Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS hardly batted an eye when I finally told them that I was seeing a Brazilian bohemian. After all, Fabio followed a long list of my inappropriate partners, including a deposed African prince, a South African mercenary, and an Austrian, not to mention Winston Churchill. When I told my parents that I was running around with a Brazilian samba radical, they just said, ‘Well, that’s nice for you, dear. When are you coming home?’ With nearly three months of my grand three-month trip already gone, and my journey not a mile closer to my departure-point of Santiago, I had to admit that this was an excellent question. Of all the questions in my life, however, it was the one I found the hardest to answer. When on earth was I coming home?

  Christmas was around the corner, I had eaten my way through a nice little percentage of the travel-agency bonus, and I had not the slightest inclination to return to Australia. I knew I was running from one thing to the next, from Barretos to Buenos, from a malandro to a bohemian, but my instinct kept telling me I was doing the right thing. Who was this Fabio? What would I do if I stayed in the city? How would I survive? These questions were not just knocking on the door. They were like an earthquake ripping the ground up around me; but I stood still anyway, hoping against all odds that I had chosen the last untouched piece of earth and was not about to glide ignobly into the gaping abyss beside it. And while I waited for the ground to stop shaking, I followed Fabio Barreto. I tailed him through the bairros, botequims, and back streets of Rio de Janeiro, where he knew everyone from the illiterate, penniless drunks right up to the aristocrats, where he would laugh as easily as he would cry, and tell me stories so crazy that they had to be true. He held Rio de Janeiro in the palm of his hand. He was an extraordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, and I, being a merely ordinary woman among it all, was going to hold on to that for as long as I possibly could.

  –9–

  Subversives

  I am afraid.

  We are unequal

  And we want to be.

  – CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE, ‘Favelário Nacional’

  The third rite of passage for a foreign woman living in Rio, beyond the obligatory stringing up by a Lapa malandro, and humiliation by samba, was to make a triumphant return to the favela in which your new Brazilian partner was born. The prodigal son returns, victorious and bearing a wealthy foreign princess and imported goods in hand. Among the community of middle-class expats in Rio de Janeiro (who did not, of course, live in favelas), the favela connection was your measure of street cred. It might have only been cool by proxy, but it was the closest to cool a middle-class foreigner was ever going to get.

  I’d listened with fascination as Chiara had told me, over expensive meals in Ipanema, about her boyfriends, who didn’t have the money for a bus, taking her to visit cutlery-less shacks where their enormous extended families would crawl out of their hovels to greet her like the messiah. I was living in Rio, paying for dental work, and still missing out on the action. I made a formal request to Fabio.

  ‘No,’ he replied immediately.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it is dangerous.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What do you want to go there for then?’ he asked.

  ‘I need to see your favela,’ I replied.

  ‘Why?’ Fabio asked.

  ‘I want to understand poverty in Brazil,’ I replied earnestly. He burst out laughing.

  ‘That’s easy enough. Give me all your money!’

  ‘Alright,’ he eventually said upon seeing my irritation. ‘I need to buy some pot anyway. Let’s go to Mangueira.’

  ‘But I thought you were born in Caxias!’ I exclaimed. Caxias was a large, poor, suburban area in the north of Rio, not unlike Newcastle or Geelong in Australia, whereas Mangueira was an edgy inner-city favela.

  ‘Yeah, well … yeah. I was,’ he admitted. ‘But it was where my father was born anyway. Caxias is not quite, well, you know … ’

  ‘I’ll just tell Gus … ’

  ‘Nobody. You will tell nobody,’ he interrupted. ‘Otherwise Gustavo might report me to the police for leading astray a middle-class girl into the slums.’

  After making me swear over my mother, the Bible, and the holy gods of samba that I would not under any circumstances tell Gustavo that he had taken me to a favela, Fabio and I walked down to Lapa, stopping under the shady bits to stage brief recoveries from the soaring temperatures, and then caught the bus for Mangueira.

  It was a Sunday afternoon. The streets were silent and the sun was at high noon. The shutters of the second-hand furniture shops, funeral parlours, and repair garages were fixed tight, and the usually buzzing Cruz Vermelha was nearly empty. Only the corner bars and love motels were open, and a dodgy little gambling shack where Fabio sometimes went with his friend Juan after samba. Everyone else was on holiday. Glistening groups of tanned, taut men played football on closed-off side streets while their wives looked on, smoking cigarettes and calling the broods of under-dressed children running about their feet. Smoke billowed from the obligatory barbecues, laden with sides of beef and salty sausages, and the odd radio echoed funk from between the empty terraces. Our bus snaked its way through the colonial diagonals of old Rio, her once-elegant terraces more broken down the further out we drove. Onion-like strips of paint peeled off baroque domes, nouveau friezes sprouted tropical shrubs, and some façades were just façades with nothing behind them at all.

