Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  Gustavo would go to all the schools — the middle-class favourite of Salgeiro, the working-class school of Tijuca, the battlers out there in Madureira’s Portela (near mestre Ararei’s house), even to the traditionalist’s Mangueira — just to get inspiration for his annual Carnaval ball costume. The year before, he told me, he’d gone as a coral reef, complete with starfish on his head and shells draped around his hips.

  Costumes were bought in the bazaar district of Saara, named for the Arab immigrants who set up their businesses in the run-down old colonial terraces in the fifties. It was like a slutty plastic souk. The lanes echoed with the shouts of furious negotiations and high tempers, and the pavements were clogged with women pondering over rolls of leopard skin, fur, pink tulle, lime-green sequined satin, silver lace, and gold lamé. Kids ran riot through strands of sequins, diamantés, glitters, sparkles, ribbons, and feathers, while businessmen queued at the counters of those shops buying ready-made — ‘Two nurses and a belly dancer, please!’ I heard one bark. Doctors, police, gypsies, pirates, and cowboys were old favourites, as were the classic Carnaval beaded bikini with feathered headdress or the malandro masquerade, but there were mountains of Bin Laden masks and plastic babies for someone to construct a costume of bizarre and bad taste as well. There was only one rule, and that was that less was more. Beyond the role reversals, political statements, and just plain beauty, the most important accessory for your Carnaval costume was a good, healthy display of naked flesh.

  ‘I really can’t wear this,’ I said to Gustavo as I put on a wire bra-cage built for Pamela Anderson, the only pieces of anything opaque being two sequinned stars to cover my nipples and a t-shaped strip of sequins fringed with a curtain of beads that still loitered threateningly on a hanger in the change room.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s not enough of it!’

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘Of course there’s not!’ he exclaimed. ‘Imagine! Did you really think I would leave you there naked?’

  ‘Oh,’ I breathed in deeply with relief. ‘Thank God. I thought you meant … ’ He shook his head with a smile.

  ‘Of course not, darling,’ he said, retrieving a golden-feathered crown from a small box with a twinkle in his eye. ‘There’s still the headdress!’

  Carnaval had brought the militant designer out in Gustavo. I spent the mornings in tow as he ran through the streets of Saara, expertly dodging between the shoppers and merchants, and uncovering rare, beautiful fabrics and costumes in the dusty backstreets. He spent evenings poring over magazines, books, and opera films. He had his mind on one thing, and one thing only, and that was the most glamorous invitation in all of the land — the invitation that would place its bearer in the Who’s Who of Rio de Janeiro for at least the year to follow, and which would secure your shady contracts, protect your marriages, and augment your flow of lovers. It was the invitation to none other than the Copacabana Palace Ball.

  ‘A ball of princes, barons, counts, and lords. The most glamorous people in all of Rio and Brazil will be there,’ Gustavo eulogised, adding afterwards with his little finger to the corner of his lip, ‘and perhaps a little Australian aristocracy?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, understanding perfectly. ‘Oh yes, indeed. Definitely a cattle heiress.’

  THE COPACABANA PALACE BALL was an A-list event where your presence depended on either money or beauty, and oodles of it. And the ripeness of your social status was revealed by whether you paid or whether you didn’t. For while the focus of attention may have been on the sequin-adorned bodies of the latest soap stars and models in the photographer’s line of vision, the truth is that the event was buttressed by rich, old, boring people who had the money to fork out 2000 reals for a ticket. After establishing that there was no possibility that my wealthy father might see fit to buy his daughter’s way in to the society set of Rio de Janeiro (discreetly, of course!), Gustavo set about arranging me a ticket through the usual Brazilian channels. That was, to use a little jeitinho with the organising committee. There was nothing like the promise of a ticket to the Copacabana Palace Ball to make a girl throw aside her morals. How far down the road to corruption and dishonesty I had come. I remembered how at the start I would protest to pay for my share, how righteous and fair I had been. Now, I was prepared to step on heads, crushing the princess crowns beneath me like chicken bones to get into the party.

