Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  ‘IT IS SO SIMPLE. Life is so simple,’ Gustavo philosophised one morning as he struggled vainly to reclaim our washing line from the swollen summer garden. Bloated on sweet tropical rains and hot humid days, the steeply sloped garden had become a bottomless tangle of foliage and trees, and was fast advancing on the walls of the Casa Amarela. Only God and Torré really knew what lay under the waves of vines, creepers, and parasites at the back of the house. Once, after a half-hearted burn-off in September, I found the remains of a penny-farthing cycle and a lion-claw bathtub. By February, the garden had assumed firm control. The mango and avocado trees were strangled by vines, the smell of rotting fruit stung our nostrils, and the red lobster claws of the heliconia had taken on prehistoric proportions. Some vines were so strong that they even grew trunks.

  To cut back the garden so that the washing line and path were visible, Gustavo had enlisted the help of the neighbour’s son, a strong silent boy who wouldn’t have looked out of place on a pedestal in the Greek and Roman antiquities section at the Louvre. Both of them were shirtless and sweating, and carried long metal scythes; Gustavo had tied his forehead with a red scarf, lending him the appearance of a portly Arabian assassin. It seemed like a losing battle in any case. The garden would only grow back the next day, and probably even more ferociously in revenge for the previous day’s attacks. ‘Do what you want. I always tell you that. It’s the only way to be happy.’ Gustavo sighed as the same vine he had been hacking at for ten minutes flopped back stubbornly, and then he sat down suddenly on the step.

  IT WAS CERTAINLY what everyone else was doing. People went where they wanted, with whomever they wanted, when they wanted, without a care in the world. They would even warn in advance against their unreliability by adding the prefix ‘Carioca time’ when making appointments, which meant that they might turn up two hours late, or simply not at all — something I eventually discovered after waiting for long periods on street corners. Shame about poor old granny waiting for that visit, then, but she can hardly expect much more in a country that closes its hospitals during World Cup football matches. Hedonism was a lifestyle that bred self-sufficiency. Sure, it could be frustrating checking yourself into hospital alone with appendicitis, but at least you didn’t have to do it for anyone else.

  Rio de Janeiro was a city of petty anarchists. Not the church, nor the state nor even conscience seemed to control the most orderly of folk. More than 80 per cent of habitations, including the odd mansion and high-rise tower, were illegally built; the police enforced laws arbitrarily; vigilante justice was a popular form of social control; over 40 per cent of the economy was black; famous musicians admitted to buying pirated music CDs; and everybody drove while drunk. You couldn’t blame anyone. That was the price of personal freedom and a government that genuinely didn’t seem to care.

  The art-nouveau house next door to us, owned by an eccentric intellectual called Anna, was the location of regular parties in which her resident anarchists, artists, alternative-political-party members, and children-in-need would host kids’ Carnaval drum practice, electro-punk bands, weird modern-dance displays, and very loud poetry readings. The streets would clog up with cars and taxis, the sidewalk would jam with uninvited kids, and I could hear the last stragglers loudly debating concepts like Brazilian nationalism in the garden across from my window in the Chinese princess room until the sun rose every weekend.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone on the street ever complain about the noise?’ I asked Gustavo one morning when he grumbled about them keeping him up all night. He looked at me strangely and then shook his head. ‘No, of course not,’ he replied, adding, after a thoughtful pause, ‘Anyway, complain to who?’

  Individual rights were quite a complicated issue in Rio de Janeiro. There was clearly no right to an environment free from noise, a barely enforced right to education, a mocking attitude towards intellectual assets and, as for property rights — that old chestnut — well, they were tenuous at best.

  When I’d first arrived, I’d flirted briefly with the idea of buying a house on the southern peninsular of Ipanema Leblon Beach where there is a favela called Vidigal, a village that clings to the side of a magnificent mountain called Dois Irmãos or the Two Brothers. Apartments with full-frontal views of Ipanema Beach sold for around US$15,000 at that time, so it was not hard to be lured by the prospect. Sometimes Chiara and I would visit after going to the beach in the mornings, racing each other up the winding lanes on the back of the motorbike taxis, and throwing glances back over our shoulders to where the mountain plunged into the sparkling Atlantic ocean below. Chiara was always on the look-out for beautiful black men whom she had not yet met, and who, she claimed, only existed in the favelas. ‘It’s the interbreeding that makes them beautiful,’ she used to explain in her matter-of-fact manner. ‘Classic Darwinian perfection. That’s why the English are so ugly. They live on an island.’ Aesthetics aside, it seemed like an investment opportunity, particularly since in the posh next-door suburb of Leblon the same apartment without a view would sell for about US$200,000.

  ‘It’s settled, then,’ I said one day to Fabio and Carina as we lounged around on the hammocks at the hostel. ‘I’ll just sit on the investment, rent it out, and in ten years make US$100,000.’ I was relieved to have finally found an easy way of avoiding my impending financial disasters. ‘I’ll call my family today.’

  Fabio and Carina looked at me incredulously.

  ‘Oh my God, darling,’ said Carina. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ She looked at Fabio and they laughed together.

