Chasing Bohemia (18 page)

As we left, I begged Fabio to walk slowly, just so I could absorb every last, raw, breathing detail of the scene around me. The sun was setting over Mangueira by that time, an orange haze dissolving behind the silhouettes of dancing kites. People left their doorways and awnings in the relief of dusk. There were no lights around the edges of closed curtains or jammed shutters. It was all right there in front of me. An uncensored pile of humanity. A voyeurist's dream. Glassy-eyed alcoholics wandered between clusters of single mothers in bright, tight tops while smartly dressed church-goers stepped over cavernous-faced drug addicts, and tired dealers hocked the last of the
ball
gear, shouting bags of ten, twenty, thirty. Children were running between everyone's legs, and two brothers started fighting, tumbling into the dusty gutters with shouts of accusations and allegations. The favela looked like a rabbit warren; tunnels and lanes connected the houses, and the blue light of hundreds of televisions flashed through every open door and window.

At the entrance, a dozen elderly black women sat at a table and chatted over plastic cups of beer. They were chastely dressed in powder-pink or white wedding suits, complete with lace-net hats, silk gloves, white stockings, and polished buckle shoes. They could have been sitting on the Champs Elysées in the 1920s rather than under the Mangueira flyover. One took out a mirror and powdered her nose. I looked over with interest.

‘
Olha a Velha Guarda
!' Fabio exclaimed in delight. It turned out that the women were the oldest members of Mangueira's Escola da Samba choir. They were on their way to a function at a posh venue in the south of Rio. One of them, a vivacious woman of around sixty called Soninha, had known Mauricio, and told Fabio a little story or two. His eyes shone as she described Mauricio singing and playing music at the corner bar opposite the church. She had told him that story before, he told me later, but she always told it a little bit differently.

That afternoon, completely seduced by the favela, I remembered Chiara's words under the arches about looking for culture. It had been so long since travelling had made me crazy like it had that first time I had travelled around Europe, my head exploding with old cities and history and my insignificance in the world. I felt sublimely dwarfed by the enormity of Rio de Janeiro. There were so many layers, so much complexity to this city, that I felt I could live in it for a hundred years and not understand it.

The next day, I went straight down to Helen, the bookseller in Lapa, to get everything she had on favelas, although it was not much. She sent me on to the dusty second-hand bookshops of Praça Tiradentes, where heirs came in after funerals to sell off the unwanted books of their late relatives. They were displayed in messy, unmarked stacks. Some of them sold them by the kilo — twenty reals for a kilogram of words. Vinyl records were ten. It was impossible to find anything in Praça Tiradentes. Only the greying owners in their cheap nylon shirts with the underfed look of a Brazilian reader about them knew what those piles really contained, and would shepherd you through to the appropriate place. I later found out that they would lie shamelessly to sell any book. They were probably starving, after all. But that day they gave me
Bandido
by Ronaldo Alves and
Abusado
, a biography of the drug boss of the favela of Dona Marta (the location of Michael Jackson's video clip, ‘They Don't Care About Us'). He was killed shortly after its publication.

Of course, the only person not so enchanted by the subject of ‘favela' was Fabio, since it was him that I badgered daily to take me there — as his taste for fine wines and cheeses grew, and mine exploded for sugar-cane juice and deep-fried pastels. It was not exactly his way of going up in the world, replacing our bohemian-chic lifestyle and occasional posh lunches in Zona Sul with visits to dirty, poor favelas in the north, even if they had been home to him.

Still, he suffered my ignorant clamour for knowledge nobly, and over the following months patiently took me to the favelas of Dona Marta, Vidigal, Manguinhos, Serrinha, Rocinha, Lucas, and many more, and found me places where I could sit quietly and watch the world around me. Well, at least until December, when he started calling me a spoilt middle-class princess who'd become high on gangster-glam. But that's another story. Back on that day in Mangueira, I was just another observer watching the world with bovine detachment. Back then, I was just a traveller.

–10–

Gypsy Eyes

She had eyes like a gypsy, oblique and sly.

