My Anglo-Saxon tolerances were ill-adapted for the climatic extremes of the Brazilian summer; I found it impossible, without sluicing the pavements with great quantities of my sweat, to do anything except lie very still in the hammock between eleven and four. I went to the beach early morning and took long siestas in the afternoon. Only at sunset, as the city breathed a collective sigh of relief, did I slink onto the streets to sip coconut water by the black-and-white mosaic boardwalks of Copacabana and Ipanema Beach, snack on chic European cuisine at the lake kiosks, or drink caipirinha at outdoor bars in Lapa.
It was like a teenage summer. My skin turned a rich, rosy brown from mornings on Ipanema Beach, my hair streaked an expensive Brazilian blonde, and I finally abandoned my lesbian jeans for the more appropriate Lapa uniform of bikini top, cotton hot-pants, and Haviana thongs. I was twenty-eight years old and I had never looked so good. I felt lazy, wonderful, and indolent. And not the slightest bit guilty. One fleeting thought of the overcrowded Jubilee Line between Neasden and central London was enough to induce a warm, fuzzy feeling of smug satisfaction deep inside my heart.
My family’s loaded calls to ask me when my visa was running out fell on deaf ears. ‘What are you doing there anyway?’ they would ask, appealing to the family’s puritan work ethic. I fended them off by telling them I was learning samba. ‘What the hell is samba?’ asked my father gruffly, finally weighing into the debate when my mother told him I would not be home for the fourth Christmas in a row. ‘Well, shouldn’t you be in a school or something at least?’ he asked, after I tried to explain about the drums, the shrill cry of the cavaquinho, and the group of black men on a lonely back street underneath a fat yellow moon. He added morosely, ‘This lack of structure cannot be good for you.’
At that stage, just about the only things structured in my life were the white Doric pillars of Casa Amarela. The few traces of normality I’d retained melted away under the scorching Brazilian sun, leaving me hostage to none other than Fabio. Chiara had been recalled to Europe to resolve her Masters degree, Carina was preparing to leave for the annual Jallad family reunion at her father’s Buzios beach house, and Gustavo was taking daily refuge in the Olympic-sized swimming pool at his brother’s castle in Santa Teresa. I was cast out with the bohemians, thrown to the sambistas. Even my psychological rock of the Friday-night samba at the Beco do Rato had fallen away from underneath me only the Friday before, after an ideological argument between the musicians and the owner, Marcio, over whether beers should be free for musicians or not. Fabio had led the case for the Dionysian, arguing that all things — namely beer and food — should be free and available for the musicians of Rio de Janeiro, in compensation for their selfless contribution to the creation of beauty and pleasure. Marcio had argued that that would be fine, except for the fact that everyone in Rio de Janeiro considered themselves a musician. (Was it only stringed musicians who got the beers? Did one include the egg shakers? Did a Coke can constitute a musical instrument?) So the ideological argument was, in reality, unsustainable and impractical. There was an enormous explosion at the bar when a bin was thrown at the wall in frustration; and the following Friday, Fabio took me drinking on the stairs of our artist friend Selarón.
Having drunk excessively on the account of two Japanese tourists who took entire memory-chips of photos of Fabio dressed in white and playing cavaquinho, we sat ourselves on the first landing of Selarón’s stairs. The introverted artist himself joined us unexpectedly, and Fabio grew increasingly emotional about the events at the bar the week before.
‘Music will return to the ears of the people,’ he cried, with a bottle of cachaça in one hand and his cavaquinho aloft in the other. But Selarón just shrugged, as though it had never left, and made way for the drunks on the staircase to rally around their king.
‘I say down with the bourgeoisie, down with the landlords and their dirty little bean-counters. Music for the people! Beer for the people!’ he cried.
‘Beer for the people!’ echoed the alcoholics.
‘Music for the people!’ he cried.
‘Beer for the people!’ they repeated.
It was only the second Friday of summer, and we were unemployed. Losing your only source of income a couple of weeks before Christmas in London or Sydney might be quite depressing, stressful even, but here in Rio there were no such concerns. It was almost seen as a blessing. Any form of commitment that required you to turn up anywhere at any time during summer, even if it did pay your weekly bills, was considered an imposition not worth its while for Brazilians and bohemians alike.
