Chasing Bohemia (11 page)

A Colombian jewellery seller showed me his nasty leather wares and then struck up a conversation with me. He told me that his strategy on Copacabana beach was to not try to sell to anyone, to simply wait for the girls to call out to him. I asked if it was successful, but he ignored the question and asked me if Winston Churchill was my boyfriend. Everybody knew everybody in Lapa, if not by name or nationality (non-Brazilians were called by their country of origin … Hey Cubano! Hey Italiana!) then by their face. I gave a half-nod, half-shake, not really wanting to lay claim but, at the same time, wanting to discourage the jewellery seller. He laughed and then asked in Spanish-accented English, ‘You know whatta malandro is?'

‘Is an art,' he continued, not waiting for my response. ‘You got to getta foreign girl first — you know, the girl drinking caipirinha — then make love good and get them pregnant as quick as possible. Once you get them to move in with you, you can go back to your life. The first time you are unfaithful they get mad, but they stay with you because they think you will change. After all, they're the ones paying for stuff. Sometimes they use the money thing to try and get you to change, but you don't change. They learn Portuguese eventually and start thinking back to the types they left behind. The strong ones try to kick you out, but you have nowhere to go, because you are malandro. Malandro has nothing except the woman who pays his bills. And then, they end up paying for you to move out. Like him,' he said, gesturing to a Rastafarian nearby.

‘His German girlfriend don't even live here, and she pays for his apartment.' He shook his head with envy, and then added. ‘Brazilian girls are too smart for that.' I looked around at the bar I had once seen as a multicultural celebration of low-cost airfares, and now saw nothing but sleazy gigolos and their victims. The Colombian watched me. ‘You are disgusted, I can see, but that, my princess, is a malandro. This whole city is malandro. This city is my teacher. This city has been my education.' He was interrupted by the sound of his cellular phone ringing angrily. A high-pitched voice buzzed from the speaker, and he held it away from his ear a little. It was his girlfriend asking him where he was. He was comically outraged and turned to me as he hung up the phone, saying, ‘Brazilian women get soooo jealous,' before asking if I wanted to go home with him. I twisted the straw in my caipirinha and said that two malandros don't make a gentleman. He just frowned and said, ‘So is that a yes or a no?'

My holiday romance with the most beautiful man in Lapa finished in spectacular style some three or four weeks after we met. I called it a day, of course, but not before one last incident in which I discovered his ex-wife was neither his ex, nor dying, nor even an actress, for that matter. It was a sunny, sparkling morning in Santa Teresa, filled with juicy ripe mangoes and promise in equal abundance, when Gustavo called up from the ground floor that Winston had an unexpected visitor at the gate. At the time, I was sprawled in a dressing-gown on the Chinese princess bed, and Winston Churchill was sitting on the balcony smoking a cigarette while downstairs, by the naked-nymph statue, Paulo and Gustavo were lounging on the wooden deck chairs. As Gustavo called up to me, Winston called down to the visitor, and gave a small wave. Gustavo scuttled frantically up the stairs and Winston walked in cooly from the balcony — they both nearly collided in front of me.

‘Winston!' he cried. ‘There is someone downstairs saying she is your wife!' My jaw dropped in outrage.

‘Ex-wife!' I swiftly corrected, and looked to Winston.

Winston clasped his hands and looked to the ceiling.

‘Oh, for goodness sake, Winston, stop this madness, will you?' Gustavo snapped, with uncharacteristic annoyance. ‘She is my niece. I am charged with her care.' But Winston could not stop this madness. He was born mad.

‘She is not your niece. She's a tourist,' he said accusingly, as though their crimes were in some way equal, only adding afterwards in his own defence, ‘and that is my ex-wife.'

Gustavo clapped his hands over his ears, crying, ‘Oh, you terrible malandro! Well, whoever she damn well is, she's waiting at my gate, and you will go down and attend to her.' And, he added in a warning tone, ‘And I don't want any scenes here. I have a reputation to keep.'

