MARKET DAY - Part 1 Dawn

This is Part 1 of a 4-part series describing

a typical Saturday ---Market Day ---in Glória.

Note: Some of the names in this story have

been changed because I can’t remember the

real names of all of the people in the town.

Dawn:

        Saturday was the best day of the week in Glória.
If I hadn’t been awakened by crowing roosters or braying donkeys, I would have been aroused by horses and mules clomping along the dirt road in front of the four-room house we rented. Brunie, the other Peace Corps Volunteer with whom I shared a house, woke before I did. She often sang as she did morning chores, which was a more pleasant way to wake than a braying donkey.
        With shiny black hair, dark eyes, and nearly perfect Portuguese, Brunie fit completely into the Brazilian landscape. Only her five-foot-ten inch height gave her way as an American. I was about five foot eight, with light hair and green eyes and imperfect Portuguese. No one ever mistook me for a native. Brunie had spent a little over a year in Brazil’s northeast before I arrived in Glória. I’m not sure if I would have survived without her guidance.
        Overloaded trucks roared past the house, sending billows of dust through the shutters that covered our glassless windows. Each truck was loaded with goods to be sold at the weekly market and with passengers, either those arriving to sell their wares or to buy goods for that week. Ox carts with large noisy wooden wheels, also moved through town to transport goods.
        I slipped into a robe and rubber thongs. After a trip to the outhouse, I dressed in a cotton shift, glided into leather sandals, and ran a comb through my sun-bleached hair.
        When I emerged from my room, Brunie stood inside the front door with Seu Vicente, an elderly man who stopped at our house every Saturday before heading to the market.
“Bom dia, Seu Vicente. And how are you this morning?” I said. Seu Vicente’s chocolate-colored face broke into a toothless smile. His cheeks looked like the cracked earth of a deeply-eroded field.
        “I am well, and you?” he responded, lifting his leather gaucho hat. “I have again asked Dona Brunie if she will marry me, but she always says ‘No’. Maybe next week she will accept my proposal.”
        “Next week we won’t be here. I’ll pay you now if you will remember to leave my eggs with Dona Nininha,” Brunie said.
        The old man’s eggs rested in a large reed basket, each egg wrapped in a leaf for protection. He counted a dozen into the bowl Brunie held and accepted several crumbled bills, stuffing them into the small leather pouch he wore at the waist of his unbleached muslin trousers. Seu Vicente then shuffled toward the center of town.
        Brunie and I grabbed canvas totes, plastic bags, rope sacks, baskets and small cooking pails ---everything we had that could hold our purchases. Most of the items we could buy at the market were not available in local stores, so we needed to purchase enough to last the entire week. Since we would be in the capital city the following weekend, we needed to buy a little extra, but we could shop in Aracajú before returning to Glória the following Monday. In the capital, market day was every day except Sunday. Or we could ask a neighbor to purchase items that would be difficult to transport on the bus.
        Before seven a.m. the tropical sun was already blazing. The temperature in the shade would probably hit over one-hundred degrees that day. Glória was only ten degrees south of the Equator. Back in Pennsylvania everyone was probably complaining about winter weather.
        We headed for the Banco do Brasil. Fifteen or twenty horses or mules were tied to posts in front of the modern building. The bank collaborated with the owner of a huge storage silo on the edge of town to provide farmers with storage space for beans and other crops. When beans were plentiful they would bring only pennies per kilo. Depending on a farmer’s harvest, the bank would loan him enough money to store his beans and live for several months. When the price of beans went up, the farmer could remove some from storage, sell them at a higher price and gradually pay off the loan.
        After waiting in line behind a gaucho who emitted a leathery scent, we reached our friend Carlinhos at the teller’s window. We withdrew enough money from our accounts to pay for expected purchases.
        As Peace Corps Volunteers, we each earned about sixty dollars per month, plenty to purchase food and survive in Brazil’s interior. Our rent was five dollars, split between us. We paid a woman to wash and iron our clothes and a neighbor boy everyone called Gugú to carry water from a damn a few miles outside of town. He had four huge cans strapped on the sides of his donkey. 

        We splurged on a monthly trip to Aracajú to collect our living-allowance checks, stay in a pensão, luxuriate in a civilized hot shower, take in a movie, and relax at the beach.
        We left the bank walking on cobblestoned streets to the praça near the center of town where the mercado was held each Saturday.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

See other posts in this series:
Market Day - Part 1 Dawn (this one)
Market Day - Part 2 Shopping
Market Day - Part 3 Morning & Afternoon
Market Day - Part 4 Saturday Night

Find another great story about shopping on 

market day in northeastern Brazil HERE. 

It, too, was written by a former PC Volunteer.

MARKET DAY - Part 2 Shopping

Brunie (blue blouse) and I (straw hat)

choose fruit from the weekly market.

This is Part 2 of a 4-part series describing

a typical Saturday ---Market Day ---in Glória.

