Apanhar Means to Catch
Emma Sheppard | Nonfiction, Fall 2024
When I was twenty-two, I boarded a plane with two overweight bags and moved to a Brazilian city whose name no one in my family could pronounce. I did it to be with a man named Gil, for reasons no one in my family would challenge. For reasons I didn’t fully understand.
I boarded the plane with a semester and a half of Portuguese, a functional fluency in Spanish and a modicum of unearned confidence under my belt. I thought I knew enough. Enough language, enough about this man, enough about myself.
I learned a lot of words in those two years. And not just words, but a language that crawled inside of me, whose rhythms became my rhythms. The way to make little noises when asking for directions so I sounded fluent enough to be given accurate information, and how to coo at babies, and how to complain about the weather. I learned a language. But I also learned words. Those words crawled inside of me too. They took up residence. They shaped me, in ways I sometimes wished they hadn’t.
____________
Years after I moved back from Brazil I was talking to an Angolan friend. My Portuguese had adjusted by then; I’d mostly learned to smooth out the Paraense-isms that dotted my accent like regionally specific potholes. I had trained my ear to assimilate the sharp, truncated “-t”s and “-d”s of non-Brazilian Portuguese speakers instead of the fluid, almost liquid “-tch” s and “zh”s that I had been used to.
But I hadn’t learned how to react when I was told “eu te apanho depois,” that he’d pick me up later. My friend didn’t know why I looked stricken, and I couldn’t explain. I stumbled over an explanation–apanhar had a different meaning in Brazil; I didn’t know all the other meanings. I was still learning.
My explanation was the truth. But not all of it. The truth was that I had learned the meaning of the word that twisted in my stomach every time I heard it, no matter how long it had been, or how many times I would hear it used as "I'll pick you up” or “I understand”.
____________
Coming out of Gil’s mouth, apanhar was a threat.
At first, it seemed like he was joking. It was tossed off with his signature giggle as he lazily lunged for the ankle of a squealing child who ran by the couch in his mother’s house. He would fling the child over his shoulder to loving shrieks on both sides of the equation as I found myself suddenly sitting in the middle of a tickle war, ending with Gil lightly bopping the baby on the head, as I mentally filed that move away as something that would not be done to our figurative future children.
It wasn’t until the end of my second or third trip to his mother’s house that I heard it the way I will always remember it. When it lost its lightness. I don’t quite remember what his nephew, Dudu, had done to inspire the shouting in the house. The shouting always caught me by surprise; the way it would rise into the silence and fill the air with tension. Sometimes I saw it coming, but mostly I didn’t—curtness is hard to pick up on, no matter how fluent you think you are. Not till the explosion, not till the screaming.
In the early days I would sit on the couch pretending to read. These weren’t my people, not yet. Later, when it was directed at the kids, I would try to interject, the most half-hearted of protests that we all knew would go unheard. There were too many ways to dismiss me. In this particular explosion, Dudu tried to escape, slipping into the room he shared with the other kids, curled up defensively on his mattress as his uncle towered over him. “Dudu!” Gil’s bellow was still new to me, still caught me off guard. “Vai apanhar, sim.”
And there it was. He was going to get it. Apanhar—not pick up, not understand; catch, yes, but not a ball, not a cold. A beating. A masterful work of linguistic denialism—a beating not given, but received, the subject the child cowering on his mattress on the floor, not the grown man standing over him.
____________
When we were alone, I was the subject. With me, it wasn’t a “vai,” not usually. Less a threat than an offer. And it wasn’t shouted. I was the one who shouted in those days.
I was the one exploding, though at the time I couldn’t figure out why. I exploded because all of the Portuguese in the world couldn’t replace the sharpness of English, couldn’t replace all that I wanted to say. I shouted because the myriad silences between us were too strong to be punctured by just my words.
And so I shouted—at the water bugs that flew out at me when I was taking the clothing off the line strung up in the back of the apartment. Shouted more at the fire ants that crawled up the breaks between the tiles in our kitchen—and sometimes up my legs. Shouted at the internet which cut out in the middle of a conversation with a friend back home.
Toddlers throw tantrums because they don’t have the words to express all of their feelings. In those days, when I had built a life that was squeezing everything from me, and when the words available were words that were not mine, I was a toddler. And so I shouted. Shouted as if I was slamming my fists against the walls of my reality.
I shouted so Gil would hear me, hear what I still didn’t know how to say. Screamed so that I could hear myself, as if the power of my voice could shake myself back to where I knew I needed to be.
Gil didn’t have to shout. His rage was controlled, quiet. He would let me scream, knowing his greatest weapon was walking away, not engaging. It was that silence that caused the screaming in the first place, as if I was filling it with louder noise because he refused to fill it with words.
