Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  ‘Cancodrillo is a businessman, Superchango is a god. At six in the morning, they’re still in the bar and Cancodrillo says, “Now there’s going to be a real battle, a real challenge! You see this little table football … We’re going to play this game. And if I win, you are going to give me your powers of a god. And if you win, I’ll give you all my business.” Superchango says, “OK.”

  ‘They play table football for ten centuries and nobody wins, or, rather, nobody knows who won and who lost, but after the battle, Cancodrillo isn’t a businessman anymore and has become a god, and Superchango isn’t a god any more and has become a businessman. Their roles have changed and both of them become really sad. They don’t laugh any more. They get lost. They lose the treasure. And the only good thing about this sadness is that they become friends. They decide to travel all around the world to find love and laughter. They experience drugs and go to Patagonia. They go to France, New York. They go everywhere, everywhere …’

  At that moment Manu was distracted by something and had to go. ‘If you don’t know this story,’ he said, ‘you cannot really understand Clandestino. It isn’t really a record. It’s part of a story. Next time maybe, I’ll tell you how it ends.’

  CHAPTER 19:

  BRAZIL – AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE GODDESS

  ‘If you don’t accept your darkness, you have to project it somewhere else.’

  Gilberto Gil

  Tthought that meeting up with Manu in Brazil would be easy. For the last few years he’s spent a couple of months or so there every winter, mainly in the northeast, around Fortaleza and the neighbouring beaches in the state of Ceará. His management told me that he’d be there, but by the time I arrive he’s gone … desaparecido. Maybe he’s gone off with the repentistas, the medieval troubadours of the sertão, skilled in creating ballads on any subject to order, whom he invited to his Feira de Las Mentiras in Spain. He once told me that he sometimes goes on the road with them, surviving on the lethal sugarcane liquor known as cachaça and little else.

  Once upon a time, Ceará was one of the most fertile regions in Brazil. The humid coastal fringe had a soil rich in mineral salts and humus. It was a region of savannahs, blessed with frequent rain. Then human hands came along and turned all that green to mud and dust as a sugarcane monoculture took over. There were riches for the mill owners, but Ceará is today one of the most underdeveloped parts of the Western hemisphere. In the Mariatchi bar in Barcelona, Manu told me, ‘The first thing you need to know about Ceará is Luiz Gonzaga, he’s the Bob Marley of Brazil,’ and launched into “Asi Branca”, a beautiful song in which Gonzaga says he will return to the backlands when the rain comes, when the land is as green as his beloved’s eyes. It is a Brazilian classic and has been covered by, among others, Tom Zé, Gilberto Gil and David Byrne.

  Ceará is the place where Manu recharges batteries, smokes a few joints and writes some songs. It’s a perfect environment in which to kick back or even retire. Many Europeans have done exactly that. I met the British consul and she told me that numerous Brits had hooked up with local Brazilians during a holiday in the Ceará, then married and stayed. She was surprised how successful and long-lasting these relationships seemed to be.

  For Manu, the most important fact about Ceará is that his son Kira was born there. His name means ‘the bird that takes flight’ in the local Indian language Guaraní. It also means ‘sun’ in Persian. Manu’s mother has met the child more than once, and Ramón hoped to do the same, but was taken ill when he was due to travel to Fortaleza. Kira’s mother and Manu had a short-lived relationship when they were on a trip together in the Amazon and, despite his crazy global schedule, Manu sees as much of both of them as he can. In 2009, he took the ten-year-old Kira on tour from Salvador to Recife, further down the coast from Fortaleza.

  In 2011, Manu also investigated the idea of setting up a project to harvest rainwater and irrigate the sertão during the dry months. With his girlfriend Maria Santos, they looked into solar-powered pumps and new, portable, filtering techniques. He also talked about setting up a factory to make the T-shirts and other items sold as merchandising at his shows, using organic material, naturally.

