3. In Brazil

The first time Roberta and I ever spoke was in an opera rehearsal,

when she was working for a newspaper and I for another. I asked
her a trite question and was given a rude answer. It was a sign
from the gods, but I didn’t understand it then. On March 30,
1996, we started dating.

During the course of that same year, she realized the dream of leaving her mother’s apartment and moved in to a place five stories below mine — in the same building, yes. On September 9, 1997, we moved in together. I was 27; she was 25.

Our nest: three bedrooms, 180 square meters, overlooking the sea, costly rental. Major emblem of a fantasy I mistakenly embraced. Not having the adequate profile of a bourgeois-preppy-provider, I often stumbled on it, incurred debts, left home for five months, had other relationships; by and large I was a bad husband — though Roberta’s concept of a good husband can be disputed.

Still, there were good moments during those four and a half years when our lives were wrought together (or apart). The best of it all was undoubtedly the pregnancy and Henrique’s first year of life.

Our marriage was crumbling down, for a change, when Roberta told me at lunch that she was pregnant. She had confounded her pills. It was the first time in years she was so distracted, and it did happen right when I was about to leave home for good — or at least, so I thought. We segued into two weeks of discussions, where I did bring up the potential for an abortion. But we decided to go on. And, to parry any misinterpretation, I never regretted that.

In every single argument along those two weeks, a not-so-unreasonable doubt never slipped past the tip of my tongue: was he really my son? But then it did when Roberta was already into the seventh month, and I had been along in every ultrasound exam, bought stuff for the baby’s room, made plans. So, I really wasn’t genuine when I asked, but I did utter that which was one of the most unfortunate sentences of my life — however tough the competition!

Apart from that, the pregnancy was fine. After nine years in a management position at a newspaper and a reasonable salary, I quit it in order to start my own business. My drivers: have more free time, stop working nights and weekends, and quit mixing my job with my personal life, because Roberta was then at the same newspaper and our senior-junior relationship was not exactly harmonious.

Peace and quiet ended on September 16, 2000, when a medical exam showed the umbilical cord to be wound around the baby’s neck. The obstetrician decided to proceed with a Caesarian cut that very same Saturday, and Henrique was born a month early. I was deeply moved and cried profusely in the delivery room; I got scared when I saw him come out with the cord around his neck, but the pediatrician reassured me that he was all right; and, so, his early days were quiet and easy. There was reflux for a while, sleepless nights, but it all came to pass and the future loomed jubilant like in margarine ads: Henrique was a happy child with his handsome features already showing.



Our marriage ended when he was one and a half. I no longer believed in our relationship and therefore took to seeing someone from days of yore; Roberta found out and had me leave home, as it follows suit. When I went back for my stuff, Henrique held me tight. That was our first farewell.

Up until then, to me and Roberta there had been no sign of autism. Henrique became a toddler at 11 months of age, showed no signs of apathy or hyperactivity, interacted with us and even uttered a few words. Later on, some people claimed to have noticed something different about him. Well, they should have said so. Roberta and I were first-time parents; we didn’t see any reason for concern.

In time, Roberta started to directly or indirectly blame me for Henrique’s autism. Searching the Internet, she read that, however rare, it is possible to perceive autism around the 18th month of the baby’s life, and that may have been the reason why she associated it to our separation. Though I understood it was Roberta’s own personal limitations that led her to say so, the clearly untrue association hurt me tremendously. Now, a proud resident of a “major autism treatment center”, she must have learned that the syndrome is largely due to genetic mutations, and an alleged trauma would never trigger the disease like a magic spell. Furthermore, such trauma wasn’t even there, for I kept very close to my son. As a matter of fact, closeness between me and my son was only discontinued as a result of the escape, which indeed causes deep psychological wounds to a child.

At 22 months of age, Henrique went to school for the first time, in Leme, near home. There were some adaptation problems, the perception that he took too long to speak, signs of the first tensions, but no red light warning yet. Around that time, a homeopathic pediatrician started seeing him because of his allergies. To my frequent questions about his late start in speech, her usual reply was, “You’re spoiling parents, that’s all; it will come in time”. I later learned that most pediatricians haven’t got a clue to what autism is all about, let alone to diagnosing it.

Remarkably enough, this is not exclusive to Brazil, but to developed countries as well. There are several possibilities to diagnosing and treating autism in Brazil, but there is no public policy or any major communication efforts about the syndrome. As a result, parents of autistic children usually find themselves in a true pilgrimage towards appropriate diagnosis first, and then searching for potential schools and likely therapies. That doesn’t mean, though, that parents in other countries are not faced with similar scenarios or that there are no success stories here. The latter actually depend, among other things, on the parents’ persistence and love for a child which have to be greater than other ambitions.

