To the Other Host Sister
I was twenty-one when I arrived in Brazil as an exchange student at the Universidade Católica do Salvador and was assigned to live with your family. I moved into the apartment you grew up in, one long block from the sea. My bedroom—with its heavy wooden wardrobe where I hung up my sundresses, twin beds where I read the poetry books and novels I'd given up half my suitcase for, and TV where I watched Brazilian dating shows and dubbed American movies—was likely once yours. Every morning, I woke to the smell of fried plantains sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, freshly sliced papaya, espresso; the sing-songy sway of the Bahiano accent drifting up from the busy street. And when I lay in bed, unable to sleep most nights, I at least had the sound of the rain thumping against the closed metal shutters to relax me, the salty ocean air to breathe in, breathe out.
I had felt out of sync back home since my brother Peter's death two years before: grief stretching and compressing time. But the laid back rhythm of life in Bahia put me at ease. I took studio art and history classes on a campus where feral cats lounged across piles of textbooks and small monkeys and tropical birds were mosaiced between the palm leaves. I spent afternoons at Farol da Barra beach, snacking on fried salgadinhos and gritty fruit picolés. Nights and weekends were for dancing in Pelourinho, trips to small towns in the interior or islands a short ferry ride away, sitting at bars with friends as a chilled choppe rotating between us, our small glass cups being emptied then filled.
Your father, with his short fro and dapper white goatee, would call after me from the doorway with the only English phrases he remembered from his studies years ago: Guhd-y bye, my dhar-link! Guhd-y bye, my luhv! When I stayed out late, he waited up at the kitchen table until he heard my heels coming down the hallway, the slow sigh of the front door hinges. Then he would kiss both my cheeks goodnight as though I shared as much of his blood as the daughter who slept in the room beside mine, or you, the daughter whose portrait hung at the end of the hall, framed by clay angels.
*
The night I met your family, your brother was in town visiting from school. Outgoing and mischievous, he was just a little bit older than Peter would have been. Your sister, the youngest, was more reserved, but welcoming and sweet. The way they interacted—how they annoyed each other and amused each other and balanced each other out—made my heart ache.
Later that night, as I was unpacking my bags, your brother picked up a photo I had brought along and asked about the young man with my same black hair and hazel eyes. I told him about Peter, quietly adding the footnote that he was gone. Your brother looked taken aback. He nodded and said there had been a third child, an eldest sister. In gaining two surrogate siblings, I suddenly realized, I had inadvertently acquired another ghost. Sheepishly, we then moved back to the dining room and the elaborate meal your mother had prepared, along with seemingly benign questions about where I was from, what I was majoring in, who I wanted to be.
*
The first time I ever heard Portuguese was in a song: driving around with a newly licensed Peter blasting Manu Chao from our dad's car speakers. "Clandestino" had just come out and we listened to the album on repeat, the mostly Spanish songs occasionally flowing into English and French. And then, a sound I had never come across before, that felt both familiar and distant from the Spanish Peter already spoke so well: Ó minha cachoeira/Minha menina/Minha flamenga/Minha capoeeeeeeira.
My brother was always calling me over to listen to a new album he’d found in the $1 bin at the record store, or to look at a book or movie he’d picked up at the library, or to quiz me about something he deemed crucial to my education: the capital of Tajikistan, the origins of the Zapatista movement, the lead singers of 90s grunge bands.
When Peter cared deeply about something, he needed all of us to care as deeply. I had often wondered how he would ever work a full-time job or get married with his mix of intensity, impulsiveness, and absentmindedness. Sometimes I had the strange feeling that his suicide a year after college graduation, at the end of my own freshman year, had been caused by a lack of imagination—my inability to picture him as an adult.
*
While your family had been taking in students for years, I was the first girl. Minha irmã, your sister and I called after each other playfully, the words less raw for me outside of English. But I wondered how she heard my sister, in her own language, a decade after you passed away.
Between holidays and trips and leisurely Sunday lunches, I met many people who knew you. Your cousins and aunts and uncles, your grandmother, your neighbors, even your high school boyfriend. But I never learned any details about your life. The few times I tried to ask questions, I found myself running up against silence, the invisible contours of their pain.
What wasn't said could be felt in the photo that sat framed in a prominent spot in the living room: you and your younger siblings in a row, your arms intertwined, bound together. Your froth of long dark curls and your warm smile.