  I had already spent the last of my advance for this book, but when a bucket-shop charter flight to Fortaleza turned up for less than £400, I couldn’t resist it. I had this fantasy that Manu and I would hang out on the beach for a few says, shooting the breeze, puffing on some superior weed, downing some cachaça and maybe writing a song or two. Who knows? But the fact is that I’m here uninvited and whether Manu is away on the road or simply avoiding me, I have no way of knowing.

  He’s told me often enough that his favourite city is Rio de Janeiro. He takes pride in being accepted as the ‘house’ guitar player in some of its neighbourhood bars. ‘The old guys don’t know I’m Manu Chao,’ he told me, ‘and five minutes after I walk in, a guitar comes along and I have to sing for them for hours and hours.’ I love Manu’s line about Rio: ‘It’s the only city in the world where you can turn up to a bar at midnight banging a drum and they complain when you stop playing at 3am.’

  Of course, the favelas or shantytowns up on the hills around the city are dangerous. ‘Some people criticised the film City of God because it was so violent,’ Manu says, ‘but the reality is like that. There are the problems of alcohol, coke, ganja. I talked to the boss of a gang. He’s twenty-four but he said he was scared of his little brother and complained to me the youth have no morals any more. You have to be invited into the favelas, and I know people there.’

  Although Manu is attracted to and even in love with such places, the misery provokes his anger and he channels it into his music. ‘I’ve seen women thrown out of hospitals when they were about to give birth, guys being tortured in the favelas. And there’s nothing I can do about it.’ There are favelas in Fortaleza too, if slightly less dangerous ones, where Manu made that touching video of him playing guitar with the favela kids.

  Almost as soon as I land in Fortaleza, I check out the current trends in Forró, the dance rhythm of Brazil’s northeast. Today’s Forró, however, turns out to have little in common with the now antique poetic world of Luiz Gonzaga, who died in 1989. In fact, it has all the kitsch appeal of an endless Eurovision Song Contest, which might be quite amusing after several caipirinhas but sounds less good if you happen to be sober. I go and see Montage, a camp duo who sing an ode to Benflogin, a painkiller that teenagers use to get off their heads, and a song about prostitutes called “I Trust My Dealer”. Charter planes, mainly full of Italians, fly regularly into Fortaleza for cheap, good times with the local girls. Another curious song of theirs features lyrics about the Afro-Catholic religion Candomblé, whose variously coloured beads denote devotion to different deities. For example, blue and white are the colours of Yemaya, the ocean goddess. Daniel, the singer of Montage, tells me that he ran the lyrics of his Candomblé song past a local priestess in order to check they were OK.

  The beach of the future – Praia do Futuro – celebrates the goddess Yemaya.

  Candomblé fascinates Manu, partly because the different deities each have their own distinct rhythm, but also because each deity has his or her own very human qualities. Candomblé gods and goddesses are more human than holy. A Candomblé priestess once told Manu that he was the son of Changó, the fearsome Yoruban god of thunder, and she then initiated him into the religion.

  I once met Gilberto Gil, superstar of Brazilian tropicalismo, the radical music style of the 1960s and 1970s, who later became Brazil’s Minister of Culture. He was also a priest of Changó. Candomblé theology runs counter to the black and white worldview prevalent in Christianity and Islam. ‘It’s like the Greek pantheon, in that figures like Changó are both good and bad,’ Gil told me. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I’m both good and bad. If you don’t accept your darkness, you have to project it somewhere else.’ It was hard to disagree with him when he added: ‘The world could do with a bit less fundamentalism and a
bit more Brazilian tolerance.’

  When Candomblé gets mixed up with other African traditions, or even the reading of Tarot cards and other divination or witchcraft techniques, they call it Macumba, especially in and around Fortaleza. I’m told that any black man wearing a fedora hat will definitely be a practitioner. There are Macumba myths about animals like the Boto porpoise who can shape-shift into the form of an attractive man and seduce young women. Shops or market stalls will sell potions and herbs that are part of the Macumba pharmacopeia. Herbal Viagra is a top seller. If someone needs money, a Macumba herbalist will give them a potion to bathe in, and cash should then flow into his coffers. I recall a story Manu told me about feeling he was under a bad spell and being told to cover his body in salt, once a day, for several days.

