• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I was staying in my hotel near the city center, relatively near Elino’s apartment; Rita’s house was vaguely on the way. Most people would have dropped her on the busy street that ran beside her neighborhood, but Elino, with much courage and chivalry, said he would take her to her door. Rita protested, but Elmo persisted, bumping up and down the twisting narrow streets past the falling-down shacks.

“Can you find your way out?” Rita kept asking, knowing he had never entered this neighborhood before.

“I think so,” he replied.

Then, right after the heavy metal door in front of Rita’s house had clanged shut, a torrential downpour exploded, outstripping by far the “normal” heavy tropical rain bursts of Salvador. The rain became a waterfall; we could see no more than five feet in front of the car. Lightning sliced the dark on all sides.

“Is it true her neighbor is an assassin?” Elino asked.

I glanced at him. Why was he thinking of assassins in this storm? Then I remembered that Rita had mentioned her neighbor during her talk. “Yes,” I said, “he is. And he’s eighteen.”

I knew the way to the end of the bus line, but because I had always previously arrived at Rita’s by bus, I wasn’t at all sure which route we should take after that. We got completely lost. The rain got worse. Lightning shot blue into the street beside us. We could smell it. Elino grew increasingly distracted and began to drive more and more erratically. Then a young man ran by.

“Let’s ask him the way,” I said.

Elino looked at the man nervously, who was about eighteen and had already passed us anyway. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think that is the sort of person we should stop for directions.”

And then, he looked at me, the rain, and we began to laugh. What assailant in his right mind would be out on such a terrible night? The only people out were lost sods like ourselves. We laughed and laughed, the car splashing along the muddy, rutted lanes.

Suddenly, we burst unexpectedly onto a busy street, and both Elino and I recognized where we were.

Elino smiled. “Ah, what an adventure Rotary is,” he said.

“Hey, Margaret!” Phyllis bounded up the stairs to my front porch in Seattle. I was drinking a lemonade and watching the renovation on the house across the street that had formerly been the drug and prostitution center. It had been bought by a family of Ethiopians who had divided it into three apartments but kept the classic outside lines of the house. The entire crew also seemed to be Ethiopian. Phyllis sat in the chair beside me and handed me a flyer. “Isn’t this your old capoeira teacher?”

I took the flyer. Our capoeira teacher had left Salvador some years before and moved to São Paulo, where he’d attracted a more middle-class clientele and made a livable salary. Indeed, it appeared that he, now clearly much better known, had been invited to the United States to give workshops. A local capoeira group had invited him to Seattle. He was to give a workshop that afternoon.

I had tried to play capoeira when I had first come to Seattle, but had soon stopped. It wasn’t the same. Capoeira was rapidly becoming popular overseas as Brazilian immigrants introduced it in their adopted homelands. Some of them actually knew how to play; others did not, but the Americans they taught didn’t know the difference. Some Americans, who didn’t have a clue, were also purporting to teach it. But even the knowledgeable Brazilians were teaching an audience that knew nothing about Brazilian society or history. The play was couched in terms of “takedowns” and competition instead of the complexity, balance, and chess-like strategy of the game I had known in Salvador. Besides, the emphasis the Seattle teachers placed on continual back flips was not going to work for me, so I had dropped it and watched the groups from afar.

I felt a rush of warmth when I saw the flyer, though. I hadn’t seen our teacher for years.

“I would love to see him,” I said.