  Gustavo started by arranging a lunch with the organiser at his brother’s Castle Ideal. It was held on a scorching Sunday afternoon in the ground-floor salon of the castle, where the walls dripped with Brazilian masterpieces and the mantlepieces overflowed with gold, baroque angels. Through the shuttered windows, I could see an original Mathuin sculpture in the garden.

  Gustavo was dressed in his usual immaculate white. As he explained to me carefully before our guest’s arrival, we had two bargaining chips: the Castle Ideal, which The Ballmaster wanted to use for a lunch with a C-grade French celebrity who was coming to town; and the next-door neighbour’s son, who was eighteen and looked like a Michelangelo statue. ‘They need more sailors,’ he said, for that year’s theme was Atlantis. My rugged Australian charm, I was informed with brutal honesty, would be of no value whatsoever.

  ‘Be fresh, darling. Talk about the kangaroos … the diamond mines your father owns … the slaves your mother commands from her porch. The money, sweetheart. The money. Tell them you are a writer. No …’ He paused and wrinkled his nose. ‘A journalist — it sounds better, doesn’t it?’ He patted my hand reassuringly and gave me a knowing wink.

  The round table at Castle Ideal was laid for a king with three layers of cutlery, English china plates, gold plates under the plates, crystal wine glasses, engraved silver water goblets, an engraved duck whose back opened up to reveal a strange cold soup, and a large assortment of silver trays laden with glistening meats. The guests were arranged with equal care: Gustavo, Luis Carlos, a middle-aged Bardoesque-looking woman called Shu-Shu, The Ballmaster, me, the next-door neighbour’s mum, and two potential male models squaring up the table like pawns on a chess board. Luis Carlos, as head of the household, held a small gold bell in his hand that he rang loudly after everyone was seated. A fat woman in thongs hurried to fill our goblets, and we began.

  A discussion of eighteenth-century religious sculpture kicked off with the prawn cocktail entrée. I kept quiet, responding only with a gracious ‘hmmm’ and a knowing chuckle, which I employed at appropriate intervals as The Ballmaster expounded on his Parisian acquisitions in this area. At the main course, the conversation went up a pace to Brazilian modernism, and I managed to get a word in about my favourite painter, Di Cavalcanti, who painted the streets of Lapa in the first half of last century. The table looked across at me. Gustavo nodded approvingly. The Ballmaster looked at me for the first time with bright, inquisitive eyes. His nose twitched ever so slightly.

  ‘And what is it,’ The Ballmaster asked, slowly enunciating the word ‘it’ in a tone so clipped that everyone jumped, ‘that you are doing here in Rio de Janeiro? Are you on holiday?’

  ‘Carmen is a journalist,’ Gustavo interrupted expertly, and winked at me, but The Ballmaster didn’t look at him. He had begun a lengthy inspection of my appearance, from the crown of my head to my badly manicured fingernails. I sensed imminent disaster. I immediately regretted my lack of consideration in selecting my clothes that morning. I was wearing a cheap, white stretch dress that had suddenly developed an unfortunate coffee stain on the hem. It was the only thing I owned that didn’t cause me to sweat profusely in the February heat.

  ‘Oh re-ally?’ he asked, in a tone that implied he did not believe a word. ‘An Australian journalist. How in-ter-esting. I know a thing or two about Australian wine.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, thrilled to have found something in common.

  ‘Yes. It is all produced in France.’

  ‘Uh … I don’t think so,’ I said without th
inking.

  Gustavo kicked my shin under the table. I smiled quickly.

  ‘I mean, sorry, of course you are right. It is fascinating, isn’t it? Our lack of skill there in Australia, that is. Positively provincial!’

  Gustavo smiled approvingly. The Ballmaster’s nose twitched.

  ‘And you?’ I asked with an ingratiating smile.

  ‘I organise the Copacabana Palace Ball, but my true vocation is in fashion and design,’ he responded, with a terrible exaggerated French accent, adding afterwards, ‘En Paree.’

