Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  ‘Life is so short,’ I rationalised to myself; I would be gone to Salvador before long, and Gustavo, Chiara, and Carina would all be a distant memory. That was, of course, before I met Winston Churchill and things got a little more complicated.

  –5–

  Malandro

  Malandro is malandro, like a fool is a fool.

  – BEZERRA DA SILVA

  The sun was rising over the moonstone arches of Lapa when I first met Winston Churchill. Fingers of rose-coloured light were slowly creeping towards the archways, exposing darkened crevices where Friday-night lovers huddled and alcoholics cradled their empty bottles. A ragtag bunch of dishevelled lawyers, transvestite prostitutes, and street kids on glue were gathered around two musicians, one with a drum and the other with a plucky little guitar that the Brazilians call a cavaquinho. A toothless hag was dancing barefoot, wearing a glittering plastic sack and an elaborate feather headdress left over from last year’s Carnaval parade. Winston Churchill spotted me staggering along with my third (or was it seventh?) caipirinha, the limes browning in a cup of melted ice and sugar, wondering where Chiara had gone to and whether it was in fact plausible that I could be the first Australian samba queen of the bateria! Later, people would say that I went out with Winston Churchill because I wanted to save him, but at the time it was arguable that the only person in need of saving was me.

  Brazil’s homage to the English prime minister was six feet tall, black as midnight, and dressed all in white. His eyes were a startling pale blue, split with hazel like a wild cat. In less than a second, Gustavo’s society bachelors were about as interesting to me as a blank wall. Winston abandoned the other musicians to their indulgences and walked unashamedly to my side. Nothing was said at first because he was singing a song about something called a beijo while plucking romantic twanging notes from his lyre. It was just Winston and me on a dirty cobbled street in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, the universe with all its stars and moons spinning around us. When I asked him what a beijo was, he kissed me on the mouth, looked me straight in the eyes, and said in English, ‘That is a beijo.’ Afterwards we walked along Flamengo Beach and talked about samba. He told me I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. It seemed unlikely, even more so because we were on the beach which was already filling with hordes of coffee-coloured supermodels in g-strings, but I didn’t argue the point. It was not really the kind of point I would have argued. Less than four hours later, having progressed to lunching ‘poolside’ at a five-star hotel in Ipanema, tuxedoed waiters hovering above us as though we were the King and Queen of England, he made a dramatic confession.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  My fork clattered to the table in shock. A waiter went on brushing down the crumbs as though nothing had happened.

  ‘But we just met …’

  ‘I know. Love is crazee, no?’ he said, warmly clasping my hand and instructing the waiter to bring us champagne. What a glorious culture! So unbound by insecurities and free of fear! I had been serenaded, flattered, and loved in less than five hours. It was incredibly romantic, even if I discovered three days later that Winston lived with his ex-wife, a dying actress who had promised him her inheritance.

  Understanding the motives behind my taking up with Winston Churchill is bound to be a messy business, but I guess the starting point was that I fell head over heels in love with possibility. How could I not? It was as if, coming home alone one day to the red-brick semi-detached in the ‘burbs, Brad Pitt passed you on the sidewalk, fell to his knees, and said, ‘My God. I’ve finally found you.’ You’d give it a go, wouldn’t you?

  Winston Churchill was built like a spring boxer, looked like a buffed-up version of Denzel Washington, and could dance a samba that made the guys from the Buena Vista Social Club look like they had club feet. Of course, if I had known it was the devil himself asking me to dance, maybe I would have thought twice. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. When he came to my house two nights later and serenaded me underneath the Chinese princess balcony with sweet tinkling tunes about undying love while the neighbours pelted him with rotten mangoes and threats of violence, I took my chances and delayed my ticket to Salvador once more.

  It started with a bang. It was as if he had been waiting for me to arrive. On the muscular arm of Winston Churchill, the back streets of Rua Joaquim Silva, Rua da Lapa, and Rua Taylor rushed to life for me with the colour of his stories and anecdotes.

