Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [23]
Valença boasted three trios elétricos in its micareta parade. A trio elétrico was a huge, moving sound system housed on a cargo truck. The speakers amplified the rhythms of a band that played atop the truck. The music was so loud in Valença that the bands had to stop playing when they passed old buildings or crossed the antique central bridge, as it was feared their vibrations might destroy the structures.
When I arrived at the micareta with Cecilia and Edilson, I still felt fragile, assaulted by Salvador’s destruction of any hope of silence or privacy. I walked alone, well away from the blast, rejecting any music as a continuation of the pure noise I’d been trying to escape. This samba beat was not my rhythm, I decided. I watched the quiet river, the fishing boats sitting on dark water, a silent space removed and yet beside the pushing, bounding human exhilaration that inhabited the streets.
Then, when my concentration wandered, when I forgot myself, I realized I’d begun to dance. A man with whom I’d exchanged smiles grabbed my hand, and we began some kind of samba-reggae. Then, Cecilia put her hands around my waist and we began a line dance: two steps to the right, back, forward, three slides to the right, one to the left.
By midnight I was dripping sweat, and like most of the women, had tied my T-shirt high under my breasts, leaving my waist bare to catch any passing breeze. Most of the men had removed their shirts altogether. At one point I looked up and saw the stars. No moon.
We caught an early bus back to Salvador, and I arrived at my apartment in time to see the sun rise. The transvestites were gone, the bars closed, the cars still in their garages. I sat outside in front of my apartment building for a few moments with Pedro, the security guard. He was out there every night, all night, making friends with people on the street, surveying whatever activity took place before him. He made about eighty dollars a month and traveled over an hour each way to work. He was in his mid-thirties, and his dream was to finish high school and get a job as a mechanic. He often brought books and studied during the night.
“This is my favorite time of the day,” he said.
Yes, I thought. Across the street I heard a lizard sing.
five
learning to dance
I tried to stay connected with my close friends overseas through periodic telephone calls. It worked poorly. My life in Bahia was so different. The mundane details of my friends’ daily lives became meaningless to me as more time passed. Their concerns often sounded petty and almost banal. And yet, these were people whom I loved, whom I missed—sometimes terribly. I was as elated as I had ever been while in Brazil, but also the loneliest I’d ever been.
I had left John behind when I came to Brazil. We agreed to be “free” while apart, but I think both of us had expected to get together again when I returned. The conversations with him were the most difficult. Because we no longer knew the intimate details of each other’s lives, our conversations became increasingly superficial. One evening, despite our best efforts, we had a terrible fight born of disconnection. Somehow we weren’t communicating, and the further we got from understanding each other, the less we told each other the truth.
I lay in bed that night, listening to the street noise, and thought about communication. The telephone is a dangerous way to try to resolve an argument because we share only words; things said are left in the air with nothing to support them but memory and uncertainty. Unlike the written word, the telephone presumes to emulate a physical connection; we are engaging in spontaneous exchanges in which the body is completely absent. So no matter what the intention, a tense telephone conversation leaves an electronic taste on the tongue. We rank such technology of communication high in our society, I thought