Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [126]
Finally, Rita told our agent that I had to return to my country the next day, and if we didn’t get our signature, than he wouldn’t get paid. She had, intelligently, only paid him a portion of his fee. So, he hustled and somehow made the lawyer set an actual appointment—she then only kept us waiting four hours before she deigned to see us.
So, now the building was ours, but I was nervous. It had a beautiful facade dating from the early nineteenth-century, but it was a total mess. It had been passed on in a single family, generation to generation, and no one seemed to have done any maintenance for a hundred years. We got a renovation grant from England by incredible good luck, but it was only 12,000 pounds. Rita said she was sure that would cover the costs of renovation. I hoped so. Rita was exhilarated about the whole thing, so I kept my mouth shut. We were going through the building with the architect in a few days. He had already seen it and said it was OK.
Rita and I had been spending long evenings talking. Last year, she had begun having panic attacks. Her heart would beat erratically, would race and not stop. Then she would get anxious and paranoid. It hit her first when she went to the World Social Forum in the southern Brazilian town of Porto Alegre. Rita had traveled little. She seemed so urbane, but she never had the money or opportunity to see much of anywhere except Salvador.
Her doctor gave her some kind of medicine for the panic attacks, told her to quit drinking alcohol, get more exercise, do meditation, and to take weekends off. She had done everything the doctor suggested. She also began seeing a therapist. Bahia Street was so stressful for her, let alone where she lived. A man had come to the front of her house the previous month and shot someone on the street right in front of Rita. Her niece had been sitting at the curb six feet away. The killing was a case of mistaken identity.
“Why can’t these assassins be more professional and at least shoot the people they are paid to instead of some innocent bystander?” she had asked me rhetorically. The assassin was supposed to hit the father of the ten-year-old boy across the street, but he had shot a local mechanic instead. The father of the boy had now disappeared, and the boy was afraid to come out anymore. The neighbors were leaving food for him.
“I can’t stand it much anymore,” Rita said. “Things are getting worse and worse. Outside the center, this city is like a war zone; it is a war zone.” It was the lived reality of the statistic that Brazil had the highest murder rate in the world. Friends of the Bahia Street girls kept getting killed. “I’ve always loved my neighborhood,” Rita said, “but now I don’t want to go home anymore.”
She was spending most of her weekends in Arembepe. She had rented a room and had friends there. We went there when I first arrived. The room was very simple; we slept on mats on the floor, but we spent most of our time outside anyway. It was tranquil, and it was safe. She had around her the smell of the sea that she had known as a child. I worried about her. Rita ate healthy food, lots of fish and vegetables, but people who have been brought up poor in Salvador die young. Rita was in her forties. I got scared sometimes.
I lay in my hotel room a few days later with the fan on. I should run down to the sea, I thought, jump in, clear my brain, and let my stomach settle. But I couldn’t. I had no energy. My stomach hurt.
Rita, Mario the architect, and I had inspected the building the previous day. We went into the neighbor’s house and looked at it from above.
“Well,” Mario said. “It’s a good buy. It will have to be entirely rebuilt of course, but with the land at the back and its location, it’s still a good buy.”
“What do you mean, has to be rebuilt?” I asked. “You mean gutted and repaired.”
“Well, more than that. You have to leave the