Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  It was a pessimistic and unfair view, although heavily subscribed to by large numbers of the traveller community who would arrive, become seduced and betrayed in a matter of days, and then leave, disgusted. There were always a few who would stay, of course, and join in guiltily, blaming it on the jungle, the cheap beer, and the hot weather. This was probably best explained, as my English expatriate friend did one day as he sat among his harem of wives under a mango tree like a Roman emperor, plucking ripe fruits from the pregnant boughs above, and said: ‘Nature gets us all in the end’.

  –11–

  Money and Morality

  In Brazil today, if you’re not a scoundrel when the sun goes down, you’ll be one when the sun comes up.

  – Pretty But Dull, a play by NELSON RODRIGUES

  We didn’t exactly rip off tourists — certainly we were nothing like Winston and the whores — but we had to start making a living somehow. All the economising in the world could not disguise the fact that there was nothing coming in. My future was looming on the horizon like a giant tombstone, inscribed with the words, Carmen Michael, Death by wage slavery, Will be dearly missed by VISA card Australia. While Fabio was managing most of the bills, I still had a secret expenditure account that was rapidly draining away my credit rating. Designer clothes and beauty products were the key culprits and, no matter how hard I tried to scrape the last specks out of a pot of face cream, refused to be eliminated. I tried easier targets, like bargaining at the local markets for fruit and vegetables, checking to see whether the bus was running before I jumped in a taxi, and checking the bill at restaurants (which was always wrong, I might add), but my penny-pinching strategies only served to disgust Gustavo and Carina.

  ‘It is only fifty reals,’ Gustavo said one day when Fabio’s musician friend Juan turned up unannounced on the doorstep to ask for one hundred reals to print the fliers for their local Carnaval gathering. He already had fifty in his wallet, and told me to run upstairs and get the rest. Juan smiled at me as he waited patiently outside the gate, Torré analysing his every move.

  ‘I don’t have it,’ I shrugged.

  Gustavo looked at me with surprise.

  ‘Well, he certainly doesn’t have it,’ Gustavo responded.

  ‘It’s always fifty reals here and fifty reals there. I’m nearly broke as it is.’

  Gustavo gave a crooked smile.

  ‘Oh … you poor, poor girl. Poa! Broke? Come on.’

  ‘Why do we have to pay for it? It’s not my problem.’

  ‘Because you know him. He is Fabio’s friend, is he not? He would not have knocked if he didn’t need it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Gustavo looked at me in surprise.

  ‘They might be simple people, but they are honest.’

  I sighed with guilt, and Gustavo took a closer look at me.

  ‘He would not dare come to this gate otherwise.’

  The truth was that I was living like a rich person, but I didn’t have the money to be rich. I was getting to be like one of those rich trust-fund kids who can’t afford to buy a round of drinks. Perhaps the one redeeming quality of rich people in Brazil is, in fact, that they know how to be rich. The wealthy Brazilians may have a limited appreciation of urban planning, economics, philosophy, literature, food, sport, and the arts in general, but they sure know how to throw it around. Some Europeans, such as the Portuguese journalist Pereira Coutinho, might have called them the ‘anti-elites’ and accused them of being a vulgar, money-worshipping ruling class, on a par with the court of Louis XIV; but, in their defence, how else can you keep a third of your country below the poverty line without any substantial resistance? It was certainly not by showing them that all human beings are born equal. Knowing how to be rich is a vast and underrated responsibility in a country with neither the money nor the inclination for a social support infrastructure, and one that is completely lost on foreigners and often their own fledgling middle class.

  Carina, for her part, pays for the education of her staff, lends them money to build houses, and picks up the bill for medical treatment when they really need it. While clearly not of the same calibre — if UNDP inequality indicators are to be believed — the rich vaguely fulfil the role that the family might play in Italy, or that the state is intended to take on in Australia. People like Chiara and I just confused everything because we had the lifestyle and education of rich people, but went around talking to street kids and malandros and drug addicts as if we were one of them. While some of them liked it and would compliment us on our non-discriminatory approach, I was not so naïve as to think that there were not an equal number who detested us for it. The rich have an understanding of their place, as do the poor.

