Chasing Bohemia (6 page)

In front of us, a toothless hundred-kilo woman wore an orange bathing suit cut into strips to resemble a Los Angeles flyover. Huge wads of flesh were oozing through the holes, and a pair of black, shiny hot pants designed for a thirty-kilo thirteen-year-old covered her modesty below. Her feet were clad in a pair of high-heeled plastic platform thongs. Her companion, a pregnant man with a twenty-inch microphone of grey hair, was nodding earnestly at her conversation.

‘Is she a prostitute?' I asked Chiara, and she shrugged and said, ‘Sometimes.'

As for the others, while there was a bit of variation — the odd hair clip here and there — the official uniform of Lapa was, by and large, ten-inch plastic platform thongs in white or pastel colours, size-four hot pants cut six inches below the bellybutton, and a breast-popping Lycra midriff shoestring strap top. Hair was worn long and greased. And while the majority of the girls in Lapa would make a supermodel look like a spoilt old bag, it was clear that age and weight were not barriers to the proud wearing of the uniform. I was not the first foreigner to gape wide-eyed at the sex-industry-inspired fashion — that surely accounted for the gaggle of nerdy-looking sex tourists who were hanging around on our left — but Chiara was disappointed by my uncultured surprise nonetheless.

‘That's the way people dress in the tropics,' she explained.

‘Well, they don't dress like that in Cairns,' I said dubiously.

‘I mean the Latin tropics, not
Anglo-Saxon
places,' she said.

The colonial terraces that lined the streets were similar to Largo dos Guimarães in Santa Teresa, but smaller, more shabby, and blackened from pollution and age. The inescapable stench of urine wafted through the air from no apparent source, and broken cobblestones ran beneath our feet. Chiara emerged from the bar, stopping to chat to someone at the entrance, and then took me to sit down on one of the six red-tiled terrace steps that ran up the side of the Arches of Lapa. Two homeless kids rushed up and sat at our feet, sniffing glue from a Coke can.

‘Lapa is the real bohemian district,' Chiara told me, as a police car pulled up onto the terrace below us. ‘I lived in Salvador for three months looking for this, and I did not once find anything like it. I should have stayed in Rio.'

‘Looking for bohemia?' I asked

‘Looking for culture,' she corrected me with a smile.

I glanced around to see what she was seeing: Lycra-clad locals, muscle boys, musicians, drunks, tourists, and a hippie element of dreadlocked jewellery-sellers entwining bits of leather and stone. There was a lively and vibrant mood, even if it was faintly menacing. Two portly musicians laughed loudly as they entered a bar with their instruments, a woman argued furiously with her lover who was trying to free himself lightly from her grasp, street kids played truant around a burnt-out car with one hand wrapped around their glue bottles, and a group of tough-looking young black men lounged against a graffitied wall with effortless Brazilian cool. The initials CV, for Comando Vermelho — Rio's main drug-trafficking faction, Chiara told me — were scrawled on every wall.

A police car drove up shortly afterwards, a machine gun resting on each of the three passenger windows. The street kids ran, the onlookers scattered casually, and Chiara and I watched on as one particularly brutish officer got out and began systematically ripping apart a mattress that lay beside the burnt-out car.

IT WAS CHIARA
who laid out the landscape of Brazil for me, albeit through the fiery telescope of a Marxist revolutionary. She told it from the start: from when the Portuguese had arrived ‘accidentally' on their way to India in 1502, to the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries; the enslavement and massacre of the Indian populations; the coming of the African slave trade; the relocation of the imperial court of Portugal to escape Napoleon; coffee; sugar; war with Paraguay; independence; military dictatorship; the impeachment of Collar; and the rise and rise of Lula. I hadn't even known there was slavery in Brazil.

‘How could you not know that?' she asked incredulously, and tossed her head with irritation. ‘That's the problem with travellers. They don't have a fucking clue. How can you travel in a country without knowing anything … no! …
everything
about it. What's the point?'

