Despite being illegal, there are gambling points visible on almost every street corner and around 300 bicheiros in Rio run a network of 1,200 lotteries, employing some 40,000 people. It costs just 1,000 cruzeiros (3.5p) to bet and the game is so popular, particularly among Rio’s 3 million favela (slum) dwellers, that it moves millions of dollars each week. No one cracks down because the police receive kickbacks, the politicians often have their campaigns funded by the bicheiros, and the people can dream of winning fortunes.
Bicheiros have long contributed to samba schools to gain support in the poor communities where most of their clients (and much of the electorate) live, but their patronage has become more explicit since the 1970s. The turning point was 1975 when a bicheiro known as Anísio hired a top carnival designer, Joãozinho Trinta, to produce a spectacular parade with huge papier-mâché animals, spinning roulette wheels and fabulous costumes for his school, Beija Flor. Since then, the bicheiros have thrown money at the schools in attempts to outdo each other.
In 1984, they created the Premier League, in which all but the Mangueira school are run by bicheiros (Mangueira has an elected president). Samba schools each spend between $1 million and $4 million on their parades, half of which is often bicheiro money. Such large sums mean that Carnival has become increasingly professionalised. Schools hire directors and keep dancers and singers on fat retainers, swapping and selling them like football stars. Watched live on television by 50 million people, the splendour of the costumes and floats has superseded the importance of energy and dance skills in judging each parade.
My school, First Station of Mangueira, is one of the oldest. Its strange name comes from the fact that it was founded at Rio’s first suburban railway station, back in 1924. In its fierce struggle to retain some independence, Mangueira has obtained sponsorship from companies such as Shell. But the bicheiros are infiltrating; they have taken one directorship already and the jaws of the big-timers who do not yet control a school are snapping at the door. The last-but-one president was assassinated and rumour has it that drug money is rife.
This year, a series of misfortunes suggested that Mangueira could keep out the bicheiros no longer. Already-scarce funds were frozen last month when a judge ruled in favour of a woman who claimed that Mangueira had stolen her song. Rehearsals were cancelled and fierce squabbles broke out. Dona Neuma, the school’s 70-year-old First Lady and daughter of one of the founders, attacked the ‘new administration’ and said she would not parade for the first time in sixty-four years. Roberto Firminho, the president, retorted furiously that ‘the old lady should retire and stay at home with her mouth shut’. The case was, however, resolved a week before Carnival and Dona Neuma relented.
Four weeks before the big night I visited the barracão, the school’s centre of preparations. The enormous concrete hangar, with a corrugated-iron roof and a pink gate, was guarded to prevent rivals taking a sneak preview. Inside, the air reeked of carpenters’ glue, and hammers were banging and drills whirring everywhere. Disembodied papier-mâché figures and limbs lay discarded on the floor: here a cow’s head, there a count’s leg. It seemed they could never be ready on time and the workforce was buzzing with talk about other schools’ sumptuous special effects.
Roberto Firminho sauntered out to greet me. Rubbing his moustache, he claimed everything was under control. ‘It’s always like this,’ he smiled, unconvincingly.
He was right, though. The week before Carnival, the barracão had been transformed into a magical kingdom of medieval castles, French drawing rooms complete with marble columns, green brocade, gilded mirrors and chandeliers, Portuguese galleons on a silver sea, ten-foot-high elephants, and zebras dancing around an enormous African warrior head.
A man with a clipboard of pencil sketches was barking orders at a hundred people working round the clock on ten floats, scurrying up and down ladders with hammers and paint brushes, creating marvels from foam, fibreglass, wire and paints of myriad colours. Ilvamar Magalhães is the carnavalesco, the man who creates the Mangueira ‘look’. Having chosen this year’s mango theme almost a year ago, he buried himself in libraries to discover how the fruit came to Brazil and to design the floats and costumes (known as fantasias) to tell the story.
Carnival is an enormous industry, bigger in Rio now even than shipbuilding. Preparations for the big week provide permanent employment for 80,000 people, including musicians, architects, carpenters, electricians and sculptors. Samba schools are the main breeding ground for musicians and dancers, who spend the rest of the year giving demonstrations. Some of the painters in the barracão are well-known artists.
