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

by Juliana Barbassa

  The less experienced members of the institute got a chance to handle the next bit of work: give the croc a microchip tag between its clawed fingers and slice off a designated sequence of scales on its tail. This combination gave the animal a unique marking and gave the researchers blood and bits of osteoderm—thick, hard jacaré skin—to test for heavy metal exposure. As they worked, Ricardo took a moment to answer some of my questions about what all the west-side development meant from a croc’s perspective.

  Ricardo was thrilled that this animal was female. That’s because 85 percent of the nearly 500 jacarés captured so far in their survey are male. They’re not sure exactly why this is yet; more study is needed. But they have a theory. The abundance of organic matter—the fermenting shit that burped up gases when Ricardo walked into the creek—makes the muck along the banks where the animals build their nests warmer. Since gender is determined by temperature, an imbalance there could lead to a preponderance of males. The long-term effect of this skewed ratio was obvious.

  There were myriad other problems. Their food options were growing more limited: a look at the content of dead animals’ stomachs found they were living largely off insects and food people threw at them—things like crackers, sometimes still in their packaging. The crustaceans, fish, frogs, birds, and small mammals the jacaré usually relies on were rare treats. As creek banks were cemented and condomínios loomed alongside lagoons, the crocs had difficulty finding room for their leafy, muddy nests. Ricardo had even found them nesting inside the big cement tubes that carried sewage. The scarcity of food, the close quarters, and their territorial nature made for an unhealthy combination that led to fights. Even their genetic diversity was threatened. The built urban environment made it increasingly hard for animals to travel to other ponds to crossbreed.

  The sun was starting to set. Our croc had long stopped struggling and had given herself up to being probed, handled, and photographed. There would be a lot of caiman-themed Facebook uploads that day. Our work done, we untied the creature and watched as she slid back into the water and became another pair of golden-yellow eyes pricking the murky green surface.

  The crew was packing up and preparing for the nighttime part of the course. This involved capturing jacarés in the water while balancing in a little rowboat, then hoisting the thrashing animals on board for measuring and tagging. I’d seen the boat. It was strapped to the roof of a car, and was about as long as some of the crocs out there. I’d had enough. I left them to it and headed to my parents’ house for dinner. Within fifteen minutes the guards of Nova Ipanema were raising the security gate for me.

  Six months later, I thought of Ricardo and his crew again. The Sunday paper carried a full-page advertisement for Riserva Golf, the condomínio that would rise by the Rio 2016 golf course. The super-deluxe marble-and-glass-skinned high-rises had apartments that were “suspended mansions,” the ad said, costing between $2.3 million and $23 million each; even before the towers were erected, 60 percent of the units were reserved for prospective buyers. I’d clearly underestimated how much was to be made from this transaction.

  The copy sang the new venture’s pedigree, calling attention to such details as the filigreed glass entrance inspired by the Louis Vuitton store in Singapore. But the real attraction was the astounding natural surroundings: “the Marapendi lagoon, the vegetation of the Marapendi reserve, the blue ocean, and the future Olympic golf course.” There was no mention of the crocs.

  * * *

  I. In addition to not helping remedy Rio’s low-income housing deficit, building the Vila do Pan required the removal of about one hundred favela houses. The reason given was that these houses were an environmental threat.

  II. Later in 2012, an investigation by city council members found that Itanhangá, the golf club named in the bid, was never approached about hosting the golf tournament. A letter released to the press by the club’s president confirmed this; it also said he believed the club could have met Olympic requirements.

  III. Later, the head of the city’s environmental department explained that the purpose of the environmental impact report is to investigate alternatives. As the city council and the mayor had already determined the golf course location, there was no need for a study.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE BUSINESS OF SEX

  It was midafternoon on Tuesday, the last full day of official Carnaval festivities, and the euphoria that builds during the five-day holiday was reaching its boiling point. A mass of revelers waited for the Banda de Ipanema, one of Rio’s most beloved blocos, or roaming bands, under a furious afternoon sun. I stood on the beach, my back to the ocean, my arms wrapped around a palm tree, and wondered how long I’d last.

