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1 I had just boarded a Varig Brazilian Airlines flight from Brussels to Salvador. The year was 1991. I knew I had left European space and entered Brazilian almost as soon as I entered the plane. I walked to my assigned seat and found a nun sitting there. “Excuse me,” I said. “You’re in the wrong seat.” “No,” she said. “This is my seat.” “May I see your ticket?” I said. The people in the adjoining seats were all listening; a child stared over the back of the next row. Who would harass a nun? She handed me her ticket. It was for three rows back, a center seat. The plane was packed. “See,” I said. “Your seat is different.” The annoyance around me thickened to hostility. The nun looked at me, said nothing. “Do you understand?” I asked. “This is my seat,” she said. “I’m sitting here.” The man beside her placed a protective hand on her arm. A man behind me took my hand luggage. “Let me help you with your bag,” he said in Brazilian-accented English. He strode toward what was indisputably my new seat and placed my bag in the overhead. Brazil-1, Margaret-0. I was now squashed into my new seat between a fat man who was already snoring and a man whose foul breath rushed at me when he smiled. As I settled in, I contemplated the politics of the World Cup. If a game like that could invert power relations between G8 countries and countries struggling to pay off international debts, then what unbalancing experiences could I expect in Brazil? I was only on this plane because of Alexandra. It was her fault. I was an anthropologist working in Amsterdam and had been awarded a year’s fellowship position in Australia. Alexandra had somehow convinced me that from Amsterdam, Brazil was on the way to Australia, and, that being the case – particularly since she would be visiting herself one seduction 2 dance lest we all fall down – I simply had to visit her family in Salvador, a major city in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Somehow I had conceded to this dubious plan. “You’ll love it,” Alexandra had said to me only a few weeks before. We were sitting in her section of an illegal squat in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. She loaded more wood into the old, rusted barrel that served as her heating source. The building was in a state of disuse and disrepair, virtually abandoned by its owners, and it had been taken over by squatters. About twenty other people lived in this squat, but Alexandra had sectioned off this large room for herself, secured by a heavy wooden door, a bolt, and large lock. Alexandra’s room overlooked a canal. Its floors were wide sixteenth -century oak, the ceilings high and dark from centuries of life and grime. In one corner, Alexandra had built herself a bed of planks. Near the ancient glass-paned double door that lead to nothing but a view above the canal, she had placed two lumpy but serviceable sofas she had found in the street somewhere nearby. Across from the bed, fairly near the stove, she had set up a gas burner on a rough counter and connected it to a propane tank. Beside the burner stood a battered sink and a bucket to catch the water beneath. Everything was as tidy and spotless as cleaning could make it. “You will love my family, my sisters,” Alexandra said, handing me a steaming cup of tea she had poured from the pot that stood warm on a homemade shelf above the stove. “How long will you be able to stay?” “I don’t know,” I said. “My position in Canberra doesn’t start for two months, so I suppose I could stay as long as six weeks.” We settled into the sofas. Late afternoon sun shone across the dark planks, catching their soft, deep color, making them luminous. Alexandra opened the doors, and we heard the bells of bicycles and the conversations of people as they passed below. We sat in silence for a moment, savoring the peace. “When you get to Salvador,” Alexandra said, “you will understand why I so love this place.” “I love this place too,” I said. “No, it’s different for me. You’ll see.” She laughed. “You know, I wouldn’t give this invitation to visit my family to just anybody. It...

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