Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [51]
She looked at me intently and then gave me a huge smile.
“Don’t be sad,” she said. “My peanuts, they keep the heart warm.”
eleven
a stranger
Luzia moved south for an acting gig, and we gave up the apartment. While I was trying to figure out what to do next, Rita kindly invited me to stay with her. I was sleeping in her living room. One day, I returned to the apartment after visiting a friend, lay down on the mat she’d prepared for me, and felt the symptoms of dengue fever. I had caught it before, so I recognized the signs immediately.
Dengue fever is transmitted by a mosquito. It was limited to Asia for some time but had recently spread to South America. In the city of Salvador, it was an epidemic. Its symptoms include violent headache, high fever, change of pressure behind the eyeballs that makes them feel as though they’re being wrenched from your skull, an intense aching of the bones that turns into unendurable internal itching, and the inability to get up or eat anything. Rita was away visiting her father and not expected to return for a week and a half.
From a nearby bar, a band blasted out samba music, the singer continually flat. At midnight, a fundamentalist Protestant church began a service, and the preacher screamed in competition with the samba. Soon, it started to pour. This did not dampen the spirits of the noisemakers, but a waterfall erupted from under the wooden shutters and began to cascade down the living room wall. I hurriedly gathered my things and moved them across the room. By the time I got to the mat, it too was soaked. I found rags that clearly had been used for this purpose before and piled them along the bottom of the window frame. I started to mop the floor, but could feel the dengue gaining in strength. I stumbled to Rita’s bed and collapsed.
I passed out. When I regained consciousness, I realized I could no longer move. This attack was worse than my previous two. My bones had ached intensely before, but now they felt as though they were shattering, breaking into a thousand pieces and then breaking again. I tried again to move, to prop myself up on a single elbow but my body refused to cooperate. Interesting, I thought, only vaguely concerned, I cannot reach even those pools of water beneath the window, let alone the kitchen sink. Thirst could kill me before Rita returned.
You should survive, I thought. Look at your friends. Survival is like an undulating litany to them. Survive, at all costs. Survive, and those who don’t, watch them pass with more determination to survive yourself.
Some survive better than others, I thought. Gato—would he survive? He’d left the capoeira room one night after rats had eaten his clothes. He’d stayed with Luzia and me for a week or so and was now sleeping in a back closet of a friend’s bar, helping out in exchange, acting as a night security guard. He told me that a female European visitor had come for a few weeks and developed a passion for him. She wanted to pay his way to Europe so he could live with her there. After much self-doubt about whether this was prostitution or if he was allowing himself to be enticed into some kind of sexual slavery, he had decided to go.
“What other chance do I have?” he asked. “I think she’s a good person.”
What would I do in his situation? I thought. “Be careful,” I said. “Try to figure a way to teach capoeira, to make your own money, as fast as possible.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s my only independence, isn’t it?”
I asked about his family. He said that his sister, Renata, who was now sixteen, was still going to school. I smiled and shook my head. Gato didn’t smile and pretended that his sister