Chasing Bohemia

Contents

Preface

1
Rio de Janeiro

2
Copacabana

3
A Rodeo, a Revolutionary, and a Runaway

4
Casa Amarela

5
Malandro

6
Buenos Aires

7
A Patron of Bar Claudio

8
Fabio

9
Subversives

10
Gypsy Eyes

11
Money and Morality

12
My Brilliant Career

13
Murder on the Dance Floor

14
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (… in Rio)

15
Regina

16
Twilight before Carnaval

17
The Inferno

18
Bye Bye, Bohemia

Acknowledgements

Preface

T
here are no quotable quotes about the city of Rio de Janeiro. Except for the modest local saying that God is a Brazilian, obviously no observer of this city has ever made a contribution worthy of her. Maybe it's because humanity itself pales in the face of Rio. A city of sweeping white beaches, plunging black-granite cliffs, roaring tropical jungles, and the most beautiful hedonists on earth does not need to resort to one-liners to explain herself. While other cities clutch onto their clichés, Rio just sits around like a spoiled teenager, her days filled with the job of simply being fabulous.

‘Rio will eat you alive. It's not a city for foreigners, said an Englishwoman I knew before I left from London. Her Brazilian boyfriend had just spawned a child to another woman for the second time in their five-year relationship with the excuse that ‘these things just happen'. She arrived back in Heathrow with her suitcases and a warning: ‘Only the people born in that den of iniquity can survive its moral vacuum'.

Certainly, the relationship between Rio's decadent locals and her scrupulous tourists can seem a little strained at times, even if the problem is mostly on our side. The people of Rio, known as the Cariocas, abandoned the inconvenient shackles of religious moralising over five hundred years ago when the Portuguese arrived in the Bay of Guanabara and lost their minds over the exotic locals. It has been one New World wave after another ever since: royal courts, African slaves, European war refugees, and now the tourists — each dabbing their bit of colour onto those acres of tan-coloured flesh you see stretched out across Rio's beaches today.

Rio is an odd place for the traveller. Despite its tantalising image, most people just skip it. It is too hard to get to, the Portuguese language is too hard to learn, and the idea of the third world hanging off the cliff behind your hotel is not necessarily the most appealing holiday option. The tourists who do make it here, with their cocktail-fuelled dreams of Carmen Miranda, huddle around westernised bars in Copacabana and Ipanema beach, while their younger backpacking counterparts quickly book their buses up to Salvador for sun and sex tourism. Each time I tried to leave, Rio hunted me down in my dreams and dragged me back again. Her ragged favelas, wild sensuality, and eternal suffering haunted me wherever I went.

As a traveller, I found myself drifting luxuriously between the layers of culture and wealth. I would travel in a single night from a cocktail party of aristocrats in Copacabana to a gathering of the great-grandsons of slaves in the slum-ridden north of the city and then, by sunrise, arrive back to a wild street party of middle-class kids and travellers in Lapa. That was nearly four years ago now, and I still have her under my skin. Perhaps it is the relentless sunshine, the chaos of everyday living, or that wild
Carnaval
of theirs, but Rio de Janeiro just seems to me the most extraordinary place.

–1–

Rio de Janeiro

The tram passes full of legs.
White, black, yellow legs.
My God, my heart asks, why so many legs?
But my eyes ask nothing at all.

–
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE, ‘
The Poem of Seven Sides'

A
s a child, my mother used to call me Carmen Miranda. Until I first saw a film of the fruit-adorned dancer with her tiny, brown waist and white, gnashing teeth, I really thought it was my own original middle name. Sitting on the porch of the old weatherboard at our Esperance farm as she flashed onto the screen, with crackling, dry-brown plains all around me, the stock dying of thirst, and the flies throwing themselves at the sponge-cake screen, I realised that I was a long way from the original. I had never even eaten a pineapple at that stage of my life, much less had the decadence to wear one on my head. Perhaps it was a form of escapism for my mother as she tried to reconcile her own years of travelling around the Americas as a young woman with her new role as an anonymous farm wife in that far-flung corner of Western Australia. Sometimes she would tell us the stories of her own American adventures to pass the long, empty nights. We heard how her parents waved at her from the docks in Perth as she left with her white leather luggage and matching gloves; how she travelled from Canada to Panama alone on buses; and how the border police in Mexico rang her father because she was under twenty-one and they thought she was a runaway. Those were the days when travel was wild. Even going to LA was crazy. Not like now. Now everyone has been everywhere.

