Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [17]
We danced most of the night.
One day, I asked Agnaldo to play the rhythms of the orixás for me on his berimbau so I could record them.
“It’s for my research,” I said, although in reality I wasn’t sure how I could use these recordings. I just wanted them; I wanted to remember the tones he played.
“This is good,” he said. “We must record our stories, our music, because people are changing them. They don’t know the true stories from before.”
We sat in the capoeira practice room, alone in the quickly fading light of an equatorial evening.
“Rhythm: Oxum,” Agnaldo said, naming an orixá. Then he played, the notes reverberating, fast and varied. Then, “Rhythm: Iansã,” and Her rhythms echoed around the walls, sneaked into corners now lost to shadow.
The recording I made of Agnaldo’s music was full of street noise that I hadn’t noticed at the time, but Agnaldo’s notes still come through pure and strong. Later, Agnaldo asked me to come visit him at his home to record the tales that his father, a “big African,” had told him when he was a child.
Pelourinho’s large stucco buildings created veritable walls along the area’s narrow streets. To reach Agnaldo’s house, I passed through a tunnel beneath one of these buildings and emerged on the other side to a country hillside. The cobbled city street became a dirt path lined by green grass and trees. One-room dirt and tin shacks dotted the hillside. The steep hillside offered a vista for miles across the city, which suddenly seemed silent and far way.
The huts were built one upon the other. They had dirt floors, no toilet facilities, and no running water. Most shared a common wall and some leaned precariously down the hillside. I imagined that in the rain, all the floors and the path itself became a single rushing sheet of water.
Agnaldo ushered me into his two-room house. I never saw the back room, but it was apparently a bedroom with only a doorway and no window. The front room, where the only light came from the doorway and front window, contained a small gas burner upon which he heated water for coffee. Also in the front room were scattered wooden boxes for sitting, some dishes, two pots, and a radio on a shelf. Boards had been laid between several boxes to create a table. There was a cupboard for food; it was tightly shut, I knew, to keep out cockroaches and rats. Everything looked spotless: the dirt floor was swept and a bucket of clean water stood near the stove. Agnaldo offered me thick sugared, coffee, and we drank it as we sat on wooden boxes in the shade in front of his house. He recited tale after tale, many in Iorubá, a Nigerian language which I did not understand, but most in Portuguese with Iorabá phrases. It was clear that Agnaldo remembered the tales exactly as his father had told them.
I made Agnaldo an extra copy of the tape I made because he said he couldn’t get his children interested in memorizing the tales. He feared the tales would get lost when he no longer remembered them.
A month or so later, Agnaldo invited me to a Candomblé gathering. “You need to find your orixá, your guardian spirit to protect you,” he said. We were sitting on the front steps along the gutter in front of the old building where we had just finished capoeira practice. I kicked at a piece of rubbish with my toe.
“I don’t know how to choose an orixá,” I said.
“You don’t choose the orixá. She or he chooses you.”
“But, Agnaldo, this is not my religion. I’m not baiana. I don’t want to be a tourist gawking at someone else’s sacred space. I don’t want to disrespect you that way.”
Agnaldo laughed. “That’s why I’ve invited you. To understand us, you must know our gods. And anyway,” he stood and held out his hand to help me up, “you need a guardian spirit to protect you here. I wouldn’t be a friend if I didn’t introduce you.”
I went to the gathering with Ana. Agnaldo told me not to wear black, to wear white if possible. When I told