Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [4]
I thanked her, shut the door, and turned on the shower. The water came out surprisingly cold. Strange, I thought, I’m so hot, yet my skin still tenses at the anticipation of a cold shower. I stepped in, and, after a few seconds, my body adjusted and it felt fine. Then, as I was shampooing my hair, I saw a dark shadow on the wall. My eyesight has always been bad, and the only light in the room came filtered from above the short wall that separated the bathroom from the kitchen. I leaned closer for a better look, then jumped back.
It was a cockroach, at least three inches long. Once I’d seen the first one, I began to notice them everywhere: two in the corner, one by the ceiling.
I rinsed my hair, turned off the shower and, watching carefully where I stepped in my bare feet, quickly dried off and put on a sleeping shirt.
Alexandra’s three younger sisters smiled at me as I reentered the bedroom–I now realized that all five of us were to be sleeping in here. Alexandra gave me a fierce glance. I toweled my hair and said, “I feel much better.”
Andrea shoved my bag to the foot of the bed, the only space available for it, and shut the door. The temperature in the room immediately rose ten degrees. She lay down on the bed and I perched beside her. Alexandra, eighteen-year-old Ana, and sixteen-year-old Soraia took the two bunk beds.
The “mattress,” I discovered as I lay down, was a flimsy plywood box with no padding whatsoever. It was covered only by a thin sheet. I raised myself onto my elbow and felt the wood begin to crack. This entire thing is going to collapse, I thought. I lay perfectly still.
After some time, Ana spoke. “Está muito calor aqui,” she said. “Vou subir.” She crawled from the top bunk bed, pointed toward the ceiling, and with a motion of her hand, invited me to join her. Andrea grabbed our sheets and bounded out behind us. We unbolted the back door, climbed a ladder made of wooden slats nailed into the crumbling concrete wall, and climbed onto the roof.
A warm night wind touched my face, and I breathed a grateful sigh. I curled up in the sheet and lay down upon the concrete roof. The night was not quiet; I counted at least five radios blaring competing music stations at full and tinny volume. A mosquito bit my elbow, so I covered my arms with the sheet. Another mosquito landed near my eye. I pulled the sheet over my head. Then from below, something bit me. I jumped.
Andrea said something I didn’t understand. Then she made a crawling motion with her hand. “Ant,” I said copying the motion. She nodded. Another bite. How many hours before dawn?
I’m an anthropologist, I kept thinking. I can handle this. But I don’t have to like it.
The next morning I discovered that what I had thought the night before to be an urban stream running past the front of their house was actually an open sewer. This sewer emptied into an even larger sewage canal at the bottom of the hill. Alexandra told me that their house now had a completed cement and tile roof and a partially-plumbed indoor toilet because of money she and her brothers had sent from Amsterdam. Despite the daily scrubbing that Ana and Soraia gave to their house, rats still lurked beneath the back washing trough. The girls washed the dishes immediately after we ate and placed them in tightly shut cupboards, yet, when I pulled out a coffee cup for morning coffee, I found a cockroach nestled cozily inside.
Their neighbor’s home consisted of rubble piled into unstable walls, topped by a roof of broken boards. At the bottom of the hill, next to the larger sewer, young children, who seemed to have no parents, lived in a makeshift tent of torn blue plastic sheeting. These children came daily to beg at the door for food.
Everyone I saw in the area was part African descent, various shades of brown and black, often clearly mixed with indigenous or European ancestry. At five feet