Emiliano Battista: Carioquinha

We’re all fated to see our past become a foreign country—a place we can visit like a tourist.

The author (second from left), with his stepbrother Rodrigo (left), step-cousin Luis-Augusto (right), and neighbor and friend Marcelinho (far right), so-called to distinguish him from Marcelão, an older kid who lived in the same row of houses on the Rua Silveira Martins, in the Flamengo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1978. The place no longer exists—a high-rise is there instead.

By Emiliano Battista

“I’m from Brazil.” I’ve said some version of that thousands of times. In English and French. Spanish and Italian. Even in Swedish, a language I once spoke relatively well. Never in Portuguese. If the question of your origins came up, it was in relation to the part of Brazil you hailed from. But it rarely did. People there moved around less in the ’70s and ’80s, and if you happened to find yourself far from home, that “foreignness” quickly became your nickname and rendered the question moot. Far from Rio, in Bahia, I quickly became Carioquinha, and if anyone remembers the scrawny blond k…