Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the ‘five-year-plan’-style purges ebbed and flowed like the waves on Copacabana, taking out today’s flotsam and bringing back yesterday’s jetsam, with everyone hoping that a change of scum would quell the masses for another year. Garotinho, the corrupt and overweight ex-governor of Rio de Janeiro, was out after he went on a Monty Pythonesque hunger strike against poor treatment by O Globo, which earned him taunts of ‘starve, you son of a bitch’ across websites and newspaper letter columns. Apparently he didn’t see the irony of his actions. Or maybe he did. Maybe he was taking the piss out of all the poor, hungry people in Rio who had voted for him. Passing him on the way out was ex-president Fernando Collor, recently given a backslapping welcome back into the Senate after being forced from office on some clearly not-so-disgraceful charges of bribery and corruption some fourteen years prior.

  ‘How do these people get back in?’ I cried to Fabio.

  ‘Democracy is new,’ he shrugged. ‘We only got the vote in 1985.’

  It was as rotten as last month’s fallen mangoes. Even down at the Lapa quadrangle, the selection of our very own local ‘Queen of the Batteria’ was tainted with corruption and nepotism. Fabio, part of the selection panel for the best composition — Lapa! Nova Capella! Asa Branca! ... What splendour has our Lapa! — had to agree that Queen I and Queen II were not quite up to the job with their chubby white legs and waddling samba. In contrast to the more typical parliamentary injustices, though, at least the jilted locals didn’t go down without a fight. Five magnificent black goddesses, who had been smashing up the cement floors with a samba from times forgotten, took their revenge and invaded the winner’s circle with a war dance. When they broke through the linked arms of security with one synchronised swing of their enormous hips, the security fell back, the crowd roared, the organisers cowered, and the fat little white queens had to flee with their crowns. If someone from parliament had seen them, they would have given them a job on the spot. The queens, that is. At times like that, it was easy to understand why every now and then people just exploded and lynched someone.

  ANARCHY WAS a confusing environment. On the one hand, I was flourishing with creative impulses; writing poetry and short stories, and playing music, not to mention the great sense of importance I felt in turning up late and finding that people were still waiting for me. On the other hand, I was starting to get a little uncomfortable about the consequences of extreme personal liberty in a less-than-perfect world. Violent or corrupt gangsters got to live in the best houses. Good kids got murdered without trials. Illegal house-building was destroying the beautiful Tijuca forest. Vigilante justice didn’t always get the right guy. Judges didn’t always know intuitively whether someone was guilty or not, and Fabio, for his constant unreliability, lost a lot of gigs. While I was enjoying my new-found freedom, I was also discovering that the freedom of other people could be quite irritating.

  As the days wore on, I began to see the merits in more than a few of the laws that govern Australian society. The Anglo-Saxon adherence to turning up on time, for example, our respect for other people’s right to own property, to a safe and pleasant environment — even the existence of an orderly queue took on a new value. More and more, I found myself longing for control, stability, and organisation. For a little enforcement of the law. For the traffic police to say, ‘No, you cannot use the bus lane.’ For the police to shut down the electro-punk party next door. For the police to stop beating up street kids. I wanted a system, and a little equality, goddammit.

  When I found myself at the post office barring the way of the fifteenth queue-jumper who had pushed in, claiming that he knew the post office manager, with a threatening, ‘You can just wait your bloody turn, sonny Jim,’ I fell back in shock. Did those words of middle-class conformity really come out of my mouth? Had I not rallied against that sort of conformity my entire life? Didn’t I love the chaos? The madness? Was the disorder of Brazil not its very attraction?

  ‘Our lawlessness is a symptom of corruption, not of our love of personal freedom,’ Fabio argued as we smuggled our way into a Banco do Brasil gallery exhibition opening to drink free champagne. ‘Personal freedom is only for people with money or connections in this country.’

  ‘And malandros,’ I added, as I handed him another glass of free champagne.

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘Would you trade your freedom for a society free of street kids, corruption, and inequality?’ I asked Fabio. ‘Would you prefer to live in Norway, for example?’

