Chasing Bohemia (17 page)

Feared by the middle and elite classes of Rio de Janeiro, but tolerated for lack of a better (or cheaper) option, the favelas have always been isolated from mainstream society. As a result, the old favelas like Mangueira, Providencia, and Rocinha are highly organised communities, with residents' associations, political representation, and entire homespun technical industries that can link new residents with free electricity, tap water, and sewerage tapped into from the government network. Not to mention armies. But they are not communes: favelas are products of necessity, not ideology. New residents must apply to the existing association of residents and, unless they are a brother or cousin, they are unlikely to be approved. For many new families arriving from the impoverished north-east of Brazil, their only option is to create a new favela; and in spite of daily protests in letters to the editor of
O Globo
, the weak and corrupt system of local government in Rio de Janeiro is neither capable of, nor interested, in controlling these outbreaks of tin-roofed shacks on the green, leafy mountain sides. ‘Where else would they put the mamas that suckle their babies, the men for their factories and the young girls who clean their toilets for slave wages?' Fabio asked me rhetorically when I asked him about this, adding afterwards, ‘All those people running about without houses might start a revolution or something …'

The houses of the favela themselves are generally rectangular stacks made from unfinished red bricks. Roofs are made from corrugated tin and, on the more established dwelling, red terracotta tiles. Doors are either wooden or just a cloth curtain — although, as Fabio explained, they hardly need doors because nobody steals in the favela. The favelas have their own police force made up of local drug-trafficking factions, who are said to enforce the death penalty and other punishments for thieves, rapists, and child molesters. Some of the houses I saw were painted the green and pink colours of the Mangueira tree. Personally, I thought that some of the houses were quite quaint and charming. A very personal opinion indeed, it would seem, as later Carina and Gustavo recoiled in horror at the idea that the favela could even be considered an area fit for human habitation.

‘But some of them have the best views of Rio de Janeiro!' I said one day with a shrug. Vidigal had one-hundred-and-eighty degree views of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘But it's a slum.' Carina shook her head incredulously.

‘A beach-front slum with ocean views. It will be tomorrow's bairro of the elite.'

‘Never. It is impossible.'

‘Why?'

‘It just is.'

‘Would you rather live on the ground floor of a stinking high-rise at the back of Copacabana than in your own house by the sea with the best views on earth?'

‘It's too dangerous.'

‘But what if it wasn't?'

‘You don't understand Brazil.'

‘No, I don't.'

That's because I don't smell the stigma of poverty the way they do. That's my own private luxury as I drift through the world in countries that are not my own.

THE ROAD LEADING UP
into the favela was flat and rough. Two abandoned art deco factories with broken windows and walls nearly black with graffiti tags marked a gloomy entrance. Hot-dog stands and supermarkets reeking of rotten food lined the unfinished road. Kids played with polypipe, motorbikes screamed by with long-legged women attached, their orange hair-extensions flying in the wind, and mothers stood, rocking babies on their hips and shaking off the toddlers that clung to their knees. In small lanes leading off between the houses, beautiful, hard young men and women lounged on unfinished walls and watched us pass without smiling. Nor did Fabio smile. He just tipped his hat and kept his cavaquinho in full view.

He only relented at one house filled with children, and sang a song. Beautiful dark-eyed children spilled barefoot from the windows and doors, and surrounded Fabio, and one particularly fat little one about five years old pushed her way to the front of the crowd and began to bark song requests. He obeyed, and she started singing and dancing like a child star auditioning for
Orphan Annie
. Some young women passed by and commented, ‘How sweet. Look at the kids singing and dancing.'

We turned and started smiling back, on the brink of an Africa photo moment with the poor, happy kids of the slum, until the little girl picked up a rock and hurled it at one of the women, shouting as she did, ‘Fuck off, you old whore.'

The woman dodged the rock and laughed wickedly, as though she'd expected that reaction all along. My mouth fell open, Fabio burst out laughing, and the girl gave us a toothy, malicious cackle.

