Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  Luckily, Fabio and I lived close by each other. He kept most of his records and musical-instrument collection in a house down from the Convent of Santa Teresa; but, as his email nickname, ‘mongrel’, indicated, he was not really of any fixed abode. That was typical of a Rio bohemian, though — not that it stopped any of them from acquiring the possessions of a person with a ten-bedroom mansion. Among Fabio’s personal stash were gems such as half of the samba records ever produced in Brazil, a good few hundred American blues and jazz LPs, five broken record-players, twenty-five show hats, ten pairs of white trousers, a trunk of clown costumes, ten drums, and a rusty collection of tin whistles. Nor could you underestimate his organisational skills. His goods may have been littered across the houses, hotels, and parks of Santa Teresa — some were even in the possession of the homeless of Lapa — but Fabio kept a tight inventory in his gnarled memory.

  ‘Where’s my Carnaval drum?’ he demanded of an inebriated street-sleeper, blind with either cachaça or cataracts or both, one morning in Lapa. It was the week before Carnaval in February.

  ‘Sheeeet, Fabio,’ the guy slurred. ‘Zhhhee last I saw, Miguelzinho had it at his house.’

  ‘Well, go and get it. I want it back for Carnaval,’ Fabio said abruptly. The drunk scuttled off.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did he borrow it?’ Fabio nodded. ‘Yeah, for Carnaval.’

  ‘And you want it back now, after a year?’ I asked, laughing. He nodded, as serious as a Mafia don.

  ‘Three years, actually. Of course I want it back. Or he can start paying interest in that cachaça.’

  And he meant it. Mostly, Fabio arranged to stay in houses in exchange for cleaning them; only, he hated cleaning. Every week he would call in favours from a drunk or criminal who owed him for something, and I would find them at the house scrubbing the floors and Fabio sitting back like a Bahian sugar-plantation-owner, in his Panama hat and dark sunglasses, reading the paper and occasionally pointing out bits of missed dust. My mother’s saying that people are born either peasants or aristocrats in this world, despite whether they were actually born peasants or aristocrats, never rang truer.

  Gustavo’s prediction of ‘money issues’ was proven correct within the month, although not quite in the form I expected. Fabio’s way of managing our monthly expenditure chasm (his was about 125 dollars per month; mine was more than 1000) was to drag me down to his weekly expense levels, rather than expect me to pay to bring him up to mine. His only exception to this dignified strategy was the entirely reasonable concession of fine wines and cheese; for, as it transpired some weeks later, underneath that penniless Brazilian radical lurked a deeply repressed ‘foodie’. Gustavo taunted him ruthlessly about this with comments like, ‘But I thought you were a bohemian!’, though he said privately to me, with a rueful smile, that had Fabio been born on the right side of the line, instead of in a poor working-class suburb in north Rio, he probably would have been a captain of industry. He certainly had the delegation thing down pat. There was nobody more ruthless in a bargain, more ferocious about debt collection, nor shrewder about favours than that bohemian. I didn’t pay to enter a single club when I was with him, and we went out four times or more a week. I paid local prices for everything I bought, and got freebies on top of that. When we cooked at home we ate for less than two dollars a day, and when we travelled I spent less than half of a single traveller’s budget on both of us.

  At the risk of tormenting the reader with the Brazilian inflation index, especially after my narky comments about Americans in Buenos Aires (all right then, in my positive new mood even I could admit that we all love bragging about how much we didn’t spend at a third-world dinner for two), a week on a deserted island cost me all of ten dollars.

  ‘Because you slept on the beach!’ Gustavo protested.

  ‘The best things in life are free,’ I said.

  Gustavo disagreed entirely with the expression.

  ‘No, they are not. Diamonds are not free. Wine is not free. Big houses are not free.’

  So we camped. It was still magnificent. Fabio knew of places in Rio that the most hardened locals had never heard of. He was a gypsy of Rio, and there was not a place in the city that was out of bounds for him. That day, he didn’t even tell me we were going to go away.

