Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [12]
Suddenly, a huge rock whizzed past my ear and shattered on the paving stones in front of me. I leapt behind a pile of forgotten concrete. A small boy slid in beside me. The people on the street disappeared. Another rock crashed into our concrete shield like a small bomb while down the street a car window burst into spinning glass. I heard shouts, then silence.
Within seconds people stepped onto the street again and picked up the threads of their gossip. The small boy beside me glanced at me quickly and then shuffled away. I rose and, with my still halting Portuguese, asked a man what had happened.
He flicked a toothpick at his teeth. “A fight,” he said. I nodded and continued on my way. I was not as accustomed as he to violence that erupted from calm and then, just as quickly, disappeared.
I reached the road’s summit and the hilltop praça. On one side stood the church, decayed, plaster flakes dusting steps built to honor an immense doorway that had not been grand itself for a century. On the other side of the praça, the hill dropped away sharply, offering a view of the city and the darkening sea beyond. I loved this praça: the young boys playing soccer in their bare feet, lovers sitting together on low walls, exchanging touches and shy smiles.
At the far end of the praça stood the old Fort. Once a valiant protector of the city, it was now an unmaintained center for African-Brazilian cultural groups. An indeterminate number of people also lived there—street children and others who had nowhere else to stay. The Fort had no functioning sewage facilities (we always peed in the dark spaces behind walls) and only one spigot for running water. In the center of the central courtyard, people had ripped out a circle of stones and dug a pit. When I arrived, a fire burned there.
Every Friday at the Fort, we had our capoeira circles, or rodas. I entered the stone-walled room and blinked in the tenuous glow of a poorly connected light bulb. Before me sat my fellow capoeira players in a circle, all dressed in the white trousers and shirts that were considered the traditional garb of capoeira. At the far end of the circle, seven people played instruments: an African-style drum, two tambourine-like instruments called pandeiros, a cowbell-like agogô and three varied-toned berimbaus. The berimbau was a single stringed bow with a resonating gourd that had been developed in Brazil but was similar to musical instruments in Angola. It came to Brazil with the slaves, my teacher told me, and had changed over the centuries. For more than three hundred years it had been the central instrument of capoeira.
Jorge, about twenty, tall, dark, fine-featured with short hair, played the lead berimbau. He gave a long call that was half cry and half shout that began the chanting of capoeira angola. These chants were based on African rhythms and cadence, moving between set calls and response. When Jorge changed his lead call, those responding also changed their words and tones in a seamless stream, with no break in the rhythm between chants. This music had the intoxicating quality of a trance, and yet it was also the opposite of a trance: in capoeira angola, all nerves and sensibilities were focused, aware, and Zen-attentive.
I had begun to know my fellow players. Louis, a tall, broad-shouldered man, sold coconut juice on the beaches. He said that capoeira