Piauí Magazine
November 2008

Family Matters
A Father in a Foreign Land
Dorrit Harazim

A week in which the personal dramas and court trials of three families collided in Rio de Janeiro once again. At the heart of the matter, an eight year-old boy.

rouched down on TAM Airlines' infallible red carpet, which this time actually served a purpose, a passenger in transit to Rio de Janeiro tried to gather the cluster of documents that had fallen from his hands. Friday, October 17th, lobby of Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo. He arranged his backpack, sent his two suitcases off again and headed to Gate 7. Guided by loudspeakers, he embarked on Flight JJ3522, en route to Galeao Airport. He settled into an aisle seat, took out a book of crossword puzzles in English, and dove into a half-finished puzzle.

David Goldman didn’t have the typical sleepy face one associates with someone who has just traveled over nine hours in coach on an international flight. It’s possible that his former occupation, when he crossed the airways between the United States, Europe and Japan as a model, helped to forever inoculate him against jetlag. Warned that a reporter would be sitting next to him on the flight and would be asking him questions about the legal labyrinth that he found himself trapped in four years ago, Goldman didn’t say no.

“I don’t have anything left to lose,” he said in a neutral tone, putting away his crossword puzzle book.

Goldman explained that he met Bruna, a Brazilian woman, in 1997 when they were 32 and 24, respectively, when they both lived in Milan. They fell in love and she got pregnant. They decided to cross the Atlantic and start a family in New Jersey, where Goldman had family ties and his own house. They were married there and their son was born there five months later, and they lived there for four years. Periodically, the three of them, or just the mother and son, traveled to Rio on vacation to see Brazilian relatives and grandparents.

In June 2004, Bruna and the boy took off from Newark Airport to go on another one of those Rio vacations. Days later, Bruna announced to David, by phone, that their marriage was over. She also told him that the most appropriate solution would be a divorce. She informed him that she and her son would not return to the US and urged David to come to Rio to formalize the separation. If he didn’t, he would never see his son again.

By retaining a minor in Brazil without her husband’s permission, Bruna violated an international treaty to which Brazil, the United States, and seventy-nine other countries are signatories. The Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, signed in the city of Hague in the Netherlands in 1980, was approved by the Brazilian Congress in 1999, and was issued by Decree #3413 on April 14th of the following year.

Since the word “kidnapping” in Brazilian Portuguese is fatally associated with criminality and physical violence, a more appropriate translation would be the English term “child abduction,” which the Convention refers to, or perhaps it could be “country transfer and illicit retention of children.” In most of those types of kidnapping, the abductor is a parent who removes the child from the company of the other parent, travels with the child, and retains the child in another country.

According to the International Convention, the signatory country to which the child is brought is required to act in order to assure the child’s immediate return. The treaty also states that after the minor is returned to the state of his habitual residence, the litigating parties may fight for custody. But even so, they must do so in the responsible forum: in this case, in New Jersey.

Like all treaties, the Hague also includes exceptions and conflicting interpretations. And it’s using these meandering interpretations that lawyers and judges act.

David Goldman settled into his seat and fumbled for his backpack to discuss his perspective on seeing his son for the first time since 2004. Days before, the 16thFederal Court had granted his visitation request and he had left Newark on the first flight that had a seat available. Based on the decision, the visit would begin at 8pm on that unusually rainy and cold Friday and would end at 8pm on Sunday. It would be two days of, in family court jargon, “non-supervised contact” with his son—who David Goldman last saw when the boy was four years old. Now, he’s eight.

“I have no way of knowing how he will react when he sees me again,” Goldman said. “I’m not going to force it. Maybe he’ll be confused seeing that I’ve gone gray, but I know that he’ll recognize my hair. I’m going to wear casual clothes, like I used to wear during our American weekends.” Goldman said that he had separated two sets of photos so that his son could remember his life in the US.

In the first packet there were commonplace photos that could be in any young couple’s photo album. In the pictures he showed and commented on, there were trips to Disney World and to Canada, Halloween parties, father and son rolling in the snow and in fall leaves typical in the Northern Hemisphere where they lived. There were photos of birthday parties with the paternal and maternal grandparents, games with cousins Sean’s age, shots from Sean’s first school (Sean is the boy’s name), his little black cat, Tuey, and the first two pine Christmas trees planted by the family at the entrance of their house in Tinton Falls. “I’m a regular guy,” the American summarized.

In the second set there were equally happy images of the child, this time with his mother. “Maybe I won’t show these right away,” Goldman pondered. “First, I need to feel out my son’s emotional state.” The American reasoned a bit more, admitting, “To be honest, I’m the one that needs to prepare myself. To prepare myself for the possibility that the visit will be cancelled at the last minute, just another legal maneuver from the Lins e Silva family.” Before the flight landed in Galeao Airport, the name of the family that has made circles in Goldman’s imagination was constantly on his mind.

After divorcing unilaterally in Brazil, Bruna remade her professional and private life in Rio. She became a designer, opened a boutique in Ipanema and married the lawyer João Paulo Lins e Silva, son of the respected Paulo Lins e Silva and part of the Carioca clan that for more than 130 years and for five generations has provided legal assistance to the national elite. She changed her name to Bruna Bianchi Carneiro Ribeiro Lins e Silva and got pregnant. Sean’s half sister, baptized Chiara, was born on a Thursday last August. Bruna fell ill giving birth. There were complications, and she died. She was 34 years old.

“Mango juice, please…thank you,” said the American to the flight attendant, in Portuguese tinted by the years he lived in Milan, before switching back to English to tell his story. “Bruna and I lived in the same building, La Darsena, but we never crossed paths. One day, the owner switched our apartments so that we lived near each other, and bingo, it was fate. She was studying fashion in college, and I was a model, and we just fell in love.”

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Copyright © 2008 Piauí Magazine - Brazil, Reprinted with permission

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