Unfortunately, the Leme school closed down. I visited several such schools in early 2003 but none was totally satisfactory. Roberta eventually liked one in Copacabana but still pointed at how difficult it was to cover the distance on foot. I hesitated, but finally agreed. Another mistake! It turned out to be one of those schools with a liberal outlook but a rather conservative approach. Evidently, we should have taken him to another option right away, but inexperience played an important role again.

The school’s very lousy psychologist only did us one good: She gave us the warning that there was something more serious than we had anticipated. To her mind, Henrique did not catch up with the other children, he was inferior and needed doors to be closed so he would stay in the classroom. Utter nonsense, but it helped us decide we needed to seek professional advice.

Starting in the summer of 2003, Henrique’s first ever therapy had no connection with his communication problems. I took him to a sensory motor expert because of his arching legs, that resembled mine. Besides improving his posture and walking poise, this excellent professional indicated he had hypotonicity (reduced muscular tonus), as he somewhat frequently fell backwards, and a fragility to the facial muscles that interferes in speech. During the eight months of weekly sessions that followed, Roberta only took him there once, which was nevertheless in response to my mother’s insistent calls. I took him to all the other visits. The effort was discontinued because the therapist went on maternity leave.

Having been warned by the school, I told Roberta we had to take Henrique to a good psychologist. “What will people say when they learn Henrique sees two therapists?” she argued during a conversation I am never to forget, while I spoke on the cellular phone from the gate to my office building and she spoke from her office. “Before age 3 nobody takes children to therapy” and “don’t you dare say my son has a problem” were but a few gems coming out of this dialog, which she later denied.

After some major efforts, my mother and I managed to convince her to permit a preliminary examination by a psychologist cousin of mine who had experience in the educational field. Four sessions were conducted at Roberta’s place which made clear that his development (as well as his speech) was slow to progress and that there was need for long term treatment, which could not be undertaken by my cousin for ethical reasons.

We were referred to a psychologist who followed a psychoanalytical line. What took us aback at first was her rather formal office, with an orthodox couch (used in heterodox fashion by Henrique) and the fact that she saw adult patients as well as children. Our first conversations were fine, though, and we decided to go for it. We settled for two weekly sessions and I was in charge of taking Henrique on Mondays.

In late 2003, during the sensory motor expert’s maternity leave, Roberta made arrangements for two weekly sessions with a speech therapist, without letting me know, on the belief that the problem could be restricted to his speech. I accepted it and started to take him there on Tuesdays. Given that she was also a relational therapist, with connections to psychoanalysis, results were not immediate but rather in the long run. Her work and that of the sensory motor expert who started to see him as of late 2004 contributed largely to Henrique’s self-reliance and self-esteem, encouraging him to be even more affectionate than he already was — not all autistic children achieve that! Visits to those therapists were only brusquely discontinued by the escape.

Henrique’s speech was slow to come and the phantom of autism was ever more real. We asked the psychologist and she spoke of “autistic characteristics”, “autistic features”, but she was never straightforward. It is not hard to understand why Roberta and I never demanded a firm response from her: reading about autism on the internet, unsure of the symptoms, and scared to death of a potential positive diagnosis, we only sought to postpone the pain. We wouldn’t say it out loud, but, sure enough, that was it. Any father of an autistic child will understand.

So, in 2004 we started with the whole lot of exams. Electroencephalogram: nothing abnormal. MRI: same. For both, Henrique had to be sedated, which further increased our pain. The third step was to seek a geneticist. She said, as we knew, that there was no exam capable of diagnosing autism other than clinical observation; however, we could have his blood examined in order to check whether Henrique had the X-fragile syndrome, an abnormality caused by a defective gene leading to retardation, among other consequences. Roberta froze when she learned that, for male children, the defective gene always comes from the mother. From June, month when we consulted the geneticist, to October, when I could wait no longer and took Henrique on my own for the exam, she raised a lot of barriers to keep from collecting his blood. Eventually, the result was negative.

In 2004, Henrique was already attending a much better school, a truly liberal one, which made real efforts to include him in the activities and did not hide from us how hard a challenge it was, however stimulating it could also be. Henrique was really pleased to go there every morning, a wonderful thing, as it was. He soon became very fond of the teacher, fond of her assistant — who would perform an important mission in the next year as his facilitator, the one who works towards integrating an autistic child to his/her environment — and was liked by both children and adults. There were obvious difficulties, but the love surrounding Henrique and the many steps forward he could actually take thoroughly overcame any such obstacles. Those professionals still ask about him and express their love in a way that only translates how special those twenty-eight months were to Henrique.

