Chasing Bohemia (25 page)

Preparation: set the temperature to maximum by ensuring that as many people as possible (preferably peers of the person being argued with) are within hearing distance.

1.Storm up to the person concerned with a furious expression and demand a private conversation.

2.Do not wait to be granted the private conversation you requested, but start immediately by presenting the pettiest reason decorated with a vicious personal insult, for example: ‘You drank all the milk, you shameless whore, didn't you?'

3. Do not wait for answer. Add more petty insults.

4. If participant shows signs of leaving the scene, take the bin and throw at concrete wall.

5. Add more grave insults such as: ‘Your mother is an ugly cow' or ‘Anyway, I slept with your best friend.'

6. If participant really goes to leave, throw something else in their path.

7. If participant succeeds in exiting stage, stop talking and give a bellowing roar. Threaten suicide if bottles or rocks are handy.

8. In the rare case that your threat of suicide is ignored, throw yourself on the ground in front of a moving taxi (taxi drivers are used to this in Rio, but do not attempt this with Leblon four-wheel drives).

9. In final scene, present flowers, on knees.

IN FABIO'S CASE
,
t
he tension of having to work for the first time that year had built up a rush of frustration so great within him that he felt compelled to pick our bin up and smash it on the sidewalk. Afterwards, he fell to his knees, tore at his breast, and bellowed like a wild animal, smashing his fists on the cobblestones until he began to sob uncontrollably. The tourists cowered behind the gate and watched on with wide eyes. Dominique came out onto the Portuguese-tiled balcony with a sleep mask on her head, and the shutters at the priest's house opened. Fabio slumped against the gate and choked back an enormous sob of self-pity. I remained stoically unemotional throughout this exhibition until eventually he stopped, wiped his eyes and smiled, even a little bashfully, as an actor might after having given a star performance of Hamlet. He thrust a dirty-nailed hand in the direction of the tourists to reassure them, but they shrank from his grasp back behind the gate. I sighed deeply and took the opportunity, in the lull of emotion, to inform the tourists in an American-customer-service-style voice that they would be departing shortly. A red-haired girl from Liverpool came forward from behind the gate and asked in a fragile, sympathetic whisper if everything was all right. I smiled broadly.

‘Of course,' I laughed heartily, and plugged the nervous air with an unbroken discharge of words. ‘We were just conversing about how wonderful last week's samba school was. The bin? Oh, you know how Latin people are. They get so easily excited about things. All that racket makes for a great samba evening, though. So where are you from? Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester? That's nice. Are you ready? Fabio is ready, aren't you, sweetheart?'

They looked at Fabio beside me, sweating whiskey like a werewolf, his pupils dilated, and his hair in a wild Afro, and then looked back at me.

‘Great then,' I said, not giving anyone a chance to change their minds. I winked at the red-haired girl. I stopped two passing cabs, shoved them inside, took five hundred reals off them, and threw ten at Fabio to buy some drinks. By the time they departed, his emotional pendulum had reached its mid-point, and he was sitting contentedly between two kids from Manchester in the back seat. As I watched the car disappear down the first curve in Joaquim Murtinho, I could hear him yelling happily out the window in English, ‘Bye, my love.'

We made it down to the cabaret by 10.00 p.m., only to find it inexplicably filled with elderly people — a good percentage of them walker-frame bearers — and their families, as opposed to the cigar-smoking millionaires and scantily dressed waitresses of our fantasy expectations. The low red lights we expected to find hanging over each white-clothed table were absent; the room was lit instead by garish overhead illumination that left nothing to the imagination. We hid ourselves away in the changing rooms and rehearsed one more time while children from the party ran among our feet. We remembered at this point that we had never sung into a microphone, and broke the grim news to Foguette. He told us to hold it close. A few minutes later, the band on before us finished their set and came backstage, disappointingly dressed in casual t-shirts and shorts, in stark contrast to our lush cabaret wear.