The backbone street of the
burraco quente
— loosely translated as the ‘hot hole' because of its violent confrontations between police and residents — appeared to be an oddly cheerful place. Elderly men and women played cards and drank beer at wooden tables to the sound of samba beating out from scratchy radios. Green, blue, and yellow flags strung between the roofs fluttered quietly in the afternoon breeze, while what seemed like hundreds of children ran madly underneath them, laughing and dragging kites, with their younger siblings behind them. It was only when I tripped over the makeshift barricade designed to stop police cars getting into the favela, and saw the armed
trafficantés
against the inside wall with their faded AK-47s, and the dealers selling cocaine openly on the streets, that I realised things were a little hotter than the average local village. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are armed fortresses, generally run by trafficking factions and barricaded with cement pylons. You are not free to enter without giving an account of yourself to the armed guards on the entrances, even though in our case they seemed to be quite pleased that a tourist wanted to see their favela. They even showed off a little, pointing out to me the kilos of drugs they had in their bags, and their shiny silver handguns.

Mauricio Barreto, Fabio's father, was born on the burraco quente. Fabio never did get to meet him or his two half-brothers because they all died young. They are just statistics now — extra points on the average annual body-count of around 1200 people that the police of Rio de Janeiro kill every year. But in his day Mauricio would have been quite a personality. In the seventies he was in Ilha Grande, the island prison where white ‘political prisoners' thrown in jail by the old military dictatorship drew up the blueprints for the drug-trafficking faction Comando Vermelho. They threw the black ‘criminals' in with the white ‘prisoners', hoping that that the former would finish off the job that the torture chamber down by the serene gardens of Campos Santana had started.

But it didn't happen like that. Instead, the two groups put their heads together and came up with a plan for an armed struggle, funded by the white-powder currency of the Latin American underclass. Screw cottage industries; instead, sell coke and pot to the middle-class kids next door, and fund your communities for health, education, and … well … Carnaval. Things couldn't have been much worse for the under-classes in the seventies — the world-wide published diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus in the sixties is a stunning testament to their daily fight against hunger, disease, and police — and the favelas took the only option they had. They set up their drug businesses, trained an army to defend them, and armed themselves with the ex-weapons of corrupt and underpaid police.

The old adage that power corrupts was no less true in this situation, and shortly afterwards a brutal breakaway faction was formed called Terceiro Comand, the creation of which — among other factors — prompted the government to set up a special elite operations force called BOPE. The underpayment of BOPE, in turn, spawned private militias. Now Rio de Janeiro is in the midst of an urban war, although nobody wants to admit it, presumably because war requires the government to adopt an ideological position. It might be a bit much, even for Rio's middle classes, to accept that their democratically elected government is going to war, not on the pretext of something as glamorous as self-defence or as important as protecting human rights, or even something as ‘necessary' as other people's oil, but simply over poor people. Blacks, poor, and the homeless: the axis of evil in Rio de Janeiro.

Fabio doesn't have a photo of his father, but each time he goes to the burraco quente he asks the old people if they remember him. Sometimes he finds someone who does, and they tell him stories that he tucks away in that gnarled old memory of his, along with his old Carnaval drums, glittering among the rubble like hard little diamonds. That day we started the search in a bar on the burraco quente, and met two alcoholics who at least claimed to remember him. Still, if I'd had any doubts about whether Mauricio was really his father, I only needed to see the somewhat theatrical head of the residents' association doing an imitation of Mauricio Barreto, before my very eyes. It was eerily familiar, from the sideways slouch of a tall man, his comical appraisal of his audience, and the wide, booming laugh that I already knew so well.

After sifting through memories of Mauricio, I wanted to continue over the hill to Vila Miseria, the poorest part of the favela, but Fabio was keen to get down to the bottom again. ‘Cartola's house,' he said with an encouraging smile, pointing down a small lane. It may have been my intention to understand poverty, but it was Fabio's that I understand samba. Being poor, he was somewhat less interested in poverty than me, but he was an expert at spotting opportunities to convert his day into the further examination and enjoyment of samba. ‘It's my birthday today,' I said once, thinking about going down to Ipanema to drink caipirinhas and get a beach massage. ‘Well, aren't you a lucky girl?' he said, stepping back with a look like he couldn't believe his luck. ‘Because today is also the Holy Day of Sambistas in the cement parking-lot beside the Vila Isabel supermarket. Let's go and celebrate your birthday.'