The whole thing went down the drain in 2005. Alves’s entrance on the scene brought about tension that hit everyone, especially Henrique, who, after three years as the man of the house — sleeping, as it was, in Roberta’s bed longer than advisable — started to share his mother with a man he had only met one month before. Talking to the school as early as March, Roberta said there had been no change to Henrique’s routine. I was the one who had to communicate the change to the coordinator and the teacher.

I threw a tantrum on February 13. I went depressive over some double-sided jealousy, the naughtiest one being the impression that my son was being abducted by another man — a depressive vagary that only time would prove it was not so erratic. Roberta’s trip on the 18th, leaving her child in the hands of an “emotionally unstable” father, as she put it, was the tipping point wherefrom I did not succumb. I saw it was high time I broke up with this insane connection and started to look exclusively at Henrique, which is, despite the personal and objective difficulties, one thing I am sure to have been doing ever since.

Upon returning from her 10-day trip, Roberta seemed taken by an angry sense of guilt. She had a fit at school because Henrique had been allocated to a different group from those kids with whom he had shared the previous year. The problem was that they were already into the third week of classes and the coordinator calmly explained all the reasons to me (Henrique’s difficulty to keep up with the group and the strong bond he had developed with the smaller children’s teacher). That fit was but the beginning of a sabotage process against Henrique’s school development, perhaps under the influence of an idea that he would have better care overseas, where she was moving to just as soon as I signed some mischievous draft document.

After the psychoanalytic therapist finally mentioned autism, and complying with a reiterated suggestion from my psychiatrist — whom she would later present to Court as evidence that I cannot look after my child — Roberta accepted to take Henrique to a children’s psychiatrist. In two sessions, the physician straightforwardly offered Pervasive Developmental Disorder — Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). That is also known as atypical autism, when not all symptoms are severe enough as for classical autism but where the individual does not have the communication skills and the social adequacy to be a high performing autist.

Grievance was thus complete, but at least now there was a clear enemy to be fought. We decided that Henrique would be seen by a behavioral therapist, who would perhaps do more objective work instead of waiting for his subconscious mind to come forth. As for myself, I started reading more about autism, which actually led to some, why not, misunderstanding. When I introduced myself to a theme-list on the Internet, I said I was beginning to read about the matter. Roberta then started to use this message in her legal petitions as “evidence” that I only started to take an interest on the syndrome after she had found herself another man. As one looks forward into the darkness, one forgets to watch one’s back!

In the year of our separation (2002), I used to sleep with Henrique on Wednesdays and Fridays, which were later replaced with Thursdays at Roberta’s request that he were not subjected to many and often back-and-forth trips, and spend entire Sundays with him. As of 2003, weekends were so changed: I’d spend one day with him, either Saturday or Sunday, and she’d spend the other. In April, 2005, she decided to change to alternate weekends. I then requested to have Henrique sleeping with me on Mondays following her weekends in order not to go seven days without seeing him. Thursdays remained as they were. She agreed.

But then the Corpus Christi holiday came and she traveled, leaving Henrique with me for four subsequent days. Upon returning on May 30, her angry guilt strain was in full gear. She said I’d no longer have him on Mondays nor would I have any extra day in June, though that was when I would have my vacations, as previously notified. Moreover: in very rude manners, she discontinued relations with my mother, who had always been a mediator between herself and myself, and definitely supported us in bringing up Henrique.



On June 14, 2005, she sent a message to one of the editors at the newspaper where I am employed asking whether I really couldn’t go on vacation in July because of a literary event to be covered. So, she wanted to know why I’d retire for the month of June. How ethical, hey! During this period I eventually had very little contact with Henrique, owing the very few encounters to the speech therapist and the sensory motor expert, who opened up their sessions that I might watch.

Curiously enough, in July, when I was back at work, Roberta offered me a week with Henrique, when she would, paradoxically, be off her job. Some very odd events took place during those days. There is a witness to at least one such event. Roberta called me at 7:30 to ask whether I could take Henrique on his visit to the sensory motor expert an hour later. I said yes, of course. As I arrived at the professional’s office, lo and behold, there was the couple, who had arrived earlier without notice and made a point of participating in the session. When we all left, Roberta bid farewell to Henrique, who cried, as any loving child would do to his mother; so she held him and said, “I know it hurts, son.” Now, talk about the Geneva Convention!

Despite his mother’s “wisdom”, Henrique had a fine week, apart from some mild food poisoning one day and the fact that he had to go a few hours without me, when he nevertheless played with my mother and sisters while I worked. He would open up a broad smile every time he saw me!

