Chasing Bohemia (10 page)

‘Cash.'

Poor Winston.

But aside from his ex-wife, lack of money and education, and the fact that we had absolutely nothing in common, things were going blindingly well for a holiday romance. Certainly, I was a little concerned about the ease with which he said he loved me, the wide gap between our respective maturities (he was twenty-one, I was twenty-eight), and the fact that he was disproportionately good-looking compared to me, but I just put it all down to the fact that, finally, men were starting to appreciate me for the goddess that I was. Clearly those silly, repressed Anglo-Saxon boys who took six months to say that they kind of liked me just didn't know what a fabulous woman I was. It had taken twenty-eight years, but I had finally been discovered in Brazil.

My friends were not so much concerned about the relationship as by the fact that I thought it would last more than two days. Gustavo rolled his eyes every time Winston's name came up, but Carina listened with her characteristic attentiveness.

‘Are you happy?' she asked me, spreading her palms.

‘Ecstatic!' I responded, with unreal enthusiasm.

Carina smiled gently.

‘So then, enjoy it because it won't last a month.'

How could she say such a thing! In the throes of passion, I could see nothing in front of me but sheer joy with the most beautiful man on the planet. Sure, he was not exactly Einstein, but who said genius could not be taught? Surely a few hot courses down at the local TAFE and some good old-fashioned direction would put him on the right track. He had so much potential it amazed me. Oh, Potential! That shimmering oasis!

It was about that time that I first heard the word
malandro
. That insinuating trio of syllables were spoken in relation to my very own Winston Churchill by some white, middle-class Brazilian friends who sniggered behind the word and then shook their heads amusedly when I asked them what it meant, as though it were a social nuance too complex to explain to a mere foreigner.

‘But what is the English translation?' I asked.

‘I don't think that there is one,' Carina replied. ‘It is a uniquely Latin concept.'

From then on, as I stumbled through the tourist landscape of Lapa, through capoeira classes and samba
rodas
and
churrascos
, my ears alert to the word, I heard nothing but malandro, malandro, malandro. The sambistas in Lapa composed songs about them, politicians accused their opposition of being one, and jilted wives screamed it down from their windowsills to unfaithful husbands.

In a hedonistic culture still trying to shake off Catholic morality, and that troubling little personal quality called loyalty, the figure of the malandro crops up time and time again as the tortured anti-hero of Brazilian folklore. The story is usually straightforward: poor boy turns clever hustler in the face of poverty and discrimination and then falls in love with an innocent little rich girl whose social-climbing family try to stop the union. Despite his gambling, alcoholism, and rampant infidelity, she follows her heart (or at least her hormones), and rebels against her better judgement to run away to Lapa, or some other inappropriately bohemian bairro, with him. His lines are inevitably funnier than all the other dull, faithful characters in the piece, and it goes without saying that he gets more women. And it seemed it simply wouldn't be Brazil without an ignominious play for the malandro's heart by a shameless hussy singing cabaret in a sexy dress. In the landscape of Brazilian sentimentalism, look no further than Jorge Amado's gambler Vadinho (
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands
), Chico Buarque's contrabandist, Max Overseas (
Opera of the Malandro),
and the adventurer Leléu in the film
Lisbela and the Prisoner
— all wonderful adaptations of Brazil's favourite son.

But it was not until one Friday night when I was alone that I started to unlock my own little definition of malandro. Winston Churchill had gone away with his ex-wife, who not only seemed to be living far longer than I had expected, but was appearing with alarming regularity in theatres around town. I had even read a review in which she was described as having given a ‘glowing' performance as a Brazilian Lady Macbeth. I couldn't bring myself to believe that Winston Churchill would lie to me. His eyes were too blue, his body too perfectly formed, and his skin too deliciously dark for him to be a liar. Perhaps the problem, as the immaculate Gustavo informed me that evening on the balcony, was that I looked at everything from the perspective of an Anglo-Saxon woman.

‘You need to loosen up,' he murmured, upon seeing me fret over the latest review of the dying ex-wife actress, then softened; ‘This is Brazil. The problem is not Winston Churchill, my dear. The problem is you. Go to Lapa and get another malandro.' He paused, ‘Perhaps a George Washington this time ...' He snorted hysterically at his own joke until his amusement died down to a splutter and he retired to his rooms in a flutter of white kaftans.

