Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [3]
Alexandra’s room overlooked a canal. Its floors were wide sixteenth-century oak, the ceilings high and dark from centuries of life and grime. In one corner, Alexandra had built herself a bed of planks. Near the ancient glass-paned double door that lead to nothing but a view above the canal, she had placed two lumpy but serviceable sofas she had found in the street somewhere nearby. Across from the bed, fairly near the stove, she had set up a gas burner on a rough counter and connected it to a propane tank. Beside the burner stood a battered sink and a bucket to catch the water beneath. Everything was as tidy and spotless as cleaning could make it.
“You will love my family, my sisters,” Alexandra said, handing me a steaming cup of tea she had poured from the pot that stood warm on a homemade shelf above the stove. “How long will you be able to stay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My position in Canberra doesn’t start for two months, so I suppose I could stay as long as six weeks.”
We settled into the sofas. Late afternoon sun shone across the dark planks, catching their soft, deep color, making them luminous. Alexandra opened the doors, and we heard the bells of bicycles and the conversations of people as they passed below.
We sat in silence for a moment, savoring the peace.
“When you get to Salvador,” Alexandra said, “you will understand why I so love this place.”
“I love this place too,” I said.
“No, it’s different for me. You’ll see.” She laughed. “You know, I wouldn’t give this invitation to visit my family to just anybody. It’s exactly because you see the beauty here, of this squat, this place most people wouldn’t even want to set a foot in. This is why I know you’ll rest fine with my family.” Alexandra sighed. “A half an hour before my Dutch class. You know, it’s funny. I’m learning to read and write English and Dutch, and I never really learned to read and write Portuguese.” She laughed. “After I learn these other languages, maybe then I’ll be able to learn the language I was born with.”
“Você pode dormir comigo!” Andrea said. Andrea was Alexandra’s thirteen-year-old sister. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and surveyed the narrow, low bed in front of me. From everyone’s gestures, I gathered that she and I were supposed to share it. Alexandra had just escorted me from the airport by bus. The flight, on four different airplanes, had taken over twenty hours. In Salvador, it was now sometime in the evening after dark. I was in the bedroom of Alexandra’s family home. Alexandra’s family lived in a very poor part of Penambuas, a neighborhood at the periphery of Salvador. Inside their bedroom, a dim lightbulb hung above our heads. The single bed in front of me was about five inches from my shin, a bunk bed about five inches behind me. The only ventilation came from the door to the living room and a six-by-six-inch grated hole in the wall above our heads. I could hardly breathe. Alexandra watched me carefully for my reaction.
I laughed. I was an anthropologist. I had lived for months in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, subsisting on sago grubs. I could handle this.
“Thank you,” I said to Andrea. “Tonight I could sleep on anything. But I’m a lot bigger than you. I will push you onto the floor!”
Alexandra translated and Andrea shook her head dismissively. “Would you like to take a shower?” Alexandra asked.
I nodded and she led me from the bedroom to a bare concrete box of a room. It contained only a toilet with no seat and a shower head with a drain near the center of the floor.
“The toilet doesn’t work,” Alexandra said. She gestured toward a bright red plastic bucket. “Just fill that with water from the shower, dump it into the toilet