Chasing Bohemia (20 page)

So there it was. I should have guessed. Lurdinha, the home-wrecking, illegal alien adolescent, had managed to achieve the one thing that all the slaves in Salvador could never buy for a Brazilian woman: a life without jealousy. Jealousy. Envy. Suspicion. Paranoia. All gone — with one flick of the soap star's hair as she walks out on a family man in mid-life crisis to spend a night with mum. Infidelity is big in Brazil. Jealousy is bigger. While their Latin-African trappings may have contributed to their sensual dispositions, their passionate spontaneity, and their capacity to dance that orgasmic convulsion called the samba, it has also made them completely paranoid. After all, if a man can fall in love with you at first sight, with how many more women up the street is there the risk of the same thing happening? Our conversation highlighted the ordinary fears of the average Brazilian woman as she battled her way through the minefields of hedonism, and I patronisingly extended my sympathy. ‘It must be terrible to feel so insecure about your relationship all the time,' I said to Carina. ‘All that lack of trust and constant suspicion must be exhausting.' Thank God I was above all that, I thought to myself afterwards. Thank God I was an Australian woman and I had control.

BY JANUARY
, a new samba roda had opened up in the Bar Cosmopolitan to which I was tagging along behind Fabio. Generally, when I went to the rodas, I would find myself a table at the back of the bar with Chiara, and use the event as a reason to catch up on life or brag about the time that I had escaped from the wannabe rapists at Barretos. The local girls were still pretending I didn't exist. Fabio would sit at the musician's table, turning his head back for an occasional glance at my increasingly drunk and rowdy table, until eventually he could resist it no more and would come and join us. That was until one fine evening when Carina came along and put me straight. She sat with us, observing in her quiet, attentive manner (Carina did not dance samba) before turning to me to say, ‘I am shocked, Carmen. I really am. I mean, you haven't approached the table once, not once.' I looked at the table, at Fabio engrossed in picking the strings of his cavaquinho, and then back at Carina, and asked, ‘Why should I?'

Carina rolled her eyes as though explaining something to the most naïve person on the planet.

‘You must protect your territory, my friend.' And then, as if afraid of being overheard, she dropped her head and glanced furtively around the bar.

‘There are predators everywhere.'

I frowned. What on earth was she talking about? I looked around the bar, but everything seemed to be pretty much the usual Thursday-night hash: whores, married men looking for lovers, lovers of married men, girlfriends, coke addicts, musicians, a couple of wannabe intellectuals, and a clumsy Danish anthropologist trying to play the triangle. Nothing out of the ordinary. I looked back at Carina with a questioning shrug, but she urged me to have another look. This time I followed her glance around the bar, and the scene transformed before my very eyes. The group of fun-loving samba-dancing Brazilians had suddenly grown wolf-like teeth and were gnashing their way towards my boyfriend. I sat up straight. The world had suddenly turned green. I saw one girl edging her way to the back of his chair, another brush her arm too accidentally against his shoulders, and one more blow a suggestive kiss in his direction. How naïve I had been!

I could barely control myself as I leapt to his defence, knocking past the rows of women to take my true and rightful position at the back of his chair. Fabio looked up with surprise. I looked back at Carina and she nodded with grave approval. I placed my hands on the back of his chair possessively and looked at my attackers with an aggressive expression. The kiss-blower had turned away, the shoulder-rubber had found another man, and the chair-edger, well, I just elbowed her to the side. I felt a strange, giddy surge of relief. I had protected my man. He was mine. I caught the eye of another chair guard, and she smiled at me supportively. We were all a team, after all — the chair guardians at a samba roda. Admittedly, I did see her boyfriend later kissing the chair-edger, but the important thing was that she had protected her public reputation. What happens on the piss-stained cobbles of Lapa afterwards is beyond anyone's control.