These latter tales took place after — and as a consequence of — an argument between myself and Alves on June 9. One hour before I picked up Henrique to come spend the night with me, Alves had called me to say, in a blatant tone, that I should leave his woman alone. I told him he should do the same about my son, because he was striving to destroy Henrique’s life as he tried to separate him from me. His response was rather revealing: “Watch what you’re saying because I am recording everything.”

When I arrived at the building, he came downstairs on his own and imposed himself upon me for almost half an hour, thereby putting off my right to be with my son. Amongst a lot of silly stuff, he said Henrique would have much better treatment in “my country” (his own words — now bear with me: he was referring to the United States, where he then lived; not to his native Brazil, nor to today’s home in Australia or who-knows-where tomorrow) and alluded to alcoholism, “madness”, the usual clichés. He only heard two adjectives from me: obnoxious and sucker. What a surprise indeed it was to hear him some months later say in a mournful tone of voice that I had called him such names.

The much more severe October 3 row had other preceding occurrences. For instance, after insisting, to no avail, that the speech therapist and the sensory motor expert sign a report favoring Roberta and Alves’s intent on moving abroad, the latter resorted to yet another rather renowned professional, who, in turn, submitted Henrique to some assessment sessions, one of which included me, and wrote a number of superficial remarks about Henrique’s ages concerning different aspects of his development. The couple prohibited that professional from letting me have a full copy of the report and instead included a mere excerpt in a December petition towards their trip.

In July, Roberta asked me for an authorization to take Henrique on a trip to Chile. I refused, because back then any travel abroad was dangerous. In May, 2006, it was from Chile that they left and made their way to Australia.

Well, then, on October 3, as I was late writing a singer’s obituary for the newspaper, my sister went ahead to pick up Henrique. To the utmost surprise of both parties, she was there without me and Roberta and Alves came downstairs without my son. The couple was obviously discomposed by an extremely polite letter I had sent four days before to Roberta with copies to the school and to the therapists. The letter contained a number of potential lines for dialog, which were fully understood by the professionals. But on that 3rd day of October, when I arrived and asked Roberta whether she had read it, her reply was: “No, I haven’t.” Which one was worse, the lie or the disregard for dialog?

Standing before my eyes, Alves addressed my sister in extremely rude terms whereby he extolled his own “normality” for “not consuming alcohol, for doing exercises, for taking care of himself”. In order to show off his “superiority”, he told her, “Just look at yourself and look at me!” A rather taken aback Andréia replied, “Roberta, this guy is a Nazi!”, to which he replied, “Better be a Nazi than a nutsy!”

Being aware of everything that was going on, I was outraged to learn this and could not hold my peace as they went on about us three having a conversation. I started to shout I wanted my son, because it was my day with him, that my right could not be curbed by so much insanity… Alves called upon the local security guards, who were a lot more polite than him, and after a full hour’s delay my sister and I finally received Henrique. Scared by all that shouting, the boy held tight to my arms and did not let go until we arrived at my place. Not for a single second was he willing to let go of his grip on me!

Five days later, there was a party at school. It was my weekend with Henrique, but since that was also Roberta and Alves’s religious wedding ceremony, she asked me if she could have her son on Saturday — I would pick him up on Sunday. Though Henrique was, possibly, the only child with three adults around him, everything ran smoothly until pretty close to the end. When I started to say goodbye, Henrique said “embora” (meaning “let’s go”) and tried to drag me along. I very quietly said that he was going to stay with his mother and, on the next day, we would play together. Apparently scared at us being so close to the gate, as if I were one of these people who keep breaching agreements and escaping children, Alves ran to take Henrique in his arms and said, “Today you will stay with papai Zé” — Zé is short for José, and papai is daddy.

I counted up to 20, turned around and went away, wondering where had that epithet come from. On Monday, October 10, I inquired at school and they told me the step-father had already used that expression there, which led the coordinator to consult with Roberta and the behavior therapist on the issue. The former said it had been spontaneous, a type of miracle. The latter said she thought nothing of it, since it was not only “papai” alone but rather another expression, so it was not likely to confound Henrique.

I told this lady, whom I still trusted back then (less and less, however), that it was not to be accepted in any terms whatsoever because it could indeed cause confusion to Henrique and, furthermore, he had a father who played a very active father’s role to him. To the newfound step-father, another nickname should be given: Superman, Supermouse, Aquaman, anything that did not have father stuck to it, for reasons that were more than obvious to any human being in a sound mind.

