Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  When Charles Darwin climbed to the tip of Corcovado, then without its Cristo, his walk started along the Rio Carioca’s aqueduct:

  The path for the few first miles is the Aqueduct; the water rises at the base of the hill and is conducted along a sloping ridge to the city. At every corner alternate and most beautiful views were presented to us. At length we commenced ascending the steep sides, which are universally to the very summit clothed by a thick forest.

  . . . We soon gained the peak and beheld that view, which perhaps excepting those in Europe, is the most celebrated in the world. If we rank scenery according to the astonishment it produces, this most assuredly occupies the highest place. . . .

  In spite of legal protections, the trees that once covered the mountains of Rio had been largely cleared by the mid-nineteenth century to make way for coffee plantations or to be burned as fuel. When Darwin hiked along the river and up the Corcovado, the landscape that so moved him was already marred.

  This led to erosion, and endangered the Carioca’s source. That threat prompted Rio’s first reforestation effort: under Emperor Dom Pedro II, land around the springs began to be expropriated in 1844, and an extensive replanting campaign took hold.II

  Regardless of the regulations, residences encroached on its banks over the years. It was channeled and eventually had its lower half sealed into subterranean passages, only to reemerge as a rank canal by Flamengo Beach, where I first became acquainted with it.

  Prompted by the Carioca, I began to dig up information about water pollution and learned the Carioca was a microcosm of what happens to waterways all over the state.

  Rio treats only two-thirds of its waste. This means that one out of three times someone flushes a toilet, the contents stream, unprocessed, into rivers, lakes, bays, and the ocean. This is no secret. The state environmental agency, INEA, warns residents to avoid the beach for twenty-four hours after a heavy rain, because downpours rinse out the rivers and turn the ocean into a cesspool.

  Nor is Rio’s condition unusual. About 54 percent of Brazilians are not hooked up to pipes that divert sewage away from their homes. Even fewer are connected to a wastewater treatment system. This deficiency stands out when it is compared to other basic services: 98 percent of Brazilians have access to electricity, 81 percent have running water, and 91 percent have telephones. In 2013, 70 percent of Brazilians had cell phones—many more than had basic sanitation.

  But Rio could do better. It was one of the first cities in the world, after London and Hamburg, to benefit from modern sewerage infrastructure. Dom Pedro II, who was behind the reforestation effort around the Carioca’s headwaters, also ordered the city’s first sewage pipes in the mid-nineteenth century.III

  Rio’s location in ocean-level alluvial plains at the foot of forested mountains made drainage a struggle from the start. A lack of basic sanitation added sewage to the marshy landscape. Plagues were so notorious that merchant ships avoided its port during the summer months. This was economically disastrous for a trading city. It was after a devastating yellow fever epidemic that lasted from 1849 to 1851 that the emperor granted the government powers to hire a sanitation and cleaning company. The job eventually fell to the British-financed Rio de Janeiro City Improvements Company, later known simply as City. Works began in earnest in 1862. By 1887, Rio had seven treatment stations.

  In spite of Rio’s early start, more than a century later, the state’s streams and rivers delivered about 480 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of raw sewage to the bay, every day. It made nearly all beaches along the bay too polluted to swim; its stench greeted me every morning when I ran past the mouth of the Carioca. Sewage burbled up from burst pipes and pooled along the curb of my street in Flamengo. Neon-green cyanobacteria, which feed on this organic matter, scummed up the lagoons out west.

  How did this happen? Some of this waste flowed, raw, from favelas that had no sanitation. That was easy to see and smell. But that was also only part of the story.

  At a conference on water quality, I learned about the invisible elements of Rio’s failing sanitation system. Much of the pollution comes from the parts of town that officially benefit from a sewerage system. This happens, in part, in areas where the network is old and oversubscribed. Old pipes break, or back up and overflow into rainwater drainage systems, into subterranean rivers, or out of manholes.

  But not all of this contamination is accidental. There are also illicit connections between homes, buildings, or entire shopping malls that feed sewage straight into rainwater pipes, or into rivers, lagoons, or the ocean.

