Chasing Bohemia (19 page)

Of course, it was difficult in such a faithless environment not to have a few niggling doubts about your own partner. Even if he was the most saintly of humans, as Carina once said to me, ‘It's not about your man. It's about the other women.' The truth is that I had no guarantees either way. I was in unexplored territory, physically and emotionally, and not just with respect to the Brazilians but with respect to myself as well.

I started to have an inkling of what it must be like for immigrants from religiously conservative backgrounds to integrate into a liberal country like Australia — the painful process of having to accept that you were dragging around with you a gold-plated set of cultural baggage foisted upon you by your church and country, and then having to reduce those acquired values down to your core personal ones. I hoped I would have some left, I thought to myself. In an ideal world, I would broaden into a sensual, vivacious samba dancer without losing those capacities of loyalty, honesty, and reason that I held so dear to my heart. But, of course, there was a very real risk that I would end up a treacherous, calculating gold-digger instead, and still not know how to dance! I was in no-man's land. Calling friends or family for advice would have been useless. They were working on a value system that had no bearing in Rio de Janeiro. I only had my instinct, and it was telling me, with a reckless disregard for my welfare, to stay right where I was.

By New Year's Eve, everything was in place for an unbroken eight-week stretch of indulgence of the most opulent order. The Brazilians were as ready as they would ever be. Their skins shone with rich, tropical tans, their cellulite had been sucked out, their faces restretched, their work commitments put on hold, and their marriages cooled to a weekly phone call. ‘I need some space,
querida
.' Everybody was champing at the bit for eight weeks of drunken, hedonistic madness, and nothing on this earth — not civil war, not terminal illness, not even a loss in the football — was going to stop them.

‘Christmas is for partners,' Gustavo said when I told him about my plans to spend New Year's Eve on Copacabana with Fabio. ‘But New Year's Eve is for your lover.'

I looked at him in disbelief, but he brushed me off with a short wag of his finger.

‘Don't go all innocent on me,' he warned.

Carina and Chiara were back on the night of the twenty-fifth, and had their snouts in the trough by Boxing Day. Fresh-faced gringos from the Anglo-Saxon countries were flowing into the Rio Hostel every hour, while seasonal malandros from as far as Cuba lined the Joaquim Silva. It was like feeding time at the zoo. The love hotels returned to full rates, cellular bills went through the roof, and Rua Joaquim Murtinho woke every second night at 4.00 a.m. to the sound of someone's husband being kicked out of home — and then again, at 6.00 a.m., to the sound of him being forgiven. Winston Churchill went into a frenzy, jumping around to two, even three, women per night and even getting jealous if one of them went off with someone else. The women displayed a little more decorum than the men, but not much. It truly seemed that every single person I knew in Rio de Janeiro was unfaithful. There was not even a stigma attached to dating a married man. I would overhear friends, neighbours, and beauticians encouraging their girlfriends before first dates, as though the married man was the most eligible bachelor of the year.

‘Have a great time. I really hope it works out,
girlfriend
!' my pedicurist said one day to the beautician who was waxing my legs, about to go on her first date with a married man.

‘So do I. He's so cool,' the waxer responded with an earnest sigh.

‘Well, I hope he pays for everything, at least,' I said dryly.

The waxer gave a slightly wary smile as though I was suggesting something highly rebellious.

‘Nooo. I believe in equality,' she responded lightly.

‘Then get a husband first, darling,' I heard myself grumble.

The conflict between my culture and that of the Brazilians seemed to be an eternal one. Some days I would wake up early, drink my coffee without sugar and cream, and go running to get the filth out of my system, my body shaking with rage as I reflected on the sins of this irreverent culture. Other days I would wake up late and lazy, tear the fruit apart with my hands, flirt with the garden boy, and feel as liberal as hell. On the off days, I was a lone dissenter in any case. The most faithful audience I could hope for was a new tourist, for certainly the long-term expats had wised up long before me.