We made our way onto the small stage without attracting attention, and were finally looking down on a large selection of Rio's theatre community, or at least their grandparents and extended families. For a moment, everything seemed like a really bad idea, but Dominique flashed a movie-star smile, told me to think of the record deal, and we were away. It was now or never, and the crowd were as interested and attentive, or at least as drunk and deaf, as they were ever going to be.

Turn around
… A little off-key? Yes. Doesn't matter.
Turn around
… It was a rough start for Bonnie, but we were enthused by a group of backpackers who started slam-dancing in front of us to the final bars of the song, even if they had crashed the party, as Rubems told us later. We missed Foguette's cues for ‘Ain't No Sunshine,' and I played the verse chords wrong. ‘Jolene' was passable, but since the crowd was largely Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, they failed to appreciate the New York-cool angle that I was trying to give to the music. The crowning moment of the evening was our later substitution of ‘Heart on a String' into the slot of ‘I Will Survive', a momentous decision that saved us from utter humiliation. We received lukewarm applause, which dissolved quickly into sounds of drunken conversation. The performance was, according to Foguette, alright, much to the disappointment of Gustavo who was hoping for a ‘Triumphant Success', or at the very least, a ‘Tragic Disaster', to give him something to talk about at his next cocktail party. Rubems told us we were wonderful, and invited us back to play at the next function. When I told him this later, Fabio said slyly: ‘He just wants to sleep with one of you,' to which Dominique smiled sympathetically and said, ‘envy is a terrible thing, isn't it?'

Although Rubem's invitation strangely did not materialise, the next time my mother inquired, I told her I was going to start singing cabaret in Rio de Janeiro. There was a long pause at the other end, after which she launched into another conversation about money, education, and visas. In the end, to get her off my back, I said cheerfully, ‘OK then, I'll come home and marry an accountant from the tax office in Canberra. Will that make you happier in your old age? To know everything is nice and safe and dull?' It was an old threat, but it always worked on my parents, who were small-business people and farmers and would rather their daughter become an abattoir worker than marry into the public service.

‘Why do you have to be so extreme about everything?' asked my father, the man who sold the family farm at thirty years of age and took his four children to live in a hippy commune while he got one of the first degrees in his family. I didn't know, so I just gave him the same answer I give to all questions about my life, ‘Why does anyone do anything in life?'

–13–

Murder on the Dance Floor

Oh, Oh, Oh, I'm gonna kiss your husband,
Oh, Oh, Oh, I am kissing your husband.

–
MC NEM
, ‘Rio de Janeiro'

A
fter our brief disagreement about tours, I hadn't seen much of Chiara since her return. I noticed her a few times sitting under the arches, but she was in her own world, remote and unreachable among the street kids and dealers and whores, drinking beer and talking in the harsh, strange tongues of street Brazil. She didn't go to Ta' Na' Rua any more, nor did she mention Ararei. Capoeira was finished. The reason was not entirely clear, but I gathered something terrible had happened in Europe. It had to do with a capoeira instructor and his money collection box. When she relayed the story that they'd had t-shirts printed and distributed that read,
CAPOEIRA DUBLIN: PUT THE MONEY IN THE BOX
, I didn't ask any more questions. Some things don't need explaining.

‘Carmen!' I heard her call one night, and stopped to see her emerge from the shadows of the arches, the dilated pupils of the black street-kids shining behind her in the dark.

‘What are you doing tonight?' she asked nonchalantly.

‘Going to the samba, probably,' I said with a shrug.

‘Samba, samba, samba,' she said with a condescending smile. ‘We are in Rio de Janeiro, and you are hanging out at sambas. Don't you want to do something wild? That nobody else has done before?' The Irish accent she once had was completely gone. She was a Latin woman now.

‘What's wrong with samba?' I asked.

‘Samba is dead, Carmen. Dead.'

