Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  My friends didn’t seem too bothered by the idea of Brazil. Everyone spent three months in South America climbing up mountains and getting high with shamans before going home to Australia to get married, have some brats, and die. So the city of Rio de Janeiro itself was just meant to be a short sun-and-samba stopover before I went on to ride with gauchos at a Brazilian rodeo, meet the Afro-Brazilians of Salvador, canoe up the river with the Amazonian Indians, climb Machu Pichu, buy a terrible Bolivian llama jumper, hunt with revolutionaries in Columbia, and, finally, take tea with Marcos of the Zapatistas in Mexico. At that time, after a decade in the travel industry with free flights and work-sponsored travel, I was a hunter-traveller, slinging countries like pelts on my back before moving onto new territories within a matter of days, boredom my only predator. In retrospect, I should have known better than to underestimate a tiger like Rio de Janeiro, but I guess there comes a time when all hunters become the hunted.

  CONTRARY TO THE SOUND ADVICE of Carina and to the delight of Chiara, the following afternoon I located a ghost bus for Barretos that was departing Rio on a one-off rodeo special on the Sunday evening. It would arrive at some time on Monday morning at the bus station of Barretos. I booked the ticket. Carina’s colleague Alex at the Rio Hostel loaned me a tent in case the hammock didn’t work out, and I told Carina I was leaving in three days. I was organised. Locked and loaded. Just two more nights in Rio de Janeiro and I would be done with the tropical city of the south and onto my big adventure — an adventure that, I had to admit, always seemed to be one stop down the road and never quite where I was at that moment.

  For the rest of the day, I walked up and down what seemed to be the best parts of the ninety-three different stone staircases that link Santa Teresa to the low-lying suburbs that surround her. One of them is even a famous work of art, covered in beautiful tiles from every country in the world. The artist, who lived on the stairs, was a mad Chilean who came to Rio over twenty years before and started tiling the stone staircase for lack of something better to do. Chiara said he had not left the staircase in twenty years. He certainly acted like he owned it — washing it every day, watering its plants, and telling people not to ash their cigarettes on it. He had thousands of hand-painted and rare tiles on some 150 rows of stone, and I asked him if he had one from Australia. He led me excitedly to one on the third flight, which turned out to be a rather disappointing mass-produced Home Base type of bathroom tile decorated in pastel-blue flowers. He said it was from Brisbane. At least it was better than New Zealand’s, which was blank.

  When I got back in the afternoon, I saw that Chiara had left me a note to go to her capoeira night. The note read to meet her at a place called Ta’ Na’ Rua in Lapa.

  ‘Where is Ta’ Na’ Rua?’ I asked Carina.

  ‘Somewhere dirty and strange, knowing Chiara,’ she mumbled from beneath the reception desk. Our conversation coincided with the daily return of the ‘Don’t be a Tourist: be a Local’ favela tour group. One of the Scandinavians was at the front with a glum face.

  ‘How was it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Alright,’ he mumbled with a shrug.

  ‘Alright?’ I probed.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t what I expected.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t that poor. Nobody was starving there. There was even a bank there.’

  ‘It’s disappointing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. I did slum tour in Soweto, man. Now those guys are seriously poor.’

  As I left, the tour guide offered me a lift down to the capoeira in his black four-wheel drive with tinted windows. He was a big man, with that overfed look of the Brazilian upper class about him, dark curly hair, and an even bigger smile. English pop music poured from the CD player. He told me about his business and asked if I could connect him up with STA Travel in London.

  ‘So where you gonna live in Rio?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not going to live in Rio.’

  ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I live in Australia,’ I shrugged. There was a moment’s silence.

  As we pulled into Lapa, he looked across at me.

  ‘Well, whatever happens, Santa Teresa is going to be a long way to come when you’re my girlfriend.’ And then he gave a big cheeky laugh, as though not even he could believe what he’d just said.