I was silent. When I first started travelling I would read the guidebooks religiously, swot up on the local customs, history, and religion, watch the films, read the English-translated literature, and learn the basic language. And then I got bored. Bored of travellers telling each other the same stories from the shaded boxes. ‘Did you know that Prince Pedro had twenty-five lovers …?' ‘Oh, really. Did he? Where did you read that? Page 39? Or is yours the last edition, which would make it page 25?' Even the local tour guides around the world read from the guidebooks. Backpacker conversations were distilled through Lonely Planet, Footprint, Rough Guides, and all those other books designed to destroy the spontaneity of life. There was nowhere left to move. We all went to the same hostels, saw the same sights, and read the same books. Now I just travelled to get a buzz. The less I knew, the better. It was my way, as I hitch-hiked with truck drivers, had dangerous relationships with inappropriate men, and trekked over mountains alone, of reminding myself, after all the mind-numbing call centres and dull conversations about interest rates and housing prices and career ascension, that I was, in fact, still alive.

–4–

Casa Amarela

The moon was magnificent. In Santa Teresa, between the sky and the flatlands below, the least audacious soul was capable of going up against an enemy army and destroying it.

–
MACHADO DE ASSIS
,
Quincas Borba

T
hey say that two rivers cross underground in the heart of Santa Teresa. Maybe that's why I kept returning, dragged back to that odd little hill by mysterious underground forces each time I went to leave. Santa Teresa has a long history of harbouring fugitives, right from the early days, when the rebellious escaped slaves were forming
quilombos,
or hideouts, up to the turn of last century, when the elites built big-gated mansions to flee the yellow fever that was gripping the old city at that time. The former left for the north of Rio in the 1880s and the latter for the south in the 1930s, and now there are just bohemians and artists and the odd eccentric traveller who's lost his way in the wild tropics. Our most famous resident was Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, who spent his stolen millions on a house in the hills, and escaped extradition by having a child with a Brazilian ‘dancer'.

I had a triumphant return to Rio de Janeiro from Barretos. The Barretos Rodeo was everything I had dreamed of and feared, and more. It had started with my 3.00 a.m. Monday arrival at the ‘Married Campsite', which was naturally filled with marauding gangs of drunken, single cowboys. It was a less-than-suitable environment for a lone foreign woman about to camp out with her tent and hammock, and by the downtrodden looks of the women waiting in water queues I sensed that the rodeo folk might not quite identify with Chiara's post-modern single-woman-traveller theory. Perhaps Thelma and Louise had never been released in Brazil, and they just thought I was a shameless whore setting up shop for the week.

As it happened, they did think that, and I was forced to defend myself later in the week against three inbred cowboys who tried to break into my tent. I dealt with this the only way I could, and that was by pretending to be mad. I screamed and howled, brandishing my boot like a club and my bottle of perfume like pepper spray, and eventually they went away. By Thursday morning, those who had not seen the film were getting a pretty good idea of what Thelma and Louise was all about, and everyone left me alone. In retrospect, those cowboys were probably just coming over to offer me a cup of tea, but I wasn't taking any chances.

In any case, the following day I was unearthed by the organisers as the first foreigner to visit Barretos Rodeo, and was quickly shunted up the social ladder. I left the Married Campsite for a villa in town on the tray of a four-wheel-drive pick-up truck, smiling haughtily at the slobbering cowboys who had trespassed on my hammock area the previous night. From then on, it was free barbeques at the VIP hospitality camps, priority seating, and introductions to the worst country musicians I have ever heard. I became an instant local celebrity, was asked to sing a song at an exclusive after-party, and gave a lunchtime speech on comparisons between Brazilian and Australian rodeos. I felt like a sixteenth-century traveller arriving in the kingdom of Eldorado. I saw kings and queens, performing horses, wandering mystics, not to mention five midget bull acrobats who specialised in bull wrestling. I spent my days meeting the cowboys, hobnobbing with the organisers, and visiting local charities in the community with a paparazzi photographer from the
Barretos Mirror
in tow.