‘But how will you and the other musicians support yourselves?’ I asked with genuine concern.
‘Starve ... ’ Fabio said, putting the back of his hand across his eyes in mock tragedy.
‘Oh, no ...’ I started.
He rolled his eyes at my concern and shook his head.
‘Relax. Don’t look so worried. It’s summer. Everything will be fine. There will be money growing on the banana trees by next weekend. Rivers of gold backing up in the sewers. Honey and manna falling from the sky. My darling, we are rich. We will be rich. We will be rich!’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said with an anxious smile. Where could these fabulous riches come from, aside from my dwindling bonus or another crash in the exchange rate between pounds and clams? Would we steal it? Would I have to beg my father for a trust fund? But Fabio just tutted patronisingly, then lifted my chin up with his forefinger to kiss the tip of my nose.
‘It’s tourist season, my love,’ he said, throwing back his head with a carefree laugh, and then repeated, ‘It’s tourist season.’
That Friday night the lanes of Lapa heaved with fresh tourists, seasonal malandros, and bored kids from the rich south zone of Rio. Brightly lit barracas lined the sidewalks selling tapioca crepes, kebabs, grilled cheese, passionfruit or pineapple caipirinhas, plastic snakes of honey cachaça, and the winter staple of Skol beer. All the old faces were on the streets. Winston Churchill was by the arches, the whores outside on the staircase, and everyone was smiling and waving at the new entrants like something out of the Muppet Show. They had barely finished singing ‘It’s time to get things started,’ and the Scandy blondes were arm-in-arm with ebony-coloured Rastafarians whose wives lingered on the other side of the road negotiating with graceless packs of English lads. Lone German men with fetishes for black women gathered at the front of Ta’ Na’ Rua, and fat, middle-aged English divorcees pretended that they were not paying for the drinks of the twenty-year-old gigolos sitting beside them.
Everybody in Lapa whored in summer, even if they weren’t whores. The prize was too lucrative, the easy money too alluring. Plus they might even find someone who was good in bed or, even better, who’d offer to marry them. The price varied from dental work to a free dinner down in Leblon, and nearly all the tourists denied they were paying. The most honest approach I ever heard was an American friend’s, who said, quite simply, ‘I’m just here for the bone.’ At the start of that summer, I tried to be a moral crusader to tourists that I met, and to warn them off the bad gigolos; but my warnings just served to depress them, which meant they would stop paying for everyone’s drinks, including mine, so I relented. Since when were holidays about reality anyway? Who was I to pull down the idyllic palm-tree film screen before the party was even over, just because I had been ignominiously strung up by a Lapa malandro? From then on, I would listen earnestly along with Fabio when we met the packs of Irish/English/German guys/girls who had Halle Berry or Winston Churchill on their arms, and nod with mock amazement when they would say bashfully, ‘Well, I thought it was just a holiday romance, but last night she/he told me he/she loved me ...’
Of course, it was difficult in such a faithless environment not to have a few niggling doubts about your own partner. Even if he was the most saintly of humans, as Carina once said to me, ‘It’s not about your man. It’s about the other women.’
The truth is that I had no guarantees either way. I was in unexplored territory, physically and emotionally, and not just with respect to the Brazilians but with respect to myself as well.
I started to have an inkling of what it must be like for immigrants from religiously conservative backgrounds to integrate into a liberal country like Australia — the painful process of having to accept that you were dragging around with you a gold-plated set of cultural baggage foisted upon you by your church and country, and then having to reduce those acquired values down to your core personal ones. I hoped I would have some left, I thought to myself. In an ideal world, I would broaden into a sensual, vivacious samba dancer without losing those capacities of loyalty, honesty, and reason that I held so dear to my heart. But, of course, there was a very real risk that I would end up a treacherous, calculating gold-digger instead, and still not know how to dance! I was in no-man’s land. Calling friends or family for advice would have been useless. They were working on a value system that had no bearing in Rio de Janeiro. I only had my instinct, and it was telling me, with a reckless disregard for my welfare, to stay right where I was.
