Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [133]
On Mariana’s suggestion, we head to Flamengo, as far from Barra as public transportation goes. The bus trip along the coast takes an hour and a half, in part because street parades (different from the one that woke us) delay us twice. Other passengers, all quite friendly, regard us as oddities, particularly the two young girls engrossed with Mary; when they pantomime a question about whether she has children, Mary tries to say she has a cat but conveys instead that she is a cat, eliciting delighted laughter. An elderly gentleman in front of us, who once worked for Xerox and spent time at the company’s Connecticut headquarters, coaches his shy four-year-old grandson, Jaime, to tell Cheryl, “Hi. I love you.” When she responds in kind in English, the foreign language startles him, and he bursts into tears.
The palm-lined Flamengo and other nearby beaches look a little meager compared with Ipanema, but they feel more natural, largely secluded from urban and resort development. Most beachgoers settle in at tables with chairs and umbrellas provided free by dozens of barracas, food and drink stands. Following the routine, we pick a place close to the bus stop. Over the next several hours, a stream of waiters brings us limeades and cheese “crepes” on a stick, the specialty of our barraca. Scads of vendors stop by, selling everything hawked in Rio plus oysters on the half shell, fresh fish, blow-up Santas, coconut-shell planters with live flowers, cigarettes by the pack or individually (with a free light), and ashtrays decorated with crab shells. Jaime and his grandfather also stroll past us on a walk and the child waves at us cheerfully like we’re longtime neighbors.
The next day, Sunday, is the busiest of the week for the beaches. Multiple generations of families show up together, including grandparents in some cases with swimsuits as ample as ours. Wanting to try a different beach, we decide on Patamares, mainly to have lunch on the shore at Caranguejo da Dadá after our time in the sun. Today, in addition to other services, our barraca sets out inflatable plastic kiddie pools for toddlers, and a really enterprising vendor cooks fish and sausages on a commercial-size charcoal grill mounted to a three-wheel cart that he pushes through the sand.
The food at Caranguejo da Dadá is terrific, especially the bobó de camarão, made with jumbo shrimp, dried and grated fresh cassava, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, and coconut milk. The kitchen sautés the ingredients first in dendê and then stews them together until the flavors meld and the mixture thickens. It may not be the most appropriate dish for a hot summer day on the beach, but it’s as well crafted as anything else we see or purchase in Salvador.
Getting comfortable now with the surface charms of the city, we’re ready to delve deeper into its character and fervent energy. The key, many experts suggest, lies in religion, not so much in the Catholicism practiced in the venerable churches that we and other tourists visit, but in the Afro-Brazilian blend of beliefs called Candomblé. The creed prospers in many areas of the nation, and shares a heritage with other African-based religions in the New World, but Candomblé comes originally from Bahia and exerts its broadest overall influence in Salvador.
Our first glimpse of this side of the city comes on taxi trips that take us past a small lake near the center of town. A dozen colorful sculptures, each about twenty feet tall and grouped in a circle, rise from the water. Mistaking them initially from a distance as Christmas trees, like the one we saw in Rio, we finally realize they are orixás, the deified forces of nature worshipped in Candomblé. Slaves brought a devotion to them from their homelands, but the Church in Brazil firmly banned the ancient African religion. Rather than acquiescing, the slaves discovered they could secretly maintain their faith in the orixás by disguising them as Catholic saints and syncretizing those identities. Omolú, who possesses feared and respected power over disease, for example,