We worked our way up from the beach, fighting through the crowd. It turned out she was a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher from the slums outside São Paulo. She taught Portuguese grammar and composition to 150 fifth-graders who cycled through her classroom in batches of about forty. They were mostly favela kids, poor and tough, with hard lives. Many had drugged-out parents or were on drugs themselves. To teach them, she said, she'd had to learn to be tough.
"Tough enough to teach me?" I asked. (I know, gag, right? But it was all I could manage with my Portuguese.)
Ana smiled. "If you want."
I nodded. "Eu quero."
She shook her head. "Nao, it's not 'key-er-o.' That's Spanish. KYER-o."
And so it began. I led her away through the crowd, down along the street and back to the beach. We walked out on the rocks and sat down, looking into the water. A crab was skittering along the bottom of one of the tidal pools.
"How do you call that?" I asked, pointing. I had my arm around her, and she was snuggling into my side.
"Caranguejo," she said. "Kar-ahn-GWAY-joo. A good word to learn proper pronunciation. Say it."
You have got to be kidding me, I thought, but I repeated it.
She shook her head. "No. Again."
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Somewhere in the far recesses of my brain, my friends were yelling, "Dude! You're in!"
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I said it again. Wrong. She started to give me a lecture on phonetics. Midway through I touched her arm and asked if she wanted to kiss me, and she said yes, why not. We made out for a while, and she pulled away. She said, "You kiss differently than a Brazilian. You do it rhythmically."
I started to apologize, but she put her hand over my mouth. She thought for a second. "I didn't say bad. Just different. I like it."
We made out for a while longer, until the tide had come up over the rocks and was lapping at our feet. "Let's go," she said.
"Where?"
She shrugged. "Anywhere."
We walked off, still talking. I referred to her as my profesor, which I instantly realized was masculine. She laughed and said, "Profesora. I'm a woman." She touched her crotch. "There won't be any surprises there, when . . ."
She looked at me as though realizing what she'd just said, then started giggling.
Somewhere in the far recesses of my brain, my friends were yelling, "Dude! You're in!"
I was not in that night. The next, as I walked with her away from a free concert, Ana said, "This is all just bread and circuses. We have nothing, so we celebrate, we sing, we dance to forget that we have no food on the table."
"Bread and circuses?" I said.
"Yes. If we can't comer, we comer." She laughed. "Oh, another one of my piadas pornagraficas, my pornographic jokes . . ."
I frowned. "If we can't eat, we eat?"
She shook her head. "No. It's also the same as transar, to have sex. Like, yesterday I ate the most tasty pizza, or yesterday I . . ."
She colored slightly.
"Ate the most tasty girl?" I suggested.
"Tá," she said. "That's it. But you don't pronounce the 'r' at the end of the infinitive. Come-gh."
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