Chasing Bohemia
Page 1
CHASING BOHEMIA
Carmen Michael first visited Brazil in 2003 for one week, and has been there ever since. After completing a degree in economics at the University of Sydney, she worked in the travel industry and travelled extensively. She contributed to Lonely Planet’s Rio de Janeiro Guide, set up a website for women travellers, conducted radio interviews for the ABC, and has written articles across a wide variety of subjects, including travel, politics, economics, and the arts. Carmen lives in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro.
for Fabio
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
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First published by Scribe 2007
Copyright © Carmen Michael 2007
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.
Cover design by Nada Backovic
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Michael, Carmen.
Chasing bohemia : a year of living recklessly in Rio de Janeiro.
9781922072061 (ebook.).
1. Michael, Carmen - Travel - Brazil. 2. Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) - Description and travel.
I. Title.
918.0
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
Contents
Preface
1 Rio de Janeiro
2 Copacabana
3 A Rodeo, a Revolutionary, and a Runaway
4 Casa Amarela
5 Malandro
6 Buenos Aires
7 A Patron of Bar Claudio
8 Fabio
9 Subversives
10 Gypsy Eyes
11 Money and Morality
12 My Brilliant Career
13 Murder on the Dance Floor
14 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (… in Rio)
15 Regina
16 Twilight before Carnaval
17 The Inferno
18 Bye Bye, Bohemia
Acknowledgements
Deixe-me ir preciso andar,
Vou por aí a procurar,
Sorrir pra não chorar
Quero assistir ao sol nascer,
Ver as águas dos rios correr,
Ouvir os pássaros cantar,
Eu quero nascer, quero viver
Se alguém por mim perguntar,
Diga que eu só vou voltar
Depois que me encontrar
– ‘Preciso me encontrar’ by Manguira composer CARTOLA
Leave me to walk.
I am going away
To find laughter over tears,
To see the sun rise,
To watch the rivers run,
To hear the birds call.
I want to be reborn.
I want to live.
And if someone asks after me,
You can say that I will only return
After I have found myself
Preface
There are no quotable quotes about the city of Rio de Janeiro. Except for the modest local saying that God is a Brazilian, obviously no observer of this city has ever made a contribution worthy of her. Maybe it’s because humanity itself pales in the face of Rio. A city of sweeping white beaches, plunging black-granite cliffs, roaring tropical jungles, and the most beautiful hedonists on earth does not need to resort to one-liners to explain herself. While other cities clutch onto their clichés, Rio just sits around like a spoiled teenager, her days filled with the job of simply being fabulous.
‘Rio will eat you alive. It’s not a city for foreigners, said an Englishwoman I knew before I left from London. Her Brazilian boyfriend had just spawned a child to another woman for the second time in their five-year relationship with the excuse that ‘these things just happen’. She arrived back in Heathrow with her suitcases and a warning: ‘Only the people born in that den of iniquity can survive its moral vacuum’.
Certainly, the relationship between Rio’s decadent locals and her scrupulous tourists can seem a little strained at times, even if the problem is mostly on our side. The people of Rio, known as the Cariocas, abandoned the inconvenient shackles of religious moralising over five hundred years ago when the Portuguese arrived in the Bay of Guanabara and lost their minds over the exotic locals. It has been one New World wave after another ever since: royal courts, African slaves, European war refugees, and now the tourists — each dabbing their bit of colour onto those acres of tan-coloured flesh you see stretched out across Rio’s beaches today.
Rio is an odd place for the traveller. Despite its tantalising image, most people just skip it. It is too hard to get to, the Portuguese language is too hard to learn, and the idea of the third world hanging off the cliff behind your hotel is not necessarily the most appealing holiday option. The tourists who do make it here, with their cocktail-fuelled dreams of Carmen Miranda, huddle around westernised bars in Copacabana and Ipanema beach, while their younger backpacking counterparts quickly book their buses up to Salvador for sun and sex tourism. Each time I tried to leave, Rio hunted me down in my dreams and dragged me back again. Her ragged favelas, wild sensuality, and eternal suffering haunted me wherever I went.
