something that was, it can become a permanent state. We inherit traits, sure, but we might also inherit longing.
Thirty years after Mister Cho’s apartment complex, I am back in the Northern Pacific Coast range. In this familiar wild maritime climate, hot dry summers are getting hotter by the year. The home I now live in is practically in the forest, on the perimeter of our collective stupidity. One home for one family, not a complex with others, in a land where large trucks roam.
~
When I was barely a teenager, low-income students at Father’s Brazilian university occupied classrooms demanding free housing. With fewer taboos around age in Brazil, the more daring teenagers from my neighborhood would flock to this unpoliced place. I would bike over to get high and read the college students’ books, and then bike to a friend’s house to snack or swim, transitioning from child to not-child multiple times in a day. My first notion of the squishiness of time and place was in that university, where Brazil’s first particle accelerator was built. It was my first notion of how vast a self can be: part collective, part introspective, all contradiction. It almost drove Mother mad, the agency I sought at thirteen. And as my curiosity grew, the world of ideas calling to me in direct proportion to our inability to find common ground, Mother and I started our split. As some mothers and daughters inevitably do.
Mother first left Brazil just shy of twenty, joining Father in their Swiss exile. I got to know fruits that were very expensive in Brazil, she tells me now, like apples, strawberries, and pears. Father called her Apple Girl. I have a picture he took of me eating an apple on my first night, she says, referring to what was, literally, their very first time being all alone. In Mother’s famed apple picture she is wearing pigtails. I imagine Father behind his camera, playful as he was, elated with his new bride, their adventures just beginning. I sometimes missed my Brazilian fruits, but red cherries consoled me.
Years later, when Brazil’s military dictatorship was starting to wane, a film came out based on Mother’s ex-boyfriend’s play. In this play, and in the film, a woman tells her ex that she is engaged and leaving for Europe. Mother remembers where this real-life exchange happened: in a small university town, the park and bench in the shade of a Sibipiruna tree.
That first boyfriend lost Mother to the “gringo,” as they called Father, a different kind of Brazilian, long-haired and multilingual. He was an odd bird that swooped in, snatching the youngest of eight Catholic siblings.
Mother was of a common Italian-Portuguese Brazilian stock. Most of her siblings had many children and we all remain connected. She was the only one who left, and I followed in her footsteps. Back home, mutual support, meddling, and celebration continues. And then there is me, watching from a distance.
Father was the middle child of three, of a less common Swiss-German and Portuguese-Spaniard mix. I have two cousins on this side, which is a small number for Brazil, but we also remain close.
In physics there are four fundamental forces of nature, and of the four, gravity is the weakest. You need closeness for a strong gravitational force. The day to day of our interdependence is a possibility held at bay by the opposing force of individualism. That, and in my case, the fact that I kept moving. The fundamental forces in nature are also called fundamental interactions. You have to stop moving to get close.
~
If I could choose one superpower—teleportation please. The fictional transfer of matter from one point to another might not be so fictional since a particle accelerator disintegrated a particle and then it reappeared. If they get around to inventing a person accelerator, I’ll hop in during the cold damp winters of my Pacific Northwest home and catch all the Brazilian holidays (which are plentiful), and all those Sunday lunches (which are leisurely), and try Brazil on again just to see how it fits. But, for there is always a but, the unrelenting heartbreak of Brazil is someone passed out on a sidewalk on your way to work. These bodies were common in São Paulo long before most major cities in the US started having their own. I had sidestepped misery on the daily, which does a number on your soul.
Maybe one day, in my teleported Brazilian break, in a day that starts with our fruit laden breakfasts, the air sticky with promise, I would step into a cool tiled bathroom for a cold rinse, likely my second in a day of many cold rinses. This would be a typical tiled bathroom, with a bidê and a little garbage can next to the toilet, perhaps due to an underworld of piping so narrow that toilet paper can’t be flushed. In this typical Brazilian bathroom, on this teleported day, I would forget to pick up the squeegee to hold its handle up high and reach the temperature gauge on the electric shower head. There’s a squeegee, you see, because there is no shower stall, just a little slope towards the drain. On this day, I would forget to use the squeegee and get on my tippy toes instead, reaching up with my fingers to change the gauge only to get zapped as the tiles are wet, as happened so many times in my childhood. But this zap would shock me right back to my northwest corner of the northern hemisphere, a whiplash less jarring than the non-teleported journey of car-bus-plane-plane-car to reach Mother’s home. Or of leaving Brazil’s summer and arriving in the dark winter of my home.
We don’t know what exactly causes gravity to exist or how it interacts with the other forces in the universe, but perhaps my gravity defying teleportation would teach my atoms to quickly rearrange. Gravity would cease to be the greatest of cosmic mysteries, and there would be no more waiting for a long cultural reassembly.
~
At the tail end of the pandemic, I returned to the northeast coast of Brazil, a place I’d loved long ago. I spent a month with my twelve-year-old twins in a little house by a deserted beach in the Atlantic coastal forests of Bahia. In the mornings the twins unenthusiastically managed remote school and little monkeys would come to our windows looking for pieces of fruit.
It had been almost two and a half years since we’d been back and the children’s Portuguese had slipped away, because I’d let it. English was quicker. We had been pandemic homeschooling and I worked full time—there was little that didn’t slip.
Our little house was at the end of an unlit and impossibly pocked dirt road where lakes form after flash summer rains. Half-finished construction projects surrounded us and the workers tossed broken tiles, pieces of brick, and piles of sand that sunk into the dirt and became the road itself.
