‘Oh, forget Salvador!’ she cried, and swung herself onto the back of a motorbike. ‘Do you realise what you are looking at? You are never ever going to find anything wilder than this in the whole of South America,’ and we sped up the hill, Chiara with her hands in the air like a teenager on college break.
When we entered the mestre’s house, I was surprised to see him already drunk.
‘That’s not very healthy for a capoeira master, is it?’ I asked Chiara dubiously.
‘He is channelling the spirit of Exu,’ she explained.
‘Who’s Exu?’
‘An Afro-Brazilian god of Candomblé,’ she whispered, while smiling at the swaying mestre. ‘He is a messenger in the religion for both bad and good.’
‘But why is he drunk?’
‘He has to drink cachaça, and smoke cigarettes, too, to bring on the visions.’
‘It doesn’t sound very god-like to me.’
‘Exu is Exu,’ she said with a shrug.
ALMOST CERTAINLY under the influence of Exu myself, later that afternoon I turned up to my first guitar lesson in Brazil. Fabio’s house was also on the Rua Joaquim Murtinho; it was another colonial construction from the same period as the Casa Amarela, but simpler, and with traces of an artist’s inhabitance on the front porch. One of the ninety-three stone staircases of Santa Teresa ran up the side of it and was a popular escape-route for the child muggers who were tormenting Carina and her clients with increasing regularity as the summer approached. Strange, dark, triangular terrace houses with elaborate baroque friezes lined the winding path beside the house, and on the final step a Candomblé offering of a clay bowl filled with red candle wax and speared with thin brown sticks lay smoking. We called up to Fabio, and he appeared in the window. He was shirtless, and his hair hung in wet, dark ringlets across his forehead. His skin was the rosy colour of burnt sugar. When he saw it was Chiara and me, he gave a big Brazilian smile and came down to open the gate.
He was a cartoonist’s dream with his mad shock of black curls, enormous eyes framed by sweeping eyebrows, a long, elegant nose, a wide mouth, and very big teeth. He had an emaciated bohemian body — the type that sees little exercise and sleeps at odd hours — his hands worn and calloused from playing drums, and his thumb and forefinger stained yellow from hand-rolled cigarettes. His voice, that day, was raspy from a late night, and as he introduced us to his house and his things he coughed happily. In the background, the raindrop harmony of someone he identified as Hermeto Pascoal was playing on a vintage record-player.
I sat down on a wooden chair ready for the lesson, but he kept wandering around the room, seemingly collecting things to arrange in a little altar he had made to Saint George in a nook of the room. A bottle of cachaça and a candle stood behind it. He placed a sprig of a strong-smelling plant he called aruda over the shoulder of a plaster figurine of the mounted knight, crossed himself, and then came over to us. He sat down opposite me while Chiara swung in the hammock.
Silence followed. He looked at me, then at Chiara. Then back at me. He sat back in his chair, crossed his arms and observed me for a moment, before leaning forward and asking in Portuguese,
‘Where is your guitar?’
I looked to Chiara. She nodded and translated.
‘I don’t have one,’ I said, and shrugged.
‘She doesn’t have one,’ Chiara translated.
Fabio sat back, stroked his sideburns, and then looked back to me again. Chiara’s hammock creaked softly. Time expanded. Fat seconds rolled over. The corners of his mouth began to twitch with amusement. I shrugged again. Chiara looked up from the street and glanced between us. Another thirty long seconds passed before the upturned corners of his mouth spread into a smile. He slapped his knee loudly and burst out in a peal of the most indecent laughter I had ever heard. Chiara exploded into giggles with him, and I was not far behind.
THE LESSON AFTERWARDS was a confusion of stringing guitars, making coffee, and rolling cigarettes. As he and Chiara drifted off into an animated discussion in Portuguese, I got up to wander around the room. Untidy piles of books and old photos covered the surface of an antique wooden table, rows of vinyl records were stacked up against the peeling walls, and a motley collection of musical instruments lay in the corner.