  ‘I don’t think I should have to trade my freedom for a fair and humane society,’ he replied.

  ‘What if you could?’

  ‘No.’

  I was in no position to criticise. Australia and Italy may be two societies that are better at reconciling the elusive objectives of order and freedom, and yet the fact remained that both Chiara and I were in Brazil. Maybe a reconciliation was not even a desirable outcome — something that would be, as Chiara pointed out, ‘a compromise that left you neither offended nor pleased in that nether region of nothing.’ Or maybe it was simply a case of wanting the best of both worlds. It was just that the rules applied to us in Australia and Italy. They were our societies, with laws and responsibilities and ‘deep complexities’ that we were obliged to understand. Maybe the truth was that Brazil was, in fact, a highly ordered society, even more so than our own ‘nanny states’, where freedom was really only for the rich Brazilians, just as Fabio had said. Maybe the chaos of Rio was no more than the loosening of the rope at feeding time.

  And if that was the case, then we and all the other tourists running around South America could hardly look down our noses at the Brazilian elite. At least they understood their responsibilities, however inadequate they were at fulfilling them. We were free. Tourist. Traveller. Voyeur. We could judge without the risk of being judged. Take without the peril of suffering retribution. That’s why we all loved it so much — simply because the rules did not apply.

  –15–

  Regina

  Man protesting to president at a political rally: I am just a simple man with four hungry children. I just want to work. I have a right to a job. I have a right to work to feed my kids.

  President (screaming): Subversive! Arrest him.

  – A Land in Anguish, a film directed by GLAUBER ROCHA

  Sometimes I tried to lay low, but trouble just kept coming my way. No matter how hard I tried to pretend that things were normal, the ground kept on breaking up around me. Chiara came by on a Tuesday as Gustavo and I were watching the Snakes and Ladders soapie. It had been a trying three-hour session of soapies, and I was more than a little irritated by the collapse of a believable plot. It was getting too far-fetched even for the Brazilians: people coming back from the dead, black people portrayed in professional roles within a Brazilian corporation. Where would it all end? Only our Cleo Pires managed to do something predictable by playing the role of a brassy motorbike-riding teenager in designer-slashed Iron Maiden t-shirts, a move which was creating fresh waves of aesthetically motivated delight among her pseudo-feminist fan base. Gustavo had been praising the ‘natural’ beauty of one of the older actresses, a sixty-year-old woman who had been botoxed and stretched so many times that she barely had a nose, when Chiara slipped into the room.

  ‘She is hardly natural,’ I was protesting, as Chiara sat down beside me. ‘Are you seriously telling me she hasn’t had a facelift?’

  ‘Oh, a facelift?’ Gustavo dismissed me with a wave of his hand. ‘That’s nothing! Everyone has that. She doesn’t have implants.’

  Chiara interrupted our conversation with a light touch on the top of my hand. I glanced over to her, saw her pleading eyes, and quickly pulled back my hand. She only touched people’s hands when she wanted something that was not owed to her.

  ‘But it’s an emergency,’ she protested in advance.

  ‘What sort of emergency?�
�� I asked, suspiciously.

  ‘Regina’s going to die.’

  But of course she was. What else could Chiara be coming to tell me on a Tuesday night? That she had a new job? That there was a new band playing on Saturday night or that her boss was giving her the shits? That would be far too trite for Chiara Rimoldi. Regina was going to die. Nothing less could justify an interruption of Snakes and Ladders.

  ‘She’s camped under a bridge outside the Church of Our Lady of Gloria,’ Chiara told me quickly, seeing her window of opportunity. ‘We have to go there. She’s afraid they’ll kill her if they see her on the street.’

  THERE WAS LITTLE POINT in refusing. When Chiara got an idea in her head, she’d virtually have to be burnt at the stake before she’d back down (it was no coincidence that she had a witch tattooed to her shoulder). Some call that integrity of perspective and others just call it stubborn, but that was of no consequence to the glamorous young revolutionary.

