Chasing Bohemia

by Carmen Michael

  The floats were spellbinding. The extravagance, the lavishness, the pomp of it all was absolutely, quintessentially Rio. Twenty-five-thousand performers, forty-five floats, six queens, 1800 drummers, 700 dancers, and hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of spray-painted foam, plastic, and tin passed in front of us over nine hours. It was a celebration of opulence and excess. There was a pyramid of 100 naked people painted blue, writhing, suspended between the bars. There were giant eagles and enormous hawks, a gaping green snake, 200 dancers dressed as water, Egyptian pharaohs, one hundred captains of S&M, a 100-metre-high blue wizard holding aloft a child, a boudoir filled with amorous lovers, and an enormous politician caught with his pants down — not to mention thousands of kings, queens, nobles, princes, princesses, marquises, barons, and counts.

  It was wild and magical. I was high on shine. I forgot every problem I’d ever had. I surged with the crowds as the queens did their samba, and held my breath as the mestre of the bateria held aloft his magic wand, and spun with the flag-bearers as they spun. I was part of it, and I was desperately proud of Brazil and of my city, Rio de Janeiro. I was anything but a broke Aussie backpacker about to go home. I only really got a hold on myself when Xuxa, an Aryan queen in a silver cat-suit with silver hair, burst onto the parade on top of a blue-and-white rocket and caused our entire section to burst out into tears of adoration.

  ‘Who is that?’ I shouted over the noise to Gustavo.

  ‘Xuxa,’ he shouted back.

  ‘What does she do?’ I asked, thinking that she must have been some sort of goddess or religious figure.

  ‘She’s blonde,’ he yelled.

  ‘What?’ I yelled back.

  ‘Kids’ TV presenter,’ he said, shrugging. As he watched me look around at the people crying, he added, ‘these are simple people, Carmen. Very simple.’

  Carnaval finished reluctantly. We made our way back to the Casa Amarela in bright daylight, trudging home with the rest of the crowds and tinged by a dull sadness that it was finally over. Tonnes of abandoned costumes clogged the sidewalks, and people rummaged through the worthless foam and metal to salvage precious feathers and sequins. Drunks called out obscenities at the passing crowd, and mothers rushed their daughters along to the bus queues. As we passed Lapa, I could see Maria passed out against the wall of the arches, her king’s cape on the ground and her crown tilted comically over one eye. By the time we got home, I nearly fell through the gate. We collapsed onto the deckchairs. Fabio arrived playing the cavaquinho and still drunk, and Gustavo went to make us tea. As I took the cup and saucer, my hands shook with the DTs. It was another blindingly hot day.

  –18–

  Bye Bye, Bohemia

  And now, what should I do without you?

  You never taught me to forget.

  You only taught me to want

  And want and want.

  – CATAENO VELOSO, ‘You Never Taught Me to Forget’

  My year in Rio de Janeiro finally ground to a halt around May 2004. I received a notice from my bank saying that they suspected fraudulent activity had drained my bank account. Outraged, I demanded a statement of the suspected activity, and found myself having to meekly confirm that I had in fact been responsible for the expenditure on luxury hotels in Paraty, champagne bars in Ipanema, a side trip for two to Salvador for the Festival of Bonfim, and the hire of a luxury sports car in Copacabana. My year in Brazil was over. I told Fabio I would be back in three months, and he nodded sadly.

  ‘If I had a real for every gringa who said that to a bohemian in Lapa, I wouldn’t be a bohemian anymore.’ My dreams of being a Saint Tropez heiress faded as fast as a Carioca’s promise of fidelity. Gustavo sat on the edge of the Chinese princess bed as I packed my bags and lamented grimly, ‘It’s so disgusting not to have any money, isn’t it?’

  Indeed it was. It is disgusting to arrive in any country without money, but to arrive home with nothing is a disgrace. My parents picked me up at Kingsford Smith Airport and we drove to the farm at Captains Flat. It was four years since I’d been home. It was the year of the worst drought that the area had seen for eight years, the great dry covering half of New South Wales, and there wasn’t a kangaroo in sight — just empty, dry paddocks and cows with thirst-crazed eyes. The first night I dreamed of football-sized avocados and cavernous green gardens that swallowed entire tractors, and woke up on the floor. I spent a month or two at home until I secured a contract back in the travel industry with a company that sold coach tours to ‘grey nomads’ through Europe. On my first day at work not a single person said hello to me. They didn’t even look up from their desks. It nearly killed me.

