Looking

On our fourth day in Salvador da Bahia, the girls and I visited the Igreja do Bonfim, an old church that sits high on a hill on the upperside of the bay.  We all sat in the pews, scattered but close to each other.  This was a looking-place: to look, to be the object of looking, to be part of a long history of looking, to notice the act of looking.  One of us looked closely at the artistic details of the church, another read about the history of the church in her tourist guide, another watched the tourists enter and leave the church (crossing themselves, genuflecting before sitting down, taking photographs, whispering in the ear of a friend, kneeling to pray, fingering one's hair), and the fourth looked indifferent.

When we left the sanctuary and wandered into the outer rooms of the church, we stood in a space for those looking to be healed.  Plastered onto three walls are photographs of all kinds of people: people in wedding clothes, people lying in hospital beds, people in graduation gowns, and just faces in little squared photos like those taken for a passport.  From the ceiling hang plastic (or wax?) body parts.  Mostly legs and arms.  Some heads.  I looked at one of the girls for confirmation of something she was feeling that might reflect something I may have been feeling (and which I cannot yet describe).  I got it.

Leaving the room, we sat in a window sill and looked out at the view.  The patch-work, mountain-ascending, height-defying, cliffside-clinging housing of the poor surrounds the hilltop church.  They're called 'favelas' by many people and in many sources, but I'm not sure if I should call them by such a name.  (I am an outsider.)  'Favela' means 'slum,' I think, and perhaps they're not slums.  They're neighborhoods constructed out of found materials, exclusion, desperation, creativity, necessity, hope, determination, marginalization, overpopulation, poverty, poetry, and resistance.  These 'self-constructed' homes and the long, winding, climbing staircases leading up, up, up scream out to anyone looking: live!

Having climbed up the hill to get to Bonfim, we four girls descended as it began to rain.  We had one umbrella and we rotated its use: two girls (one holding the umbrella and the other wrapping her arm around the waist of the holder) enjoyed the cover while the other two got wet (and the opposite the next rainy day).  Walking rather aimlessly, and defensively looking down at the sidewalk ahead of me (don't want to step in anything gross), I noticed feathers and feathers on the walk and in the gutter.  Large, black and white, and not a few.  

'Candomble,' one girl said.  Up ahead: a crossroads, and a ditch alongside the road, filled with feathers perhaps covering a carcass of some gift to the orishas.  They eat well.

While riding on the bus back to Pelorinho, I noticed the number of churches standing high and mighty in the hills.  Their spires are beyond reaching -- they reached as they were constructed, sometime in the candlelit 1500s.  Now they simply stand, obviously old, unkempt (a word my mother loves), with dark spots (mold? fallen paint? dirt?) all over the plaster surface.  They stand in the mountains, overlooking past and present, city and ocean, native and visitor, unencumbered and homeless, saying to those passing through: look!