Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  –17–

  The Inferno

  Today the samba went seeking, and who it sought was you.

  – CHICO BUARQUE DE HOLLANDA, Quem te viu, quem te vê

  And on the seventh month there was Carnaval. They said let there be samba, and there was samba. Carnaval had started, and for the first time since I’d arrived seven months before I finally understood something about the irreverent Brazilians. This was not a party; it was a war. It was April out there, surrounding the garrison and closing in around us with her flag of inevitable reality. I knew I was leaving. They knew they were going back to work. We were brothers-in-arms against call centres, factories, and VISA card Australia, and we were damned if we were going out on our knees.

  I was out for three days without returning once to the Casa Amarela, and the annual Carnaval of Rio de Janeiro had only just begun. Carnaval had another week in her, Fabio said on the first day. At least a week, said Juan, a friend of his we picked up some time on day two. I didn’t want him to come with us because he was foaming with sweat and had a junkie prostitute hanging on his arm, but Fabio said we would lose her by the first turn of Praça Mauá. He was right. Juan lost the junkie, picked up a desperate American tourist, and together we went to Cacique de Ramos.

  Fabio and I had started on the Thursday at a party by the old port, finished the night sleeping on a dusty favela floor in Mangueira, and had gone straight down to Copacabana to catch some afternoon rays. We got caught up in a funeral procession for a drug dealer outside Botafogo, and I lost Fabio. Afterwards I wandered the streets with a clown and two Spanish girls dressed as pixies. We drank some more on Botafogo beach and went to a party in Ipanema, where they invited me to a foursome. I said ‘yes’ and then fell asleep before it happened. They still made me breakfast in the morning, though, and we exchanged phone numbers that we knew we would never call. I came back through Lapa, and found Fabio asleep on the stairs beside Juan and a girl dressed as an Indian. Or maybe she was a cowgirl. It was as though the entire city had been trapped in a gigantic, fantastical kaleidoscope. I woke him up and he fell to his knees. ‘Yes, my princess, my princess. Your wish is my command.’ He shook his head sideways with tired, crazy cachaça eyes.

  ‘Let’s go home, Fabio,’ I sighed. I was exhausted.

  ‘No,’ he yelled, with surprising fervour, and jumped to his feet. His eyes opened wide. ‘No. Absolutely not. Are you crazy? It’s Carnaval.’

  When he saw how exhausted I really was, he changed tack and came to my side, massaged my shoulders, and murmured that I must be strong. Juan woke up and placed a rock under the arm of the Indian. They hadn’t been home in three days, either; but, as they said themselves, missing the Slaves of Mauá would be like missing your own birthday. It was the first bloco of Carnaval. So there we were, three warriors of Carnaval: me in my white, broken tutu with blood roses in my hair; Fabio in a red bustier and silver fishnets, with black smudges of mascara streaking down his cheeks; and Juan, a barefoot, sweating black hulk in white trousers.

  Rain fell on the city of Rio de Janeiro in apocalyptic proportions that night. Enormous tropical drops smashed at the pavements, thunder cracked around our ears, and lightning streaked across the blackened sky. The city filled up like a swimming pool, entire streets disappeared, and shanties slid down cliff faces. I thought it might have lessened crowd numbers, but the water only made them wilder. As the procession moved down Avenida Rio Branco, men climbed up and down trees beating and tearing at their chests like savages, shook the corrugated-iron doors of newspaper stands, and jumped on roofs; women ran wild down the centre of the avenue; and elderly women in white made fervent prayers to the sky. In some parts, people were fighting and wrestling. In others, it was an orgy of embraces and passionate kisses, sometimes with three, four, or more people at the same time. Fabio had said that the people always went rabid at the Slaves of Mauá. It was the first Carnaval street party after another year of corruption scandals, poverty, suburban massacres, currency problems, and marital disasters. By the time the people got to the port of Mauá, they were dying to forget.

  Days seemed to pass before we reached the other side of town. The lights were out on the main drag, and the shadows of deserted office buildings loomed above the people as they ran wild like a rebel army through deserted boulevards and avenues. The epicentre of the procession was a float moving ahead of us, partially obscured by the bodies of people hanging off its sides. Steam from the pulsating crowd rose around it. Fabio pulled me towards him. ‘We have to get to the cordon,’ he whispered urgently. The cordon circled the truck, the dancers, and the bateria — the hundred-or-so drummers responsible for igniting the fury and passion of Carnaval.

