Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [2]
“I’ve never been to Las Vegas,” he continued, “but I think it must be similar. There the casinos lure people in to lose their money, to gamble it away until they have nothing. To encourage them, they and the local government make the entire city a fantasy, bright lights, pretend worlds. This is the same, only I suppose here people have no money to lose; they have nothing, only their connection to reality. And here, with their lights and foreign music, they’re taking that away as well.”
“And after Christmas is Carnival,” I said.
The driver laughed. “Ah, now Carnival is an entirely different matter. These lights, these plastic Christmas trees, these Santas, they’re a foreign invasion; they’re a fantasy created from politician’s glitter. But Carnival, it’s our own fantasy, our own complicated past superimposed on a present that includes the rats, racism, death, love, sex, forgetfulness, and bliss. Carnival is our own rhythm. As the song says, sadness has no end, only happiness. That’s Carnival.”
“This is where I’m staying,” I said.
“On the corner?” I nodded. “You’re not from here, are you? Are you a foreigner or from the South?”
“A foreigner. My accent doesn’t sound Brazilian, does it?”
“You have an accent, but your Portuguese is local. Why do you have such good Portuguese?”
I opened the door and glanced up to see the beloved face of my friend Rita. She waved from the balcony of the apartment she’d recently rented in this relatively safe corner of central Salvador. The rain had stopped. “Thanks for the conversation,” I said to the driver. “You’re a poet.” He smiled and took the fare I held out for him.
“And you’re easy to talk to.”
“I have a history with Bahia,” I said as I climbed from the car and waved back at Rita, “a long history.”
part one
learning to dance
one
seduction
I had just boarded a Varig Brazilian Airlines flight from Brussels to Salvador. The year was 1991. I knew I had left European space and entered Brazilian almost as soon as I entered the plane. I walked to my assigned seat and found a nun sitting there. “Excuse me,” I said. “You’re in the wrong seat.”
“No,” she said. “This is my seat.”
“May I see your ticket?” I said. The people in the adjoining seats were all listening; a child stared over the back of the next row. Who would harass a nun?
She handed me her ticket. It was for three rows back, a center seat. The plane was packed.
“See,” I said. “Your seat is different.” The annoyance around me thickened to hostility.
The nun looked at me, said nothing.
“Do you understand?” I asked.
“This is my seat,” she said. “I’m sitting here.” The man beside her placed a protective hand on her arm.
A man behind me took my hand luggage. “Let me help you with your bag,” he said in Brazilian-accented English. He strode toward what was indisputably my new seat and placed my bag in the overhead.
Brazil-1, Margaret-0.
I was now squashed into my new seat between a fat man who was already snoring and a man whose foul breath rushed at me when he smiled. As I settled in, I contemplated the politics of the World Cup. If a game like that could invert power relations between G8 countries and countries struggling to pay off international debts, then what unbalancing experiences could I expect in Brazil?
I was only on this plane because of Alexandra. It was her fault. I was an anthropologist working in Amsterdam and had been awarded a year’s fellowship position in Australia. Alexandra had somehow convinced me that from Amsterdam, Brazil was on the way to Australia, and, that being the case – particularly since she would be visiting herself – I simply had to visit her family in Salvador, a major city in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Somehow I had conceded to this dubious plan.
“You’ll love it,” Alexandra had said to me only a few weeks before. We were sitting in her section of an illegal squat in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. She loaded