  ‘There’s Priscilla, she used to be married to the most beautiful man in Lapa. Used to chase him up and down the stairs there for the first three years with a kitchen knife because he kept running around on her. He’s in jail now. Oh, and there goes Bahiano, he runs the honey cachaça stand. He’s been away. He slapped his woman in the middle of the street here and the drug don here got pissed off because Bahiano didn’t ask his permission to do that on his streets, so he had to go and hide out in Minas. His best mate stole his girl and the cachaça stand while he was away and he would be ringing him asking, “Are things cool to come back?” and his friend kept saying, “No, a couple more weeks, brother …” Eventually he came back ... Otario! And watch out for that guy. That’s PC Fernando. He’s the only uncorrupt policeman in Brazil, and the locals hate him. Nobody can bribe their kids out of jail. There’s the dono of the boca-da-fume, the mouth of the smoke, where you buy your drugs. That girl there, she does sex for money, a garota-de-programa we call it here. So does her mum, sitting with her. That street there, used to be a line of brothels. Filled with French prostitutes …’

  I was already well acquainted with the streets of Lapa through my wanderings with Chiara, but I didn’t understand it until I met Winston Churchill. He knew the dealers, the musicians, the street kids, and the whores, even the rich kids who came down to throw themselves away. Not to mention the past, the present, and, on a not-so-rare occasion, the future of whatever was happening in that block of about eight streets. He became my Rio connection. My man in Rio.

  Winston Churchill and I drifted night after night between the crumbling colonial facades of Lapa, now blackened with the vomit and piss of a hundred years of bohemia. We sang in cabarets, drank cachaça in gypsy bars, and danced on the street until midday on weekdays. It was an endless theatre under the backdrop of Lapa’s magnificent moonstone arches — the Colosseum unwound across the city of Rio. Centuries of souls have passed through those graceful arches right back from the early days of slavery when the beasts of burden would cross from the west to work the Jesuit plantations in the south of the city. At that time Lapa was shored by the festering lake of Boqueirão, until the elites of the city could bear it no more and filled it in with dirt, turning it into an exclusive entry park called Passeio Publico where they could eat cucumber sandwiches on Saturday afternoons. They bulldozed half the habitations of Rio de Janeiro to renovate the tropical capital, but the rancid smell of bohemia soon drifted back over the new baroque statues, and after some time they abandoned Lapa to the bohemians once more.

  Lapa. Beautiful, glittering, and terrible. Forty-two arches in all, one for each creature of abandonment — her slaves and fugitives, malandros, and poets, whores, pimps, and patrons. Lapa is to the bohemians what china white would be to a junkie — a pure rush of undiluted pleasure. She refused nobody, and they paid with what they had: inheritances, families, talent, and, failing those, self-respect. She turned intellectuals into babbling drunks, decent women into whores, and shored up her gutters with the decomposing souls of magnificent musicians.

  For some, it was the drugs that dragged them back to Lapa; for others, the music; for many, the easy sex. But for me it was the randomness of daily life. Each time I walked down to Lapa from the heights of Santa Teresa, smelling the urine-soaked stones before I had even descended into that cobbled lair, I felt my heart flutter. I never knew what I was going to find: a fist-fight between two women over a man, a band of musicians playing on the street, a political demonstra
tion, a Carnaval rehearsal, a police raid on the transvestites, or nothing at all — perhaps just a couple of old musicians playing on a street corner. The unpredictability was addictive.

  As for Winston and me, our relationship played right into the wide-open arms of Lapa. If Lapa was unpredictable, Winston was chaos. He had no phone, no bankcards — not even an identity card. He would be at my house for three days, disappear for five, then turn up in a flounced mini-dress wearing make-up and carrying a bottle of pink sparkling wine.

  ‘Come on, we’re going out,’ he said that day, throwing me the black dress.

  ‘Where?’ I protested.

  ‘To a club,’ he slurred drunkenly.

  ‘In that?’ I asked laughing.