Taking Gustavo's advice, I went down to Lapa alone. It was a messy Friday night. Walking down Rua Joaquim Silva as a foreign woman on a Friday night is equivalent to walking into a paddock of starved cattle with a bucket of oats, and I could almost hear the stampede of visa-hungry Brazilians as I sought refuge under the awnings of the ambitiously titled ‘Bar 100 per cent'.

I knew its owner, Carlito, from my wanderings with Winston Churchill, and he greeted me with a friendly smile and shooed away three boys who had continued following me. It was early evening and the patrons appeared to be already drunk, or maybe they'd just never sobered up from the night before. I asked Carlito if he knew where Winston Churchill had gone, and he completely avoided the question by taking my hands in his and telling me insincerely that Winston loved me very much. His wife, Isabelle, rolled her eyes behind him and went out back to fetch more beer. To stem my humiliation, I changed tack.

‘Well, Winston Churchill is a malandro, anyway,' I said to provoke a response. I stole a glance at his face. It was the first time I'd used the word, and Carlito smiled guardedly. Lapa protects her own. Isabelle looked across at her husband with amused curiosity and, after glancing briefly back at her, he cleared his throat and said, ‘A malandro is not necessarily a bad man. He's like Napoleon. Depends if you talk to the French or the Russians, I guess.' Isabelle could resist no longer and gave a snort of disgust. A bitter debate erupted between the women and men drinking in the bar as to whether a malandro was a conniving sexual deviant or a swell guy, simply misunderstood. The debate fired along for a while, fuelled by personal experiences and anecdotal evidence, the women generally saying that they should all be locked up, until the argument was punctured by a voice behind us.

‘Today, maybe,' the voice said, and I turned to face a slight old man who had entered the bar, looking like a mirage among the boardies and thongs in an immaculate white suit and elegant, white Panama hat. ‘But in my day,
minha filha
, in my day, malandros were different.' He held out his palm to greet me elegantly with a kiss on the top of my hand, and Carlito introduced me to eighty-four-year-old Waldemar da Madrugada. ‘The malandros who existed in Lapa in my day were well dressed, charming, and elegant. They wore white hats, white shoes, and white linen suits,' Waldemar said, brushing an invisible speck from his own white lapel and looking down sniffily upon the surrounding bare chests and thongs that were the unofficial uniform of Bar 100 per cent.

It turned out that Waldemar da Madrugada — loosely translatable as ‘Waldemar of the Crack of Dawn', and named as such for his lengthy sessions and reliable morning presence in the bohemian bars — was one of Rio de Janeiro's oldest bohemians and most adored personalities of Lapa. He had arrived in 1940, after a decade in a violent orphanage in Minas Gerais, where he had been placed after his father shot his mother dead. He was one of the original sambistas, playing with godfathers of samba like Cartola and Carlos Cachaça at Mangueira's Estação Primeiro, and he was frequenting Lapa back when the police were still beating up musicians for playing drums. In Waldemar da Madrugada's day, Lapa was sighing the last of her belle époque. It was a time of heaving whorehouses and hedonistic cabaret, where dandy boys, jostling alongside French prostitutes and the children of slaves on the dance floor, bred the samba, for which Brazil is famous today.

It was a tumultuous period in the history of Rio de Janeiro. The society was still reeling from the recent abolition of slavery, and the cities were filling with landless and destitute peasants. The papers may have bubbled every day with claims about the Paris of the Tropics, but Rio remained a fundamentally poor and divided city. It was from this landscape that the mythological figure of the malandro arose, like a devil from dust, a reckless creature of abandonment who parodied the rich and (occasionally) protected the poor. It was this Dionysian figure, sitting at the bar drinking
choppe
beer at midday on Monday, surrounded by women, that became the inspiration for folklore. The malandro was a classic anti-hero.

There is not a sambista worth his salt who hasn't written a song heralding the magnificent malandro and his dastardly exploits. Around the bars of Lapa, they tell the stories of malandros like Miguelzinho who stole the church bells of Lapa and sold them, only to steal them all back again before midnight the next day after the local priest refused to baptise Miguelzinho's daughter without the bells. Or of the homosexual fighter Madam Satâ, recently immortalised in film, born to slaves in the impoverished north-east of Brazil, who was swapped at nine years of age for a horse, only to escape to Rio and become a cabaret performer and protector of prostitutes in Lapa. Madam Satâ, who spent some thirty years of his life in prison for a variety of charges ranging from anti-social behaviour to the murder of a policeman, became a controversial figure in Brazilian history. Waldemar, like half of Lapa, was quick to point out that he had known the great malandro personally. ‘Madam Satâ was a great man. He had a noble heart. He was a violent man, but he protected the people,' Waldemar explained. ‘Lapa was a violent place then, and he looked after the prostitutes. Once he went to the police station and took on five policemen who beat up his girls.'

