by Ellen Levy
The café had its usual Saturday crowd when I walked in, but Rogeirio was easy to pick out. He had a diffident elegance, an inwardness that was rare here and apparent in the way he watched the crowd and smoked slowly, deliberately. He was tall, slender, willowy, with hair cut close to his head like black stubble around a balding pate. His hair looked felty, like the nubble on a blanket well worn. He had enormous eyes that bulged slightly, chocolate brown irises, the sclera slightly yellow. His lashes were long and black. He had a tender face, smooth save for a black mustache, with deep, kindly grooves at either side of his mouth from smiling.
I remember being surprised that he was black, because the Rotary Club was—from all I’d seen—exclusively white. (The myth of racial equality in Brazil, championed by Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, was clearly a myth in Salvador. Freyre had argued that a history of miscegenation had tempered racial divisions in Brazil, that race was an economic category here, not a matter of skin color. But this was only partly true. The prestigious Clube Bahiano excluded black members, I’d been told, and you didn’t need to be a statistician to see who was rich and who was poor in Salvador. Years later I’d hear an eminent historian, Emilia Viotta da Costa, say that Brazil’s myth of racial equality was akin to America’s myth of the self-made man: a story intended to convince the disenfracnshised that their exclusion was a personal failure, not a societal one, so as to discourage organization along economic or racial lines. But by the time I arrived in Salvador, the only people I spoke to who believed Brazil was race-blind were white.)
I remember that Rogeirio wore faded jeans and a sport shirt and that he had a camera at his left side suspended by a strap from his shoulder. I remember that he was someone who set me at ease; he seemed peaceful, gentle, at home in the world, and I relaxed a little with him. In a month or two he would leave for the United States for a year’s study at Texas A&M on a Rotary fellowship. He seemed very much older than I, though in truth he was perhaps thirty, thirty-one. He’d studied engineering in Brazil but a year’s study in the States would offer new information and connections. He was excited to hear about Texas, but I worried for him there, as a black man, unaccustomed to the intricacies of American racism.
I remember that he proposed that we walk together in the port and that we did. It was afternoon and the light was long and angled at that hour, good for the black and white photographs he shot. We strolled along the promenade, past the Bahianas in their lace skirts and turbans, the smell of dendê and onion and sea salt and exhaust around us. He took pictures and chatted with the people he photographed and we walked and talked casually, as if we knew each other well. I told him that I liked to take photos as well, that I’d spent a lot of hours in darkrooms at college, developing and printing images. Seeing him onto a bus in the port, I said I was glad to have met him. I wished him luck in Texas.
—I’ll call you sometime, he said, and we can go shoot photos. All right?
—I’d like that, I said.
The sunlight glinted off the small, white tiles of a praça in front of the Igreja do Bonfim, where we went to take photographs a few weeks later. I remember that we went to the Ribeirão, an old quiet port down the hill from Bonfim. I remember descending together through the steep and narrow cobblestone street that led from the church down to the waterfront, a cool shadowy passage between two-story stucco houses painted pink and green and lavender. There, as we descended from the church to the waterfront, Rogeirio took my hand. And for a while we walked like that, to the water’s edge, until our hands got sticky with sweat and we let go.
Pelourinho
Portuguese is a deceptive language with its rolled Rs and sensual susurrus. Everything you say in Portuguese sounds like you are talking about sex. Meu bem, como vai? The open mouth, the sliding tongue, words roll out like an overturned basket of goiaba fruit, tumbling, rolling.
It was a Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after we’d started seeing each other, when Rogeirio proposed we have lunch at a restaurant in Pelourinho that a friend of his ran. He wanted me to try sarapatel, a stew that was, he said, a specialty of Salvador.