–
MACHADO DE ASSIS
,
Dom Casmurro

D
ecember arrived in Rio like a train coming to the end of the line. It ground to an exhausted halt and the passengers piled off, gasping with relief. The sun turned into a blazing white-hot ball, the palm trees drooped lazily, the streets were dotted yellow with the carcases of overripe mangoes fallen from the grand mangueira trees. Everybody stopped doing everything. Museums, post offices, receptions, and empty banks hummed to the sound of air conditioning, and shutters and blinds stayed jammed shut from morning to dusk. In the blinding heat of the midday sun, when even the streets seemed to desert themselves, the brown bodies of Rio de Janeiro crushed onto white sandy beaches or sought refuge in shady bars with frozen beer served in long, amber-coloured bottles. The rich disappeared to their beach houses in Buzios, tourists arrived in droves, and the heat closed in around us, exploding off every pavement, bouncing from windscreens, and seething from the car bonnets. Forty-degree averages appeared on the public digital temperature-clocks that lined the city, sales of fans and air conditioners went mad, and the petrol stations started running out of ice-cream. Everybody dropped five kilos overnight.

My Anglo-Saxon tolerances were ill-adapted for the climatic extremes of the Brazilian summer; I found it impossible, without sluicing the pavements with great quantities of my sweat, to do anything except lie very still in the hammock between eleven and four. I went to the beach early morning and took long siestas in the afternoon. Only at sunset, as the city breathed a collective sigh of relief, did I slink onto the streets to sip coconut water by the black-and-white mosaic boardwalks of Copacabana and Ipanema Beach, snack on chic European cuisine at the lake kiosks, or drink caipirinha at outdoor bars in Lapa.

It was like a teenage summer. My skin turned a rich, rosy brown from mornings on Ipanema Beach, my hair streaked an expensive Brazilian blonde, and I finally abandoned my lesbian jeans for the more appropriate Lapa uniform of bikini top, cotton hot-pants, and Haviana thongs. I was twenty-eight years old and I had never looked so good. I felt lazy, wonderful, and indolent. And not the slightest bit guilty. One fleeting thought of the overcrowded Jubilee Line between Neasden and central London was enough to induce a warm, fuzzy feeling of smug satisfaction deep inside my heart.

My family's loaded calls to ask me when my visa was running out fell on deaf ears. ‘What are you doing there anyway?' they would ask, appealing to the family's puritan work ethic. I fended them off by telling them I was learning samba. ‘What the hell is samba?' asked my father gruffly, finally weighing into the debate when my mother told him I would not be home for the fourth Christmas in a row. ‘Well, shouldn't you be in a school or something at least?' he asked, after I tried to explain about the drums, the shrill cry of the cavaquinho, and the group of black men on a lonely back street underneath a fat yellow moon. He added morosely, ‘This lack of structure cannot be good for you.'

At that stage, just about the only things structured in my life were the white Doric pillars of Casa Amarela. The few traces of normality I'd retained melted away under the scorching Brazilian sun, leaving me hostage to none other than Fabio. Chiara had been recalled to Europe to resolve her Masters degree, Carina was preparing to leave for the annual Jallad family reunion at her father's Buzios beach house, and Gustavo was taking daily refuge in the Olympic-sized swimming pool at his brother's castle in Santa Teresa. I was cast out with the bohemians, thrown to the sambistas. Even my psychological rock of the Friday-night samba at the Beco do Rato had fallen away from underneath me only the Friday before, after an ideological argument between the musicians and the owner, Marcio, over whether beers should be free for musicians or not. Fabio had led the case for the Dionysian, arguing that all things — namely beer and food — should be free and available for the musicians of Rio de Janeiro, in compensation for their selfless contribution to the creation of beauty and pleasure. Marcio had argued that that would be fine, except for the fact that everyone in Rio de Janeiro considered themselves a musician. (Was it only stringed musicians who got the beers? Did one include the egg shakers? Did a Coke can constitute a musical instrument?) So the ideological argument was, in reality, unsustainable and impractical. There was an enormous explosion at the bar when a bin was thrown at the wall in frustration; and the following Friday, Fabio took me drinking on the stairs of our artist friend Selarón.

