Chasing Bohemia (21 page)

‘Your doctor,' I started to shout, ‘is a voodoo practitioner who cheats on his wife and spends Friday to Sunday high on cocaine …'

‘He is channelling for Exu,' Gustavo defended him tersely.

By this time, I had been in the tropics for nearly six months, with not a Machu Pichu postcard nor a llama jumper in sight, and my friends began ringing me with greater frequency to find out what was going on. My illuminating new ideas only produced further concern. ‘If you eliminate the human need for trust,' I would say, running my ideas by them on the phone, ‘infidelity is an excellent concept.' There would be a pregnant pause followed by something like, ‘Well, if you eliminate the need for breathing, so is pollution. Quite frankly, Carmen, are you all right?'

Being an Australian, I was also concerned with the practical implications of this devil-may-care attitude to fidelity. Did people walk around with blinkers and earplugs, and pretend that they didn't see him coming out of that love hotel with a Danish capoeirista? Or did they just up the ante, and cut out fidelity all together? Or was it that jealousy was just a cheap, dirty trick, — like the Brazilian government's use of Carnaval to distract people's attention from social problems — used to keep people from considering the true merits of their partner.

It was a pessimistic and unfair view, although heavily subscribed to by large numbers of the traveller community who would arrive, become seduced and betrayed in a matter of days, and then leave, disgusted. There were always a few who would stay, of course, and join in guiltily, blaming it on the jungle, the cheap beer, and the hot weather. This was probably best explained, as my English expatriate friend did one day as he sat among his harem of wives under a mango tree like a Roman emperor, plucking ripe fruits from the pregnant boughs above, and said: ‘Nature gets us all in the end'.

–11–

Money and Morality

In Brazil today, if you're not a scoundrel when the sun goes down, you'll be one when the sun comes up.

–
Pretty But Dull
, a play by
NELSON RODRIGUES

W
e didn't exactly rip off tourists — certainly we were nothing like Winston and the whores — but we had to start making a living somehow. All the economising in the world could not disguise the fact that there was nothing coming in. My future was looming on the horizon like a giant tombstone, inscribed with the words,
Carmen Michael, Death by wage slavery, Will be dearly missed by VISA card Australia.
While Fabio was managing most of the bills, I still had a secret expenditure account that was rapidly draining away my credit rating. Designer clothes and beauty products were the key culprits and, no matter how hard I tried to scrape the last specks out of a pot of face cream, refused to be eliminated. I tried easier targets, like bargaining at the local markets for fruit and vegetables, checking to see whether the bus was running before I jumped in a taxi, and checking the bill at restaurants (which was always wrong, I might add), but my penny-pinching strategies only served to disgust Gustavo and Carina.

‘It is only fifty reals,' Gustavo said one day when Fabio's musician friend Juan turned up unannounced on the doorstep to ask for one hundred reals to print the fliers for their local Carnaval gathering. He already had fifty in his wallet, and told me to run upstairs and get the rest. Juan smiled at me as he waited patiently outside the gate, Torré analysing his every move.

‘I don't have it,' I shrugged.

Gustavo looked at me with surprise.

‘Well, he certainly doesn't have it,' Gustavo responded.

‘It's always fifty reals here and fifty reals there. I'm nearly broke as it is.'

Gustavo gave a crooked smile.

‘Oh … you poor, poor girl.
Poa
! Broke? Come on.'

‘Why do we have to pay for it? It's not my problem.'

‘Because you know him. He is Fabio's friend, is he not? He would not have knocked if he didn't need it.'

‘How do you know?'

Gustavo looked at me in surprise.

‘They might be simple people, but they are honest.'

I sighed with guilt, and Gustavo took a closer look at me.

‘He would not dare come to this gate otherwise.'

The truth was that I was living like a rich person, but I didn't have the money to be rich. I was getting to be like one of those rich trust-fund kids who can't afford to buy a round of drinks. Perhaps the one redeeming quality of rich people in Brazil is, in fact, that they know how to be rich. The wealthy Brazilians may have a limited appreciation of urban planning, economics, philosophy, literature, food, sport, and the arts in general, but they sure know how to throw it around. Some Europeans, such as the Portuguese journalist Pereira Coutinho, might have called them the ‘anti-elites' and accused them of being a vulgar, money-worshipping ruling class, on a par with the court of Louis XIV; but, in their defence, how else can you keep a third of your country below the poverty line without any substantial resistance? It was certainly not by showing them that all human beings are born equal. Knowing how to be rich is a vast and underrated responsibility in a country with neither the money nor the inclination for a social support infrastructure, and one that is completely lost on foreigners and often their own fledgling middle class.

Carina, for her part, pays for the education of her staff, lends them money to build houses, and picks up the bill for medical treatment when they really need it. While clearly not of the same calibre — if UNDP inequality indicators are to be believed — the rich vaguely fulfil the role that the family might play in Italy, or that the state is intended to take on in Australia. People like Chiara and I just confused everything because we had the lifestyle and education of rich people, but went around talking to street kids and malandros and drug addicts as if we were one of them. While some of them liked it and would compliment us on our non-discriminatory approach, I was not so naïve as to think that there were not an equal number who detested us for it. The rich have an understanding of their place, as do the poor.