When he asked me what song I wanted to learn, I didn’t even hear him. Chiara repeated the question, and I shrugged. The only song I could think of was ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, a request that Chiara refused point-blank to translate. ‘Well, can’t you make up something to impress him?’ I begged her. ‘You know Brazilian music better than me.’ She refused with an irritated toss of her head, on account of being an anthropologist, and I asked Fabio to make a recommendation. He smiled gently and chose a Mother’s Day song written by the sambista Nelson Cavaquinho called ‘Vou Abrir a Porta’ (‘I’ll Open the Door’), in which the narrator agrees to let his vagabunda of a mother, who has abandoned him and his father several times already, back into the house one more time because it’s Mother’s Day. He ended the song with: ‘But don’t delay, because there are two more in line.’
The music lessons that followed were like a meandering summer river. Fabio Barreto was not a man in a hurry for anything. Sometimes we would sit and listen to his favourite CDs, other times he would make me play the tambourines while his eyes glazed over, but mostly he just seemed lost in his own world of samba rhythms. I tried to get him to write me out some chords to practise, but it was useless. He was rigid in his attachment to the fluid. Nor would he be bound by those earthly constraints such as appointments or time. Sometimes I waited an hour outside his house for him to turn up to the lesson; sometimes he didn’t come at all.
Learning samba was far more difficult than I expected. I guess it probably would have helped if I’d known how to play guitar in the first place, but it seemed to me to be about as achievable as learning how to be a Viennese concert pianist. It takes more than four chords on an electric guitar to make the instrument invoke fat, yellow moons and old black men on street corners, and by day three I was banned outright from playing the guitar until I could play the tambourine with rhythm.
‘Are there any foreigners who play samba well?’ I asked hopefully after one particularly challenging afternoon on a song called ‘Gostoso Veneno’, (‘I Love the Poison’) by Noel Rosa, in which Fabio had demonstrated the rhythm nearly ten times over without success. We hadn’t even discussed the chord formation. I simply did not hear the beat he was hearing.
‘No,’ he replied simply.
Despite my disappointing lack of talent, however, I was content to be simply guided through the landscape of Rio’s musical scene by this extraordinary expert. Brazilian music is staggeringly rich and varied. While the West is more familiar with bossa nova, samba, and, more recently, the drum cry of capoeira, there are dozens of different musical genres in Brazil — maxixe, baiaõ, maracatu, forró, jongle, caipira, calangu, chorinho, MPB, and Carioca funk, not to mention their own Brazilianised brands of hip hop, rap, soul, R&B, folk, rock, and Hermeto Pascoal, who is a freaky little category all to himself. The English might be at their best at comedy; the Italians at designing beautiful things; the Australians at thrashing everyone at sport; but the Brazilians know how to make music. It runs through their veins and comes out of their hair.
On Thursday nights we danced in Club Democraticus, a 120-year-old club in Lapa frequented by a heady combination of malandros and the radical chic from the Zona Sul. The Brazilians called it a gafieira, a type of dance hall that emerged at the turn of last century as a place of music and dance for Rio’s urban working class. Before their advent, Rio’s different communities were largely polarised by their musical tastes, whether it was opera and classical for the Europeans or drum-based beats for the Afro-Brazilians. Responding to a desperate need for assimilation, and in tandem with the politics of the time, they quickly became places where musicians and audiences of black and white ba
ckgrounds alike could mix and create new sounds. Street drums mixed with the guitars and flutes of jazz, classical, and even tango; the big-band influences of North America drifted south, and a new Brazilian sound was born.
It wasn’t entirely surprising that I didn’t know how to dance samba and probably never would, but the truth still stung. ‘You are so rigid,’ Fabio murmured devastatingly in my ear the first time I danced with him. ‘Relax. Just try and listen to the music,’ he added, a word of advice made all the more humiliating when translated by Gustavo afterwards. (And there I was, thinking he was whispering how love was crazee!) To the sheer delight of Rio’s samba community, the dance of samba confuses and confounds foreigners. You start off keeping a reasonable rhythm on one drum beat and then suddenly, just as you are about to shimmer smoothly past the gorgeous man by the bar, find that it has unexpectedly stopped or changed speed. Scared off by the unpredictable drums, you leap blindly to the tinkle of the triangle — only this hardly makes a decent dancing beat — and you end up vibrating like a person having a fit, your appearance made even worse since, all about you, ordinary Brazilians are wrapping their luscious hips around the air with a cool sensuality unrivalled since that video clip for the lambada. So you jump back to the drums, only to find them abandoning you once more, leaving you caged in by the guitars, trapped under the cavaquinho, and defeated by the remaining twenty-five percussion instruments. The trick, I was told, is to follow your heart, but who knows how to do that?
