Chasing Bohemia (33 page)

I guess you can't have everything all the time — a philosophy that might have been better bestowed on the managers of the Rio Hostel, who were at that moment preparing for Carnaval by figuring out how to fit twenty-five people in a room six metres by three. They considered having three bunks, but settled on putting the Carnaval arrivals in hammocks. They were charging 160 reals for a bed and 140 for a hammock. It was 10 February 2004, and it was show time. The hostels were bursting with camera and iPod-toting travellers, and the intercom at the Rio Hostel was hot with malandros from Lapa. There was a robbery every day on Joaquim Murtinho, sometimes more. The tourist bairros of Santa Teresa, Copacabana, and Ipanema were invaded by marauding gangs of barefoot thieves who would hold up anyone with anything. Some would use knives; others, just a pen. One used a sharp twig. Reactions varied between the nationalities — the people from stable, developed countries invariably suffering most from the violation.

‘Why, oh why, Carina, they want to take my money? I do nothing with them. I love poor black people. I have black boyfriends. I am not racist. I take many photos of them. Why they are stealing from me?' one Scandinavian girl moaned. ‘Never mind darling. This is Brazil,' she would say soothingly, hugging the latest victim and throwing warning looks as Chiara stifled cruel giggles behind their back. The Italians and Israelis were outraged at the humiliation of being caught out as mere mortal ‘tourists', and simmered with revenge. ‘I gonna get that little bastard and roast him alive. If I was in Rome/Gaza, I beat the shit out of him. Really I do.' The South Africans and Australians, for their part, were either Crocodile Dundee about it all, or too drunk on their way back from Lapa to see what was happening. One Queenslander watched in awe as his wife beat up a street kid. ‘Some little kid tried to rob me with a bloody stick, mate. I told him, “I'll bloody rob you at this rate sunshine”', she said, rubbing the scratch above her eye while her husband's head bobbed up and down in silent agreement.

The thieves got so bold in Rio de Janeiro that they started robbing people in front of the police. When they could actually be bothered charging someone, police cars were in such short supply that they would put the victim in the back seat beside the assailant. Most would drop the charges after sitting for more than five minutes beside a skinny, barefoot, black thief shaking like a leaf, and the police would take him off alone to beat the shit out of him instead.

Lapa was heaving ten days in advance. Spontaneous blocos filled the backstreets, makeshift bars clogged the sidewalks, tourists stumbled wide-eyed through the lascivious locals, and hundreds of panama hats appeared on heads in Lapa, annoying the hell out of Winston and Fabio, whose malandro images had been thoroughly confused with multiple cases of mistaken identity. A new egalitarian spirit was overtaking the people. Leblon playboys danced with Maria, resplendent in her new gold lamé clown costume, while Barra supermarket princesses seduced young black guys from north Rio.

The final days before Carnaval passed by quickly. Too quickly. I woke up one night suffocating with the heat, and was overwhelmed by a sense of destiny. My days were numbered, and I knew it. Even my mother had stopped asking me when I was coming home. I jumped up from the Chinese princess bed with my heart in my throat, and threw open the balcony door. Outside it was silent. A pale, silver moon hung low and enormous in the night sky, and the smell of honeysuckle drifted up to the balcony. I slumped on the Doric columns like a tragic heroine, ‘Memories' playing in the back of my mind. What on earth was I going to do when I got home? How would I ever face the real world again?

–17–

The Inferno

Today the samba went seeking, and who it sought was you.

– CHICO BUARQUE DE HOLLANDA,
Quem te viu, quem te vê

A
nd on the seventh month there was Carnaval. They said let there be samba, and there was samba. Carnaval had started, and for the first time since I'd arrived seven months before I finally understood something about the irreverent Brazilians. This was not a party; it was a war. It was April out there, surrounding the garrison and closing in around us with her flag of inevitable reality. I knew I was leaving. They knew they were going back to work. We were brothers-in-arms against call centres, factories, and VISA card Australia, and we were damned if we were going out on our knees.

I was out for three days without returning once to the Casa Amarela, and the annual Carnaval of Rio de Janeiro had only just begun. Carnaval had another week in her, Fabio said on the first day. At least a week, said Juan, a friend of his we picked up some time on day two. I didn't want him to come with us because he was foaming with sweat and had a junkie prostitute hanging on his arm, but Fabio said we would lose her by the first turn of Praça Mauá. He was right. Juan lost the junkie, picked up a desperate American tourist, and together we went to Cacique de Ramos.

