Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [47]
Don’s room was near the front on the upper floor. In an attempt to cheer the place up, he’d painted the entire room pink. He bought a narrow bed and a small writing table. Despite his beautification endeavor, he found he was unable to sleep because cockroaches kept falling on his head, so he hung a brightly colored cloth across the ceiling. I visited him a few days afterward.
“The ceiling cloth has a strange sag,” I said. Don took one look at the ceiling and put down his pen. The sag, of course, was an accumulation of cockroaches waiting to cascade down in one huge mass. We walked out of the room.
Don and I had actually met each other some ten years before while we were both doing fieldwork for our doctoral dissertations in Papua New Guinea. There is a bond anthropologists gain in the field that is like no other friendship I know. We tend to learn obscure languages and have deep experiences that, when related to outsiders, sound like long travel monologues—or like bragging about all the exotic places we’ve known. But, with each other, we can relax and find unembarrassed joy in speaking together languages only heard in remote jungles—or relishing colorful slang only used on the streets of Salvador. Don first came to Salvador to visit me, and because he was looking for a new field site, I showed him the best time I could; I wanted him to return. I knew that with him I could giggle, or grow over experiences no one else would understand. Don, with his pert nose and gentle smile (belying his often acerbic commentary on the world), was the only person I had ever met, Brazilian or otherwise, who, within a day of arriving in Salvador, and after I had dragged him to a capoeira roda—which completely bored him—decided to walk back to my apartment alone at night. I let him go because I knew that he, unlike most other people, would survive the walk.
Like me, Don became fascinated with Salvador, received a grant for research, and had then returned. He is an annoyingly good linguist and he learned Portuguese quickly. His plan was to stay about a year, then write a book on the sex and gender complexities of the transvestite prostitutes. Unlike me, he followed his plan. He also somehow managed to keep his relationship with his boyfriend intact. When, after about a year, he told me he was leaving, going back to Sweden and his boyfriend, I nodded and wished him luck. But I felt bereft. With whom now could I talk about the elements of Salvador that almost drove me mad with anger? Who would I tell about the horrors of the poverty, the complacency of the middle class, of the parts I had come to detest?
I hadn’t seen Agnaldo at capoeira for some months. When I asked our teacher about him, he just shrugged. “He’ll show up when he wants to,” he said.
Finally, he did, but something seemed wrong. Agnaldo had always been slender, but now his high cheekbones jutted too far above hollows where his cheeks had once been. His eyes darted around in a disturbing way, and his concentration when he played, always brilliant before, was erratic. I didn’t want to say anything to others in the group, but I wondered if something had happened, if he was depressed and drinking more, or if, perhaps, he had some degenerative illness. When Agnaldo invited me to his home to discuss the history of Candomblé in Salvador, I was pleased, more for the chance to talk with him privately than anything else.
The following Sunday I went to Pelourinho to find him. The local government had recognized the tourist potential of Pelourinho and was investing millions in its restoration. Tattered old buildings were being gutted and rebuilt. The façades were being restored with remarkable skill, transformed from derelict structures into stunning mint condition edifices, complete with traditional detail and craft work. The former residents had been paid a stipend and forcibly evicted to neighborhoods out by the airport. Our old capoeira space, from which we had been evicted