It was a calculated risk she took, to avoid having to sell her brand-new fridge, less than two weeks after she’d bought it, for half the price she’d paid for it (depreciation was big in Rio). But it didn’t pay off. The guy didn’t pay her back, she lent him more drugs to earn the money, and the deal fell through. For all its advanced business strategies and complicated market structures, bankruptcy in the drugs business wasn’t tempered by the concept of limited risk, and within one month of the payment defaulting there was an order out from the Chef, a drug boss who was said to have killed his own mother in an argument, to kill her on sight.
Ten minutes passed before we finally heard the clatter of shoes. We stood up. Her young son came first, leaping silently into the arms of Chiara, where he clung like a frightened chimp, sucking his thumb and watching with wide eyes for his mother to appear. Regina came into view as she rounded the last flight of stone stairs, her boyfriend close on her heels. The lights from the church shone down on her like a spotlight. I was prepared for just about anything that night except for what was to come around the corner. Her hair came first — a wild lioness’ mane of streaked black extensions — but it was her outfit that stole the show. It was nothing short of astonishing. It was a retro flared body-suit made of glistening neon-pink wet Lycra, the kind used for leotards in the eighties, and it clung like a soaked t-shirt to her skin, outlining every curve, nook, and cranny of her strong body. A halter-neck collar barely contained her enormous breasts, and wide semi-circles of slack fabric flared out from her knees into cones of shimmer around her white, foamy platform sandals. Diamantes were scattered like delicate raindrops over the fabric, and an oval hole had been cut out around the pregnant drum of her belly. This was the outfit to end all Lapa outfits. She looked like a cross between Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Elvis in his last concert in Memphis. I realised it was not the kind of thing we should have been focused on at such a delicate moment, but the details were always overwhelming in Brazil. We were speechless.
‘Oh, my God,’ I eventually murmured.
Chiara looked to me and said in English, ‘Oh shit, man.’
I looked up to check that I hadn’t imagined the situation, but she was standing there in all her glory, appraising us silently. Why she was dressed like this while sleeping under a bridge, waiting for her death, was anyone’s guess. There are some things that shouldn’t be analysed. These were the Americas. These were strange, surreal lands where women dressed up as Elvis to meet their deaths.
‘Hello, my friend,’ she said to Chiara.
‘Hello, Regina,’ Chiara responded.
‘You are all I have,’ she said, getting straight to the point and looking hard at Chiara. Chiara breathed in deeply and sucked in her lips. Regina was a tough lady, but even her hands were shaking as she told her story, hoping that some tinderbox of pity within our hearts could be ignited to save her life. If she was faking it, she was a good actress. The situation was hopeless, she said. There were no alternatives, no options, no plan B. She had nothing in the world except us. It was her own fault, of course. She was a trafficker. She understood what happens when you don’t pay debts to the Commando Vermelho. She had probably even inflicted punishments herself at some time or another. She went over her torturous story one more time, describing each detail with dignity, wincing only at the part where she lent the guy more money.
‘Why did you get into this stuff to begin with?’ I asked. ‘You have a family, Regina. How can you risk their welfare like this?’
‘For the love of God! My kids have to eat.’
‘Why didn’t you get a job in a supermarket?’
She stared at me with glittering, hard eyes.
‘Because it didn’t turn out that way.’
‘Would they really kill a pregnant woman for 1000 reals?’ I pressed her dubiously.
‘They would kill for fifty,’ she responded with a bitter twist of her lips, shifting into the shadows as the spotlights of a car coming into the church car-park roved over us.
‘What about your brother?’ I asked. ‘Won’t he protect you?’
‘My brother will do the job.’
She flicked at the diamanté trousers. It must have been a joke. The situation was so absurd it couldn’t be taken seriously. Surely this was a cartoon world, not a real one, and these were cartoon people running around who were making up their problems just to entertain us. And wasn’t there some cartoon help-centre where we could take her?