  I saw this when, in an attempt to clean up Rio’s south-side beaches, the state’s environmental department sent a tiny robot with a camera to inspect the underground plumbing in one of Rio’s toniest zip codes, Leblon. The inspection found an expensive beachfront hotel, a mansion within a gated community, and a high-rent residential building all illegally pouring their waste into the water main, which empties—you guessed it—right into the Atlantic, at the beach frequented by the same people who produced the waste in the first place. Rio’s sewage problem clearly goes beyond not having the means or resources to do the right thing.

  Cariocas, as usual, have learned to manage. Before going to the beach, they check the newspaper’s back pages. Next to the weather, there is a list of the stretches of coastline that are unsafe for bathing that day.IV

  The cost of environmental degradation, however, isn’t measured only in hot days spent at the beach without a cooling dip in the ocean. The real toll is the population’s health. A four-year study by the Instituto Trata Brasil, a water and sewage public interest organization, looked at the correlation between health and wastewater collection. In 2011, the latest year examined, Brazil’s public health system had 396,048 patients hospitalized because of intestinal infections presumed to come from contact with sewage. More than one-third of those who got sick were children under five.

  To learn how Rio got this way, I went to conferences and interviewed experts. But to grasp what it meant, to see how life is strangled out of a river, I turned to the Carioca—my Carioca. I decided to trace it as Darwin once had, up the mountains and back in history, from its mouth at the bay to its source, somewhere on ridge of the Serra da Carioca, the Carioca Range.

  Standing on Flamengo beach where the stream flows into the bay, I turned my back to the water and looked up toward Cristo, hovering 2,300 feet above the city and three miles away. Between us lay a valley that encompassed the neighborhoods of Flamengo, Laranjeiras, and Cosme Velho, where visitors boarded the little train that took them to the statue’s base. That was the course of the Carioca. The question was where to look for it, and how to recognize it in the congested urban landscape that lay ahead.

  For help I called on Phellipe Nascimento Silva, a bald twenty-eight-year-old whose generous grin turned his eyes into bright half-moons above his round cheeks. He’d grown up within earshot of the Carioca in a favela called Guararapes, high up in the Carioca Range, and now he coordinated a group called Anfitriões do Cosme Velho, the Hosts of Cosme Velho. It trained teenage boys from Guararapes as tourist guides and taught them environmental responsibility. I learned about the group when it partnered with the national park employees for a daylong cleanup of the Carioca. This was the only public show of concern I’d seen for the river.

  Phellipe’s community had particularly strong ties to their plot of land in the mountains. A farm had once occupied those slopes, and Guararapes’s first residents were farmworkers. In 1967, they pooled their savings and bought the eight acres of land on which they lived. Pride of ownership anchored Phellipe and the community to the land.

  We had scheduled to meet at the little information stand Anfitriões had set up high up in Cosme Velho. To get there I jumped into a cab in Flamengo and headed up the valley, moving slowly through the congested traffic of a high-density canyonland of buildings.

  When the road widened
into a plaza and bus terminal, a placard caught my attention. I stepped out of the cab and into the swirling mist of the overcast afternoon. “Rio Carioca,” it read, and gave the length of the river, 2.6 miles, and its destination, Flamengo Beach. It was the first sign of the stream since I’d left the flats, and I was glad for it—nothing else about this place hinted that a river ran through it.

  Behind the graffiti-tagged sign was a cement wall, about waist high, enclosing an oblong opening. I peered into a shallow well. It was a window onto the subterranean river. We’d been driving right over it the whole time. Gray water rushed past the unbroken darker gray of its cement banks, filtering through shredded plastic bags, broken toys, and sun-bleached soda bottles. The cloying smell of pure sewage was familiar. We were some two miles from the beach and already the Carioca was no more than a conveyor of waste. Still, it was a glimpse of the river. I was on my way.

  I was back in the cab for just few minutes when we passed a narrow entrance to a dead-end street. From the taxi I had seen quick flashes of color within—pastel yellow, robin’s egg blue, pale pink, and minty green. I’d been on the lookout for this. It was the Largo do Boticário, a square named after a druggist who’d done very well for himself by bottling and selling the waters of the Carioca for their healthful qualities. He’d owned this land and in 1836, he broke it up into lots for sale. I asked the driver to pull over, and walked in along a narrow lane paved in wide flagstones to an intimate little plaza.