  The permissiveness of Carnaval, the heady sensuality of Cariocas, and the ubiquitous beer sellers with their Styrofoam coolers conspired to turn the barely clad crowd surging past into an eroticized tangle of slick, tanned limbs that shimmied to the beat of the approaching band and threatened to dislodge me from my perch. This was the live-and-let-live Rio de Janeiro of stereotypes at a fever pitch, and the tableaus unfolding suggested that the city’s reputation for openness and a fluid view of sex was at least partly deserved. In the thick of the crowd, eyes met, hands groped, and legs entwined as strangers of similar or opposite genders locked lips and bodies together with a hunger that was as intense as it was brief; seconds later they parted, carried by the throng into the arms of other anonymous revelers.

  I was an island of fully clad sobriety in this surging erogenous sea, and worse, I was working, or trying to work; my reporter’s notebook was tucked into the waistband of my shorts to keep from getting lost. I could feel its metal coil digging into my belly and its hard cover softening with perspiration.

  I was attempting to report about an ongoing anti-homophobia campaign and the growth of gay tourism, particularly during Carnaval. More than a quarter of the three million or so tourists who flood Rio every summer are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. I intended to interview a few, which was why I had parked myself near the Rua Farme de Amoedo, a notorious open-air cruising ground, right when the most gay-friendly Carnaval bloco made its final and most disputed sally.

  Not only was I getting smeared with other people’s sunblock and sweat and drenched with sprays of the sweet sparkling cider that is a favorite with festive drag queens, but I was stuck, trapped by the humanity that surrounded me, and no one, gay or straight, could be bothered to stop for a chat. There is no sin south of the equator, songwriter Chico Buarque wrote; he could have been standing where I was that day when the words came to him.

  It wasn’t until the band had squeezed loudly, gleefully past that I let go of my tree and waded against the human tide toward Farme de Amoedo proper, looking for friends who’d said they could help. As I got closer to Farme’s epicenter, there were fewer women, and for that matter, fewer men wearing anything beyond a sunga, the narrow band of spandex that Carioca men wrap around their midsection as beachwear. On occasion the sungas were accompanied by a Zorro mask, a pirate eye patch, or spray of jewel-hued feathers. But there was no mistaking it: the business on Farme that day was sex.

  Eventually I found my friends, an engineer and a university professor as lithe and fit and attractive as the rest, but fully clad. We headed to the sand to sit and talk for a bit. With them was a young Frenchman on his fourth visit to Rio’s Carnaval. Three out of four of Rio’s LGBT tourists fit roughly into the same category as my new acquaintance: between twenty and thirty-five years old, in the city for about five days and ready to live it up.

  These young men loved Rio and Rio loved them right back: LGBT visitors dropped upward of two hundred dollars a day, nearly triple what heterosexual tourists spent. This explained in part Rio’s outreach and advertising campaigns. Certainly, the city cultivated a relaxed, accepting image, as the secretary of tourism had said: “The city of Rio is welcoming in its essence, and Carn
aval is when it shows that most clearly.” But there was also a lot of money to be made by packaging and selling this hospitality.

  We spread sarongs on the sand, grabbed a round of beers, and I asked the young Frenchman what kept him coming back. He smiled. Not far from us was one of the outdoor showers Cariocas used to wash off the salt water after a dip in the ocean; our eyes followed a swarthy young man as he sauntered over for an open-air rinsing-off ritual that was as much a bath as a calculated display of body parts toned to perfection.

  “There is so much seduction everywhere,” said the Frenchman, sitting cross-legged by my side, his fingers fluttering generally in the direction of the showers, the sidewalk beyond, and the bars whose tables spilled out onto the street. “You are in overdrive, all the time.”