‘They killed a woman in front of her five children last month for not paying her debts,’ she said. Her son, who was up until that point sitting quietly under Chiara’s arms, began to yelp. He got up and ran around us in circles, laughing idiotically as Regina relayed other anecdotes of slaughtered families and mothers who didn’t pay their debts.
‘Jesus,’ I mumbled to Chiara, and turned away. ‘What have you got us into now? What’s this got to do with us?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Chiara eventually responded tiredly. The child stopped and stared at me, his dark eyes huge as saucers, as if trying to understand what we were saying, and I looked away. It was only eight hundred reals that we didn’t have.
‘What will you do if we give you the money?’ I asked.
‘I’ll go up the hill and face my fate,’ she replied. ‘But to go up with nothing is to face a certain death.’
The child fell silent then, as though defeated, and slumped down beside me and began licking my arm like a puppy. I put my arms around him, and he laid his head on my thigh and looked up at his mother.
After a few more hours of talking through alternatives that didn’t exist, we decided to leave. We invited Regina to come and have something to eat, but she refused. She stared at us through the bars of the gate as we walked away, her child standing silently beside her.
As we descended the cobbled lane, a ravenous hunger overcame both of us and we headed for the twenty-four-hour Amaro bakery in Gloria. It was nearly midnight by then, and people were sitting on yellow plastic chairs and tables around the bakery. An old man covered in black soot mumbled unintelligible words at an invisible person, and a woman screamed down the telephone at her daughter. ‘The bastard drank my money again. I got no money, darling. Oh Lord. Nothing. Not even to eat. Why did I give it to him, you’re asking? To mind it. That’s why. Just to mind it. I swear, how could he do this? God save me. God save us.’
I was surprised that I even had an appetite; but, as it turned out, we devoured the entire chicken there and then, pulling its legs off like savages and gulping the white, greasy flesh down while hardly chewing it. Afterwards, unable to digest either the chicken or the situation, we just looked at each other.
‘Oh well, give her the money, I guess,’ I said.
Chiara looked away down the street and mumbled.
‘Yeah, I guess.’
When I got back, there was a message on my phone from Fabio wanting to know where I was. He didn’t agree with giving Regina the money. He was of the school of thought that we can’t alter our own destinies, much less the destinies of others, by doing a little charity work on the fringes. Having said that, the next day, when I asked him to take the money down to Regina, he admitted that he would do the same thing if he was as rich as a foreigner. I guess poverty breeds fatalism. Or wealth breeds delusions. Or both. The end sum seems to be the same in Rio, in any case. Afterwards I thought about why we’d paid a drug dealer’s debts and not for some poor kid’s education or an old woman’s food. There were surely a million better uses for that money. Out of vanity, I could say that it was because we wanted to change her life and get her out of trafficking, but that would be a lie. Both Chiara and I knew that she would almost certainly go back to it, and would almost certainly be in the same situation in the future. It was exhausting to admit it, but I ended up thinking that it was simply because we couldn’t face having her death on our consciences. Neither of us
could face the idea of going down to Lapa and discovering that she had ‘disappeared’.
That night, when we went back to the Casa Amarela, its front salon was lit up with another frivolous party of Santa socialites. Chiara begged me to not let her open the door to the beggars and dealers and whores for at least a month — one month without The Hopeless invading our consciences and dreams with their depressing and irreversible fates. Because it wasn’t our fault. Because we weren’t born like Fabio, who could see the beauty in all that humanity rolling around him without guilt making him want to change it. And because the harsh truth is that there are thousands more women just like Regina who ride the line between life and death in Rio every day, and we didn’t have the money to pay for them.
‘Can you try to avoid the desperate people for a while, though?’ I asked Chiara. She nodded sadly.
‘Because it’s too hard,’ I added.
–16–
Twilight before Carnaval
Carnaval fooled me once more.
I left my troubles behind me at the door
To dance and sing
Dressed as a king
Until Wednesday,
When the curtain always falls.