‘What are you doing here if you disagree with the culture?' a Swedish expat asked me one evening in Lapa as I expounded on the immorality of Brazilians, and made snide remarks about how the only thing that Brazilian women seemed to have picked up from the liberating seventies was their dreadful fashion sense.

‘I am not opposed to their marvellous sensuality, fabulous music, and magnificent views,' I responded curtly. ‘Just to the rampant infidelity which undermines relationships and respect for women here.'

He shrugged and drank back the last of his beer.

‘It's all the same. One doesn't come without the other.'

I argued the point, but despite the convincing logic of Christian morality that had control of my mouth, my instinct hung back uncertainly. I couldn't shake off the unanswered questions that lingered at the back of my mind. There was certainly no sexual repression in this society. They were in control of their sexuality in a way that I had never observed in London or Sydney. There was no need to get horribly drunk to make a pass at the opposite sex, and no puritan culture of calling sexually liberal women ‘sluts'. Were the women and men of Rio really behind the times, or was it a possibility, in fact, that they were in front — and that we just didn't notice them passing us?

At the heady helm of hedonism, I even found myself questioning my good Christian values. On the good days I felt that perhaps this heaving mass of infidels represented the future of relationships between man and woman. Brazil may have been backward in terms of every United Nations and World Bank indicator of living standards, but they were scooping the world indicators for happiness year after year. They were just about the happiest damn people I'd ever met. They were forever smiling and laughing. What were they laughing about, anyway? It certainly wasn't the clean water and nutritious food. Maybe it was at us. Here they were, with not a care in the world, having a jolly old time with the neighbour's wife while we were sitting piously in front of our television sets limiting our exposure to sin to watching it in French films. And if the world could change its mind so easily on Judas, well, who was to say that it got the Ten Commandments right? Maybe Jesus and Mary had been a pair of dirty swingers like the Cariocas.

I found my answer, or at least the start of my questions, in the unlikely case of rising soap star Cléo Pires. Ms Pires was officially appointed Rio's sexiest woman the year after I arrived — no mean feat in a country whose beaches teem with supple-skinned beauty queens who have achieved the impossible goal of making Lycra g-strings look fashionable. Pires' sun-soaked form screamed from the daily tabloids, her satisfied smile blanked out the magazine covers, and stalkers surrounded her Ipanema condominium. Not that it is unusual for Brazilians to go mad over soap stars, football stars, B-grade celebrities from the United States, or even the odd tourist, for that matter. They have a boundless and infectious enthusiasm for tacky extremes. But Cleo Pires, or Lurdinha, as she was known in the garish soapie
America
, had positively eclipsed the celebrity ratings. The evening soap, which portrayed the lives of illegal Brazilian immigrants turned cowboys in Texas, was enormously popular. It doubled the entrance price at the Barretos Rodeo, sent decent women fleeing for the Mexican border, and was wholly responsible for the wave of straw Stetsons that appeared on the Ipanema beach that summer. Even the beloved Giselle Bündchen, the supermodel ex-girlfriend of Leonardo di Caprio and can-can cheerleader of the Brazilian football team, was starting to look like yesterday's desserts. As Carina, my barometer of popular Brazilian opinion informed me, Lurdinha was officially ‘cult'.

‘Men want to marry her and women want to be her,' Carina said wistfully as we walked towards her house in the elegant bairro of Jardim Botânico. It was another balmy Thursday evening, and we had worked up a dreamy state while walking around the heart-shaped lake that stretches from the back of Ipanema to the botanical gardens. If Rio was the ‘sleeping giant', then surely Lagoa was Narcissus' pond. It was as still as a watercolour in the rosy hues of dusk; moody images of the surrounding mountains reflected off her silken surface, and white stalks stood stone-like in the shore reeds. Jardim Botânico lay behind Lagoa. It was a triangular area flanked by the lake, botanical gardens, and a magnificent sheath of rock, and bathed in the extraordinary light that bounced between stone, wood, and water. It was elegant, discreet, and terrifyingly expensive. Carina often encouraged us to move there. There were none of those vulgar and ostentatious views over the Bay of Guanabara that the rest of the city swanked off, but it had attained the status of the most sought-after address in Rio de Janeiro for the very simple reason that there was no favela. The vertical escarpments behind the bairro made it a physical impossibility, unless the people planned to live on scaffolding.