  A hush closed in as I stepped into the square and away from the busy street. Facing me, silent and shuttered, were two- and three-storied neocolonials, dilapidated, with patches of crumbled plaster but still showing their bright colors. The forest rose behind them, filtering the watery light of the overcast afternoon into a dappled green. Hand-painted tiles with blue, white, or yellow geometric designs ran in decorative friezes around windows, doors, and benches.

  The drizzle thickened into a soft rain, heightening the colors and bringing a chill to the air. In the middle of the square was a small pillar that read, in Portuguese, “You who live in this nook, blessed by water and silence, remember that the enchantment of this place depends on you.”

  Indeed, the corner felt ethereal, set apart from the frenzy of the metropolis. I heard the three-toned call of the flycatcher, the coo of a dove, the drip of water from the eaves onto the stone below and, under these layers, a whisper—the sound of a rushing stream. I turned around. I’d walked right over the river. The flagstone walkway was a tiny bridge over the Carioca.

  Kneeling on a cement bench bordered with tiles that had spiderwebbed with cracks, I looked down. The river was walled in, with ancient stone steps leading down to the water, but here it gurgled along on a natural riverbed, through moss and clumps of grass, under fiddleheads of ferns that nodded and dripped in the rain. The fresh scent of wet vegetation was still tainted with sewage, and the water had a whitish hue, but it was distinctly cleaner. Much of the pollution poured into the river below this point, as it ran under and through densely populated middle-class neighborhoods, including my own, Flamengo.

  Minutes later, I found Phellipe huddled under a white tarp with his teenage charges. The boys were surly; it was wet and downright cold. They didn’t expect many tourists. Phellipe was free; from that point on, I’d go with him, to see the Rio Carioca he knew.

  In his car now, we turned up the mountain. Soon the pavement went from asphalt to well-worn black cobblestones. Houses gave way to trees on a road carved into the mountain. He pulled over. A deep valley ran parallel with the road. On the opposite slope, the modest brick homes of Guararapes clung to the steep terrain. This was where he lived, he said, pointing at a well-built plastered home near the top. To the right and above the community, a wall of greenery rippled in the rain, dotted with the mango-yellow and fuchsia copses of the first blooming trumpet trees. The Tijuca National Park surrounded Phellipe’s stretch of the community.

  And then I saw it: a steam ran at the very bottom of the crevasse. It was the Carioca. We picked our way down to the path by the water. Here was something that looked and smelled like a mountain creek as it meandered past smooth boulders and bamboo thickets. A mutt, unused to strangers, growled at us. Phellipe shushed it. We walked along the dense vegetation by the water’s edge: strangler figs, towering jackfruit trees with their lumpy, rough-skinned fruit, and a tangle of vines that draped to the ground. Raindrops tapped on the broad leaves of banana trees.

  Here and there, tubes of PVC tubing snaked down the hillsides, each contributing one home’s worth of waste to the stream. This was where the problem started. There were no other homes above. It was no different than what happened farther down the line, except in Guararapes it was aboveground, visible.

  Knowing pollution of this sort happened elsewhere, everywhere, was no help to Phellipe. The fact that his own community contributed to the slow death of the creek he’d bathed in as a child upset him. He dropped his cheery veneer and began to talk, his right hand making hard chopping motions as he listed his efforts with Anfitriões: they’d helped organize trash pickup along the river to prevent flooding when it rained, and set up a community recycling program. The money they raised was used to buy bags of rice and beans for the poorest in Guararapes.

  “We work with the national park, do our part with the kids, teach them something about this place,” he said as we turned and hiked back out of the valley. “It belongs to us. But we have no resources to deal with this,” he said, pointing at the pipes dipping into the river.

