Chasing Bohemia (14 page)

Usually I went to Ipanema's ninth post, the champagne bohemian's section of the beach, a Brazilian Tamarama. There we frequented barraca Batista, run by a thickset black man with an enormous Carioca smile who used to deal to the pop stars of Rio de Janeiro before he got caught, did his time, and then set up a beach tent. He was old-school Ipanema when things were even looser than now; racing up and down on motorbikes to the favela, and playing bossa nova with the young hippies of Zona Sul before the drug factions shut them up and the police started a civil war in their own city. ‘They were the good old days', he used to say, ‘before things got heavy.'

Ipanema was the diamanté in the tiara of Rio de Janeiro: the holiday from being on holidays, the ‘dream' for one hundred and sixty million Brazilians, the location of the seaside apartments of Brazil's famous musicians, actors, artists, and rich people in general, and the only place in the country where you could lie back and forget the horrors of the third world. If you didn't squint too hard to the south, that is, where the biggest favela of South America, Rocinha, spilled over the stunning rock escarpment of Dois Irmãos like a cluster of cockles. Still, there were quite a few palm trees to get past before Rocinha became a bother to the irreverent beach-goers of Ipanema Beach.

Sometimes it had the feeling of a huge Hollywood studio down there, spectacularly wedged between Copacabana beach, the lake of Rio de Janeiro, and the stunning rock escarpment of Dois Irmãos, and fringed with row after row of gently swaying palm trees. There wasn't a decent penthouse with servant's broom closets that didn't rent for less than 10,000 reals (US$5000) per month. You couldn't even buy those apartments, a real estate agent once told me. They were owned by media and industry barons who wouldn't sell at any price. At the same time, less than a stone's throw away, the poorest citizens of the country toiled away with spectacular views over Rio de Janeiro for around 250 reals (US$125) per month.

‘Goodness, how I remember when I was young like you. I lived like there was no tomorrow. It all seems like a dream now,' Gustavo murmured beside me. Then some other thought entered his mind and he looked at the ground and said softly, ‘Brazil is complicated, Carmen. It's not just about being poor — that could be resolved for you and Fabio. You have money. You could take him away from here. But it is the stigma of poverty that is the problem. It eats people up from the inside.'

I ignored him, of course. I went out that night dancing samba at the musician's commune of Semente instead. They played a music called
chorinho
, loosely translated as ‘the crying chords'. It was, indeed, a heart-rending chorus of guitars, bandolins, and violins, sometimes even a harmonica or flute. It was music for broken hearts and unrequited love, for great expectations and forgotten promises, and for tragedy, tragedy, and tragedy. Only a country like Brazil could inspire her musicians to sing such sad songs. They played so beautifully that sometimes even the dancers would stop and just stand to watch the musicians in the tiny bar. We danced between the sets that Fabio played, silently and slowly, with the arches of Lapa gleaming through the open windows behind us.

–8–

Fabio

Of what importance is the landscape,
Gloria, the bay, the line of the horizon? ...
When all I see is a backstreet.

–
MANUEL BANDEIRA
, ‘Poem of the Beco'

T
he most obvious challenge to our relationship as teacher and student, and later, as we started our holiday romance in that classic cliché, was the fact that he spoke Portuguese and I spoke English. I noticed that Fabio, however, with his arm-waving and theatrical face, had less difficulty in getting his point across. My own attempts at communication were limited to humiliating neanderthal transactions, which Gustavo translated with glee.

Me: ‘You is bad man.'

Him: ‘Please, darling. So sorry I am late. I really could not avoid it. It was an emergency.'

Me: ‘You is bad. Food bad. Man bad.'

Him: ‘I am really sorry. I got caught up with my mother. She wanted me to do something. I really could not get out of it.'

Me: ‘Bad man.'

Him: ‘All right. I see your point. It's unacceptable.'

Me: ‘Very bad man.'

Him: ‘Fine. I have that clear in my head. I am very sorry. It won't happen again. What's for dinner anyway?'

Me: ‘Bad man.'

