Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  ‘Today, maybe,’ the voice said, and I turned to face a slight old man who had entered the bar, looking like a mirage among the boardies and thongs in an immaculate white suit and elegant, white Panama hat. ‘But in my day, minha filha, in my day, malandros were different.’ He held out his palm to greet me elegantly with a kiss on the top of my hand, and Carlito introduced me to eighty-four-year-old Waldemar da Madrugada. ‘The malandros who existed in Lapa in my day were well dressed, charming, and elegant. They wore white hats, white shoes, and white linen suits,’ Waldemar said, brushing an invisible speck from his own white lapel and looking down sniffily upon the surrounding bare chests and thongs that were the unofficial uniform of Bar 100 per cent.

  It turned out that Waldemar da Madrugada — loosely translatable as ‘Waldemar of the Crack of Dawn’, and named as such for his lengthy sessions and reliable morning presence in the bohemian bars — was one of Rio de Janeiro’s oldest bohemians and most adored personalities of Lapa. He had arrived in 1940, after a decade in a violent orphanage in Minas Gerais, where he had been placed after his father shot his mother dead. He was one of the original sambistas, playing with godfathers of samba like Cartola and Carlos Cachaça at Mangueira’s Estação Primeiro, and he was frequenting Lapa back when the police were still beating up musicians for playing drums. In Waldemar da Madrugada’s day, Lapa was sighing the last of her belle époque. It was a time of heaving whorehouses and hedonistic cabaret, where dandy boys, jostling alongside French prostitutes and the children of slaves on the dance floor, bred the samba, for which Brazil is famous today.

  It was a tumultuous period in the history of Rio de Janeiro. The society was still reeling from the recent abolition of slavery, and the cities were filling with landless and destitute peasants. The papers may have bubbled every day with claims about the Paris of the Tropics, but Rio remained a fundamentally poor and divided city. It was from this landscape that the mythological figure of the malandro arose, like a devil from dust, a reckless creature of abandonment who parodied the rich and (occasionally) protected the poor. It was this Dionysian figure, sitting at the bar drinking choppe beer at midday on Monday, surrounded by women, that became the inspiration for folklore. The malandro was a classic anti-hero.

  There is not a sambista worth his salt who hasn’t written a song heralding the magnificent malandro and his dastardly exploits. Around the bars of Lapa, they tell the stories of malandros like Miguelzinho who stole the church bells of Lapa and sold them, only to steal them all back again before midnight the next day after the local priest refused to baptise Miguelzinho’s daughter without the bells. Or of the homosexual fighter Madam Satâ, recently immortalised in film, born to slaves in the impoverished north-east of Brazil, who was swapped at nine years of age for a horse, only to escape to Rio and become a cabaret performer and protector of prostitutes in Lapa. Madam Satâ, who spent some thirty years of his life in prison for a variety of charges ranging from anti-social behaviour to the murder of a policeman, became a controversial figure in Brazilian history. Waldemar, like half of Lapa, was quick to point out that he had known the great malandro personally. ‘Madam Satâ was a great man. He had a noble heart. He was a violent man, but he protected the people,’ Waldemar explained. ‘Lapa was a violent place then, and he looked after the prostitutes. Once he went to the police station and took on five policemen who beat up his girls.’

  The first malandros, as recorded by writers such as Luis Martins, were paid by prostitutes to guard their rooms while they slept, and to protect them from being beaten up or robbed. This paradoxical image of a malandro as a Robin Hood-style protector is a powerful one in folkloric Brazil, so much so that he has been raised to saint-like status. Attend a house of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, or browse through a shop selling religious icons, and there is an odd figure among the devils and saints — one of a man dressed exactly as Waldemar, complete with a white panama hat tilted rakishly to one side. Said to embody the wild African spirit of Exu, the malandro, or ‘Zé Pelintra’, as he is often called, has turned into a modern-day religious symbol for Afro-Brazilians. He sidesteps harsh titles such as ‘thief’ or ‘gigolo’, using his tricks, charm, and persuasion to bankroll an idle lifestyle of samba, gambling, and beautiful women. The malandro symbolises the rebellion of the lower classes against social and economic inequality; his cheeky exploits, however small, are lauded as a victory over Brazil’s elites.