  It was a local custom to reach and touch the cordon of the bateria, even if, like a brush of the Pope’s hand, it was only for the briefest moment. ‘You can’t leave without touching the cordon of Carnaval,’ Fabio said with a wistful smile. We fought like warriors that night against the other million pilgrims of hedonism in Rio de Janeiro to get to the Holy Cordon. We wheedled and flattered, slipped into gaps, pushed past blockades, and tripped over old women to make our way through. The end would justify the means, I was assured. I hated crowds, but I wanted to touch that rope more than anything in the world. The cordon became my reason for being. Our chance came when a fight broke out between a foreigner and a Brazilian over his girlfriend. ‘You bastard,’ the tourist was shouting. ‘Get your hands off my girl or I’ll break your face.’ The Brazilian was laughing aggressively. ‘She wanted it, man,’ he said while the guy’s girlfriend hung back behind them, smiling like a devil. The tourist threw a punch, the crowd shied away from them, and Fabio and I ran through the middle. Water was rising up through the sewers. The people heaved together in a soaked mass of bodies. We had made it to less than twenty metres from the cordon, and Fabio thrust his way through the last of the crowd, using sheer force. He took hold of my wrist and hauled me through after him, tearing off the belt I was wearing and leaving my wrist covered in burns. Finally, we had the rope in our hands.

  Beyond the cordon, it was silent. The crowd raged behind us, but the musicians were suspended in the night. An army of black drummers lined up in ranks held their batons above white goatskins, their muscle-bound arms trembling in anticipation, while half-naked dancers in feathers and sequins stayed still in the front like warrior horses, their heavy breathing the only movement to betray them. They all awaited the call of the conductor — the general of this chaos — who would draw the line between sanity and madness, stillness and rage. His hand slashed the air the moment my grip tightened on the cordon. His muscled arms came down in a momentous roar: thakka-thakka-thak thak-thak-thak.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the madness of a hundred drums being played in perfect unison. The pavement vibrated. The lampposts shook. The beat dissolved me. It rose up in my chest, blocked out my thoughts, and exploded every sense in my body. I fell back in wonder. I wanted to throw myself at their feet, plead forgiveness, and dance until I died. It was the closest thing to heaven I could have imagined. All around me, people flung themselves at each other like devils possessed. They trembled, convulsed, and fell into each other’s arms hysterically — moaning, screaming, laughing, and crying.

  Their goddess, an Amazonian beast in feathers, came to the edge of our side of the cordon, and I looked up at her. She was enormous — two heads reared above me, teeth bared, glistening with beads of rain and half-naked. She must have been forty or more, but she was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. She held her arms up like a pharaoh, and the crowd fell back. They called to her, begged and pleaded, and she paced back and forth. Our queen. Our queen. And then she stopped, looked behind her, and with a face wild and proud as a warrior she started to samba. It was a war dance, and thunder struck as her feet broke up the pavement beneath her. Water sluiced the crowd. They roared at the top of their lungs. She threw back her feathered head, and her mouth con
torted in a sneer of derision so wide that I thought she would swallow us all up. I kept my hand on the cordon. I had no choice. I couldn’t move. Rio de Janeiro had me possessed.

  IT WAS AN ALMOST painfully long stretch of festivities that week. There were eighty-one official street blocos, hundreds of unofficial blocos, sixteen masked balls in private clubs, hundreds of penthouse parties, and three magnificent evenings of samba school parades.

  It was a busy Carnaval in 2004, by all accounts. Thirty people died in road accidents, eighty-seven were murdered, 140 were robbed per day, a bus was torched out near Fazendinha after a child was killed by a bala perdida, a lost police bullet, and still the governor described it as a ‘tranquil’ week. Carnaval was always an edgy time in Rio. In 2003, the drug faction Commando Vermelho kicked off Carnaval by torching fifty buses and exploding bombs. Shopkeepers barred up their doors, Lula sent in the military, and by the end of Carnaval they had nearly 40,000 police and military guarding the streets. The wave of attacks was said to have been ordered by the faction boss Fernandinho Beira Mar, or ‘Little Freddy by the seashore’ — a personality I found all the more sinister for his childish diminutive. I was used to criminals with real names, like Charles Manson or Carlos The Jackal. At least I knew where I stood with them. With names like Little Froggy, Crazy Eli, and the Red Command, you were never quite sure.

