The Beat Goes On and On

I found that I would lose the beat whenever I paid attention to my fingers. So I closed my eyes. Our drumming floated into the night through the open windows. Faster and faster we went, and I realized that although my fingers were flying, I was not only playing but listening.

In Brazil, we were never far from drums and soccer. It soon became obvious that the country produces great musicians and great soccer players because these are more than pastimes, they are practiced with something approaching religiosity. They are a part of being Brazilian. For many, excellence in these skills can be tickets out of poverty.

The day after Macambira's class, for example, my wife and I were in a taxi headed from our hotel in Barra to Pelourinho when the driver swerved and hit the brakes. I looked up to see if there had been an accident, but no, it was just two men crossing the busy street, carrying a soccer goal. No one honked.

The taxi dropped us off at a nondescript building, Mestre Bimba's Capoeira Association. Delighted with the percussion class, we had decided to take a capoeira lesson, too. This is a martial art disguised as a dance that was developed by African slaves. The kicks and twirls are set to a pulsing rhythm played on drums and the berimbau, a bow-shaped instrument brought over by slaves from Angola. The beat was similar to the Ijexa rhythm Macambira had taught us the previous evening.

Our instructor, Fuisco (like Macambira, many Brazilian artists use only a single stage name), wore a loose blue tunic and a sleeveless T-shirt. He showed us the basic capoeira step -- the right and left feet moving back alternately, with a forearm coming up to guard the face -- and quickly progressed to crouches, twirls and somersaults.

After 40 minutes I was exhausted, but Fuisco was not done. He brought out orange traffic cones and taught us to move around the cone in time with the beat, adding feints and twirling kicks. Around us, more advanced students -- some of them visitors who were spending the summer in Salvador learning various arts -- practiced a rapid series of handstands and kicks that kept time with the beat.

My thighs ached after the class, and I lodged myself in a cafe on the nearby square of Praca Anchieta. Music and dance festivals are regularly held on Tuesday and Sunday evenings in Pelourinho and we had timed our visit to be there on a Tuesday. We ate lunch at a nearby comida a kilo (meals by the kilo) restaurant, where patrons pile salads and hot food on plates and pay by weight, an especially good option for vegetarians. The range of fresh fruits and juices was astounding: Many meals included melon, guava, mango, passion fruit, pineapple and several indigenous Brazilian fruits.

From the Coliseu restaurant on Praca Anchieta, I saw flocks of tourists visit the nearby Sao Francisco church, where slaves once carried their masters to Sunday prayers. Luiz Jungblut, a local guide, showed us the plain crucifix in one corner of the church where slaves could worship, in sharp contrast to the main sanctuary, which is gilded in gold. During much of the church's heyday, Jungblut told us, religious leaders had insisted that black people did not have souls.

The scars of slavery are still visible in Brazil, especially in the distribution of wealth and power. Still, in Salvador, I saw many groups of people with different skin tones collegially huddled together in restaurants and on the squares. Locals at the music festival that evening came in groups of mixed ethnicity, and everyone danced with everyone else. Close to midnight, my wife and I walked down a cobbled street, drawn to a pounding beat. A dozen drummers marched in a procession, arms and hands moving in trancelike rhythm. Some hurled their drums aloft and pounded them overhead. A crowd formed around the performers and soon a welter of torsos pressed against us. A pair of hips rhythmically bumped against me in the dark, keeping time with the drums.

Going With the Flow

I found the same lack of self-consciousness in Rio. At Carioca da Gema, a popular nightclub in a neighborhood called Lapa, I met Nilton Nasser, a dermatologist from southern Brazil. Through a range of samba favorites, Nasser, his wife and the rest of the crowd danced and loudly sang along. At another club, Vinicius, in Ipanema, an elderly patron stopped at my table and moved my plate to one side to clear space to write a check. When she was done, she absent-mindedly touched me on the cheek and muttered thanks in Portuguese.

The lack of inhibitions spilled into language, too. TAM airlines, which we took from Miami to Brazil and on several internal flights, had an in-flight magazine that tackled English with the same gusto Brazilians play soccer with. A review of Richard Gere's performance in "Chicago" said the movie offered "an unusable opportunity of watching Gere showing he is a talent as a tape dancer." I felt liberated after reading that and, everywhere I went, I pushed the boundaries of my limited Portuguese. No one laughed at my contortions.

There weren't many inhibitions at the regular tourist spots, either. Crowds 10 deep at Christ the Redeemer, the famous statue atop Rio's Corcovado Mountain, posed for pictures before the statue with their arms outstretched. Tanned bodies in scanty swimwear were everywhere along the magnificent beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. At a cafe called the Girl from Ipanema, where musicians Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes were said to have spotted the teenager who inspired them to write the famous song, an entire franchise has been built around the tune, with T-shirts and memorabilia hawked along with average food.