  We went without even a change of clothes. We got on a local bus, the kind that crosses from one side of the city to the other, and just headed south. We tracked the coastline out of Rio de Janeiro — past the mosaic walkways of Avenida Atlantica and the sleek waterfront penthouses of Ipanema, along the Niemeyer’s coastal flyover and onto the never-ending highway of Avenida Atlantica with the favela of Rocinha like a wall behind us. As we passed through the traffic, Fabio pointed out the endless lines of gated communities, and said loudly for everyone to hear, ‘favelas of the rich’. Most people just ignored him, but the middle-aged women on the seat in front giggled, and looked back at him saying, ‘that’s right meu filho, that’s right.’ The traffic finally disappeared at Recreio beach, and the city dribbled away behind us. A sign appeared for the outlying coastal district of Barra de Guaratiba, the ‘Bay of Herons’, and the bus slowed down as the road deteriorated.

  The long-forgotten landscapes of old colonial Rio rolled slowly by my window. Palm-leaf shacks and shady, white-washed bungalows with terracotta roofs and blue doors reminiscent of the inland towns of Portuguese Goa dotted the landscape. Red clay shored the unsealed roadsides, where the odd sleeping fisherman sat in the shade of palm trees beside his cluster of squirming blue-black crabs. On the right, the road fell away into tranquil, reed-filled lagoons, and I spotted a cluster of canoes moored to a stick, with lone herons silently stepping through the water around it. The bus stopped at a village snuggled into the hill above a small cove, and from there we trekked uphill over eroded clay trails until we reached a clearing that looked out over a white, sandy beach.

  Except for a small shack on the right-hand side, which was inhabited, Fabio told me, by a hermit called Raul, there was no other sign of life. It was a truly deserted paradise. We slept on the beach under a star-spangled sky, and woke to a blazing, purple dawn and the green, overgrown jungle screaming with birds and animals behind us. We spent the mornings searching for shells and driftwood, and the afternoons lying in a makeshift hammock. Our isolation was broken only on the third day when two fugitive drug dealers arrived and set up camp on the other side of the beach. They spent the day on the sand, their gold chains glinting in the sun, Carioca funk blasting out of a small radio, as they made animated phone calls back to their gangs in Rio. But that didn’t bother me. This was Brazil, after all.

  ADJUSTING TO A BOHEMIAN’S BUDGET was not without its frustrations, but they were usually no more than passing whims.

  ‘I want to eat Thai in Leblon,’ I announced one night.

  ‘It’s too expensive,’ he responded. ‘I’ll make it for you if you really want it.’

  ‘What I want,’ I argued with the disposition of a spoiled child, ‘is to go out like I used to. See films, theatre, eat food.’

  ‘Spend money, you mean,’ he retorted, and the next day took me to a place where free films were showing. He seemed to be genuinely liberated from money. He led an extraordinary life, filled with fascinating people, incredible stories, and rich experiences — and he barely spent a single cent. Not that he was above material consumption in some supernatural way. He simply didn’t have access to it. On the very few occasions that Fabio did come into some cash for the day, it was almost not worth the trauma it caused. Whatever amount he had in his hand on the day, he would spend immediately. He spent it, smoked it, lost it, lent it, got robbed of it, burned it, for all I knew, and came back home the way he always did, with nothing but a song and smile.

  I only saw him once with money in the first three months that I knew him. He was in the midst of a wild shopping frenzy on Rua Carioca in the centre of Rio, the day after h
e’d done a rare paid acting job, with a frenzied look in his eye and a fist full of grubby dollars. He was buying glittery plastic things that you get in discount stores.

  ‘Why don’t you buy a new shirt or something, or put down some money for a new guitar?’ I asked, but he didn’t really hear me. He was mesmerised by the plastic and tinsel and sparkle.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he mumbled, ‘I need this. I really need this.’ His hands ran over the cheap goods — the plastic trays and tacky notebooks, cheap novels, and machine-woven rugs — as though a glimmer of the material world from which he was excluded somehow lay within the bargain box. I left him there, and he returned at night with nothing but an enormous bouquet of flowers for me. He had to spend the rest of the week busking to pay for his dinners, but I guess that’s what happens when you live for the day.