  Even after repeated returns, he was still a little shy of diving into the muscle-bound throng and hadn’t mastered the Carioca confidence required to approach a stranger and extract a kiss. But he had also never paid for his liaisons, although such exchanges weren’t uncommon among foreigners in town for a quick dip into Rio’s good times, he said. This too I had gathered from the mismatched couples, gay or straight, canoodling on the beach. He found his partners online, at bars, on the beach and was never short of desirable company.

  Rio certainly had its appeal—it had been elected the “Sexiest Place on the Earth” by the LGBT travel site TripOut, and with good reason—but it wasn’t without a dangerous undercurrent.

  Just days before, a taxi driver outside the international airport had attacked a gay couple from northern Brazil with homophobic slurs, then punches. The assault wasn’t as serious as other cases of violence against the LGBT population that I’d written about since arriving; the men recovered and the driver was arrested. But it was also a sobering reminder of the social tensions coursing through Carioca culture.

  I understood Rio’s appeal to someone like my French interviewee. The shameless sexy on display had long been one of the city’s more enticing aspects to visitors. This was a place where the heat and humidity encouraged a certain indolence, a sway and drag of step, and discouraged a whole lot of clothing. Men sauntered about shirtless and women reveled in their curves no matter their years and fitness level. This meant you could be engaging in some innocent or decidedly dull endeavor—bagging your purchases at a pharmacy or riding the elevator to the office—and suddenly get an eyeful of some deep cleavage or a clearly outlined rear end. This seemed to keep the collective libido stoked.

  To me, this comfort with flaunting the flesh was refreshing after long seasons in countries where any display of the body was either forbidden or a pleasure permitted only to the thin, the young, and the perfectly fit. The Cariocas’ apparent freedom, their exuberant public displays of affection, and their libidinous street parties often led foreigners to see Rio as a great free-for-all, a sexually fluid place that harbored few inhibitions.

  Even while living abroad, I knew the reality wasn’t that simple. True, sex seemed to be everywhere: in by-the-hour motels that did a banging business during lunch and after work; in the prime-time soaps churned out by the Rio studios of Globo, with their juicy close-ups of in-depth kissing; and in the explicit photos advertising the services of prostitutes—male, female, or transgender—that turned downtown phone booths into cornucopias of sex to satisfy any appetite. And yet, there were cases like that of the visitors beaten before they even left the airport, and the more serious attacks that killed more than three hundred LGBT people a year in Brazil.

  “It’s a city of extremes, Rio,” the Frenchman granted, saying he had heard the occasional homophobic comment. He’d never been assaulted, but the worry hovered in the background. “Sometimes I worry a little bit, I’m not sure how far I can go. Maybe I look at the wrong guy in the eyes a little too long, maybe they’re not gay.”

  Sorry I’d forced the conversation into such a gloomy turn, I let my friends go back to the fun and elbowed my way to the subway. Street parades had been going on for weeks. They start well before Carnaval’s official opening day, and linger for days past their traditional ending at noon on Ash Wednesday. I was beginning to cave under the relentlessness of this inescapable party. Youngsters belted out Carnaval marchinhas inside the metro station, the acoustics making their bass drum reverberate like peels of thunder; sequined dancers on their way to the official Sambódromo parade stuffed themselves and their great plumed shoulder harnesses into the train and made the carriage pulse as they samba-stepped along to some impromptu singing; by the time I got off at Flamengo Station, the pervasive tah-cah-TAH tah-cah-TAH tah-cah-TAH that had once left me so nostalgic for Rio rung like a jackhammer inside my skull. I shut myself in my room, turned the air conditioner way up, and churned out the article I’d been reporting.

  That evening, disinclined to face the frenzy again, I curled up on my couch to mull over the multi-hued hedonism outside. At first glance, Brazil gave the impression of being a progressive place: it had the world’s largest gay pride parade, although in São Paulo, not Rio; the prostitutes who traipsed up and down Copacabana’s sidewalks had their profession codified by the Ministry of Labor; the president, Dilma Rousseff, was a no-nonsense former guerrilla who took her oath of office accompanied not by a husband, as she was long divorced, but by her daughter.