But Winston didn't make scenes. He simply nodded, calmly put on his white shirt, arranged his tufts in the mirror, and walked past us and out of the house. He exited the gates, locked them neatly behind him, took the reluctant arm of his dying ex-wife in his, and walked off down the street — leaving the residents of Casa Amarela and the priest's house ogling in his wake.

MAYBE IT IS A LITTLE EASIER
to understand the malandro when you look around the city and see tourists and the elites of Brazil spending the same amount in a day on lunches as what the typical worker gains in a month. Given the choice between cleaning toilets at a country club and helping a rich white woman spend her pocket money, I know which one I would choose. The modern malandro may not wear a white-linen suit, but then neither does the elite class of Brazil. The suit was only a parody of the elite, after all. The modern malandros are surfers and capoeiristas and sambistas, who offer to show girls around and then spend their money so fast it makes their head spin. And afterwards, as any good malandro should do, they disappear without a trace into the night to tell their tale to some Carlito at the local
botequim
. As one famous malandro once said, while the gullible exist, there will always be malandro.

In the days that followed what became known as the ‘balcony incident', it dawned harshly upon me that I had fallen head first into the most clichéd trap of a South American hustler. More humiliating than the Turkish carpet tea-shop gig, more dangerous than the Delhi Airport-taxi scam, this was the kind of stuff Lonely Planet should have been warning their travellers about. Even the whores of Lapa felt sorry for me, shaking their heads as I wandered hopefully from bar to bar looking for my malandro. They named a bush after me, an odd little shrub tree that had grown out of a concrete wall, and called it ‘The Tree of Carmen's Love', because it grew out of the stone with nothing to nourish it. It was for my book, I protested falsely afterwards, but nobody believed me because they don't read books in Lapa; and even if they did, the last person they would want to read about would be Winston Churchill. Instead, they just pointed their thumbs at Winston's latest victim — the Danish capoeirista, as it happened — and laughed.

–6–

Buenos Aires

… a city without ghosts …

–
JORGE LUIS BORGES
, on Buenos Aires

N
ews of the ‘balcony incident' rushed up and down Rua Joaquim Murtinho like wildfire. The little groups of people gathered on street corners that I had found so charming when I'd first arrived revealed themselves to be highly sophisticated networks of espionage. There was a reason they dragged half the contents of their houses out onto the street every night, and it was not to amuse the tourists with their quaint Brazilian traditions. The truth was that it contained secret radio equipment that they would use to beam information through to the FBI and KGB. While Winston Churchill was hardly a man known for his discretion, even I was alarmed at the penetration of the balcony incident into the avant-garde world of Santa Teresa. People I had never met in my life, seeing me pass in the street that week, would nod in my direction.

‘That's the one,' they said. ‘That's the home wrecker.'

‘He told me he was divorced!' I pleaded, but they would shy away from me with wary expressions. To stem the damage to my reputation, I beat a hasty retreat from the bohemian world of Lapa and returned to the socialite parties of Gustavo, but it was to no avail. Even there, tongues were wagging with the fall from grace of the Australian cattle heiress.

There were some key channels of information distribution, namely Chiara Rimoldi, Gustavo da Avila, Carina Jallad, and Winston Churchill, but there was no stopping the beast once it got started. For there are two things in this world to which this nation of idlers is completely enslaved: sex and gossip.
Fodder e fofoka
. Brazilians would betray their best friends, give up their sons, even do a hatchet job on their own husbands to ensure their daily fix of the sweet sound of others people's immorality.

Every evening as they huddled around their portable barbeques, grilling large hunks of red meat and pink sausages, they sieved through the information of the day, expressed the level of outrage appropriate to the fofoka, and disseminated the exaggerated details according to their quality. The most highly prized stories concerned bisexual infidelity and jealousy ‘burnings', although nobody ever turned their nose up at a good old-fashioned illicit affair or some illegitimate children. The only thing I could hope for was that somebody on the street would do something worse and take the heat off me. After two days of the tongues still wagging, Gustavo recommended employing classic Brazilian diversionary tactics and starting a rumour of my own.

‘Like what?' I said eagerly.

‘It will have to be big,' he murmured, stroking his goatee with a cool Machiavellian air about him.

