As they walked along the rise that leads out
of Pelourinho, holding hands, a peek here and there he complains that she is not
showing much affection and she wonders what else he wants for her to do. The
thing about how when you are in Rome you act like the Romans? It just never
stuck. She had her inhibitions, the
kind she kept as though she were going to get gold for them someday, those ones
you hold so dear that you begin to believe they are everything. There are
things about life and affection that sometimes you just have to let go of, she
thought. The thinking was easy; it was the doing that seemed like a myth. When
she noticed his frustration at not getting through to her, she smiled, and
said, “This thing, the Brazilian public
making out thing has not yet caught on me.”
There was something about her that made him
want to engage, he could not put a finger to it; or maybe he was not listening
to himself, that thing about listening with your heart he brushed off, this
woman made him go places with his ears. He wanted to listen to her with
everything he had, he started to think that he may finally come to an
understanding of that thing about listening with the heart, but the heart is a
tricky thing. On the rise out of Pelo, just
before they go to cross the road towards the direction of the road to Port Barra,
where she wanted to spend the day with him on the beach, someone called him
from behind them. He recognized his friend Chukwu. Chukwu had always had
problems with his car, it was twenty years old yet still, he could not let that
thing go, Mamanda realized that they should have taken another route away from the famous garage where Chukwu
seemed to have a permanent place. Knowing her man, she knew she would have to
wait for him to help because he never thought twice about helping a friend. Why
did Chukwu need her man’s help at a garage anyway, “I thought people paid someone to work on their cars in a place like this?
She mumbled to her man. Being a man of few words he mentioned something about
how he would be right back and helped find her a spot to wait from.
While she waited, she recalled how when on
her first trip to Nakuru, Kenya on her senior six long vacation from Uganda, several
Kenyans sustained old cars. Maybe they are just poor, she had thought. On
another trip several years later, she’d gone to Eldoret for a friend’s father’s
funeral and her friend’s uncle picked her and a few friends from the bus stop
in the oldest Peugeot she had ever seen. That thing must have been thirty years old, he
took them to his house where they would be staying until the funeral was over.
On reaching this house they were mesmerized, they could not place the two
together, the idea of a ram shackled car and a humongous furnished mansion
owned by the same man. Maybe that thing about how Ugandans just love nice cars
even if they lived in the dingiest of places is also true. That thing about how
Kenyans, save and invest in property and do not splash money around might also
be true. Ah! For generalizations, she wondered what kind of house Chukwu had.
Since she had only been in Pelo for a couple of weeks she had not yet had the
chance of getting to know her man’s friends. And why was she even calling him her man? She wondered. It had been
two weeks and this thing between them, had no name yet.
As she sat on the pavement by the garage, she
noticed the female hawkers had on boob tube tops and hot pant shorts, she had
started to fall in love with Brazil, covering the body here was an art, it
seemed like no one would care if one decided to go around topless, some of the
outfits she had seen on the female species left nothing to one’s imagination,
yet it felt right, the freedom was freeing in itself. This was going to be her first day at the
beach in her new bikini outfit, as she glared at Chukwu who kept smiling at her
and saying thank you for stopping to help, she mastered all the strength so as
to avoid calling him names as her irritation rose at Chukwu’s car woes which wasted
her precious beach time. After about two hours, her man walks up to her, smiles
and says they can now leave. A little furious that he had not offered to get
her something to quench her thirst on this humid day in Salvador, she turns to
show him that face, and wakes up from her slumber.