  At the border of north Rio, the colonial cityscape ended and we were cut off abruptly by the Avenida Presidente Vargas, a sixteen-lane highway that drives a swathe of open horizon through the uneven, unplanned back streets of Rio de Janeiro. As we waited for the traffic lights at Central Station do Brasil, I gazed up at the favela of Providencia. The highway seemed to have been slapped down in the middle of chaos. Perhaps the urban planners thought that three-or-so miles of a sixteen-lane highway might somehow resolve the variations and contradictions between the empires of colonial, imperial, and republican Rio, and ultimately modernise the crumbling streets around it. It was an ambitious project.

  Avenida Presidente Vargas was built in 1941, and over five hundred buildings were demolished, including five churches and the first home of samba, Praça Onze, in the process. It was named after the president who went down in history for defining the first set of labour laws in Brazil before spectacularly committing suicide at his Catête Palace. It was intended to be symbolic of ‘new Brazil’, synonymous with the modernist developments of Brasilia, and a signal to the world that Brazil had finally arrived. The Brazilians, though, instead of hallowing the new object of modernism, crawled all over the highway as if it were a new toy, colouring her edges with market stalls, marking her walls with graffiti, and filling her lanes with hand-drawn carts and brightly painted trucks.

  The road itself starts at the grand, neo-classically inspired Church of Candelariá (better known internationally as the location of a police ‘street clean up’ operation in 1993, when eight street kids were murdered and another seventy-seven shot at while they slept on the steps), then sweeps down past the intimidating Palace of Duque Caxias, headquarters of the armed forces of Brazil (better known as the only headquarters of a national army to have been robbed in broad daylight by ATM thieves), past the broken city clock-tower, past the ugly Soviet-styled Central Station, past the glossy black high-rise of the Prefecture of Rio de Janeiro, and then fades out into north Rio. It may even have worked if, simultaneously with modernising the roads of Rio de Janeiro, they had attempted to modernise some of the social institutions of this complicated city; but, as it stands, the road today remains overshadowed by the great looming hulk of the favela of Providencia to the right and the shales of mountain slums to the left. It is like a giant stone starfish lurking between the skyscrapers of central Rio, rust-coloured shacks fastened to her legs like cockles, and the runaway tropical forest dripping down her back like seaweed.

 
It was the first place to be called a favela, Fabio told me, as he craned his head to see the north wing from his window. Providencia was formed by the returning soldiers of the Battle of Canudos, a massacre in the hostile north-east of Brazil in 1897 in which the government cut down some 25,000 people in retribution for their creation of a breakaway religious community (and Favella was the name of the hill above their ragged village). Brazil is far from a warring nation, but this was a battle of biblical proportions. On one side were the captains of a fledgling and insecure Brazilian republic, and on the other were a zealous preacher called Antonio the Counseller and his devoted, sickle-wielding followers. He was a classic new-world fanatic, wandering the Brazilian sertãos, eating locusts and bark and preaching apocalypse, or in his case making such startling prophesies as ‘in 1898, there will be many hats, but few heads’. He was mad and he was hungry, and within a short period he was followed by many other mad, hungry people. To this day, educated Brazilians say that they cannot understand how corrupt evangelical preachers manage to make millions off people who have nothing; but for Antonio’s followers, at least, it was simply a matter of swapping tyranny for insanity. The 1888 abolition of slavery had filled the roadsides and pavements with a pool of contenders.

  When the soldiers returned to Rio to claim the houses and glory that had been promised them for their part in the brutal massacre, the government unsurprisingly reneged. The land owners of Brazil, then still living in central Rio, were outraged by the sight of the returning soldiers building little shacks on the hills above them, and journal archives show various editorial debates over how to get rid of them. Clearly, none of the debates ever got around to considering the idea of building decent alternative housing, though, and Providencia stayed. Indeed, it seemed nothing could move it — not the government offers of ‘relocation’ to the land-locked, arid territories in north-west Rio, nor the repeated police invasions, nor even the odd landslide that took half the houses of the bairro with them.

  We passed the deserted concrete bleachers of the Sambadrome, from where the infamous Carnaval parade of Rio de Janeiro is beamed out every February. Behind it, the favelas of Falete, Fogueteiro, and Prazeres clung to the hillsides in shades of terracotta, red, and brown, the colours of earth and poverty in Brazil. The only exception was one odd white strip behind the Sambadrome, the favela of Coroa, where the residents of Santa Teresa bought their weekend cocaine. Here the government had given the residents a few thousand gallons of whitewash so that the rust wouldn’t come up too badly for the cameras positioned on the avenue during Carnaval — a bold white blaze cutting its way through the blur of poverty. High up on the hill to the left were the diamond-white Gothic spires of the Castle Ideal where Gustavo was spending his lazy afternoons by the pool. From that angle, it looked like a lighthouse shored up by miles of undulating rust-brown rises of favelas.