– CHICO BUARQUE DE HOLLANDA, Dream of a Carnaval
In the twilight hours before Carnaval, the little way had become the highway. This time, the city really had stopped. We were finally into the last days of summer and into the last days of preparation for the world’s wildest party. Temperatures continued to soar and heavy tropical rains fell in the evenings. By day, the white sandy beaches of the Atlantic Ocean heaved with pure, unadulterated joy. Young lovers gathered on foamy shorelines, fat women lazed about in g-strings, and children played dangerously close to the shore break while their parents smoked pot under candy-striped umbrellas. The Cariocas stayed on the beaches until nine or ten in the evening, soaking up the last of the summer sun as if it would never return. Even Fabio went to the beach in February, although never before 4.00 p.m. He could only tolerate the twilight hours.
Nights were spent at the infamous escolas da samba, or samba schools, and days under the golden South American sun. It was the time for final rehearsals at the samba schools before their finest dancers, musicians, and beauties exploded onto the screens of millions of people around the world in all their sequins and feathers. The rehearsals themselves — the wild, frenetic nights of heel-breaking samba in the brightly lit quadrangles of north Rio — were almost more popular than the real parade. It was the only time of the year when the residents of south Rio came north. Mangueira, Salgeiro, Vila Isabel, Portela, Tijuca, Beija Flor: the samba schools were like football teams. They had their own colours, t-shirts, and fierce inter-school rivalries, not to mention Fabio and the samba hooligans.
Finalmente, Carnaval. Finally, Carnaval. The phrase echoed through the emptying city as the last of the workers got on their buses for home. The main celebration sits on the Roman calendar on the first Saturday of Lent, although some argue that Lent sits on the last day of Carnaval. Cultural appropriations of the Catholic Church aside, Carnaval is generally believed to have been a concept imported by the Europeans. Some said its roots were pagan, others said it was a slave’s day off, but most agreed it was simply time off from being yourself. If you were rich, you dressed like a pauper. If you were poor, you dressed like a king. If you were normally a faithful, loving wife, you became a cheap tart. And if you were normally a cheap tart, you could be … hmmm, well, I guess you became even more of a cheap tart! Carnaval is about the unstoppable and insatiable desire of the Cariocas for revelry. Five working days off — five days of parades, balls, street processions, and closed streets. Shops shut their doors. Offices are closed. Everyone is included. Carnaval is not about some subsection of society. It is society. The only enemies, as journalist Eneida once said, are rain, police, and pessimists.
People were electric with anticipation. Conversations centred on what people were doing for Carnaval, where they were going and what sort of fantasy they would wear. Nobody could or would think of anything else. One year, President Lula had even put his political decisions on hold with the dizzy excuse that his ‘head was in Carnaval, not on cabinet’. The papers buried corruption scandals on page twelve. The gossip pages were alight with speculation about who would take the title that year, and bitchy commentary about the Carnaval queens. Bright images of oily, naked brown flesh filled the pages of the most serious of journals, the television channels ran programs on how to make costumes, and sensationalist scandals broke out in the tension. In Rio, it was Mangueira’s appointment of an Aryan queen of the drums, the director’s refusal to let some celebrity or another ride on his float, the lack of space in the parade for the velha guarda, and the treacherous dumping of one school for another by a publicity-hungry celebrity who needed ‘maximum Carnaval exposure’. In São Paulo the parade was broke again — the debt to be ‘resolved after Carnaval’ — while in the north, the police of Olinda rocked the hedonist boat by announcing a ban on the libidinous act of ‘stolen kisses’.
For the amateur Carnavalista, the Rio Sambadrome was the epicentre of celebrations. It was along this hallowed piece of concrete that the samba schools performed over four nights every February. Some 36 schools of up to 4000 performers each would dance and strut their way down that catwalk of bitumen where heroes were made and champions were felled by the baying of the crowd. It was bairro against bairro in this battle of the diamantes; the schools were generally identified by the regional district from where they took their unpaid performers. Underneath the schools, or to the side if you took Fabio’s perspective, were some three hundred free blocos, or street processions, performing at different times and with varying levels of organisation and popularity. A bloco could be one million people strong, like the Black Ball, or ten people around a local bar, but the thread that ran through all of them was samba. Even the private balls played Carnaval marches. It was bewilderingly complex, this business of partying, but even the simplest person had a sophisticated grasp of the inner workings of Carnaval and could articulate their perspective. They knew the schools, the rainhas, the directors, even the subtle differences in philosophy and symbolism of each school. If the people of Brazil had shown half the interest that they showed in the running of Carnaval in the running of their government, they could have taken over the West centuries ago.
