Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [41]
I bought a grammar text and decided to practice middle-class Portuguese. The only middle-class person I knew, however—except Luzia’s theater friends, who delighted in inventing their own outrageous swearing vocabulary—was Mauro. He had continued to visit. He seemed to feel that the Love Motel debacle was his fault. I felt shy and probably talked too much. I started telling him about my capoeira friends, my adventures in the favelas, and about Penambuas. One night he took me to an expensive Chinese restaurant. After we’d ordered, he produced a packet of dried leaves.
“I want you to wash yourself with these,” he said.
“What’s this?”
He looked down at his plate. “They’re very cleansing. I think they would protect you.”
I turned the packet over. “Is it Candomblé?” I asked.
“No. Well, not really.”
“New Age?”
He looked up suddenly. “I don’t think it’s safe. These people you hang out with. You don’t understand about Brazil. You like too much the simple people.”
“How exactly do you define ‘simple people’?” I asked, setting down my wineglass. The term os simples in Bahia was generally used by middle-class people when referring, in a fairly condescending way, to poorer people with no formal education, suggesting they did not possess equal intelligence.
“Those people you consider friends. You could get in trouble with them. The police could arrest them for marijuana smoking or something.”
“You should talk,” I said. “More middle-class people here smoke marijuana than the poor, as far as I can see. You really mean that I shouldn’t associate with poor, darker people who live in the favelas, don’t you?”
Mauro blew out air in frustration. “There you go again! You North Americans think you know everything. These people are more like beasts than they are like us. They live among the rats and the cockroaches!”
“Beasts.”
“You mistranslate.”
“Beast is a fairly basic Portuguese word.”
“But you don’t understand. You are using your First World brain here. You don’t understand Bahia. I mean they’re like the beasts in a good sense; they are closer to the earth than we are. They understand certain things we don’t. They are people who live closer to nature.”
“They do live closer to nature. Many have dirt floors and their sewage runs in front of their huts. We’re not talking about Indians of the forest here, Mauro. We’re talking about people who live in the same city you do, who want basically the same things you do, but who seldom have enough to eat and no chance of any decent education to give them a different life. How many times have you even entered one of the hundreds of favelas that surround this city, Mauro?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“That means never, presumably.”
“It does mean never. They’re not good places, not for me, and certainly not for a woman like you. If you want to do research with these people, you should hire someone to interview them. You can get everything you need that way. You’re deluded to call any one of these people ‘friend.’ They’re only using you. They could get you involved with bad things and get you arrested.”
I put down my napkin. “I am a foreigner here, and I don’t pretend my country is any better,” I said, “and there are many things I do not understand. Particularly about how the middle class here can live with so much misery surrounding them each day. How people like your mother can be delighted at the murder of malnourished,