  For the other 364 days of the year that he was not tormented by the evils of money, Fabio devoted himself to the rituals demanded by the God of samba. In Fabio’s world, samba was an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-creating eternal God, responsible for the oceans, the mountains, the shapely mulattas, and the tasty feijoadas on Sundays. When he played gigs, even the table was arranged like an altar with a statue of Saint George, his sword aloft and his pencil-thin moustache quivering, a sprig of holy aruda and a scattering of candies, cachaça, and prawns in offering.

  There are different types of samba, including the commercialised version that gets beamed all over the world every year at Carnaval, but Fabio mostly played samba da raiz, ‘samba of the roots’, where random musicians gather on street corners with drums and tambourines made from plastic, tin or Coke cans, and sing songs of oppression and redemption, their hearts bursting with pain and joy in equal abundance. I came to love Carnaval for all its glitter and sequins and excess, but for me this would always be samba at its best: the slow, steady thump of the drum, the undulating waves of the tambourine, and the shrill cry of the cavaquinho on a lonely back street, underneath a fat yellow moon.

  On Fridays, we went to the cheap, dirty sambas at the Beco do Rato or the ‘Corner of the Rat’ where vagabundo musicians played samba around a table set up at one end of a closed-off street. It was on the run-down end of Lapa where the streets were filled with rubbish, the terraces—some still housing clandestine brothels — were falling down around us, and transvestite prostitutes walked the darkened lanes. It must have been a posh street once, where French prostitutes set up their boudoirs to charm the local coffee barons and their wayward sons, but that was a long time ago. Those whores all went back to Paris in the forties, some of them fat on the trinkets of slave-owners and some of them not, and the area fell from disrepute into disgrace. The samba was little more than an excuse for organised debauchery, and the local girls didn’t like the look of me at all. I would be introduced to them time and time again and, except for the more worldly singers, they would pretend we had never seen each other. This left me utterly perplexed until an old woman behind the bar explained, ‘There are three women to every man in Brazil. They don’t like competition around these parts.’

  The organisers behind this unholy revelry were an eclectic mix of bohemians who drew the women, and the real musicians who played the music. If there were too many or too few from either camp, the night was a disaster. In addition to this core, there were any number of other punters playing drums and Coke cans at the table, and at least a dozen back-up singers shouting at the top of their lungs. Occasionally Waldemar da Madrugada would come and play the triangle and fall asleep on his chair at the table. The Beco do Rato was a whorehouse, but it was an organised whorehouse; and despite the apparent lack of control, I quickly learned that the band and crowd were adhering to a strict set of rules and regulations.

  First, there was the table. Around this, only the musicians could sit and, on rare occasions, such as making up for infidelity or some other heinous humiliation, so could the odd girlfriend. Second, there were the people. They were arranged in layers, with girlfriends at the front; lovers, second row; lanchinos (snacks) third row; married men looking for lanchinos, fourth row; and homeless men and crazies on the outside. Every now and then, a woman tourist would throw everything into chaos by breaking ignorantly through all the ranks and standing in a girlfriend’s place or, worse, pick up an instrument to play; but, generally, people kept to their quarters. Third, musicians had to ask permission to play in this wheel of samba or roda from the master of ceremonies, namely Fabio, who dealt out this lofty privilege according to the applicant’s experience, respect from the community, and willingness to play for free. Fourth, the samba only stopped when the people stopped. Fifth, the people’s will was final and paramount.

  Generally they played the old sambas of greats like Noel Rosa, Cartola, Nelson Cavaquinho, Ismael Silva, Wilson Moreira, Wilson Batista, and Paulinho da Viola, but the real test of a sambista’s muscle was in the improvisation session, a feverish exchange of rhymed insults and xenophobic abuse they called partido alt. It was a kind of freestyle samba to the beat of a drum and chorus:

  What about that whore

  You have by your side?

  You think she’s with you

  But she’s with me on the sly.