  We slept when we could, catching ten minutes here and an hour there, like war-torn soldiers in the midst of a raging battle. The sound of explosions and fireworks punctured the normally tranquil Santa Teresa nights. You could barely get out your front door without being caught up in a wave of street bands rushing down the street. The biggest was Saturday’s Black Ball, which filled up the central business district on Avenida Rio Branco at 8.00 a.m. with one million people dressed in black and white, to be equalled only by the afternoon’s Ipanema Gay and Lesbian block, Kindness and Sort of Love, which inched along the beachfront with parades of drag queens dressed up like Carmen Miranda and Mexican soap stars, and always ran into the radical-chic, out-of-tune musicians of the What Shit is This? bloco coming the other way.

  Saturday night was back to Avenida Rio Branco, where hardline Carnavalistas the Chiefs of Ramos would hold drum slanging-matches with the bloco of Beer Breath. Sunday was our very own Santa Teresa bloco of Carmelitas — where everyone dressed as nuns in homage to the original rebel nun Carmelita, who ran away from the Santa Teresa Convent sometime in the 1920s to join the Carnaval festivities — and Monday was the Lazy Dog at Flamengo. The final days of Carnaval spawned the vagabundo blocos like the I would rather starve than work and the inevitable Don’t push, you’ll only make it worse blocos of Iraja, the unambiguous If you give it to me, I’ll eat it bloco around Tijuca, the conciliatory I’ll be home soon, darling bloco and, when that ran out of steam, its competitor Come home for what?

  There were hundreds more spontaneous blocos of twenty or thirty people that had sprung up like fresh mushrooms wherever a bar was open or someone sold caipirinhas. Fabio started one just by getting off the tram with his drum. We had not eaten for days at that time, and had been heading out for dinner, when we got off the tram into a concentration of a couple of hundred punters without a band. ‘It was my responsibility to help them,’ Fabio said when he came home twelve hours later, having led 100-odd orphans through the streets of Santa and over the perilous rail track on the top of the arches of Lapa, ‘I couldn’t leave them without a drum. Anyway, it is not a time for eating. It’s Lent.’

  My favourites, though, were the old school-street blocos, the kind that started at sunrise, where families and bohemians alike would run down the city streets, forcing traffic to a standstill and everyone out onto their windowsills. The Sky in the Earth and the Cordon of the Fire Serpent were the most popular, with dozens of trumpets and horns and drums floating down the streets of old Rio, playing bright circus marches and swallowing up the cars and buses. For me, that was the Carioca at their best — the crowds streaming with ribbons and feathers, holding aloft gaudy crepe paper umbrellas, shimmering banners of São George, and enormous papier-maché heads bobbing above the procession, as bearded men on stilts wove their way through the crowd, people in the houses threw water on our heads, and children ran between our legs. This was pure Carioca chaos. The Cordon of the Fire Serpent would not even announce the time of their bloco, and instead just turned up on some square in the city at 6.00 a.m. and waited for their friends to call their friends who called their friends.

  I had three changes of costume by Monday, and most, owing to my acquisitions at the Barretos Rodeo, revolved around cowgirl themes: a rodeo cowgirl, a belly-dancing cowgirl, and a nursing cowgirl. Fabio stuck mainly to women’s clothes, his most successful outfit being a closed-face burka underneath which he would triumphantly reveal a red fishnet bodysuit with army boots. It was vulgar and in terrible taste, particularly when he started dancing Carioca funk with a girl dressed as Bin Laden, and Carina didn’t like it one bit. ‘How can you let him go out like that?’ she said one afternoon as he flashed her on the street. ‘I’m afraid he’s out of my control,’ I responded. The world seemed to have turned upside down: men dressed as women, women dressed as men, playboys dressed as whores, Maria dressed as a king, and Winston Churchill dressed as a nun. I did wonder that first year in Rio why there were not more people dressing to take the piss out of corrupt politicians and bent policemen; but I guess, as the sociologists argue, Carnaval is not so much about protest as it is about reaffirming all the structures of society. Okay, now you play Indians and we will be cowboys. Or, in the case of the Cariocas: Okay, now you put on the gimp suit and I will beat you with the cat-of-nine-tails. ‘The tables are turned,’ shouted a homeless king to nobody in particular one night in Lapa. ‘Until Wednesday,’ shouted someone else dressed as a whore, ‘And then we will turn them back.’