Fabio and I had started on the Thursday at a party by the old port, finished the night sleeping on a dusty favela floor in Mangueira, and had gone straight down to Copacabana to catch some afternoon rays. We got caught up in a funeral procession for a drug dealer outside Botafogo, and I lost Fabio. Afterwards I wandered the streets with a clown and two Spanish girls dressed as pixies. We drank some more on Botafogo beach and went to a party in Ipanema, where they invited me to a foursome. I said ‘yes' and then fell asleep before it happened. They still made me breakfast in the morning, though, and we exchanged phone numbers that we knew we would never call. I came back through Lapa, and found Fabio asleep on the stairs beside Juan and a girl dressed as an Indian. Or maybe she was a cowgirl. It was as though the entire city had been trapped in a gigantic, fantastical kaleidoscope. I woke him up and he fell to his knees. ‘Yes, my princess, my princess. Your wish is my command.' He shook his head sideways with tired, crazy cachaça eyes.

‘Let's go home, Fabio,' I sighed. I was exhausted.

‘No,' he yelled, with surprising fervour, and jumped to his feet. His eyes opened wide. ‘No. Absolutely not. Are you crazy? It's Carnaval.'

When he saw how exhausted I really was, he changed tack and came to my side, massaged my shoulders, and murmured that I must be strong. Juan woke up and placed a rock under the arm of the Indian. They hadn't been home in three days, either; but, as they said themselves, missing the Slaves of Mauá would be like missing your own birthday. It was the first bloco of Carnaval. So there we were, three warriors of Carnaval: me in my white, broken tutu with blood roses in my hair; Fabio in a red bustier and silver fishnets, with black smudges of mascara streaking down his cheeks; and Juan, a barefoot, sweating black hulk in white trousers.

Rain fell on the city of Rio de Janeiro in apocalyptic proportions that night. Enormous tropical drops smashed at the pavements, thunder cracked around our ears, and lightning streaked across the blackened sky. The city filled up like a swimming pool, entire streets disappeared, and shanties slid down cliff faces. I thought it might have lessened crowd numbers, but the water only made them wilder. As the procession moved down Avenida Rio Branco, men climbed up and down trees beating and tearing at their chests like savages, shook the corrugated-iron doors of newspaper stands, and jumped on roofs; women ran wild down the centre of the avenue; and elderly women in white made fervent prayers to the sky. In some parts, people were fighting and wrestling. In others, it was an orgy of embraces and passionate kisses, sometimes with three, four, or more people at the same time. Fabio had said that the people always went rabid at the Slaves of Mauá. It was the first Carnaval street party after another year of corruption scandals, poverty, suburban massacres, currency problems, and marital disasters. By the time the people got to the port of Mauá, they were dying to forget.

Days seemed to pass before we reached the other side of town. The lights were out on the main drag, and the shadows of deserted office buildings loomed above the people as they ran wild like a rebel army through deserted boulevards and avenues. The epicentre of the procession was a float moving ahead of us, partially obscured by the bodies of people hanging off its sides. Steam from the pulsating crowd rose around it. Fabio pulled me towards him. ‘We have to get to the cordon,' he whispered urgently. The cordon circled the truck, the dancers, and the
bateria
— the hundred-or-so drummers responsible for igniting the fury and passion of Carnaval.

It was a local custom to reach and touch the cordon of the bateria, even if, like a brush of the Pope's hand, it was only for the briefest moment. ‘You can't leave without touching the cordon of Carnaval,' Fabio said with a wistful smile. We fought like warriors that night against the other million pilgrims of hedonism in Rio de Janeiro to get to the Holy Cordon. We wheedled and flattered
,
slipped into gaps, pushed past blockades, and tripped over old women to make our way through. The end would justify the means, I was assured. I hated crowds, but I wanted to touch that rope more than anything in the world. The cordon became my reason for being. Our chance came when a fight broke out between a foreigner and a Brazilian over his girlfriend. ‘You bastard,' the tourist was shouting. ‘Get your hands off my girl or I'll break your face.' The Brazilian was laughing aggressively. ‘She wanted it, man,' he said while the guy's girlfriend hung back behind them, smiling like a devil. The tourist threw a punch, the crowd shied away from them, and Fabio and I ran through the middle. Water was rising up through the sewers. The people heaved together in a soaked mass of bodies. We had made it to less than twenty metres from the cordon, and Fabio thrust his way through the last of the crowd, using sheer force. He took hold of my wrist and hauled me through after him, tearing off the belt I was wearing and leaving my wrist covered in burns. Finally, we had the rope in our hands.

