What We Do After Gunfire
In Brazil, life goes on.
Jaque sits on the porch steps that lead from her tiny house down to the basement home of her uncle. Her three children, sunburned from Rio de Janeiro’s blazing February summer, hang like ornaments from her limbs and lap. I rest my elbows on the iron bar of the window and spread my fingers in the space between outside and in.
The first blast sounds like an avalanche untangling itself from the mountain. The sudden and boundless rumble shakes in my belly, echoing above my head and below my feet. From the window I see Jaque stumble down the stairs with her baby clutched to her chest and her daughter and son grasping at the hem of her skirt. She glances my way for a second, and the look on her face makes my stomach tighten. I see the warning in her eyes, and I hit the floor. My cheek presses into the dirty blue rug, and I stare at the red flashing numbers on the digital clock beside the television. It’s 3:30 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon.
When I first met Jaque, she was silent and smiling, and her third child was still in her belly, waiting to enter the battleground of Falet—one of Rio de Janeiro’s five hundred plus favelas, or slums. We pressed ice cubes against our foreheads to protest the sun that ferocious summer, and the neighborhood kids shouted “Teacher!” when they saw me on the street. Jaque’s mother called me her white daughter, but for the first two months I lived in her home, Jaque and I barely spoke to each other. She watched me, curious yet unmoved by the strange American dance teacher who had befriended her mother and become an unexpected guest in their tiny, tin-roofed house. She refused to let me help with dinner.
But one night as I danced with her mother in the living room, overcome with the beat of my favorite Brazilian song, Jaque leapt from her seat with a wail and started shaking her hips in circles around my body, yelling, “Eu nunca soube sobre seu coração maluco do brasileiro!” “I never knew about your crazy Brazilian heart!”
They called Jaque favelada, meaning someone with the real style of the favela. The favelas of Brazil were notorious for their tangle of colorful shacks, drug trafficking rings, violent encounters with the police, and Brazilian funk music. And oh, how the favela could be stylish. Stylish like AK-47s slipped between the hipbones and Bermuda shorts of twenty-two-year-old drug lords. Stylish like high-heeled women stomping their feet to the rat-a-tat percussion of funk songs blasting from hand-painted boom boxes at all hours of the day and night. Stylish like the coded victory cry of three bullets released into the air while dancers chanted, “The police don’t come to our parties!”
Jaque knew all the shortcuts in Falet’s maze of staircases and gutters, and she knew the people who did their business there. Because she could move quickly, without bus fare, she ran all the errands for her family. She understood the favela like a gardener understands the geometry of her garden and is willing to touch things that have not yet become beautiful.
Jaque never looked worried when the guns fired. Her two-year-old cried loudly and her mother clucked her tongue and muttered about the end of the world, but Jaque just kept sweeping the kitchen floor in her cutoff denim skirt or tickling her baby’s face. Then she’d look at me with large amber eyes and laugh: “é malucera neh?” “This is craziness, huh?”
My body is still flat on the floor, legs wedged under the bed, face against the scratchy carpet. Yes, I think. This is craziness. The hail of bullets has stopped and been replaced by an uncertain stillness. Twenty minutes have passed since Jaque fled down the stairs with her children, and I console myself with the thought that she’s in her uncle’s house taking cover in his bedroom, but the air is empty of the two-year-old’s tears or the baby’s giggle.
I crawl to the doorway, where I weigh the risk of standing upright to move toward the staircase that will take me outside, and to her. I wonder in this moment if we mimic our surroundings. If we yell back at bullets and bite our tongue in the ceasefire. When the kids in this neighborhood hear hip hop on the radio, they imitate the sound of machine gunfire to accompany the beat. I don’t know what sound we make when we imitate death, but I’m sure I have heard it here. I’m sure that in the space between Jaque and me, there is a path from the hand that resists violence to the hand that accepts it. I silently plead with Jaque’s children to make noise, but only the high-pitched wind whistles in my ear.
Jaque’s favorite time of day, it seemed, was at night when all her kids were asleep and no one had come home yet. I often found her in bed covered in a blanket with her youngest baby on her chest, her four-year-old at the other end of the mattress, and her two-year-old on the bed by her side. The air echoed calmly around the breath of the children. And though her eyes were closed, she was always awake and whispered my name.
We had our most intimate conversations on these nights. Jaque didn’t tell secrets to her mother because they were too much alike, and she didn’t tell secrets to her sister because she was younger and more religious. But she confided in me when we were alone and her kids were asleep in the bedroom in Falet.
She told me how much she missed the father of her four-year-old daughter. He was the one she still loved, but he chose to be a trafficker. “And that,” she insisted, “is not a life. Just a short existence before death.”
One afternoon, months after this, I sat crying in her living room over a broken heart. She walked in and spilled a bag of rice as she waved her arms around and shouted through a beaming smile, “We deserve good men! We deserve good men!” It was the first time I’d heard her say she deserved anything good, and I nodded my head slowly with wide eyes. Because we did.
The digital clock above my head now blinks 4:15 P.M. Forty-five minutes since Jaque and her kids ran down below. The gunfire has returned, but this time it’s a distant reverberation. I stand up.
When Jaque cleans the house she moves briskly, never putting anything back in place carefully, yet somehow managing not to make a sound. This is how I move downstairs now. Like a gust of wind.
In front of her uncle’s door, I pause and press my ear to the splintered wood. I want Jaque to teach me how she walks through her world like a queen. I want her to show me the swiftness of her hands and the abandon of her hips. If I had a sound to mimic Jaque, it would be Rio at four in the afternoon, when the sun crackles on concrete and feet tap, preparing to dance.
The door’s creaky hinge is the first sound to break the silence. Next is the whisper of my name on Jaque’s lips. She is lying on her uncle’s bed, eyes closed, her baby on her chest, the other two children at her feet. She grins as I curl my body into the tiny spot beside her.
“They were tired,” she says, brushing a long braid off her face. “It’s so peaceful when they sleep.”
Jocelyn Edelstein has spent extensive time in Brazil, dancing and working on her upcoming documentary, Believe The Beat, which follows a group of hip hop dancers from Rio de Janeiro. Her documentary work has also led her to Europe where she has enjoyed the honey cake in Prague and the gelato in Florence. She currently resides on the Oregon Coast where she teaches dance to all ages, writes, and plays in the ocean. To learn more about Jocelyn, visit her website at www.danceharvest.com or to preview her upcoming documentary, visit www.urbanbodyproject.com.