Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (37 page)

I took a week to finish my piece for the
Sunday Times,
and I had to re-live all the agony to do it. I was greatly relieved when it was written, but by then I had developed an infection of the gut which slowed me down for several more days. It was the first illness of the entire journey. In Africa my health had been perfect although I had eaten and drunk everything that came my way. There is nothing worse for health than imprisonment and frustration.

Franziska and I met several times, but my fear continued to make me as shy as a fourteen-year-old. My last days in Fortaleza were the beginning of the festival of Sao Joao, a week of celebration throughout Brazil. We went to a dance on the beach where I felt sure I would be able to overcome my faint-heartedness. A big crowd sang and danced and drank at wooden tables under a broad tiled canopy. The moon was full, the air warm on the skin, the coconuts swayed on the shore. Everything was auspicious . . . until I saw her friends from the office, two policemen I had last seen when I was their prisoner. I even caught a glimpse of the guns in their waistbands, and my ardour froze to ice again.

We sat for a while, much later, side by side on the beach listening to the waves. I longed to touch her smooth long legs, to feel her skin against mine, but I was paralysed, thinking:

'Once I start, where will it end?'

I knew it would be our last meeting. We found a taxi after walking a long way, and in the taxi I kissed her for the first time and knew it would have been alright. But by then it was too late.

The priests had all been summoned to a Diocesan conference at Maranhao, a long way away. Father Walsh had told me they would all be leaving in three days' time. He did not say I would have to leave, but it was obviously time to go. I was hoping they had not had to invent the conference to get me out of the house.

I was packing the bike in the backyard on the morning they left for the bus station; wonderful, kindly men whom I would be most unlikely to see again. An hour or two later I left myself. The thought of going made me nervous. I saw myself as a target for every idle policeman on the two thousand miles of road to Rio, and it was not unlike the very first departure in London. In some ways I felt even more vulnerable than I had then.

At the first police checkpoint on the highway leaving the city they checked me out but gave me no trouble. I had an impressive temporary driving licence, with an utterly villainous picture of me taken for it, and they liked that. Still the cloud of anxiety travelled with me down the highway. Then gradually the familiar movement, the sound of the engine

and the rush of air built up my confidence as nothing else could. I sat up and took notice of the bright green forested hills, and the streams and lakes that reminded me of Tanzania.

I began to remember who I was and what I had already done and the strength came pouring back into me. By the end of the day I had crossed from Ceara into the state of Pernambuco, and somewhere about there the cloud detached itself and floated back to Fortaleza. After a month of misery I felt free. At last.

I was travelling south from the Equator down the east coast of America on a parallel track to my journey down the east coast of Africa. It was a magnificent geography lesson. If Ceara resembled Tanzania, then inland Bahia was similar to Zambia, while Minas Gerais, the next great state on the southward trail, was startlingly like Rhodesia, with those same massive rectangular rock formations, old gold mines, gem stones, broad skies, dry air, and peaceful lambent evenings. As an introduction to the size and diversity of Brazil it was breathtaking.

The life of Brazil, though, seems to derive little from life in Africa, even with such a large proportion of Africans descended from former African slaves. There have been Europeans here for hundreds of years, imposing themselves on the native Indian population, building churches, fighting over the spoils, interbreeding, creating complex hierarchies, becoming rich and destitute, leaving the traces, layer upon layer, of their passions and virtues.

When the first foundations were still being laid in Salisbury and Lusaka, the Portuguese palaces and cathedrals in Brazil were already ancient, and the coastal states were peppered with thriving communities. The towns portray their history. In the centre they aspire to the church.

Great efforts were made and many lives expended to cut, haul and lay the stone that paves the roads and clothes the buildings. Radiating outwards the roads soon turn from cobble to dirt, and the houses shrink and decay until they meet the modern highway system where a newer kind of wealth makes a new stand in cement and girders and asphalt, garages, bus stations, and newly dilapidated hotels.