We caught a bus from the port at Barra to the ladeira—the enormous elevator that connected the two cities, upper and lower—and from there we walked the few blocks north to Pelourinho. As we descended a cobblestone street between old buildings, Rogeirio pointed to a door on our right, a small discreet door I’d never noticed before. He said this was the headquarters of Ile Aiyé, the carnival group to which he belonged, which insisted on an exclusively black membership in response to the exclusively “white” bloco International. Ile Aiyé had been among the first to openly challenge the racism in Salvador, their formation an early salvo in what had become only recently a black civil rights movement in Brazil. All that behind a door I’d never noticed.
The restaurant, farther down the street on the left, was not yet open, so we strolled into the cobblestone square of Pelourinho, which I loved, loving too that shift from the shadowy street into the bright open light of the square. Pelourinho, the heart of the old city, was touristy, but I loved it in those days, as tourists did.
High up on the cliff that overlooked the cidade baixa—the modern lower city—Pelourinho is a steeply sloping square of black cobblestone (stones rubbed smooth by human traffic, feet, and time) that falls away steeply, like a rug hung out a window in a breeze, or like a thing out of nightmare, a dream in which the world tips too far and you cannot help but fall. One leans back descending into the praça (which narrows like a funnel at its lower end to a single, cobbled street) as one would lean back descending a steep mountainside, or a path into hell; it is a disorienting vantage: one looks down on rooftops and at the same time up at church spires, a confusing latitude, where it seems space bends, one stands in a fold where past is present tense.
At the high end of the plaza is the former customs house; facing the square are baroque buildings, two and three stories tall, gaunt and brightly colored with shuttered windows trimmed in white and ornate ironwork balconies, where shops selling leather goods and jewelry cater to a foreign crowd, and where in the evenings in the 1980s, prostitutes stood on the balconies and in the narrow streets soliciting another kind of tourist. I’d bought a leather purse there and a money belt to replace the one stolen at the beach, huarache sandals. I liked to go there to sketch, but I couldn’t get the hang of perspective; it always seemed my buildings were in danger of toppling into the square.
We were holding hands as we entered Pelourinho, Rogeirio’s hand smooth and soft in mine. He squeezed my hand gently and said, “Sabe, y’know, a hundred years ago, less than a hundred, we couldn’t have walked hand in hand like this. A hundred years ago, if I’d come here, I’d have come here in chains.”
Pelourinho. The diminutive makes the word sound endearing, like a child’s name. I have come down these streets often by myself, thin ribbons of cobblestone and shadow and sudden shafts of light from between the high walls on either side. I’d never considered the meaning of the name—Pelourinho, little pillory—and that this cobbled square, my favorite place in a city praised for its beauty, was a place meant for public humiliation.
In the restaurant, we took a table in the middle of the room. On the wall behind me, a black velvet oil painting of a clipper ship in a storm, another of a guitar player leaning against a palm tree in the moonlight. A slow fan turned overhead.
—Cara, como vai? Hey, man, how’s it going? A small, round, shiny-faced man clapped Rogeirio on the shoulder.
Rogeirio stood. They embraced.
I smiled and watched them, listening to their exchange, still finding these formalities captivating in a foreign tongue, their staccato rhythm, savoring my new understanding of these words.
Rogeirio had wanted to bring me for weeks but we had been lazy, spending our afternoons in bed, long afternoons of cloying heat, sheets sticking to our thighs and backs and knees. After sex I was often restless. I showered alone, brushed my teeth, tried to retrieve my own salty s
cent, wet scent of the ocean, the sharp odor of onion and skunk, an acrid smell that I secretly loved because it was mine. I did not desire Rogeirio, but I liked him. He was kind, and I still believed that sex was the proper thing to offer a man I was dating; like serving coffee, it was more a matter of etiquette than taste.
Rogeirio was smoking now, as he did after sex, blue smoke in soft tendrils from his nostrils and lips as he talked to his friend. He said my name, introducing me to the owner, his friend.
—Prazer, we said, smiling, taking each other’s measure.
I was conscious of my pale skin, my sun-bleached hair. Outside this cool whitewashed room, the street was bleached under the overbearing sun that erased shadow at this hour, everything bared like the teeth.
—Are you hungry? Rogeirio asked.
—A little, I said.
—Only a little?