I arrived back at the Rio Hostel as the sun was setting, still dressed in my boots and cowboy hat, shocking Carina with my safe return and earning a new level of traveller's credibility with Chiara. For the weeks that followed, Chiara and I would sit around the pool at the Rio Hostel impressing newly arrived gap-year travellers at least ten years younger than us: ‘That's nothing. Do you know where Carmen has just been?'

My tale bulged into an urban myth, expanding to an epic adventure in which I fought off ten cowboy rapists with a nail file. I basked in the glory, scored many an admirer with my new reputation as a fearless woman adventurer, and set about acquiring a luxury tan. I grew fat on the riches of my experiences. So I guess it was only natural then, in that dripping climate of traveller's narcissism, that I would find myself living at one of the most glamorous mansions in Santa Teresa.

It was not far from the Rio Hostel, on the same street where ancient yellow trams ramble through to the champagne bohemian district of Santa Teresa. I passed it every day as I walked up to eat in the rice-and-beans restaurants that serve the uncomplicated culinary fare of Rio de Janeiro. The Casa Amarela was the most grandiose mansion on the backbone street of Rua Joaquim Murtinho, yellow as a canary with spanking-white chocolate-box trimming. It loomed out from behind a screaming tropical garden of hibiscus and banana palms; and through the flouncing pink foliage along the entrance path, passers-by could see a black marble statue of a naked nymph playing with her hair at the front of the house. On the second floor, a line of four shuttered doors were flung open onto a balcony of blue-and-white Portuguese tiling, and above that there was the endless blue sky of Brazil. Of all the fantasies a girl could have, I guess this one had met my inner Saint Tropez heiress, the one denied to me for so many years as I'd heaved my way through overcrowded trains on the Bondi-to-North-Sydney line and, later, through the damp, dank passageways of the London Underground.

In the week since my return from Barretos, I had become a dedicated user of the faded-yellow tram that raced the residents of Santa Teresa up and down to the city below. The yellow cars had once connected the whole of Rio de Janeiro until some officious secretary of public works decided that the city would be so much more attractive with big, grey polluting buses and traffic jams. The militant residents of Santa Teresa had dug their heels in and kept their tram, and now it's a tourist attraction of sorts. I loved it: the chipped yellow paint, the ancient wooden benches, the grumpy drivers, the flirtatious passengers, and the way that the wind blew back your hair as it reached the rises of Santa Teresa. It was like something out of
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, hurtling its way around cobbled corners with a furious clanking bell. Even the most hardened locals would put their heads out their windows to see it pass, and the passengers would pay their respects likewise and inspect the contents of every house.

If you took it from the bottom to the top, to a place called Silvestre, the wilderness, you could run along the empty forest roads of Tijuca, with the enormity of the city of Rio de Janeiro sweeping out to your left and the statue of Christ looking down on you from the right. Rio de Janeiro was a city best seen from on top. As my mother said when she came to visit, ‘At ground level, it's a toilet,' but up on the peaks of Corcovado, it was like you were suspended in the heavens. Up there on the silent mountains, the jungle plunged down beneath you like folds of green satin, and the blue waters of Copacabana and Ipanema sparkled like a necklace of jewels. Even the city condominiums were a creamy white.

‘THAT'S MY HOUSE
,' I shouted to Chiara over the clatter of the tram one day. I was on the front bench of the tramcar perched beside the driver while Chiara hung off the side in a cluster of nut-brown bodies.

‘Of course it is,' Chiara replied, as she smiled seductively at a teenager hanging beside her, his tanned stomach tightening with each turn.

‘Shall we ask them if you can stay there?' she added, shifting closer so her hair fanned out around her adolescent admirer. ‘Why should I ask?' I yelled playfully. ‘It's my house!'

Chiara laughed and shouted back, ‘Exactly.'

Later, as we dangled our legs into the pint-sized pool of the Rio Hostel and sipped caipirinhas, she asked: ‘So when are you going to move there?'

I laughed at her. ‘It's not a hotel! It's somebody's house.'

She tossed her dark hair. ‘So what? Just turn up with your bags. They will find a room.'