Dona Celeste's Samba School

The bus from São Paulo took thirty-one hours, and for the last six of them Elias did not sleep at all, because of the heat, and the smell of somebody's dried fish in the luggage rack, and the man across the aisle who had been playing the same cassette of Roberto Carlos since Vitória da Conquista.

It was the second week of January, 1985. In São Paulo it had been raining for nine days, warm grey rain that turned the gutters into rivers and the sky into wet cardboard, and Elias's mother had been working double shifts at the Hospital das Clínicas since Christmas, coming home at two in the morning in her white shoes and falling asleep on the sofa without taking them off. And on the first of January, at breakfast, with her eyes shut, she had said: "You're going to Salvador. To Tia Celeste. For the holidays. I've written to her. She says yes."

"Who's Tia Celeste?"

"My father's aunt. Your great-great-aunt, I suppose. Or great-aunt. I never know." Elias's mother had opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. "She's seventy-nine. She lives in the old part of Salvador. She has a samba school."

"A what?"

"A samba school. A little one. She started it in nineteen forty-nine with her husband, when she was younger than me." Elias's mother had smiled, for the first time in a week. "I went once, when I was your age. For Carnival. She made me carry a feather. I've never been so frightened or so happy in my life."

So here Elias was. Thirty-one hours. A bag with three T-shirts and a sketchbook and a box of coloured pencils, and a letter for Tia Celeste in Elias's mother's handwriting, and two hundred thousand cruzeiros folded into his sock, which, with inflation at two hundred per cent, was worth almost nothing.

And then, at a little after four in the afternoon, the bus came round a long bend on a hill, through a gap in a wall of mango trees and concrete, and Elias saw the sea.

It was enormous. A great curving bay, blue and silver and green, with islands in it, and white sails, and ships, and a long low wall of city running along the edge of it, under a cliff. And on top of the cliff, another city, an older one, with towers and domes and church spires and red-tiled roofs piled up on each other in the sun, yellow and pink and blue and white, all jostling for a view of the water. Salvador. The Upper City and the Lower City, Elias's mother had said, one on top of the other, joined by a lift.

The bus station was chaos. Taxis, buses, hawkers, families with chickens, a man selling coconuts with a machete, a woman in a white lace dress and a white turban and strings of coloured beads, frying something in a great black pan of orange oil that smelled so good Elias's stomach turned over. Acarajé, said a sign. Heat came up off the tarmac in waves.

Elias stood on the pavement with the bag, and the letter, and looked about for an old lady.

There were dozens of old ladies. None of them looked as if they owned a samba school.

"You are the São Paulo child."

The voice came from behind. Elias turned round.

She was the smallest grown-up Elias had ever seen. She came up to Elias's shoulder, and Elias was not tall. Thin, and very straight, in a dress of white cotton with blue flowers, and white shoes, and a white handbag over her arm, with her grey hair pulled back so tightly under a blue headscarf that it seemed to pull her eyebrows up with it into an expression of permanent, faintly amused surprise. Her face was very dark and very lined, and her eyes were very bright, and she was holding a folded umbrella like a sword, although there was not a cloud in the sky.

She looked Elias up and down. Slowly. From the hair to the trainers and back again.

"Hm," she said. "You have your grandfather's ears. He was my nephew. He had terrible ears. He could not hear a surdo if it fell on him." She held out her hand, palm up. "The letter."

Elias gave her the letter. She did not open it. She put it in her handbag, and snapped the bag shut.

"I am Celeste," she said. "Dona Celeste, to everybody. Tia Celeste, to you, if you behave. Come. The bus to the Upper City leaves in four minutes and the driver is a fool who will not wait for anybody." And she turned and set off across the bus station, through the taxis and the hawkers and the chickens, very fast, with her umbrella, without looking back.