  I rifled through my brain for some memories of Winston Churchill’s social rebellion that might justify his dastardly behaviour, but I could only come up with the time he interrupted some street kids who were about to mug me with a clap behind the ear, and the warning that, ‘Nobody steals my woman’s money except me.’ Waldemar interrupted my thoughts with the timely reminder, ‘There are no malandros left. The bohemian life of Lapa is nothing more than nostalgia. Bohemia is not what you see in Lapa now with all these people making nothing more than noise pollution.’ Waldemar gazed outside the bar with a frown.

  ‘Samba, rock’ n’ roll, hip hop. The music is contaminated. The malandro in my day didn’t snort and he didn’t smoke. He lived during the night, gambling and loving.’ Certainly it is a little difficult to imagine the tuxedoed malandro surrounded by his flapper women on Rua Joaquim Silva now. The street where the cabarets and gambling houses once thrived is now an ugly tangle of boom boxes pouring out American hip hop, bad Brazilian rock, and the obscenities of Carioca funk. Even the magnificent arches of Lapa are now dwarfed by the headquarters of oil companies and banks.

  In the music and books of Rio, the intellectuals now complain that malandragem is dead, and that the only malandros that exist now ‘wear neckties’ and have ‘political candidacy’. The popular singer Chico Buarque made this nostalgic lament in his smash musical Opera of the Malandro, claiming that, while the same injustices of poverty and discrimination plague Brazilian society, the malandro culture of intellectual protest has disappeared from Rio along with the bohemian, trapping the frustrations of her impoverished classes into lives of violence and crime.

  I went home early that night and waited for Winston Churchill to call, but he didn’t. A friend rang and told me they saw him coming out of the love hotel Villa Rica with a Danish capoeirista called Helda. The following Monday, I wandered back down to Lapa, hoping that I might run into him, and eventually settled for a beer outside the famous pick-up joint, Tá Ná Rua.

  The street outside was broken and empty after the weekend’s punters had gone home, riddled with their drugs and nauseous with their own debaucheries. All that remained were the base elements. The local drug lord, a smooth and sober seventeen-year-old, leaned over the handlebars of his new mountain bike, his gaze looking out at another place. A beautiful bald girl stroked a stuffed poodle, her lips curled into a repressed laugh as she chain-smoked long cigarettes and offered drinks to the local boys, who refused them. One teenager, a dealer who turned actor as one of the stars in City of God before returning to dealing, sat beside her. A guy covered in tattoos of Christ was kissing his girlfriend, who only had half a face, her chin smashed in by the baseball bat of her lesbian ex-lover. Three older Rastafarians in knitted hats leaned against the side of a car smoking joints and bitching about their German wives. A recently arrived Spanish tourist snorted cocaine at the base of a stubborn oiti tree, while abandoned local children, faces already haggard, were playing games in the street, clinging divinely to the notion of childhood, the futility of playing truant apparent to everybody. The unavoidable reek of ammonia, as always, permeated everything.

  A Colombian jewellery seller showed me his nasty leather wares and then struck up a conversation with me. He told me that his strategy on Copacabana beach was to not try to sell to anyone, to simply wait for the girls to call out to him. I asked if it was successful, but he ignored the question and asked me if Winston Churchill was my boyfriend. Everybody knew everybody in Lapa, if not by name or nationality (non-Brazilians were calle
d by their country of origin … Hey Cubano! Hey Italiana!) then by their face. I gave a half-nod, half-shake, not really wanting to lay claim but, at the same time, wanting to discourage the jewellery seller. He laughed and then asked in Spanish-accented English, ‘You know whatta malandro is?’

