Latin American Community: Little Bird

Photo provided by the author

By: Camila Consolmagno

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao

My story begins where it ends. All my life I’ve heard people say, ‘when one door closes, another opens,’ and all my life I saw this as nothing but a pretentious proverb attempting to justify the vexatious things that happen in life. In reality, sometimes things just occur irrationally. People seek comfort, sometimes in a proverb, in the same way as a hug; it will never actually solve the problem, but it will still be solacing. While growing up, however, I’ve realised that that saying isn’t as ostentatiously ignorant as I’d always believed. All endings are also beginnings; we just don’t know it at the time. And so, my story begins and ends with an airplane. 

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It was an ordinary day in Guarapari, Brazil – adhesively hot. I wasn’t born here; my birth-city is a 15-hour car drive away. I was born in Londrina, my mother’s city, but my parents moved to Guarapari just a couple of months after having me. I don’t recall the time, but the sun was out, probably morning. I was in my mother’s flat – which was unusual for a Saturday, considering I spent the weekends at my dad’s. Unwashed dishes from the night before. No toys on the floor for a change. Four packed suitcases by the door. I was nine years old and my brother was four. 

Dad finally arrived, late and impatiently pressing his car horn. ‘Vamos!,’ he yelled still from inside the car but with his head poking out of the window. His girlfriend of a few months was sitting next to him in the passenger seat. My mother rushed down with my brother and I; then ran up and down again but this time with our suitcases. We’re waiting outside the flat. ‘Vamos!,’ Dad shouts again. My mother’s crying. My brother doesn’t understand what’s going on, and I’m mad at him for not knowing. ‘Say goodbye to mum’ I suggest, ‘because you might not ever see her again” – I’ve always been dramatic. He cries and hugs her, and I say a quick goodbye. We get in the car and just as the door closes my dad agilely speeds. I look back but in the flash all I see is a speck of what’s supposed to be my mother’s face. In what feels like less than a second, she vanishes, and I don’t get the chance to look at my mother’s face for one last time before I go. 

I didn’t see that face for another six years.

We arrive at the airport just in time. My dad and his girlfriend say their last goodbyes. I envy their hugs and their kisses and their tears as all of that was blindly swept away from me in the honk of a car. I still hate that noise. 

One airplane, eleven perpetual hours. I remember staring out at the clouds and imagining what it would be like to taste them. They looked like candy floss. Although I hated candy floss, the thought of eating a cloud was incredibly appealing. ‘It’d taste like ice,’ I thought, ‘after all it’s just water anyway.’I tried to look for shadows in the clouds, trying to see if I could find an angel. Eventually I just gave in to the screen in front of me and watched Finding Nemo repeatedly for the remaining nine hours. Growing up in a small town with fifty-two beaches I found comfort in the sea, even if it was pixilated.

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We were moving to Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, England. I hadn’t really quite processed that – and I wouldn’t for a while. What then used to be a magical town full of adventurous parks where my nine-year-old self could gambol for hours on end, is now a monotonous nightmare for the seventeen-year-old version of myself. ​

We lived with my grandparents for the first bit before we found a place of our own. Their house was a two-storey, three-bedroom, old English brick house. It would be spacious if my grandma had not adorned it with every decorative gift she had received within the past thirty years and bric-a-bracs she’d found in Sunday markets for the last ten. Mini replicas of famous paintings, like the Mona Lisa and Girl with a Pearl Earring hung above the living room’s electric fireplace that I’ve never seen been used. On the wall that followed the evanescing burgundy carpeted stairs that made ghost-like creaks whenever it made contact with any sort of weight, my grandparents blue-tacked framed photos of family members, dead and alive. My father was there, a profile picture of himwhen he was fourteen; that one was my personal favourite.Upstairs were two guest rooms, a bathroom, and my grandparents’ en-suite room. The first guest room was taken by my uncle, so we stayed in the second – the biggest, though not by much. My bed was a single mattress on the carpet floor, coercively squeezed between a wall, right below the only window in the room and next to the double bed where my dad slept. My brother slept on an air mattress adjacent to the double bed, so our mattresses formed an L around its left side. 

My dad’s girlfriend, Carol, joined us three months later and all four of us were crammed into that same room. Sometimes at night, Carol and I couldn’t sleep because of the notable different time zones that we still hadn’t got used to. So, whilst my brother and my dad slept soundly, she’d join me on my mattress and we’d get a pack of cards and quietly, yet competitively, play until we were both finally sleepy, this was often until 3am. Sometimes, we would also watch the current melodramatic Brazilian soap opera on the internet. Or, play the most emulous rounds of dominoes. Together, we always found something to fill our sleepless, empty nights with.

Although, I only seemed to love her when no one was watching. I was still pretty raw from leaving my mother behind and I thought there was a chance I could convince my dad to take us back to Brazil and return to our ordinary lives. But we are better off here, it just took me a while to realise that.

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I’ve been moving all my life. In Brazil, I learnt never to get attached to a house as every year we moved and changed schools. Now, in England, having moved cities twice, gone to four different schools and lived in five different houses, I’ve learnt not to get attached to people. Albeit, at the same time I’ve grown used to moving, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. Once my dad knew he didn’t have to have it all figured out to move forward, he hasn’t stayed still. I think that’s where I get my impulsiveness from, but some would call it courage. 

I leave Brazil, enter England. My mother leaves, Carol shelters me. One door closes, another opens. 

People often ask me which of the two countries I prefer, almost in a wrong or right form, but they’re incomparable. I can’t note the similarity or dissimilarity between the Latin heat and the British wintry, a feijoada versus a roast dinner, a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. They are countries underneath the same sky and above the same sea, but they are different universes apart. This year when I turn eighteen, I will have lived half of my life in each country. The magic of it all is not choosing which I love most but loving the most of out of both. In the end, I’m only one airplane away.

Camila Consolmagno is a final-year Bachelor of Laws student at SOAS, University of London. She is the first Brazilian President of the SOAS Latin American Society and an aspiring human rights lawyer