Chasing Bohemia (13 page)

‘Fabio is the ultimate bohemian. This guy understands Brazilian culture from the inside out,' she went on, uncharacteristically eager. ‘A real sambista of the roots. Have you read Jorge Amado? He is like Vadinho.'

‘You mean the misogynist gambler who beats his wife?'

‘Not that part …' she tutted happily. ‘I am talking about the spirit of Brazilian bohemia. Fabio represents the bohemian of Rio the way Vadinho did for Bahia.' She nodded to herself silently and then added, a little wistfully, ‘You are really going to understand Brazil from this guy.'

‘Not to mention the fact that I am going to Salvador soon,' I added, more to remind myself than Chiara.

‘Oh, forget Salvador!' she cried, and swung herself onto the back of a motorbike. ‘Do you realise what you are looking at? You are never ever going to find anything wilder than this in the whole of South America,' and we sped up the hill, Chiara with her hands in the air like a teenager on college break.

When we entered the mestre's house, I was surprised to see him already drunk.

‘That's not very healthy for a capoeira master, is it?' I asked Chiara dubiously.

‘He is channelling the spirit of Exu,' she explained.

‘Who's Exu?'

‘An Afro-Brazilian god of Candomblé,' she whispered, while smiling at the swaying mestre. ‘He is a messenger in the religion for both bad and good.'

‘But why is he drunk?'

‘He has to drink cachaça, and smoke cigarettes, too, to bring on the visions.'

‘It doesn't sound very god-like to me.'

‘Exu is Exu,' she said with a shrug.

ALMOST CERTAINLY
under the influence of Exu myself, later that afternoon I turned up to my first guitar lesson in Brazil. Fabio's house was also on the Rua Joaquim Murtinho; it was another colonial construction from the same period as the Casa Amarela, but simpler, and with traces of an artist's inhabitance on the front porch. One of the ninety-three stone staircases of Santa Teresa ran up the side of it and was a popular escape-route for the child muggers who were tormenting Carina and her clients with increasing regularity as the summer approached. Strange, dark, triangular terrace houses with elaborate baroque friezes lined the winding path beside the house, and on the final step a Candomblé offering of a clay bowl filled with red candle wax and speared with thin brown sticks lay smoking. We called up to Fabio, and he appeared in the window. He was shirtless, and his hair hung in wet, dark ringlets across his forehead. His skin was the rosy colour of burnt sugar. When he saw it was Chiara and me, he gave a big Brazilian smile and came down to open the gate.

He was a cartoonist's dream with his mad shock of black curls, enormous eyes framed by sweeping eyebrows, a long, elegant nose, a wide mouth, and very big teeth. He had an emaciated bohemian body — the type that sees little exercise and sleeps at odd hours — his hands worn and calloused from playing drums, and his thumb and forefinger stained yellow from hand-rolled cigarettes. His voice, that day, was raspy from a late night, and as he introduced us to his house and his things he coughed happily. In the background, the raindrop harmony of someone he identified as Hermeto Pascoal was playing on a vintage record-player.

I sat down on a wooden chair ready for the lesson, but he kept wandering around the room, seemingly collecting things to arrange in a little altar he had made to Saint George in a nook of the room. A bottle of cachaça and a candle stood behind it. He placed a sprig of a strong-smelling plant he called
aruda
over the shoulder of a plaster figurine of the mounted knight, crossed himself, and then came over to us. He sat down opposite me while Chiara swung in the hammock.

Silence followed. He looked at me, then at Chiara. Then back at me. He sat back in his chair, crossed his arms and observed me for a moment, before leaning forward and asking in Portuguese,

‘Where is your guitar?'

I looked to Chiara. She nodded and translated.

‘I don't have one,' I said, and shrugged.

‘She doesn't have one,' Chiara translated.

