The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding Page B

at all hours of the day and night. Stylish like the coded victory cry of three bullets released into the air while dancers chanted, “The police don’t come to our parties!”
    Jaque knew all the shortcuts in Falet’s maze of staircases and gutters, and she knew the people who did their business there. Because she could move quickly, without bus fare, she ran all the errands for her family. She understood the
favela
like a gardener understands the geometry of her garden and is willing to touch things that have not yet become beautiful.
    Jaque never looked worried when the guns fired. Her two-year-old cried loudly and her mother clucked her tongue and muttered about the end of the world, but Jaque just kept sweeping the kitchen floor in her cutoff denim skirt or tickling her baby’s face. Then she’d look at me with large amber eyes and laugh: “
é malucera neh
?” “This is craziness, huh?”
    My body is still flat on the floor, legs wedged under the bed, face against the scratchy carpet. Yes, I think. This is craziness. The hail of bullets has stopped and been replaced by an uncertain stillness. Twenty minutes have passed since Jaque fled down the stairs with her children, and I console myself with the thought that she’s in her uncle’s house taking cover in his bedroom, but the air is empty of the two-year-old’s tears or the baby’s giggle.
    I crawl to the doorway, where I weigh the risk of standing upright to move toward the staircase that will take me outside, and to her. I wonder in this moment if we mimic our surroundings. If we yell back at bullets and bite our tongue in the ceasefire. When the kids in this neighborhood hear hip hop on the radio, they imitate the sound of machine gunfire to accompany the beat. I don’t know what sound we make when we imitate death, but I’m sure I have heard it here. I’m sure that in the space between Jaque and me, there is a path from the hand that resists violence to the hand that accepts it. I silently plead with Jaque’s children to make noise, but only the high-pitched wind whistles in my ear.
    Jaque’s favorite time of day, it seemed, was at night when all her kids were asleep and no one had come home yet. I often found her in bed covered in a blanket with her youngest baby on her chest, her four-year-old at the other end of the mattress, and her two-year-old on the bed by her side. The air echoed calmly around the breath of the children. And though her eyes were closed, she was always awake and whispered my name.
    We had our most intimate conversations on these nights. Jaque didn’t tell secrets to her mother because they were too much alike, and she didn’t tell secrets to her sister because she was younger and more religious. But she confided in me when we were alone and her kids were asleep in the bedroom in Falet.
    She told me how much she missed the father of her four-year-old daughter. He was the one she still loved, but he chose to be a trafficker. “And that,” she insisted, “is not a life. Just a short existence before death.”
    One afternoon, months after this, I sat crying in her living room over a broken heart. She walked in and spilled a bag of rice as she waved her arms around and shouted through a beaming smile, “We deserve good men! We deserve good men!” It was the first time I’d heard her say she deserved anything good, and I nodded my head slowly with wide eyes. Because we did.
    The digital clock above my head now blinks 4:15 P.M. Forty-five minutes since Jaque and her kids ran down below. The gunfire has returned, but this time it’s a distant reverberation. I stand up.
    When Jaque cleans the house she moves briskly, never putting anything back in place carefully, yet somehow managing not to make a sound. This is how I move downstairs now. Like a gust of wind.
    In front of her uncle’s door, I pause and press my ear to the splintered