‘It’s like this. Just like this,’ said one ex-Carnaval queen to me matter-of-factly late one evening, and then vibrated across the floor, her legs spinning like the road runner and her hips tracing a sultry figure eight above them. She was fifty years old and had a body like an eighteen-year-old, and it was all so unfair. It was like listening to an American speak French or watching Germans dance to reggae. Never are you more acutely aware that you are a foreigner than when you dance samba in Brazil.
‘It’s like having three legs,’ I complained to Fabio later.
‘Now that is something that a woman will never understand,’ he replied, and gave that laugh again.
My emerging relationship with Fabio raised eyebrows everywhere.
‘So what on earth is happening with this little romance of yours?’ Gustavo teased me one day as we sat at the beach. ‘So romantic. I’ve never seen anything like that. The cattle heiress is the Queen of Lapa now. She will spend the rest of her days looking at the moon, singing from a eucalale, and living off love.’ He laughed, delighted by his own imagination. ‘Then, later, as you get old, you will have his children and become Maria, cleaning the house, working for your husband, holding the babies in one arm and the washing in the other. Never complaining. Maria never complains. What a happy life. How pleased your father must be that he spent all that money on your education.’ I laughed along with him.
‘Really, dear, how can I find you a real man when you are traipsing around with those bohemians all the time,’ Gustavo asked, with obvious exasperation.
‘Fabio seems to be a real man,’ I suggested.
Gustavo was outraged by the proposition.
‘He’s not a real man. He’s a bohemian.’
‘Oh, please!’ I exclaimed.
‘My dear, you are not seriously considering a relationship with him?’
‘I am seriously considering a holiday romance.’
‘It will be a disaster,’ he said dramatically.
‘That must be a slight exaggeration, Gustavo.’
‘He is different from us, my darling,’ Gustavo warned.
‘Why? Because he is poor?’
He dismissed me with an agitated flick of his wrist.
‘Because of everything. Anyway, do what you want. You obviously will, anyway. It’s just that you are so young. Just remember that the time passes by so quickly …’
Then he drifted off, looking out over the sparkling blue Atlantic, and sighed nostalgically. It was hard to think of anything passing us by with that backdrop. We were at the barraca Miriam on Ipanema’s eighth post. Gustavo and I were lying back in striped deckchairs being served coconut water by a whale-sized queen in a strip of Lycra masquerading as a swimsuit, while insanely beautiful men strutted past like peacocks, pausing to flex their muscles in front of anyone who gave them a second look.
Usually I went to Ipanema’s ninth post, the champagne bohemian’s section of the beach, a Brazilian Tamarama. There we frequented barraca Batista, run by a thickset black man with an enormous Carioca smile who used to deal to the pop stars of Rio de Janeiro before he got caught, did his time, and then set up a beach tent. He was old-school Ipanema when things were even looser than now; racing up and down on motorbikes to the favela, and playing bossa nova with the young hippies of Zona Sul before the drug factions shut them up and the police started a civil war in their own city. ‘They were the good old days’, he used to say, ‘before things got heavy.’
Ipanema was the diamanté in the tiara of Rio de Janeiro: the holiday from being on holidays, the ‘dream’ for one hundred and sixty million Brazilians, the location of the seaside apartments of Brazil’s famous musicians, actors, artists, and rich people in general, and the only place in the country where you could lie back and forget the horrors of the third world. If you didn’t squint too hard to the south, that is, where the biggest favela of South America, Rocinha, spilled over the stunning rock escarpment of Dois Irmãos like a cluster of cockles. Still, there were quite a few palm trees to get past before Rocinha became a bother to the irreverent beach-goers of Ipanema Beach.
Sometimes it had the feeling of a huge Hollywood studio down there, spectacularly wedged between Copacabana beach, the lake of Rio de Janeiro, and the stunning rock escarpment of Dois Irmãos, and fringed with row after row of gently swaying palm trees. There wasn’t a decent penthouse with servant’s broom closets that didn’t rent for less than 10,000 reals (US$5000) per month. You couldn’t even buy those apartments, a real estate agent once told me. They were owned by media and industry barons who wouldn’t sell at any price. At the same time, less than a stone’s throw away, the poorest citizens of the country toiled away with spectacular views over Rio de Janeiro for around 250 reals (US$125) per month.