  ‘What’s wrrrong with it?’ he asked with mock offence.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said with delight. This was not my life, after all. This was a three-month trip to South America. We did go out that afternoon, first to have an expensive lunch on me (Winston forgot his wallet) and then afterwards to a new samba club called Democraticus. Which was on him, he said. Well, sort of, anyway. He knew the doorman, and got us in for free.

  The drinks didn’t bother me. It was the dental work that set my warning bells ringing. He came to the house one morning with a toothache, claiming he needed his front teeth capped. Gustavo pulled me aside with an urgent whisper, ‘Not the dental work, Carmen. It’s a slippery slope from there. You are still a young woman. You don’t need to pay for teeth.’

  Poor Winston. I loaned him fifty reals to get the pain seen to, but it illuminated some fairly serious problems about the income divide. It was not Winston’s fault he didn’t have any money. Brazil was an exceptionally poor country for most of her citizens. Besides, had I not been raised to think that love came above money? Compassion before materialism? To share with the needy? Not to mention the fact that he had sacrificed whatever job he may have had to show me around Rio for the past two weeks. I felt genuinely indebted.

  ‘So, Winston Churchill, you never did tell me the story behind your name …’

  ‘My mother liked it,’ he smiled innocently.

  ‘She’s a fan of the big man, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’ His brow furrowed.

  ‘You know? The English prime minister?’

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t know who you are talking about.’

  ‘You don’t know who Winston Churchill is?’

  ‘I am Winston Churchill.’

  ‘No, but before you, darling, there was a prime minister …’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I never had an education.’

  Tears welled in the corners of his blue eyes and my heart sank.

  ‘Even now,’ he choked over the words, ‘except for capping my front teeth, it’s been my only dream to go to school …’ he drifted off emotionally. ‘Perhaps, perhaps when the inheritance comes through … I don’t know. I’m dumb anyway …’

  ‘No, Winston,’ I protested, drowning in those big blue eyes. ‘You are not. What a thing to say. You just haven’t had the opportunities.’ I reassured him. ‘Look, maybe I can help you … I mean, how much does school cost here?’

  ‘Just five hundred dollars …’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘Cash.’

  Poor Winston.

  But aside from his ex-wife, lack of money and education, and the fact that we had absolutely nothing in common, things were going blindingly well for a holiday romance. Certainly, I was a little concerned about the ease with which he said he loved me, the wide gap between our respective maturities (he was twenty-one, I was twenty-eight), and the fact that he was disproportionately good-looking compared to me, but I just put it all down to the fact that, finally, men were starting to appreciate me for the goddess that I was. Clearly those silly, repressed Anglo-Saxon boys who took six months to say that they kind of liked me just didn’t know what a fabulous woman I was. It had taken twenty-eight years, but I had finally been discovered in Brazil.

  My friends were not so much concerned about the relationship as by the fact that I thought it would last more than two days. Gustavo rolled his eyes every time Winston’s name came up, but Carina listened with her characteristic attentiveness.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked me, spreading her palms.

  ‘Ecstatic!’ I responded, with unreal enthusiasm.

  Carina smiled gently.

  ‘So then, enjoy it because it won’t last a month.’

  How could she say such a thing! In the throes of passion, I could see nothing in front of me but sheer joy with the most beautiful man on the planet. Sure, he was not exactly Einstein, but who said genius could not be taught? Surely a few hot courses down at the local TAFE and some good old-fashioned direction would put him on the right track. He had so much potential it amazed me. Oh, Potential! That shimmering oasis!

  It was about that time that I first heard the word malandro. That insinuating trio of syllables were spoken in relation to my very own Winston Churchill by some white, middle-class Brazilian friends who sniggered behind the word and then shook their heads amusedly when I asked them what it meant, as though it were a social nuance too complex to explain to a mere foreigner.

  ‘But what is the English translation?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think that there is one,’ Carina replied. ‘It is a uniquely Latin concept.’