Parade day dawned cloudy and rain-laden but could not dampen the general glee. Inflation of 30 per cent a month and searing recession were forgotten as society figures and slum-dwellers mingled, worry lines falling from faces before my eyes. Walking towards the lights of the Sambadrome through a warren of tiny streets littered with beer cans and feathers and sequins from costumes, Cosmi Tudo, a drummer from Mangueira – resplendent in white silk tunic and gold turban and unrecognisable as a construction worker – said: ‘We’re poor and no one notices us but, for one day of the year, we’re kings.’
As we watched the other schools parade, our spirits soared. Surely, we said, the Mangueira song is catchier, its floats prettier. We laughed cattily as Salgueiro’s flag-bearer slipped, someone lost a hat, and a dancer from Estácio fainted. On and on went the processions of warriors, Indians, voluptuous women in rhinestoned bikini bottoms (their breasts splendidly naked and surely silicone-enhanced), cavemen under showers, giant insects, mermaids, and older women whirling in hooped skirts held up with hosepipes.
We marvelled at the giant steamships of Salgueiro and the gadgetry of Mocidade with its flying model helicopter, lasers and video screens. It seemed an incredible waste in such a poor country for so much luxury to be created for just one night and then thrown away, but Trinta explained: ‘Intellectuals idealise poverty but the masses don’t. They want luxury.’
Finally, it was our turn as the last school of the second night, the pink glow of dawn visible already over the lights of the favelas. The roar of the audience sent us into ecstasy – except for five breath-stopping minutes when the mast of our Portuguese caravela got stuck under the television tower. Afterwards, Magalhães was jubilant: ‘It’s definitely our best since 1987 [the last time the school won].’
Convinced we had come second, the results announced the following afternoon were a huge disappointment: Mangueira was a dismal fifth and Salgueira had clinched its first victory in seventeen years, scoring top marks in all categories from choreography to floats, story, costumes and music. A devastated Firminho said the school would appear at the champions’ parade for the top five schools wearing black headbands. He complained: ‘Some judges always try to appease the most powerful.’ Dona Neuma was more philosophical: ‘Mangueira has been parading for sixty-eight years. We’re used to such results. I cry.’
Over at Salgueira, it seemed the celebrations would never stop. King of it all, in a white suit and banana grin, was Waldemir Garcia, known as Miro – a bicheiro who describes himself as a farmer. Only a week earlier, he had been in court – bracketed by heavily armed security guards in dark glasses – facing charges for drug trafficking and running gangs.
It’s every aspiring foreign correspondent’s dream when the foreign editor calls you in to his glass box and asks: ‘Where in the world would you like to go?’ In the late 1980s no other newspaper had as many overseas bureaux as the FT and on the foreign editor’s wall there was a huge map of the world dotted with coloured pins to represent them all. Red for staff, blue for super-stringers, and yellow for stringers. I was being promoted from yellow to blue, which meant I would get a fixed salary and my own office and secretary.
It was December 1989 and I had little doubt about where I wanted to be. I had had war and now I wanted revolution. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and the only place for a reporter, it seemed to me, was Eastern Eu
rope where people were taking to the streets and communist regimes were toppling like dominoes.
I had grown up on the Cold War and nuclear bunkers, Brezhnev of the bushy eyebrows and talk of détente. One of my school friends was Polish and her father regularly disappeared to smuggle bibles across the Iron Curtain. When we were lined up in the school playground to check that our heels covered a fifty-pence piece, we often talked about what we would do if the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb. The end of the world seemed a distinct possibility: at home in the evenings we all watched Survivors, the programme about people who had come through a mysterious plague and were having to rebuild civilisation all over again.
The foreign editor agreed he would send me to Budapest and introduced me to the paper’s Eastern Europe editor, John Lloyd, who was one of my heroes.
That afternoon I went to Foyles and bought books on the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring. Then I went to one of my favourite places in London, the Albanian record shop in Covent Garden, where men in long macs exchanged whispered messages amid busts of Enver Hoxha.
