Llama for Lunch (33 page)

I found the office of the airline who had ‘wait-listed’ me in Belem, but not easily, because the street it is in runs off another and the powers that be had not seen fit to put its name on it. A sulky young man with a bad cold, who didn’t seem terribly enamoured of me at first, finally searched the computer and said that he could confirm a booking for me on that day but would keep trying for an earlier one. This was a start.

I tried to obtain money from a machine at the bank but it informed me coldly that I didn’t have enough loot in my account for it to give me a sample. I have learned that there is no point arguing with a machine that has a fixation about something, no matter how big a black lie it is telling. I tried my other card and was told that the pin number was wrong. To my chagrin I discovered that, after you have inserted three wrong pin numbers, the machine refuses to play with you anymore. I moved to another bank where I eventually persuaded the machine to give me a few real and then moved on to the Great Phone Search. Embratel, the alleged phone company, had a huge building, but no telephones. I found only offices where people were paying bills. At one office I sought help and found an exceptionally obliging receptionist who spoke English. I explained the whole sad story to her and, leaving her post, she came out into the street with me and dialled my number on a public phone. To no avail. It continued to be cut off each time it rang. She said, ‘I see the problem. I’ll get my supervisor.’ After a long consultation, the two ladies decided that I should go to the place that connected calls by an operator, and the supervisor led me down the street, around the corner and pointed me in the right direction. Lovely lady.

I never found the joint. Everyone I asked for help directed me elsewhere. I went round and round and up and down until my feet gave out. I tried again in the evening and, wouldn’t you know, I had been walking past this blasted office all the time. Steps led up to it from the street but, more discreet than a house of ill repute, it displayed no outward sign that even hinted to the passing world what its function might be. Something had finally registered when the gate man of a big office block nearby, who took a lot of trouble to help me, told me that it was next to the police station.

People in Rio were generally very kind to me. But I also saw Cariocas, as Rio folk call themselves because that is the name of the central downtown district, do strange things. When driving around in traffic it seemed to be the passenger’s job to stick his arm out of the window and give rude signs while screaming abuse at other motorists and pedestrians who got in the way. It appeared to be mainly good-natured reproachment and most of the time I found it highly amusing. Cars would actually stop for you at crossings and give you a beep to tell you to go ahead. Not buses, however. You had to jump back mighty smartly onto the pavement to escape them. They practically came up there to get you. At times buses swerved so close to the gutter that, if your nose had been protruding, you’d have been gone.

Downtown again on another beautiful spring morning, I walked about the parks and squares enjoying myself. With a ‘Bom dia’, I sat down next to a man on one of the seats that were dotted around under the trees. My companion turned out to be one of the many homeless who frequented the downtown area. Later I wandered into the large church that dominated one side of the square. I had recently sworn off churches, but I got sucked in again like I do every time. I like the look of church interiors and I love the feeling of peace that they generate. Besides, churches are good for a sit-down when you are tired of the tourist traipse. It is a pity, however, that they don’t run to toilets.

This church’s interior differed greatly from what its exterior promised. Outside, it was a peculiar mix of Grecian and Georgian styles but inside it was as though I had entered a long, narrow, lofty cave made entirely of elaborately carved wood. Down the cave’s sides were interspersed glass-fronted niches that contained statues of saints and deities. And high up were wonderful carved wooden boxes, like those of a theatre, where the landed gentry must sit – very handy places to snooze through the sermon. The cave culminated at the altar, which was also all wood and rose, carving on carving, up to the far distant roof. Later I saw another church that was also entirely made of wood and had huge polished wooden columns that marched in a line all the way down to the altar.

In the evening I took the subway to Catete, the next stop down from Gloria. There was a museum here that was alive at night with people visiting, studying and eating at the snack bar in the grounds of the fabulous old building that had bronze vultures perched on its top. I took a chair and waited in the warm evening air for a turn on the internet and then sent a rocket to the phone-card pixies.