  ‘If you want it,’ Fabio snorted, ‘You gotta go get it, buy an AK-47, and then stay in it.’

  And that, pretty much, was freedom in Rio de Janeiro. It was as good as your gun. There might have been a few pockets of occasional order around Ipanema and Leblon, but most of Brazil was still living in the Wild West.

  The rattle and hum of lawlessness shook every corner of the city. Newspaper columns filled daily with complaints from respectable middle-class citizens about illegal housing being built next door to their houses. Unregistered kombi vans clogged the bus lanes, pirate vendors blocked the doorways of record shops, and judges were forever being ticked off for creating their own laws. Drug dealers set up their boca da fume on family neighbourhood blocks in Copacabana to save their customers having to walk up the morro hills, and in central Rio a social movement called the ‘Movement of People without Roofs’ was organising squats of up to 600 families in abandoned buildings. Entire bairros of the city had never paid for electricity, light, or taxes. It truly seemed to me as though the government had lost control of the city. An average of 6500 homicides, 32,000 stolen cars, 22,000 assaults, and 5000 group robberies were committed annually in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

  ‘What happens if we run into trouble?’ I asked my friend Anna anxiously one day as we drove through a massive yellow police sign that said STOP NO ENTRY into the forest of Paneiras. She was stoned, and wanted to see the forest before the sun went down. A group of a dozen-or-so armed police loitered on the roadside ahead of us around a couple of four-wheel-drives.

  ‘What trouble?’ she asked.

  ‘Police trouble,’ I said peering out the window with a thought for my illegal status.

  ‘No problem,’ she said, smiling and rubbing her thumb and forefinger together. ‘Jeitinho.’

  OH, JEITINHO. The little way. The reason that Brazil is corrupt, and the reason that we love and hate her. Jeitinho is the twenty you slip a cop to cancel your traffic fine; the smile you give to customs to hasten your visa; the cash you pay your cleaners; the job you give to your neighbour’s nephew in exchange for her minding your kids on Saturday nights; the million you pay a senator to get your policy through. It happens everywhere in the world, but nowhere else is quite like Brazil. It is the oil that greases the wheels of an absolutely ineffective system of government. You could hire the police as personal bodyguards, buy your way out of an arres
t — that was 900 reals, I had been reliably informed — and push through council approvals with a greasy palm. Without a doubt, if you had money, corruption was more efficient than bureaucracy.

  Carina played by the rules, but she was a lonely bastion of integrity out there in a world where even simple tourist hostels lied about each other to get favouritism in the guidebooks and regularly sabotaged each other’s business — anything to avoid the silly strategy of improving their products and conducting some good old-fashioned advertising.

  A pirate vendor on Rua Uruguaina said it all for me one afternoon as I looked for a rip-off of the latest Seu Jorge CD. A tall, powerful man called Dudu told me he earned about 1000 reals per month by selling pirates, compared to the minimum wage of 350 reals — and, moreover, it was his own business. If he didn’t want to turn up, he was the only one who suffered.

  ‘Why doesn’t everyone do it then? What makes a good pirate salesman?’ I asked, but we were interrupted by the sound of a whistle. I looked around to see a group of ten khaki-clothed civil police belting their way towards us. They rapidly seized the screens of CDs and dealt out slaps to the unlucky vendors who had not yet scattered. By the time I turned back to Dudu he was already gone, and I saw his lean, muscular frame pounding the cobbles outside the Church of Our Lady of Rosário and Saint Benedict. He stopped beside the entrance, framed by big red velvet drapes and the baroque friezes above him, and yelled back the answer to my question: ‘Be able to run fast, girl, that’s what!’ Then he laughed, with his head back, his enormous white teeth glinting in the sun, and disappeared.

  The system might have worked for the strong, brutal, or rich, but when the boot was on the other foot, your son could get passed up for that government job for a lesser candidate with contacts; corrupt politicians never went to jail; and cases of police violence barely made the news — much less the courts.

  On one of Chiara’s more depressing revolutionary missions, I once met a pressure-group of mothers whose children had been murdered by the police. Most of them were still waiting for trials, let alone justice. The meeting was originally planned as an open discussion between the residents of favelas and the police regarding the use of the caveirão or ‘skull’, a black, tank-like vehicle that the BOPE forces had started using to tackle traffic in the favelas. Marcelo Freixo, at the time a human-rights activist for NGO Justica Global, wanted to use the forum to argue that the caveirão was an instrument of war and therefore could not be used in civilian areas. The secretary of security for Rio de Janeiro — the head of the political arm accountable for the police of the city — didn’t even turn up. He sent twenty-five-or-so heavily armed henchmen instead, a couple of whom wore the black berets of BOPE emblazoned with the skull-and-crossbones.

  One of them ‘accidentally’ emptied his bullet case on the table in front of us, the bullets spilling around on the floor in the dank UERJ university auditorium, just in case the mothers had forgotten why they were there in the first place. Marcelo, whose torturous job was to keep the debate focused on the caveirão and the understandably high emotions of the mothers in check, decided to stage a peaceful yet firm walkout to protest the absence of the secretary of security. At the last minute, after the group had taken down their miserable handmade posters of newspaper cuttings and photos of their kids and begun filing past the police, one woman broke down and launched at them. Her face contorted in fury as the other mothers held her back.