  Regina had entered our lives as a result of Chiara’s anthropological research. She was interested in the concept, as propagated by anthropologists such as Zuenir Ventura, of the divided city; of the existence of two cities, third and first world, beside each other. Only, Chiara wasn’t like other anthropologists. For a start, she believed in copulating with her subjects. Second, she believed ‘you had to be one to understand one’. This had several implications for her, such as the adoption of skin-tight denim jeans, platform shoes, and white diamanté-emblazoned boob tubes, and the acquisition of a street vocabulary with phrases like yai sangue bom (what’s up, blood?) baguli e doidão ne? (the shit is heavy, innit?), and chapa-quente irmão (the heat is on, brother).

  When we went to Lapa she knew everyone on the street. They adored her. The thieves gave her clear passage through any area, the street kids lay around her in a protective ring as she sat drinking her beers, and even the most hardcore dealer would fawn shamelessly to her affections. She was named godmother to two babies, and crowned the Queen of Lapa by the caipirinha salesmen. Street kids would come begging for a coin, and she would take them in her arms and give them two. And then the next day, as they came to stroke her hair and sit on her lap, she would just as easily push them away and punish them with brooding silence. She was my Kurtz, and Rio was her Congo.

  Once, when walking down to Lapa, we were surrounded by a gang of screwdriver-wielding street kids. I jumped with fright and said, ‘It’s OK, we are locals. We know Fabio.’ Chiara fell apart on the street laughing. ‘Shut up, you idiot. How embarrassing,’ she said, and pushed them out of her way. They let us go and, as we walked on down to Lapa, she imitated my voice in a cruel parody: ‘It’s OK … I know Fabio. Fabio? What does he know about anything?’ She could walk on the most dangerous streets of Rio de Janeiro without the slightest risk. Her madness was her protection.

  It was a long way from Capoeira Chiara, and this fact didn’t escape the people around us. But Chiara didn’t care. She didn’t care what people thought. That’s just the way she was. As her closest friend in Rio, this had several implications for my own life. In particular, our circle of friends and places to go out to together shrunk dramatically. Her new rule that all places outside the favela were dull and void (except Lapa), and that all people not living in the favela were dull and elitist, meant the elimination of restaurants, clubs, parks, bairros of legal housing, not to mention Gustavo and Carina’s parties, and any event of any description in Santa Teresa. Even artists and bohemians were out. It was ‘Catra this’ and ‘Catra that’ until we were all mad. Thank God that the people from the favela liked to go to the beach; otherwise, Ipanema might have been on the black list, too.

  ‘What happened to capoeira?’ I asked her once.

  ‘Capoeira died,’ she said.

  ‘What happened?’

  She looked away, edgy and reluctant to explain, and then turned back to me, as though maybe if she told me once, she wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.

  ‘I studied it and studied it and studied it until it died. I wanted it to be there. I looked so hard for a meaning in it all, but the more I studied it, the more it slipped away.’

  I BOUGHT ten more minutes of Snakes and Ladders, enough to see Cleo get put in a mental institution (think of Mac from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ... pre-lobotomy), before we left the house and made our way down the southern stone staircase of Travessa Cassiono and into the bairro of Gloria.

  The Church of Our Lady of Gloria, perched uneasily on a small hill on the other side of Rua da Lapa, connected to the city below by a steep, winding, cobbled lane. It was an elegant, white, baroque building typical of the colonial era. The soft hills of Rio de Janeiro made a natural canvas for the architects of the church and, from the heights of Santa Teresa, you can still see one after the other of the elegant, white colonial steeples perched on their lonely hilltops. In the old days, they would have been landmarks for weary travellers moving through the thick jungle with their horses and bullocks, signalling a small village perhaps; but now the valleys in between are filled with the urban sprawl of low-cost housing.

  To the north of the church, the hill led down through a series of mathematically arranged gardens and monuments: a monument to the discovery of Brazil; a mounted statue of Riachuello; and then Praça Paris, a rectangular park filled with ponds and shaped plants and a few Greek-looking sculptures apparently inspired by the Tuileries.