  ‘Is an art,’ he continued, not waiting for my response. ‘You got to getta foreign girl first — you know, the girl drinking caipirinha — then make love good and get them pregnant as quick as possible. Once you get them to move in with you, you can go back to your life. The first time you are unfaithful they get mad, but they stay with you because they think you will change. After all, they’re the ones paying for stuff. Sometimes they use the money thing to try and get you to change, but you don’t change. They learn Portuguese eventually and start thinking back to the types they left behind. The strong ones try to kick you out, but you have nowhere to go, because you are malandro. Malandro has nothing except the woman who pays his bills. And then, they end up paying for you to move out. Like him,’ he said, gesturing to a Rastafarian nearby.

  ‘His German girlfriend don’t even live here, and she pays for his apartment.’ He shook his head with envy, and then added. ‘Brazilian girls are too smart for that.’ I looked around at the bar I had once seen as a multicultural celebration of low-cost airfares, and now saw nothing but sleazy gigolos and their victims. The Colombian watched me. ‘You are disgusted, I can see, but that, my princess, is a malandro. This whole city is malandro. This city is my teacher. This city has been my education.’ He was interrupted by the sound of his cellular phone ringing angrily. A high-pitched voice buzzed from the speaker, and he held it away from his ear a little. It was his girlfriend asking him where he was. He was comically outraged and turned to me as he hung up the phone, saying, ‘Brazilian women get soooo jealous,’ before asking if I wanted to go home with him. I twisted the straw in my caipirinha and said that two malandros don’t make a gentleman. He just frowned and said, ‘So is that a yes or a no?’

  My holiday romance with the most beautiful man in Lapa finished in spectacular style some three or four weeks after we met. I called it a day, of course, but not before one last incident in which I discovered his ex-wife was neither his ex, nor dying, nor even an actress, for that matter. It was a sunny, sparkling morning in Santa Teresa, filled with juicy ripe mangoes and promise in equal abundance, when Gustavo called up from the ground floor that Winston had an unexpected visitor at the gate. At the time, I was sprawled in a dressing-gown on the Chinese princess bed, and Winston Churchill was sitting on the balcony smoking a cigarette while downstairs, by the naked-nymph statue, Paulo and Gustavo were lounging on the wooden deck chairs. As Gustavo called up to me, Winston called down to the visitor, and gave a small wave. Gustavo scuttled frantically up the stairs and Winston walked in cooly from the balcony — they both nearly collided in front of me.

  ‘Winston!’ he cried. ‘There is someone downstairs saying she is your wife!’ My jaw dropped in outrage.

  ‘Ex-wife!’ I swiftly corrected, and looked to Winston.

  Winston clasped his hands and looked to the ceiling.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Winston, stop this madness, will you?’ Gustavo snapped, with uncharacteristic annoyance. ‘She is my niece. I am charged with her care.’ But Winston could not stop this madness. He was born mad.

  ‘She is not your niece. She’s a tourist,’ he said accusingly, as though their crimes were in some way equal, only adding afterwards in his own defence, ‘and that is my ex-wife.’

  Gustavo clapped his hands over his ears, crying, ‘Oh, you terrible malandro! Well, whoever she damn well is, she’s waiting at my gate, and you will go down and attend to her.’ And, he added in a warning tone, ‘And I don’t want any scenes here. I have a reputation to keep.’

  But Winston didn’t make scenes. He simply nodded, calmly put on his white shirt, arranged his tufts in the mirror, and walked past us and out of the house. He exited the gates, locked them neatly behind him, took the reluctant arm of his dying ex-wife in his, and walked off down the street — leaving the residents of Casa Amarela and the priest’s house ogling in his wake.

  MAYBE IT IS A LITTLE EASIER to understand the malandro when you look around the city and see tourists and the elites of Brazil spending the same amount in a day on lunches as what the typical worker gains in a month. Given the choice between cleaning toilets at a country club and helping a rich white woman spend her pocket money, I know which one I would choose. The modern malandro may not wear a white-linen suit, but then neither does the elite class of Brazil. The suit was only a parody of the elite, after all. The modern malandros are surfers and capoeiristas and sambistas, who offer to show girls around and then spend their money so fast it makes their head spin. And afterwards, as any good malandro should do, they disappear without a trace into the night to tell their tale to some Carlito at the local botequim. As one famous malandro once said, while the gullible exist, there will always be malandro.