  All this has a very poetic, curious and charming aspect, but I get glimpses of the real power of Macumba in Fortaleza. Whereas Manu’s views on things like politics or music are relatively rational and understandable, his more esoteric ideas on chance and energy, which underpin his philosophy of life, are opaque. He certainly takes coincidence and portents very seriously. Certain colours mean certain things to him, but he doesn’t want to elaborate too much. ‘If we get really stoned one night, maybe I’ll explain,’ he told me. ‘You shouldn’t get too hung up on this stuff.’

  By pure coincidence, or cow-incidence, as Manu has started calling it, during my stay in Fortaleza an important festival dedicated to the sea goddess Yemaya is due to be held on a beach called Praia do Futuro – the beach of the future. I have this strong intuition that Manu knows I’ll be looking for other consolations and will be tempted to attend the festival. I’m fairly sure that he knew I was coming to Brazil to find him.

  This quest for Manu is beginning to unhinge me. What the hell am I doing flying to a strange city halfway round the world on the off chance that I’ll run into this elusive rock star? Does Manu really want me to delve into the most private recesses of his life in pursuit of my journalistic quest? Does he really want me to trample all over the hallowed ground that he jealously reserves for spiritual recuperation and downtime with his son? Does he even want to see me at all? Or does he want me to try and understand something deeper about myself and my life, about the goddess of the sea and ultimately about him? Or perhaps I’m just a useful idiot in some guerrilla marketing campaign set-up by Manu and his manager. Or is the dope round here just too strong?

  At the Yemaya Festival there are hundreds of people garbed in blue and white, the colours of the ocean goddess. Several women are dressed up as mermaids, and drummers beat the rhythms of the orixas or ‘deities’. There are also a few politicians touting around for votes in the forthcoming elections. After asking a few people if they know what’s happening, I end up talking to a woman who looks like an ordinary housewife. She turns out to be a priestess of Yemaya. As we’re on the Praia do Futuro, I ask her if she makes predictions. ‘Often,’ is her reply.

  She tells me that Yemaya is a rather chic and vain goddess, who loves perfume and flowers. People are pouring perfume into the sea and the shore is strewn with roses and other blooms. It’s a ritual that expresses gratitude for the goddess and the ocean. Fishermen take it especially seriously, although many people from the parched interior are also here paying their respects to the goddess. How can it be that people with so little, and certainly so much less in material terms than most Westerners, are able to express such boundless gratitude?

  The atmosphere is full of joy and I think of Manu’s comment about the luxury of depression. ‘If you are struggling to feed your family in South America, you don’t have time or energy to be depressed.’ Almost as if it were a throwaway line, the priestess casually tells me that I should leave the beach at five.

  A few minutes after five, my translator from the tourist board reminds me of the priestesses’ words and says that we should leave. But I just need a few more minutes while I photograph a wonderful-looking character in a white suit, who’s up to his knees in the blue and white surf, distributing roses. Then, as I’m taking a flower from the beach and placing it in the ocean, to bid my own respectful farewell to the goddess before going, a couple of youths knock me over and steal my camera and MiniDisc recorder.

  I struggle to my feet, severely winded by the blow, and after recovering my breath I think of the priestess. Had she foreseen this? Or had she set the whole snatch up, just to impress the gringo writer?

  She’s given me her address and, with help from an understanding taxi driver, I find her house in the backstreets of a Fortalezan suburb. Her entire unassuming home is a shrine to Yemaya, with paintings, candles, beads and statues of the chic goddess everywhere. Fortuitously, possibly even fatefully – although I realise I’m beginning to see pre-ordained fate in everything that’s happening to me – the local English teacher happens to knock on the door just as I arrive and helps to translate.