  Yet places of prostitution were being shuttered as the city gentrified, and reports of violence against women and the LGBT population were on the rise. Increased awareness of rights was a big part of this, certainly, but it didn’t explain the numbers entirely. I turned these thoughts over in my mind that night and in years that followed as I tried to come to terms with another of Brazil’s idiosyncrasies, brought to its zenith in Rio: the vibrant openness around issues of sex, sexuality, and gender relations that seemed to flourish alongside, and in spite of, deep pockets of machismo, homophobia, and a potential for violence. Now these areas were also undergoing a rapid succession of legal, social, and structural changes. What did this transformation mean for those whose lives were entangled in it?

  The business of sex has been a notorious part of this port city since its earliest years. In 1820, French traveler Jacques Arago reported prostitutes to be “as numerous as at Paris,” present “in every quarter and in every street.” A journalist who wrote vivid memoirs of fin-de-siècle Rio, Vivaldo Coaracy, found the city replete with painted ladies who called from windows, bars, and brothels, part of echelons of depravity “that started with cachaça in São Jorge Street and ended up with the obligatory champagne of the chic pensions in Catete.”

  Convivência—the live-and-let-live art of coexistence—has always been a guiding principle in Rio. The city is dense, with deeply etched hierarchies of class, race, origin, and occupation. It is only through skilled maneuvering and obeisance to a shared code of conduct that distinctions can be maintained in such close quarters. Foreigners are often oblivious to the terms that regulate these interactions, and mistake Rio for a liberal paradise where blacks and whites, rich and poor, migrants and locals, prostitutes and ladies who lunch can mingle easily and without prejudice. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  There have always been rigid, if unspoken, rules about sharing space. Vivaldo Coaracy, the journalist who wrote about Rio at the end of the nineteenth century, gave an insightful description of this balancing act in his account of the Confeitaria Colombo, a café that still serves full afternoon tea under gilded mirrors more than one hundred years later. Earlier in the day, well-to-do ladies would cluster around the little tables, gossiping and eating cake. Around 4 p.m., they cleared out en masse, leaving only the languid gentlemen of the literary set, still nursing their sherry. By 5 p.m., the place filled up again, this time with madams and prostitutes, some of them minor celebrities who would then hold court among the crystal and the marble.

  I’d seen the same complicated ballet on the sidewalks of Copacabana: traditional restaurants with bow-tied waiters spread their tables onto the
black-and-white mosaic walkway where prostitutes also cruised for clients, families took the evening air, street vendors hawked miniature Cristo statues to tourists, doormen kept watch, and beggars beseeched them all for change—each highly conscious of his place and his relationship to others, careful not to overstep his bounds and create unwelcome interactions.

  As Rio de Janeiro began to polish its image, however, the balance created by this carefully orchestrated convivência was upset. The city’s bordellos could be described as blight or as beloved institutions, depending on who’s being asked, but while Brazilians largely shrugged their shoulders at what they saw as an entrenched aspect of urban life, blatant prostitution wouldn’t do when the city was under the international spotlight. With the World Cup and the Olympics looming, the brothels, saunas, and clubs where the trade was plied began to suffer the biggest crackdown in decades.

  The first to go had been the infamous Help!, a colossal discothèque whose neon lights had throbbed in the heart of Copacabana for twenty-five years, offering johns—most of them gringos, as it was a tourist favorite—their choice from among the two thousand prostitutes who rotated through during the week. It was closed down in January 2010 to make way for a music museum designed by the same firm that gave New York’s Lincoln Center a facelift.

  Another of the city’s storied bordellos, the 1902 neoclassical Hotel Paris, was shuttered in 2011. It had anchored the lower-tier sex trade in Tiradentes square for decades. With its closure, Rio’s respected prostitution rights organization, Davida, lost its home and dozens of prostitutes lost their place of work. The French brothers who bought it planned to turn it into a boutique hotel, Le Paris, with a rooftop pool and a daily rate of six hundred dollars.