Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [50]
With a pretense of normality, I waved back and indicated that I had to hurry, but would catch him next time. At the top of the hill, at the main praça, I slowed, steadfastly ignoring the many vendors who shouted at me. “Amiga! You speak French? You speak German? You speak Italian? You are beautiful, gringa. You want to buy?”
At that moment, I knew I would always be a stranger in Salvador. I wanted to go home. I just wasn’t sure where that was.
A few nights later, I wandered down a central city street, a soft wind touching my hair and a full moon over the bay. I listened to the litany of the men I passed: “Sexy, you look delicious. Amiga. Gringa. Beautiful, beautiful, come with me.” Because of my physical appearance, everyone knew I was a foreigner. Even if I lived in Salvador twenty more years, this would not change.
I had been speaking that afternoon with a man of German ancestry whose family had lived in Bahia for three generations. He laughed when I told him of my feelings of alienation in Bahia, of always being the outsider. “I am baiano,” he said, “I was born here. But in the popular concept, I am too white to be baiano. People always take me for a foreigner. And this is in my homeland.”
Rita, who was quite dark, walked with street confidence, a classic baiana. But, walking with me caused her periodic identity crises because through visible association with me, people often included her in their foreigner-directed commentaries or demands for money. One time she stopped dead in the middle of the street and began shouting to the vendors and anyone else who cared to listen. “I am not a foreigner! I am baiana! Leave me alone!”
I suggested that she walk apart, disclaiming acquaintanceship with me. She growled that she didn’t believe in such discrimination. “You just have to become more black,” she said.
My concern was not robbery, violence, or any other disaster, but how ethnicity, nationality, and economics affected relationships between me and the people I had grown to love. How much of what Mauro said was true? Rita, Luzia, Jorge and his family, Gato, Agnaldo—what was the reality of their expressed affection, of their repeated endearments, calling me their nêga (black one), telling me that although my skin was white my soul was baiana? These assurances of acceptance fractured like light on the broken stones of the mosaic sidewalk. I was like a piece of chalk left outside, waiting for the first rain. Such a rain would melt me.
Insecurity, the vagabond’s bane. When I went from being a traveler to resident, I became involved. I was now unsure which, if any, locale I considered “home.” I had also lived in Europe and Australia, but they were not “home.” I slid between communities, change itself being my most solid constant. I realized that it was friendship that made my life possible.
As I toyed with the idea of returning to the States, a place I had not lived for years, I wondered what connections I would make with old friends there. Or how I could leave these friends in Salvador behind. The ones in Salvador I would place in a memory box, petrified in time and space until I saw them again. The friendships in the States could, by now, for all I knew, be destroyed through neglect and perspectives that were literally a world apart.
I considered the difference between the vitality of an immediate friendship and the memory of a friend, how the memory increasingly becomes a personal invention bearing less and less connection to a real person. How much disjuncture would I find between my memories and the memories my friends had each created of me?
I tried to walk relaxed, but confusion, and the knowledge of loneliness, gnawed at me like the rats I feared. Then, on one corner, I saw an old woman, a peanut vendor I had seen many times before.