Classroom for Kites

It’s 2021 in Buzios, a hangnail of peninsula three hours east of Rio De Janeiro, and vaccine accessibility is lagging behind the U.S. when I arrive at this popular vacation destination. I wonder if these boys have been going to school. It’s June and their winter school break wouldn’t be until July (opposite seasons from the U.S.). Maybe they were doing distance-learning in the morning and had whimsical teachers in the afternoon. Kites.

Over the afternoon, the chorus of boys grows louder as dozens of yellow, purple, and red comets jitterbug across the sky. Watching from above the valley—my bare feet stick to the bricks lining a sliver of soil culivating parsley, thyme and mystery herbs. The air is heavy with the smell of soil and salt from the ocean.

The dozens of boys congregate on a bulldozed dirt lot already advertised as the future home of Vivo Buzios. Instead of being saturated with jubilant voices, the scene will probably sound like the graphic designer’s rendition on the billboard—clean white apartments. Within a few weeks, a deep trench will bisect this rare flat terrain and barbed wire goes up around the lot, excluding anyone but employees. Until then, boys and kites rule. On this red-soiled plot, no electrical wires, trees, buildings or grown ups obstruct flight.

The Buziano blue sky, without a speck of cloud, belongs in a children’s drawing. The boys, in barefoot or flip-flops so thin the soles disappear underfoot, belong in the painting of an old master. Some Brazilians call this peninsula the “End of the Line” because it’s the last stop on the bus route from Rio. Not coincidentally, it draws those who float outside conventional norms and might never return. Buzios remained almost unknown and without electricity until Brigit Bardot escaped the Rio paparazzi to vacation here with her Brazilian boyfriend in 1964. In spite of becoming a hotspot for world travelers including DiCaprio and Madonna, many charms remain—boys flying kites.

My girlfriend M and I call them “boys” but some are probably old enough to drink and vote. One day, however, I see a boy no more than five years old cradling a spool of string as big as his torso. As a boy, my dad helped me usher a kite into the wind on at least one memorable occasion. Upon taking the helm myself, I wrestled against an inevitable crash. In Buzios, I spotted only a few girls meandering in the lot, within a whisper’s reach of a boy or a friend. They watched but never piloted. M lived in Brazil until she was 10, and has never tried to fly a kite. These boys could teach us.

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In “A Schoolboy’s Story,” Machado de Assis, a contemporary of Twain and an equal in satire, writes: “Now I was a prisoner, I was dying to be outside, and thought back to the hill and the Campo, and the other idle kids…Just to complete my despair, through the school windows, in the clear blue sky, above Livramento hill, I saw a paper kite, a big one high up in the sky, attached to an endless string, billowing in the wind, a wonderful sight. And there I was in the school, sitting with my legs together, and my reading book and grammar on my knees.”

At that time, I would think about the high school boys in my classes in Rochester, New York, my hometown. In particular, I remember Sam, a polite and respectful boy, even prone to wise-cracking some with his buddy. I’d sit next to him and help sound out words in a book like “dinner” and “future” and “excited.” I wondered where he would be in three years.  Sam hardly seemed the type to join a gang, as he and his buddy often talked about going to “The League,” meaning the NBA. I wondered about the other boys in my class far too embarrassed to let me sit next to them and read aloud. In Rochester, far more boys carry guns than kites.

It’s not as if Brazil is exempt from the drug trade and gangs and crime. Before I first visited Brazil in 2019, a Rochester acquaintance who had been to Rio for work once warned me to be careful. M has encouraged me to wear a thin pouch belted under my shorts for my cash and credit card. Like the U.S., Brazil has an ocean-wide chasm between the haves and have-nots, the legacy of colonies who relied on slaves to satisfy a hunger for material wealth. Nowhere is paradise. Yet in Brazil boys don’t bring guns to school for revenge. And in towns like Buzios, kites dance into the night sky.