  At night and on weekends, I would try to capture the beauty of Brazil for my friends with descriptions of the sweeping cliffs, the roar of the tropical jungles, and the sound of a hundred drums under the arches of Lapa. My stories had broad appeal among students, hippies, my family, single mums, and the unemployed, but there was dissent among the mortgaged middle class. They would smile distractedly, shift in their seats, and eventually interrupt with the question, ‘So what have you been doing there, anyway?’

  At the start, I would give socially acceptable explanations — such as ‘studying the culture’ or ‘learning Portuguese’ — but after listening for the three hundred and eighty-fifth time to, ‘I just don’t get how you earn money from that,’ I changed my response to, ‘Nothing. I’ve been doing nothing for an entire year. Just sitting on my arse drinking cane whiskey.’ That was usually enough to break the ice with the Sydney high-achiever crowd, who could finally relax in the knowledge that I hadn’t pulled the carpet from underneath them and gone and discovered a new tribe of Amazonians. I was an unthreatening travel bum who had finally come back home with her tail between her legs and had accepted a job back in the travel call centre. Everything was in place, and I was back in the system where I belonged. Those already in the call centre displayed a profound sense of rejection. ‘What’s so wrong with our lives that you don’t want to be part of them anymore?’ they would ask earnestly.

  It was hard to shake off the anarchy of Brazil, and I got caught out in the margins of an organised society more than once — first for driving an unregistered car though the country back-roads, and then for riding a pushbike without a crash helmet.

  ‘It’s my head,’ I protested, but the two policemen, who were clearly not in the mood for individualistic arguments, sneered, and then said sarcastically, ‘Not when you’re banged up in intensive care at St Vincents’ on Medicare, it’s not.’

  ‘I don’t want St Vincents’ medical care,’ I protested. ‘I refuse to accept the impositions of an interventionist nanny state ... ’ But they interrupted me with a snigger and said, ‘Aw, tell that to the judge, luv.’

  But if I thought the loss of anarchy was hard, nothing broke me like the saudade — that evocative sensation described by seafaring Portuguese which, lacking a direct translation, I now understand means a heart broken into bits by its memories. I played Cartola over and over again, hoping to kill the nostalgia somehow, but it only made it worse, each note bringing those fat, yellow moons behind my eyes and the torturous sound of a cavaquinho through my window. I survived by playing capoeira on Bondi beach with a fierce Brazilian woman called Meire Lou, and drinking with my brother and sister at the Brazilian bar in Bondi on Thursdays. I eventually managed to put $6000 in the bank by eating pasta for three months and selling my possessions. The mortgage drones were furious.

  ‘How can you go back to Brazil? You don’t have any money,’ one couple asked.

  ‘I’ve sold everything,’ I responded.

  Their jaws dropped in outrage, and they eventually spluttered, ‘Well, that’s just … that’s just bloody irresponsible.’

  My parents saw me off from the airport this time, a little sadder than usual, and to make them happy I told them I was going to start a business. I had even believed it myself for a while, until I
went drinking with my old boss and she’d said, ‘I’d probably stick with cabaret if I were you.’

  IT WAS DECEMBER by the time I got back to Brazil. Fabio arranged for a band of five sambistas to serenade me at the airport gates. My barely adequate financial situation must have been a disappointment to Fabio, but he got over it. ‘Join the club,’ he said with a shrug. At first, owing to the fact that it was a weekend, it appeared that nothing in Rio de Janeiro had changed. It was bloody hot, the smell of rotten mangoes hung in the air, and the sound of ‘Memories’ burst out of Gustavo’s radio. The samba was still pumping on until midday, Gustavo was still bitching about Fabio, Chiara still hated everything except Catra and funk, and Fabio still had the look of someone with not much to lose.

  It wasn’t until eight o’clock on the Monday morning that I realised something was different. We had been out late the night before and I was in a deep, dreamy sleep. Gustavo, Fabio, and I were dancing samba with a bunch of grey nomads around our tour bus in Rome when a slow, piercing shriek blasted away the cobwebs of unconsciousness and catapulted me into the bright, painful light of the day. ‘What, where, how?’ I muttered, still dancing. I got up and flung open the balcony doors, unsure whether I was in Captains Flat, Rome, or Rio. The sound continued. I was confused. I was in Rio. Maybe. But what was that sound? My gaze focused on the other side of the street, where the people in the priest’s house had opened their shutters and were staring back at me.