By New Year’s Eve, everything was in place for an unbroken eight-week stretch of indulgence of the most opulent order. The Brazilians were as ready as they would ever be. Their skins shone with rich, tropical tans, their cellulite had been sucked out, their faces restretched, their work commitments put on hold, and their marriages cooled to a weekly phone call. ‘I need some space, querida.’ Everybody was champing at the bit for eight weeks of drunken, hedonistic madness, and nothing on this earth — not civil war, not terminal illness, not even a loss in the football — was going to stop them.
‘Christmas is for partners,’ Gustavo said when I told him about my plans to spend New Year’s Eve on Copacabana with Fabio. ‘But New Year’s Eve is for your lover.’
I looked at him in disbelief, but he brushed me off with a short wag of his finger.
‘Don’t go all innocent on me,’ he warned.
Carina and Chiara were back on the night of the twenty-fifth, and had their snouts in the trough by Boxing Day. Fresh-faced gringos from the Anglo-Saxon countries were flowing into the Rio Hostel every hour, while seasonal malandros from as far as Cuba lined the Joaquim Silva. It was like feeding time at the zoo. The love hotels returned to full rates, cellular bills went through the roof, and Rua Joaquim Murtinho woke every second night at 4.00 a.m. to the sound of someone’s husband being kicked out of home — and then again, at 6.00 a.m., to the sound of him being forgiven. Winston Churchill went into a frenzy, jumping around to two, even three, women per night and even getting jealous if one of them went off with someone else. The women displayed a little more decorum than the men, but not much. It truly seemed that every single person I knew in Rio de Janeiro was unfaithful. There was not even a stigma attached to dating a married man. I would overhear friends, neighbours, and beauticians encouraging their girlfriends before first dates, as though the married man was the most eligible bachelor of the year.
‘Have a great time. I really hope it works out, girlfriend!’ my pedicurist said one day to the beautician who was waxing my legs, about to go on her first date with a married man.
‘So do I. He’s so cool,’ the waxer responded with an earnest sigh.
‘Well, I hope he pays for everything, at least,’ I said dryly.
The waxer gave a slightly wary smile as though I was suggesting something highly rebellious.
‘Nooo. I believe in equality,’ she responded lightly.
‘Then get a husband first, darling,’ I heard myself grumble.
The conflict between my culture and that of the Brazilians seemed to be an eternal one. Some days I would wake up early, drink my coffee without sugar and cream, and go running to get the filth out of my system, my body shaking with rage as I reflected on the sins of this irreverent culture. Other days I would wake up late and lazy, tear the fruit apart with my hands, flirt with the garden boy, and feel as liberal as hell. On the off days, I was a lone dissenter in any case. The most faithful audience I could hope for was a new tourist, for certainly the long-term expats had wised up long before me.
‘What are you doing here if you disagree with the culture?’ a Swedish expat asked me one evening in Lapa as I expounded on the immorality of Brazilians, and made snide remarks about how the only thing that Brazilian women seemed to have picked up from the liberating seventies was their dreadful fashion sense.
‘I am not opposed to their marvellous sensuality, fabulous music, and magnificent views,’ I responded curtly. ‘Just to the rampant infidelity which undermines relationships and respect for women here.’
He shrugged and drank back the last of his beer.
‘It’s all the same. One doesn’t come without the other.’
I argued the point, but despite the convincing logic of Christian morality that had control of my mouth, my instinct hung back uncertainly. I couldn’t shake off the unanswered questions that lingered at the back of my mind. There was certainly no sexual repression in this society. They were in control of their sexuality in a way that I had never observed in London or Sydney. There was no need to get horribly drunk to make a pass at the opposite sex, and no puritan culture of calling sexually liberal women ‘sluts’. Were the women and men of Rio really behind the times, or was it a possibility, in fact, that they were in front — and that we just didn’t notice them passing us?
