Brazil

Brazil is the country Emma Valentine first encounters through films and later chooses as the destination of an extended journey. It changes from an imagined elsewhere, glimpsed through Portuguese-language cinema, into a lived landscape of unfamiliar cities, a lagoon, and a friendship that gives lasting meaning to the red string she wears when she returns to Apollo Kagwa.

An imagined world beyond Boones Mill

As a girl, Emma watched a film about slave uprisings in Brazil at a public library in Roanoke. Ms. Rook had not known what the film depicted, and Emma, too polite to tell her, kept watching it repeatedly. She loved the sound of Portuguese, and persuaded Ms. Rook to order more Brazilian films, including Bye Bye Brasil, Subway to the Stars, and Os Trapalhões e o Rei do Futebol. The library eventually stopped buying tapes because one girl's enthusiasm could not justify the expense, but the films had already altered Emma's sense of possibility: the world seemed larger than Boones Mill, and she wanted to see it.

That early fascination becomes a concrete decision when Emma tells Apollo she is moving to Brazil and has already bought her tickets. She plans to go to Salvador, in the north, but cannot say how long she will stay. Their kiss precedes her departure by four weeks. Brazil is therefore not just a setting for her travels; it is the choice that separates the new relationship from the life Emma has decided to pursue.

Emma's journey and the Salvador lagoon

Emma initially stays with a family in Itapuã, a neighborhood of Salvador. There she visits Lagoa do Abaete, a lagoon reputed to be haunted. As her Portuguese improves, she comes to know a washerwoman who lives there. Emma's host family warns her away from the woman, calling her a witch, but Emma likes her and sees in her a resemblance to the mother she has lost: tough, funny, and unconcerned with other people's opinions. Emma sneaks out of the family's house to sit by the lagoon while the woman does her washing.

Before Emma leaves for Manaus, the washerwoman tells her to make three wishes for her life and ties a red string around her wrist. The rule is that Emma must let the string come apart on its own; when it falls off, her wishes will come true, and she must not cut it. Emma initially treats the ritual as amusingly mystical, but the string remains on her skin for more than six months. By the time she recounts the story, she admits that she wants the wishes to come true and that she believes in magic.

After a few months in Salvador, Emma moves to Manaus and then Fortaleza. She expects eventually to reach Rio and São Paulo, but has not yet visited them when Apollo reflects on her travels. Her route makes the scale of the journey tangible: Brazil is not a single destination in her account but a sequence of places she continues to move through.

Distance, return, and memory

During Emma's absence, Apollo follows news from Brazil online and watches Quilombo, a film about African slaves fighting the Portuguese. It recalls the movie Emma loved as a child, and he imagines her watching it repeatedly in the public library in Roanoke. His reading and viewing become ways of keeping her journey present while their correspondence continues despite her unreliable internet access.

After a year, Emma writes that she is returning to the United States and asks whether Apollo might meet her at the airport. When they see each other again, the red string on her wrist first unsettles him: he wonders whether it was tied there by someone she loved in Brazil. Emma's account replaces that anxious guess with the history of the lagoon, the washerwoman, and the wishes. Brazil thus returns with Emma not as a romantic rival or a distant abstraction, but as the place where she encountered a maternal figure, adopted a ritual, and allowed herself to believe that her wishes might come true.