  We parked in Lapa, he threw a one-real note to an old guy without shoes, and we walked the rest of the way to the bar. It was a hollowed-out crumbling terrace painted fire-engine red, with a sign saying ‘Ta’ Na’ Rua’ and a drawing of a juggling clown hanging rakishly above it. Some ragged-looking hippies with armfuls of seed and leather jewellery stood outside, drinking and smoking weed. Inside, a beautiful black girl dressed in torn punkish clothes with waist-length plaits flipped the pages of a magazine laid open on the top of the bar.

  At the back of the dimly lit terrace, Chiara’s capoeira group were practising their ‘game’. It was the first time I’d seen a real game of capoeira. Up until then, I only knew it as some sort of Afro-Brazilian martial-arts hybrid that seemed to get hold of people with the voracity of an evangelist cult. One week you would be drinking at the local with your mate; the next week, he would have disappeared, re-emerging some months later wearing white, carrying a tambourine, and speaking in strange musical tongues.

  In front of the stage at Ta’ Na’ Rua, a circle of people, including Chiara, surrounded two men in play. The game was in full swing. A strong older man in a small, black, peaked hat crouched beneath the kicking legs of a fit young man dressed only in white trousers. The tour guide and I moved in closer to have a look, and Chiara glanced across at us briefly. I started to smile, but she had already looked back to the game.

  The younger one was a marvel to behold. Like a gymnast swinging and straining against the floor rather than bars. He moved swiftly and expertly, twisting his lithe, beautiful body in clean-cut moves to the rhythm of three drums behind him. He rolled effortlessly onto his hands and held both legs up in the air, perfectly still like a forked tree, lingering for a second before one leg swung down. The room gasped as he brought his knee close to the temple of the older player and then withdrew, as though he wanted to remind his audience that he was controlling the game. The audience breathed a sigh of relief, and the tour guide looked around at the spectators.

  By contrast, his opponent was calm, even subdued. He was probably around forty, but he had the measured movements of someone much older. He seemed to be moving through the game reactively — unhurried, perhaps, by youthful enthusiasm. I watched him carefully. His eyes didn’t blink. Meanwhile, the young man, emboldened by his near victory, played on with more energy. Sweat began to glisten on his chest and arms. He spun once more in the air, kicked his legs up to his side, and balanced on one arm. His muscles rippled. The sweat flew off him. He seemed inspired by the admiration of the crowd; but then, somehow, only moments later, it seemed to tire him. His game lagged briefly. The older man continued at the same steady pace.

  The other players around them clapped louder as if aware of an imminent finish. The young man came back on the attack, conscious that the game had slipped away a little from him, but still confident. Big, bold moves followed, but still the older man escaped easily from underneath him. It went on for minutes like this, consistency wearing away at stamina, until the younger man’s exhaustion finally brought a moment of confusion. In an instant’s fatal hesitation, he allowed the older man to move to the centre. The young man was suddenly underneath. The game had turned. The clapping grew louder. He extracted himself crudely in a last escape and then threw his body forward again, but he was blocked at every move. His flailing, deer-like limbs collapsed against the circling predator. It was impossible to tell if this was a game, a fight, a play, or two animals in a darkened wood, but eventually the circle closed with the older man wound around the young man like a snake i
n the grass. The game was over.

  ‘CHIARA!’ I EXCLAIMED, after the game had finished. ‘That was incredible.’ But she didn’t respond. She was looking past me at the departing tour guide.

  ‘What’s the tour guide doing here?’ she asked.

  I looked back over my shoulder.

  ‘He gave me a lift.’

  ‘Well, don’t bring him here again,’ she said with flashing eyes. ‘Ararei’s capoeira is clean of those tour sharks … and that’s the way we’re going to keep it.’