  Back in the car, Phellipe released his pent-up frustration. The only faces of government the residents of Guararapes, and the nearby favelas of Cerro Corá and Vila Cândido, saw regularly were the police officers who started patrolling once a UPP was inaugurated in mid-2013. Otherwise, these favelas went without basic services, whether it was sanitation or the shoring up of the precarious slopes that sometimes crumbled in the rain, as they had in 2010, taking down a house with three little girls who’d been asleep inside. Phellipe was among those who dug until daybreak looking for them, only to find they’d been crushed under a water tank.

  It was getting dark, and we were drenched. But Phellipe had one more thing to show me: the Mãe d’Água, a name that means Mother of the Water. I’d never heard of it, but I was curious. We headed up the mountain again. The road turned and doubled back as it led us higher. On the left plunged a ravine; on the right rose the mountain, dense with greenery. We were deep in the forest, the only ones out there in the gloom and the rain. He pulled over at a tight bend in the road. Outside, the air was rich with the decay of leaves, wet earth, and the flowering of something intensely sweet. Birds trilled in the heavy tree cover. Walking across the street, I looked down at the ravine and saw the tops of the redbrick houses. We were above Guararapes. A trickle of the river spewed from a pipe that ran under the road, cascaded down, and collected in a pool below.

  Phellipe led me back across the street, to a small flat-roofed structure of granite blocks with a broken-down doorway nearly hidden under a shaggy canopy of vines and encroaching vegetation. Graffiti tags in red and black covered the outside. This, Phellipe told me, was the Mãe d’Água, where the Carioca was first gathered and channeled into the aqueduct for delivery in the city below. I’d wanted to see the river’s origin, and this was it, he told me.

  I’d biked past it before and never gave it a second look. Now I saw that on the side facing the street there was a stone plaque with deeply etched writing. It was so covered in graffiti I had to trace the sharp angled letters with my finger to understand: “During the reign of Dom João V . . .” This was the name of the Portuguese king under whom it had been built, and at the very bottom, the year: 1744.

  Just above us, beyond a broken-down iron fence, were the reservoirs where the water was collected before flowing into the aqueduct. A waist-high gate was shut with twine. All of it was abandoned. Phellipe was clearly ready to leave, but I couldn�
��t just yet.

  In his History of Portuguese America, published in 1730, the historian Sebastião da Rocha Pita described a “copious river called Carioca, of pure and crystalline waters.” Locals believed its waters “made gentle the voices of musicians and beautiful the faces of women,” he wrote. That was the river I wanted to see.

  Phellipe shrugged his shoulders. I could do what I liked; he was done being wet and would wait in the car.

  I vaulted the arrow-tipped spikes of the fence and lowered myself down on the other side. Mangoes and overripe jackfruit littered the ground; the humidity intensified their sweet-sour scent. A banana tree held out its little hands of ripening fruit. No one had bothered to harvest any of it; the place felt truly abandoned. Straight ahead was a stone wall mottled orange and green with lichen and moss. A stairway led up its side.

  At the top were the old reservoirs, three huge stone basins where much of Rio’s water was once held. They now had saplings sprouting out of cracks in the sturdy masonry, their roots slowly prying apart blocks of granite. Toward the back there was a smaller reservoir, and above it what looked like a control room. I climbed farther, stepped in. Broken glass crunched under my heels, and what was left of wooden windowsills and doorjambs lay soft and rotting underfoot.

  The mountain loomed behind the reservoir, enshrouded in vegetation that swayed with the rain. Dusk deepened the shadows, but I could hear the rush and gurgle of running water.

  I stepped gingerly over the thick stone wall that circled the back of the reservoir and onto the mountain’s variegated granite. There the river ran clear and cold. It spouted out of a thicket above, then coursed along a sharp fault line in the rock. Below my feet it dove down and around the reservoir, into a diversion that would send it pouring above Guararapes.

  I sat with it for a moment, feeling the bare rock beneath me, fingers in the water, drenched by the rain. The darkness brought the forest close, and the air was soft, deep, lanced with sounds of life heard but not seen. I felt if I cupped the stream in my hands I should see reflected in it the Carioca, the mountain, the landscape that unfolded around as it once was, as Darwin had seen it, too beautiful for words; as the historian Rocha Pita had seen it a hundred years before Darwin; and as the indigenous Tupi had seen it before the Portuguese ever set foot on this mountain.