Note: Some of the names in this story have

been changed because I can’t remember the

real names of all of the people in the town.

Shopping:

        The town square where the market was laid out was bare except for an old bandstand in the middle. There were no trees nor grass, as they would have been trampled by vendors and townspeople.
        Dona Maria had covered her designated area with four-foot high ceramic jugs ----the kind used to store water in nearly every home in town that didn’t have a cisterna in the back yard to collect rain water. A man from a neighboring village had spread his aluminum cooking vessels and enameled chamber pots on squares of burlap. Venders opened sacks of dried black beans, rice, or flour. Others had set up shabby wooden booths with canvas canopies to shelter themselves and their wares from sun or rain. We passed a dark man selling large ropes of tobacco and an ancient woman with her display of sandals and headed toward the vegetable vendors.



        With Seu João’s help, we chose the best of his onions, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, and yams. Seu João weighed them on his balance scale using brass weights and placed our purchases in my basket. We headed to Seu Paulo’s booth to select from a dozen varieties of bananas. We collected a dozen green oranges from another vendor. The oranges weren’t green as in “unripe” they had green skins, not orange.

        We quickly passed a display of jaca, jackfruit. The watermelon-sized greenish-yellow fruit emanated a distasteful sweetish odor. We threaded our way between brooms, fabric, baskets, and straw hats, greeting our neighbors along the way. We chose rice and black beans ---staples of the Brazilian diet ---scooping them into aluminum pots. We purchased a plump live chicken from Dona Maria Fatima. Brunie carried it up-side-down by its feet.

        Next we headed through a narrow cobblestoned street to the meat market in the next block. We visited Zé Pedro’s booth to purchase two kilos of beef which Brunie placed in her metal pail. Seu Agnaldo placed a kilo (2.2 lbs.) of pork on top of the beef.
        Next we crossed the town’s second plaza, this one filled with trees and plants and benches emblazoned with “From the Benevolence of Mayor....” followed by his name. I often wondered if the next mayor would tear out those benches to install new ones with his own name on them.


        In the post office, I pulled letters from my pocket and paid for postage to the United States. Dona Alícia used syrupy glue to affix eight stamps to each letter. Then she hand stamped them with purple ink to cancel them. Dona Alícia placed our mail that had arrived on the bus the night before ---six letters ---on the counter. Brunie and I received more mail than anyone in town, with the exception of the Banco do Brasil.
        The telegraph operator, emerged from the back room. “Dona Brunie. Dona Carolina. I am so pleased to see you,” he said with a voice as syrupy as the glue. I hope I will see you at the movie tonight. He was a married man who like to flirt. We said hello, then ignored him.
        We grabbed our mail and headed for the bakery. The proprietress, carrying a mug of steaming coffee, greeted us with, “Bom dia, meninas. Tudo bem?”


        “Yes, Dona Anna. All is well with us,” answered Brunie. “And how are you?”
        After greetings and inquiries about the woman’s family were completed, Brunie asked for pão. The woman wrapped six tiny loaves of bread --- about the size of sausage buns ---in white paper. When I asked for mantega, Dona Anna stepped aside so that Brunie could take butter from her refrigerator. Brazilians had numerous superstitions, one of which was an irrational fear of mixing anything hot with anything cold. After Dona Anna had sipped her hot coffee, she would not open her kerosene-powered refrigerator for several hours. Brunie lifted a large crock of butter from the shelf and scooped a large blob of it onto a piece of waxed paper with a flat wooden spatula. She weighed it, wrapped it in butcher paper, and placed it on top of the meat in her pail.
        Finally, our shopping done, we headed home.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

See other posts in this series:

Market Day - Part 1 Dawn
Market Day - Part 2 Shopping (this one)
Market Day - Part 3 Morning & Afternoon
Market Day - Part 4 Saturday Night

MARKET DAY - Part 3 Morning & Afternoon

This is  Part 3 of a 4-part series describing

a typical Saturday ---Market Day --- in Glória. 

Note: Some of the names in this story have

been changed because I can’t remember the

real names of all of the people in the town.

Morning & Afternoon:

        After shopping at the weekly market, we carried our heavy purchases to our small house. Brunie placed a bit of dried corn and a bowl of water on the floor, then untied the chicken’s legs and let her strut around the kitchen. Neither of us had the heart to kill a chicken, so when we decided to cook chicken for dinner, we would take her to a neighbor to trade for a chicken the neighbor had killed.
        Brunie had opted to purchase a small stove powered by a propane tank, thus we used our built-in wood-burning stove as counter space. We soaked vegetables in iodine water and placed them in our kerosene refrigerator. We cut gristle and fat from the meat, throwing it out the back door where large vultures with blue-black opalescent heads swooped down to gather the scraps. We placed fruit in large gourds that had been cut in half to make bowls. Beans, rice, and other dry goods went in airtight containers, more to protect them from mice than to keep them fresh.

Ceramic drip water filter similar

to one we used in Glória.