  It would be a humiliation for a rich Brazilian to be asked to contribute to a charity and not to give, particularly after they’d ransacked the government coffers with bent contracts and unnecessary monopolies, and kicked out deserving management-job applicants in favour of their sons and daughters. They will find that fifty centavos. It is part of the deeply patronising tradition of relationships between rich and poor, which reaffirms all the power institutions upon which Brazil is built — namely, slavery. Anthropologist Roberto da Matta called it the ‘do you know who you are talking to?’ culture. Forget the folk-dancing tour. That will teach you nothing about the culture of Brazil. Watch how an upper-class liberal treats a parking attendant. Now there’s a lark. There are at least twenty different ways you can humiliate a poor man, but I guess I liked the Leblon princesses’ way best — the irreverent swagger and the brassy stare of a seventeen-year-old in her dad’s BMW as she flicks a coin mid-air at a man old enough to be her grandfather beats the hell out of watching sequined mulattas any day. That’s why the average Brazilian gets so miffed when foreigners come here claiming that they are not rich or that they want low, local Brazilian prices. They don’t know how to act in accordance with their wealth. It is insulting for them to see a foreigner bargaining viciously for prices or trying to avoid paying for the tram. These are privileges accorded only to the poor of Brazil — not to the rich, much less a foreigner. You would never see Gustavo bargaining for anything less than 500 reals. He wouldn’t lower himself to such crassness.

  Take the Santa Teresa tram, for instance. It’s a bargain method of transport, although you have to be savvy. Sit down and you pay sixty centavos (about thirty cents), but hang off the side and you travel for free, thus giving rise to the occasional sight of a tram moving along with nobody in the seats and the sides covered in passengers. The problem, though, is that the trams are falling into disarray because of lack of funding, so the drivers sometimes get tough on the backpackers and demand they cough up the money. Chiara recounted this story to me.

  ‘Sixty centavos!’ the conductor barked one day at three backpackers clinging clumsily to the side.

  ‘But we’re on the side,’ one protested.

  He stopped the tram and asked in a slow, sarcastic tone, as everybody turned to look.

  ‘Are you really telling me that you have come all the way from England and don’t have sixty centavos for a tram ride?’

  The culture of wealth that surrounds Rio de Janeiro is complicated. Certainly the magnificent natural backdrop, the bling culture of the Cariocas, and the decadent behaviour of western tourists all heighten the appearance of wealth in the city, but Rio’s absolute wealth does not come close to that of western cities such as Paris, London, or even Sydney. Rio may have its one chic street with jewellers and Chanel and Mercedes on the drive, and its handful of suburbs with the obligatory Vaucluse-like mansions and yacht clubs, but their inhabitants are not jaw-droppingly rich. Even the quasi-elite, like Carina, for example, have a standard of living that is not vastly different from the upper-middle class of Australia. The truth is that the gross domestic product of Brazil is about the same as Australia’s, only she has ten times as many citizens.

&n
bsp; For me, the appearance of wealth in Rio de Janeiro was defined almost exclusively by its relativity. Its offensiveness was not in its excess — as an Australian living in the top 10 per cent of the world’s most wealthy citizens, I should have been immune to that — but its in-your-face-inequality. There seemed to be something distinctly immoral about the residents of expensive white condominiums looking out onto the kitchen windows of favelas, without any obvious sense of guilt. And it was hard to see it as simply an issue of development. Built on slave labour, once home to the segregated imperial court of Portugal, and a purpose-built playground for the rich and famous, the very roots of Rio de Janeiro were sown in disparity. The most outstanding feature of the city to the naked eye is that there is no middle class. There is no middling suburbia; no significant industry. The only thing of human-produced value in the entire city is the culture of its poorest people. People come to Rio de Janeiro to spend their money, not to make it. Even the tambourines and drums for which they are famous are imported. Nearly one-third of the jobs in the city are in the dead-end world of unskilled services. It is simply a city of rich people and the people who serve them.