On Saturday mornings Rio has a wonderful antique market. I took the subway to near where I estimated it to be. On one of the main city streets I passed a corner niche of a building where a street person had cosily established himself on a ground sheet covered by a big cuddly blanket. A trolley that contained his belongings was parked alongside him and five healthy-looking dogs curled around his body – a five-dog night for real! The market had been set up underneath the freeway fly-overs and bridges near the waterfront where the ferries docked, and the stalls extended for kilometres. It took me four hours at a hard trot to get around this market. The merchandise was mostly good, nineteenth-century, European decorative items, such as lamps and vases in porcelain, silver and glass, as well as heaps of old costume jewellery. Some of the goods on offer were very highly priced but others were bargains. I bought a couple of small Chinese figurines that I reckoned I could manage to squeeze into my bag. But I sorely regretted having to leave behind the marvellous, but extremely clunky and highly breakable, oriental pieces that I coveted.

I continued walking on from the end of the market and came to the domestic airport, where I unearthed an accommodating cash machine and, at last, a phone that was willing to connect me to Australia. Halleluiah! But I couldn’t use it unless I was prepared to haul someone out of bed at three in the morning. I figured that was stretching the bonds of family and friendship too far.

On reflection, I came to the conclusion that most of the people in South America were just as lost as I was most of the time. No matter where I went, at least one person would accost me and ask for directions. In Spanish or Portuguese. I took it as a compliment – obviously I didn’t look like a foreign tourist. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to look like most of the ones I saw. Although in the north I came across no western tourists except the three backpackers on the boat to Belem, they were thick on the ground in parts of Rio. I think tourists get mugged because they advertise the fact that they are just that. In Rio I found that I was dressed much the same as most other women of my age – slacks or jeans and a shirt. Rio is reputed to have the loveliest women in South America – but what about the men? A very unfair proportion of them are drop-dead gorgeous. On several occasions I was asked if I was Argentinian. I haven’t worked out if that was good or bad yet.

On Sunday morning I headed for the weekly North East Fair at Cristobello, which was said to be a lively show. I nutted out how to get there by the subway but then found it shuts on Sunday. So I took a bus to Central, where I asked directions of a conductor who put me on the right bus. When I saw a police station labelled Cristobello, I asked the driver if I was there. He said, ‘No, you’ve come too far. Sit down and I’ll get you there.’ I thought he intended to drop me off on the way back but after we had continued on for a long time I discovered that he was looking for another bus that was going to Cristobello. Finally he stopped his bus in the middle of the street and, hailing a bus that was heading in the opposite direction, chatted to its driver. I was then told to get on this other bus, around the front so that I didn’t have to pay. The next driver took me right to where the fair was held, under overhead tarpaulins all the way around the outside walls of a massive stadium. The numerous stalls were interspersed, now and then, by bandstands and portable wooden dance floors that were surrounded by hundreds of tin tables and chairs and crowded with people who danced to the very loud samba music, sang, drank beer and had a ball. There was beer on all the tables. Wherever I went in Brazil, at any time of the day, I saw people drinking beer.

I walked around kilometres of clothes and all kinds of goods, but discovered to my surprise that all the big stalls sold hectares of plumbing supplies. This should have been called the Plumber’s Picnic, not the North East Fair. There was food galore. You could eat barbecued corn on sticks, beef or chicken shasliks, grilled cubes of white buffalo cheese on skewers and many other goodies. One area was devoted to trash and treasure and mountains of it was laid out on the ground.

I was standing in a crowd watching some dancers, when a fellow in front of me turned around, took a look at me, then looked again quickly. I was not deluded that he had been stunned by my ravishing beauty. I knew instantly that he was a bad lot who had decided that I was an easy mark. Like the poor dog, I have a sixth sense about people sometimes. Sure enough, when I moved off, he immediately followed me. I stopped and let him pass and made certain that he was not able to get behind me again until I lost him. I read once that a well-known thief declared, ‘You can’t rob someone who is on to you.’

