Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  We were late for our first tour that evening, thanks to Fabio, but nobody was too bothered. As Carina predicted, our ‘clients’ had already been drinking caipirinhas since five in the afternoon, so by eight their big, red, northern European faces were shining with sun and alcohol. It was a magnificent Rio evening, nearly twenty-five degrees at nine, the crickets screaming in the tropical jungle around us, and all the residents out on the street with their worldly possessions. The next-door neighbour had even brought out a lamp and hearth-rug. The gringos jostled excitedly at the hostel exit, waiting for their big night of bohemia to begin, while Fabio skulled caipirinhas upstairs like a rock star about to go on stage. As he jumped about, getting his ‘show time’ energy rushing through his veins, Carina pulled me aside to warn me about splitting the proceeds.

  ‘Just remember, darling. Don’t pay all at once. He is not used to having money. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen, as you guys say!’

  I waved her away with one hand.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody elitist,’ I retorted.

  But she just shook her head and gave a rueful smile.

  It was a roaring success. Even if my translations were less than 40 per cent accurate, we improvised like true professionals. Fabio tap-danced his way down to Lapa, charming the yellow-haired crowd with his songs and cavaquinho, while I played Charlie, bringing them up from behind. He introduced the Scandinavian girls to Winston Churchill (in exchange for a nominal commission), had Waldie tell his samba boat story in exchange for free beer, sold three paintings on behalf of the artist Selarón, and secured free entry and drinks to the Club Democraticus. The commentary was sketchy at best, filled with disconnected stories and irrelevant facts, riddled with prejudices and potential law suits, and frequently displaying a profound lack of historical knowledge:

  This here is the Convent of Santa Teresa, built in 1780 by the runaway saint Teresa who petitioned the governor of Rio to ... umm ... to do something. Anyway, moving swiftly on ... The bars, a recent addition to the colonial architecture, were placed on the windows at the start of the 1900s, to protect the local community from the naughty, slutty little nuns getting out and tempting the good malandros of Lapa with their kinky outfits. Fabio! Here is a wall picture of Madam Sata who, in spite of being gay, was also a good fighter. Joao do Rio lived here. He was a good bloke, he drank a lot, and he wrote some stories about Rio. He loved whores, too. There is Priscilla. She is a whore. So are the three next to her. Does anyone want me to buy them drugs?

  Still, nobody complained, and at three in the morning we split the money fair and square, two hundred each, hit up a Scandinavian couple for an early-morning dinner of goat curry and rice alongside the intellectuals of Nova Capella, and then went home. Carina had arranged a tour for every night that week, so I told Fabio to meet me the following night at the hostel at the same time.

  He didn’t turn up the next night. Nor the following night. Nor even the third night. He disappeared into Carioca no-man’s land. Not even Winston had seen him. Carina tutted and said, ‘I don’t want to say that I told you so.’ I didn’t see him again until he turned up three hours late on the fourth night, claiming not to have eaten for two days and not to have one centavo in his pocket. The hems of his white trousers were filthy with Rio street dirt, and the band of his hat was as twisted as a scarecrow’s. Dark rings had appeared under his eyes. I sat stiffly on the edge of a porch deckchair with a deliberately cold expression. He smiled and took my hand, which I withdrew immediately. The floor creaked from the other side of the door, where Gustavo was listening into our conversation. Fabio tried another tack.

  ‘When will the next tour commence?’

  ‘Tour? What tour? Where the hell have you been? What happened to our tour business?’ I said angrily.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I was possessed by Exu?’ he offered hopefully.

  ‘Well, if you can’t even dignify me with a serious response …’ I said, getting up. He grabbed my hand.

  ‘I told you you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Go to hell then. Anyway, there is no tour. The gringos have gone out.’ By that stage, even I was calling them ‘gringos’. Fabio’s face fell.

  ‘There has to be. I am desperate. I haven’t eaten all day, and I owe thirty reals to someone in Lapa,’ he said, genuinely distressed.

  ‘Why didn’t you turn up the next day then?’

  ‘I didn’t need the money then.’

