Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (39 page)

“Is it a prayer or a wish?”

“Wish, prayer, whatever,” said Andy. He handed me a yellow and green ribbon. “If you tie this on my wrist, I’ll never take it off.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because that’s the rule. You tie the ribbon on and make a wish. Or a prayer. Then you can never take it off. It has to disintegrate in the shower or something.”

“That could be a while,” I said, fingering my ribbon.

“I’m prepared to deal with that.”

From Bonfim we were ready to take on the African spiritual roots, and we started to search for a candomblé. This took us a few days. Authentic ceremonies are hidden, as they were when slaves had to practice their religion in secret. The ceremony has to take place on soil. Since so much of Salvador is covered in concrete, it’s only in the ramshackle hills of a favela that one can find enough bare earth for a candomblé. We came in a cab. The driver parked and walked us up a steep hill on a broken staircase. We arrived just before the ceremony started. Andy joined the men on one side of an otherwise barren courtyard, and I joined the women on the opposite side. Our jeans and white skin made us obvious outsiders. No one embraced us, but no one questioned our sincerity either. They even gave us each a seat among the few chairs lined up on either side.

Soon a woman entered, wearing a white colonial dress with a turbaned headdress. Ruffled from waist to shin, she carried a plate of food to set at a distance from the crowd. Andy and I looked at each other from across the room.
For the or
ixás?

The drummers pounded an African beat, and the center of the room filled with a stream of dancers whose full white skirts lifted and swirled as they brushed past us in circle upon circle. With her hooped skirt, the leader wore pink slippers with pom-poms. She might have picked them up at K-Mart, except that we were in Salvador. Andy’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of those slippers, and just as quickly his subdued expression returned. I had to cover my mouth so I wouldn’t laugh.

The woman shuffled her slippers in a dance based on an African beat with percussive instruments. In a commanding alto, she led the song. A string of dancers followed her into a circular dance, each twirling circles into a larger circle. Just watching the movement was hypnotic. For two hours the women danced without resting. Then one woman dropped to the floor, her body rigid then spasmodic as the spirit entered her. I looked to Andy, who was looking to me. We both turned back to the woman on the floor, whose fits and jerks continued as the woman in pink slippers crouched beside her. An invisible force wrestled with both of them until they surrendered. From the silence came a barely audible sigh. We sank back into our seats, exhausted.

After we left the ceremony, having been permitted to come so close to the secret of another culture, we were silent. That night there was no critiquing, no debating. We just felt closer, safer in each other’s arms.

On our last night, Andy and I drank coffee outdoors in a square surrounded by colonial buildings painted turquoise, pink, and yellow. We faced the gold and white façade of São Francisco Church. I was trying to quit but I still smoked a cigarette or two every night, which Andy tolerated even though he was adamantly against smoking. His home had burned down when he was a boy, possibly due to a cigarette; now he tapped strangers in public to point out the “No Smoking” sign. On this last night in Bahia, we tried to break free of our fears.

“Try one,” I said, joking, as I slid a cigarette his way. “It’s a clove cigarette.”

“Okay,” he said, lighting up. Soon he stamped it out. “That is sickening.”

I stood up. “Okay. I’m going to get you drunk. Come on, I’ll be the designated walker.” I grabbed his hand. “Everyone’s going to that church.” I pointed to São Francisco. People jammed into the space beneath the arches so that the vestibule and the square blended into one. Organ music played inside. Every chandelier was lit; it gleamed like a palace.

A priest in silver robes doused the frenetic mob with holy water from an ornate aspergillum, which reminded me of a scepter. We joined the masses.

“This is wild,” said Andy.

“Church was never this much fun back in the States,” I said.

Drenched in holy water, we wandered out onto a cobblestone street leading to the
pelourinho
, the pillory. In front of another church were iron shackles where slaves had been flogged if they refused Catholicism.

“Let’s find some capoeira,” said Andy.

“I agree,” I said, taking one last look at the iron shackles. Capoeira is a martial arts dance that was developed by slaves in secrecy, since they were not allowed weapons. Young men and women perform it on the streets to the accompaniment of the berimbau, an instrument made from a gourd and a reed shaped into a bow. We found the stage where some of the best dancers performed. A woman in a muscle shirt with rippled biceps oiled to shine like mahogany kicked a leg over her partner’s ropy shoulder. He crouched before springing from his toes into a back flip.

