New Carpet

The American stepped out into the tropical evening, muted traffic sounds coming through the trim foliage. Está demorando. It's taking a long time. How curious that the thought arrived first in Portuguese; perhaps, after so many years, he was finally becoming Brazilian.

He strolled around the garden, a patch of faux jungle fronting his apartment building. Big leafy plants, flowering shrubs, and tufts of bamboo surrounded a small patio with stone benches and a little fountain. He plucked a ripe blossom from a branch and held it close to his nose, drawing in the sweet perfume.

“Senhor Charles?” Antonio, the doorman, called in Portuguese from the main entrance. “Won't you be going up?” Antonio filled the doorway in his blue work shirt and carefully pressed pants, his thick arms crossed like a bouncer.

“No, Antonio. The carpet installers haven't finished yet. Even then it will be perhaps two or three days before the fumes from the glue...” — Charles searched for the right word —  “dissipate.”

“Why then is the Senhor waiting?” The respectful third person, somehow mocking. Does he know?

“They might steal something. You never can tell.” Charles ambled back toward the entrance. Antonio's bulk blocked the way but after a moment he moved aside, letting Charles pass.

“And dona Rita?” Charles's young wife.

Charles looked back at him. “Have you seen dona Rita today?”

The doorman looked at him for a moment and shrugged. “I've only been here a short time.”

“Of course. Dona Rita is traveling. Visiting her mother. As for myself, I've got reservations at the Hotel da Bahia.” Don't do too much explaining.

The doorman nodded and sat back down at his desk. He glanced up at Charles then went back to leafing through a magazine.

Charles moved back toward the door. Antonio made no motion to press the buzzer, so he pressed it himself and stepped back outside.

Looking back at Antonio through the glass, Charles could glimpse the two strands of candomble beads around his neck, one red, the other white, signifying his patron saint, his orixa. Not really a saint but an African god from the religion brought over with the slaves and later camouflaged with Catholic counterparts, camouflage being the secret of survival.

Charles knew Antonio participated in the ceremonies in the terreiro, where priestesses, the baianas in their traditional white dresses, whirled themselves into ecstasies until the orixas descended into their bodies, speaking through them and puffing on cigars. Outside the temple, he had seen Antonio practicingcapoeira, kicking and slashing at sparring partners while standing upside down on one arm. A martial art camouflaged as dancing, the dancers' bodies wrapped with muscle like steel cables.

He poked a finger into his own doughy belly and lit another cigarette. There were some things here he would never understand, but that only made him feel more Brazilian. Cheerfully accepting the incomprehensible was very Brazilian indeed.

But of course he wasn't Brazilian. He wasn't sure if he was even American anymore.

Twenty years before, he had come to Bahia to work for a British engineering firm. Everyone he knew, the foreigners anyway, were British, and he found Briticisms creeping into his speech, beginning sentences with So and ending them with then. So it's all over then. So his wife's having an affair then. So let's have another drink then.

During his last trip to the States, two years earlier for his mother's funeral, he'd found his English clumsy at times. People would give him a strange look when he said the simplest of things — ordering a drink in a restaurant — as if he were saying the right words but somehow not speaking quite correctly.