some stories won't go away
Some stories just demand to be told. I tend to forget things pretty easily, but when something keeps coming back to me I my guess is it’s a sign that it could be something significant. But who knows what’s significant and what isn’t – rarely do any of us have enough perspective on our lives to see what really matters and what doesn’t, without the benefit of time and hindsight, and wisdom.
To get to the point, I was out at a restaurant in Pelhourinho with one of my favorite profesoras whose name is Conceção and who is probably around age 25. She wanted to go to see a blues band which was good, and pretty loud, and played more songs that I knew than any other place I’ve been since I got to Bahia. Afterwards a Samba / Forro (FO-ho) band came on and the real show began. Forro is an offshoot of Samba which to the trained ear has a distinctive sound but when I tried to get Conceção and her friend Lidia to define it they couldn’t. But they could identify it by ear with little if any problem.
Conceção’s friend was on vacation from where she worked in one of the northernmost states of Brazil, near Venezuela, where she works for a non-profit organization as an educator of Portuguese and other things for the population of what they call Indios (and there’s a name for the tribe too and I can’t remember it - *idiot*). Lidia had long frizzy brown and blond hair, was pretty small, and *extremely* hot. The whole time we were out I was fighting with this Dutch guy named Michel (who, don’t get me wrong, is cool, but when it comes to women men are like sharks with each other – it’s a free for all) for her attention. The situation was not in my favor in this regard because Michel, being one of those Europeans who already speaks at least four languages (German, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, probably others), spoke and understood and joked in Portuguese *way* better than I can. Luckily for me most of my verbal interaction with women, even the ones who speak English, consists of staring at a point between their eyebrows and nodding my head. This worked OK until she paused for me to answer whatever question she just asked me. In some cases I did alright but in others I’m sure it was quite obvious that I didn’t understand a word of what she had been saying. In my own defense I’ll just add that the music was loud as freakin hell, and this didn’t help a lot either.
So luckily for me the dance scene was one of those insane crowds where everyone’s pushing their way through to get somewhere important like in a big rock concert in the States. The good thing about this (for me, at least) is that you can have a good time, and dance, and not have to worry about anyone seeing how uncoordinated you are.
Brazilians have an inexaustible capacity for partying. A lot of the time parties (festas) which include live music, drinking, fights, public making out with strangers, and plenty of other fun stuff, don’t start until midnight or after and go until 5 in the morning or later. So around 10pm on this particular night (a school night, mind you) I was about ready to go, after hanging out at that place for 3 or more hours, but of course the two Brazilian women weren’t. They stalled us for another hour without much problem, by just talking, walking off, whatever. This wasn’t the last time I observed Brazilian stay-at-the-party stall tactics, where everyone’s like “ok, time to go”, and somehow 2 or more hours later we’re still there. Since then it’s happened every time I’ve been out.
So we finally extracted ourselves from the crowd, by shaking our hips from the middle of the restaurant (it was pretty big), through the crowd, and out the back door which was nearly impossible to find. We then meandered our way over to one of the squares in Pelhourinho that are surrounded on all sides by churches. The two Brazilian girls, having had more than a few drinks, were laughing and yelling all the way to another restaurant, where most of the patrons were seated outside and there was a, how shall I put this, rather stout black woman singing up at the front into a mic attached to a small amp and accompanied by an amped acoustic guitarist. She was a great singer, and was singing some song that Conceção insisted that we had to wait and listen to. The song ended but then Lidia requested that the woman sing another one that she wanted, which she did.
Meanwhile, me and the Dutch guy immediately attracted a number of street kids, who came up and very persistently asked for money at various times during the few songs that we stood outside the fence of the restaurant for. There was one “kid” who I’ve seen before, who either looks like total shit from drug use to the point where he’s aged, or he’s an adult with some kind of developmental disorder. He’s small and thin with a child’s body, and head, but his face is twisted to look older – forty maybe. He angrily begged and clutched his stomach but he looked so much like a drug addict that I couldn’t give him any money.
One of the other students from the school, a German woman who has very striking blue eyes, very fair skin and light sandy-blonde hair, immediately attracted three or four Brazilian men who immediately started hitting on her. This always happens, i.e., the guys are on the German woman like flies on shit and the street kids are on the Euro/American guys like flies on shit. Even my cover of “I’m from Malta, not the US” doesn’t fly too well in this scenario.
Usually the street kids know better than to bother asking Brazilians anything, but one kid approached Conceção with his hand out. She was pretty tipsy at this point, and so just laughed and smiled back at him and stuck her face out while repeating what he’d said in a mocking tone. He didn’t say anything but his hand dropped and his face said “aww, just f it.”