  Statistically, the richest 10 per cent of people in Brazil earn about 57 times the amount earned by the poorest 10 per cent — compared to a multiple of 12.5 in Australia. This represents an average difference in earnings of US$37,534 to US$656 per annum. That’s the extreme end of the scale, and probably based on the difference between a farm worker in Para compared to an executive in São Paulo. Let’s take a Rio example. The minimum wage is about 350 reals per month, although a lucky waiter or cleaner in central Rio probably gets around 600 reals. At the other end of the working scale, a graduate accountant or lawyer gets around 6000 reals per month. This means, broadly, that the lawyer is on ten times the money of the waiter serving him. There is almost no chance whatsoever that that waiter will ever sit at a table drinking a beer after work beside that lawyer. There is no chance that he would even use the same supermarket, nor that their daughters would dance at the same club one night. In fact, just about the only connection that the waiter would ever have with the lawyer would be to serve his dinner, or have his wife clean the lawyer’s house, or possibly have his son seduce the lawyer’s daughter down in Lapa during Carnaval.

  There is a failure of the social contract, which, even if it does not demand the honouring of the idealistic notion that all human beings are born equal, should at least demand that they have a chance to get up there if they work hard enough. I recall an interview on television with a Brazilian actress who shocked audiences by saying that she didn’t have a cleaner when she lived in New York. The interviewer’s mouth fell open with horror at the idea of the actress sweeping her own house.

  ‘But why, darling?’

  ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ the actress shrugged. ‘Cleaners get paid a decent wage in America.’

  There is a rich indolence among Cariocas, rich or poor, when it comes to matters of work and productivity. Service levels are awful in the city, corruption is shrugged off, and people complain constantly of their maids ripping them off. It is everybody’s dream to have a job in the government, from which they can’t be sacked. But there is no honour in an industrious work-ethic. ‘So chic!’ Gustavo would exclaim as I went off to the beach. ‘Only a very chic woman can go to the beach on a Tuesday morning.’

  Work is out of fashion in Rio de Janeiro — those who turn up expect to be abused, and those for whom the workers turn up seem to feel obliged to abuse them. At times the relationship between worker and boss borders on the theatrical, almost sexually sado-masochistic. Humiliation, degradation, and deprivation were popular techniques. Sim, senhora. Não, senhora. That the elite even maintain their positions in society has to be down to these crude mind games, for it certainly has nothing to do with their cultural superiority.

  AS FOR MYSELF, I wasn’t only struggling with the threat of absolute poverty, but also with the reality of comparative poverty. Chiara had returned to Rio with a topped-up trust fund and a sunny new outlook on her revolutionary activities, Carina’s father had instructed her to buy an apartment on his account, and Gustavo had Casa Amarela and an entire island he used to call ‘the farm’ to the south of Rio. New travellers with enormous bank accounts arrived to live on Joaquim Murtinho, and inconveniently became friends — Nico with his generous French government unemployment fund and Anna, another Italian trustafarian. They were, as the local malandros astutely identified them, on dinheiro de primeiro viagem or ‘first trip money,’ implying generosity and naïvety in equal abundance. I was the only one without a ‘fund’ of some description, and the only one living a lifestyle ridiculously beyond my means.

  I tried the Brazilian approach, and called my father to see whether I might be able to access some of the vast Michael family assets — to assess the possibility of selling off a few of the one million kangaroos for which I was famous within the leafy garden walls of Santa Teresa — but there was no sympathy forthcoming from the home camp. There was a general consensus among everyone I knew that it was well and truly time that I came home and started commuting two hours a day and working in the real world like the rest of them. Not that my father was ever a wage slave. He had a wonderful unstructured life behind him. Maybe that’s why he got worried. The one child who looked like she might make it straight in the corporate world had run off to Brazil.

  ‘Trust fund?’ my father echoed incredulously down the phone when I proposed an array of solutions to my problems. ‘You are about the last person I would trust with a fund of any description.’

  My brother was no better.

  ‘Boo-hoo …’ said my brother unsympathetically when I unburdened my woes upon him. ‘Come home and work like the rest of us, you lazy cow.’ My sister was more helpful, although her means were limited.

