Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [70]
“What! They all left, like that?”
“Yeah. Like I contaminated the pool water or something. So, after a bit, I got out and started back to my apartment.”
We sat in silence. I considered the humiliation I would feel in that situation.
“But,” Herns finally said, “as I was walking up the stairway, I thought to myself, ‘I am an anthropologist. It certainly appears as though the swimmers left on my account, but it could have been coincidental. As a scientist, I need further experimentation.’”
“Herns, what did you do?”
“Well, I returned to my apartment, collected a book and an air mattress I had, and headed back to the pool. Put the mattress in the pool, climbed on, laid back and began to read.”
“And?”
“All the swimmers left.”
I laughed. “Bloody hell, Herns.”
“So, I had the pool all to myself.” He took a sip of his mineral water, a pleased smile now on his face. “After about fifteen minutes, a woman slipped into the pool, a very attractive blond woman actually, and she slowly swam past me. As she got close, she asked, ‘Are you French?’ The book I was reading was in French—I’d forgotten about that, that they might notice the French. I knew if I said anything she’d hear my French accent, so I said nothing, just kept reading. ‘You’re French, aren’t you?’ she asked again. Still I said nothing.
“So, after a few minutes, she climbed out of the pool and returned to her friends. ‘He’s a foreigner,’ I heard her say. ‘He doesn’t speak Portuguese. I think he’s French.’
“After that, one by one, the swimmers returned to the pool, and as they passed, they smiled at me. I ignored them.”
“So, you only contaminate the pool—you are only ‘black’ black—if you are Brazilian black, not French black.”
Herns shook his head. “You tell me. I don’t know. I can only tell you what happened. You interpret it as you like.”
“So, a black European—or American, presumably—foreigner is ‘whiter’ than a black Brazilian. Rita’s talked about this. But what about somebody from Africa? You could have been from Senêgal. Or Haiti for that matter—a nationality that clearly didn’t suggest itself. Would that make you ‘blacker’?”
Herns laughed. “Gets a bit complicated, doesn’t it? It’s amazing what we internalize and come to believe. We aren’t even aware sometimes how we know what we know.”
Alex called me early one Saturday morning.
“My trust lawyer says you have to register as a charity in Britain for me to give you any more money.”
“How do I do that?”
“I don’t know. There are people here who do, though. When can you come over to set it up?”
“Well, finals are next week, so I suppose I could come after I get my grades in.”
I set down the phone with a sigh. This was what Rita and I had planned from the beginning, but now it just sounded like work. I now understood how complicated the legalities were. I didn’t know how to set up nonprofit status in Britain, but it was sure to be much worse than the States. I felt defeated and alone.
It was more than just administrative bureaucracy. As an academic, I was also supposed to be publishing. Between teaching and Bahia Street, I had absolutely no time left for research. I had planned to get some writing done over the summer, but this plan was fading fast.
I also had a worry that I could admit to no one. I was not sure Bahia Street was working. The director of Juliana’s school had said he supported the idea of a favela student, but the teachers clearly didn’t agree. Juliana’s math teacher told her repeatedly that children from the favelas always fail. And because her fellow middle-class students didn’t see the need to study much, Juliana wanted to follow their example. She wanted expensive tennis shoes, she wanted the new style pink backpack.
Rita had also sounded depressed when we had finally been able to talk on the phone. I tried to perk her up, but even to my ears my cheery words rang false. Because phone calls were expensive and the connections so difficult to maintain we were, in reality, working in separate