  Eventually the dream dissolved, and I saw that a nasty little clock alarm was making all the trouble. Fabio was asleep beside it, his face planted in a pillow, with no sign of waking up. I slammed my fist down on the top of the alarm and slumped to my knees. I couldn’t figure out whose alarm it was and why the devil it would be on in our house, but was given no opportunity to digest this mystery before Fabio jumped up like a soldier caught sleeping on patrol, gibbering wildly: ‘What, what, yes, time, please, late, maybe I’m late, early never…’ He ran to the closet, got inside, then out again, lapped the room twice, ran to the doorway, caught his forehead on the overhead panel of the door, and landed smack on his back. I was fully awake by then. ‘What the hell is going on, Fabio?’ I mumbled. Not disheartened, he got up again, pulled on his shorts, and ran downstairs, saying, ‘Have my lunch ready for twelve,’ and I watched him disappear down the street to his first steady job.

  Yes, Fabio had a job. As incredible as it seemed, he had turned his back on fifteen years of bohemia, put aside his hundred compositions about malandragem, and joined the worker bees. The party had come to a screeching halt. That morning I rang the Italian revolutionary to tell her about the new developments and to see if she wanted to go to the beach.

  ‘Can’t. I’m working,’ she said, lamentably.

  ‘Since when does a revolutionary work?’ I cried.

  ‘Since I had to pay my rent, you cheap corporate whore. My parents are threatening to cut off my trust fund. Now fuck off!’ She slammed the phone down.

  My lazy Monday plan of a trip to the beach, followed by a manicure and dinner at Bar do Mineiro, was shaping up badly. I went downstairs to have coffee with Gustavo. He had been doing breathing exercises and complaining of a rash since I’d come back. He claimed haughtily that Fabio had brought bugs from Lapa into the house.

  ‘Shall we go to the museum at Niteroi today?’ I asked brightly. He breathed deeply, sighed heavily and muttered, ‘Unfortunately, minha filha, I have to clean this house.’

  ‘Where’s Denize?’ I asked, incredulous.

  ‘She’s studying to be a doctor now. Can’t come anymore on weekdays,’ Gustavo responded with a shrug, and slipped on a pair of yellow gloves.

  ‘And Fabio?’ he asked, picking up a broom. ‘How are things between you two now?’

  ‘Gone to work,’ I said, hardly believing it myself.

  ‘Oh, God save us,’ Gustavo said, and crossed himself, for there was one thing that bohemians and the elite of Brazil had in common, and that was an extreme revulsion for work. ‘The poor man. It’s so disgusting to have to work.’

  Fabio’s job, the voluntary slavery — paid in at a luxurious one-and-a-half times the minimum wage of 320 reals per month — was to maintain the garden and run dinners one night a week at Julie’s Poussada Manga Manga. He’d got it the week before I arrived. At first it was difficult, seeing my jewel of a bohemian getting up with bags under his eyes to go off to work each day. His weekday nocturnal nature frittered away, and he started binge drinking on Saturdays. We stopped going to samba on Mondays, started watching television on Wednesdays, developed a semblance of routine when it came to food, and he stopped seeing shapes in the clouds.

  For my part, I failed to rise to the challenge, and proved myself to be a terrible cook and a completely inadequate housewife. ‘Sometimes I wonder what your purpose in life is, Carmen,’ Gustavo would say in one of his new and transitory alliances with Fabio. ‘A woman needs to be either Maria — a housewife — or be rich, and you are neither.’ Still, we survived the transition somehow. Sometimes it broke me down to see Fabio covered in dust and paint, but mostly I found it quite sexy. His guitar hands turned rough, his pasty nocturnal skin tanned to a rosy brown, and his bohemian beer belly all but disappeared. I needn’t have worried in the first place. He got sacked three months later, and became a ruthlessly commercial organiser of street samba instead.

  As for the others, never say never. Chiara started working on reception at the Rio Hostel and running samba tours, Carina fell in love with Australia, Gustavo started frequenting a cabaret on the backstreets of Lapa, Paulo became famous, Winston moved to Sweden, Denize got into university, Dominique became a DJ for a strip club, and Regina left dealing and disappeared.

  And, in the Chinese princess room of Casa Amarela, I started writing my first book — a far-too-romantic novel about an Australian girl who went to Rio and fell in love with a malandro. The only thing that really remained constant was my devastating talent for the samba. Oh, and that fat yellow moon. She’s still there.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to …

  Chiara, Gustavo, Carina, and Fabio, for making this story possible, and particularly Chiara for her research on funk and the characters of Lapa; Benython Oldfield, Ann, and John, for opening the way; the people of Scribe Publications, for taking a chance; my parents, for their support …

  … and Rio de Janeiro, for putting on the lights just when I needed them.