  ‘My child was robbed. He went to report the crime to you and ended up murdered.’ She tried desperately to control her voice, but it was impossible. Tears flooded down her cheeks, and her pupils dilated in horror at her memories. The women gathered close by her side.

  ‘I want — I want justice …’ She looked around in disbelief. ‘How can you just… how can they just sit there …?’

  Marcelo sighed, and swung his head a little in a combination of pity and frustration. The henchmen shifted uncomfortably and looked up to the general commander of the military police, Hudson de Aguiar, who in turn responded to the woman with a sympathetic, patronising smile.

  ‘Look ... there is a bate-papo, (a questions-and-answers chat session) in six months or so ... If you could go along there and register your concerns …’ As it turned out, she had already been to that bate-papo. Three years ago. Her son had been a student. He had been robbed and went to report the crime, not knowing that the very police to whom he made the report were in collusion with the thieves. She was still waiting for the court case when we met her. Where the dedicated student activists of Rio’s state-funded university system were was anyone’s guess — probably getting drunk in a bar in Leblon and complaining about student fees. It was, after all, about the time of year when they dressed up in paint and raised money on the streets for their annual bush-week parties. Those weeks must have been tough competition for the street-kid beggars; but, hell, who wanted to be a wet blanket?

  It did beg an old question — one that no doubt plagues the development economists a lot more than it does ordinary Brazilians. Is a corruption-free Brazil even possible? Brazil is a democracy, isn’t it? Certainly it is in need of some modernisation — a hike in minimum salaries and some land reforms would be a good start — but all the rules are there. At least half the problem has to be that nobody pays any attention to them, and whether that’s due to political incompetence and an absence of governance or a natural ‘anarchic will’ in the genetic makeup of Brazilians, corruption has filled the vacuum. Bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, embezzlement, price-fixing, collusion … The daily newspaper reads like something out of a Dick Tracey cartoon.

  There is a school of thought, propagated by commentators such as Roberto da Matta, that a Western capitalist democracy was never going to work in Brazil anyway. It requires a genuine belief in the principles of equality and individuality, for a start. In the words of ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ‘It’s futile to say that the income is concentrated. That’s been the case for 500 years’. Brazil’s feudal style of land distribution started right back in the 1500s when King John III of Portugal split the country into twelve equal parts and delivered them to his favourite noblemen.

  The inequitable structure of land ownership was further compounded by the introduction of mass slavery — an integral part of the Portuguese stronghold in Latin America. It is broadly held that by 1850 Rio de Janeiro had about 80,000 slaves in the city — about 40 per cent of the population, and some three times more than the slave populations in comparable ports such as New Orleans. (In fact, despite the heavy political focus on the United States slave trade, Brazil was the recipient of the largest number of African slaves. The country received about four million slaves over this period, in comparison with about 700,000 in North America.) Some two-thirds of all the arable lands of Brazil are now in the hands of only 3 per cent of the population, while vast tracts of land lie unproductive, and homeless rural workers line the roadsides. The application of capitalist democracy to this hierarchical, almost caste-like, structure was destined to leave a wide overhang. It looked about as right on Brazilian society as a tango danced by a fat American tourist. Or a sari worn by a white English woman. Or… hmmm, samba danced by me.

  It is true that the kneading of democracy into Brazil in the last twenty years has gone some way to readdressing inequalities. Introducing the bottom rung of a welfare ladder to poor families (cleverly linked to sending their kids to school); giving a cheap facelift to some of the more prominent favelas of Rio, turning a blind eye to the invasions of the landless peasant movement (resulting, in turn, in the settlement of 300,000 homeless families across the country); and the introduction of affirmative action quotas in universities have all been gigantic steps in the right direction, with tangible impacts. The inequality ratio of the richest 10 per cent to the poorest 10 per cent has fallen from an index of 65 in 1998 to 57 in 2006, followed by even greater falls in the number of Brazilians under the poverty line. And despite th
e image presented by the media, homicide rates have also fallen — by nearly 30 per cent in the state of Rio de Janeiro — even if lighter crimes such as the number of stolen vehicles went up 60 per cent, and the number of street muggings nearly doubled, over the same period.

  But it is the tip of a very large iceberg. Corruption scandals come and go without consequence, the state remains fat and bloated, and violence still terrifies the citizens. In 2006, São Paulo ignited into violence, the city came to a standstill, and nearly 200 people were killed as their local criminal faction waged war with the police over conditions in prisons. Close on their heels in Rio, traffic groups attacked some fifteen police stations across the city in retribution for the state sponsoring of militia groups in the city. A bus was torched, killing eight innocent people. Corruption scandals that would sink an Australian political party for a decade, if not for life, occurred on a quarterly basis — 2006 being the year of the ‘mafia of the leeches’, the ‘scandal of the mail’, and the disaster of the ‘monthly graft’. In 2007, four hundred military police were under investigation for selling drugs and arms to the traffic factions, and a decorated commander of the BOPE elite was arrested for extortion.