Beyond the cordon, it was silent. The crowd raged behind us, but the musicians were suspended in the night. An army of black drummers lined up in ranks held their batons above white goatskins, their muscle-bound arms trembling in anticipation, while half-naked dancers in feathers and sequins stayed still in the front like warrior horses, their heavy breathing the only movement to betray them. They all awaited the call of the conductor — the general of this chaos — who would draw the line between sanity and madness, stillness and rage
.
His hand slashed the air the moment my grip tightened on the cordon. His muscled arms came down in a momentous roar:
thakka-thakka-thak thak-thak-thak.

Nothing could have prepared me for the madness of a hundred drums being played in perfect unison. The pavement vibrated. The lampposts shook. The beat dissolved me. It rose up in my chest, blocked out my thoughts, and exploded every sense in my body. I fell back in wonder. I wanted to throw myself at their feet, plead forgiveness, and dance until I died. It was the closest thing to heaven I could have imagined. All around me, people flung themselves at each other like devils possessed. They trembled, convulsed, and fell into each other's arms hysterically — moaning, screaming, laughing, and crying.

Their goddess, an Amazonian beast in feathers, came to the edge of our side of the cordon, and I looked up at her. She was enormous — two heads reared above me, teeth bared, glistening with beads of rain and half-naked. She must have been forty or more, but she was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. She held her arms up like a pharaoh, and the crowd fell back. They called to her, begged and pleaded, and she paced back and forth. Our queen. Our queen. And then she stopped, looked behind her, and with a face wild and proud as a warrior she started to samba. It was a war dance, and thunder struck as her feet broke up the pavement beneath her. Water sluiced the crowd. They roared at the top of their lungs. She threw back her feathered head, and her mouth contorted in a sneer of derision so wide that I thought she would swallow us all up. I kept my hand on the cordon. I had no choice. I couldn't move. Rio de Janeiro had me possessed.

IT WAS AN ALMOST
painfully long stretch of festivities that week. There were eighty-one official street blocos, hundreds of unofficial blocos, sixteen masked balls in private clubs, hundreds of penthouse parties, and three magnificent evenings of samba school parades.

It was a busy Carnaval in 2004, by all accounts. Thirty people died in road accidents, eighty-seven were murdered, 140 were robbed per day, a bus was torched out near Fazendinha after a child was killed by a
bala perdida,
a lost police bullet, and still the governor described it as a ‘tranquil' week. Carnaval was always an edgy time in Rio. In 2003, the drug faction Commando Vermelho kicked off Carnaval by torching fifty buses and exploding bombs. Shopkeepers barred up their doors, Lula sent in the military, and by the end of Carnaval they had nearly 40,000 police and military guarding the streets. The wave of attacks was said to have been ordered by the faction boss Fernandinho Beira Mar, or ‘Little Freddy by the seashore' — a personality I found all the more sinister for his childish diminutive. I was used to criminals with real names, like Charles Manson or Carlos The Jackal. At least I knew where I stood with them. With names like Little Froggy, Crazy Eli, and the Red Command, you were never quite sure.

We slept when we could, catching ten minutes here and an hour there, like war-torn soldiers in the midst of a raging battle. The sound of explosions and fireworks punctured the normally tranquil Santa Teresa nights. You could barely get out your front door without being caught up in a wave of street bands rushing down the street. The biggest was Saturday's Black Ball, which filled up the central business district on Avenida Rio Branco at 8.00 a.m. with one million people dressed in black and white, to be equalled only by the afternoon's Ipanema Gay and Lesbian block, Kindness and Sort of Love, which inched along the beachfront with parades of drag queens dressed up like Carmen Miranda and Mexican soap stars, and always ran into the radical-chic, out-of-tune musicians of the
What Shit is This?
bloco coming the other way.