Every good Salvadoran knows to decorate for the Festival of Iemanjá, and Carol had done her civic duty to the utmost. She had hung the beautiful tapestry over the buffet table, and the sculpture of the vain Iemanjá admiring her reflection stood among the vegetables, fruit and silverware. She had also tied foamy blue and white net and ribbon all over the place.
Too little, too late, if you asked me at the time. Iemanjá had made her displeasure with me known already. The old girl was high maintenance, that’s for sure. And I say “old girl” with complete confidence, being as she IS the daughter of the creators of the world.
I continued to roam around the party, sampling a pizza petal now and again, but still chugging water like a fiend. I talked to Amina Dickerson for a while, learning that she worked for Kraft in Chicago. I told her how much I liked her Velveeta and her logo; being a big eater and an advertising man, I was qualified to do both.
Amina and her husband Julian Moore (who eluded my camera) were there for the evening festivities: Carlinhos Brown, another venerable Salvadoran music legend, had erected three or four massive stages on the very streets we tromped on that morning. Carlinhos and crew (a bunch of stars!) were the ones to run through the streets at dawn, singing for Oxum. I hated to have missed that, but I was wallowing in the rack.
Carlinhos was also the spearhead behind the massive Iemanjá decorations, and was the Big Daddy of the huge family of entertainers who were going to pass through those stages. More music! On top of the sonic blast from Carnaval. It only happens once in a blue moon, and we were there to witness it.
Hold on!! That meant we had to walk back down there and back up again! Aieee!! Well, at least there were a bunch of other folks to share to trek: Cindi and Bill Howley and their kids, a very nice bunch, I’ll say. The youngest son was what an old lady (or I) would call “a little scamp”. All the kids were cute as hell, polite and not afraid to speak to weird old men in new Havaianas.
Wait! I just found Carol’s dossier on the Howleys. Encapsulated: The Howley family is Bill, Cindi, Annie, Clara and Tom. Bill works for Winrock International, an offshoot of the Rockefeller Foundation whose mission is renewable energy and sustainable development. Cindi recently went back to work at a winery — right up her alley. They lived in Brazil for almost five years, roughly between 94-99.
So. The Little Scamp’s name is Tom. He’ll always be The Little Scamp to me.
I was also in error about Ruybela. She doesn’t teach with Nelson: Ruybela Carteado was with Julian and Amina. She is a dynamic promoter of anything to be promoted that keeps her going between her home here and in Philadelphia.
It was time to go. And the new shirt I put on became an old shirt instantly.
Down, down, past urine wall and surroundings, past the dental supply place, finally breaking “free” where we came out that morning. But breaking free involved running into a brick wall of humanity grooving to the Brazilian sounds coming from Stage One.
No camera. Jean had the disposable. Which gave the event a whole William Eggleston quality to it. He always took only one shot of anything. Not a billion shots of the same thing. One shot. The three taken with the disposable are the only ones, if I’m not mistaken.
It was flat packed to the gills down there! And everybody knew all the words to the songs again! Grrrrrr! Our group moved through the crowd with the cohesion of a paramecium, undulating from all sides. One person would see a good place to stand (forget about sitting) and pull the crowd that way. Then another move. Then another. We were actually better where we were at the beginning. We could see and hear the stage better. The move that looked attractive, up a little rise on a side street, was ultimately not as good.
And goodness gracious was I ever thirsty! We ALL were. But the crowd-to-vendor ratio was woefully bad. If one of the enterprising Bahians had had a REALLY big cooler full of water and a few beers, he could have put his children through college on the money he would have made that day. God bless Bill Howley. Not only did he carry Tom on his shoulders for a large part of the time, he voluntarily pierced the throng to buy us beer. And he wouldn’t even take my money, to boot! What a guy.
I drank half the beer Bill brought me, but my body screamed “WATER!!!” We were on a rise, the street made of cobblestones. My Crocs were steady and sturdy 99.9% of the way, but the cobbles would get me every now and then. I staggered through the crowd, throwing around an occasional “licença” (excuse me). I finally found one vendor who was being besieged just as he set down his giant styrofoam treasure chest. Talk about your piranhas! I managed to snag a water and have it finished before I could make it back to the mother ship.
All the music from the stage was smoking hot Brazilian when we first got there. The crowd was happy and benign, and singing along, probably like they’d do at a kids’ soccer game. But then the music got slow and introspective and quiet. For a long time. The crowd was getting kind of distracted because they were louder than what was coming from the stage. There is no reason to do that. These people should have been rocking the house. Carol even got bored, and asked if anybody was ready to leave.
The Howleys were ten steps ahead of us. We watched them disappear into the crowd, eventually only seeing a very tall Tom as they were enveloped by the mass.
On our way out Carol and Nelson stoped to samba to some of the music blaring out of huge outdoor speakers at this bar. They far eclipsed the sound from the stage, disappearing in the distance. And the people at the bar and outside were raising hell and having a blast.
That’s why I couldn’t understand why the groups on the stage had ceased to play the party music. Don’t get me wrong. The slower stuff was pretty, and would have been great if you were sitting in a bar listening to it while a ceiling fan rotated slowly above your head and a beautiful Bahian served you roskas. But here, we were international potted meat, and wanted to get our pipoca on. I’m sure it was just a slow stretch, but it felt like an eternity, and a large group of festival goers tends to be pretty ADD. We were no exception.
It’s such a weird sensation to break free of a gigantic jamboree like that one. The crowd becomes thinner and thinner, the streets clearly show the aftermath of the human traffic, and the smells are presented to you in a crystal clear fashion. The disappearing dusk drove it home even more. There were a bunch of us, but it was still kind of a lonely feeling at the same time. I’m sure that our having to leave the next day added to it. For some reason, it was a vivid reminder of leaving the Alabama State Fair by the secret gate that only a “few” people knew about–the one with the best parking and the non-crowded entrance.
We magically made it up the hill somehow. Surely our training of the afternoon hadn’t hurt. At the house, I decided to sit in the cold tub for a while. My engine tends to run hot all the time, but it was in overdrive, and I needed to cool ‘er down. Jean and Carol sat up there for a while and chatted while I played the manatee and watched the sky.
We had a pickup kind of dinner. Carol dragged everything out of the refrigerator, and we had a big ole smorgy accompanied by the ever-popular manioc flour. At this point, it was decided that Daniel and Patricia were going to join us in Rio.
Robo had posed the idea earlier in the trip. Daniel and Patricia were the perfect traveling companions for many reasons: smart, fun, lively, curious, irreverent. Oh. And they both spoke Portuguese. We may have still taken them even without all the glowing adjectives. And Robo was not terribly keen on being language deficient in Rio for 7 days. Relying on me to tell everybody about my sweat and about the beauty was just not gonna be enough.
Therefore, as president of whatever one of his endeavors it was, Robo authorized a grant to underwrite part of D&P’s trip to Rio to stay with us in the huge house (that slept 13), learn about Rio and its Carnaval themselves, and help us survive same. Carol immediately went upstairs to book flights, and I went into Daniel’s temporary lair to celebrate our success by watching TV with my new BKFs. I had completely flipped into paternal mode, and was loving it.
Would Carol want them back after we got through with them? There are a million literary and musical references from throughout history that say “não.”