Caranguejo

There are some Portuguese words that entered my vocabulary because they’re the capoeira names of people I know. (Capoeiristas get baptised with a ‘nom de guerre’, bestowed on them by their mestre based on some physical or personality trait – it’s a kind of street name which you’re known by in the world of capoeira. Mine is Simpatia). Thus I know duck (Pato), gafanhoto (grasshopper) onca pintada (a type of jaguar), bicho do mato (amusingly, beast of the weeds or undergrowth), beija-flor (hummingbird, literally, flower-kisser), arco-iris (rainbow), caranguejo (crab) – and all of these words when I see or hear them pleasantly call to mind people from home.

Caranguejo was a guy I only had the fortune to meet once, a very good friend of a very good friend, a capoeirista from Grupo Abolicao in Oxford (the nucleus of the group I play with). One of those people whose astounding personal qualities burn themselves onto you from the first moment, Caranguejo was clearly searingly intelligent, beautifully witty, inciteful, loyal, unstoppably playful, humble, wise way beyond his years and an incredibly complex deep thinker – one of those people who seems about ten times more alive, in every sense of the word, than most people. He was also, when I met him, in the advanced stages of a savage and pretty much unstoppable brain cancer. He died last year, by all accounts facing his unfathomably cruel illness and far far far too early death with a staggering humour, courage and acceptance that deeply marked all who knew him.

So, the word caranguejo – usually just a word on a menu - makes me think of him. You get crabs here as a kind of bar snack by the unit for about 80p. I’ve yet to sample one in Brazil, but last night, our first night in Salvador (a place Caranguejo had been to – the capoeira Mecca - and loved) I thought it apt to crack into one in his honour.

So, A and I ordered a caranguejo along with our beer and a couple of other sea-food based bits and pieces, thinking we’d have a kind of tapas-style lucky dip and not knowing really what to expect. A few minutes later the waiter returns and sets on the table before us a large bowl containing one huge, whole, hot and rather angry looking crab, accompanied by a plastic bucket and a large white solid stick-like object, which on closer examination turned out to be made of heavy plastic.

A and I looked at all these things, then at each other, and realised we were completely flummoxed and had absolutely no idea how to extract anything edible out of the assembled items. I picked up the stick and examined it tentatively. Maybe we have to smash it with this? I propositioned. We both looked at the crab. It looked back at us with an expression in its dead little beady eyes which I can only describe as deliberately unhelpful. Gingerly A flipped it over. The bottom of it yielded no further clues as to where to begin. “I think the good stuff might be in there” I said, pointing to its stomach. We wielded the stick over the crab. It looked utterly impenetrable. We put the stick down again. By this point, we were utterly helpless with laughter, as were most of the people watching us from adjacent tables. Attempting to take charge of the situation, A picked up the crab, with the expression of someone who’s about to defuse a bomb, and getting some purchase on its face with her nails, levered its head off to reveal a frothy black mess of unidentifiable innards. We looked at each other, horrified, and swiftly shut the crab and put it back in its basket, from whence the crustacean stared at us triumphantly.

At this point we knew we had been well and truly beaten. Crying with laughter, we realised that we had no option but to sit there with the crab between us until something else happened. Obviously enjoying the situation immensely, the waiter generously allowed everyone to appreciate the spectacle we had created for several minutes before he stepped in to our rescue and gallantly ripped the crab’s leg off, deftly cracked it, and offered me the meat it the claw.

Once the waiter had gone, seeing that we were still completely lost on how to continue, and so weak with laughter we were barely able to lift the crab-smashing club, the guys on the next table stepped in and continued the lesson in how to get meat out of a crab, which is not too far removed from getting blood out of a stone. Despite their admirable attempts not to make us appear any more stupid than we already did (a pretty impossible feat), we couldn’t help feeling, as A put it, like little children being spoon-fed as we bemusedly handed bits of discombobulated crab-anatomy to them to deal with. All in all, I think that crab went down in a blaze of glory, yielding as it did an incredibly puny amount of food in relation to the immense amount of laughter at our expense from everyone in the vicinity. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed eating anything more.

As an atheist I struggle with the idea of an afterlife, but it suddenly struck me in that moment, drunk on beer and laughing, that if there is one, I’d like to conceptualise it as a state of total access to all the knowledge and joy and pleasure, unfettered by all the pain, struggle and inconvenience, that life presents us with. And I hoped that Caranguejo, somehow, was enjoying the moment as much as we were.