Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  – MACHADO DE ASSIS, Quincas Borba

  They 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.’

  ‘What, like I turned up with the hammock in Barretos?’

  ‘That was the outback. This is Rio,’ she said.

  ‘But …’

  ‘But, but, but. Enough of your buts, Carmen! You are driving me crazy with buts,’ she cried in exasperation, her Italian accent winning out over the Irish one, as though I was the one suggesting that she turn up at someone’s house with her bags and move in.

  I didn’t th
ink seriously about it, though, until one morning, after having been woken up for the seventh night running by a drunken Chiara at 5.00 a.m. and then by the rustling plastic of the German girls at 7.00 a.m., that I passed the house and spied someone sleeping in a hammock. It was the first time I had seen someone outside the house, and I stopped at the gate for a rest.

  The steep and uneven staircases, not to mention the increasingly oppressive heat, often forced walkers to stop outside random houses for little rests before continuing on their way. New tourists marked themselves out immediately by rushing up and down the staircases, trying to get it over with quickly and ending up unattractively red faced and drenched in sweat. Only the locals knew that you had to ‘take it slow’.

  The hammock-sleeper opened one lazy eye. I made a sighing gesture to indicate my exhaustion and pointed to the blazing sun above. Perhaps he would offer me a glass of water. I tried my wonderful Portuguese: ‘Is house mine. I come in?’

  The hammock-sleeper jumped up with unexpected enthusiasm and rushed to the gate.

  ‘Yes, come in. Come in.’

  I briefly considered that he might be an axe murderer, but decided it was too hot for anyone to be killing anyone, much less with an energetic axe, and followed him into the house.

  I didn’t regret my forthrightness (or Chiara’s, anyway). The grand tour of the Casa Amarela, as I would come to know it from the carefully opened coffee-table books, revealed a magnificent, turn-of-the-century art-nouveau property restored in a style of camp tropical Brazil meets French Maison, with Ming Dynasty Chinese influences. If that sounds all too much for the sleek inner-city modernist, I can assure you, it was. It was wonderfully, magnificently, fabulously excessive. The hammock-sleeper, a Brazilian soap star called Paulo — who I would later discover had taken up acting to avoid being committed to a mental institution — hustled me down the long French-tiled hallway and into the first of the three enormous living rooms that made up the first floor.

  Rousseau-like canvases of brightly coloured toucans and Brazilian parrots in the midst of a lime-green jungle screamed down at a zebra-skin chaise lounge, while overloaded sideboards of engraved Brazilian wood creaked under the weight of bronze religious sculptures, Ming vases, and blown-glass ashtrays. In the centre of the room, a round coffee table inlaid with a shimmering pond of water was scattered with rose petals and candles. Stained-glass shutters opened out onto a steep slope of overgrown garden at the back of the house where a horse-sized Rottweiler, which Paulo called Torré, played joyfully. A love-swing hung from a giant mango tree.

  In the second room, an enormous round table was laden with gold plates and copper goblets. Canvases of ripe, luscious fruits, seemingly split open with someone’s bare hands, decorated the walls, and plants in stone pots stood in the four corners. The final room on the ground floor was decorated in the style of Imperial Portugal, with two thrones in royal blue, an unused mahogany writing bureau, an assortment of baroque, silver, religious sculptures from the eighteenth century, a large Debret etching of King Dom João VI, and a white kneeling couch for the slave who would massage my feet. I could hardly catch my breath before being whisked up a wide-turning staircase and into a chandelier-lit bathroom of exquisite blue tiles.

  ‘It is magnifi—,’ I started, looking up in wonder at the hundreds of glass crystals, but Paulo silenced me with a finger to my lips. He was nearly bursting with pride. He ushered me out of the bathroom and along a hall into the second-floor rooms I had originally spied from the street.

  I found myself face-to-face with my destiny — the Saint Tropez heiress, that is. In front of me stood a red-lacquered bed built for a Chinese princess, complete with arm rests for the slaves to carry it. By the window was an enormous writing desk made of a carved black wood. Antique Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling, and a gentle breeze sounded delicate wind-chimes on the balcony. The yellow tramcar from Santa Teresa rattled by, and across the road I could see the white-washed walls of the priest’s house.

  We were interrupted by the sound of a man’s voice downstairs, and Paulo scurried to meet him. There was a brief delay before they both appeared, carrying between them a plant potted in white engraved wood. The gentleman who had joined Paulo was around sixty, handsome, distinguished, and dressed in small white shorts and a pink t-shirt. He had shapely, tanned legs, a manicured, white goatee, and elegant unlined hands. The manner in which Paulo deferred to him indicated that he was the real owner. He smiled at me, put the plant down, and said something in French. I looked at him blankly and he apologised.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. I thought you were French. What do you think, dear? On the right side of the table or the left?’ Gustavo looked at me intensely while I looked at the plant and correctly sensed somehow that this was not a throwaway question, nor was my answer to be irrelevant to my future relationship with the man who owned the most magnificent house in Santa Teresa. I studied the plant’s position, walked around the room a little, considered the light, and then told him to move it to the left. Paulo moved it, and I told him to move it back ten inches. ‘Renaissance?’ I asked with a French accent, and he corrected me and said it was baroque — at the time, I suspected that neither of us knew if it were either. He asked me if I was certain it should not be to the right and I gestured with a royal wave to indicate that I was. In short, I bluffed.