*
As the months went on in Bahia, I sometimes found myself pausing mid-sentence, surprised when I realized I was having a casual conversation in Portuguese. The more my fluency improved, though, the more complicated emotional intimacy became. When Brazilians asked about my family, my grammar began to waver. No tense felt right. Did I have a brother? And if I only had had one, then was I supposed to use the past perfect or the imperfect past when I said that he was gone? Had I lost Peter once, or again and again?
“In gaining two surrogate siblings, I suddenly realized, I had inadvertently acquired another ghost.”
Restless and awake at odd hours of the night, I read my way through the eclectic stack of books I'd brought from home, many of which I'd taken from Peter's bookshelf. Recognition washed over me at certain passages, feeling connected to a younger version of my brother who had also loved those words. And then it would hit me all over again: the way he dismissed art, language, and travel—passions we had shared—as his depression worsened, considering them nothing more than a distraction from the real problems of the world.
He used to knock on my door late at night to play me a song he'd just written, anxious to see my reaction, even if it required waking me up. When did he abandon the sticker-covered case at the back of his closet, leaving his guitar to warp and split?
Taking art classes, feverishly writing poems, and studying Portuguese simply to understand the Brazilian music that I loved were the only things keeping me in school. I was determined to push back against my brother's narrative and prove to him that beauty mattered. That it’s what mattered most. But there was no one to fight with anymore, no one arguing back.
*
Every couple of weeks, your brother would come back to Salvador for a short stay, injecting the apartment with lighthearted energy. His shameless bravado made me laugh: constantly working out, drinking protein shakes, bragging about girls, and flexing his muscles as your sister rolled her eyes. It was only later that I realized there was more to his health and fitness regimen than vanity, when your sister told me about the difficult period he went through after losing you, drinking and partying too much.
Your family had had time to work through their sadness and anger, while mine was still in the earliest stages of acceptance. The idea that our grief would stay this intense was terrifying, but the idea that it would fade scared me, too. After ten years, would we still remember Peter so vividly? What would it mean for my brother if I started to feel better? What would it mean for me, as a sister? These were questions I wouldn't have been able to articulate in any language.
*
Early one morning, jolting out of bed after another nightmare, I stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water. Your sister was up studying. We fell into a frazzled conversation about you and Peter, during which she finally told me about the day you died. But she was speaking so quickly, going faster the more tears there were, and I couldn’t grasp all the words, nor could I bring myself to interrupt. I found it easier to pretend I understood. And in truth, even with the gaps, I did.
“Did I have a brother? And if I only had had one, then was I supposed to use the past perfect or the imperfect past when I said that he was gone? Had I lost Peter once, or again and again?”
I know that you were a teenager, that it was a tragic accident. And while Peter had been struggling for years, his downward spiral came as no less of a shock. The void you left in your family had a different shape than the one Peter left in mine but it had the same sharp edge.
I had relived the before and after of my brother’s suicide a million times in my head, trying to construct a narrative that made sense. But always in English. Now, I felt the story wind its way differently through my brain. In translation, my emotions became simpler, the family dynamics less charged, my sense of abandonment, my fears and regrets, farther away.
The darkness of my brother's final months and the abruptness of his absence had made him feel like a stranger to me. Nearly as much of a stranger as you were. But living with your siblings—having that sense of camaraderie again, the comfort of my life moving forward alongside theirs—shook earlier, sweeter memories of my own family back to the surface. I was surprised to realize that my relationship with my brother was still evolving, could keep evolving. Even without him there.
Estou com saudades, your sister and I said to each other, nodding. Tenho saudades. It felt so much more honest that in the Portuguese construction, absence has weight, a body; and that defying the distance between past and present—by remembering the things you miss—is not just an emotional, but a physical, act. You have to matar as saudades: kill them. By looking at old photos. By talking about your childhood. By listening to music you and your sibling loved, turning it up loud enough to make the floorboards shake. A pleasurable form of pain.
About the Author
Photo credit: Sonia Bazar
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is a poet and translator based in Montreal. Her work has been honored with a Hopwood Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, appearing or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Lilith, Ploughshares, The Common, Words Without Borders, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University.
Read Rachel’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Joseph Chan.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