It would be a humiliation for a rich Brazilian to be asked to contribute to a charity and not to give, particularly after they'd ransacked the government coffers with bent contracts and unnecessary monopolies, and kicked out deserving management-job applicants in favour of their sons and daughters. They will find that fifty centavos. It is part of the deeply patronising tradition of relationships between rich and poor, which reaffirms all the power institutions upon which Brazil is built — namely, slavery. Anthropologist Roberto da Matta called it the ‘do you know who you are talking to?' culture. Forget the folk-dancing tour. That will teach you nothing about the culture of Brazil. Watch how an upper-class liberal treats a parking attendant. Now there's a lark. There are at least twenty different ways you can humiliate a poor man, but I guess I liked the Leblon princesses' way best — the irreverent swagger and the brassy stare of a seventeen-year-old in her dad's BMW as she flicks a coin mid-air at a man old enough to be her grandfather beats the hell out of watching sequined mulattas any day. That's why the average Brazilian gets so miffed when foreigners come here claiming that they are not rich or that they want low, local Brazilian prices. They don't know how to act in accordance with their wealth. It is insulting for them to see a foreigner bargaining viciously for prices or trying to avoid paying for the tram. These are privileges accorded only to the poor of Brazil — not to the rich, much less a foreigner. You would never see Gustavo bargaining for anything less than 500 reals. He wouldn't lower himself to such crassness.

Take the Santa Teresa tram, for instance. It's a bargain method of transport, although you have to be savvy. Sit down and you pay sixty centavos (about thirty cents), but hang off the side and you travel for free, thus giving rise to the occasional sight of a tram moving along with nobody in the seats and the sides covered in passengers. The problem, though, is that the trams are falling into disarray because of lack of funding, so the drivers sometimes get tough on the backpackers and demand they cough up the money. Chiara recounted this story to me.

‘Sixty centavos!' the conductor barked one day at three backpackers clinging clumsily to the side.

‘But we're on the side,' one protested.

He stopped the tram and asked in a slow, sarcastic tone, as everybody turned to look.

‘Are you really telling me that you have come all the way from England and don't have sixty centavos for a tram ride?'

The culture of wealth that surrounds Rio de Janeiro is complicated. Certainly the magnificent natural backdrop, the bling culture of the Cariocas, and the decadent behaviour of western tourists all heighten the appearance of wealth in the city, but Rio's absolute wealth does not come close to that of western cities such as Paris, London, or even Sydney. Rio may have its one chic street with jewellers and Chanel and Mercedes on the drive, and its handful of suburbs with the obligatory Vaucluse-like mansions and yacht clubs, but their inhabitants are not jaw-droppingly rich. Even the quasi-elite, like Carina, for example, have a standard of living that is not vastly different from the upper-middle class of Australia. The truth is that the gross domestic product of Brazil is about the same as Australia's, only she has ten times as many citizens
.

For me, the appearance of wealth in Rio de Janeiro was defined almost exclusively by its relativity. Its offensiveness was not in its excess — as an Australian living in the top 10 per cent of the world's most wealthy citizens, I should have been immune to that — but its
in-your-face-inequality
. There seemed to be something distinctly immoral about the residents of expensive white condominiums looking out onto the kitchen windows of favelas, without any obvious sense of guilt. And it was hard to see it as simply an issue of development. Built on slave labour, once home to the segregated imperial court of Portugal, and a purpose-built playground for the rich and famous, the very roots of Rio de Janeiro were sown in disparity. The most outstanding feature of the city to the naked eye is that there is no middle class. There is no middling suburbia; no significant industry. The only thing of human-produced value in the entire city is the culture of its poorest people. People come to Rio de Janeiro to spend their money, not to make it. Even the tambourines and drums for which they are famous are imported. Nearly one-third of the jobs in the city are in the dead-end world of unskilled services. It is simply a city of rich people and the people who serve them.

Statistically, the richest 10 per cent of people in Brazil earn about 57 times the amount earned by the poorest 10 per cent — compared to a multiple of 12.5 in Australia. This represents an average difference in earnings of US$37,534 to US$656 per annum. That's the extreme end of the scale, and probably based on the difference between a farm worker in Para compared to an executive in São Paulo. Let's take a Rio example. The minimum wage is about 350 reals per month, although a lucky waiter or cleaner in central Rio probably gets around 600 reals. At the other end of the working scale, a graduate accountant or lawyer gets around 6000 reals per month. This means, broadly, that the lawyer is on ten times the money of the waiter serving him. There is almost no chance whatsoever that that waiter will ever sit at a table drinking a beer after work beside that lawyer. There is no chance that he would even use the same supermarket, nor that their daughters would dance at the same club one night. In fact, just about the only connection that the waiter would ever have with the lawyer would be to serve his dinner, or have his wife clean the lawyer's house, or possibly have his son seduce the lawyer's daughter down in Lapa during Carnaval.

There is a failure of the social contract, which, even if it does not demand the honouring of the idealistic notion that all human beings are born equal, should at least demand that they have a chance to get up there if they work hard enough. I recall an interview on television with a Brazilian actress who shocked audiences by saying that she didn't have a cleaner when she lived in New York. The interviewer's mouth fell open with horror at the idea of the actress sweeping her own house.

‘But why, darling?'

‘I couldn't afford it,' the actress shrugged. ‘Cleaners get paid a decent wage in America.'

There is a rich indolence among Cariocas, rich or poor, when it comes to matters of work and productivity. Service levels are awful in the city, corruption is shrugged off, and people complain constantly of their maids ripping them off. It is everybody's dream to have a job in the government, from which they can't be sacked. But there is no honour in an industrious work-ethic. ‘So chic!' Gustavo would exclaim as I went off to the beach. ‘Only a very chic woman can go to the beach on a Tuesday morning.'

Work is out of fashion in Rio de Janeiro — those who turn up expect to be abused, and those for whom the workers turn up seem to feel obliged to abuse them. At times the relationship between worker and boss borders on the theatrical, almost sexually sado-masochistic. Humiliation, degradation, and deprivation were popular techniques.
Sim, senhora. Não, senhora
. That the elite even maintain their positions in society has to be down to these crude mind games, for it certainly has nothing to do with their cultural superiority.