When they finished the dance, we made our way back to the main square again. “I thought you were going to get me drunk,” said Andy.

“I know, but everywhere we turn is a church.”

We heard drums pounding to a samba rhythm and Andy walked toward the sound, stopping in front of a building with a sign that read “Grupo Filhos de Gandhi.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Andy had been studying Portuguese since his arrival in Brazil. He explained how Carnaval is organized. “This is like a fraternity,” he said.

“A fraternity?” I rolled my eyes and started to leave.

“Not like fraternities in Ohio,” said Andy, catching my arm. “This is a fraternity for Carnaval. This group is called the Sons of Gandhi.”

From inside an otherwise empty lobby, two skinny boys in droopy jeans and soccer shirts beckoned us to join them. We shook our heads because we were both thinking they might rob us. It had been risky enough to go to the favela. Maybe this was pushing it. As we turned away the boys called us back, laughing and raising their thumbs.
“Todo le
gal!”

Andy lit up at the expression.
“Todo?”
he asked, stopping.

“T
odo!”

“What are they saying?”

He told me that his students used this phrase to mean “It’s all cool.” The boys said something else to Andy, who strained to comprehend their Portuguese before he threw up his hands in surrender. Waving us in, the boys pretended to pound drums, their feet moving to a samba beat.

“It’s a nightclub,” said Andy. “You want to try it?”

“I guess it’s safe. They are the Sons of Gandhi,” I said.

Soon the boys were ushering us down an ominous hallway. We paused before entering a dark staircase, but the music grew louder from below and promised festivities ahead. We took the stairs, then an alley, and came to a courtyard by following the high-pitched voices and thundering drums. On the stage, four bony boys in soccer shirts and sagging jeans played homemade percussive instruments. They couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. The singer’s voice hadn’t quite changed yet. Pounding instruments made from metal, animal-skin, or gourd, the boys sang to an audience of about five people sitting at cheap plastic tables. They included a woman who might have been one hundred years old. She rose up every so often to dance until she collapsed into another plastic chair. The place was too empty to leave.

“You want to stay?” asked Andy.

“I love it,” I said. “These guys are great.”

He gave me his dreamy stare with his heartthrob smile, probably a remnant of his days in a band. I wondered if he knew how cute he looked. He’d shaved off his mustache before we ever kissed, but I couldn’t remember when it had disappeared.

Andy ordered a caipirinha, and I drank Guarana, a Brazilian soda with the same effect as Jolt. The place was filling up. By the time a new band came on, the place was packed. This band was led by boys who were maybe sixteen. They set a long-necked beer bottle on the stage and started to hiss and cackle. The audience let out a collective sigh just as the drumming began. Andy and I looked at each other. What was so funny about an empty bottle? Then someone said,
“Boquinha da garr
afa.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The mouth of the bottle,” Andy explained awkwardly. “It’s a euphemism.”

“For what?”

“A penis.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

Two girls were coaxed onto the stage: one with cornrows, compact in her tube top and stretch pants, the other a sultry girl with kinky auburn hair and mocha-colored skin, in a backless sundress. The girls in the crowd rattled their hands then squeezed them over their eyes as if to say, “I can’t watch.”

I worried for those girls onstage. What was about to happen up there?

The compact girl stepped forward easily. Without much ado she danced over the bottle, lowering herself into a crouch over it, and gyrating athletic hips to a raucous cheer from the crowd.

“Oh. I see,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” said Andy.

The sultry woman in the backless dress took her place. Before long we witnessed girls of all ages and shapes, in all manner of dress—miniskirts, hot pants, bikinis—lining up to crouch over the beer bottle, shimmying down on it. Even the old woman gave it a shot. She tipped and swayed from age abetted by alcohol until two young men gently led her back to another plastic chair on the sidelines.

Sweat, toil, and sex permeated the air. We were deep in the swell of the crowd, dancing and cheering for the latest contender when two boys whisked me away from Andy. With drumbeats pounding, girls gyrating over bottles, and other girls latching onto the newly freed Andy, I was lifted from my place and sandwiched between boys who ground into me, front and back. I grew frantic until I saw Andy’s face pop out from a tangle of female limbs. He was searching the crowd for me. Our eyes met. We reached our hands through the crowd, but our captors squeezed tighter and edged us apart.