  ‘I can lend you a couple of hundred.’

  ‘A couple of hundred what?’

  ‘A couple of hundred dollars.’

  ‘That’s hardly going to pay my bills.’

  ‘You can stay with me when you get back,’ she offered kindly.

  ‘I’m not coming back,’ I screamed, surprising even myself with the violence of my outburst.

  ‘No, I know. But if you do ... you know ...’ she reassured me.

  The only person to offer me anything substantial and without strings attached was a penniless Irish actor friend of mine, Lochlann O’Mearain, who wrote me an email out of the blue and offered to give me five hundred pounds to continue my luxurious unemployment until the end of Carnaval in February. I was so surprised that I nearly swallowed my mango skin. Lochlann never had more than twenty pounds on his person, or any possessions, in the entire time I knew him. His penchant for giving away other people’s possessions as presents was the cause of much irritation in our household of otherwise corporate high-fliers. Maybe he was just amazed that I was unemployed when it had always seemed to be him with the job problems, maybe the exoticism of Rio de Janeiro had inspired some madness, or maybe he was just messing with my head.

  I was on the verge of accepting Lochlann’s generous offer, if only out of curiosity, when Carina came up with an ingenious plan. It had followed a meeting with Carina and Fabio at the Rio Hostel in which I had expressed serious concerns that I might have to return at some stage to my country to work. Carina listened intently as I explained my dilemma. Everyone went to Carina with their problems. She had inherited her father’s careful and considerate manner of listening to other people’s dilemmas and finding reasonable solutions. She thought quietly for a moment before suddenly turning to me with a suggestion.

  ‘I’ve got it. Why don’t you run tours in the lead-up to Carnaval?’

  ‘I’m a tourist. Not a tour guide.’

  ‘You know more about Lapa than me! Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m not Brazilian.’

  ‘But Fabio is,’ she said, and thumbed in his direc
tion.

  ‘Fabio?’ I echoed uncertainly.

  We both looked over to Fabio, who had long since lost interest in the discussion, and was at that moment tracing the clouds in the sky with his forefinger and humming a tune that sounded like a dozen broken gates opening and closing.

  ‘Hmm …’ she said, raising one eyebrow with concern. ‘I see what you mean.’ She sighed and then shrugged.

  ‘But what choice do you have? You are broke. I will have ten gringos ready to go tonight.’

  ‘But what will I say?’

  ‘Whatever. They will be drunk by the time they go, anyway.’

  Fabio jumped to life with the new proposal and proposed a rare afternoon on the beach to celebrate our imminent wealth.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit too early to celebrate?’ I asked.

  ‘Never! Never too early to celebrate. Never!’ he cried. ‘To the contrary, it is good luck.’ He bounded ahead of me on the street and I quickened my pace to keep up with him. ‘All right, then. But shouldn’t we prepare?’

  ‘Prepare what? We will just improvise. Between my charm and your English, we are guaranteed of success.’

  ‘But they might want to know stuff, like historical things. They are paying, after all. And my Portuguese is terrible.’

  ‘You worry too much. Foreigners! Always worry, worry, worry. If I was as rich as a foreigner, I would not worry about a single thing. Not one little thing.’

  Generally he hated going to the beach, but when he wanted to please me he would accompany me and hover all day under the umbrella, swimming only at the water’s edge. He might have been a shark on the back streets of Lapa, but on the beach he was completely out of his element. He was afraid of the water, had sensitive eyes, and did not like direct sunlight. He would shrink back from every wave that crashed on the shore whispering, ‘Here comes the tsunami.’ He preferred instead to go to one of the hundreds of waterfalls that sprang like black gold from the mountains around Rio, where he could root around in the rugged riverbeds and gnarly trees, calling to the monkeys and toucans under a light that fell in strange, fan-like patterns on our faces and on the mossy forest floor. That day on the beach, however, he lay about like an Italian count on the Mediterranean coast, soaking up the rays, or standing around with the other boys smoking cigarettes and even, in the afternoon, braving the strong, foamy undercurrents.