And to those who said that they could never be with someone who didn't speak the same language, as some of my friends did before going back to sit silently with their husbands in front of the TV: I agree; in theory. Happily for me, as it turned out, my adventure was not about theories or appropriate behaviour. After almost a decade of being immersed in mind-numbing mediocrity, I was happy to just blow with the wind. There were the odd few difficulties, like the time we went away for a samba weekend with some musician friends and I had to blend into the walls like a creeper, but it didn't bother me. Some of them were less communicative than me. They were musicians, after all, not the university debating society. I sat, observed, shut up for once in my life, and hopefully learned something. Sometimes I played the egg-shaker. Words are just one part of any story. Maybe if Fabio had had an old best friend who he kicked about with all the time — someone else I would have had to please — it would have been different, but he didn't. Despite, or perhaps because of, his extroverted nature, he was a loner.

The Brazilians, for their part, were not a bit bothered about a relationship in which the two people didn't speak the same language. Relationships were not about dull conversations. They were about sex. This was a culture that worshipped beauty and sensuality, not a rational mind. They were the modern-day Romans, the Latin court of Louis XIV, lounging around with lyres, reading each other poetry, and feeding each other with whiskey and grapes. They were physically in touch with each other in a way that I struggled to even perceive, much less understand. Gustavo and Carina could detect a second glance from an admirer at five hundred feet and be over there in a split second, leaving me standing confusedly in their wake. The reality is that you can tell a foreigner in Rio de Janeiro, not by their blonde hair and fair features (since there are numerous Cariocas with these features, after the waves of European immigration in the sixties), but by the way they hold themselves. They are loose. We are tight — rigid with millennia of scientific rationality and church morality in our postures. They are split with the sensuality of the Africans and the instinct of the Indians. So it was not just a language that was in front of me; it was a whole way of existence.

Luckily, Fabio and I lived close by each other. He kept most of his records and musical-instrument collection in a house down from the Convent of Santa Teresa; but, as his email nickname, ‘mongrel', indicated, he was not really of any fixed abode. That was typical of a Rio bohemian, though — not that it stopped any of them from acquiring the possessions of a person with a ten-bedroom mansion. Among Fabio's personal stash were gems such as half of the samba records ever produced in Brazil, a good few hundred American blues and jazz LPs, five broken record-players, twenty-five show hats, ten pairs of white trousers, a trunk of clown costumes, ten drums, and a rusty collection of tin whistles. Nor could you underestimate his organisational skills. His goods may have been littered across the houses, hotels, and parks of Santa Teresa — some were even in the possession of the homeless of Lapa — but Fabio kept a tight inventory in his gnarled memory.

‘Where's my Carnaval drum?' he demanded of an inebriated street-sleeper, blind with either cachaça or cataracts or both, one morning in Lapa. It was the week before Carnaval in February.

‘Sheeeet, Fabio,' the guy slurred. ‘Zhhhee last I saw, Miguelzinho had it at his house.'

‘Well, go and get it. I want it back for Carnaval,' Fabio said abruptly. The drunk scuttled off.

‘What happened?' I asked. ‘Did he borrow it?' Fabio nodded. ‘Yeah, for Carnaval.'

‘And you want it back now, after a year?' I asked, laughing. He nodded, as serious as a Mafia don.

‘Three years, actually. Of course I want it back. Or he can start paying interest in that cachaça.'

And he meant it. Mostly, Fabio arranged to stay in houses in exchange for cleaning them; only, he hated cleaning. Every week he would call in favours from a drunk or criminal who owed him for something, and I would find them at the house scrubbing the floors and Fabio sitting back like a Bahian sugar-plantation-owner, in his Panama hat and dark sunglasses, reading the paper and occasionally pointing out bits of missed dust. My mother's saying that people are born either peasants or aristocrats in this world, despite whether they were actually born peasants or aristocrats, never rang truer.