The first malandros, as recorded by writers such as Luis Martins, were paid by prostitutes to guard their rooms while they slept, and to protect them from being beaten up or robbed. This paradoxical image of a malandro as a Robin Hood-style protector is a powerful one in folkloric Brazil, so much so that he has been raised to saint-like status. Attend a house of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, or browse through a shop selling religious icons, and there is an odd figure among the devils and saints — one of a man dressed exactly as Waldemar, complete with a white panama hat tilted rakishly to one side. Said to embody the wild African spirit of Exu, the malandro, or ‘Zé Pelintra', as he is often called, has turned into a modern-day religious symbol for Afro-Brazilians. He sidesteps harsh titles such as ‘thief' or ‘gigolo', using his tricks, charm, and persuasion to bankroll an idle lifestyle of samba, gambling, and beautiful women. The malandro symbolises the rebellion of the lower classes against social and economic inequality; his cheeky exploits, however small, are lauded as a victory over Brazil's elites.

I rifled through my brain for some memories of Winston Churchill's social rebellion that might justify his dastardly behaviour, but I could only come up with the time he interrupted some street kids who were about to mug me with a clap behind the ear, and the warning that, ‘Nobody steals my woman's money except me.' Waldemar interrupted my thoughts with the timely reminder, ‘There are no malandros left. The bohemian life of Lapa is nothing more than nostalgia. Bohemia is not what you see in Lapa now with all these people making nothing more than noise pollution.' Waldemar gazed outside the bar with a frown.

‘Samba, rock' n' roll, hip hop. The music is contaminated. The malandro in my day didn't snort and he didn't smoke. He lived during the night, gambling and loving.' Certainly it is a little difficult to imagine the tuxedoed malandro surrounded by his flapper women on Rua Joaquim Silva now. The street where the cabarets and gambling houses once thrived is now an ugly tangle of boom boxes pouring out American hip hop, bad Brazilian rock, and the obscenities of Carioca funk. Even the magnificent arches of Lapa are now dwarfed by the headquarters of oil companies and banks.

In the music and books of Rio, the intellectuals now complain that
malandragem
is dead, and that the only malandros that exist now ‘wear neckties' and have ‘political candidacy'. The popular singer Chico Buarque made this nostalgic lament in his smash musical
Opera of the Malandro
, claiming that, while the same injustices of poverty and discrimination plague Brazilian society, the malandro culture of intellectual protest has disappeared from Rio along with the bohemian, trapping the frustrations of her impoverished classes into lives of violence and crime.

I went home early that night and waited for Winston Churchill to call, but he didn't. A friend rang and told me they saw him coming out of the love hotel Villa Rica with a Danish capoeirista called Helda. The following Monday, I wandered back down to Lapa, hoping that I might run into him, and eventually settled for a beer outside the famous pick-up joint, Tá Ná Rua.

The street outside was broken and empty after the weekend's punters had gone home, riddled with their drugs and nauseous with their own debaucheries. All that remained were the base elements. The local drug lord, a smooth and sober seventeen-year-old, leaned over the handlebars of his new mountain bike, his gaze looking out at another place. A beautiful bald girl stroked a stuffed poodle, her lips curled into a repressed laugh as she chain-smoked long cigarettes and offered drinks to the local boys, who refused them. One teenager, a dealer who turned actor as one of the stars in
City of God
before returning to dealing, sat beside her. A guy covered in tattoos of Christ was kissing his girlfriend, who only had half a face, her chin smashed in by the baseball bat of her lesbian ex-lover. Three older Rastafarians in knitted hats leaned against the side of a car smoking joints and bitching about their German wives. A recently arrived Spanish tourist snorted cocaine at the base of a stubborn oiti tree, while abandoned local children, faces already haggard, were playing games in the street, clinging divinely to the notion of childhood, the futility of playing truant apparent to everybody. The unavoidable reek of ammonia, as always, permeated everything.