Fabio sat back, stroked his sideburns, and then looked back to me again. Chiara's hammock creaked softly. Time expanded. Fat seconds rolled over. The corners of his mouth began to twitch with amusement. I shrugged again. Chiara looked up from the street and glanced between us. Another thirty long seconds passed before the upturned corners of his mouth spread into a smile. He slapped his knee loudly and burst out in a peal of the most indecent laughter I had ever heard. Chiara exploded into giggles with him, and I was not far behind.

THE LESSON AFTERWARDS
was a confusion of stringing guitars, making coffee, and rolling cigarettes. As he and Chiara drifted off into an animated discussion in Portuguese, I got up to wander around the room. Untidy piles of books and old photos covered the surface of an antique wooden table, rows of vinyl records were stacked up against the peeling walls, and a motley collection of musical instruments lay in the corner.

When he asked me what song I wanted to learn, I didn't even hear him. Chiara repeated the question, and I shrugged. The only song I could think of was ‘The Girl from Ipanema', a request that Chiara refused point-blank to translate. ‘Well, can't you make up something to impress him?' I begged her. ‘You know Brazilian music better than me.' She refused with an irritated toss of her head, on account of being an anthropologist, and I asked Fabio to make a recommendation. He smiled gently and chose a Mother's Day song written by the sambista Nelson Cavaquinho called ‘Vou Abrir a Porta' (‘I'll Open the Door'), in which the narrator agrees to let his
vagabunda
of a mother, who has abandoned him and his father several times already, back into the house one more time because it's Mother's Day. He ended the song with: ‘But don't delay, because there are two more in line.'

The music lessons that followed were like a meandering summer river. Fabio Barreto was not a man in a hurry for anything. Sometimes we would sit and listen to his favourite CDs, other times he would make me play the tambourines while his eyes glazed over, but mostly he just seemed lost in his own world of samba rhythms. I tried to get him to write me out some chords to practise, but it was useless. He was rigid in his attachment to the fluid. Nor would he be bound by those earthly constraints such as appointments or time. Sometimes I waited an hour outside his house for him to turn up to the lesson; sometimes he didn't come at all.

Learning samba was far more difficult than I expected. I guess it probably would have helped if I'd known how to play guitar in the first place, but it seemed to me to be about as achievable as learning how to be a Viennese concert pianist. It takes more than four chords on an electric guitar to make the instrument invoke fat, yellow moons and old black men on street corners, and by day three I was banned outright from playing the guitar until I could play the tambourine with rhythm.

‘Are there any foreigners who play samba well?' I asked hopefully after one particularly challenging afternoon on a song called ‘Gostoso Veneno', (‘I Love the Poison') by Noel Rosa, in which Fabio had demonstrated the rhythm nearly ten times over without success. We hadn't even discussed the chord formation. I simply did not hear the beat he was hearing.

‘No,' he replied simply.

Despite my disappointing lack of talent, however, I was content to be simply guided through the landscape of Rio's musical scene by this extraordinary expert. Brazilian music is staggeringly rich and varied. While the West is more familiar with bossa nova, samba, and, more recently, the drum cry of capoeira, there are dozens of different musical genres in Brazil —
maxixe
,
baiaõ
,
maracatu
,
forró
,
jongle
,
caipira
,
calangu
,
chorinho
, MPB, and Carioca funk, not to mention their own Brazilianised brands of hip hop, rap, soul, R&B, folk, rock, and Hermeto Pascoal, who is a freaky little category all to himself. The English might be at their best at comedy; the Italians at designing beautiful things; the Australians at thrashing everyone at sport; but the Brazilians know how to make music. It runs through their veins and comes out of their hair.

On Thursday nights we danced in Club Democraticus, a 120-year-old club in Lapa frequented by a heady combination of malandros and the radical chic from the Zona Sul. The Brazilians called it a
gafieira
, a type of dance hall that emerged at the turn of last century as a place of music and dance for Rio's urban working class. Before their advent, Rio's different communities were largely polarised by their musical tastes, whether it was opera and classical for the Europeans or drum-based beats for the Afro-Brazilians. Responding to a desperate need for assimilation, and in tandem with the politics of the time, they quickly became places where musicians and audiences of black and white backgrounds alike could mix and create new sounds. Street drums mixed with the guitars and flutes of jazz, classical, and even tango; the big-band influences of North America drifted south, and a new Brazilian sound was born.

