The monumental and the pedestrian

by Fabiana Nicoli Dias (Brazil)

I didn't expect to find Brazil

Apaga Fogo Beach (in english: Put Out Fire Beach) was the first place that some friends and I visited in Arraial d'Ajuda, a small district in Bahia (BR). Talking to the kiosk waiter, I discovered that the beach’s name is due to a legend: in this narrow strip of land that separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Buranhém River, fishermen lit lamps when they went to the sea and extinguished them when they returned, signaling their safe arrival to family and friends. As a literature student, this type of story - legends and myths that are reinvented in oral fragility and richness, fragmenting and merging to form new narratives that can eventually be written - has always fascinated me. It was this story that left the calm of the place do its job, taking my mind out of my urban hometown, since my body were no longer there. In the evening, we went to the district historical center, where I visit the small and simple Church of Nossa Senhora D'Ajuda, built between 1549 and 1551, a period that portuguese colonization was relatively early. Many stories surround the miraculous appearance of the fountain with sacred waters outside the church in the early years of the jesuits' arrival, when the building still had its straw structure. It’s curious how the life of this picturesque place revolves around this sacred spot, how the Arraial d’Ajuda occupation is due, in part, to it. A certain guilt persists in me to find something poetic in the walls and waters of that district even all of this was at the cost of an intense and violent process of colonial exploration. It is from pain that poetry is born, apparently. Not from beauty, as the belletrists suppose, but from the pain that cannot be ignored. “Here in Arraial, the rain is passenger. Where the passengers go, it goes after”, sang a man, in his forties, selling trinkets a few days later on Praia do Mucugê. No sooner said than done. The rain caught us hard. But that didn’t take away the tranquility of the trip. In fact, it was while I was soaking wet and singing an axé song that I thought of what the seller had playfully said. I started to observe those people and that tourist district: if that was a space of passage, of transition; would it be those passable people? People though we, tourists, could also pass, often without paying any attention to them? I wanted to get to know them, to understand their daily life in times of low tourist season. I wanted to know how they mocked us, tourists, with our pretentious noses. I wanted to know about the hidden places in the district, that only locals knew about. But I was too shy to actually look for it (I hope I’m not like that anymore). I looked through the woman serving a table at the kiosk. I could see her being a dedicated mother, saving money to pay for her son's college in the capital. I looked back on the handsome guy who played the guitar in the bar where we drank. I could imagine a girl with a shy smile asking for his phone number on the show break. I remembered the beautiful voice of a venezuelan woman singing “Tarde em Itapoã”, at a restaurant where we ate. I wondered what brought her to Brazil: was it the political crisis in Venezuela? If so, it was really sad that she now finds herself in a country whose president discriminate immigrants and tarnished the image of her hometown. I don't know, but it made me want to be passable myself. I did not expect to find this: this desire not to be a tourist in a massive touristic place, this curiosity to learn more about its stories, to understand the grandeur in the daily life of those people. The monumental on the pedestrian: that was what I didn't expect to find.