Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [19]
I descended the bus steps into a huge outdoor market. Five streets met to form a wide central area of road that was carpeted with mats and cloths covered with tomatoes, oranges, pineapples, bananas, jackfruit, carrots, and other fruits and vegetables I had never seen before. Everywhere people pushed between the piles of produce. Vendors shouted the qualities of their wares. At the corners of the market stood bars, cement rooms with an open wall at the front, where men packed inside drinking beer. I was the only white person there.
Where was Rita?
I had grown used to being a minority of one in Penambuas. At first the men in that neighborhood had watched me with hostile eyes from the doors of their homes. But gradually, as Andrea and Ana introduced me to their neighbors, the men began to acknowledge my presence. They began to shout, “Oi, gringa!” as I passed. As more time passed and they came to know me as a temporary resident of their neighborhood, they began to greet me by name.
This is good experience, I thought as I wandered around the market, feeling peoples’ eyes on me, the obvious outsider. In the North, as a white person, I was nearly always in the majority. I almost never felt the discomfort of entering a room where everyone else was a different color than me. When I did anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, I had been different than the local population, but a strong colonial attitude amongst the indigenous people there, which persisted despite the relatively recent independence of that country, made the situation different. I was alien there, but my place was established: like it or not, I was a member of the colonial power group, a position that brought certain separation and a defined, if dubious, status. Here in Salvador, however, it was different. I was an outsider, pure and simple. Rita’s neighborhood was not my place. Peoples’ glances silently asked what I was doing there.
Then, from behind a horse tied to a truck, Rita came bouncing out along with a small slender woman.“Margaret!” she shouted. “You made it!”
The rush of relief I felt made my knees weak.
“This is my sister Norma,” Rita said, indicating the woman beside her. She kissed Norma goodbye and turned to me. “She’s staying at the market. Let’s go buy some fish and cook lunch at my place.” We headed through the market where it seemed that everyone shouted a greeting to Rita. As my presence faded into the background, I relaxed and began to smile. As I looked at people, they smiled back.
“It’s a wonderful market,” I said.
“As long as it lasts,” Rita replied. She bent over some tomatoes, selected the four she wanted and handed the vendor some coins without asking the price. He seemed satisfied. “The city wants to close all the markets such as this one. They say it causes too much mess.” We skirted a pile of oranges. “But that isn’t really the problem. The big grocery chains here—they’re mostly owned by one family—want to control the buying and selling of food so they can get all the profit. Markets take their money away, as they see it.”
“But that’s terrible, Rita! How long has there been a market here?”
“It was here as long as I can remember, and I grew up here. When I was a child, there were dunes here. Can you believe that?” I looked around at the urban landscape of hovel built upon hovel. “This whole area was full of dunes and grass and trees. We used to run down the hill and play in the water at the bottom, go swimming. This was a fishing village on the outskirts of Salvador.”
We came upon three men sitting in the shade of a bar wall. Before them was a wooden crate covered with newspaper. Laid out on the paper were several fish. Rita squatted in front of them. “What kind of tuna is this?” she asked, picking up one of the fish. The man replied with a name I didn’t understand. “That’s good,” Rita said. “I’ll buy it.”
“How’s your brother?” the man asked as he began to wrap the fish.
“He’s started university,” Rita said.
“You sent him to school, didn’t you? Paid for it, paid for him to take the university