‘Goodness, how I remember when I was young like you. I lived like there was no tomorrow. It all seems like a dream now,’ Gustavo murmured beside me. Then some other thought entered his mind and he looked at the ground and said softly, ‘Brazil is complicated, Carmen. It’s not just about being poor — that could be resolved for you and Fabio. You have money. You could take him away from here. But it is the stigma of poverty that is the problem. It eats people up from the inside.’
I ignored him, of course. I went out that night dancing samba at the musician’s commune of Semente instead. They played a music called chorinho, loosely translated as ‘the crying chords’. It was, indeed, a heart-rending chorus of guitars, bandolins, and violins, sometimes even a harmonica or flute. It was music for broken hearts and unrequited love, for great expectations and forgotten promises, and for tragedy, tragedy, and tragedy. Only a country like Brazil could inspire her musicians to sing such sad songs. They played so beautifully that sometimes even the dancers would stop and just stand to watch the musicians in the tiny bar. We danced between the sets that Fabio played, silently and slowly, with the arches of Lapa gleaming through the open windows behind us.
–8–
Fabio
Of what importance is the landscape,
Gloria, the bay, the line of the horizon? ...
When all I see is a backstreet.
– MANUEL BANDEIRA, ‘Poem of the Beco’
The most obvious challenge to our relationship as teacher and student, and later, as we started our holiday romance in that classic cliché, was the fact that he spoke Portuguese and I spoke English. I noticed that Fabio, however, with his arm-waving and theatrical face, had
less difficulty in getting his point across. My own attempts at communication were limited to humiliating neanderthal transactions, which Gustavo translated with glee.
Me: ‘You is bad man.’
Him: ‘Please, darling. So sorry I am late. I really could not avoid it. It was an emergency.’
Me: ‘You is bad. Food bad. Man bad.’
Him: ‘I am really sorry. I got caught up with my mother. She wanted me to do something. I really could not get out of it.’
Me: ‘Bad man.’
Him: ‘All right. I see your point. It’s unacceptable.’
Me: ‘Very bad man.’
Him: ‘Fine. I have that clear in my head. I am very sorry. It won’t happen again. What’s for dinner anyway?’
Me: ‘Bad man.’
And to those who said that they could never be with someone who didn’t speak the same language, as some of my friends did before going back to sit silently with their husbands in front of the TV: I agree; in theory. Happily for me, as it turned out, my adventure was not about theories or appropriate behaviour. After almost a decade of being immersed in mind-numbing mediocrity, I was happy to just blow with the wind. There were the odd few difficulties, like the time we went away for a samba weekend with some musician friends and I had to blend into the walls like a creeper, but it didn’t bother me. Some of them were less communicative than me. They were musicians, after all, not the university debating society. I sat, observed, shut up for once in my life, and hopefully learned something. Sometimes I played the egg-shaker. Words are just one part of any story. Maybe if Fabio had had an old best friend who he kicked about with all the time — someone else I would have had to please — it would have been different, but he didn’t. Despite, or perhaps because of, his extroverted nature, he was a loner.
The Brazilians, for their part, were not a bit bothered about a relationship in which the two people didn’t speak the same language. Relationships were not about dull conversations. They were about sex. This was a culture that worshipped beauty and sensuality, not a rational mind. They were the modern-day Romans, the Latin court of Louis XIV, lounging around with lyres, reading each other poetry, and feeding each other with whiskey and grapes. They were physically in touch with each other in a way that I struggled to even perceive, much less understand. Gustavo and Carina could detect a second glance from an admirer at five hundred feet and be over there in a split second, leaving me standing confusedly in their wake. The reality is that you can tell a foreigner in Rio de Janeiro, not by their blonde hair and fair features (since there are numerous Cariocas with these features, after the waves of European immigration in the sixties), but by the way they hold themselves. They are loose. We are tight — rigid with millennia of scientific rationality and church morality in our postures. They are split with the sensuality of the Africans and the instinct of the Indians. So it was not just a language that was in front of me; it was a whole way of existence.
Chasing Bohemia Page 10