        I used a handful of sugar as an abrasive cleaner for the filter in our drinking-water crock and set a huge pot of water to boil for the required twenty minutes before adding it to the terra cotta water filter.
        By eight-thirty or nine, we had completed our chores and were ready to prepare breakfast. Brunie flipped through our James Beard paperback cookbook ---conveniently issued by the Peace Corps ---to find a pancake recipe. She mixed flour, eggs, baking powder, sugar, powdered milk, water, and vanilla. I cut up a banana and sectioned an orange.
        Someone had told Brunie that there was no maple syrup in Brazil, so she had packed two bottles of concentrated maple flavoring in her foot locker. We mixed it with corn syrup to approximate the maple syrup we enjoyed at home.
        After breakfast, I spent the morning working on lessons for my English classes. The ginásio was staffed with some bankers and elementary school teachers who worked during the day, so high school classes were held evenings and on Saturdays as well as weekday afternoons. I, too, was a professora at the ginásio. 

        Since we had eaten breakfast later than usual, we skipped lunch. While most Glorianos took their after-lunch siestas, I headed to the school's office in the priests' home next to the church. Using Padre Henrique’s typewriter and the school’s hand-cranked mimeograph machine I made copies of a worksheet for my two o’clock class of beginning English students.

Students show off their

new school uniforms.

        Only fifteen of the twenty-one students showed up, not bad for Saturday. Even fewer arrived for my three and four-o’clock classes, but a few students lingered after class, trying out the American slang I had taught them.

        “Do you think I’m cute?” asked Fernando.
        Veralucia laughed and said, “No, Fernando. You are not cute. But you are cool.” The boys snickered because the word ‘cool’ sounded like a naughty Portuguese word. The students laughed and teased each other, butchering English about as much as I normally butchered their language.
        Veralucia asked, “Will you go to the movie tonight, Dona Carolina?”
        “No. I already saw tonight’s film,” I lied.
        “I can never understand the English on American films. Why is that?”
        Of course she couldn’t. The sound system on the projector was so bad that even I couldn’t understand the garbled English. I had attended one film, the first weekend I spent in Glória. I vowed it would be my last. The theater had hard wooden seats with almost no leg room. There was no ventilation in the theater. After twenty minutes it felt and smelled like a steamy locker room.
        To help promote the Brazilian film industry, a law prevented foreign films from being dubbed into Portuguese. Therefore every American film had Portuguese subtitles. The owner paid a few high school students to sit at strategic places so they could be ‘readers’. They read the subtitles out loud so any illiterate citizens could enjoy the movie.
        Brunie had spent the afternoon at the office of an agronomist and home economist commissioned by the state government to impliment agricultural and nutrition improvements in the small town. Many farmers requested hybrid corn or other seeds from Luís Carlos. Brunie and Irene talked to women about boiling and filtering water and adding more vegetables to their diets.

Trucks carried vendors and shoppers to and from the

 weekly market.  Our neighbor Gugú, who carried

water to our house, sits on his donkey to the right.

        Trucks, horses, donkeys, and mules with the last of the market-day vendors and shoppers passed me as I walked home from the school. Many vendors would travel to markets in other towns Monday through Friday the next week and return to Glória on Saturday.
        When I arrived home, I decided to take a shower and wash my hair. First I heated water in a huge cooking pot, then mixed enough cold water with it to make it luke warm. In the kitchen, with a slightly slanted mud-brick floor and no windows, I undressed and scooped water into a smaller pot and poured it over my head, allowing it to run under the door to the outside. 

        The house was equipped with a small shower stall, but one had to carry pails of water and go outside to enter it, so it was more convenient to shower inside the house. Besides, soon after she arrived in Glória, Brunie had found a snake in the shower room, so we used it only for storing brooms and other tools. We brushed our teeth standing just inside the back door, spitting into the yard.
        Since we had been to the market that morning, we had a variety of fresh foods for dinner. We could make beef stew with potatoes, onions and carrots. We could use our hand-cranked meat grinder to make hamburgers or meat sauce for pasta. But, since it was Saturday and Brunie wanted to go to the movie that night, we opted for something less time-consuming. We fried fresh pork and heated leftover beans and rice from our kerosene refrigerator. There was always fruit for dessert. We often ended our meal with maté tea. Brunie didn’t like coffee, and frankly the coffee in Glória wasn’t very good. Someone explained that all the good coffee was exported.
        After cleaning the dishes and storing leftovers, we left for Saturday night on the town. The second town square was not used for the market. It had been planted with grass, trees, and other tropical plants. And there were benches scattered around the perimeter. That is were everyone gathered to watch the movemento.

The praça where everyone 

strolled on Saturday night, 

to see and be seen.

See other posts in this series:

Market Day - Part 1 Dawn

Market Day - Part 2 Shopping

Market Day - Part 3 Morning and Afternoon (this one)

Market Day - Part 4 Saturday Night

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)