It was a bairro filled with soap actresses and free of crime. The only exception, and a notable one at that, was the Bus 174 incident — recently immortalised in an award-winning documentary — in which a survivor from the Candelariá street-kid massacres held commuters hostage for a day or two outside the botanical gardens. He said he only wanted recognition for the fact that the police had killed all his friends and had never stood trial, but it turned into another Brazilian media circus involving a lynch mob, some corrupt police who obviously didn't turn up to their ‘How to deal with harmless hostage takers' training day, and the faithful
O Globo
media monopoly. In the end, the police suffocated poor Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, which was probably the more humane option given the state of Rio's unsanitary prison system. That said, it would be unfair to let the ugly situation of Nascimento — who was, as one south zone resident clarified for me one day, ‘just travelling
through
Jardim Botânico on the bus' and was not actually ‘
from
Jardim Botânico' — overshadow the true and deserving merits of the bairro. These were not sown in violence, drugs, or prostitution like the other
commum
bairros, but in the slushy, foamy, pink world of soap operas.

It was there, in Carina's very own bairro
,
that the true opium of the Brazilian masses was produced in nauseating quantities. It was there, in the leafy surrounds of King Dom Joao VI's pleasure garden, that the writers of Brazil were put to an honest day's work writing the
novellas
or soap-opera scripts that include every social, economic, and personal issue from corruption to infidelity, from violence to military dictatorships. They wrote about half-a-dozen novellas per year, and filled them with gorgeous white people in mansions and the odd black domestic worker. They were single-handedly responsible for the historical interpretation of their country, the consumption patterns of Brazil, and the simplification of the Portuguese language in Brazil to a two-tense structure — not that I begrudged them that. It was wonderful for a lazy verbal cripple like me. Not to mention a glorious source of decorative insults that I could use to expand my fighting vocabulary with Fabio. ‘You is bad man' flowered into an elaborate ‘You filthy, traitorous devil. Put your heart on the table or I rip it from your breast.'

And because the
O Globo
media monopoly controlled some 70 per cent of all print and television distribution in the whole of Brazil, the images were reinforced again and again. It was robotic mind-control of the finest order, with even their President Tancredo Neves once famously stating, ‘I'll fight with my army minister, but not with
O Globo
.' And who could blame him?

The Brazilian press might be better understood if you can permit yourself to imagine what might happen if our government handed over all of the public and private television networks, and all the national papers, to the trusty management of London's
The Sun
newspaper. It was the only country in the world where fashion models were used for comedy shows. It was like watching Benny Hill without Benny Hill. Not that that stopped me falling hook, line, and sinker for their glamorous stars.

‘Lurdinha?' I asked Carina, bemused. Sure, I had seen the papers, but I'd thought it was just more
O Globo
vomit. The actress was not extraordinarily beautiful. She had a neanderthal brow, for a start; her stage name sounded like a German Nazi nurse in a human-experiments laboratory; and, being the trust-funded daughter of some middle-rate celebrities, she was hardly about to get her clothes off.

‘I don't get it,' I said bluntly. ‘I don't see it.'

‘It is hard to put into words. She has this inner sparkle …' Carina began to explain, and then trailed off, twisting the straw in her Cosmopolitan and looking out the window with a wistful expression. After a moment she turned back to me.

‘Let me give you an example then. Last night, in the middle of a threat from another woman who wants her boyfriend, Lurdinha just announces she is going to spend a few nights with her mother. Alone. She needed time. Alone. Imagine. In the middle of that! She just doesn't care. She is not jealous at all. It's incredible. She's amazing.'