Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [22]
The street in front of our apartment was an ocean of sound, a continuous cant punctuated by the louder noise of cars without mufflers, buses without mufflers, and whole orchestras of horns. I seldom noticed the bar music during the day, but at night the bars owned the sound waves. All four bars on our short street played popular Brazilian pop and Carnival beat at the highest possible decibel through the night. Then, around three in the morning, the street fights started. The fights were often between a transvestite prostitute and her client. Our street was a center for the transvestite prostitution scene in Salvador. The fights usually revolved around robbery: either a client thought that he’d been robbed (generally true) or a transvestite claimed she’d been robbed (almost never true—they were too street smart for that).
I now knew two other foreign anthropologists living in Salvador: Don and Cecilia. Don came to do research on these transvestites. He told me that the robbery game was routine: while the transvestite and client had sex in the back of the client’s car, the transvestite casually removed the client’s wallet, took whatever money she found there, and then replaced it, leaving behind all the client’s credit and identity cards.
When the time came to pay, the client found he had no money. The transvestite became righteously indignant: she had fulfilled her part of the bargain, she trusted him, and he had assured her that he had money, which now—magically it appeared—had vanished. And yet, his cards remained. What was an honest businesswoman to think? As the volume and pitch of her protests increased, the client began to glance nervously up and down the street. These confrontations generally ended with the client apologizing and giving the transvestite his wristwatch.
The transvestites in Salvador injected silicone into their thighs, knees, and buttocks to give them what they considered a more feminine shape. The silicone they used was not medical silicone, but the substance used to mold car dashboards. According to rumor, some had as many as twenty liters (five gallons) of silicone in their bodies, but the norm was four to five liters (about a gallon).
I grew to know these transvestites, greeting them as I walked home late from a roda or evening gathering. Below our living room window often stood a transvestite who wore a beautiful dress, marine blue and flowing to her knees. Only when she turned did you realize that the dress had a front only; the back was two thongs and her bum provocatively bare. Nadia, a very tall, mocha-skinned transvestite with short, dark hair, hung out on the street above the bar that my capoeira group frequented. “You can send any of those boys my way anytime,” she’d say to me, shaking her hand rapidly in an expressive and lewd manner. I was happy for her and her fellow transvestites’ presence. They knew the streets well. I also felt they protected me.
But my tolerance for noise in Salvador usually lasted about two weeks. One Friday—after a night of particularly spectacular and loud fights and a day of climbing up and down ten flights of stairs because the elevator had broken again—I shouted at Luzia for no reason at all. She looked at me and smiled. “I think you need a change of energy,” she said.
I shut up and called Cecilia, my other expatriate anthropologist friend, an Englishwoman who had gone “native” several years before and married Edilson, a local Bahia man. Cecilia read Portuguese with expert fluency and generously shared with me her extensive bibliographies. Bearing all this in mind, I invited myself along on her and her husband’s weekend trip to Valença, a provincial riverside town three hours south of Salvador, famous in certain circles for having Brazil’s first cotton gin. Cecilia and Edilson were going to participate in a micareta—a small local carnival. In the months preceding Carnival, many towns had micaretas to honor the orixás. The energy of the entire area grew with each micareta, culminating with the