Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [10]
“How do you know all this history?” I asked. She shrugged and looked at the ground. “I like history,” she said. She gave a small skip and glanced over at me shyly. “I’m writing about the history of the churches in Salvador. I want to show photos of the churches and then write about it. Maybe you would like to see it?”
“I’d love to.”
When we entered the building where the capoeira group trained, I treaded lightly. In these buildings, to fall though a floor was to tumble into whatever horrors lay in the darkness below. Rats lived fat in every gutter. It seemed that literally hundreds of people lived in every house. Cockroaches, the most populous residents, were everywhere.
We walked up a dark wooden stairway to the second floor. When we entered the room, a group of people, mostly dark young men clad in white, fell silent and stared at me. Andrea walked over to a tall man in his early thirties with short dreadlocks and began talking with him. I stood by the door and waited for her to rejoin me.
“He says because you are Alexandra’s friend he will try you out,” she said when she returned. She glanced at my legs. “You’re wearing shorts though. At least they’re fairly long. He says you must never come back in shorts. Don’t worry, we’ll make you some white long pants at home if he lets you stay.” She gave me a little push, and I walked toward the center of the room.
The teacher, as I now understood the dreadlocked man to be, motioned me to stand in front of him. He began to move gracefully back and forth, almost a dance move, very light on his feet. He motioned me to copy him. I did and soon we were moving together, facing each other, swaying. I tried to match his moves. He stared into my eyes; it was a gaze so intimate I blushed. I moved with him, looking only into his eyes, transfixed in their pull and their power.
Then, suddenly, he looked away. The release was so strong it felt as though I had been holding a taut rope that someone had just let go. I fell over. The teacher and the rest of the class laughed. The teacher turned to Andrea and said something I didn’t understand.
“He says you can train with them,” she said. “He says you move very strangely, but you can feel the energy and, for a woman, you’re strong. That, he said, is at least a start.”
The teacher motioned me to stand behind a line of other students, and I found myself performing a series of exercises: seemingly endless knee-bends and contorted push-ups. My head spun with the heat and exertion, but I was determined not to stop. My sweat formed a slippery pool around my hands and feet. Thank God I’m strong, I thought.
The building where we trained capoeira was as decrepit as the rest of the buildings in Pelourinho, but its second-story floorboards were wide and strong. Our training room had a twenty-foot ceiling of thick beams and two walls that were lined with high, arched casement windows from which hung heavy wooden shutters that we opened and closed when we came and went. The windows had no glass, only filigreed ironwork on the bottom third to prevent people who leaned out too far while watching street movement from crashing to the street below. It seemed to me that watching street movement was an honored occupation in Pelourinho.
We trained from five to seven, three nights a week. Each evening, as the sun began to set, long shafts of light stole through the window openings, joining us in our efforts, turning the walls a deep blue. Gradually, the shafts of light shaded pink, mixing with the dimness of the room to create a stillness that all our grunting and exertions could not disturb.
During the second training session, one of the better students came up to me and said hello. His skin was the color of light copper and his hair hung in loose curls around his shoulders. “I am studying English,” he said in beautifully accented English. “May I practice with you?”
I smiled.