Courage · fiction
How to find the courage to change your life
A story about a Colombian girl in the nineties who discovers capoeira in a square and learns, through the ginga, that whoever stops, falls.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
The girl heard the berimbau before she saw the circle.
It was a sound she had never heard. Metallic and sweet at the same time, like a wire someone had made sing. It came from a square near the school, in a mountain city in Colombia, one afternoon in 1996. She was eleven and walking home with her heavy backpack and her usual fear: the fear of arriving and finding her father shouting again.
She followed the sound.
In the square, under a tree, there was a circle of people clapping. In the middle, two young men moved in a way she couldn't name. It wasn't fighting, because no one hit anyone. It wasn't dancing, because there were kicks passing a hand's width from the face. It was both. And the two of them were smiling.
An older man, gray-haired, played the berimbau and sang in a language that wasn't Spanish. It was Portuguese. She didn't understand the words. But she understood the tone: it was a song about someone who had crossed the sea.
She stayed until the end. She came back the next day. And the next.
On the fourth afternoon, the man with the berimbau called her over.
"Do you want to learn?"
She said yes before thinking.
He taught her the ginga. Left foot back, right foot back, arms protecting the face, the body swaying without stopping, from one side to the other.
"Why can't you stop?" she asked.
"Because in the roda, whoever stops, falls."
She did the ginga for months. She did it at home, in secret, in her room, while her father shouted in the kitchen. She did it in the schoolyard. She did it until the movement lived in her body. And she noticed something: when she was moving, she wasn't afraid. Fear needed her to stand still to catch her.
One night, lying in bed, she had a vision.
She saw the circle in the square grow enormous. She saw, inside it, people from every era. Men and women brought by force on a ship, centuries earlier, clapping in secret in the middle of the bush, inventing a fight that looked like a dance so no one would notice it was a fight. She saw that the ginga had been born of those who couldn't stop. Of those who, if they stopped, would be knocked down forever.
Then she saw herself grown. She was twenty-eight and at a station, with a suitcase, leaving home. She didn't know where she was going. She only knew she was going. She saw herself at forty, in a room with mirrors, in a country across the sea, teaching the ginga to a group of women who were also afraid of something. And she saw herself telling them the berimbau man's sentence.
The vision ended. She lay there, eyes open. Outside, the city slept.
It took her seventeen years to pick up the suitcase. It wasn't easy. She was afraid every time. But every time she was afraid, she did one thing: she did the ginga. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, slowly, even standing in line at the bank, even sitting on the bus. It was a movement so small no one saw it. It was enough to remind her she wasn't standing still.
Courage, she discovered, isn't not being afraid. It's not standing still long enough for fear to catch you.
Bairo says capoeira was the bridge to the country he had said, since he was a Colombian boy, would be his. In his story, much of what came after was ginga. Read: Capoeira was the bridge.
The way forward
Courage isn't the absence of fear; it's movement. When a big change seems impossible, make a small movement, today, in its direction. And look for your circle: people who clap while you learn.