  Gustavo went to his Copacabana Palace Ball, and when he returned he told me it was the most glamorous place on earth, although the balance between old people and models could have been fairer. The next day he appeared in the society column of the daily newspaper, resplendent in his shells and seaweed. We shared a drink on the terrace at Casa Amarela as he described the costumes in perfect detail right down to the very last sequin.

  On the only evening we spent together, on the Monday night, we went to the Sambadrome parade. Gustavo was appalled to discover upon our arrival that I had unknowingly bought us the cheap 40-real tickets to Section 11, the people’s stadium.

  ‘We cannot go there. You don’t understand,’ he said shaking his head.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s where the poor people go. It’s terrible. Crowded and noisy … fighting to go to the toilet and to see the parade.’

  ‘I don’t care about sitting with the people,’ I shrugged.

  ‘Sitting?’ Gustavo yelled as we made our way through the mud and muck on the outskirts of the Sambadrome to the last section of bleachers, the lanes clogged with drinks salesmen, and people pissing on our heads from the stadium above. ‘We will be lucky to be sitting, minha filha.’

  It was like boarding economy-class on the Delhi-Varanasi Express — that sinking feeling you get as you make your way down past nice, orderly carriages filled with clean, polite people only to discover yours is the carriage on the end vibrating with noise and overflowing with glistening arms and legs. There appeared to be no limit to the number of tickets that had been sold for Section 11. People thronged at the entrance and spilled over the back of the rafters as security guards shoved them back with batons, and the crowd surged closer again. People had been queuing for the concrete bleachers since 7.00 a.m. with their eskies and collapsible chairs and hordes of undisciplined children. By the time we hauled ourselves into the section through the masses of brown, lithe bodies, the bleachers were ridiculously overcrowded, and generosity was in short supply.

  ‘Get out, you fucking gringos,’ a fat woman abused us as we pushed our way through
the rafters. ‘What a fucking insult. You have money, but you choose to come and crowd the locals’ stands. Are you trying to humiliate us by sitting in the poor people’s stands, you foreign bitch?’ I withdrew in shame and began to look for another place, but Gustavo had kicked into survival mode.

  ‘Shut up, you disgusting woman! I am a Brazilian!’ Gustavo screamed back. ‘And move over! We are sitting here,’ he said emphatically, and squashed himself between her and another drunk Lycra-clad sea lion. I wedged my bottom in uncomfortably beside my abuser, but as soon as I was sitting she leaned in conspiratorially with beery breath and said, ‘Okay, now you have sat down. Any newcomers, we use the same strategy, yeah?’

  We spent the next two hours hurling abuse at any newcomers until the parade started, and everyone went crazy jumping up and down, forgetting that they even had a seat.

  That year, the biggest scandals were inside the Sambadrome. The Carnaval parades were not exactly known for their modesty — the definition of ‘dressed’ being the covering-up of nipples and vulvas and the occasional anus — but even the Cariocas had their limits when it came to vulgarity. The inner-city samba school of Grande Rio took it all too far with their radical theme of ‘wear a condom in the garden of evil’ and had an entire float censured by the Public Ministry of the Duque de Caxias (rumoured to be backed by the church) for vulgarity. The float was said to contain vulgar statues of people in Karma Sutra positions, but we couldn’t see it. They were covered in an enormous sheet of black plastic. Still, they were probably on a higher moral plane than the year before, when the school received two million reals from a presidential candidate from the state of Maranhão to run a theme singing homage to his hometown during election time. Anyway, who cared about politics? The schools could have used the floats to promote slavery, and everyone would have still cheered.