  In the days that followed what became known as the ‘balcony incident’, it dawned harshly upon me that I had fallen head first into the most clichéd trap of a South American hustler. More humiliating than the Turkish carpet tea-shop gig, more dangerous than the Delhi Airport-taxi scam, this was the kind of stuff Lonely Planet should have been warning their travellers about. Even the whores of Lapa felt sorry for me, shaking their heads as I wandered hopefully from bar to bar looking for my malandro. They named a bush after me, an odd little shrub tree that had grown out of a concrete wall, and called it ‘The Tree of Carmen’s Love’, because it grew out of the stone with nothing to nourish it. It was for my book, I protested falsely afterwards, but nobody believed me because they don’t read books in Lapa; and even if they did, the last person they would want to read about would be Winston Churchill. Instead, they just pointed their thumbs at Winston’s latest victim — the Danish capoeirista, as it happened — and laughed.

  –6–

  Buenos Aires

  … a city without ghosts …

  – JORGE LUIS BORGES, on Buenos Aires

  News of the ‘balcony incident’ rushed up and down Rua Joaquim Murtinho like wildfire. The little groups of people gathered on street corners that I had found so charming when I’d first arrived revealed themselves to be highly sophisticated networks of espionage. There was a reason they dragged half the contents of their houses out onto the street every night, and it was not to amuse the tourists with their quaint Brazilian traditions. The truth was that it contained secret radio equipment that they would use to beam information through to the FBI and KGB. While Winston Churchill was hardly a man known for his discretion, even I was alarmed at the penetration of the balcony incident into the avant-garde world of Santa Teresa. People I had never met in my life, seeing me pass in the street that week, would nod in my direction.

  ‘That’s the one,’ they said. ‘That’s the home wrecker.’

  ‘He told me he was divorced!’ I pleaded, but they would shy away from me with wary expressions. To stem the damage to my reputation, I beat a hasty retreat from the bohemian world of Lapa and returned to the socialite parties of Gustavo, but it was to no avail. Even there, tongues were wagging with the fall from grace of the Australian cattle heiress.

  There were some key channels of information distribution, namely Chiara Rimoldi, Gustavo da Avila, Carina Jallad, and Winston Churchill, but there was no stopping the beast once it got started. For there are two things in this world to which this nation of idlers is completely enslaved: sex and gossip. Fodder e fofoka. Brazilians would betray their best friends, give up their sons, even do a hatchet job on their own husbands to ensure their daily fix of the sweet sound of others people’s immorality.

  Every evening as they huddled around their portable barbeques, grilling large hunks of red meat and pink sausages, they sieved through the information of the day, expressed the level of outrage appropriate to the fofoka, and disse
minated the exaggerated details according to their quality. The most highly prized stories concerned bisexual infidelity and jealousy ‘burnings’, although nobody ever turned their nose up at a good old-fashioned illicit affair or some illegitimate children. The only thing I could hope for was that somebody on the street would do something worse and take the heat off me. After two days of the tongues still wagging, Gustavo recommended employing classic Brazilian diversionary tactics and starting a rumour of my own.

  ‘Like what?’ I said eagerly.

  ‘It will have to be big,’ he murmured, stroking his goatee with a cool Machiavellian air about him.

  ‘Tell me ...’ I pleaded. He paused, and then clicked his fingers, smiling broadly as the idea came into his head.

  ‘I’ve got it. What about, Juan has the clap?’

  Carina, for her part, was bent on a bloody revenge. In a city where men and women were in an undeclared state of war, both sexes were shrewd in shoring up their allegiances in times of need, and I was quickly identified as a potential coalition partner. She had her friend read me the tarot cards, and I came up with the devil three times and the hanged man twice.

  ‘Forget the moral arguments,’ she announced, when the devil appeared for the third time. ‘They will only fortify his position. Refute any mention of the balcony incident. You must simply tell people he was terrible in bed. It is an extreme measure in Rio de Janeiro, darling, but guaranteed to destroy him.’