  The disagreement that followed showed the classic traveller’s dilemma. I argued that the tours might offer a way for the instructors to sustain themselves so that rich foreigners like Chiara could play for free without the ignominy of feeling like they were buying culture. Chiara argued in turn that there was no more certain sign of the death of a culture than the existence of a tour. I broadly agreed with her, even if it was less for the moral reasons than for the fact that they were downright embarrassing. Paying $50 for Massai women to leave their cooking and cleaning to jump up and down for a while, or travelling through slums in a bullet-proof van was not so much of a moral issue to me as it was one of individual pride. It was like an admission that either you were so awkward that you couldn’t find your own local connections to something as readily available as a poor person or, alternatively, so dumb you couldn’t see the contrivances behind it all.

  I shrugged the argument off. I didn’t want to think about it. I had learned in my long career in tourism, as bucket-and-spade tour operators ripped up paradise beaches and low-cost airlines destroyed quaint European villages with a force unknown since World War II, that it was best not to think about anything too much whilst travelling. This was an opinion not shared by Chiara, of course. She was a mad Brazilophile, and was in Rio after living in Salvador, where she had apprenticed herself to learn the art of capoeira. She was a warrior. Unlike my decision to go to the rodeo, her passion for Brazil had been turned and shaped over years, manifesting itself in her studies of anthropology at Trinity College in Ireland and her dedicated following of capoeira. She was tall and willowy with long, dark hair when I met her, but on her passport photo she had a peroxided mohawk.

  ‘My punk days,’ she explained, as we made our way out of Ta’ Na’ Rua and onto the street outside. It was dark by then, and the white, stone aqueduct of Lapa shimmered up ahead of us in the moonlight. The arches stood eighty feet above the deepest ground, connecting the hills of Santa Teresa with the city below in a dramatic sweep of Roman-style arches. It was one of the first constructions of Rio, and the surrounding buildings wrapped themselves around it. Carina told me that they had once carried water from the springs of Corcovado, but now it was just a tram track. We stopped underneath it for a moment while Chiara yelled up into the convex so I could hear the acoustics before moving on up the stairs towards the centre of Lapa.

  The night was sleazily inviting, the air moist, and the light split yellow and black like a tiger’s eye. A thick cluster of people hung together at the head of the cobblestone cross between two streets called Joaquim Silva and the Ladeira of Lapa, and from the steps of Bar Antonio they looked like bees moving up and down a trail of honey. There was a terrific noise ricocheting between a group of drummers under the arches and somebody’s car-boot stereo. It made the drunks and tourists wild, their pupils dilated and their feet stamping, but the locals looked less perturbed. The men lounged alone, predatory on the white, stone staircases, watching squads of young girls in bright miniskirts walk arm-in-arm, atop marching walls of brown legs.

  In front of us, a toothless hundred-kilo woman wore an orange bathing suit cut into strips to resemble a Los Angeles flyover. Huge wads of flesh were oozing through the holes, and a pair of black, shiny hot pants designed for a thirty-kilo thirteen-year-old covered her modesty below. Her feet were clad in a pair of high-heeled plastic platform thongs. Her companion, a pregnant man with a twenty-inch microphone of grey hair, was nodding earnestly at her conversation.

  ‘Is she a prostitute?’ I asked Chiara, and she shrugged and said, ‘Sometimes.’

  As for the others, while there was a bit of variation — the odd hair clip here and there — the official uniform of Lapa was, by and large, ten-inch plastic platform thongs in white or pastel colours, size-four hot pants cut six inches below the bellybutton, and a breast-popping Lycra midriff shoestring strap top. Hair was worn long and greased. And while the majority of the girls in Lapa would make a supermodel look like a spoilt old bag, it was clear that age and weight were not barriers to the proud wearing of the uniform. I was not the first foreigner to gape wide-eyed at the sex-industry-inspired fashion — that surely accounted for the gaggle of nerdy-looking sex tourists who were hanging around on our left — but Chiara was disappointed by my uncultured surprise nonetheless.

  ‘That’s the way people dress in the tropics,’ she explained.