  The level of vulgarity varied according to the location, crowd, and time of the night — Lapa at 6.00 a.m. on a Saturday morning being the trough of obscenity — but the general aim was to blow off some steam about the day. Politics, football, and personal insults were keen favourites. There was no censorship, although anyone who joined in partido alt and did not rhyme or respond directly to the previous verse was beaten to death and left in a dumpster. Later, as I started to understand the slang in the lyrics a little better, the underlying philosophy of the music was no less of a reason for alarm. It was appallingly sexist, for a start — the lyrics for the most part objectifying women and justifying hustling, infidelity, abrogation of family responsibilities, and even sometimes domestic violence — but, hey, that was Rio de Janeiro. After all, if their most celebrated playwright, Nelson Rodrigues, could get away with the statement that ‘all women like a slap around the face; well, at least the ones that are not neurotic anyway,’ then who was I to argue? It was their culture. I was just a simple Australian traveller blinded by bohemia and cheap beer.

  The samba dragged me into every piss-stained corner of Rio de Janeiro where people had chosen to reject the inviting blue sea to play music in the thundering heat. You had to be dedicated to samba in a city where the sambistas almost purposefully chose the most godforsaken places to hold their rodas. The best ones were in the cement carpark in Cacique da Ramos, in an impromptu session beside the freeway at Mangueira, or in the dirty street opposite the Beco do Rato in Lapa. They were almost always on a dusty, hot street and never anywhere near the massive body of cool water that surrounds the city of Rio de Janeiro.

  Fabio had set up no fewer than three street sambas in Lapa — Mondays at Bar Claudio, Thursdays at 100 per cent, and now Fridays at the Beco do Rato — and each one of them, at some stage or another, had reached cult status among the radical chic of Rio. For while he may have set them up among the rubbish and junkies and whores, the end-target crowd was deadly fashionable. Therefore, to set it up by the diamond bays of Ipanema or Copacabana, with the stunning backdrop of Corcovado behind us, would have been missing the point. Street samba was a capricious little princess, and there was nothing the Cariocas loved better than a dirty, dangerous, and undiscovered samba. And he abandoned his sambas nearly as fast as he created them. ‘We are like surfers,’ Fabio explained of street samba one day. ‘Only, our waves are the streets.’

  It is hard to say now whether I fell in love with the samba or simply with Fabio’s perspective on it, but I guess it doesn’t make any difference anyway. I even unconsciously became a kind of sambista myself. After meeting him, the whole thing got a hold on me like a mid-western cult. I took on the daily pastimes of a sambista —sleeping all day, dancing all night, spending my late
afternoons seeking out rare copies of Cartola albums, ragging out other forms of music as underdeveloped, and laughing at sexist jokes. I didn’t even stop to analyse myself until a jazz musician friend came over from France.

  ‘This music is shit, Carmen,’ said Nico, to my jaw-dropping surprise. But Fabio had trained me well as a soldier of the revolution, and I defended the music passionately the entire night until there was just Nico, myself, a guy alternating between playing a matchbox and a fork, and an unconscious cavaquinho player left. I, in the heat of my fervent Brazilian nationalism and fuelled by a copious quantity of bootleg cachaça, was pleading with my French jazz friend to listen to the ingenious beat that the fork player was making.

  ‘Yes, he may be making a rhythm, darling, but the fact remains,’ Nico eventually shouted, ‘that he is using a set of fucking cutlery.’

  There are definite parallels between North America and Brazil in terms of their musical development, although samba probably has more in common with blues than jazz. The samba was very much rooted in Rio’s poor communities of ex-slaves compared to say, bossa nova, which was a creation of the intellectual elite. Like anything that had happened in Brazil, there were wildly dissenting views as to the real history behind the rhythm. Waldemar da Madrugada told me it was the sound of the oars of the slave boats coming over from Africa, ‘boom-chak-chak-chakka, boom-chak-chak-chakka’. Chiara and I would get him to tell the story over and over again just to hear the scary, ghostly sounds he would make at the end, always terminating in the grisly wails of someone being murdered, ‘Woooo … aaaaaa … eeggghhhhhhh … agghhh.’ The foreign anthropologists who hung around Lapa pounced on that version, and Fabio sniggered to me one day that one of them even wrote their thesis on it. Waldemar was furious because his nephew had told him to not tell any more stories to foreigners without getting paid, but nobody saw the anthropologist again. He took to hitting up Chiara and me for money every time we had a chat with him, until we told him that we were penniless NGO workers on a project digging wells.