Rogeirio was teasing, flirting with me in front of his friend.
—You have to eat, he said, playing on the double entendre of “eat” and “fuck” in Portuguese.
I knew that he was showing me off, but it didn’t matter. We were both ornamental for the other. I was proud that he was tall, lanky, well spoken, Bahian. He was, I suppose, glad that I was fair, American. What I felt for Rogeirio was not love or desire but a gratitude that approximated both. He was kind to me, knew the town, was a decent man.
I smiled and said, “I’ll eat.”
It was for this after all that we had come: to eat sarapatel, a thick Bahian stew, a dish no one mentioned at the cooking school. Rogeirio promised that his friend made the best there was.
When the food arrived, Rogeirio dished up rice for each of us, heaped it on our plates and then ladled over this the thick, brown sarapatel. The stew was delicious, salty and thick, the color of black beans and fragrant with spices—cumin, pepper, cinnamon, clove, bits of meat or noodle. I couldn’t tell which.
—Wonderful, I said. What is it?
Rogeirio smiled. Blood stew, he said.
It seemed a fitting food for us in a place where a bloody past still bled into the present, and where I often felt just beneath the surface of our affair something painful, a wound, though whether it was his or mine or both I couldn’t say. He might have been describing the city itself, whose horrific past seemed to flavor the present; he might have been describing the sad, violent blending of bodies that I was learning about that year, which for a long time I would mistakenly believe was all that could exist between a woman and a man.
Filha de Iañsa
Though I would live in Bahia for most of six months, I never visited a terreiro, the house of a mãe de santo, a saintly mother, in which is practiced the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé, a syncretized blend of African deities and Catholic saints. But living in Salvador, you could not remain ignorant of its gods and goddesses.
Their names were among the lyrics of Bahian pop singers, their images were everywhere, painted on murals, on T-shirts, carved in wood. Their saints’ days were celebrated with verve. In January, there had been a celebration of Yemanjá, the beautiful mermaid goddess, whose day was celebrated with a flotilla of boats and wreaths of flowers cast onto the waves at dawn.
Devotees of candomblé were said not to be practitioners but sons and daughters of their gods; in the midst of worship, one became possessed by the spirit of the god, became that figure, danced his or her dance in the circle of the devout. I had been to a small museum of Afro-Brazilian art at the edge of Pelourinho and was fascinated by the garb and the natures of these gods. Each one had a personality, traits that their followers were said to share: Yemanjá was beautiful and vain; Xango was the warrior; Exu, the trickster; Iañsa, the fierce, blade-wielding Amazon. As with my passing acquaintance with astrology and the Myers-Briggs, I wondered vaguely what I was, of which god was I a daughter?
Barbara had told me that she wanted to be a filha de Iañsa, daughter of the goddess of storms and thunderbolts, who was associated with the Catholic Saint Barbara. Iañsa’s color was red, she carried a machete; she was a force to be reckoned with. I was surprised that Barbara would identify with Iañsa. I thought she must be a filha de Yemanjá, the beautiful, self-regarding mermaid, depicted always with a mirror in one hand.
It was Boa Gente who settled the matter.
In one of the last classes I took with him (opting, at the end of the eightweek sequence, not to pay tuition for the coming term though Barbara would continue on), Boa Gente brought up the subject. He was, as usual, touring the room as we struck positions. He was adjusting our poses, commenting, correcting, praising, when he came to me.
I never knew what it was that he saw in my posture that day, but as he watched me press my foot into midair, he stopped and looked me dead in the eye, eschewing commentary on my pose to comment instead on me.
—Você, he said, frowning with concern. You are too competitive; you must not be so competitive. So angry.
I smiled, trying to joke it off.
—I like to compete, I said. I’m not angry. I smiled but I felt exposed, summed up, and blushed.
—You think too much about what the others are doing, he continued. You must think about what you are doing, not them.
I nodded, hoping he’d let me go. But he held my foot in midair, cupped the heel in his palm. I couldn’t say what I wanted: that I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t watch the others. I wouldn’t know what to want if I didn’t compete with them, if I didn’t want what they did.
