Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [106]
Karey twisted in her chair and her face closed in on itself in pain. I wanted to hug her, but I could feel her pushing us away, making even thicker the sultry Salvador air.
Two days later, Karey left Brazil and returned to the United States. Rita and I went out for a beer. We both felt we had failed. Nelson brought us an ice-cold beer, telling Rita to touch it to confirm that he had brought her the coldest he had.
I had been a bit nervous about walking to the bar at night. Everyone in Salvador had been telling me about the recent police strike.
“What do you expect?” Rita had said. “The police haven’t had a pay raise in seven years. They can’t survive on their salaries; they have to take bribes to exist!” The police had tried to negotiate with the local government but had gotten nowhere, so they decided to strike. The ensuing chaos had led to pitched gun battles in the streets, massive looting, seventy-eight deaths, and, no surprise, all schools being closed, including Bahia Street. “We just stayed inside,” Rita said. “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine now.” No one else seemed particularly nervous either, so I decided to relax—or more accurately, relax in the alert street-smart awareness I always adopted in Salvador.
“These interns are so difficult,” Rita said as she poured our beers. “On one hand, I feel I should have taken better care of Karey, but I don’t have time to look after someone here.” She downed her small glass of beer in one gulp. “My, that tastes good,” she said. “Perhaps we could get a special group of apartments close to Bahia Street for visitors and young students so that after the excitement and exoticness of the first few weeks wears off, I could protect them a bit from the struggles and loneliness that that seems to come from actually living here. Particularly since the interns aren’t living with a wealthy family who can make life resemble what they know in the United States.”
“Life here, even with a middle-class family, bears almost no resemblance to the United States,” I said. “Particularly for people from Seattle.” I waved to Nelson and asked him for a prosciutto and cheese sandwich. Rita said she’d have the same.
“A middle-class family here is only going to be overprotective of them,” she said. “The interns would miss the entire point of coming here. What would they do? Take a bus from their fancy condo to teach in the scruffy center of town?”
“No, that doesn’t work. But what can we do?”
“Not have any interns?”
“We’ve said that before as I recall,” I said.
“Yeah.” Our sandwiches arrived. “Thanks Nelson. That was fast,” Rita said.
“Always fast here,” Nelson said.
“In more ways than one,” Rita retorted. He flipped an impolite hand gesture and Rita laughed.
“Do you want me to be there tomorrow when you talk with Christina’s mother?” I asked.
Rita’s meeting with Christina’s mother was designed to convince her to let Christina and her younger brother stay with Rosa, the same caregiver we’d used before.
“No,” Rita said. “I’m going to tell her that we’ll pay for the caregiver, but not give any money directly to her.”
“And if I’m there, she’ll think you should be giving her twice as much because you have this white gringa supporting you.”
“Exactly. The boyfriend probably won’t want Christina to leave.”
“Is he still raping her?”
“It appears not.” Rita waved to Nelson for another bottle of beer. “We don’t really want him to know you’re here anyway, do we?” Nelson brought the bottle and placed our empty one beneath the table for counting later when he calculated our tab. “So Margaret,” Rita began as she waited for me to finish pouring our next beers. “I want to talk with you about an interesting thing that’s happened with the public and private school girls in Bahia Street.”
Although the Bahia Street Center itself was now as good as the best of the private schools in Salvador, we had come to realize that we could no longer