Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  For a social artist like Gustavo, I was a blank canvas. He was an optimistic man with an enormous imagination and no children to disappoint him.

  ‘So, my dear, what are you doing in Rio?’

  ‘Just passing through. I thought I would stay on for a month.’

  ‘Marvellous. Lemon with your tea?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Of course you will. You must. English people do.’

  ‘Oh. I guess I will, then.’

  ‘And your family?’

  ‘I have two brothers and one sister and ...’

  ‘No, not that. Your lineage.’

  ‘Ummm … Well sort of half-German, half-English, dash of Scot. My dad works in sort of, well, consulting, but they were farmers originally, really.’

  ‘Oh! A ranch owner. A fazendeiro, we call them here.’

  ‘It’s not really a ranch; more like a farm. It’s not really of the proportions of your coffee colonels or anything …’

  ‘A fazendeiro’s daughter …’ he interrupted dreamily.

  ‘Not really a fazenda, as I said, but a small plot of …’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘I come from Australia, but I was living in England for five years.’

  ‘So you have blood of the English aristocracy.’

  ‘Not quite … I mean, Australians are not really what you call aristocratic, but …’

  ‘But you personally formed part of the landed gentry?’

  ‘No, not …’

  ‘Please, my child. There is no need for explanations.’

  Silence from my end. His eyes grew very wide.

  ‘Your grandmother was an English baroness, wasn’t she?’ His eyes boggled.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was not until the following week, when I discovered that there was a soap opera or novella playing in Brazil at the time about a young fazendeiro’s daughter who ran away to Rio to escape an arranged marriage, that I realised the full extent of Gustavo’s extraordinary imagination in making me his heroine. He became determined to broker an alternative arrangement to my phantom fiancée, preferably with one of his illustrious connections, before, as he put it, ‘the sun set on my youth’. To prepare me for this end, as we split open fresh mangoes from the garden and fed Torré delicate spoonfuls of duck-liver pate, he educated me on the finer points of Brazilian culture. Never lose your temper; never reveal publicly that you have seen anyone with anyone at any time (direct family members excepted); never ever admit to infidelity (do you want to upset the whole apple cart?); and smile, for goodness sake, darling. Nobody likes miserable medieval types in Brazil.

  It was like living in the middle of a soap opera at times (Gustavo was the wise godfather figure, I was the innocent heroine, and Chiara was the villain).

  ‘How are you, my pearl?’ he asked one morning a couple of weeks into my stay, as I rose after a night under the belly of Lapa with Chiara and her capoeira boys. He was helping the cleaner, Denize, arrange the house, as a Brazilianised version of Cats’ ‘Memories’ poured out of the radio. Gustavo’s favourite music was opera, but when he did lower himself to the common chord, it was a strict rota of Lloyd Webber musicals, Queen, and anyone who did a version of ‘I Can’t Live (if living is without you)’.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said, remembering the group playing under the white arches of Lapa, the street kids clamouring to join in, the drunks wavering in the background, and the steady rhythm of the tambore drum as two men in white spun and turned like prisms of light in the darkened circle.

  ‘Did you dance at the baaalll?’ he asked lazily.

  ‘Not really a ball.’ I said amused. ‘I was with Chiara …’

  ‘A ball. How wonderful. Were there handsome men and champagne and music and caviar …?’ he continued with a dreamy smile.

  ‘I was in Lapa, Gustavo.’

  He gave a little shiver of repugnance.

  ‘Indeed.’

  He massaged my entrance into his odd little high-society world with the preface that I was an Australian cattle heiress (‘nearly one million kangaroos!’) escaping a marriage arranged by her tyrannical tycoon father. It was a crash course in the delicate chains of etiquette that encircle a society of infidels, and I stumbled through it like a bull in a china shop, with Gustavo shifting the Ming Dynasty vases out of my way as I came. I made all the classic faux pas of ‘innocent’ Anglo Saxons — asking what people did for a living, presuming that the people who were with people were actually the people who they were with, and so on —but the Cariocas are generous and I was forgiven. It was relatively simple to enter Gustavo’s society world, partly because it was not really high society, but mainly because the people were frequently drunk.