I was talking with Lidia and not understanding about 80% of what either of us were saying, and another street kid in rags, about age 10-12 came up to us with his hand out. I shook my head when he asked but then she asked him something like “when was the last time you bathed or ate?”, the implication being that he was a crack addict or glue sniffer, which he clearly was. She put her hand on the short hair of his head and rubbed it in the most affectionate, intimate way I’ve ever seen anyone deal with a street kid or a homeless person, anywhere. She then said something about his eyes and put her hand on his face and pulled his eyelid down. It was too dark for me to see what she was looking at, but you didn’t have to look twice to see the kid was in bad shape. He was completely disarmed by her unexpected compassion, however, and when he saw there wasn’t any money coming he walked off, disgusted.
I’ve never seen anyone in real life act with such compassion to a stranger who clearly didn’t want it. To me it seemed like one of the most selfless acts I’ve ever seen, even if it didn’t result in changing anything. Maybe it did – maybe the kid decided to give up crack that night and turn his life around. Not likely, but it’s comforting to know that there are people in the world who can care about strangers without honestly expecting anything in return.
We watched the kid run off into another corner of the square and down one of the dark cobblestoned streets. As he did so I told her that I never knew how to deal with street people – I didn’t want to give them money if they were drug addicts, because not only do I end up getting ripped off but it just perpetuates their suffering. If they weren’t addicts I didn’t want to fail to acknowledge their humanity by brushing them off or not giving them anything when the smallest amount of money for me could actually pay for a lot of food for them. What do you do? I asked.
She gave a long answer, which I really didn’t understand one goddamn word of, which is really frustrating, because she might have said something pretty profound judging by the tone of her voice. And then she looked me in the eye and held my gaze as she finished what she was saying, and I could see that her eyes were bloodshot in the dim restaurant lights which spilled towards us in the street. I started to look away but saw that she was looking at me intently, and we looked straight into each others eyes for at least a minute, which was on the border of extremely uncomfortable for me or the opposite – very intimate. And she ended her last sentence with “proposição” (proposition). At that point I balked, realizing I didn’t know what she was saying. I was exhausted, though, and I panicked, and so I said “I don’t know”, assuming that she had been talking about the street kid still. But in retrospect I think she was asking me to take her home with me, and I’m not saying I have a big head, because, trust me, I don’t. I could quite easily have misinterpreted her look but there are some human expressions that are universal and this was one of them.
To get to the point, I was out at a restaurant in Pelhourinho with one of my favorite profesoras whose name is Conceção and who is probably around age 25. She wanted to go to see a blues band which was good, and pretty loud, and played more songs that I knew than any other place I’ve been since I got to Bahia. Afterwards a Samba / Forro (FO-ho) band came on and the real show began. Forro is an offshoot of Samba which to the trained ear has a distinctive sound but when I tried to get Conceção and her friend Lidia to define it they couldn’t. But they could identify it by ear with little if any problem.
Conceção’s friend was on vacation from where she worked in one of the northernmost states of Brazil, near Venezuela, where she works for a non-profit organization as an educator of Portuguese and other things for the population of what they call Indios (and there’s a name for the tribe too and I can’t remember it - *idiot*). Lidia had long frizzy brown and blond hair, was pretty small, and *extremely* hot. The whole time we were out I was fighting with this Dutch guy named Michel (who, don’t get me wrong, is cool, but when it comes to women men are like sharks with each other – it’s a free for all) for her attention. The situation was not in my favor in this regard because Michel, being one of those Europeans who already speaks at least four languages (German, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, probably others), spoke and understood and joked in Portuguese *way* better than I can. Luckily for me most of my verbal interaction with women, even the ones who speak English, consists of staring at a point between their eyebrows and nodding my head. This worked OK until she paused for me to answer whatever question she just asked me. In some cases I did alright but in others I’m sure it was quite obvious that I didn’t understand a word of what she had been saying. In my own defense I’ll just add that the music was loud as freakin hell, and this didn’t help a lot either.
So luckily for me the dance scene was one of those insane crowds where everyone’s pushing their way through to get somewhere important like in a big rock concert in the States. The good thing about this (for me, at least) is that you can have a good time, and dance, and not have to worry about anyone seeing how uncoordinated you are.