Back in the city I was making for a place where the Gloria bus stopped when I came to the entrance of a building that I guessed to be Rio’s cathedral, the Catedral Metropolitana, but only because there was something to indicate this printed on the front doormat. There was no sign. A couple of hulking stone statues stood guard outside looking faintly Egyptian. This building, the last gasp in ugliness, looked more like a museum than a church. I had noticed it before but had resisted a visit, but now curiosity got the better of me. The flattopped monstrosity looked nearer to Doctor Who’s daleks than anything that belonged on this planet. I believe its design was a copy of an ancient temple. Totally circular in shape, its rough concrete sides went up in steps and stages to a great height. Once inside I saw that the steps were actually slot-shaped windows and then I could also see the four huge stained-glass panels that quartered the walls from the floor thousands of metres up to the top. The stained glass was impressively patterned with random, abstract designs and the sliced-off top was inset with a clear-glass square cross. There was no conventional altar, but hanging in the centre of the building, suspended from somewhere way up in the gods, was a big wooden crucifix, underneath which crouched a circular dais and a set of steps to mount it. Several wooden statues stood about. The temple/church/darlek didn’t look any more Christian inside than it did out, but it sure was big. It could have seated the biblical five thousand on the backless, polished-wood benches that encircled the walls and came down to encroach on the dais. It was spectacular but it had no atmosphere. It was not the sort of place in which to commune or contemplate.

In the evening I mounted a bus, fully believing that I was off to the domestic airport to make a phone call. I wasn’t and I didn’t. Instead I spent an hour and a half circumnavigating Rio. With all its bright lights, it is a very pretty town at night but I did not even sight the airport. However, I did learn how to get to the botanical gardens if I should want to go there. The next day I found the right bus and the airport and was very pleased with myself. Then I walked across the fly-over to the downtown area and again nagged the airline about an earlier ticket. Still no luck.

The way that many people rode buses for free amazed me. All you had to do was enter via the front, thus avoiding the turnstile. Over sixty-fives, if they were game, could freeload, also small children, those in school uniforms or just carrying books, and women with babes in arms. No credentials were checked. Brazilians seemed very tolerant of each other. I suppose they had to be when there were so many poor people. I saw conductors look the other way when young lads got on the bus, limboed under the turnstile and didn’t pay. And drivers would allow vendors onto the bus to try to sell some small item to passengers. The vendors would recite their spiel up and down the aisle, offering you one lolly or a packet of gum, and then alight without paying. One day a well-built young bloke got on selling batteries. He’d had one leg amputated at the knee and he hopped along without a crutch. I had previously decided that buses were only for the fit and strong and not for the infirm or feeble but this lad made his way along the jolting bus with his box of batteries, sold some, and then hopped of.

I went to the beach at Ipanema, which is further on from Copacabana, and walked along the foreshore for a long way. This was not exactly a deliberate venture; although the breeze was pleasant by the sea, this day was quite hot. I was looking for a map shop that I still have yet to uncover. Maybe next time.

In a cafe near the beach I saw an example of the Ugly Tourist that I hadn’t seen for a long time. I had hoped that they all might have died out. This one was a late-middleaged, American female old enough to know better. She and her poor doddering husband were making a frightful scene about the kilo menu. She demanded loudly to know what was in each dish – and there were at least twenty dishes – what it cost and how the system worked. It was hard to believe anyone could be so thick. You load your plate and pay ten real per kilo. Simple. Not for her. Later when I went to pay the cashier, she was there making another scene about how much it cost it and how she should pay. Then she said to the cashier, ‘That’s all right. Now tell me what that is in my money.’ I imagined the cashier trying that trick in her country. Would she give him the price in reals?

It was late afternoon when I got on a bus to return to my hotel. I had not previously taken one at peak hour, and now I realised why people said that most robberies occurred on buses. Standing squeezed in a solid mass of humanity in a lurching swaying vehicle, I thought, Now is the hour. Drivers of northern buses had been horrendous, but at least they had not been doing their stuff in heavy traffic. Imagine a four-lane highway with four buses across it, all flat-out performing like cars racing in a Grand Prix, passing each other, swerving all over the road, in the centre of town. I decided that drivers get their jollies from upsetting their passengers and if they can’t scream around corners and roar down narrow streets – I was in one that actually mounted the kerb and drove with half its wheels on the footpath – or if they get stuck in traffic where they have to slow down, they display their frustration by jerking the brakes so that the passengers fall about the bus anyway. But then, they were very good to me whenever I was lost.