____________
Except one. Apanhar. Impulsive with Dudu, it was calculated with me. It was muttered at the end of a fight, shoved through gritted teeth. His fists clenched as he rubbed the inside of his own palm, holding his whole body back, as if leaning his weight against the line I was supposed to be grateful he didn’t cross. “Quer apanhar, hein?” Did I want to get hit? Was I asking for it?
And maybe, in a way, I was. Not in the way he meant, that there was something I could do to earn a beating. That I in fact, already deserved it, but he would spare me.
I did ask for it once. Literally. It was the first time we truly lost control, over a year in. We were already close to the end, which was the excuse that Gil used when we had both calmed down. We were just on edge, trying to figure out a way out of Brazil. We were on edge a lot in those days; that truth hadn’t yet sunk in.
There is no way for me to record what we were fighting about. I have long since forgotten, if I ever even knew. But I know that I lost control first, and I know that at some point he had me pinned against a wall. Maybe that was the time my head slammed into the tile and shook us both out of our spell. Or no, that must have been a different time. After he let me free from the wall, when I had expected a fist in my face, I screamed at him “Just hit me, fucking hit me so I can leave.”
He never knew I said that. It was English; it belonged only to me. And so I asked for it, begged for him to cross that line. Because as far in as I was, I knew if he crossed that line, it would finally be enough. I needed him to give me a reason, to be the one to make me leave.
After the fights, there were no words. We lay in bed as I sobbed and he cooed at me, the tension having broken as suddenly as it had sparked. Sometimes I held my cheek as if he had done it, as if the possibility itself could have left a mark. After that first fight, we went to meet my friends. I sat in the car, examining myself meticulously in the visor mirror for a black eye—not caused by him, but the kind I occasionally get when I sob too hard, just the lightest ring of burst capillaries in my eye like they just couldn’t take it anymore.
I texted Daniela “estamos chegando” as we pulled out of the house—“almost there,” slipping back into the Brazilian code of lateness as Gil gripped my knee while he drove. He would force his hand off only to change gears, almost pained to let go of me, as if the hand on my knee was sealing us back together, healing the wounds never made visible.
Every end meant it would never happen again. We never referred to the fights, never let the conflict come to a resolution, or even really affect our understanding of our relationship. We left them behind and got in the car, or rolled over and went to sleep, or….if we couldn’t find the words, we could pretend they weren’t real. I was getting good at pretending.
____________
We spent those last six months teetering on the edge. At some point, I realized that the weeks we didn’t fight were the ones I had kept quiet. I told myself I was in control. Some control. We would hold our breath and wait for something to prick the surface. And then it would. I would explode, he would shut down, I would push, and then…almost. Then he would almost.
But he didn’t. He never hit me. He repeated over and over again after those fights–“não te bato, não te traio.” It curdled into a mantra as I finally found a way out of the shouting; as I convinced myself to walk away. “I don’t hit you, I don’t cheat on you.” It didn’t occur to us then, that once you have to say it, you’ve already gone too far.
He never hit me, but he could have, and we both knew it. The threat lived with us like the water bugs and the fire ants. It was so acute that I had a contingency plan, the friend I would call if I ever needed to leave at three in the morning. Years later, on my one trip back, Daniela told me that she had known, somehow, that she was that friend.
It lived with me far longer than he did. The threat that was less threat and more prediction. “Ta louca hein, tem sorte que nao vou te bater. Mais o proximo…” You’re crazy, huh? You’re lucky I’m not going to hit you. But the next guy…
I can’t swear he actually said that last part, mais o proximo. Maybe I filled in the blanks. But I know that part was there the same way the back of his palm was. Crazy. Lucky. The next guy might.
____________
Almost two years to the day after I arrived, I left with the same suitcases I came with. The weight of them felt different on the way back.
It took a long time to shift the way I told my story from Portuguese to English. To translate, his perspective to mine. It took me a long time to unpack. Once in a while, I come across something I can’t believe I hung onto. A shirt I wore because he liked it. A word that I never understood. The phrase “but he didn’t hit me.” I discard them one by one. When I’m ready.
_______________________________________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This is a piece that I have carried with me for years. A telling of a memory that was long left, if not buried, then discarded. It was meant to be covered up by time, by moving on, by an unwillingness to confront what was. But that is what writing is for, to reveal what we would rather not. In the crafting of this story, I have cleared away the detritus from the memory, and allowed it to stand for itself, as a part, but not the whole, of my story. I like to think I have left and will continue to leave many of these markings. Of what was hard, of what it meant, of the shape of what could be to come. Sometimes it takes a while for me to look straight at them. I’m glad I have.”
Emma Sheppard (she/her) is an English professor, teacher educator, and aspiring writer living in Toronto, ON. She writes on issues of identity, community, grief, family, and more. Her work can be found forthcoming and currently in Minimag, The Bookends Review, and Eloquentia Literary. She can be found on Instagram and Substack @emma.out.loud.