I diligently locked the windows and doors at night. I even locked the bedroom door. Easing back into an awareness my body knew, I mapped the run to the nearest house and how loud I would need to be for the neighbors to hear. The car could break down somewhere, the ocean had strong rip currents, people walked on the side of the road at night, and stray dogs dashed out. As a mother I had become afraid of driving in Brazil. The roads felt smaller than I remembered.
There was Zika and dengue and bugs I’d forgotten existed, the immensity of poverty, my body doing familiar things like a canker sore and mysterious red rashes. An oil spill disaster somewhere in the Atlantic lined the beach with shell-embellished tar balls. They were cute but filled me with sadness. We needed cooking oil to clean the tar from our feet at night.
Mother came to visit for a few days and flinched at the dark young men of this region, the flinching having started after two violent break-ins and assaults back home. One evening we ended up at a samba de roda after a delicious tapioca and fish dinner. There were candles for the orixás and women who looked like me and didn’t look like me, dancing their fast samba in a playful circle. I was never a part of this but had peripherally participated from São Paulo.
My rental car bumper fell off and the man who captured rainwater and taught youth to build these systems for the rich came over to fix it. He let me borrow his surfboard and liked to chat about my nonprofit work. I harassed the local philanthropy to provide him a classroom and made sure the cleaning lady’s autistic son was granted a scholarship at the nearby Waldorf school. I did this for them, but it also helped me feel like less of an asshole tourist in my own country.
When we took Mother to the airport, rain suddenly fell like a heavy theater curtain dropping on our heads, visibility and light swallowed in its wake. Without proper street drainage the water was almost up to the car door handle. I was afraid we’d get washed out to sea but tried to keep the mood light so the children wouldn’t fear this half of who they are.
Just avoid city streets when there’s heavy rain, I told them, forcing a laugh. Isn’t this wild?
The next day the sun was strong and the hightide swallowed the river coming out of the jungle. Sweet brown forest water pushed against ocean waves to form a river-lake that cut the beach in two. We played in the sun and the twins looked wild and beautiful. They were entering puberty, and when we returned home they would enter their rooms never to emerge again. Intuiting this might be the last of these trips, I had wanted to be alone with the children in the waning closeness of their childhood. There would be many last times, for now, like the last time my son would surf alongside me, and possibly the very last time I would read them a book at night.
Having pulled one randomly from my stack, The World Without Us is a fitting post-apocalyptic nonfiction book describing how Earth would respond if humanity suddenly disappeared. On the empty beach, with abandoned half-constructed homes and the ferocity of the encroaching jungle, it was not a difficult scenario to imagine.
The cicadas drone on, Can you come back? Can you come back? Can you come back? And with every Brazilian hug, every easy interaction, every pre-historic botanical exuberance, every mango loaded tree, I have a YES.
The droning buzz of the electric fence on top of Mother’s walls will say to me that for every day that we normalize violent inequity, for every sudden hole on the road, and every act of brazen corruption, I have a NO.
~
When I was a child, Father and I made Möbius Strip together. A little topology trick that starts with cutting a paper lengthwise, giving it a half twist and taping the ends together like the infinity symbol. You then cut it in half along its center, and surprisingly, it does not result in two separate loops but remains one single and larger loop. Möbius strips have long been used as time-loop analogies where victims can be trapped in its infinite loop.
In one account, Father’s fatal accident was caused by his workload, his tiredness, and the inadequate roads of a corrupt country. Another account tells of the same conditions plus rocks thrown at windshields so cars would crash and be robbed. In both accounts the police found him dead, all his things taken.
A few years after a dear cousin’s fatal accident, one of her brothers also died in a violent crash. I contemplate the absolute mystery of how my aunt’s pain could continue to coexist with her faith.
When Mother and her sister were young, one of their brothers died on a Brazilian road too. He was a long-haired young man on a motorcycle and a truck had wanted to “scare the hippie.” Both of my grandmothers lost a son to Brazilian roads.
I am certain rocks were thrown at Father’s windshield, but have no recollection how this is the version I’ve been told. Mother retains the version where no rocks were thrown: Your father likely fell asleep at the wheel, she says. There were no signs of braking on the asphalt, his car just fell from the overpass to the dirt road below. Father’s body was found at dawn.
Presents he’d bought for my brother and me had also been stolen from the car. Wedged under his seat, they found a mangled copy of Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics. Father’s sister ended up with this book, and decades later she mailed it to me, unprompted. I learned that the author, A. Zee, had grown up in São Paulo and lived in other places we had lived. I reached out on a whim and he wrote back the very next day: Your email made me think of Gamow’s imagery of tangled worldlines in spacetime, in light of your father’s tragic end with my book by his side, of the years we spent in São Paulo and the Pacific Northwest.
A. Zee was now a physics professor in California, and he went on to explain that physicist George Gamow imagined the world as a reality that goes beyond time and that this also prompted many pseudo-philosophical ramblings.
It is the poetry of math and physics that is of interest to me. Well, that and The Mystery. I hope A. Zee doesn’t think my interests are pseudo-philosophical. Einstein himself gave into this temptation, he told me.
After the sudden death of Einstein’s school friend who had helped him understand time in special relativity, Einstein wrote to this friend’s son, only weeks before his own death: Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us, physicists in the soul, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
My mangled edition of A. Zee’s book has a burning tiger on the cover, and only recently did it strike me that the title refers to William Blake’s poem:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The poem’s unanswerable question sat in the wreck of Father’s car crash: how can both incredible pain and beauty be true?
With Brazil becoming my land of the past, memories don’t align with the scale of things and shreds are forced into narrative. My atoms were there, my atoms are here, belonging is a stubbornly persistent illusion. Life and death on the same old roads. Blake’s fearful symmetry is Brazil.