  THERE IS A SAYING in Rio that the city is composed of four social classes — ‘the poor, the very poor, the sort of poor, and the rich.’ Australia may be called the land Down-Under, but it is in Brazil, as their immigrant Princess Leopoldina once wrote in a letter to her sister back in Austria, where ‘everything is upside down’. It was a familiar sentiment among the travelling community. Australia is a wealthy, egalitarian country with an average income of US$33,000. Brazil has an average income of $3500, and even that miserable amount is distributed so unevenly that the country regularly languishes in the bottom ten of the United Nation’s world-inequality index.

  For my part, I was frequenting the ‘twilight’ class: a sort of purgatorial holding-pen that ran off the side of the gateway to real wealth and influence, where a few, nervous ‘sort of poor’ who had managed to haul themselves up from the engine-room floor mingled anxiously with the ‘rich’ slipping down the ladder. Being exposed by the ‘sort of poor’ was not a risk. These were the type of people who were still impressed by foreigners. The usually revealing answers about what school you went to, or the tell-tale signs of accents, did not apply. Cabramatta High, SCEGGS Redlands, Eton, Brixton High — it was all the same to them. Not only that, but they were remarkably shallow. Unlike English high society, for example, where you are forced to answer twenty questions about English history, Lord Byron, and the architecture of Florence before they will even let you into their damn Kings Road bars to have a beer, the only entry requirements to Brazilian high society seemed to be a tactless display of money and a pair of leather shoes. As for the ‘rich’ — the ones who had swindled their family incomes and were selling off the family antiques to pay their bar bills — they were too drunk to be bothered about whether I came from Chelsea or Charleville.

  GUSTAVO, WHATEVER HIS POSITION on this cruel totem of Brazilian high society, was an admirably devoted patron of the visual arts. He may not have been a prolific reader, but his house was a veritable museum of Brazilian art history, spanning the colonial etchings of the First Fleet right through to contemporary modernism. His favourite epoch was the emotionally charged baroque. The gilded wood angels, the engraved religious silverwork, the twisted columns, the fluted friezes, the profusion of grapes, leaves, vines, clouds, cherubs, and innocent rosy faces absolutely enchanted him. Silver ecclesiastical sculpture, processional crosses, lamps, bird-shaped incense burners, and alms dishes jammed the side tables. Wooden gilded doves symbolising the Holy Spirit graced every wall. A black Madonna guarded his bedroom door from her glass casket.

  Brazilian baroque was a marriage made in heaven. The drama, the tension, and the triumphant ostentatiousness were perfectly suited to the hot-blooded Brazilians. The Age of Enlightenment might have usurped this excessive style in Europe, but there was no such modesty in Brazil. Isolated in the tropics and spurred on by nostalgia and a gold rush, baroque went on a rampage through colonial Brazil, leaving behind thousands of gold-encrusted churches and manifesting itself in flamboyant local festivals. Most of the baroque art in Gustavo’s house came from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, growing up between its celestial godparents of mining and religion, but he took me around t
o his favourite dens of baroque splendour in Rio anyway: the gold-dripping treasure chest in the Church of São Bento, where he taught me to cross myself like a good Catholic (‘It’s like this, one, two, three, four, then kiss the hand. Look upwards. Eyes closed. Look at you now! So chic!’); and the Passeio Publico, a shadowy park across from Lapa where the rich once admired the stone arches of the mulatto sculptor Valentim, but was now ‘filled with dirty poor people’.

  On Fridays we would go to the extravagant neo-baroque Theatro Municipal to see a ballet or the occasional opera. Inspired by the Paris Opera (the sweeping lobby is nearly identical), the theatre was constructed in 1909 at the height of Rio’s belle époque, to host the sons and daughters of coffee and rubber barons in the marble and gold surroundings to which they were becoming increasingly accustomed. It was a fashionable custom to drink downstairs before the show, in the luxuriously appointed jade-tiled Egyptian salon, although it took some generosity to imagine its heyday on the evenings we went there. The room was now partially closed off, the lights dimmed to conserve expensive electricity, and the beer served in cheap plastic cups. On my first night there, the theatre hosted the baroque ballet of Swan Lake. It was a second-rate production — their insistence on sticking to a traditional European interpretation was not only pretentious but somewhat bizarre, given that we were in one of the most celebrated centres of modern culture in the world — but it was still a ballet. And I wasn’t complaining.

