Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [21]
“What?”
“Salvador is pretty leftist, you know. Last election we voted in a more leftist city government. But the right and the military are still really in control, so they’ve just withheld all the money to strangle the local government until the people all get tired of not getting paid. Then they’ll have an election and everyone will vote out the leftist government. The rightist ones, the ones who control everything anyway, will take over the government again and we’ll all get paid.”
“So, will you vote for them?”
“No. But I don’t have any children.”
“Except for paying for your brother’s education.”
“We’ll keep him in school.” She began to chop up cilantro and onions. “Now, I am going to make you some real baiana food.”
“Whatever happened with the history of churches you were doing?” I asked Andrea one day as we sat at the dining table. I was drinking medicinal tea because I had stomach cramps and diarrhea—again. Andrea had shown me her project some months ago. It had been about five pages, written in a round cursive hand, and—somewhat to my surprise given Andrea’s obvious intelligence and expressive speech—it resembled the work of a first-grader. I, whose Portuguese was barely more than conversational, helped her with her grammar and tried to show her how to put paragraphs together. I told her about history projects I had done as a girl and told her we could use my camera to take pictures. She had seemed excited at the time, but never mentioned it again.
Now she picked at the plastic tablecloth. “Oh, I’m not doing it anymore,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t know.” She scrunched the tablecloth between her fingers. “Got bored, I guess. But did I tell you I won a samba contest?”
“Yes. That’s great.” I looked at her closely. “Did you show the project to your teacher?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t interested.” Andrea rose abruptly from the table. “They don’t care anyway—the teachers. They don’t even show up most of the time. Last week I went to school three days, and there wasn’t anybody to teach our class!”
“So—how much are you going to school this week?”
“What’s the point? Nobody cares. And why should I be interested anyway?” She glared at me, leapt away from the table, and stormed out into the street.
I sighed, picked up my pen and tried to write some research notes about capoeira in my field notebook. Ana came in and turned on their new and very small television to the first of three daily soap opera miniseries that everyone watched. Within minutes a few close neighbors had settled in to join her, and several others watched through the open window that faced the street. Once the miniseries started, Andrea crept in and sat beside her sister. She looked as though she’d been crying.
I had now been living with the family for about eight months. I had learned so much from them, but I wasn’t getting my research done. I wasn’t writing enough. I felt another stomach cramp coming on and excused myself from the room. Ana and a couple of neighbors smiled. Cramps and such sickness were normal in these shantytowns. How do they do it? I thought. I’m just exhausted all the time.
After another few months, I moved into an apartment with Luzia, from the capoeira group. I told the sisters and Tatiana to come visit me anytime. We hugged and cried. I felt desolate, but also relieved. I had grown to love the family, but I also wanted some space. I laughed ruefully to myself. I was a middle-class softie.
In many ways Luzia’s apartment was not much better than the house in Penambuas. It was some twenty years old and built very cheaply. Here I still slept on a wooden box of a bed—on the floor this time rather than on a bunk. The toilet worked, about half the time, but the elevator never did. And we were on the tenth floor. “Good for our capoeira,” Luzia said. The apartment was in the center of town, and although it did not have quite as many cockroaches as the Penambuas house, it was noisy, dusty...and noisy. One thing I could count on