by Ted Simon
'Drive slowly and carefully,' it said. 'This viaduct has begun moving.'
Or the one painted on the roads in South Africa, just before traffic lights in the right-hand lane. 'Slegs Only', it warned.
'What on earth are Slegs?' I asked.
'It's Afrikaans for Only,' they told me.
The last two days before Rio were glorious, riding through the state of Minas Gerais. That rolling ranch country drew me irresistibly. I walked in the evenings past the cattle pens, admiring the solidity and workmanship of the stout black fences with their white capped posts. Mounted cowboys sauntered by with carefully laconic faces. The sun set in splendour leaving an air of great tranquillity over the land, and I swore that one day I would return there.
Then the emerald clad mountains carried me high up to Teresopolis, and soon I was standing next to the Finger of God, and looking down over the bay of Rio de Janeiro, feeling exactly the same happy premonition that I had had coming through Du Toit's Kloof and looking down to Cape Town. I knew Rio was going to be wonderful, and Rio did not disappoint me.
The friends of friends lived in luxury in Ipanema. I was welcomed into their apartment, and stood in my black boots and clumsy gear on their white carpet among priceless paintings and fragile modern art constructions, feeling as though every move I made would cause irreparable damage. 'Fantastic,' they said. 'Wonderful', as though what they most longed to do was to buy a couple of bikes and come the rest of the way with me. I was used to some of the things that wealth could do to people, and I found their swashbuckling innocence a great relief. They were generous beyond measure, but in a way that made it seem natural, nothing to make a fuss about, something between friends. I found myself installed, for as long as I liked, in a small flat within a hundred yards of the beach, above a ballet school which they ran. Every day I was invited to lunch or dine or visit someone. Almost everyone they knew seemed to have been the governor of one state or another, or related to some famous pioneer in Brazil's history. I was riding on Rio's inner circle, and the fact of what had happened to me in Fortaleza made it all seem not only unusually pleasurable, but entirely appropriate. I revelled in it.
So it was not long before I was a dinner guest of the best known and liked politician Brazil had produced this century, President Juscelino Kubitschek. The dinner was attended by other powerful and more or less obnoxious people, all striving for mastery in strident Portuguese.
My lack of Portuguese forced me to sit on the sidelines and make do with whispered translations from my friends and Kubitschek's daughter
but I watched him, fascinated. A battle raged round him about the plight of the white Portuguese in Mozambique, which Frelimo had now taken over. I thought of my friends there, of Rajah and Amade, and 'Vic' who had put me up. Giving the monstrous nature of most successful politicians, I was surprised to find that Kubitschek was the only one there whose sympathies I thought could be trusted.
Later I talked to him alone, in French, and found him very pleasant and not at all overbearing. The army, of course, had rendered him powerless, but he maintained his dignity and showed no bitterness. This self-made, self-taught man with the pale, watchful face gave the lie to all my notions of what a South American President should be.
I was under the particular wing of a lovely dance teacher we called 'Lulu', who was the most enthusiastic and intelligent companion any man could hope for. She had friends and relations in every direction, and we drove all over the mountains and beaches in her Volkswagen, Brazil's universal car, tasting every kind of fruit and sea food and exotic drink that Brazil could provide.
When she was teaching I wandered round on the bike and one day I found my way up a narrow road to a new vantage point called the Vista Chinesa. High above Rio I looked down on the big lagoon and Copacabana. The mountains rise up tall and thin and rounded on top like the divisions of a papier mache egg box, and the city is squeezed in among them. In the deep clefts the high rise blocks rise higher and higher, adding always one more floor of priceless property on every lot, and the villas swarm up the mountainsides, clinging ever more precariously. The lagoon, as still as glass, mirrors it all. Rio should really be seen from the air.
Looking over the bushes in front of the mock pagoda, a stir and a whirr caught my attention, and a humming bird appeared in front of me. It flashed black and blue and green and I thought it was the smallest thing I had ever seen and the most marvellous. It was a pulsating masterpiece hanging on a blurr of pure movement, its wings no more visible than a heat haze. It dipped its needle-like beak into a blossom. Then it vanished - I swear it almost did - and reappeared a foot away, motionless again except for the slight tremor in the enveloping air. My eyes would have swallowed it whole if they could. When it darted out of sight a little later, I felt as though I had been rooted to the spot for an age. It was one of those few moments which I felt could justify one's entire life. I made a note that 'magic was simply experiencing something for the first time'. It occurred to me at the same time that my purpose should be to increase the number of such moments until maybe, one day, everything could be magic.
It was spring in Brazil, and an ideal temperature for the beach. Lulu had a particularly well-placed relation with a house at Buzios, a most desirable beach because by a freak twist of the coastline it faced west instead of east, which gave it shelter and also a spectacular sunset. That weekend remained in my mind as probably the most idyllic of my life, and held the quintessence of what Brazil had to offer.
We wandered away from the main beach across to a smaller one, perfectly shaped, totally deserted. I swam a while along the cliff face in the crystal clear water, and then stretched out on a rock on the beach to read. ,
She was standing on the shining wet sand, looking dubiously at her own footprints. Behind her the green mountains, patched with banana and cactus, rushed up into a blue sky.
'How is it when they do the triple jump?' she asked.
She stood loosely, with the comical, awkward look dancers sometimes have when they are not telling their bodies what to do. She was frowning like a clown and running her index fingers round her thighs under her bikini bottom where it had ridden up. In the small of her back, where strong muscle held the edge of the bikini away from her spine, I noticed a streak of salty, sun-bleached hair.
