the houses opposite of our place
		Trancoso is situated on a grassy bluff overlooking the ocean and miles of fantastic beaches. The village belongs to the prefeitura of Porto Seguro, a historical small town on Brazil's northeastern coast popular both with foreign and Brazilian tourists. Trancoso's central square, known as quadrado, is lined with small, colorful colonial buildings and casual bars and restaurants nestling under shady trees.
		The history of Porto Seguro, which means 'safe port' in Portuguese, and actually of the whole of Brazil, begins on April 22, 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral's squadron saw from a distance a rounded elevation - Monte Pascoal, that lies south from Porto Seguro. In search for a safe place to moor, the thirteen caravels sailed along the coast heading north and finally anchored at a large bay of deep waters, a little before the evening of April 24. The place was later called Baía Cabrália where presently is situated the town Santa Cruz Cabrália. When Cabral departed, on May 2, he left two men banished from Portugal whose mission was to learn the language and customs of the Tupiniquim Indians, besides two sea boys who deserted to adventure in the luxuriant tropical woods. That was the beginning of the occupation of the new lands by the white men.
		On November 9th of 1759, the year the Jesuits got kicked out of Brazil, Trancoso, by royal decree, was elevated from aldeia (village) to vila (township). At this time the place consisted of 62 houses, 14 of those had shingled roofs. 500 indios living from fishing and the cultivation of cassava lived in Trancoso. A mid-eighteenth-century list of missions administered by the Jesuits classifies the inhabitants at Trancoso at that time as "Tupinikins or Tabajaras mixed with Tupinan"
		an aerial view of Trancoso that I found on the web
		Even as late as 1820, export agriculture had failed to take firm root in Porto Seguro; despite the growth of production for local markets, the region remained a poor backwater where settlers still worried about Indian attacks. Settlers, royal officials, and backwoodsmen in southern Bahia were all too aware that Indians remained a very real "issue" and that the nearby forests were not empty, uninhabited space. While settlers counted on the labor of "tame" Indians who were drafted to clear fields, open roads, and cut timber, they also had to remain on constant watch for any sign of "wild heathens," whose raids and attacks could lay waste to a fledgling commercial economy.
		Efforts were aimed at a creating a stable and productive Indian peasantry through a combination of coercion, forced cultural assimilation, and close supervision. Although unsuccessful over the long run in halting frontier expansion, Indian resistance did delay and restrict the development of a strong commercial economy in the region. An appointed white "director" and a scribe would now be posted in every Indian aldeia and charged with the tasks of "civilizing" the Indians, removing them from the "dense darkness of their rustic ways," and encouraging them to practice settled agriculture.
		Directors struggled for years to have Indians replace large palhoças (thatch huts) that sheltered several couples and their children with brick and tile houses big enough to accommodate a single couple with their children. The brick and tile houses did, indeed, directly interfere with the daily lives of Indians by dividing them into family units that met Portuguese norms and reinforced notions of Christian morality as taught by parish and missionary priests.
		When the German traveler and naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied visited the Indian town of Trancoso in 1816, he found it virtually empty: "The inhabitants live on their farms (roças) and come to church (and hence into town) only on Sundays and on feast days."
		Wherever possible, Indians were to be fully "domesticated"- that is, transformed into a settled peasantry that would contribute to an expanding commercial economy and uphold Portuguese rule. But, at the same time, "domestication" would also clear the way for further Portuguese settlement and ultimately lead to the complete disappearance of Indians as a distinct group within the region's population. Direct and open resistance to this project only subjected the Indian population to even greater pressures, culminating, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in one of Brazil's last official Indian wars.
		By 1820 Porto Seguro had grown to reach a total of over 16,000 inhabitants, including 3,650 Indians. In only two of the comarcas (judicial districts) of Porto Seguro's nine townships, Vila Verde and Trancoso, did Indians still account for the majority of the population.
		Even in the mid-nineteenth century, southern Bahia remained a frontier region of ongoing contact, accommodation, and conflict between settlers and Indians. As the trade in cassava flour grew, settlers increasingly displaced Indians.
		The development of trade and agriculture accompanied population growth in southern Bahia. The region emerged in the late eighteenth century as an important supplier of farinha de mandioca (cassava flour) and salted fish for urban markets within Brazil. Farinha made by farmers in Porto Seguro was sold not only in Salvador, the Bahian capital, but also in Rio de Janeiro and in Pernambuco. Trade in farinha allowed settlers in the region to acquire larger numbers of imported African slaves and Brazilian-born slaves of African descent.