Gustavo's prediction of ‘money issues' was proven correct within the month, although not quite in the form I expected. Fabio's way of managing our monthly expenditure chasm (his was about 125 dollars per month; mine was more than 1000) was to drag me down to his weekly expense levels, rather than expect me to pay to bring him up to mine. His only exception to this dignified strategy was the entirely reasonable concession of fine wines and cheese; for, as it transpired some weeks later, underneath that penniless Brazilian radical lurked a deeply repressed ‘foodie'. Gustavo taunted him ruthlessly about this with comments like, ‘But I thought you were a bohemian!', though he said privately to me, with a rueful smile, that had Fabio been born on the right side of the line, instead of in a poor working-class suburb in north Rio, he probably would have been a captain of industry. He certainly had the delegation thing down pat. There was nobody more ruthless in a bargain, more ferocious about debt collection, nor shrewder about favours than that bohemian. I didn't pay to enter a single club when I was with him, and we went out four times or more a week. I paid local prices for everything I bought, and got freebies on top of that. When we cooked at home we ate for less than two dollars a day, and when we travelled I spent less than half of a single traveller's budget on both of us.

At the risk of tormenting the reader with the Brazilian inflation index, especially after my narky comments about Americans in Buenos Aires (all right then, in my positive new mood even I could admit that we all love bragging about how much we didn't spend at a third-world dinner for two), a week on a deserted island cost me all of ten dollars.

‘Because you slept on the beach!' Gustavo protested.

‘The best things in life are free,' I said.

Gustavo disagreed entirely with the expression.

‘No, they are not. Diamonds are not free. Wine is not free. Big houses are not free.'

So we camped. It was still magnificent. Fabio knew of places in Rio that the most hardened locals had never heard of. He was a gypsy of Rio, and there was not a place in the city that was out of bounds for him. That day, he didn't even tell me we were going to go away.

We went without even a change of clothes. We got on a local bus, the kind that crosses from one side of the city to the other, and just headed south. We tracked the coastline out of Rio de Janeiro — past the mosaic walkways of Avenida Atlantica and the sleek waterfront penthouses of Ipanema, along the Niemeyer's coastal flyover and onto the never-ending highway of Avenida Atlantica with the favela of Rocinha like a wall behind us. As we passed through the traffic, Fabio pointed out the endless lines of gated communities, and said loudly for everyone to hear, ‘favelas of the rich'. Most people just ignored him, but the middle-aged women on the seat in front giggled, and looked back at him saying, ‘that's right
meu filho
, that's right.' The traffic finally disappeared at Recreio beach, and the city dribbled away behind us. A sign appeared for the outlying coastal district of Barra de Guaratiba, the ‘Bay of Herons', and the bus slowed down as the road deteriorated.

The long-forgotten landscapes of old colonial Rio rolled slowly by my window. Palm-leaf shacks and shady, white-washed bungalows with terracotta roofs and blue doors reminiscent of the inland towns of Portuguese Goa dotted the landscape. Red clay shored the unsealed roadsides, where the odd sleeping fisherman sat in the shade of palm trees beside his cluster of squirming blue-black crabs. On the right, the road fell away into tranquil, reed-filled lagoons, and I spotted a cluster of canoes moored to a stick, with lone herons silently stepping through the water around it. The bus stopped at a village snuggled into the hill above a small cove, and from there we trekked uphill over eroded clay trails until we reached a clearing that looked out over a white, sandy beach.

Except for a small shack on the right-hand side, which was inhabited, Fabio told me, by a hermit called Raul, there was no other sign of life. It was a truly deserted paradise. We slept on the beach under a star-spangled sky, and woke to a blazing, purple dawn and the green, overgrown jungle screaming with birds and animals behind us. We spent the mornings searching for shells and driftwood, and the afternoons lying in a makeshift hammock. Our isolation was broken only on the third day when two fugitive drug dealers arrived and set up camp on the other side of the beach. They spent the day on the sand, their gold chains glinting in the sun, Carioca funk blasting out of a small radio, as they made animated phone calls back to their gangs in Rio. But that didn't bother me. This was Brazil, after all.