  ‘Surely you realised you would need it at some stage.’

  ‘I didn’t think about it. I just didn’t need it then.’

  ‘So you only work when you really need the money?’

  He paused, as though thinking about this for the first time, and then shrugged and nodded.

  ‘Yeah. Doesn’t everyone do that?’

  ‘No!’ I was irritated. ‘Some people work because they want to put away something for tomorrow. Some people work because they have children and responsibilities to take care of. Work is important, Fabio.’

  ‘No, it is not,’ Fabio responded swiftly. ‘Fun is important. Happiness is important. Work is not.’

  ‘Is that everyone’s fun and happiness, or just yours?’

  We ended up going to the hostel that night, and despite our disappointing no-shows of the past few days, there were five foreigners ready to go. We ran the tour, Fabio was as charming as ever, the tourists loved it, and I kept the money on the pretext of covering our operating costs. Within three days, Carina’s words had rung true, and Fabio, hungry and mean from not being paid, had turned into a ruthless marketing machine. The transformation was astoundingly swift. Humiliation really worked! He arrived at the hostel promptly every day at 6.00 p.m., his nails clipped, hair slicked back, and posture fawning, spent an hour winding up the gringos to take tours, and talked professionally about expanding to other hostels.

  Chiara arrived at the hostel as Fabio was describing his plans to expand into the favelas of north Rio. Since her return from Italy, back and badder than ever, she had been engaged in some solo charity work on the streets of Lapa. Her latest ‘project’ was a tough single mother called ZeZe, who walked with a polio limp and had just come out of prison with her new baby. She was pregnant with three kids in the house when they arrested her in the middle of the night, and when she came out of jail she had to go and pick up her children off the street. She found one under a bridge with her torch. Chiara had become friendly with her kids, and she wanted to set her up with her own business selling drinks to get her out of dealing.

  ‘Favela tours?’ Chiara asked, staring at me.

  ‘Lapa walking tours?’ I offered meekly.

  ‘Samba tours,’ corrected Fabio.

  Her face twisted into a horrified expression. ‘How could you?’ she raged. ‘How could you engage in this blatant commercialisation of culture?’

  ‘We’re broke,’ I explained weakly.

  The truth was that I partly agreed with her, but I felt I had no choice. Making money was messy, but someone had to do it. Whatever way I looked at it, there was going to have to be some humiliation to suffer. That’s just the way work is. I could drag ten gringos around every couple of nights to my favourite spots and get to live in Rio de Janeiro, or I could go home and become a corporate whore.

  Fabio, for his part, was less concerned with the morality of money-making than with the question of how much we could make before Carnaval. He had an idea to fly to Havana after Carnaval (with or without me, I was never entirely sure) and, with the green light from Carina, he was planning a one-stop shop of tourism services to her unsuspecting clients with such illuminating names as the ‘Rio Porn Adventure’, ‘The Art of Hustling in Rio de Janeiro’, or ‘Find a Cheaper Mistress — Rio Love Tours’. I only really drew the line when he started talking about favela tours. I didn’t want to dampen his ent
repreneurial enthusiasm, but I had not jumped out of corporate slavery to land in the moral quagmire of poverty tourism.

  Chiara turned blue with rage at the prospect. ‘You don’t even live in the favela, you filthy opportunist!’ she spat, launching a moral missile attack on Fabio.

  ‘My father and brothers died there, so I think I probably qualify,’ Fabio said slowly with a warning smile.

  But Chiara dived right in, as usual. ‘It is blatant exploitation of the people who live in marginal communities.’

  ‘And what exactly is it that you are doing, running up and down the favelas every day?’ Fabio hit back. ‘Studying black men? Why are you here?’

  ‘I am here because I love this country.’

  ‘Only you can afford to, darling.’

  Chiara tossed her head arrogantly, spun on her heel, and walked out.