Brazilians have an inexaustible capacity for partying. A lot of the time parties (festas) which include live music, drinking, fights, public making out with strangers, and plenty of other fun stuff, don’t start until midnight or after and go until 5 in the morning or later. So around 10pm on this particular night (a school night, mind you) I was about ready to go, after hanging out at that place for 3 or more hours, but of course the two Brazilian women weren’t. They stalled us for another hour without much problem, by just talking, walking off, whatever. This wasn’t the last time I observed Brazilian stay-at-the-party stall tactics, where everyone’s like “ok, time to go”, and somehow 2 or more hours later we’re still there. Since then it’s happened every time I’ve been out.
So we finally extracted ourselves from the crowd, by shaking our hips from the middle of the restaurant (it was pretty big), through the crowd, and out the back door which was nearly impossible to find. We then meandered our way over to one of the squares in Pelhourinho that are surrounded on all sides by churches. The two Brazilian girls, having had more than a few drinks, were laughing and yelling all the way to another restaurant, where most of the patrons were seated outside and there was a, how shall I put this, rather stout black woman singing up at the front into a mic attached to a small amp and accompanied by an amped acoustic guitarist. She was a great singer, and was singing some song that Conceção insisted that we had to wait and listen to. The song ended but then Lidia requested that the woman sing another one that she wanted, which she did.
Meanwhile, me and the Dutch guy immediately attracted a number of street kids, who came up and very persistently asked for money at various times during the few songs that we stood outside the fence of the restaurant for. There was one “kid” who I’ve seen before, who either looks like total shit from drug use to the point where he’s aged, or he’s an adult with some kind of developmental disorder. He’s small and thin with a child’s body, and head, but his face is twisted to look older – forty maybe. He angrily begged and clutched his stomach but he looked so much like a drug addict that I couldn’t give him any money.
One of the other students from the school, a German woman who has very striking blue eyes, very fair skin and light sandy-blonde hair, immediately attracted three or four Brazilian men who immediately started hitting on her. This always happens, i.e., the guys are on the German woman like flies on shit and the street kids are on the Euro/American guys like flies on shit. Even my cover of “I’m from Malta, not the US” doesn’t fly too well in this scenario.
Usually the street kids know better than to bother asking Brazilians anything, but one kid approached Conceção with his hand out. She was pretty tipsy at this point, and so just laughed and smiled back at him and stuck her face out while repeating what he’d said in a mocking tone. He didn’t say anything but his hand dropped and his face said “aww, just f it.”
I was talking with Lidia and not understanding about 80% of what either of us were saying, and another street kid in rags, about age 10-12 came up to us with his hand out. I shook my head when he asked but then she asked him something like “when was the last time you bathed or ate?”, the implication being that he was a crack addict or glue sniffer, which he clearly was. She put her hand on the short hair of his head and rubbed it in the most affectionate, intimate way I’ve ever seen anyone deal with a street kid or a homeless person, anywhere. She then said something about his eyes and put her hand on his face and pulled his eyelid down. It was too dark for me to see what she was looking at, but you didn’t have to look twice to see the kid was in bad shape. He was completely disarmed by her unexpected compassion, however, and when he saw there wasn’t any money coming he walked off, disgusted.
I’ve never seen anyone in real life act with such compassion to a stranger who clearly didn’t want it. To me it seemed like one of the most selfless acts I’ve ever seen, even if it didn’t result in changing anything. Maybe it did – maybe the kid decided to give up crack that night and turn his life around. Not likely, but it’s comforting to know that there are people in the world who can care about strangers without honestly expecting anything in return.
We watched the kid run off into another corner of the square and down one of the dark cobblestoned streets. As he did so I told her that I never knew how to deal with street people – I didn’t want to give them money if they were drug addicts, because not only do I end up getting ripped off but it just perpetuates their suffering. If they weren’t addicts I didn’t want to fail to acknowledge their humanity by brushing them off or not giving them anything when the smallest amount of money for me could actually pay for a lot of food for them. What do you do? I asked.
She gave a long answer, which I really didn’t understand one goddamn word of, which is really frustrating, because she might have said something pretty profound judging by the tone of her voice. And then she looked me in the eye and held my gaze as she finished what she was saying, and I could see that her eyes were bloodshot in the dim restaurant lights which spilled towards us in the street. I started to look away but saw that she was looking at me intently, and we looked straight into each others eyes for at least a minute, which was on the border of extremely uncomfortable for me or the opposite – very intimate. And she ended her last sentence with “proposição” (proposition). At that point I balked, realizing I didn’t know what she was saying. I was exhausted, though, and I panicked, and so I said “I don’t know”, assuming that she had been talking about the street kid still. But in retrospect I think she was asking me to take her home with me, and I’m not saying I have a big head, because, trust me, I don’t. I could quite easily have misinterpreted her look but there are some human expressions that are universal and this was one of them.
posted by n10471 at 6:12 AM
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