Having drunk excessively on the account of two Japanese tourists who took entire memory-chips of photos of Fabio dressed in white and playing cavaquinho, we sat ourselves on the first landing of Selarón's stairs. The introverted artist himself joined us unexpectedly, and Fabio grew increasingly emotional about the events at the bar the week before.

‘Music will return to the ears of the people,' he cried, with a bottle of cachaça in one hand and his cavaquinho aloft in the other. But Selarón just shrugged, as though it had never left, and made way for the drunks on the staircase to rally around their king.

‘I say down with the bourgeoisie, down with the landlords and their dirty little bean-counters. Music for the people! Beer for the people!' he cried.

‘Beer for the people!' echoed the alcoholics.

‘Music for the people!' he cried.

‘Beer for the people!' they repeated.

It was only the second Friday of summer, and we were unemployed. Losing your only source of income a couple of weeks before Christmas in London or Sydney might be quite depressing, stressful even, but here in Rio there were no such concerns. It was almost seen as a blessing. Any form of commitment that required you to turn up anywhere at any time during summer, even if it did pay your weekly bills, was considered an imposition not worth its while for Brazilians and bohemians alike.

‘But how will you and the other musicians support yourselves?' I asked with genuine concern.

‘Starve ... ' Fabio said, putting the back of his hand across his eyes in mock tragedy.

‘Oh, no ...' I started.

He rolled his eyes at my concern and shook his head.

‘Relax. Don't look so worried. It's summer. Everything will be fine. There will be money growing on the banana trees by next weekend. Rivers of gold backing up in the sewers. Honey and manna falling from the sky. My darling, we are rich. We will be rich. We will be rich!'

‘But I don't understand,' I said with an anxious smile. Where could these fabulous riches come from, aside from my dwindling bonus or another crash in the exchange rate between pounds and clams? Would we steal it? Would I have to beg my father for a trust fund? But Fabio just tutted patronisingly, then lifted my chin up with his forefinger to kiss the tip of my nose.

‘It's tourist season, my love,' he said, throwing back his head with a carefree laugh, and then repeated, ‘It's tourist season.'

That Friday night the lanes of Lapa heaved with fresh tourists, seasonal malandros, and bored kids from the rich south zone of Rio. Brightly lit barracas lined the sidewalks selling tapioca crepes, kebabs, grilled cheese, passionfruit or pineapple caipirinhas, plastic snakes of honey cachaça, and the winter staple of Skol beer. All the old faces were on the streets. Winston Churchill was by the arches, the whores outside on the staircase, and everyone was smiling and waving at the new entrants like something out of the Muppet Show. They had barely finished singing ‘It's time to get things started,' and the Scandy blondes were arm-in-arm with ebony-coloured Rastafarians whose wives lingered on the other side of the road negotiating with graceless packs of English lads. Lone German men with fetishes for black women gathered at the front of Ta' Na' Rua, and fat, middle-aged English divorcees pretended that they were not paying for the drinks of the twenty-year-old gigolos sitting beside them.

Everybody in Lapa whored in summer, even if they weren't whores. The prize was too lucrative, the easy money too alluring. Plus they might even find someone who was good in bed or, even better, who'd offer to marry them. The price varied from dental work to a free dinner down in Leblon, and nearly all the tourists denied they were paying. The most honest approach I ever heard was an American friend's, who said, quite simply, ‘I'm just here for the bone.' At the start of that summer, I tried to be a moral crusader to tourists that I met, and to warn them off the bad gigolos; but my warnings just served to depress them, which meant they would stop paying for everyone's drinks, including mine, so I relented. Since when were holidays about reality anyway? Who was I to pull down the idyllic palm-tree film screen before the party was even over, just because I had been ignominiously strung up by a Lapa malandro? From then on, I would listen earnestly along with Fabio when we met the packs of Irish/English/German guys/girls who had Halle Berry or Winston Churchill on their arms, and nod with mock amazement when they would say bashfully, ‘Well, I thought it was just a holiday romance, but last night she/he told me he/she loved me ...'