  She needn’t have worried. In the end, we only ran the tours for a month or so. They ended when I paid Fabio again — leading swiftly to his second disappearance. By that stage, Lonely Planet had published a Lapa section and Carina said they didn’t need tours anyway. With no desire to jump aboard the pirate ship of favela touring, it left my bohemian aspirations at yet another loose end. It had all seemed so gloatingly achievable with my ten-thousand pound bonus in my pocket; but now the money had run out, things were looking a little grim. Despite its initially carefree image, Brazilian bohemia was shaping up as having more entry barriers than the English upper class. You had to either be born into it (like Fabio) or have it bankrolled for you (like Chiara). Not to mention the taboo of sponsorship. Even the filthiest jewellery-seller on Joaquim Silva had some old bird tucked away who they flattered for the rent. For myself, the middle road down to those wild individualist pastures seemed much harder. It was a rocky road strewn with the obstacles of puritan guilt and, far more pressingly, finances. There is certainly no joy in being free and poor if you are thinking about how to make money all the time. And there was no way of cheating, either — going back to university/job/life after six months would result in immediate disqualification from the global world order of bohemia. You can’t just be on holidays from the real world. You have to cut the ropes completely.

  AT THIS STAGE, having finally accepted the fact that my grandmother was not an English baroness, Gustavo gave me ‘The Talk’.

  ‘A lazy woman like you needs a rich man, darling.’

  ‘I just couldn’t sleep with a man for money,’ I said with a sigh, and not in the least bit piously. The truth was that I would have done just about anything to stay in Rio. But I just couldn’t undertake marriage for money.

  ‘Oh, you are so fresh, aren’t you?’ he imitated my voice. ‘How else do you think all these women laze around on Ipanema Beach? It’s not because they are married to malandros, my dear, I can assure you.’

  ‘Fabio is not a malandro,’ I protested, but he waved me away.

  I was in bohemian no-man’s land. Were these really the only two options open to me? Marry a rich ugly man or live like a filthy, backpacking bastard, hustling tourists, never knowing where I would be next, and never knowing when I would have enough to pay the rent? I felt like an eighteenth-century suffragette. Was life so cruel?

  ‘No,’ said my father dryly, forever the beacon of unwanted rationality. ‘You could get a job … for example.’

  In my financial desperation, I did consider a dull corporate job in São Paulo. The prospect was inducing waves of nausea in me; but, upon hearing that it paid five thousand reals per month, Fabio abandoned everything in his life and channelled his energy into convincing me to go for it. This was our big chance, he said — our chance at the big time. He just didn’t understand. In the end, I think I only went to the interview for him (and my dad).

  The interview was in São Paulo at an anonymous high-rise around number 49,000 on the 285-lane highway of Avenida Paulista. Flying low into the airport at Garulhos, I nearly cried. The miles and miles of white skyscrapers made the outskirts of Buenos Aires look like a country village. It was like Blade Runner without the technology. Dozens of angry little helicopters darted back and forth through the smoky-brown pollution haze while the traffic below inched its way along the main streets. It was a surreal afternoon, only made possible because a friend of mine arranged absolutely everything, down to the suit I had to borrow. Fabio brought me the bag, a gleaming black leather number that his theatre group used for playing executives.

  I sat in the interview listening to a blonde corporate helmet called Priscilla rattle on about management performance-indicators and how Europeans work only thirty-five hours a week while in São Paulo they work sixty — and why? Because they were damn-well committed, that was why … and I felt myself exiting my body to float out of the shiny high-rise windows and to commit suicide on the highway below. As I left the building an hour later, fighting through the crush of workers returning from their lunchbreak, I slumped against a wall, stared at the shiny black theatre bag, and thought about why my life always seemed to return to these points of desperation.

  By the time I rang Fabio ten minutes later from a blue telephone on the corner, I had resolved not only to not accept the job should I be offered it, but to never return to São Paulo as long as I lived. My distress had transformed into a cold anger at the barbed trappings of capitalism. The phone was answered after one ring. (Fabio had bought a mobile the day before in anticipation of our new high-flying status.)

  ‘How did it go, darling?’ he cried eagerly.

  ‘I can’t.’ There was a long pause at the other end.

  ‘What do you mean, can’t?’