The couple’s woeful artifice proved to be sadistic when my sisters, my mother, and myself realized that Henrique had taken to add “papai Zé” to the end of each utterance, elaborating on the “té” (for Zé) which we had already been fearfully hearing since the end of August. Henrique started to talk like that to anyone: “Want egg, papai té”; “Want coke, papai té”; and so on. In short, he had been given, as the result of extensive training, a verbal key to open up the doors to satisfy his whims. By voicing the magic utterance, he obtained whatever he wanted. He confused the expression so much that once, as he wanted to play with a mongrel dog lying half asleep on the curb, he said, “Wake up, papai té!”

The school, serious as it was, started to correct it, and so did the speech therapist and the sensory motor expert. But the behavior therapist, who showed to connive more with Roberta’s designs, did very little, if anything, to fight it back. The hard efforts that were being made for a few years to show Henrique that he needed to construct correct sentences in order to gain things got wasted in a matter of months.

I had better not talk much about that therapist. Concerning the work she did with Henrique, she practiced — and still does to unwary parents who look her up — the Anglo-Saxon line of a psychology of results: child must do exercises on table, score points and gain chocolate if child gets right answer, not having necessarily understood why child is doing that. Since Henrique is intelligent (he has no mental retardation, unlike some 70% of the autists), he seemed to have taken to his benefit the few good things (the chocolate) and gotten around the bad and boring ones. The therapist, for instance, spent an entire month showing him colored circles that he would remember the names of the colors “by heart”. I told her that wasn’t going to work, because Henrique needed to be stimulated by something related to his life and the things he liked, not by something as abstract as that — after all, autists by definition have problems with abstractions. It didn’t work, like many other exercises. Sometimes he said “cocô” (Brazilian version of “pooh”) so he could escape the boredom of the moment and hide in the bathroom.

As to the rest, it is always worth informing that she produced a number of reports favoring the trip to Australia (starting with the first one, in October 2005, when Henrique spent 60 hours on airplanes), a portion of which were written without my knowledge and no copies were sent to me. Also without letting me know, and on her own, she cancelled a number of Henrique’s appointments when I was scheduled to take him. And, to sum things up, she started acting as an advisor to Roberta’s plans, even though I was the one who was paying her. The couple, by the way, spent several months trying to pay more and more sessions, which they eventually managed to do only in the last month, when I said that, after her collaboration to escape scheme, I would cease to pay.

I have also paid for Henrique’s school. But, in January, 2006, Roberta brought some court document to school which said she had her son’s custody and was therefore the one to outlay for any of his expenses. I had already covered for the school’s enrollment fee but had to stop paying the monthly tuitions. Roberta’s purpose soon came out of the dark: besides trying to prove I spent virtually nothing on Henrique, she wanted him out of that school just because she thought it favored me — for this nasty thing, the truth, was what they spoken there! One such truths, much to her discomfort, was the report of Henrique’s first utterance in the classroom: “I want daddy”.

When she carried out her plan in February, with the support from that therapist’s report to the effect that it was unnecessary for Henrique to attend a school since he was soon going to move abroad (though the situation was still open, as the judge had commanded an investigation), I went to court and regained my son’s due right to return to school. Still, Roberta kept moving heaven and earth to sabotage the effort (spent an entire week inside the school premises, forced the school to accept the nanny in the classroom…), she did everything she could to keep Henrique from integrating. The worse off he was, the better it would be for her purposes. However good the school intentions may have been, it was already clear that, given the way things were going, there would be no atmosphere for Henrique to continue in the second term — exactly what Roberta wanted in order to gain yet another trump in the struggle for her trip!

All along this macabre period, which ranged from April 2005 to May 2006, I received several phone calls and email messages that could make up a “case” for psychologists — and maybe other professionals. Many of these calls and messages have given rise to anger that is hard to restrain — and often wasn’t — and others have given rise to laughter, for the absurdity in them, especially on account of the Alves style. “Delusional beliefs” and “crystal-clear egocentrism” are two of the expressions he used in the midst of texts that mixed a countryside mayor’s formalism with blatant lies.

What’s most serious about all that happened during this period is that Henrique had his voice and his personally usurped upon. Because he is an autist and cannot fully express what he feels, a number of desires and speeches were being attached to him, a strategy whose most visible moment was the use of “papai Zé” as exchange currency, which nevertheless hit deeper spots. If he cannot say how much he enjoys the school, why stay there? If he cannot say how much he likes Rio, the places he knows, the language he hears, why not write up reports and petitions stating that he loved to spend 60 hours on airplanes and that living on the other side of the earth will be wonderful for him? If he doesn’t use words to show how much he loves his dad, his aunts, and his grandmother, though he makes it absolutely clear in his laughter, tears, and hugs, why does he have to live close to these people? The escape was the corollary of a full year of continuous massacre against Henrique.