  At that point, Avenida Presidente Vargas fragmented into different roads; our road disintegrated into rough tarmac, and the streets closed in on the slum-like middle-class neighbourhoods of north Rio. A charcoal-grey railway track ran along on our right. The graffiti on the walls grew darker and more aggressive with each train station, and the signs of the drug faction CV — Comando Vermelho — appeared again and again. The big oiti trees that line the garden streets of south Rio disappeared entirely, and an aggressive military police roadblock appeared on the edge of the road. A black Range Rover emblazoned with an enormous silver skull and cross-bones passed stealthily by on our left. I could see black-clothed police leaning out of its windows, armed with machine guns. They wore aviator sunglasses and tight black t-shirts. IN GOD WE TRUST was written on the back window. I looked at Fabio questioningly.

  ‘BOPE,’ he whispered to me.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Death squads,’ he said in a whisper.

  ‘What the hell is a death squad?’ I asked in disbelief.

  ‘What do you think a death squad is?’ he asked dryly.

  ‘Vigilante justice?’

  But he didn’t respond. He started singing a cheerful song about arriving in Mangueira—Chegou-o-o-o, Mangueira, chegou-o-o-o — instead, and the other passengers looked at him and smiled. We got off the bus at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, a Soviet-style building guarded by civil police, and made our way towards Mangueira. The Brazilian flag, emblazoned with the positivist ideals of ‘Order and Progress’, hung limply in the furnace-like heat of early afternoon. A cluster of cheap chain shops, blue public-telephone bubbles, and education-related buildings served the lonely student community dribbling in and out of the gated premises. Without the sea breezes that ran up the mountain of Santa Teresa, the temperature was at least five degrees hotter, and I held my hand up above my eyes to shade them. A digital clock-thermometer read 38 degrees. As we turned the next corner, Fabio pointed out Mangueira. The favela was built on a low, rounded hill, although it was hard to tell exactly where the natural undulations lay because of the build-up of houses. They looked like hundreds of rusted cardboard boxes stacked up beside and on top of each other, and bound together by a twisted crown of illegal telegraph wires. Brightly coloured kites flew from every rooftop, banana fronds poked out from every gap, and fireworks sounded from the top of the favela.

  We crossed the last road before the favela and stopped at the pasteleria, the poor man’s McDonald’s of Brazil, to have a snack before we entered. Fabio ordered two murky-green sugar-cane juices from a man who was making it by crushing long lengths of cane with a greasy black wheel. A woman fished a greasy, fried cheese pastry out of an enormous boiling vat of oil and held it out to us in a piece of butcher’s paper.

  ‘Is there a phone here?’ I asked the woman serving, but she thumbed silently in the direction we had come from.

  ‘Only back over there?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t have phones here in the favela, because we break them,’ she said with a sour smile. I just raised my eyebrows. Even sympathy would have been patronising.

  ‘You need to cross back over the road to the real world,’ she said, her expression softening a little at my surprise.

  ‘Do you live up there?’ I asked her, gesturing in the direction of the hill of Mangueira.

  She gave a small guffaw.

  ‘Huh, what do I look like? A goat? Only goats live on a hill. I live down there. By the river.’ And then she gestured to a black trickle of sludge coming out of a cement pipe. It was as if the world had finally spun on itself and the definition of civilisation had changed. In one simple road crossing, we’d gone from a world of universities, chain chemists, and public phones to a world of smoky dirt roads and market stalls. In one simple road crossing, the energy had changed from something clean, clinical, and protected to something heavy, dangerous, and alive.

  A FAVELA, sometimes called a morro, is technically defined as a place of illegal housing, although the government has started to legalise some of the tenements with the objective of securing rates and taxes from the 30 per cent of residents of Rio de Janeiro who the NGOs claim are living in them. The government claims that it is only 10 per cent that live in the favela, but many people deny living in the favela, even on survey. The quality of life and the level of violence varies enormously between different favelas, but one thing is constant: the favela is a slum. It may overhang the poshest bairro in Rio; but give your address as a favela, and your work opportunities immediately shrink to the most menial and lowly paid jobs. With your address as the ‘favela’ your life immediately becomes devalued.

  Feared by the middle and elite classes of Rio de Janeiro, but tolerated for lack of a better (or cheaper) option, the favelas have always been isolated from mainstream society. As a result, the old favelas like Mangueira, Providencia, and Rocinha are highly organised communities, with residents’ associations, political representation, and entire homespun technical industries that can link new residents with free electricity, tap water, and sewera
ge tapped into from the government network. Not to mention armies. But they are not communes: favelas are products of necessity, not ideology. New residents must apply to the existing association of residents and, unless they are a brother or cousin, they are unlikely to be approved. For many new families arriving from the impoverished north-east of Brazil, their only option is to create a new favela; and in spite of daily protests in letters to the editor of O Globo, the weak and corrupt system of local government in Rio de Janeiro is neither capable of, nor interested, in controlling these outbreaks of tin-roofed shacks on the green, leafy mountain sides. ‘Where else would they put the mamas that suckle their babies, the men for their factories and the young girls who clean their toilets for slave wages?’ Fabio asked me rhetorically when I asked him about this, adding afterwards, ‘All those people running about without houses might start a revolution or something …’