There had been nobody to see me off when I left from London's Heathrow Airport for Rio on a cold summer's evening in August 2003. My friends didn't want to miss the end-of-summer sales, and my sister-in-law had a hair appointment. Even the Brazilian couple who checked in ahead of me had an emotional farewell from their taxi driver. I was as solitary as an English businessman on easyJet. My family and friends stopped seeing me to the airport when I was around twenty years old, just after I had made my third overseas mission to find myself. Not that I hold it against them. I can see how it would get a little uncomfortable always seeing people off on missions to find themselves. People always feel they have to say something profound at airports, and my friends had used up all their ammunition early on. My best friend, Stephanie, even used to cry, saying it was in case I didn't come back, but she needn't have worried. I always did in the end. I was a traveller, not a gypsy. By the time I went to off to South America, my overseas jaunts were about as special as a weekend in the Blue Mountains. ‘Off to the Congo, then? Well, have a nice time, dear. See you soon.'

That evening at Heathrow Airport, I chose Jorge Amado's
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
, the only book by a Brazilian writer in Waterstones Terminal Four. The back cover said it was set in the northern Brazilian city of Salvador, my third stop on a three-month trip that I was planning to make between Rio de Janeiro on the east coast of South America and Santiago on its west. It was the classic triangle trip — ‘the big whopper', one of our most popular student touring companies used to call it — from east to north to west and home again, with all the big names: Rio, Salvador, the Amazon, the Andes, Machu Pichu, Buenos Aires, maybe even Havana. Who knew? A real passport clogger. Sure, there were some vague and disconnected images of slums, Latin dancers, far-flung villages, and voodoo spirits fed to me by Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, the Buena Vista Social Club, and
City of God
, but really I was just hitting the road. The plane left late that night, the Iberia hostesses already yawning and the lights of London twinkling foggily beneath us. I thanked the Lord, Buddha, and Allah for not putting me beside a gap-year traveller, and fell asleep as Amado's handsome protagonist Vadinho started beating his wife.

We arrived in the late afternoon, flying in from the south, tracking the white foaming shoreline that split the lush green jungle forest and the sparkling blue Atlantic Ocean. The aisle passengers leaned over each other to watch the city explode onto the coast. Quartz-like clusters of white condominium high-rises rose up between outcrops of streaky black-granite rock, their peaks crowned with green vegetation of the
mata Atlantica
and their softer inclines encrusted with rust-coloured shanty towns, clinging as hardily as cockles onto a ship's belly. It was a water city; the Bay of Guanabara engulfed the city rather than the other way around. It reminded me of Istanbul, Athens, or perhaps Atlantis herself; an ancient white city crumbling into the blue waters of the Atlantic.

From my porthole, I could see the enormous statue of Christ overlooking the city, the tips of his fingers outstretched and his white stone hulk turned the colour of dusk itself. The dwarfing images that had trickled through my mailbox on brochures and postcards of Sugar Loaf, Copacabana, and Christ now disappeared into a range of dusky-blue mountains that stretched out endlessly around the city. ‘The sleeping giant,' the elderly woman beside me whispered over my shoulder. ‘That's what the Indians called it.' The Sleeping Giant. Sugar Loaf was just his elbow, Corcovado his bent knee, as he napped lazily by the deep dreamy pools of the lagoon. In my four years in Rio, I never did find a better description than that. Only the Indians and their 60,000 years of existence in that far-flung corner of Earth seemed to understand what they were looking at. All other attempts to capture the place were just scared little postcards — hasty offerings left in retreat after this wild city had confounded the photographers, bewildered the wordsmiths, and driven the painters back to their fruits and portraits.