  Sometimes we would go to Praça Paris on Sundays after gorging ourselves on coconuts and meat pastries at the Gloria open-air market, although Fabio preferred the shadowy paths of Passeio Publico, a diagonally adjacent park backing onto Lapa. He thought Praça Paris was kitsch, but at least it didn’t smell like an overflowing toilet. You had to fight the masses for a bench at Passeio Publico; and in the event that you did manage to secure a greasy plank of wood to yourselves, you would be inundated with everything from requests for money to the mad ravings of a starving philosopher. ‘It has soul,’ Fabio would say. ‘It’s Sunday,’ I would respond. ‘Haven’t you had enough of other people’s souls by Sunday?’

  From Praça Paris there was a direct line of vision into the power centre of Rio de Janeiro, where grand art-nouveau buildings jostled third-world skyscrapers and a forty-storey billboard of supermodel Giselle Bündchen advertising mobile phones winked at the traffic.

  Regina had a mobile phone. It was quite disproportionately flash for a woman of her social means, too, but then calls were her line of business. She used to stuff it down the front of her racy, pink maternity bras with wads of cash and drugs. Chiara had met her in Lapa one night, with her knack of arriving anywhere and sifting through all the normal, well-balanced people until she was left with the most desperately marginal among them. They had become immediate friends.

  She was a twenty-six-year-old, HIV positive, single mother, with three children, and, for as long as I knew her, with no father in sight. She was also beautiful and black. We hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks, since she’d hit us up for 1000 reals to pay off her drug debts. Chiara had avoided her for a while, thinking that maybe it was the kind of problem that would disappear if we left it alone. It came back, of course, like they always do. Gustavo told us to stay out of it and Fabio didn’t even want to hear about it. He had been around Lapa too long to believe that anything we could do was going to change anything.

  When we arrived at the church, a young man was waiting. He was a new friend of Regina’s, someone who had known her for less time than we had, and his hands trembled a little as he opened up the gate for us. Chiara greeted him and they kissed each other on both cheeks. She asked him what was happening and he shook his head. ‘Better you ask Regina.’ He told us to wait and disappeared down a stone staircase, stopping briefly at the bottom to remind us again to wait and not to leave. We sat down on the staircase, and dark shadows of street sleepers moved back and forth in the park below as the heavy, humid night closed in around us and a deafening chorus
of cicadas filled the air.

  It was not an easy situation. Her demographics may have told one story, but Regina was no typical victim of marginalisation. For a start, she was a businesswoman, and a good one at that. She ran the Lapa subsidiary of one of the drug factions, a tight network of drug dealers to the Thursday-night and Friday-night punters on Joaquim Silva, under the guise of selling canned drinks. I admit that learning about her debts came as a surprise to me. I had always had the impression she was good with money. She could do sums in her head instantaneously, counted money like a bank-teller, and understood the concept of cash flow better than most accountants. Regina had a diversified portfolio of customers, preferred terms with her suppliers (her brother was second-in-charge at the source), and managed a small portfolio of loans out. And since the police were bought off easily enough, her main business risk was keeping track of supplies. Margins were low but reasonable, contained by the fact that the main source of drugs was less than a ten-minute taxi-ride away, and her selling point was the convenient supply of reasonable-quality drugs in the middle of the nightlife zone. Generally, she kept her contract salespeople on a tight leash —she gave them the drugs on credit, and they would sell them that night and return the revenue and profits less than twelve hours later. She rarely contracted users.

  She was not the first drug dealer to have risked her life, and she wouldn’t be the last, but this situation still seemed unfair. Her downfall, from the lofty heights of a shack in a favela north of Lapa to living rough under a bridge in Gloria, was the result of a single bad decision in December. One of her contractors defaulted on a payment of 500 reals, and since she could not afford to front up the payment — she had just bought a fridge for the shanty — she had agreed to lend him more to get him out of trouble. It happened to the best of business people; after all, the guy had been working with her for a long time.