The streets are muddy in the rain and smell of garbage and urine, laced with coffee and cigar smoke. Buses and lorries splash through on broken suspensions, spouting black exhaust, their wooden coachwork gaudy with fairground colours and slogans: 'A woman is like a truck. She goes faster when you put your foot down'. In the evening the streets swarm with people of every colour except pure white (for the pure white keep apart); but during the hot, dry and dusty afternoons, the streets sleep.

It was a hot, dusty afternoon when I came to Senhor do Bonfim, a small inland town in Bahia, a day's ride from Salvador. I came early, wondering whether to stay, and walked through narrow streets looking in on barber shops, billiard saloons and people sipping coffee in 'butiquinos'. The week of Sao Joao was just ending. Loudspeakers on street corners broadcast music, announcements and advertisements by the town
trades people
.

I liked it, found a room near the railway, parked my bike in the street, dragged my luggage up to the first floor and flopped down on the bed to doze for a while. Birdsong and chatter invaded my half-waking state, followed by other, stranger sounds. There was a noise like muffled tin cans falling in a heap coming repeatedly from the yard beneath the open window. Then I heard an even stranger wailing musical sound, winding up and down the scale, now loud, now faint, as though blown from a long way off by a fickle wind. I opened my eyes lazily and saw a blue figure of a man, legs and arms outstretched, float up to the sky to disappear above the upper edge of the window frame. Such benign mysteries, I thought, are what make travelling infinitely worthwhile. Everyone else in the hotel knows exactly what these sights and-sounds are, but I am free to imagine anything I choose.

It was easy afterwards to spot the turkeys in the yard, and to guess that the balloon man was something to do with Sao Joao, but the skirling music remained a mystery. At dinner downstairs I heard it again. The hotel owner came towards me, agitated; something to do with the motorcycle. It was in danger, he said.

I went outside to look. The music was growing into a metallic howl, but I saw only the usual small boys gathered round the bike, prodding it and staring fixedly into the speedometer. The music had the eerie quality of an approaching storm. Then there came round the corner, at the bottom of the street, preceded by a pack of dancers in violent motion, a most spectacular thing. A thing emitting light and sounds on a scale of intensity I had never known, so intense that it took a while to focus on its various parts and identify it.

There were two objects shaped like rockets floating ten feet in the air, and about thirty feet long. They were built entirely out of brilliant fluorescent light tubes. Beneath them, myriad clusters of coloured bulbs flashed on and off, each cluster being set into a loudspeaker. Rising above the glare of the rockets were three men in bright clothing, bowing and grimacing like marionettes high above us all and plucking furiously at tiny electric guitars. On sumptuous galleries below the rockets, running all the way round this phantasmic object, were floodlit drummers dressed in satin, gesticulating, like an animated freize, as they hammered away. All of it seemed to be borne along by a throng of hypnotized dancers jerking their elbows and twirling to the music which poured out in solid waves, having no beginning nor end.

The thing drifted past at walking pace, carving a great tunnel of light and fury out of the night, and like everyone else I was sucked into its wake. It came to rest beside a large ornamental park, with trees, pathways, and a fountain. All around were huts, lightly built of palm fronds on wooden frames, selling refreshments. Middle-aged peasant ladies in heavy bodices squatted by charcoal braziers roasting skewered meat and corn cobs. A roguish old man in a velvet jacket and gaucho hat operated a crown and anchor game, with heaps of toothpaste tubes and soap as currency. A raised wooden stage had been built in the park and, facing it, a bank of seats for ticket holders and notables. The rest of us stood among the trees or wandered round the stalls.

On the stage, a ring of dancers were performing comic dances, and a man in a striped shirt and bow tie stood in one corner with a microphone pretending to be an unusually crass American tourist and making absurd

comments in pigeon English. Of real tourists there were none, but the people of the town and round about were there in their thousands, enjoying themselves enormously, warming up to a climax which was clearly still to come.

A shockwave travelled through the crowd, and the dancers hastily left the stage. A sober official came to the microphone and said something urgent about the Togo Symbolico do Republico'.

