Crossing the River by Amy Ragsdale

the oven. “ Já invento ,” she would say with pride. “I just invented it!” The “invention” would consist of something like the addition of a tablespoon of raisins. It seemed we’d opened up a whole new world of culinary improvisation, something that reached beyond northeastern Brazil’s staples of rice and beans, barely.
    Aniete slipped silently about the house, like smoke on the white-tile floor. The tile floors might not have creaked like our wood ones at home, but when I walked, my cartilage crackled; I guessed that was the difference between twenty-six and fifty-two.
    â€œ É um pouco tranquilo aqui ,” she let on one day in the first week or two of her time with us. “It’s a little quiet here.” A little too quiet.
    So we bought her a radio, one that picked up international stations, so that she could listen to music during the day and we could pick up the BBC at night and make up for our world-news blackout, as our best source was the state paper, the Alagoas Gazette , with its litany of local robberies—exploding ATMs, gunmen shaking down buses—and tales of political corruption. We’d hear Aniete singing to the radio while kneading our clothes on the plastic washboard that came with the washroom one floor below. Always a little flat, she crooned away with oblivious abandon.

8 8
    Time to Watch and Listen Time to Watch and Listen
 
    I T WAS RARELY QUIET in Penedo, at least by our standards. The sounds were layered like a complex symphony, from the Doppleresque crescendo and decrescendo of the buses rumbling past our front door, to the soft sound of rain on leaves in the back, to the distant patchwork of village sounds from Bairro Vermelho across the valley. Those varied depending on the time of day.
    At five, daybreak, we mostly heard animals: hoarse roosters, staccato dogs, whistling monkeys, and rasping crows. But by midday, the music started, an infinite variety of scraps on the wind, floating out of windows without glass whose wooden shutters had been thrown open. Then there was the insistent cheerfulness of the pop that blared, at deafening volume, from speaker systems mounted on passing motorcycles and vans. When we first arrived, these nomadic speakers were advertising political candidates, as elections were just four months away. Each candidate had his or her own song with earnest lyrics about jobs and education dressed up in pop rock. (A good way to reach a population with a high rate of illiteracy.) After two months, they almost drove us out of our house.
    Then there were the itinerant vendors, each with an identifying rhythm or melody, announcing the sale of coconut water, bread, tapioca cakes, or popsicles and ice cream—that last with a pitch that rhythmically rose and fell like cursive, “ Picolé e Sorvete, Caicó! ” By nightfall, the music was overlaid by a blanket of pulsating insect sounds.
    Punctuating the symphony was the daily, startling pop and crackle of firecrackers—or were they small sticks of dynamite? At first I thought it was just party-time-all-the-time in Penedo, but then I started to think the jangling pops might have announced things like “time to go to church.” Finally, I began to think Penedenses just like noise.
    Walking down our street one evening, I heard, then saw, a man leaning on his windowsill, pumping away on a whistle. I thought he was trying to get someone’s attention or signaling something; then I decided he was just making noise for the hell of it: a piercing declaration of Hi, I’m here.
    This was just another of many events, inexplicable to an outsider, for which I would invent an explanation. It reminded me of walking down a main street in Maputo, in Mozambique, and hearing the watchful young men emit erratic whistles. I’d spy them hidden in the shadows and wonder if they had some code, a way of alerting someone down the block, Here comes fresh meat ,