Apanhar Means to Catch
Emma Sheppard | Nonfiction, Fall 2024
When I was twenty-two, I boarded a plane with two overweight bags and moved to a Brazilian city whose name no one in my family could pronounce. I did it to be with a man named Gil, for reasons no one in my family would challenge. For reasons I didn’t fully understand.
I boarded the plane with a semester and a half of Portuguese, a functional fluency in Spanish and a modicum of unearned confidence under my belt. I thought I knew enough. Enough language, enough about this man, enough about myself.
I learned a lot of words in those two years. And not just words, but a language that crawled inside of me, whose rhythms became my rhythms. The way to make little noises when asking for directions so I sounded fluent enough to be given accurate information, and how to coo at babies, and how to complain about the weather. I learned a language. But I also learned words. Those words crawled inside of me too. They took up residence. They shaped me, in ways I sometimes wished they hadn’t.
____________
Years after I moved back from Brazil I was talking to an Angolan friend. My Portuguese had adjusted by then; I’d mostly learned to smooth out the Paraense-isms that dotted my accent like regionally specific potholes. I had trained my ear to assimilate the sharp, truncated “-t”s and “-d”s of non-Brazilian Portuguese speakers instead of the fluid, almost liquid “-tch” s and “zh”s that I had been used to.
But I hadn’t learned how to react when I was told “eu te apanho depois,” that he’d pick me up later. My friend didn’t know why I looked stricken, and I couldn’t explain. I stumbled over an explanation–apanhar had a different meaning in Brazil; I didn’t know all the other meanings. I was still learning.
My explanation was the truth. But not all of it. The truth was that I had learned the meaning of the word that twisted in my stomach every time I heard it, no matter how long it had been, or how many times I would hear it used as "I'll pick you up” or “I understand”.
____________
Coming out of Gil’s mouth, apanhar was a threat.
At first, it seemed like he was joking. It was tossed off with his signature giggle as he lazily lunged for the ankle of a squealing child who ran by the couch in his mother’s house. He would fling the child over his shoulder to loving shrieks on both sides of the equation as I found myself suddenly sitting in the middle of a tickle war, ending with Gil lightly bopping the baby on the head, as I mentally filed that move away as something that would not be done to our figurative future children.
It wasn’t until the end of my second or third trip to his mother’s house that I heard it the way I will always remember it. When it lost its lightness. I don’t quite remember what his nephew, Dudu, had done to inspire the shouting in the house. The shouting always caught me by surprise; the way it would rise into the silence and fill the air with tension. Sometimes I saw it coming, but mostly I didn’t—curtness is hard to pick up on, no matter how fluent you think you are. Not till the explosion, not till the screaming.
In the early days I would sit on the couch pretending to read. These weren’t my people, not yet. Later, when it was directed at the kids, I would try to interject, the most half-hearted of protests that we all knew would go unheard. There were too many ways to dismiss me. In this particular explosion, Dudu tried to escape, slipping into the room he shared with the other kids, curled up defensively on his mattress as his uncle towered over him. “Dudu!” Gil’s bellow was still new to me, still caught me off guard. “Vai apanhar, sim.”
And there it was. He was going to get it. Apanhar—not pick up, not understand; catch, yes, but not a ball, not a cold. A beating. A masterful work of linguistic denialism—a beating not given, but received, the subject the child cowering on his mattress on the floor, not the grown man standing over him.
____________
When we were alone, I was the subject. With me, it wasn’t a “vai,” not usually. Less a threat than an offer. And it wasn’t shouted. I was the one who shouted in those days.
I was the one exploding, though at the time I couldn’t figure out why. I exploded because all of the Portuguese in the world couldn’t replace the sharpness of English, couldn’t replace all that I wanted to say. I shouted because the myriad silences between us were too strong to be punctured by just my words.
And so I shouted—at the water bugs that flew out at me when I was taking the clothing off the line strung up in the back of the apartment. Shouted more at the fire ants that crawled up the breaks between the tiles in our kitchen—and sometimes up my legs. Shouted at the internet which cut out in the middle of a conversation with a friend back home.
Toddlers throw tantrums because they don’t have the words to express all of their feelings. In those days, when I had built a life that was squeezing everything from me, and when the words available were words that were not mine, I was a toddler. And so I shouted. Shouted as if I was slamming my fists against the walls of my reality.
I shouted so Gil would hear me, hear what I still didn’t know how to say. Screamed so that I could hear myself, as if the power of my voice could shake myself back to where I knew I needed to be.
Gil didn’t have to shout. His rage was controlled, quiet. He would let me scream, knowing his greatest weapon was walking away, not engaging. It was that silence that caused the screaming in the first place, as if I was filling it with louder noise because he refused to fill it with words.
