Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [25]
“I don’t forget anything,” she said. “Dance.”
I looked into her young eyes, eyes that had seen thirteen years of violence, starvation, and want. The power of a poem by Yeats from my childhood came to me.
“Come away O human child!
To the waters and the wild.”
It is the song of the faery folk, calling us to dance, to go where time passes unnoticed and forgetfulness is bliss. I don’t know if it is possible to transcend violence, but with Andrea’s guidance, I began to understand that on this night, we danced for the pain of the tortured man, for those before him, and for those who, assuredly, would follow. Our dance was the equilibrium that kept the world from tipping over.
I placed my hands on her shoulders, and we began to move. After a time she smiled at me. After a longer time I smiled back.
Trying to develop a balance between the physical violence that confronted me and the violence of everyday life in Salvador—the starvation, the poverty, the lack, for many people, of any kind of escape from their daily struggle with mere survival—confused me. I was often in situations that could have escalated into violence in two seconds. When I first began playing capoeira angola, my teacher and friends nicknamed me “Danger,” a name I didn’t quite understand. But I gradually came to realize that it referred to the fact that I would go anywhere. And that I didn’t quite understand fear.
Pelourinho, in the early 1990s, was full of bars that were simply dark rooms in the front or back of the old buildings. They had stone floors and stucco walls and were furnished with plastic crates, and rickety stools, ragged tables, and makeshift counters for selling drinks. The drinks were mostly soft drinks, beer, and pingau, a licorice-tasting liquor that was the common man’s version of whisky.
Our capoeira group frequented one of these bars after training—and despite the teacher’s admonishment not to drink, he usually joined us. He often drank a sweet black beer that no one seemed to consider real beer, even though it was just as alcoholic as regular beer. The bar attracted other regulars as well: Simon, with long dreadlocks who played the saxophone; Marcos, who wore bright African style clothing and who was a good capoeira player with a wicked sense of humor.
“Why is your nickname Gato?” I asked Gato one evening.
“Can’t you tell?” the teacher responded. “How many questions he asks. He’s just too curious, like a cat.”
Gato gave me a disingenuously shy smile. “I’m curious what it would be like to make love with a North American woman,” he said. The others laughed.
“If you’ve played capoeira with me in the roda,” I replied, “then you already know.”
“Good answer,” Angela said, raising her glass in a salute.
“Does that mean,” Gato said, looking deep into his beer, “that you kick a lot and fall flat on your face when you’re trying to stand on your hands?” I laughed and lightly hit him over the head.
One discussion between the teacher and several students that occurred almost every night was whether they should grow dreadlocks or not. Dreadlocks and Africanist clothing represented a political statement. One was drawing attention to one’s African descent, defining this as important. It was also connected to the Black Power movement in the United States. Brazil had an ethic, if not a reality, of racial harmony, an idea that there was no racism in Brazil, that all peoples were equal in race and only class made a difference to one’s life chances. In such a country, then, to promote one’s “difference” was an affront to the status quo. Our teacher, who had grown up in the slums, finished only the first grade and taught himself to read so he could learn about Bob Marley, thought racism did not exist in Brazil. He idolized Bob Marley but worried that dreadlocks might imply that he smoked marijuana, so he compromised and kept his dreadlocks short. Jorge, who was also from the Salvador slums, but finished the sixth grade and had parents who discussed politics at