It wasn't entirely surprising that I didn't know how to dance samba and probably never would, but the truth still stung. ‘You are so rigid,' Fabio murmured devastatingly in my ear the first time I danced with him. ‘Relax. Just try and listen to the music,' he added, a word of advice made all the more humiliating when translated by Gustavo afterwards. (And there I was, thinking he was whispering how love was crazee!) To the sheer delight of Rio's samba community, the dance of samba confuses and confounds foreigners. You start off keeping a reasonable rhythm on one drum beat and then suddenly, just as you are about to shimmer smoothly past the gorgeous man by the bar, find that it has unexpectedly stopped or changed speed. Scared off by the unpredictable drums, you leap blindly to the tinkle of the triangle — only this hardly makes a decent dancing beat — and you end up vibrating like a person having a fit, your appearance made even worse since, all about you, ordinary Brazilians are wrapping their luscious hips around the air with a cool sensuality unrivalled since that video clip for the lambada. So you jump back to the drums, only to find them abandoning you once more, leaving you caged in by the guitars, trapped under the cavaquinho, and defeated by the remaining twenty-five percussion instruments. The trick, I was told, is to follow your heart, but who knows how to do that?

‘It's like this. Just like this,' said one ex-Carnaval queen to me matter-of-factly late one evening, and then vibrated across the floor, her legs spinning like the road runner and her hips tracing a sultry figure eight above them. She was fifty years old and had a body like an eighteen-year-old, and it was all so unfair. It was like listening to an American speak French or watching Germans dance to reggae. Never are you more acutely aware that you are a foreigner than when you dance samba in Brazil.

‘It's like having three legs,' I complained to Fabio later.

‘Now that is something that a woman will never understand,' he replied, and gave that laugh again.

My emerging relationship with Fabio raised eyebrows everywhere.

‘So what on earth is happening with this little romance of yours?' Gustavo teased me one day as we sat at the beach. ‘So romantic. I've never seen anything like that. The cattle heiress is the Queen of Lapa now. She will spend the rest of her days looking at the moon, singing from a
eucalale
, and living off love.' He laughed, delighted by his own imagination. ‘Then, later, as you get old, you will have his children and become Maria, cleaning the house, working for your husband, holding the babies in one arm and the washing in the other. Never complaining. Maria never complains. What a happy life. How pleased your father must be that he spent all that money on your education.' I laughed along with him.

‘Really, dear, how can I find you a real man when you are traipsing around with those bohemians all the time,' Gustavo asked, with obvious exasperation.

‘Fabio seems to be a real man,' I suggested.

Gustavo was outraged by the proposition.

‘He's not a real man. He's a bohemian.'

‘Oh, please!' I exclaimed.

‘My dear, you are not seriously considering a relationship with him?'

‘I am seriously considering a holiday romance.'

‘It will be a disaster,' he said dramatically.

‘That must be a slight exaggeration, Gustavo.'

‘He is different from us, my darling,' Gustavo warned.

‘Why? Because he is poor?'

He dismissed me with an agitated flick of his wrist.

‘Because of everything. Anyway, do what you want. You obviously will, anyway. It's just that you are so young. Just remember that the time passes by so quickly …'

Then he drifted off, looking out over the sparkling blue Atlantic, and sighed nostalgically. It was hard to think of anything passing us by with that backdrop. We were at the
barraca
Miriam on Ipanema's eighth post. Gustavo and I were lying back in striped deckchairs being served coconut water by a whale-sized queen in a strip of Lycra masquerading as a swimsuit, while insanely beautiful men strutted past like peacocks, pausing to flex their muscles in front of anyone who gave them a second look.