  THE HOUSE WAS EVERYTHING. Casa Amarela was a classic Santa Teresa art-nouveau mansion designed by the Spanish architect Juan Gatell in 1919, using the clean modernist lines of his Catalonian heritage, and positioned on the illustrious backbone street of Joaquim Murtinho. In its time, Rua Joaquim Murtinho had been inhabited by the cream of the Brazilian ruling class, with half the generals of the Brazilian royal military, and then — after the new republic was announced in 1889 — the politicians of the new republican ministry living within her vine-encrusted walls. The new bairro was the result of an exodus from the old city that began when yellow fever seeped its way through the narrow, winding colonial lanes of Rio’s first empire. Later they would tear down half the city to clean out the dreaded virus; but at the time, the bourgeois elite had no choice but to flee to the hills, where they enlisted Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian architects to build their new mansions in the styles of their beloved Europe.

  There is something of the new world in the mishmash of architectural styles in Santa Teresa; it is without rhyme or reason, but somehow it seems to work. The existence side-by-side of a shocking pink eclectic mansion, an elegant art deco terrace, a white-washed colonial house and a cubist condominium, gave Santa Teresa a charm and individuality that I had never seen anywhere in the world. It was near deserted when I arrived that winter: the bairro was emerging from two decades of urban violence, and the suburb had fallen into ruin. Vines and creepers of once-grand gardens spilled uncontrolled over the walls, domes and spires collapsed on the badly maintained houses, and tree roots broke up the cobbled sidewalks. The bairro had reached the peak of its splendour at the turn of the century when Rio spun into her own little belle époque, her residents riding high on the spoils of a coffee boom. It crashed less than two decades later, marking the beginning of the boom-to-bust-to-boom-again economy for which Brazil has been so famous.

  The fortunes of Casa Amarela were equally tumultuous, and after the last resident — a melancholic woman who apparently used to stalk my balcony naked and covered in mosquito bites — threw herself out of the back window, the house finally fell into complete ruin and was sold to Gustavo a decade or so ago for a song. Santa Teresa had fallen into complete ruin; favelas — illegal slums — broke out like rashes in every uninhabited crevice of the bairro; the police presence dribbled down to a few corrupt officers; and the entire area was swamped with petty and not-so-petty crime.

  It was here in 1969 that the American ambassador was kept hostage after a kidnapping by revolutionaries protesting crackdowns on civil liberties by the military dictatorship. The elite of Brazil were long gone to Copacabana by that stage, where massive, white penthouses were being erected on the new sweeping Avenida Atlantica. Gustavo occasionally went down to Copacabana as well, visiting friends who lived in three-storey penthouses overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, but the truth was that he was a mansion type of guy. He had his two Rottweilers and his enormous wild garden, which supplied the mangoes, avocados, and bananas that we ate daily, not to mention the herbs and strange remedies that he extracted to supply his extensive medical needs.

  At the Casa Amarela, we had three residents in fifteen rooms: Gustavo, Paulo, and me. We sprawled across the mansion, creating nests and hives of activity in whatever corner took our fancy for the day, my favourite being perched Audrey-Tatou-like on the antique wooden chairs in the breakfast room to write my diary. Paulo, thanks to the grace of God, lived three floors below us on the ground floor among the wild garden. That meant we could hear him racing up the stairs when he wanted to attack someone, and quickly lock our doors.