It took me five more rodas and some genuinely concerned questions from Fabio as to whether I was feeling all right before I stopped guarding the chair. I explained to him that I had lost my ‘inner sparkle' for a while, and he said, ‘Lost your marbles, more like', as he swung idly in the hammock at the Casa Amarela. Chiara simply shook her head with a superior air and said, ‘I'm never going to do that,' followed by the lofty statement, ‘for I do not need a man to complete me' — neither of which I reminded her of six months later as she ran barefoot in a tearful frenzy down Rua Joaquim Silva looking for her boyfriend who had not come home the night before.

Rio de Janeiro has the extraordinary ability to take seemingly intelligent, successful, attractive foreign women, assured of their position in life, and to turn them into ragged, screaming banshees chasing under-educated men in boardies down the streets of Lapa. I've seen Carrie Bradshaw-like New York executives threatening to kill illiterate teenagers who flirt with their men, French aristocrats having babies to trap penniless musicians, London fashion designers offering free round-the-world trips to win a gigolo — all in the name of jealousy and passion. It is no coincidence that one of the favourite art pieces of Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian version of a ‘Home Sweet Home' sign, is a sculpture of a woman sitting on the windowsill with her chin in her hands. They call her the waiting girlfriend, with uninhibited joy at their own moral vacuum, and they sell her in bulk down at Sahara, the local market district.

International surveys which suggest that the Brazilians are the most jealous people on earth seem reasonable enough when you consider that they are also contenders for the most unfaithful. Underneath that cellulite-free surface is the rampant fear of women that they will be forced to raise abandoned children, and of men that they will spend their life raising the milkman's offspring. But I guess it's a dog-eat-dog mentality in a world where people look good in Lycra. The paranoia of betrayal is deeply engrained in the Brazilian psyche. The first Princess of Brazil, the Austrian Archduchess Leopoldina, was said to have died from a broken heart after suffering the humiliation that sprung from the shameless infidelity of her careless husband, Prince Dom Pedro. Even the few highbrow papers of Brazil seem to delight in reporting the deepest fears of some unfortunate soul with respect to their partner's fidelity. Take the case of poor Daniella Cicarella, ex-wife of Ronaldo, who was hounded by the press and public for her jealousy over the buck-toothed footballer. She eventually dumped him after a tragic miscarriage, only to have the papers triumphantly reveal that he had been having an affair with a Spanish model all the while. Blessed is the innocent heart of Rio de Janeiro.

Jealousy and betrayal run through the consciousness of her most celebrated writers. Machado de Assis, who lived in the 1850s, bases his famous novel on the mystery of a woman's fidelity. It is in the tragedy of
Dom Casmurro
that the marriage of lawyer Bentinho (Dom Casmurro) and his wife Capitú is destroyed through a series of hearsay comments and anecdotal evidence relating to his wife's fidelity. A throwaway comment from a parasitic family friend about her sly, gypsy eyes, a tad too much emotion expressed by his wife at his best friend's funeral, and a son who bears more than a passing resemblance to the deceased, force Bentinho into distrust and paranoia. The question of whether she did or didn't do it pervades the novel and has divided Brazilian public opinion ever since, even though the Machado de Assis' point was precisely that this didn't matter. Bentinho is no hero. He destroys his family and his life through his pathetic paranoia and jealous revenge; but, in classic Machado style, he doesn't recognise this, even at the end of his life. It is a tale of love and jealousy in Rio de Janeiro, and points more than once to the inequality of a society where smart, pretty young women were forced to marry dull, rich men in order to ascend the social ladder.

But it was no easy task to ‘keep your head about you' when, all around me, people had well and truly lost theirs. One evening in January, I went to see the play
Traição
or
Betrayal
, based on works of the avant-garde playwright Nelson Rodrigues. It was held in an ancient
gafieira
called Estudantina, an old-style dance hall that still ran big bands on Fridays and overlooked the colonial square of Praça Tiradentes. I struggled in vain to understand the finer undertones, but broadly the play covered what Nelson Rodrigues' plays always cover: gratuitous infidelity, intense jealousy, and the hypocrisy of the Rio suburban class. Incest themes were a keen favourite. He wrote a whole series of plays called the Carioca Tragedies with explicit titles such as
All Nudity Shall be Punished
,
Forgive Me for Your Betrayal
, and
The Happy Widow
, which were filled with strategies for living such as the infamous Carioca mantra, ‘Betray before you get betrayed', plays that were, as Rodrigues himself described, ‘unpleasant, foul, and disease ridden; just by seeing them the audience could catch typhus or malaria'. Or worse.

