Dona Celeste's Samba School

The bus from São Paulo took thirty-one hours, and for the last six of them Mara 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 Mara'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." Mara'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." Mara'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 Mara 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 Mara's mother's handwriting, and two hundred thousand cruzeiros folded into her 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 Mara 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, Mara'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 Mara's stomach turned over. Acarajé, said a sign. Heat came up off the tarmac in waves.

Mara 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. Mara turned round.

She was the smallest grown-up Mara had ever seen. She came up to Mara's shoulder, and Mara 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 Mara 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."

Mara 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.

Mara caught up with her at the bus stop, panting, and held out a hand. "Can I carry your bag, Tia?"

Dona Celeste stopped, and looked at the hand, and then at Mara, with her eyebrows even higher than usual.

"Carry my bag," she said. "Do I look like an old woman who cannot carry her own bag?"

"No, Tia. I just—"

"I have carried this bag up the Ladeira do Carmo every day for thirty-six years," said Dona Celeste. "I have carried it to the market and the bank and the church and the city hall, where I hit a councillor with it in nineteen sixty-two, and I would do it again." She sniffed. "But you were taught manners. Your mother taught you manners. Good. Manners are rarer than money in this city." She handed Mara the umbrella instead. "Carry that. If it rains, open it. If anybody tries to rob us, hit them with it."

It did not rain. Nobody tried to rob them. But Mara carried the umbrella all the way up into the Upper City, through the swaying, roaring, crowded bus, holding it like a sword, and felt, for the first time in thirty-one hours, oddly as if Mara had passed a test.

The house was on the Ladeira do Carmo, a steep cobbled street in the oldest part of the Upper City, where the houses leaned against each other like tired people, painted pink and blue and yellow and peeling in the sea air, with iron balconies and tall wooden shutters and grass growing out of the gutters. Dona Celeste's was blue. Three storeys, very narrow, with a balcony on the top floor where a pot of red geraniums and a cage of canaries hung out over the street. Below it, the ladeira went tumbling down the hill in a river of cobbles towards the great church of the Carmo, and beyond it, the roofs, and beyond the roofs, the sea, going gold in the late afternoon.

Mara's room was at the top, under the roof, next to the canaries. It had a bed with a white cover, and a chair, and a crucifix, and a framed photograph on the wall, very old, brown and silver, of a crowd of people in a street at night, all dressed in white, with drums, and in the middle of them, held high on a pole above their heads, a banner. Mara could not see the details. Just the shape of it, glowing, as if the photograph had caught it in a flash of light: a great square of cloth, fringed, with something embroidered in the middle, held up above the crowd like a sun.

"Carnival, nineteen fifty," said Dona Celeste, from the doorway. "Our first parade. That is the estandarte." She was quiet for a moment, looking at the photograph. "My husband carried the pole. I danced in front of it. I was forty-four. I danced from the Praça da Sé to the Campo Grande and back, and the next day I could not walk, and I did not care."

She turned to go. Then she stopped in the doorway, with her back to Mara.

"This Carnival," she said, "is my last. I am seventy-nine. My feet are finished. My heart is a disgrace, the doctor says. So this year I will lead my school down the avenue one more time, behind the estandarte, the way I did in nineteen fifty. And then I will sit on my balcony with my canaries and watch, like a respectable old woman." She looked back over her shoulder at Mara, with her eyebrows up. "Five weeks. You have arrived just in time."

And she went down the stairs, very straight, very fast, and Mara heard her below, in the kitchen, singing, in a cracked, strong, tuneless voice, while somewhere down the hill, in the dusk, faintly, a drum began to beat.