  Being a mostly-out-of-work actor, he was somewhat intolerant of the quiet moments in life and would do everything within his power to please, inspire, or outrage people to provide cheap entertainment. His way of tormenting me was to force me to sing ‘Hey, Big Spender’ in front of guests, only relenting once I had done the full cabaret dance action across the zebra chaise lounge (there was never a couch that had more attention), finishing up by sliding down the wall. This is not to say I am, or ever was, a particularly extroverted character, but to merely point out that Brazil and the Brazilians unlock the drama queen in everyone. Part of it is just keeping up with them. They dance for hours, laugh loudly, wear ribbons in their hair, and chat to complete strangers on buses. And that’s just the adults. In that sort of environment, the most introverted wallflower of an Anglo-Saxon just might find themselves singing ‘Hey, Big Spender’ as they slide down the side of a zebra-skin couch. The other part is because it’s fun. Damn it, sometimes it’s just fun to be reckless and unselfconscious, knowing that, shortly, you would never see those people again, so there would be nobody around to ever remind you of your broken, off-key voice, your clumsy, knee-grazing slide, and the uncertain, empty clap of the bemused observers that followed.

  ‘Brazilians are crazy,’ I said to Gustavo one morning as Paulo ran around the house neighing like a horse. Gustavo tittered and then poured tea out into a small porcelain cup and saucer. ‘No, Rio is crazy, my dear. And in Rio, the people who live in Santa Teresa are the most insane of them all. Anywhere else and they would all be locked up.’

  While it was not the best time of the year for lying on the beach, I can barely remember going to the tourist haunts of Copacabana or Ipanema. I stayed up on my hill, wandering up and down her ninety-three stone staircases, occasionally inventing an excuse to go into the old city on the port, but never even considering going down to explore the famous beaches of Brazil.

  I started reading books about Rio de Janeiro, snatching at whatever English books I could find, and desperately trying to learn a bit of the confounding language of Portuguese. I met a Chinese-Russian-Brazilian woman called Helen who ran a run-down bookshop in Lapa, frequented by a group of poets who claimed to be friends with Nick Cave, and who opened the world of Brazilian literature and culture for me. Each Tuesday I would go to collect my book of the week — the writers Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector; the playwright Nelson Rodrigues; the historians of Empire Adrift or the gossipy little Every Inch a King; and the eternal observers, our very own Peter Robb and the cantankerous Steven Berkoff.

  I found myself visiting museums with genuine interest for the first time in my life, speaking to old people on street corners to get their stories, and buying up the locally written guidebooks, heaven forbid. I would even have used the library but, due to ‘Culture on Strike’, a protest by the workers of cultural institutions in the city in an attempt to get paid, the Biblioteca Nacional was clo
sed for that year. For the first time in a long ten years of travelling, I felt like I was discovering something completely new — as though I was at the back of a deserted library in an abandoned house, blowing the dust off a yellowing volume of magic spells, about to discover something quite extraordinary.

  It was a dream life.

  ‘My God,’ whispered a friend of mine from London who happened to be passing through Rio and saw the state of luxury I was living in, ‘You’re not doing a Talented Mr Ripley on us, are you?’ I could see the reason for his concern, as I was flitting about society parties and bohemian enclaves every night until dawn, sleeping until noon, taking coffee on the Chinese princess bed, and then wandering about avant-garde poetry readings and art exhibitions until the night began again. If someone had stood between me and my princess bed at that time, maybe I would have killed him, too. My plans to move on to Salvador were abandoned in a haze of blue-blooded bohemia. My family sent emails asking me when I would be leaving Rio, and I artfully avoided them by sending brief telegraphic-style replies that were guaranteed to get no response: ‘No money. Please send. Love Carmen.’

  My first month in Santa Teresa was a magical time. Gustavo loved me, and I loved him. In each other, we found just about everything we lacked in our lives at the time. He was glamorous, melodramatic, and owned a house. I was middle class, easily excitable, and paid the rent. We went to parties together, where he introduced me as his wayward niece and presented me to the most eligible bachelors of Santa Teresa, most of whom were married. Sometimes I lunched with him and his brother Luis Carlos, who lived in the heights of Santa Teresa in the ‘Castle Ideal’, a genuine castle filled with original Mathuin sculptures and half the art history of Brazil. It was one of the most blissful times of my life living there with Gustavo, finally free from the dreaded chains of wage slavery, away from the prying rationality of friends and family, and oblivious to the poverty that raged around me. My life was bound by the maze of staircases that wraps itself around Santa Teresa.