Instead of Afghans in rope sandals shooting at each other with Kalashnikovs, it was going to be a whole new world of spies, intellectuals and long evenings downing schnapps with revolutionaries while gypsy violins played in the background.
A few days later the editor, Geoff Owen, called me in. ‘I want you to be our new Brazil correspondent,’ he said. I looked at him in astonishment. I’d never been to Latin America in my life. All I knew about Brazil was coffee, Carnival and football. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a story from there in a newspaper.
The editor was of athletic build and had once played tennis at Wimbledon. He was an awkward man who never looked you in the face. He admitted he’d never been to Brazil either. ‘I think São Paulo is a bit like Milan,’ he mumbled.
It turned out that the Eastern European correspondent, who had been Vienna-based for twelve years without much happening and spoke all the languages, had undergone a sudden change of heart about leaving. I wasn’t surprised. Who would not want to stay amid such turmoil?
I went back to Foyles and swapped Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Ivan Klíma for Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado.
From the moment I stepped off the plane in Rio de Janeiro, clutching the requisite chest X-ray to prove I wasn’t bringing TB into the country, I adored it. Warm soft ocean air caressed my cheeks and I breathed in the red pepper smell of flamboyante trees, mixed with a sweet scent I later learnt was from the alcohol on which many of the cars ran instead of petrol.
The drive along the sea to Ipanema where I was staying was dreamlike. I’d never seen anywhere so beautiful in my life. The road followed the bay, curving round and round in inlets dotted with phallus-shaped granite mountains that were draped in lush greenery like something from lost worlds. On the left was the Sugarloaf with its two cable cars dangling from wires running up and down. On the right was the Corcovado, the hunchback-shaped hill topped with a towering Christ figure, arms outstretched as if blessing the city.
In 1502, when the Portuguese fleet sailed into Guanabara Bay for the first time, they were stunned by its beauty. The twisting inlets apparently confused the chief pilot Amerigo Vespucci into thinking it was a river mouth. As it was 1 January, he named it Rio de Janeiro – January River. Now, 488 years on, despite the proliferation of apartment blocks along the seafront and favelas, or shantytowns, up and down the hills, it seemed just as spectacular.
My first afternoon, on a road leading to the beach, I found the Garota de Ipanema or Girl from Ipanema bar where Vinícius de Moraes and Tom Jobim wrote their famous song on a napkin. Over a chilled beer, I watched the bronzed bodies, swinging hair and hips, ‘tall and tanned and young and lovely’, like Heloísa Pinheiro who had inspired the words back in the 1960s. These were the cariocas – the word means natives of Rio, though for me it would soon come to mean a state of mind. I thought I had never seen such beautiful people, nor so scantily clad. It could not have been more different from Peshawar.
On the corner was a juice bar, O Rei dos Sucos (the King of Juices), where people were ordering mixtures from lists of fruits I’d never heard of. In those days back home, pineapple still came in tins and even kiwi fruit were yet to appear on supermarket shelves. Aside from mango, passion fruit, papaya and star-fruit, there were guava, cashew and jackfruit and Amazonian fruits which had no translation like açaí, acerola, bacuri and cupuaçu.
I walked down to the sea and wandered to Copacabana along pavements fashioned in wave designs from black-and-white mosaics. Every few blocks stood a digital clock that switched between the time and, far more interestingly, the temperature. One informed me it was 38°C (later I would see them reach 46°C). At a kiosk, I bought a green coconut from a pile and watched the man hack off the top with a machete and insert a straw so I could sip the cool cloudy water. I felt like I’d gone to heaven.
My office was in downtown Avenida Rio Branco. Every day, after a shot of cafezinho and a hot crunchy bread roll at the counter of a street café, I would drive along the bay. Beach and sea were on one side; on the other, park and mountains. Rare was the morning it did not dawn sunny. Even when it was rainy the sky was the pearly grey of piano sonatas (though occasionally there would be tremendous tropical downpours when the traffic would come to a halt and mudslides would wash down the hills, carrying hundreds of shacks in their wake). There were never those endless dark drizzly days of England. Whatever kind of mood I left my house in, it was impossible not to be smiling by the end of that journey to work. Federico Fellini had called Brazil the Last Happy Nation. I decided then and there it would never have a revolution.