'Fireworks', I thought. The police were making a lane through the crowd, pushing people back mercilessly to connect the stage with the outside world. There was a great air of expectancy. Whatever was coming would have to be sensational to justify it, after all I had seen already. The waiting dragged on. People came on to deliver speeches of thanks and tributes. We were all shuffling our feet, impatiently. A group of youngsters in gym clothes ran rather self-consciously from the road, through the cleared lane and up the steps to the stage, having much difficulty trying to keep in formation. On the stage some of them stopped. Others ran on the spot. Those who stopped, started again with embarrassment, just as those who had continued thought they had better stop. Then I saw that the front runner had a torch in his hand with a small flame, and a voice boomed out again about the 'Fogo Symbolico'.

The applause was the absolute minimum necessary to be audible; evidently everybody found it all much too symbolic, and I wondered how far down the road they had struck a match and lit the torch. Sao Joao went out with a whimper, and I thought I had never attended a greater anti-climax in my life. I went back to the hotel to kill mosquitoes and sleep, but there were not enough blankets and it became surprisingly cold. Between patches of sleep I tried to reconstruct that fantastic music, a continuous melody played at the speed of a banjo, with some of the feeling of an old barrel organ, thickened and amplified to a frenzy of excitement. For a while I thought I had it, but in the morning it was gone.

Only much later did I discover that I had met, in Senhor do Bonfim, one of Brazil's most celebrated institutions, the unique and illustrious Trio Electrico from Salvador which was the glowing heart of the Bahia Carnival.

For six more days I moved south towards Rio. I began to study Portuguese seriously, reading menus and advertisements, and learning the road signs by heart. 'Nao ultrapassar quando a ligna izquierda for con-tinua', I repeated again and again. The one I could not understand said 'Conserva as placas'. Often it was riddled with bullet holes. I learned later that it meant 'Do not destroy the road signs'. I recalled other odd signs from Africa: the one that greeted me as I was about to take a high viaduct over the Blue Nile Gorge, leaning out from the mountainside thousands of feet above nothing.

'Drive slowly and carefully,' it said. 'This viaduct has begun moving.'

Or the one painted on the roads in South Africa, just before traffic lights in the right-hand lane. 'Slegs Only', it warned.

'What on earth are Slegs?' I asked.

'It's Afrikaans for Only,' they told me.

The last two days before Rio were glorious, riding through the state of Minas Gerais. That rolling ranch country drew me irresistibly. I walked in the evenings past the cattle pens, admiring the solidity and workmanship of the stout black fences with their white capped posts. Mounted cowboys sauntered by with carefully laconic faces. The sun set in splendour leaving an air of great tranquillity over the land, and I swore that one day I would return there.

Then the emerald clad mountains carried me high up to Teresopolis, and soon I was standing next to the Finger of God, and looking down over the bay of Rio de Janeiro, feeling exactly the same happy premonition that I had had coming through Du Toit's Kloof and looking down to Cape Town. I knew Rio was going to be wonderful, and Rio did not disappoint me.

The friends of friends lived in luxury in Ipanema. I was welcomed into their apartment, and stood in my black boots and clumsy gear on their white carpet among priceless paintings and fragile modern art constructions, feeling as though every move I made would cause irreparable damage. 'Fantastic,' they said. 'Wonderful', as though what they most longed to do was to buy a couple of bikes and come the rest of the way with me. I was used to some of the things that wealth could do to people, and I found their swashbuckling innocence a great relief. They were generous beyond measure, but in a way that made it seem natural, nothing to make a fuss about, something between friends. I found myself installed, for as long as I liked, in a small flat within a hundred yards of the beach, above a ballet school which they ran. Every day I was invited to lunch or dine or visit someone. Almost everyone they knew seemed to have been the governor of one state or another, or related to some famous pioneer in Brazil's history. I was riding on Rio's inner circle, and the fact of what had happened to me in Fortaleza made it all seem not only unusually pleasurable, but entirely appropriate. I revelled in it.