Lost between the boys, frightened but now laughing nervously, I wrestled against their playful rocking to get back to Andy. I shoved into the chest of one boy and elbowed the other in the gut. This only freed me enough to keep my head above the fray. The rush of aggression mixed with my fear of losing Andy, and was topped off by the heart-pounding effects of Guarana. Drums throbbed and echoed so that I couldn’t tell whether the swirl of madness was inside me or had engulfed me. Finally I spotted Andy inside the confusion of girls, ecstasy shadowed by hysteria on his face. Our eyes met again; his body slackened with relief. Then he wiped a tear from his cheek, which made me laugh so hard that I cried.

W
hen his semester ended in July, Andy and I began our life together by catching a charter flight from Miami to the Dominican Republic along with about one hundred people, most of them my family. We were on our way to a wedding; Tim, my youngest brother, was getting married.

It had been seven years since Bridget warned me to stay away from her mother. Shortly after her phone call, she sent me a note that included the exact words Mom had once said to me: “Eileen, you sow what you reap.” That only stiffened my resolve.

A few years later, in the spirit of reconciliation, I went home to visit every sibling in Cincinnati and take photos of their children. I was most eager to see Ted’s baby boy, who would grow into a gentler, downright angelic, version of Ted. If there was one unifying feature among all my siblings, it was that we loved children. It amazed me to see how much of my parents were alive in each of my siblings, even in my nieces and nephews. I saw fragments of my parents in every laugh, every smile, every wince, and that meant that there were fragments inside me: pieces of my parents, my siblings, my grandparents.

No one had changed, really. The insider siblings still clustered to talk about the stuff they’d always talked about, only now their stories included condos in the south and summer homes in New England. I’d hear them and think, “I didn’t even know so-and-so owned a summer house.” Bridget and Mom’s garbled prophecies had come true. I’d become the woman without a country.

During those years, I had faced another of my battles with an insurance company over a pair of legs. Out of a sense of frustration, I called Mom and asked her why she and Dad had never sued the pharmaceutical company. She told me that back in the sixties she’d been approached by our old neighbor Charlie Keating about a lawsuit.

“You can’t be serious! Why didn’t you do it?” I asked.

“Because I never took that pill!” she said.

Sometime during that period, Mom had Michael call me. He gave me a forty-five-minute lecture on taking responsibility for ourselves and our families, mentioning that it was a shame I hadn’t wanted any children. Children were the whole point, he said. Then he asked me why I’d wasted so much time in school. Did I not value family? Before I could answer, he said he would take out a modest life insurance policy for Mom and list me as the beneficiary. I appreciated the gesture, but it wouldn’t solve my problem, which was that I hated asking Mom for help and lived in fear that I would have to ask her for it one day. What if she said no? My worrying made me resent my mother. Worse, it kept my relationships with my siblings strained.

In recent years, the “babies” had been getting married. I attended each wedding. Tim’s was the last. He was marrying Isabela, a spirited Montessori teacher from Santo Domingo.

I was pleased to have Andy accompanying me. The ceremony took place in an old church in Puerto Plata. Isabela made a striking bride in startling white, her black hair styled into a perfect bun.

That evening, the DJ mixed salsa with popular wedding tunes such as “YMCA” and “Shout.” Liz rallied folks for our traditional circle dance, starting us off with a go-go step to a Beach Boys number, then Ted did his drunken uncle routine—Tom Waits meets Dick Van Dyke—and right after my cousin’s husband cartwheeled through the Circle of Doom, Andy jumped into its core.

Musicality is what I love most about Andy. His tastes range from Bossa Cubana to Appalachian strings. He plays guitar and piano, writes lyrics and melodies, but it’s his dancing I love most. Andy’s light step turns an ordinary bounce into a spring. He drops his torso and his knees alternate up and down, fingers snapping at his sides. Whether he’s shimmying to “Hava Nagila,” clapping to flamenco, or doing the do-si-do, the dance is uniquely Andy’s.