Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [75]
Rita shrugged. “There aren’t as many kinds of fish here anymore either. They probably don’t have enough food. But we can ask João. He’ll know.”
We walked up to the old fish seller. He nodded an acknowledgment to me as Rita inspected his fish. “So why are these birds disappearing?” she asked him.
“Nothing to eat,” he said. He poked one of the plump tuna that lay on a newspaper on a board in front of him. “Caught him this morning. This kind of tuna is still common. But that bird, she only eats one special type of tuna; it’s very small. And once they put in that factory north of here, that tuna pretty well disappeared. Then the birds, they started to go, too.”
“So, they won’t eat any other tuna?” I asked him. “I mean, tuna all look pretty similar.”
“To you maybe,” he said. Rita nodded at his plump tuna, and he began wrapping it for her. “But I’ve been here some seventy years, most of it fishing, and I’ve never known those birds to catch or eat any other tuna but that one.”
That evening, coming back from Rita’s, I saw the scientists again. They had just come off their boat, and they looked hot and tired. Maybe bird biologist wasn’t the best profession after all.
I hurried to the scientist I had met earlier, pulling out of my pocket the scrap of paper where I had asked Rita to write the name of the disappearing tuna. “Hello!” I said. “I may have a clue in your search.”
The scientist looked at me.
“Here.” I handed her the paper. “This is what those birds eat. And probably the pollution from one, or several, of the factories around here is killing it. So the birds are starving.”
She looked at the paper scrap. “I don’t know this word.”
“It’s a kind of tuna.”
“We have a list of the fish here and this isn’t one.”
“Well, it’s mostly gone now.”
“Yes. Well.” She shoved the paper into her bag where it clearly would be lost by the time she reached her hotel room. “I must head in.”
I continued on my way. Time and time again, I was reminded how credibility has less to do with knowledge or information given, but instead with the class and power of the person making the statement. Too bad for those little birds.
One day, I visited the tenement where Don had lived when he was in Salvador. He’d published his book on transvestites in Salvador and had asked me to take a copy to Mabel, the transvestite whose bright and smiling face appeared on the cover. Along the way, I looked for the transvestite prostitutes who had protected me during my nightly walks through these neighborhoods. They were gone. Instead, designated tourist police who wore special tourist uniforms now stood at almost every street corner of the “new” Pelourinho. Its central streets had been cleaned and repaired, its buildings restored with remarkable skill and painted bright pink, orange, and vermilion. The narrow lanes, now cloaked in a sheen of apparent safety and prosperity, were crowded with foreign tourists and middle-class Brazilians buying handicrafts and stopping at the freshly painted cafes and expensive restaurants. But, when I reached the top of the street of Don’s old residence, I saw that the transformation had not as yet touched it. The contrast was so stark that I laughed. A tourist policeman standing at the street’s entrance tried to bar my way.
“You shouldn’t go on that street,” he said with a condescending smile. “It’s not safe.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
“No, really,” he said, standing directly in front of me. “I really can’t let you go down there.”
“It’s OK,” I said and smiled back at him with equal condescension. “I have friends down there.” He looked at me, his face hardened, and he stepped aside.
I found Mabel on a bed in one of the rooms of the tenement. Her eyes were sunken, her skin stretched across her cheekbones, her lips almost invisible, the ravages of AIDS etched in every crease in her once smooth face. Her arm on the sheet was so thin I could see its separate bones. I was afraid if I touched her I’d break something. I tried to keep the dismay from my eyes, but I’m not sure I succeeded.