‘It's hardly dead,' I protested with annoyance. ‘Fabio's samba on Friday is packed, and Carnaval …'

‘Carnaval!' she guffawed, not letting me finish, ‘Carnaval is for tourists. Listen to the street. Can you hear samba here? Look around, darling, and listen.'

I sighed, wondering where her line in anthropological rebellion was going this time, and looked around reluctantly. On the Rua Joaquim Silva, the machine-gun bass of Carioca funk was beating out of a car-boot stereo while groups of street children twisted and turned their lithe little bodies, some making the sign of a gun with their forefinger and thumb. A car drove slowly by, the sound of funk flowing out its windows. It was true that there was very little samba actually on the street. Samba was contained — if only because it needed musicians. Funk was like hip hop or techno; it poured out of cheap radios and car boots, didn't need a band, and was guaranteed to provoke upturned noses from the elderly and middle class. I shrugged. Whether it was the voice of the street or not, it didn't change the fact that, compared to the tinkling melodies of samba, funk was about as kind to the ear as a pneumatic drill.

‘So you see what I mean?' she said without waiting for my answer, her previously mocking expression now replaced by a warm smile of solidarity. ‘Of course you do. Then you will come with me on Friday night.'

‘To where?'

‘To the funk ball, of course.'

‘Dunno. Are you sure it's not too dangerous?'

‘I'm sure it
is
too dangerous.'

‘Chiara! Let me think about it …' But she had already gotten up and was walking away. She stopped at the corner to call back to me, ‘You arrange the car, OK? I've lost my credit card. Just make it happen. Pick me up on Friday.'

AT MIDNIGHT
on 2 June 2002, an ambitious
O Globo
journalist by the name of Tim Lopes went undercover to investigate the prostitution of minors and the drugs trade at an illegal funk ball, a
baile funk proibidão
. Carioca funk, an aggressive hybrid of rap and Miami Bass, which uses the backbeat of machine-guns to sing about everything from polygamy to drug trafficking, was the latest musical contribution to spill out from the favelas and into mainstream Brazilian society. Lopes went into the notoriously violent favela of the Complexo Alemão wired up with a hidden camera — although, unsurprisingly, the police didn't find that when they found his body a week later, cut up into little pieces by a samurai sword. The people of Rio were horrified. Certainly,
O Globo
had never been a popular paper in the favelas — it supported the brutal military dictatorship, and even now pays scant attention to the systematic abuse of human rights that occurs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro every day — but it still seemed a little rash of Elias ‘Maleuco', or Mad Elias, the notorious drug-trafficking don who apparently gave the order.

In the three years that followed the murder, as the police dragged in the perpetrators and the Brazilian media hunted out the motives of the traffickers for such a horrific crime against a mere journalist, the new sound of Carioca funk found itself dragged into the witness box of public opinion. The headlines roared with claims that the new sound of the favela ‘incited violence', ‘apologised for drug trafficking', and even ‘impregnated women'! The Brazilian public were outraged. New laws were written banning lyrics that apologised for violence, public balls were closed down, and the MCs went undercover. It is a debate that still polarises the city today, although if the popularity of proibidão funk stars such as Mr Catra is any indication, it would appear that some are less outraged than others.

‘I'M GONNA EXPLODE
through your door in less than five minutes,' the thirty-seven-year-old funk MC, already being heralded as the movement's godfather, screamed to his promoter through a walkie-talkie over the roar of our rented Fiat engine. It certainly seemed plausible as we raced along the notoriously dangerous Linha Vermelho (The Red Line) in north Rio, passing through police blocks at 150 kilometres per hour. At first I settled back into my seat, decided to put my faith in Mr Catra, and tried to relax with the thought that Rio roads must be a little like German autobahns, that everyone drove like this, and that my driver was in control. That was until we passed a block of police who were intelligently positioned inside the highway wall taking sniper shots at the favela, while the gangs on the other side fired back in response, scattering the cars in front of us like toys.