As a traveller, I found myself drifting luxuriously between the layers of culture and wealth. I would travel in a single night from a cocktail party of aristocrats in Copacabana to a gathering of the great-grandsons of slaves in the slum-ridden north of the city and then, by sunrise, arrive back to a wild street party of middle-class kids and travellers in Lapa. That was nearly four years ago now, and I still have her under my skin. Perhaps it is the relentless sunshine, the chaos of everyday living, or that wild Carnaval of theirs, but Rio de Janeiro just seems to me the most extraordinary place.
–1–
Rio de Janeiro
The tram passes full of legs.
White, black, yellow legs.
My God, my heart asks, why so many legs?
But my eyes ask nothing at all.
– CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE, ‘The Poem of Seven Sides’
As a child, my mother used to call me Carmen Miranda. Until I first saw a film of the fruit-adorned dancer with her tiny, brown waist and white, gnashing teeth, I really thought it was my own original middle name. Sitting on the porch of the old weatherboard at our Esperance farm as she flashed onto the screen, with crackling, dry-brown plains all around me, the stock dying of thirst, and the flies throwing themselves at the sponge-cake screen, I realised that I was a long way from the original. I had never even eaten a pineapple at that stage of my life, much less had the decadence to wear one on my head. Perhaps it was a form of escapism for my mother as she tried to reconcile her own years of travelling around the Americas as a young woman with her new role as an anonymous farm wife in that far-flung corner of Western Australia. Sometimes she would tell us the stories of her own American adventures to pass the long, empty nights. We heard how her parents waved at her from the docks in Perth as she left with her white leather luggage and matching gloves; how she travelled from Canada to Panama alone on buses; and how the border police in Mexico rang her father because she was under twenty-one and they thought she was a runaway. Those were the days when travel was wild. Even going to LA was crazy. Not like now. Now everyone has been everywhere.
T
here had been nobody to see me off when I left from London’s Heathrow Airport for Rio on a cold summer’s evening in August 2003. My friends didn’t want to miss the end-of-summer sales, and my sister-in-law had a hair appointment. Even the Brazilian couple who checked in ahead of me had an emotional farewell from their taxi driver. I was as solitary as an English businessman on easyJet. My family and friends stopped seeing me to the airport when I was around twenty years old, just after I had made my third overseas mission to find myself. Not that I hold it against them. I can see how it would get a little uncomfortable always seeing people off on missions to find themselves. People always feel they have to say something profound at airports, and my friends had used up all their ammunition early on. My best friend, Stephanie, even used to cry, saying it was in case I didn’t come back, but she needn’t have worried. I always did in the end. I was a traveller, not a gypsy. By the time I went to off to South America, my overseas jaunts were about as special as a weekend in the Blue Mountains. ‘Off to the Congo, then? Well, have a nice time, dear. See you soon.’
That evening at Heathrow Airport, I chose Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, the only book by a Brazilian writer in Waterstones Terminal Four. The back cover said it was set in the northern Brazilian city of Salvador, my third stop on a three-month trip that I was planning to make between Rio de Janeiro on the east coast of South America and Santiago on its west. It was the classic triangle trip — ‘the big whopper’, one of our most popular student touring companies used to call it — from east to north to west and home again, with all the big names: Rio, Salvador, the Amazon, the Andes, Machu Pichu, Buenos Aires, maybe even Havana. Who knew? A real passport clogger. Sure, there were some vague and disconnected images of slums, Latin dancers, far-flung villages, and voodoo spirits fed to me by Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, the Buena Vista Social Club, and City of God, but really I was just hitting the road. The plane left late that night, the Iberia hostesses already yawning and the lights of London twinkling foggily beneath us. I thanked the Lord, Buddha, and Allah for not putting me beside a gap-year traveller, and fell asleep as Amado’s handsome protagonist Vadinho started beating his wife.