  THE WORD ‘PARIS’ brought diamond gleams to the eyes of everyone at the table. Like money and sex, it was a word with a high comfort-rating in Brazil. There was nothing the Brazilians liked more than to be associated with the French. The very bairro in which we were eating our lunch was once considered the Montmartre of Latin America. Rio might have even taken off with the grand title of ‘The Paris of Latin America’ itself, had the annoying Argentines not gone and thrown their cocktail hats in the ring. Not Tina bloody Sparkle! Indeed, there was a time where every little backwater from Lima to Manaus was bulldozing entire bairros to push up Haussman-style boulevards and baroque theatres in their bid to be crowned the Paris of the South! Shame about poor old Portugal, but she was such an embarrassment of a mother that most Brazilians felt sure they had been adopted out at birth.

  While the Argentines run off to Barcelona, Australians bombard the suburbs of north-west London, and Americans torment the Irish on their quest for ancestral answers, the Brazilians follow whatever trail takes their fancy, or their passport anyway, as though going home to Portugal might be more akin to heading back to their embarrassing alcoholic mother who lives out west in a trailer park. Perhaps it was because the Portuguese moved their royal court to Rio — the close proximity to the disappointing royals quickly converting the last of the monarchists — or because they sold off all of Brazil’s resources to England in exchange for saving their yellow necks from Napoleon, but the Brazilians have a strained relationship with their estranged mother country. Sometimes they insult her, rarely do they visit her, and mostly they just act kind of embarrassed about Portugal. Who wanted to be the Lisbon of the tropics?

  Brazil has firmly adopted France as her philosophical godmother. Her intellectuals were first versed in Voltaire and Dante, her aspiring middle-classes dreamt of living on the Left Bank, and her national motto — Order and Progress — albeit a little out of touch with modern Brazil, was based on the philosophy of the French positivist Comte. Even Fabio, despite his retort that Paris should be lucky to consider herself ‘the Rio of Europe’, had to admit his country’s philosophical debt to the French. Although it hardly seems visible today beneath the layers of ‘progress’, Rio did achieve her epoch of sweeping boulevards and beautiful buildings for a time. The traces can still be seen in the old fashion street of Rua do Ouvidor, the mirrored halls of the patisserie Confiteria Real, and in the back gardens of opulent mansions in Santa Teresa and Larangereis. At that time in Rio’s history, she genuinely considered herself to be the new Europe, the wild genius prodigy of Europe and Africa, before the reality of poverty and corruption set in, developers put up their ugly 1970s buildings, and Rio’s byline of ‘the country of the future’ became permanently qualified by the gloomy subtext ‘and always will be’.

  I LOOKED ANXIOUSLY over to Gustavo. I was losing ground. I was never going to get anywhere with a fashion person. He quickly intervened.

  ‘Well, she works as a journalist but, of course, she is the daughter of an Australian faz-en-deiro,’ Gustavo said loudly across the table in order to hold The Ballmaster’s attention. ‘Fabulously wealthy. You might know the name: Miss Michaels,’ he continued. The word ‘fabulously’ retained The Ballmaster’s attention for another fleeting moment, and Gustavo took the opportunity to add, ‘An excellent family. Her father has one million kangaroos.’

  ‘Indeed!’ exclaimed The Ballmaster, his eyebrows nearly falling off the back of his head. Gustavo clapped his hands with glee.

  But I was a passing interest, a mere novelty, to this palatial door bitch. He turned to the woman beside him, who was sipping her wine daintily and fluttering her eyelashes at nothing in particular.

  ‘Oh, Shu-Shu! My pretty little queen of the ball.’

  She pursed her botoxed lips prettily, and gave the shy smile of a sixteen-year-old. She must have been forty.

  ‘What does the queen of the ball do?’ I inquired politely. The Ballmaster turned back to me, incredulous with disbelief.

  ‘But don’t you know?’

  I shook my head, a little ashamed.

  ‘She will be ...’ His lips bubbled with excitement as he paused before the triumphant revelation. ‘She will be ze pearl in ze oyster.’

  ‘Ze pearl!’ the woman shrieked after him, slapping her hand on the table with unexpected force, her eyes bright and feverish.

  ‘The pearl!’ Gustavo roared.

  ‘Ze pearl?’ I asked in confusion.

  ‘She will enter the ball in a papier-mâché oyster.’