  ‘I simply cannot, Fabio,’ I repeated.

  ‘Ta’ louca mulher?’ he shrieked. ‘Five thousand, Carmen. Five thousand. Return immediately and accept.’

  But to return was a physical impossibility.

  ‘Accept!’ he bellowed.

  ‘Five thousand is not worth the price of my soul.’

  ‘Do it for a month,’ he said, switching to a more conciliatory tone under the pressure of losing.

  ‘You can’t do these things for a month. They are nasty little traps with iron teeth and red eyes and barbs for fingers,’ I said resolutely.

  ‘Bullshit, baby,’ he said in English, and hung up.

  –12–

  My Brilliant Career

  I first saw you in a Lapa cabaret

  Smoking a cigar, spilling champagne on your soiree.

  We danced a samba, swapped a tango for a kiss,

  And only left after the orchestra finished.

  Out front, a good car waited

  But you went home your own way.

  One more day that I would walk the Arches,

  Searching for the lady of Cabaret.

  – NOEL ROSA, ‘Dama do Cabaré’

  By January, I gave in to the tide around me and allowed myself to believe that my problems didn’t exist. After all, reality was far from an absolute concept in Rio de Janeiro. One look at Winston Churchill trying to convince his new Dutch lover that he was at home on Tuesday night was enough to convince anyone of that. I was there, but I was not really there. It’s a spiritual thing. You know what I mean? Perhaps my problems would go away, too, if I denied their existence hard enough. The only hitch with subjective realities is the existence of conflicting subjective realities in other people — no trivial snag in a society of such flamboyant individualists. It was all very well when you were out there on the open road, but up there in Santa Teresa there were so many realities running around it was like a north Rio intersection: buses in the wrong lane, cars backed up over the lights, and train crossings and motorbikes jamming up the gaps.

  My mother, for example, was calling me on an increasingly regular basis with irritating tidbits of her own realities. She had cunningly established a secret line of communication with Gustavo, and I would frequently return to the house to find Gustavo whispering fur
tively into the mouthpiece. ‘No. Yes. No. Yes. I can’t talk now. She’s here.’

  Her latest bugbear was that I had no money left.

  ‘Depends on what you call no money,’ I said, employing Winston Churchill’s creative sense of reality.

  ‘Your bank is sending you red letters.’

  ‘Is it really a red letter or does it just seem like a red letter?’

  ‘It seems like a red letter and it is a red letter.’

  ‘Well, that’s a very unfortunate perspective, then.’

  ‘Aren’t you illegal there?’ she asked, switching the subject.

  ‘Everyone is illegal,’ I responded nonchalantly.

  ‘Well what are you doing there?’

  I fended her off by telling her that I was learning Portuguese, that mother of all the useful languages on the planet. I sensed, correctly, that while I was requesting a small loan of $1000 it wasn’t the time to be talking of samba, subjective reality, or revolutionary new theories of fidelity.

  It was a lie, of course. My Portuguese was as terrible as ever, and so rooted in the slang of Lapa that it was hardly going to be of use to anyone in the real world, except perhaps for interpreting for a criminal caught smuggling cocaine into Kingsford Smith Airport. I could see I was in a bit of a bind, but what could I do? Now that I had given in to my desire to become a bohemian hedonist, I couldn’t let an earthly restraint such as money stop me from achieving my true vocation.

  I mulled it over as I wandered around the shady backstreets of Santa Teresa, depressed by the inflexibility of the Australian banking system and its incompatibility with my system of phenomenological reality, and thinking about whether I had done anything of value with my life in the past six months. After all, I grumbled to myself, foreigners didn’t move to Rio de Janeiro to put some structure in their lives. We didn’t come down here to get a steady job in an office, find a husband, and settle down. We came down here to run away, to be hedonists, to find inappropriate partners, to enjoy our lives for once rather than to be constantly achieving things that never really seemed to feel like an achievement. Certainly, some of us clung vainly to the notion that we were progressing in our lives by learning the guitar and studying capoeira, but most of us were just dropping out.