‘Tell me ...' I pleaded. He paused, and then clicked his fingers, smiling broadly as the idea came into his head.

‘I've got it. What about, Juan has the clap?'

Carina, for her part, was bent on a bloody revenge. In a city where men and women were in an undeclared state of war, both sexes were shrewd in shoring up their allegiances in times of need, and I was quickly identified as a potential coalition partner. She had her friend read me the tarot cards, and I came up with the devil three times and the hanged man twice.

‘Forget the moral arguments,' she announced, when the devil appeared for the third time. ‘They will only fortify his position. Refute any mention of the balcony incident. You must simply tell people he was terrible in bed. It is an extreme measure in Rio de Janeiro, darling, but guaranteed to destroy him.'

Chiara found the entire thing hilarious, not to mention ingenious, and I was shocked and appalled to find her one day in Lapa with Winston himself, slapping him on the back like an old war buddy. It was like watching a car crash, with the corpses of trust and dignity all around me, while I was planted in the middle, blood splattered all over my face and still unable to tear my eyes away.

IN THE WEEKS
that followed the balcony incident, I resolved to leave Rio de Janeiro for good. I booked a ticket straight to Buenos Aires, instead of Salvador, as I'd originally planned, and hoped that a bit of tango glamour might rub the shine off samba and set me free from the suffocating embrace of Rio de Janeiro. Chiara was thoroughly opposed to me going, vehemently denying her amusement at my betrayal, and even offering to support Carina against Winston Churchill if I stayed, but I had already convinced myself it was the right decision. It had been a wonderful experience, but it had to end. I had seen the sights, learned the language, spent most of my money, and ticked ‘Surviving a Latino Hustler' off the list of fifty amazing travel experiences to have before you die. The infantile pranks of Winston Churchill may have seemed amusing in fiction, but they weren't the kind of thing that could be endured in real life.

The culture was fascinating, but simply too different from my own — this country's childish, chauvinistic men, their hollow pursuit of sexual gratification, their undisguised class-climbing, not to mention their atrocious dress sense. It was time, or
tá ná hora
as they say here, although not very often. They are more likely to say ‘one more for the road', or
mais um,
but that was their problem. I was eight weeks into my three-month adventure, and not a single kilometre closer to Santiago. That was my problem. And not only that, but my Brazilian visa was running out. Things were coming to a natural end. One more month kicking around Buenos Aires and the Amazon, and I would be on my way to Peru, and on the road back home to middle-class suburbia, marriage, kids, a ball-breaking mortgage, and dreams of African safari holidays.

The twenty-four-hour bus ride from Rio de Janeiro was hell, only broken by another night of hell in the filthy little border town of Iguaçu Falls. Even though they were spectacular, the falls very nearly did not make up for my staying in the ugliest tourist town in Brazil. My mind was not on waterfalls in any case. It was on Rio de Janeiro. The cramped bus ride to the border had given me more than ample time to reflect on my experience, and in the pale light of the pampas I reconstructed Winston Churchill as no more than a fun-loving prankster. And as for the gossip, well, I barely understood it anyway. By the time we reached the outskirts of Buenos Aires, my initial resolve had weakened to water and I was more miserable than a homesick gap-year traveller missing her boyfriend.

Eventually the city signalled itself ominously through a series of mega-petrol stations, and wide, white blocks of brand-name factories circled by manicured lawns. Residential suburbs commenced directly after, and from then on it was block after block of evenly spaced street fronts, each indistinguishable from the next in the massive grid plan of Buenos Aires. There were no hidden lanes, no dead ends, no hills, no winding pathways without destination, and no stone staircases — just neat, square, even blocks with dull residential housing and condominiums. It was suffocating. Contrasts with the chaos of Lapa beat slowly on my brain. After miles and miles of this urban uniformity, we finally reached the art-nouveau architecture of the central business district. We turned in at the heavily fortified Plaza de Mayo, where Evita and Juan Perón once addressed the Argentine people from the dusty pink balconies and people now rushed around the smooth, paved streets in well-tailored European designer clothes. Audis, Alfas, and Mercedes appeared on the roads, and slick cafés and restaurants advertised caesar salads and chardonnay.