  By then I was desperate to go to the Copacabana Palace Ball, if only to see Shu-Shu dressed as a pearl jumping out of a papier-mâché oyster, but my clear desire only served to alienate the pseudo-French Ballmaster further. He only wanted people who didn’t want to be there. Those social types can smell desperation from a hundred yards. And when it transpired that the French soap star had cancelled his trip, I knew we had played our last card. I should have been more … I don’t know, Shu-Shu. It was a regrettable loss of opportunity, even if later I found out that the middle-aged woman had bought the title of Queen of the Ball for an unnamed sum, and that The Ballmaster was actually the son of a working-class journalist who had only made his name by living in Paris for twenty years. A ball is a ball is a ball, after all.

  I guess you can’t have everything all the time — a philosophy that might have been better bestowed on the managers of the Rio Hostel, who were at that moment preparing for Carnaval by figuring out how to fit twenty-five people in a room six metres by three. They considered having three bunks, but settled on putting the Carnaval arrivals in hammocks. They were charging 160 reals for a bed and 140 for a hammock. It was 10 February 2004, and it was show time. The hostels were bursting with camera and iPod-toting travellers, and the intercom at the Rio Hostel was hot with malandros from Lapa. There was a robbery every day on Joaquim Murtinho, sometimes more. The tourist bairros of Santa Teresa, Copacabana, and Ipanema were invaded by marauding gangs of barefoot thieves who would hold up anyone with anything. Some would use knives; others, just a pen. One used a sharp twig. Reactions varied between the nationalities — the people from stable, developed countries invariably suffering most from the violation.

  ‘Why, oh why, Carina, they want to take my money? I do nothing with them. I love poor black people. I have black boyfriends. I am not racist. I take many photos of them. Why they are stealing from me?’ one Scandinavian girl moaned. ‘Never mind darling. This is Brazil,’ she would say soothingly, hugging the latest victim and throwing warning looks as Chiara stifled cruel giggles behind their back. The Italians and Israelis were outraged at the humiliation of being caught out as mere mortal ‘tourists’, and simmered with revenge. ‘I gonna get that little bastard and roast him alive. If I was in Rome/Gaza, I beat the shit out of him. Really I do.’ The South Africans and Australians, for their part, were either Crocodile Dundee about it all, or too drunk on their way back from Lapa to see what was happening. One Queenslander watched in awe as his wife beat up a street kid. ‘Some little kid tried to rob me with a bloody stick, mate. I told him, “I’ll bloody rob you at this rate sunshine”’, she said, rubbing the scratch above her eye while her husband’s head bobbed up and down in silent agreement.

  The thieves got so bold in Rio de Janeiro that they started robbing people in front of the police. When they could actually be bothered charging someone, police cars
were in such short supply that they would put the victim in the back seat beside the assailant. Most would drop the charges after sitting for more than five minutes beside a skinny, barefoot, black thief shaking like a leaf, and the police would take him off alone to beat the shit out of him instead.

  Lapa was heaving ten days in advance. Spontaneous blocos filled the backstreets, makeshift bars clogged the sidewalks, tourists stumbled wide-eyed through the lascivious locals, and hundreds of panama hats appeared on heads in Lapa, annoying the hell out of Winston and Fabio, whose malandro images had been thoroughly confused with multiple cases of mistaken identity. A new egalitarian spirit was overtaking the people. Leblon playboys danced with Maria, resplendent in her new gold lamé clown costume, while Barra supermarket princesses seduced young black guys from north Rio.

  The final days before Carnaval passed by quickly. Too quickly. I woke up one night suffocating with the heat, and was overwhelmed by a sense of destiny. My days were numbered, and I knew it. Even my mother had stopped asking me when I was coming home. I jumped up from the Chinese princess bed with my heart in my throat, and threw open the balcony door. Outside it was silent. A pale, silver moon hung low and enormous in the night sky, and the smell of honeysuckle drifted up to the balcony. I slumped on the Doric columns like a tragic heroine, ‘Memories’ playing in the back of my mind. What on earth was I going to do when I got home? How would I ever face the real world again?