  From then on, as I stumbled through the tourist landscape of Lapa, through capoeira classes and samba rodas and churrascos, my ears alert to the word, I heard nothing but malandro, malandro, malandro. The sambistas in Lapa composed songs about them, politicians accused their opposition of being one, and jilted wives screamed it down from their windowsills to unfaithful husbands.

  In a hedonistic culture still trying to shake off Catholic morality, and that troubling little personal quality called loyalty, the figure of the malandro crops up time and time again as the tortured anti-hero of Brazilian folklore. The story is usually straightforward: poor boy turns clever hustler in the face of poverty and discrimination and then falls in love with an innocent little rich girl whose social-climbing family try to stop the union. Despite his gambling, alcoholism, and rampant infidelity, she follows her heart (or at least her hormones), and rebels against her better judgement to run away to Lapa, or some other inappropriately bohemian bairro, with him. His lines are inevitably funnier than all the other dull, faithful characters in the piece, and it goes without saying that he gets more women. And it seemed it simply wouldn’t be Brazil without an ignominious play for the malandro’s heart by a shameless hussy singing cabaret in a sexy dress. In the landscape of Brazilian sentimentalism, look no further than Jorge Amado’s gambler Vadinho (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands), Chico Buarque’s contrabandist, Max Overseas (Opera of the Malandro), and the adventurer Leléu in the film Lisbela and the Prisoner — all wonderful adaptations of Brazil’s favourite son.

  But it was not until one Friday night when I was alone that I started to unlock my own little definition of malandro. Winston Churchill had gone away with his ex-wife, who not only seemed to be living far longer than I had expected, but was appearing with alarming regularity in theatres around town. I had even read a review in which she was described as having given a ‘glowing’ performance as a Brazilian Lady Macbeth. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Winston Churchill would lie to me. His eyes were too blue, his body too perfectly formed, and his skin too deliciously dark for him to be a liar. Perhaps the problem, as the immaculate Gustavo informed me that evening on the balcony, was that I looked at everything from the perspective of an Anglo-Saxon woman.

  ‘You need to loosen up,’ he murmured, upon seeing me fret over the latest review of the dying ex-wife actress, then softened; ‘This is Brazil. The problem is not Winston Churchill, my dear. The problem is you. Go to Lapa and get another malandro.’ He pau
sed, ‘Perhaps a George Washington this time ...’ He snorted hysterically at his own joke until his amusement died down to a splutter and he retired to his rooms in a flutter of white kaftans.

  Taking Gustavo’s advice, I went down to Lapa alone. It was a messy Friday night. Walking down Rua Joaquim Silva as a foreign woman on a Friday night is equivalent to walking into a paddock of starved cattle with a bucket of oats, and I could almost hear the stampede of visa-hungry Brazilians as I sought refuge under the awnings of the ambitiously titled ‘Bar 100 per cent’.

  I knew its owner, Carlito, from my wanderings with Winston Churchill, and he greeted me with a friendly smile and shooed away three boys who had continued following me. It was early evening and the patrons appeared to be already drunk, or maybe they’d just never sobered up from the night before. I asked Carlito if he knew where Winston Churchill had gone, and he completely avoided the question by taking my hands in his and telling me insincerely that Winston loved me very much. His wife, Isabelle, rolled her eyes behind him and went out back to fetch more beer. To stem my humiliation, I changed tack.

  ‘Well, Winston Churchill is a malandro, anyway,’ I said to provoke a response. I stole a glance at his face. It was the first time I’d used the word, and Carlito smiled guardedly. Lapa protects her own. Isabelle looked across at her husband with amused curiosity and, after glancing briefly back at her, he cleared his throat and said, ‘A malandro is not necessarily a bad man. He’s like Napoleon. Depends if you talk to the French or the Russians, I guess.’ Isabelle could resist no longer and gave a snort of disgust. A bitter debate erupted between the women and men drinking in the bar as to whether a malandro was a conniving sexual deviant or a swell guy, simply misunderstood. The debate fired along for a while, fuelled by personal experiences and anecdotal evidence, the women generally saying that they should all be locked up, until the argument was punctured by a voice behind us.