  The priestess mutters some incantations, throws water on herself, then throws some shells and deals the Tarot cards. In a semi-trance, she begins to speak. She is fairly accurate about my past, even though she talks in generalities. There are, nonetheless, a few impressive hits, such as the legal action that I’m considering bringing against someone. For the future, she predicts success and a ‘powerful’ house in Brazil, protected by Yemaya and Changó, amongst other things. She also says that I’m hanging on to the past and that this is holding me back, that I need more forgiveness and more gratitude in my life.

  Before I leave Brazil, I go to another beach associated with Yemaya. I feel I haven’t taken the goddess seriously enough. I buy a bunch of roses and a bottle of decent perfume and I wade in, asking the goddess for forgiveness. I feel a great healing force going through my body and find myself crying salt tears into the ocean. All the muck and detritus blocking me up feels like it’s being dislodged, leaving my emotional arteries purged and clean. It’s the first time, for example, that I genuinely wish my ex-girlfriend happiness and am thankful for the time we’d spent together. All resentment is washed away by the caressing ocean.

  I ring up Manu’s management in Paris to try and find out where Manu might be. No word. So I hole up on the beach for a few days, in a fishing village called Preá, a really tranquil place. It’s so beautiful that I feel the urge to express my gratitude to someone and, since I’m alone, then who better than the deities? Signs and portents seem to be every everywhere. The door to my pousada requires a certain knack before it can be opened. It can’t be forced. Sheer willpower isn’t going to work. Under a multitude of stars I listen to a wonderful symphony of noise: the different sounds of the wind through the trees, the rush of the ocean, the occasional bird and every few minutes an electronic beep from somewhere, like the slowest dance music in the world, like the music of the future.

  In the end, I do meet up with Manu in Brazil. I hear about a concert he’s booked to play in Recife. Through a Brazilian journalist friend, I manage to get a backstage pass. Before the concert, Manu is nervous and isn’t talking to anyone. Afterwards, expansive as always, he wants to talk to all his fans and to the locals backstage. At last, I grab my chance and walk up to him through the crowd. Manu looks at me, with a big smile on his face and, before turning to talk to the other people waiting in line, he hugs me and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  OUTRO: FINISTERRE

  I’m at Finisterre, the end of the earth. It’s the furthest west you can go. Galician fishermen, Manu’s ancestors, would hoist sail here and strike out, braving the dark waves towards unknown horizons. It was also the final destination for many pilgrims who made the long journey on foot to Santiago. Further back in time, there was a pre-Christian pagan temple called Ara Solis here, erected to worship the sun. It seems as good a place as any to say farewell to the man who was born on the longest day of the year and who, perhaps as a consequence, honours and loves the sun.

  I heard Manu was rehearsing with his band in Galicia, the country where his father and grandfather were born. So I
followed. But now I’m here, I realise I have to let go. I’ve spent enough time and money chasing the disappearing one. I’m in debt, my journalistic career is on the brink, I’ve become obsessive. Time to move on.

  Somewhere near the beach, a musician is strumming a guitar. The music creeps by me on the waters. For a second, absurdly, I think of Prospero before he drowns his book and gives up magic. I take off my Manu Chao bracelet, which I bought at a merchandise stall in Mexico City, and throw it in the water. It bounces a couple of times and sinks deep into the bosom of the ocean. The end of the line. Even when, on my last day, I see a blog announcing an impromptu Manu concert in La Coruña, I don’t go.

  A few days earlier, I had swung by Vilalba, the Galician town where Manu’s grandfather José used to own the Gran Hotel Chao. Ramón was born there. A long time ago, in the downstairs bar, José cold-shouldered the wayward Ramón, who had forsaken his father’s dream of musical greatness to become a writer and a journalist. After several years of not communicating, Ramón returned to present his four-year-old son José-Manuel, nicknamed ‘Manu’, José’s namesake, to his grandfather. The story goes that José was playing cards when his son and grandson came through the hotel door. He refused even to look Ramón in the eye. How blind you were, José. Your dream of ‘Chopin’ Chao, a musician of global renown who would conquer not only your beloved Cuba but the whole of Latin America, was standing right there in front of you, diminutive, shy, innocent.