The former residence of Cartola, the godfather of samba, wasn't much of a house — the outside walls were covered with brown kitchen tiles, and the more recently added second and third floors had a teetering, haphazard look abut them — but, as Fabio informed me, Cartola had died as poor as he was born. Such a fate might have been acceptable if, like many great artists before him, he was only recognised after death, but the truth was that he was famous for the best part of his life. Credited with being the godfather of the modern samba, his beautiful, sad songs about unrequited love, abandonment, and life in the favela are household folk songs now, imprinted on the consciousness of each new generation of Brazilians with their constant reinterpretation. The samba school was equally humble; another Soviet-style building plonked down in the middle of the shanty houses. It smacked of political tokenism, but they had made it their own nonetheless, and painted the walls in the official Mangueira colours of garish pink and lime green. As we strolled through the halls, Fabio pointed out the most famous composers of the bairro: Nelson Cavaquinho (the Mother's Day abandonee), Carlos Cachaça (old buddy of Waldie of the Madrugada), and Cartola (composer of Winston's song about beijos!). Ahh … the ghosts of my travels. I had ghosts!

In spite of the heavily armed presence of the traffickers, and the abject poverty in which most of her residents continue to live, Mangueira is an extraordinarily dignified community. The bairro is widely recognised by artists, intellectuals, and the political elite as one of the foundation stones of Brazilian culture and surely one of the key reasons why millions of tourists travel to Rio de Janeiro every year. The Mangueira Escola da Samba was one of the first Carnaval samba schools that the world watched on television every year in February. Everybody loved Mangueira. It was everybody's favourite slum! It seemed that there was not a musician in Brazil who had not written a homage to the bairro. It was the subject of endless documentaries, books, articles, and works of art, and at Carnaval time the famous guest celebrities lined up to parade with their musicians and dancers in the Sambadrome. And why not? It was real, it was edgy, and it was talented. The entrance to the favela was like a performing arts school. The samba school quadrangle was filled with dance rehearsals, theatre auditions, band practice, composer's meetings, and writing workshops or auditions, all fed in daily from the street culture that bustled on the side lanes around it. It was a mind-boggling contrast to the harsh sight of trafficantés and cokeheads lined up against the wall outside, but then the favela was a complex ecosystem.

How did something as elegant and complicated as the samba grow from this chaos and misery and, moreover, become totally unconnected with the artistic movements sweeping the country at large? That Cartola was writing music in the same decade that the Brazilian artistic community was launching the Semana de Arte Moderna (a week of modernist art in 1922 that sought out new expressions of what it meant to be Brazilian) was little more than a coincidence. Modernism was a grand concept, with its roots largely in European movements; and while it shocked the chattering classes, it was arguably as relevant to communities like Mangueira as were the elegant museums in which it was shown. The classical international composer Villa Lobos said it all when he refused a request to teach Cartola — no doubt, Brazil's most famous black composer — how to compose in a classical format, stating that he ‘could not commit that crime'. Perhaps the marginality of this community shielded it from the consuming and intimidating influence of European cultures.

That day in Mangueira forced me to look at all sorts of uncomfortable contradictions about wealth, happiness, and culture. My mind swam with questions and observations. How could it really be that, less than five kilometres away from open sewers and police brutalisation, there were people sipping champagne by Olympic pools? Why didn't these people revolt — just throw up their hands and take to the streets? Why didn't they seem unhappy or depressed? How could people deprived of a decent education make something as intricate and beautiful as the samba? These were questions that I had never had to deal with in my own society. My sense of normality had been conditioned by the clean desks of the dole office, a functioning sewerage network, a relatively uncorrupted police force, and a distance of around 1000 kilometres between my house and most of our underprivileged Aboriginal communities. In Rio, there was no such luck. Reality was in every line of vision, even on the wealthiest corner of Ipanema Beach.