With the ‘Girl from Ipanema’ playing in my head, I rented a flat right on the seafront – Avenida Atlântica. But then I was invited to dinner by a professor who helped Chilean political prisoners find refuge. She had fallen in love with one and was moving with him abroad so needed someone – preferably female and foreign – to rent her apartment. It was just under the Sugarloaf in a little enclave called Urca, on Avenida São Sebastião, the oldest street in Rio. The apartment was uninspiring from the outside, reached by steps going down to the basement rather like Don Giovanni disappearing into hell. Once inside, however, it opened out on to a spectacular terrace overlooking Flamengo beach and the Corcovado, where I would lie in my hammock and watch the sun go down and the stars of the Southern Cross appear. Just round the corner, at the foot of the Sugarloaf, was a little beach, Praia Vermelha. By its side was a walk through one of the only surviving strips of Atlantic rainforest where if you were lucky you could see golden lion tamarinds.
My office also had a fabulous view, looking out from the twentieth floor over Guanabara Bay. Sometimes it would be torture to stay there working. Rio is a city where even bank clerks wear shorts; never had I met people whose life so revolved around the beach. So it was a joy to discover public phones on the beach – the orelhão – or Big Ears. This was before the era of mobile phones. The time difference – Rio was five hours behind London – meant I had to file my copy by lunchtime (not easy in a land where even Central Bank officials often did not start till eleven). Then in the afternoon I could go to the beach, phoning in to check or update.
‘The line’s bad today,’ the sub-editors would say. ‘It sounds as though you’re speaking through the sea.’
‘Yes, the lines are terrible,’ I would agree, wondering what they would say if they knew it actually was the sea.
The beach is the bottom line – Copacabana beach
Financial Times, 18 July 1992
FOR THE FIRST twenty-five years of my life I lived under the misguided impression that beaches were fun but limited places where one went to toast one’s body and unwind with the latest paperback before returning to London the colour of a walnut, to the envy of one’s pallid friends.
Then I moved to Rio de Janeiro and discovered Copacabana, perhaps the world’s most famous be
ach, which this week celebrates its hundredth anniversary. The subject of numerous songs, the name of bars the world over, the birthplace of bossa nova and even the inspiration for a Walt Disney character, Copacabana may be a little shabby these days but remains as exotic as ever and the soul of Brazil.
A sweeping crescent of white sand lashed by the Atlantic and backed by craggy hills (nowadays scattered with slums) between a military fort and Sugarloaf Mountain, Copacabana is more than a beach, it is a way of life. Seething with activity almost twenty-four hours a day, its four kilometres of sand act as Brazil’s best singles bar, open-air nursery, sports field, aerobics studio, concert venue, the Rio equivalent of housewives’ coffee mornings and even the setting for business deals, as well as home to some of Rio’s many down-and-outs.
My first encounter with the Copacabana phenomenon can only be described as brutal. I had rented a seafront apartment, thrilled by the realisation of a lifetime dream of being gently awoken by the sound of crashing waves. Day One I realised my mistake. Barely had morning broken when I was jolted awake by the ear-splitting twanging of something called an elétrico parked outside my window – a lorry stacked with amplifiers blasting rock music that sent shudders through my apartment.
Pulling on a few clothes (beachwear in Rio can only be described as minimalist), I ventured outside. For as far as I could see the beach was swarming with people – not simply lying in deckchairs or on towels reading books or sun-worshipping, but all involved in some form of activity.
These were not tourists. Most foreigners have been frightened off Rio by the tales of pickpocketing and ‘dragnet’ operations in which bands of street children armed with knives and shards of glass sweep the beach clean of wallets, sunglasses and even sneakers. Instead they were almost all cariocas – natives of Rio – at play in the city’s largest backyard.
Small Wars Permitting Page 8