At the heady helm of hedonism, I even found myself questioning my good Christian values. On the good days I felt that perhaps this heaving mass of infidels represented the future of relationships between man and woman. Brazil may have been backward in terms of every United Nations and World Bank indicator of living standards, but they were scooping the world indicators for happiness year after year. They were just about the happiest damn people I’d ever met. They were forever smiling and laughing. What were they laughing about, anyway? It certainly wasn’t the clean water and nutritious food. Maybe it was at us. Here they were, with not a care in the world, having a jolly old time with the neighbour’s wife while we were sitting piously in front of our television sets limiting our exposure to sin to watching it in French films. And if the world could change its mind so easily on Judas, well, who was to say that it got the Ten Commandments right? Maybe Jesus and Mary had been a pair of dirty swingers like the Cariocas.
I found my answer, or at least the start of my questions, in the unlikely case of rising soap star Cléo Pires. Ms Pires was officially appointed Rio’s sexiest woman the year after I arrived — no mean feat in a country whose beaches teem with supple-skinned beauty queens who have achieved the impossible goal of making Lycra g-strings look fashionable. Pires’ sun-soaked form screamed from the daily tabloids, her satisfied smile blanked out the magazine covers, and stalkers surrounded her Ipanema condominium. Not that it is unusual for Brazilians to go mad over soap stars, football stars, B-grade celebrities from the United States, or even the odd tourist, for that matter. They have a boundless and infectious enthusiasm for tacky extremes. But Cleo Pires, or Lurdinha, as she was known in the garish soapie America, had positively eclipsed the celebrity ratings. The evening soap, which portrayed the lives of illegal Brazilian immigrants turned cowboys in Texas, was enormously popular. It doubled the entrance price at the Barretos Rodeo, sent decent women fleeing for the Mexican border, and was wholly responsible for the wave of straw Stetsons that appeared on the Ipanema beach that summer. Even the beloved Giselle Bündchen, the supermodel ex-girlfriend of Leonardo di Caprio and can-can cheerleader of the Brazilian football team, was starting to look like yesterday’s desserts. As Carina, my barometer of popular Brazilian opinion informed me, Lurdinha was officially ‘cult’.
‘Men want to marry her and women want to be her,’ Carina said wistfully as we walked towards her house in the elegant bairro of Jardim Botânico. It was another balmy Thursday evening, and we had worked up a dreamy stat
e while walking around the heart-shaped lake that stretches from the back of Ipanema to the botanical gardens. If Rio was the ‘sleeping giant’, then surely Lagoa was Narcissus’ pond. It was as still as a watercolour in the rosy hues of dusk; moody images of the surrounding mountains reflected off her silken surface, and white stalks stood stone-like in the shore reeds. Jardim Botânico lay behind Lagoa. It was a triangular area flanked by the lake, botanical gardens, and a magnificent sheath of rock, and bathed in the extraordinary light that bounced between stone, wood, and water. It was elegant, discreet, and terrifyingly expensive. Carina often encouraged us to move there. There were none of those vulgar and ostentatious views over the Bay of Guanabara that the rest of the city swanked off, but it had attained the status of the most sought-after address in Rio de Janeiro for the very simple reason that there was no favela. The vertical escarpments behind the bairro made it a physical impossibility, unless the people planned to live on scaffolding.
It was a bairro filled with soap actresses and free of crime. The only exception, and a notable one at that, was the Bus 174 incident — recently immortalised in an award-winning documentary — in which a survivor from the Candelariá street-kid massacres held commuters hostage for a day or two outside the botanical gardens. He said he only wanted recognition for the fact that the police had killed all his friends and had never stood trial, but it turned into another Brazilian media circus involving a lynch mob, some corrupt police who obviously didn’t turn up to their ‘How to deal with harmless hostage takers’ training day, and the faithful O Globo media monopoly. In the end, the police suffocated poor Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, which was probably the more humane option given the state of Rio’s unsanitary prison system. That said, it would be unfair to let the ugly situation of Nascimento — who was, as one south zone resident clarified for me one day, ‘just travelling through Jardim Botânico on the bus’ and was not actually ‘from Jardim Botânico’ — overshadow the true and deserving merits of the bairro. These were not sown in violence, drugs, or prostitution like the other commum bairros, but in the slushy, foamy, pink world of soap operas.
Chasing Bohemia Page 14