		From the 1580s onwards, the importation of Africans to Brazil increased dramatically. The African slaves brought their ‘macumba’ (voodoo) rites to Brazil. Even today, the candomblé cult is strong in Bahia. Though, to my disappointment, such traditions were unknown among the locals of in Trancoso.
		Nearly five hundred years after Cabral, Indians still live around Monte Pascoal and on reservations elsewhere in southern Bahia. They continue to struggle against landowners and loggers in the area to hold on to what little land they still retain.
		The local population of Trancoso visibly has both Indio and African traits.
		Estrela, João and Duda
		Before the first dropouts from the cities of southern Brazil settled in Trancoso in the early seventies, the village, populated mainly by only two extended families, was virtually cut off from the rest of Brazil.
		It is said that until the sixties, money wasn't used much in Trancoso, and goods changed hands by way of barter. A local friend told me that when she was around the age of eight, two girls with lice-infested hair came to the village. Before those parasites were unknown in Trancoso. This seems to me about the most convincing proof that previously there really wasn't much contact with the rest of the world. To go to Porto Seguro meant a tiresome journey by horse or donkey.
		Only in the eighties did Trancoso get electricity and a school.
		When we arrived in 1984, conditions were still very minimal. The only store, a small dark room featuring a few wooden shelves, sold rice, beans and two or three varieties of local vegetables. On demand the store owner also sold a few medicines, though the good lady wasn't what I'd call knowledgeable as to their uses and properties. When my neighbor's daughter suffered from a bad ear infection, her mother bought a bottle of ear drops at the grocers. After learning about those drops causing the poor girl terrible pain, I asked to see the bottle. It contained a remedy for athlete's foot.
		typical bar on the village square
		There were plenty of tiny bars bordering the quadrado where the locals liked to hang out, play snooker and drink pinga, another name for cachaça, the local sugarcane booze.
		Apart from the buildings lining the quadrado, Trancoso in the early eighties consisted of only a few dozen houses. A bit further away, landless people started to build their homes on occupied grounds, according to a Brazilian law allowing land not used by its owners for a certain amount of years to be claimed. This section of Trancoso was called invação, invaded territory. It consisted of barren, sandy soil, not to be compared with the fertile earth near the village square.
		Most of the natives lived in simple mud houses: Neighbors and friends join to throw as much mud on a framework of wooden stakes as is needed to transform it into a wall. On completion a party with lots of cachaça is held, so there usually is no lack of volunteers.
		houses built of stakes and mud
		As to the durability of those constructions, I guess it's not too many years. While still living in the rented place on the quadrado, one evening while having dinner sitting around the big table out back, we experienced the sudden collapse of our neighbor's adjoining wall into a heap of rubble. For the next few weeks we had a live reality show right in our backyard, as we couldn't help but witness everything that went on in that family's now open-to-the-world kitchen. It kind of looked like a stage, with the actors entering and leaving through two door openings. The head of the family was an uncouth, insensitive fellow, who loved to terrorize his wife and the boys at any opportunity. His elder son often hid himself in the bushes out of fear of his father. When the wife was giving birth to another baby and complications arose, instead of arranging transportation to a hospital, her husband left her to the attention of some passing tourist. Only much too late was she brought to a clinic in Eunapolis, with the consequences of the baby being dead and the mother not able to ever have another one. When the poor woman returned home a few days later, her vile husband shouted at her that she was now "castrated" and useless.
		I was asked to come over and take some pictures of the dead baby. This was nothing uncommon in South America, nonetheless, I couldn't do it, I was afraid not to be able to stand the sorry sight, and that I might faint. Somebody else went and took the snaps, which we had developed and handed over later.
		Trancoso's historical church
		Trancoso's church, being one of the oldest in all of Brazil, nonetheless didn't even feature a regular priest. Once in a while some obese red-haired foreigner appeared to hold a service and to baptize some newborns. Occationally he had to baptize some teens from families living a bit farther away, who obviously had included "gotta have those brats baptized" way down near the bottom of their priority list.
		When he the padre happened to turn up, hardly any of the local males attended mass, because their drinking habits inevitably were part of the sermon.
		I only happened to witness the padre preaching on one single occasion, and was totally dumbfounded to hear him tell his congregation that animals have no souls. Exactly the type of stupid misinformation the villagers needed: They treated animals very cruelly and loved to hunt down and kill anything that moved.