We arrived in the late afternoon, flying in from the south, tracking the white foaming shoreline that split the lush green jungle forest and the sparkling blue Atlantic Ocean. The aisle passengers leaned over each other to watch the city explode onto the coast. Quartz-like clusters of white condominium high-rises rose up between outcrops of streaky black-granite rock, their peaks crowned with green vegetation of the mata Atlantica and their softer inclines encrusted with rust-coloured shanty towns, clinging as hardily as cockles onto a ship’s belly. It was a water city; the Bay of Guanabara engulfed the city rather than the other way around. It reminded me of Istanbul, Athens, or perhaps Atlantis herself; an ancient white city crumbling into the blue waters of the Atlantic.
From my porthole, I could see the enormous statue of Christ overlooking the city, the tips of his fingers outstretched and his white stone hulk turned the colour of dusk itself. The dwarfing images that had trickled through my mailbox on brochures and postcards of Sugar Loaf, Copacabana, and Christ now disappeared into a range of dusky-blue mountains that stretched out endlessly around the city. ‘The sleeping giant,’ the elderly woman beside me whispered over my shoulder. ‘That’s what the Indians called it.’ The Sleeping Giant. Sugar Loaf was just his elbow, Corcovado his bent knee, as he napped lazily by the deep dreamy pools of the lagoon. In my four years in Rio, I never did find a better description than that. Only the Indians and their 60,000 years of existence in that far-flung corner of Earth seemed to understand what they were looking at. All other attempts to capture the place were just scared little postcards — hasty offerings left in retreat after this wild city had confounded the photographers, bewildered the wordsmiths, and driven the painters back to their fruits and portraits.
The woman closed her eyes and kissed her silver cross, and the plane dropped suddenly into the north of the city, where the high-rises crumbled into rusty, undulating suburban sprawl. As we swung wildly towards the runway, she clapped prematurely, setting off a ripple of congratulatory applause in the cabin and a stampede of Brazilians to the exits. The back wheels of the plane had barely blistered the tarmac before the locals were lined up at the front of the plane, their arms overflowing with inappropriately large electrical purchases and misbehaving children.
Indignant European passengers watched on in horror as their highly evolved plane-exit queuing culture was so unapologetically ignored. ‘That’s just not right,’ said a man with a northern English accent in the seat in front of me. ‘And against safety regulations, moreover,’ added his wife with prim disapproval. There was a muted murmur of support from the surrounding seats. The Spanish hostesses, still secure in their emergency-exit seats, gave sympathetic shrugs to the seated passengers, their serene, glazed-over expressions suggesting a history of previously unsuccessful attempts to deter this crass third-world custom. When the plane finally shuddered to a halt I struggled vainly to enter the flow of Brazilians, and was eventually shown mercy by a tough-looking woman dressed in a leopard-skin-print silk blouse and solid gold bangles who changed her mind several times before finally letting me in with a loud grudging sigh and an, ‘Aw, go on then.’
I thanked God and the Americans that I didn’t have any luggage to collect. All I had was a carry-on five-gallon khaki German-army issue from World War II, stamped UB — ‘for ubercool,’ said my friend J, who’d bought the bag for me before I left. It was a generous present. J had been travelling with his UB for five years, to the envy of most of our group of friends who never managed to get out of London with less than a giant wheelie bin, and he eventually revealed his sources the week before I left. ‘Travel backpacks are gay,’ he said, taking away my old red one with the iron orthopaedic back-frame and zip-off day pack and throwing me the well-worn UB. J and I had been friends for a long time, but we struck up a strange relationship in the month or so before my departure — a sort of war-time relationship, where it took the prospect of death or disappearance for two people to overcome their inertia and declare their attractions. It always happened like that. Sometimes I even suspected that I subconsciously travelled in order to get boyfriends. They flocked to me in their dozens once they realised I was leaving. And, conversely, left me in droves each time I came back.