In the interval, I ran into an ex-girlfriend of Fabio's who was in town. I had met her in passing before, and we had a brief conversation before the second act.

‘Are you enjoying being with Fabio?' she asked.

‘Yeah, we get along pretty well,' I responded.

‘Of course,' she said authoritatively. ‘He is a magnificent man. I would still be with him if I hadn't moved away.'

She gave me a second or two to let the words sink in and then looked at me sideways with a mocking expression. I smiled nervously, unsure how to respond.

‘Then it was lucky for me you moved away ...' I said finally. I made to move away, but she blocked me with a sideways shift of her foot.

‘Because he loved me,' she said with an intense stare. I edged backwards into the wall and placed my hands against it. She took another step forward until we were so close I could feel her breath. She towered above me on her platform boots.

‘Did you hear me?' she whispered.

‘Yes.' I nodded rapidly, and ran away.

Later, when I relayed the story to Gustavo, he just laughed. ‘Don't worry about it. She was just teasing you. Brazilian women love to do that.'

There are no love stories like Romeo and Juliet in Rio de Janeiro, not even in the soaps. Her writers don't have the berth for that type of innocence. Recent research by the Brazilian census, (IBOPE), on the sexual lives of Brazilians indicated that almost 65 per cent of women in the city are single and over 60 per cent of people in the city (the male half, anyway) admits openly to infidelity or ‘open relationships'. Although it is worth bearing in mind the somewhat disturbing cautionary note in the same survey that the figures may have been slightly skewed, since a not-insubstantial percentage of men considered infidelity to only apply to a long-term lover, whereas women — more thoroughly — included one-night stands.

Social theorists around these parts are concluding that fidelity is simply another taboo lining up to be broken in the same way that virginity was in the sixties. Even children are being conditioned to discredit such conservative concepts. The school play of Fabio's cousins would have made Nelson Rodrigues proud. It was a variety satire of the main children's fairy tales —
Cinderella
,
Rapunzel
,
Sleeping
Beauty
, and
Snow
White
. The brassy script was designed to ridicule the old-fashioned edicts of eternal love and sacrifice, and it was narrated by fairies dressed up as prostitutes who delivered their lines to their delighted parents with the knowing pantomime winks and mocking tones more commonly associated with the morning whores in Lapa than with a grade-four student at a suburban primary school.

NEEDLESS TO SAY
, I was somewhat cut off in Rio de Janeiro. With no access to English news, living on a diet of beans and cane whiskey, and with my only anchor to middle-class righteousness, Carina, high on the spoils of hedonism, I fell violently ill for ten days, sweating out my fears in an hallucinogenic fever made worse by the fact that Gustavo insisted on remedying me daily with a bath scrub of hot water and baking soda. The house filled with the smell of incense and candles and the sound of Gustavo's chanting to the gods of Candomblé. The heat was getting to everyone; it seemed to be melting down the walls. I started talking to myself in my sleep. I read Voltaire, Goethe, and Dostoevsky. I saw a film called
Yellow Mango
portraying Brazilian society on the edge of collapse, ending in an unforgettable, wild sex scene where the faithful church-going evangelist character, betrayed by her sleazy little husband, sticks her hairbrush up the backside of a psychopath with a fetish for shooting dead bodies. A new toddler fashion of lettered shirts that read
Save the Cuties!
on the front and
Drown the Uglies
on the back swept the city. Everywhere I looked, society was falling apart. I read Nietzsche's book about the collapse of society that must necessarily follow hedonism, and began ranting at breakfast about the apocalypse.

‘You should really go and see my doctor,' Gustavo recommended kindly, peering into my eyes after my baking-soda scrub one morning.