—You are a child of Iañsa, he said. Do you understand?
I did not.
—Iañsa is the goddess of storms and thunderbolts, he said. Você e a filha de Iañsa. He let my foot go.
I knew that this was neither a judgment nor a curse, but a statement about my nature, plain and simple. He saw, I think, that I was at war with my own nature and that this was what made me clumsy. He wanted to help me to recognize and lay claim to what I was. I was embarrassed that he had watched me so closely, seen so much in me. But I understood that there was also a benediction in this, his observation. He saw what I could not: that I was, despite my clumsiness, fierce, kin to divinity, child of a god, a warrior.
News
When I got the envelope from INPA, it was thin and I was nervous, anticipating rejection. I had, after all, no real credentials to offer. Nothing but hope. I was just another student who had read their work, not one of them. I sat on the mattress and leaned against the wall. Outside, monkeys screamed in the trees. The wind rustled among the dead flowers in the window boxes, rattling like bones. I sat on the mattress with the monkey sleeping beside me. I tore off the end of the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of letterhead.
The letter said they would be delighted to have me join them, that while it might be difficult, given my brief stay, to integrate me into an ongoing project, they’d be happy to make available whatever I needed to pursue my own research. I recall that my bibliography was praised. I know for sure that I was asked to phone as soon as possible to discuss project options and dates. The letter was signed by my hero, Philip Fearnside.
Territory
I did not want to notice, as the weeks passed, how Nel grew listless and despairing. How she left the apartment less and less. How she stopped talking of jobs. She spent her days cleaning up the small studio apartment, reading books, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, chatting with our neighbors. She kept her few belongings in the clear plastic beach bag that was patterned with yellow daisies. Often I found her arranging her sack, taking out and refolding her few shirts and underthings into neat stacks. Maintaining perfect order in the small realm that was hers.
We talked about her getting her own apartment when I left for the Ama-zon; sometimes we went out apartment hunting. The university had closed for the year, so she had all day to search. But like the jobs she searched for, which always seemed to pay too little or ask too much—for qualifications she didn’t have, or sexual favors for the boss—she never found one.
What We
Talk about When We Don’t Talk about Love
Nel and I were downtown, near the city center, in a part of town we did not usually visit—perhaps we had come to a doctor’s office, perhaps we had come for something else—and were crossing into a cobbled praça, when a navy blue Mercedes pulled up in the street beside us.
Nelci screamed, a little sharp intake of breath, and I thought at first that the car had clipped her. But instead of drawing back, she leaned in the car window and hugged the woman behind the driver’s wheel.
I could see that the woman was pretty and young, that she had the confident poise, the calm beauty, that wealth often confers. She had long dark hair, dark eyes, a wonderful smile. Her glance, it seemed to me, was sharp, intelligent. She was clearly rich.
The woman spoke animatedly to Nelci, but Nel—after recovering from her initial surprise—appeared calm now, standing aloof from the car, erect so that the woman had to hang her head out the window to converse. Nel addressed her with the formality that we reserve for those we do not like and those we have once loved and love no longer, those we once knew well but do not now.
I could not make out most of their conversation; I tried to appear engaged in surveying the praça, to look uncurious.
—Are you still in Amaralina? Nel asked.
—Oh, no, I left there months ago, the woman said. I live over there, she gestured across the praça with a little wave. She had an elegant hand, long slender fingers, smooth skin. Where are you now? she asked Nel.
—I’m living in Barra, Nel said.
—Not bad, said her friend.
—Not bad. Nel did not sound convinced.
Nel opened a hand toward me and introduced us.
—This is my friend Elena, she said. Elena, this is Valeria. We used to live together in Amaralina.
We shook hands, lightly.
Nel spoke as if she had never mentioned Valeria to me, and I wondered if she could have forgotten. But I didn’t ask her until later, when, after a minute or two, after another series of hurried hugs, the girl in the car drove off.