		In the eighties, the church was in a sad state of disrepair. The paint was flaking off and the wood had partly the consistency of a sponge. With things continuing that way, it was only a matter of time for the church to be reduced to a heap of rubble. As this became evident to the public, some of the foreigners and Brazilian dropouts living in Trancoso recruited volunteers and organized some renovations. For a full day we all were busy painting and hammering away.
		Once our own house was ready and my garden in bloom I often got accosted with demands for armfuls of bougainvillea branches to decorate the church with.
		With the priest only showing up every few months, Jehovah's witnesses entered into the religious vacuum of Trancoso. Local converts, their blouses buttoned up to their chins, started to make their rounds on Sundays, knocking at doors.
		Millions of Brazilians are crente, as the adherents of Jehovah's witnesses and other evangelical sects are called. It seems the Brazilian brand of Catholicism doesn't meet the requirements of the masses anymore. Fatima told me that meanwhile there are churches of various sects all over Trancoso.
		The only water supply for Trancoso was the nearby river, located at the foot of the plateau on which the village stands, where an old electrical pump noisily did its job. Often the pump was broken for days or even weeks. This meant all the water needed for construction and for the restaurant had to either be hauled up the steep path from the river by locals employed for that purpose, or it had to be gotten by jeep in jerrycans.
		As the water pump wasn't located far from the place the villagers used to wash their clothes, and themselves as well, I thought it safer to buy a simple clay water filter for our drinking water. I've often drunk river water and worse on my travels, nonetheless I didn't want us to imbibe all those shampoo and soap remnants, though of course I couldn't be sure about the filter being able to get rid of them.
		Washing machines at that time were about unknown in Trancoso. All the washing was done at the small river below. As I had neither time nor much enthusiasm to do our washing, which amounted to quite a lot as it included bed sheets from the guest rooms as well, I paid Seu Frederico's wife for the job. Whenever Fatima's friends went down to the river to wash clothes she went along to help them, but she refused to take some of our own washing along. The girls loved to frolic and play around in the water.
		To dry, the wet clothing was extended either on some bushes or preferably on fences of barbed wire.
		One of the main attractions of Trancoso is the endless beach, according to Brazilian Playboy magazine one of Brazil's Top 20.
		Trancoso beach
		A great stretch of the beach is owned by some local kingpin and politician. He hadn't paid for it in money, but rather came into its possession in exchange for a transistor radio and a set of dentures for its erstwhile owner. At least that's what local lore tells; it must have happened around the sixties. I only know for sure that the old owner's descendents were really pissed off at how their grandfather had gotten cheated. The new owner used to fly in by chopter, landing right beside Trancoso's church. He often forgot to pay locals who worked for him, but nobody dared complain. His word in the right ear got murderers out of jail.
		Fatima on visit to Trancoso in 2002
		I have to admit that beaches are not my thing, I'm more at home in a dry desert climate. In my four years in Trancoso, I may have visited the beach four or five times. True, I was usually very busy, but actually I never have liked wet sand and salty water. I leave that to the tourists.
		A very old, dark skinned neighbor lady once asked me: "Well, in a way I understand the white people going down to the beach to get some colour. But what about the black ones, ain't they dark enough already?"
		The younger generation of locals started to use the beach for recreation as well, a habit they picked up from their fellow countrymen from places like Rio, where the beach plays an important part in a carioca's daily life. In Trancoso, the native women up to my generation only went down to the shore to catch some small fishes in the backwaters.
		Zilda, my neighbor and friend, used to go down to the beach for fishes and crabs occasionally too. One morning she returned all upset: "You don't believe what happened, I was all alone in a quiet spot, when suddenly a naked stranger appeared before me. I've never seen another man save my husband naked, and I want it to stay that way." Later, she pointed the offender to her sensibilities out to me: It was an architect from Rio, a customer of my restaurant.
		The local menfolks would get real angry at nude male tourists, and loved to threaten them with their machetes. Nude girls were something else, the same valiant defenders of morals and decency just stood there drooling.
		I knew a chick that sold rather plain sandwiches, filled mainly with raw beetroot and far too expensive. This girl usually went down to the beach with a full basket and only a short while later came back up, all her sandwiches sold. It was a mystery to me why anybody would buy her tasteless stuff at such a prize. Until somebody told me that she sold them in the buff.
		My kids loved the beach. Rashid's dream for a time was to become a professional surfista, a surfer.