The Purpose of a Holiday

January is vacation (or 'holiday') month in the southern hemisphere. I wrote the following for the magazine of my writers' club in Johannesburg:

The January when my Brazilian-born daughters were twenty months and three-and-a-half years old we spent our holiday with friends in a fishing village three hours east of Rio de Janeiro. Arraial do Cabo was then an idyllic place as yet undiscovered by tourists. Located at the tip of a peninsula, the village was surrounded by seven white-sand beaches, separated from each other by scenic ridges that plunged to the azure sea.

January 1982 it rained. It rained every day for the ten days we were in Arraial. The only laundry facilities were a wash tub in the back yard. I made the mistake of hand-washing a pair of jeans early in our stay. I wrung them out as best I could and hung them in the shed. At the end of the week they were still as damp as if I had just taken them from a washing machine. They also smelled of mold.

Like many Brazilian homes, our friends’ house was an ongoing project. The walls of the lounge were unplastered terra cotta building blocks. Construction materials spilled out of corners, and a heap of sand dominated the small yard. It was not exactly pretty to look at, but we had expected to spend most of our time on those glorious beaches.

We weren’t the only guests that week. The teens had brought along their friends, and eleven of us crowded the three bedrooms and competed for the one bath with installed fixtures. Eleven people had no place to go in the rain except a half-finished house or the cousins’ around the corner. There were no hotels with piped music in comfortable lounges, no boutiques or coffee shops—only open praças and snack bars with outdoor tables dripping rain. In the evenings when everyone was home, I sang lullabies for an hour or more trying to distract my children from the noise in the kitchen and get them to sleep at a normal hour. At least that was what I told myself. Maybe I only shut myself in the bedroom with them so I could escape the confusion of the rest of the house.

One day as we adults sat in the kitchen conversing over cups of strong Brazilian coffee, we heard a cry from the younger children in the bedroom. My husband Steve got up to investigate. What he saw was three-year-old Katie clinging to little Erika, who in turn held the frayed cord of an electric fan that was turned off—but plugged in. Both girls were wide-eyed and crying. Steve hurled himself at the children, knocking them free of the electric wire.

“I tried to touch them,” ten-year-old Roselito cried, “but I got a shock.”

A blister rose on Erika’s finger. The next day it was ugly and swollen. I took her through the misty rain along the open canal that conducted raw sewage to the nearest beach—the one we never frequented—to the public health clinic. There the little girl who wouldn’t let her mother near her sore finger sat perfectly still while the medic lanced it and watched in fascination while dirty gray pus poured out.

“It must be dressed every day,” the medic told me. Thereafter the highlight of each dreary day was the walk to the clinic through the rain to have Erika’s finger dressed.

When I got on the plane at the end of that horrible holiday, I leaned back in my seat, exhausted. Tears came to my eyes. I was going home. After all, isn’t that what a holiday is for—to make you feel good about being home?