‘Maybe you should stay for a while to see what happens,’ said my friend Skye as she watched me pack and repack the UB in her Battersea apartment the night before I left London. ‘And then again maybe she shouldn’t,’ cried my friend Stephanie, who had known J as long as me. ‘He’s even more of a backpacking bastard than she is.’ Skye, who had been in South America for nine months the previous year, retrieved a pair of cowboy boots and a red studded Diesel belt from the overflowing UB and shook them at me with a loud ‘tut-tut’. ‘These are not going, darling.’ I looked at the discarded items forlornly. Those two pieces had been the cornerstones of my cowgirl-chic look for the past six months. ‘Really?’ I said with a pleading look. Skye looked at me warningly. ‘Really.’
I CLEARED IMMIGRATION and, not having to collect baggage, made my way through the empty customs area. I was expecting a little chaos at the exit gates: pedlars, hotel touts, pushy taxi drivers, perhaps even a line of miserable porters — it was a poor country, after all — but the airport was nearly empty. A couple of bleary-eyed tour-company representatives slumped over the arrivals fences with hand-drawn signs on cardboard. Bored women at the Avis and Hertz counters chatted and smoked cigarettes through pink-painted mouths that matched their nails. A cluster of taxi drivers around a tin cylinder ashtray burst out laughing. One looked up at the people coming out of arrivals and said something that prompted the rest of the group to look around, but after a second they returned to their conversation. There was almost an intentional lack of interest in the few tourists filtering through the gates. I hesitated for a mo
ment, realised nobody was going to approach me, and then walked up to the group of taxi drivers.
‘Taxi?’ I suggested. They turned towards me.
‘Santa Teresa,’ I said with the firm superiority of a ‘customer’ and handed one of them a scrap of paper with the hostel address. He looked at it.
‘Seventy reals,’ he said in English.
‘Fifty,’ I bargained expertly.
‘Nuh,’ he said, handing it back to me and turning back to his friends. I looked around at the empty airport and then turned back.
‘OK. Seventy,’ I shrugged hopelessly.
He turned, smiled pleasantly, took the UB from me as delicately as if it were Prada (or a piece of dog shit), and we walked out to the car.
We drove out of the Galeão Airport along a smooth, modern concrete flyover with trimmed lawn inlays, potted palms, and polished street signs — all indistinguishable from any other airport in the developed world — until we were about five hundred metres out and the road crumbled into pot-holed disarray, the ditches filled with rubbish, and the earth grew crowded with slums. It made me wonder why third-world countries even bother with those five-hundred-metre-circumference poverty-free zones around their international airports. Maybe they are for stopover travellers who never leave the airport. Maybe they are for the passengers who travel to the airport by helicopter. Or perhaps they are just to prepare weary travellers for the confusing wealth inequalities of the third world. Now you see it; now you don’t. Personally, I prefer the earthy honesty of Mumbai Airport in India, where you land a hundred metres from someone’s kitchen, and the sheets of tin that serve as roofs flap in the slipstream of each landing plane. I know it’s offensive, but at least it’s real.
The taxi driver turned on the radio, and a drum-heavy samba blasted into the cab. Sweat was pouring down my back, but my driver remained gloriously sweat free; not even a moustache of moisture graced his flawless olive skin. Brazil skin. Africa, Portugal, and the Indians, blended into a delicious hue of burnt sugar. His eyes were a hypnotic green; a throwback to European blood perhaps, and a feature he seemed to be well aware of, because at any given opportunity he would look into the rear-vision mirror and attempt to penetrate me with a gaze of almost comical intensity. I had heard about Brazilian men here and there. A Brazilian woman at a dress shop I used to frequent in Sydney told me that they were ‘very machista’. She was posted to Sydney with her husband, but left him after three months because, as she put it, ‘he went mad on the English women’. She was a beautiful woman, too.