____________
Except one. Apanhar. Impulsive with Dudu, it was calculated with me. It was muttered at the end of a fight, shoved through gritted teeth. His fists clenched as he rubbed the inside of his own palm, holding his whole body back, as if leaning his weight against the line I was supposed to be grateful he didn’t cross. “Quer apanhar, hein?” Did I want to get hit? Was I asking for it?
And maybe, in a way, I was. Not in the way he meant, that there was something I could do to earn a beating. That I in fact, already deserved it, but he would spare me.
I did ask for it once. Literally. It was the first time we truly lost control, over a year in. We were already close to the end, which was the excuse that Gil used when we had both calmed down. We were just on edge, trying to figure out a way out of Brazil. We were on edge a lot in those days; that truth hadn’t yet sunk in.
There is no way for me to record what we were fighting about. I have long since forgotten, if I ever even knew. But I know that I lost control first, and I know that at some point he had me pinned against a wall. Maybe that was the time my head slammed into the tile and shook us both out of our spell. Or no, that must have been a different time. After he let me free from the wall, when I had expected a fist in my face, I screamed at him “Just hit me, fucking hit me so I can leave.”
He never knew I said that. It was English; it belonged only to me. And so I asked for it, begged for him to cross that line. Because as far in as I was, I knew if he crossed that line, it would finally be enough. I needed him to give me a reason, to be the one to make me leave.
After the fights, there were no words. We lay in bed as I sobbed and he cooed at me, the tension having broken as suddenly as it had sparked. Sometimes I held my cheek as if he had done it, as if the possibility itself could have left a mark. After that first fight, we went to meet my friends. I sat in the car, examining myself meticulously in the visor mirror for a black eye—not caused by him, but the kind I occasionally get when I sob too hard, just the lightest ring of burst capillaries in my eye like they just couldn’t take it anymore.
I texted Daniela “estamos chegando” as we pulled out of the house—“almost there,” slipping back into the Brazilian code of lateness as Gil gripped my knee while he drove. He would force his hand off only to change gears, almost pained to let go of me, as if the hand on my knee was sealing us back together, healing the wounds never made visible.
Every end meant it would never happen again. We never referred to the fights, never let the conflict come to a resolution, or even really affect our understanding of our relationship. We left them behind and got in the car, or rolled over and went to sleep, or….if we couldn’t find the words, we could pretend they weren’t real. I was getting good at pretending.
____________
We spent those last six months teetering on the edge. At some point, I realized that the weeks we didn’t fight were the ones I had kept quiet. I told myself I was in control. Some control. We would hold our breath and wait for something to prick the surface. And then it would. I would explode, he would shut down, I would push, and then…almost. Then he would almost.
But he didn’t. He never hit me. He repeated over and over again after those fights–“não te bato, não te traio.” It curdled into a mantra as I finally found a way out of the shouting; as I convinced myself to walk away. “I don’t hit you, I don’t cheat on you.” It didn’t occur to us then, that once you have to say it, you’ve already gone too far.
He never hit me, but he could have, and we both knew it. The threat lived with us like the water bugs and the fire ants. It was so acute that I had a contingency plan, the friend I would call if I ever needed to leave at three in the morning. Years later, on my one trip back, Daniela told me that she had known, somehow, that she was that friend.
It lived with me far longer than he did. The threat that was less threat and more prediction. “Ta louca hein, tem sorte que nao vou te bater. Mais o proximo…” You’re crazy, huh? You’re lucky I’m not going to hit you. But the next guy…
I can’t swear he actually said that last part, mais o proximo. Maybe I filled in the blanks. But I know that part was there the same way the back of his palm was. Crazy. Lucky. The next guy might.
____________
Almost two years to the day after I arrived, I left with the same suitcases I came with. The weight of them felt different on the way back.
It took a long time to shift the way I told my story from Portuguese to English. To translate, his perspective to mine. It took me a long time to unpack. Once in a while, I come across something I can’t believe I hung onto. A shirt I wore because he liked it. A word that I never understood. The phrase “but he didn’t hit me.” I discard them one by one. When I’m ready.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This is a piece that I have carried with me for years. A telling of a memory that was long left, if not buried, then discarded. It was meant to be covered up by time, by moving on, by an unwillingness to confront what was. But that is what writing is for, to reveal what we would rather not. In the crafting of this story, I have cleared away the detritus from the memory, and allowed it to stand for itself, as a part, but not the whole, of my story. I like to think I have left and will continue to leave many of these markings. Of what was hard, of what it meant, of the shape of what could be to come. Sometimes it takes a while for me to look straight at them. I’m glad I have.”
Emma Sheppard (she/her) is an English professor, teacher educator, and aspiring writer living in Toronto, ON. She writes on issues of identity, community, grief, family, and more. Her work can be found forthcoming and currently in Minimag, The Bookends Review, and Eloquentia Literary. She can be found on Instagram and Substack @emma.out.loud.