Fabio claimed not to like Carnaval, in the way that intellectual people claim not to like soap operas. He said it reduced his beloved samba to nothing more than cheap jingles, sold itself by using the images of half-naked young girls, and spawned a multitude of look-alike amateur sambistas in cheap panama fancy-dress hats right in the heart of his very own Lapa.
‘Imagine doing that with jazz,’ he protested. ‘Never!’
‘Isn’t that a little elitist for such a free radical?’ I teased.
‘What, with every idiot from Leblon to Madureira banging away on their plastic tambourines?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s not about elitism, it’s about noise pollution. Just you wait and see.’
He grudgingly went along with me to the samba schools, saying it was just for me, and ended up having to be dragged away from dancing around a dozen sequinned mulattas. I think he secretly harboured a desire to be the partner for the porta bandeira, the flag-bearing beauty who fronts the parade, but he was simply too bohemian to be part of a school. They were militant and deeply hierarchical organisations teeming with presidents and assistant presidents and all sorts of titles and departments, one of whom would be sure to quash the individuality of Fabio Barreto at some stage or another, should he have joined.
It was hard not to be swept up in the excitement.The big schools had around 5000 performers: the lead singer; three back-up singers; three cavaquinistas; three guitarists; eight allegorical floats; fifteen ‘vanguard’ dancers; sixty female dancers in sequined g-strings; one hundred old bahianas in white hoop dresses; one flag-bearer and her part
ner; a smattering of novella celebrities on floats; and a varying number of the ‘Old Guard’ (including the lovely ladies of Mangueira I had met all those months ago). This was not to mention a never-too-excessive number of clumsy Americans who paid to participate; another three or four thousand locals mingling among them whose costumes are sponsored by the Americans; three hundred perfectly timed rhythmists on big drums, little drums, drums that squealed, and drums that thundered; six assistant conductors; and ten or twenty stewards to hustle them all over the finish line in eighty minutes, one magnificent Queen of the Drums, and one very very camp director of choreography.
Carnaval was a full-time passion. Preparations started in secret the day after Carnaval for the following year and, with the exception of a few of the Carnavalescos, or organisers, everybody worked for free. The performers, the seamstresses, the float-makers, the chefs, and the drivers all worked for love, while the cost of materials was financed by the bicheiros, the local mafia who control Rio’s jogo do bicho — a gambling tradition involving a pick of 100 numbers, and the increasingly popular pokie machines.
Fabio’s only real weakness was for the samba school of Mangueira and their colours — a lurid combination of hot pink and emerald green that only a deeply tanned person of African descent should ever wear — flew from every post in his bedroom. The annual t-shirt, a chaotic explosion of flamingos and jungle natives on nylon, was worn by the purportedly reluctant Carnavalista until it very nearly walked away on its own.
Gustavo was not so coy. He loved samba school. The mountains of sequins and feathers, the papier-mâché headdresses, the gnashing teeth, and the blaring religious symbolism were all absolutely irresistible to a baroquian fellow like himself. He said it all when he commented, ‘Carnaval makes us forget ourselves.’ Carnaval, along with football, that other opiate of the masses, is constantly under fire from the intellectuals of Brazil because they see it as the reason that this seemingly wealthy country is such an economic disaster, even though holding lavish festivities to ease the misery of the masses is nothing new in world history. The Romans had their gladiators and the Spanish had their bullfights, it’s true, but the Brazilians have managed to stretch Carnaval over at least a third of the year. It would last even longer if it were up to Gustavo. ‘Such boring little people, how can you not like Carnaval?’ he said when I told him about the arguments in the newspapers. ‘Look at the sequins. What’s not to like about sequins?’
Chasing Bohemia Page 23
