Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [5]
Andrea, Ana, and Alexandra’s father sold sugarcane juice, which he squeezed in a motorized cane-crusher, at the edge of the highway. Their mother, Tatiana, looked about sixty-five, but told me she was forty. She had given birth to fifteen children. Nine still lived. Tatiana sold sonhos, sweet, sugar-covered buns filled with guava paste, from the window of the house. Because the cement used to construct the house had been mixed with a great deal of sand, the sill crumbled beneath our elbows and fingertips. I learned to lean carefully against both sills and walls.
Tatiana awoke at four each morning to make the sonhos. Sonho, they told me, means dream in Portuguese. So each day, I stood beside Tatiana as she sold dreams from the crumbling front window sill.
Of Tatiana’s nine surviving children, five still lived at home–two boys and the three sisters. The brothers only came home late at night, and the father, when I saw him, was usually drunk. Alexandra only shrugged. “He beats us,” she said.
After about three weeks, Alexandra returned to Amsterdam, leaving me in her sisters’ charge. Andrea became my primary teacher of Portuguese and the ways of the streets. I nicknamed her Ursinha or “Little Bear” because of her bright eyes and fierce temper.
Over the following weeks, Andrea, Soraia, and Ana insisted I change my wardrobe; they replaced my one-piece swimsuit with a tiny bikini, refusing to appear on the beach with me otherwise. They tightened my clothes, shredded the hems of my shorts to create a fringe, and in various ways changed every piece of clothing I had into what they considered more beautiful.
These “remodeled” clothes, which were often revealing and explicitly sexy, I considered “cheap” or overly suggestive, going by the standards of the Northern, middle-class society in which I was raised. I tried to explain to the girls that in the United States and Europe, a woman who wore explicitly sexy clothing was perceived as being sexually available or “loose.” I told them that in rape trials in the United States the way a woman was dressed at the time was often used as proof that she was “asking” for sexual violence.
Andrea and Ana told me that in Bahia, except in church or other places where one needed to show respect, this was not the case. A woman who wore sexy clothing was simply considered attractive. It was a woman’s behavior, they told me, as well as her class in society, that determined whether she was considered “loose.” During our evening chats, as we sat on the roof to catch the wind, Andrea and Ana instructed me that a woman was supposed to be sensual at all times and was expected by society at large to use her sensuality as a means to control men. But, they said, presenting a sensual image and actually being sexually available were morally and socially separate. Indeed, part of the derogatory image of the gringa or Northern female was that she was available, but not sensual. And such insults they certainly did not want said about their guest. I was, after all, their responsibility.
A few weeks after my arrival, the sisters set out to show me what they considered beautiful and important in their city. They took me to see a mall. In an instant we walked out of some of the worst poverty I had ever seen and into a designer shopping center. Light and clean hallways were flanked by inviting shops, sporting top-brand fashion and housewares. Music played from a high-tech sound system while escalators silently moved people from one well-lit floor to the next. In architecture and goods sold, this shopping center was equal to the best of its kind in the world. The majority of the people in this mall looked well-fed and well-dressed. And, like myself—and unlike my friends—they were all white.
The girls and I paused before shops that sold goods they could never buy and they smiled as if proud, showing off these stores