  ‘Well, they don’t dress like that in Cairns,’ I said dubiously.

  ‘I mean the Latin tropics, not Anglo-Saxon places,’ she said.

  The colonial terraces that lined the streets were similar to Largo dos Guimarães in Santa Teresa, but smaller, more shabby, and blackened from pollution and age. The inescapable stench of urine wafted through the air from no apparent source, and broken cobblestones ran beneath our feet. Chiara emerged from the bar, stopping to chat to someone at the entrance, and then took me to sit down on one of the six red-tiled terrace steps that ran up the side of the Arches of Lapa. Two homeless kids rushed up and sat at our feet, sniffing glue from a Coke can.

  ‘Lapa is the real bohemian district,’ Chiara told me, as a police car pulled up onto the terrace below us. ‘I lived in Salvador for three months looking for this, and I did not once find anything like it. I should have stayed in Rio.’

  ‘Looking for bohemia?’ I asked

  ‘Looking for culture,’ she corrected me with a smile.

  I glanced around to see what she was seeing: Lycra-clad locals, muscle boys, musicians, drunks, tourists, and a hippie element of dreadlocked jewellery-sellers entwining bits of leather and stone. There was a lively and vibrant mood, even if it was faintly menacing. Two portly musicians laughed loudly as they entered a bar with their instruments, a woman argued furiously with her lover who was trying to free himself lightly from her grasp, street kids played truant around a burnt-out car with one hand wrapped around their glue bottles, and a group of tough-looking young black men lounged against a graffitied wall with effortless Brazilian cool. The initials CV, for Comando Vermelho — Rio’s main drug-trafficking faction, Chiara told me — were scrawled on every wall.

  A police car drove up shortly afterwards, a machine gun resting on each of the three passenger windows. The street kids ran, the onlookers scattered casually, and Chiara and I watched on as one particularly brutish officer got out and began systematically ripping apart a mattress that lay beside the burnt-out car.

  IT WAS CHIARA who laid out the landscape of Brazil for me, albeit through the fiery telescope of a Marxist revolutionary. She told it from the start: from when the Portuguese had arrived ‘accidentally’ on their way to India in 1502, to the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries; the enslavement and massacre of the Indian populations; the coming of the African slave trade; the relocation of the imperial court of Portugal to escape Napoleon; coffee; sugar; war with Paraguay; independence; military dictatorship; the impeachment of Collar; and the rise and rise of Lula. I hadn’t even known there was slavery in Brazil.

  ‘How could you not know that?’ she asked incredulously, and tossed her head with irritation. ‘That’s the problem with travellers. They don’t have a fucking clue. How can you travel in a country without knowing anything … no! … everything about it. What’s the point?’

  I was silent. When I first started travelling I would read the guidebooks religiously, swot up on the local customs, history, and religion, watch the films, read the English-tra
nslated literature, and learn the basic language. And then I got bored. Bored of travellers telling each other the same stories from the shaded boxes. ‘Did you know that Prince Pedro had twenty-five lovers …?’ ‘Oh, really. Did he? Where did you read that? Page 39? Or is yours the last edition, which would make it page 25?’ Even the local tour guides around the world read from the guidebooks. Backpacker conversations were distilled through Lonely Planet, Footprint, Rough Guides, and all those other books designed to destroy the spontaneity of life. There was nowhere left to move. We all went to the same hostels, saw the same sights, and read the same books. Now I just travelled to get a buzz. The less I knew, the better. It was my way, as I hitch-hiked with truck drivers, had dangerous relationships with inappropriate men, and trekked over mountains alone, of reminding myself, after all the mind-numbing call centres and dull conversations about interest rates and housing prices and career ascension, that I was, in fact, still alive.

  –4–

  Casa Amarela

  The moon was magnificent. In Santa Teresa, between the sky and the flatlands below, the least audacious soul was capable of going up against an enemy army and destroying it.