  I returned to the house that night for dinner, having been invited this time, and we discussed antiques, Europe, and the Australian squattocracy. I brought with me an Australian wine — a $40 bottle of Jacob’s Creek — and he savoured it with excessive appreciation. ‘Such a fine wine!’ he exclaimed, and then launched into an attack on the horrendous Brazilian wines. I smiled. I couldn’t have cared less about wine. I could only think of that big empty Chinese princess room. I delicately steered the conversation around to the observation that he lived in such a big house alone, and Gustavo responded suavely that he sometimes rented rooms to relatives and the occasional ‘interesting friend’. After one more discreetly inquiring dinner, I jammed myself into the latter category and begged for residency at the Casa Amarela on Rua Joaquim Murtinho in Santa Teresa. He agreed to a short stay of one month, and we clinked glasses in celebration.

  ‘Will the Chinese room do for you, my dear?’

  ‘It will do,’ I said, nearly tearful with gratefulness. ‘It will do.’

  I ARRIVED LIKE a thief in the night, quietly smuggled my UB into the Chinese princess room under the protection of darkness, and hung my three items of clothing in the walk-in wardrobe. I had explained apologetically to Carina that, while I loved the Rio Hostel, I was then twenty-eight years old and could no longer tolerate sharing rooms with anybody.

  ‘I thought you were only staying a few days,’ Carina said with a teasing smile.

  ‘I don’t have to be anywhere,’ I responded happily. ‘I would like to get to know Santa Teresa a bit better, and if you could see my new room …’

  She smiled kindly.

  ‘Did you find something simple somewhere?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said nodding. ‘On this road, in fact.’

  When she dropped me off later that evening, her face took on the look of someone who has just found out that her new friend is the Countess of Monte Carlo.

  ‘Darling, let’s do cocktails as soon as you can,’ I cried as I pulled the UB out of the boot, already feeling like the Saint Tropez heiress. Carina, still looking up at the yellow house through the windscreen, just nodded and blinked in amazement.

  Once upstairs, I hid the cowboy hat and boots in a plastic bag at the bottom of the cupboard, and prepared myself for dinner. Luckily, I had managed to stow a little black dress into the bottom of the UB away from the watchful eyes of Skye and Stephanie back in Battersea. I had been carrying around that little black dress for over ten years, just in case I was invited — like some Bond girl coming in from the jungle — to dine at a maharaja’s palace in India, o
r to cocktails at the country retreat of a European count. I never did use it on all those travels, spending my time instead in a red cotton shirt and a pair of extremely worn Levi jeans that were christened ‘the urinal’ by Stephanie and me for literal reasons on our adventure through the Mekong Valley of Vietnam. That was until, of course, I arrived at the Casa Amarela.

  Gustavo, the owner of the property, was a magnificent host of aristocratic proportions. He was a chic combination of Portuguese, German, and Argentine descent, and he had run restaurants for some period in São Paulo before coming to Rio. Scattered around the house were elegantly framed photos of him and other tanned, beautiful people on yachts in Greece, their swimsuits indicating the sixties or seventies, and others of him wearing a fur muff, carrying skis up the slopes of St Moritz and other havens for the rich.

  At the start, we would share breakfast together from a table laden with fruit juices and cheese and hams, while he would attempt to elicit scandalous confessions about my past. The inevitable question about the quality of Australian men in bed came up again, although his views were somewhat more encouraging, given a recent showing of Australian Rules football on Brazilian TV. He probed at my social class with questions about family and antiques, but I kept the truth simple and unadorned.

  Despite her initial encouragement, Chiara hated Casa Amarela on first sight. She came to visit one night after I’d arrived, looked around the salon, and said, ‘It is completely gross,’ before spinning on her heel and walking out. Gustavo took muted offence, pulling me aside afterwards to ask me, ‘Who is that terrible hippy woman?’, and the relationship was strained for a long time thereafter. I organised one or two ill-thought-out dinners where the Italian and Brazilian did sit down at the same table, but their conversation was small and suspicious. Chiara could not tolerate his ‘crass display of wealth’ and Gustavo could not tolerate her wild, unkempt hair. Their lack of affection drove them both into their respective corners for a time; Gustavo’s audaciousness soared to provocatively elitist statements when Chiara was around the house, and Chiara responded by openly calling Gustavo ‘an elite falsetto’ for the lack of books in the house. I managed to smooth things over by saying that at least nobody was from the dreaded middle class. Well, apart from me, anyway.