'Oh tell me please, how does it go, the triple jump?' She pronounced it 'trip-el'. She had a way of pleading for things in her Brazilian English to make you understand that they were matters simultaneously of no consequence and of life and death. You could refuse, and nothing would be changed; or you could give, and earn undying gratitude. It was a great gift, which she had won by long effort and sorrow and laughter. It was the humorous residue of a craving which had once been corrosive enough to etch her face.
'Is that the hop, skip and jump?' I asked lazily from the rock where I was sitting and reading. I did not want to leave my book. I had my left leg over the side with the foot in the sand. Every thirty seconds or so the movements of the water combined to send a wave swishing along the side of the rock, covering my leg up to the knee and cooling it. I felt the sun's heat flowing through me into the sea.
T really don't know,' I said. 'Why? What's fascinating you?' She had asked about the triple jump once before, I remembered, in Rio.
T don't know,' she said, each word long-drawn-out and husky. 'I am going to try it anyway.'
She pursed her mouth and did a coltish sprint along the sand finishing with both feet together. She stood for a while with the sun on her back, her face in shadow, looking again at the prints she had left.
I watched her still, exploring the shape of her body. I would have expected a dancer's body to be harder, to show more muscle. Her limbs were rounded and smooth, her thighs filled out and touching to make an airy triangle below the bikini, her belly curved down from a single crease
at the navel. The smooth, firm, well-proportioned body of a twenty-year-old. Only, knowing she was thirty-six, I could appreciate what dan
cing had done for her. Funny, though, that her calves had none of that ribbed angularity. Funny too that I wasn't in love with her.
Fused with the wonderful, liquid warmth that flowed round me on the rock, so tangible that it felt like another element to complement the salty heaviness of the sea, was a warmth of feeling for this woman that was as close to love as the skin is to the flesh. Perhaps it would do as well, I thought. In some ways it might even be better. And she loved me. I know that. Only . . .
I put Islands in the Stream face down on the rock at page 241. Strange to be reading Hemingway again, after so long, on this beach, on this coast. Just for a moment I could imagine his bleary heroes bitching at each other right here, game fishing for metaphors in these same blue crystalline waters, drowning in an eternal round of fancy alcohol, fucking up the place with their manly pursuits. The image was impossible to sustain. It must have died with him.
I walked over to where Lulu was standing, on the shining wet sand, with its faint brown wash of iron glittering with fool's gold.
'Look, I am going to jump again. Now, you watch me and see what I do.'
She took a short run and jumped. I thought I represented the difference between a dancer and an athlete. The power was in a different place. I drew lines on the sand with my toe to mark off her jump. It was about six feet long. Then I ran and jumped too. My jump was scarcely better. A couple of inches, maybe. We laughed at each other.
'What do you expect from an old man?' I said.
'You are not an old man,' she said, 'and I am an old woman.'
We ran and jumped some more, and I managed to put on another two or three feet. Then I paced out the distance I associated vaguely with the Olympic record, and we looked at the far-away mark with awe.
She took my hand and said, 'Oh, Tedjy.' I smiled at her, but instead of pulling her down on to the sand I ran into the sea, playing for laughs with a silly, high-stepping trot, dragging her reluctantly behind me until we both fell into the water.
When we came out, she wanted to go back to the other beach. I would have liked to climb back on to my rock, to read some more about frozen daiquiris and 'High Bolitas', and impossible battles with legendary swordfish, but I didn't object, and we walked back, kicking the sugary sand, towards the other rocks where the little brown gully began that went up through the scrub and over the promontory back to Buzios.
There was a shelf of rock that sloped into the sea, where there were clusters of small mussels in the wash of sea water, their shells gaping like the beaks of fledglings in a nest.
'We could cook some mussels,' I said. 'Have you got any matches?'
'Is it alright? We won't be killed?'
She was not really worried. She trusted me.
'Of course it's alright,' I said, though I had never cooked mussels on a beach before. 'You just have to make sure they're alive.' What nonsense, I thought, looking down at them. You're not buying them off a barrow! How could they be anything but alive? Either alive or empty.
We found some bigger stones and built a fireplace against the wind. We pulled some dried sticks out of the scrub. They were as light as straws, and ants scurried out of them through little holes. She found a piece of round clay roof tile and I laid it so that when the mussels opened in the heat the juice would run off along the tile instead of putting out the fire. I became very excited by the idea of making a meal off this small area of rock, and as I worked I thought about living on a beach like this. The vegetation began immediately behind the sand, at the first rise of the ground. Bananas grew there in plenty. Other fruits would certainly grow there also. Vegetables too. The sea was rich with fish, prawns, lobsters. All along the coast were huts and shelters built of wood, split bamboo and banana leaf thatch. My heart sang with joy just in the knowledge that such a life was possible. The world changed for me. From that moment on I would always know that there was a beach in Brazil, if not this beach then a beach, where I could go and become whole again. What a journey this has become, I thought.
The fire - it was really more like an oven, with a flat stone on top to reflect the heat down on to the mussels - worked very well. The first mussels were orange and meaty and she ate them readily, saying how good they were. Then there were some white ones and she did not like the look of them, so I ate the white ones, and later she did too. They were all very small. It would be hard work living off these, I thought.
'It's just about perfect here,' I said.
'What a beautiful oven we have,' she said. 'It's so good Tedgy. Let's have some more.'
We got through about four dozen. Then she got some cigarettes out of the little pocket in her cap which was made of scraps of old jeans and reminded me of the one Jeanne Moreau wore in Jules et Jim.
I watched a boat rush round the bay pulling a woman on skis. She didn't look very secure. Probably she should straighten her legs and lean back more, I decided. I had only water-skied once, just long enough to know I could do it. I had tried several new things in that way. I wasn't really interested in doing them, just knowing that I could. That wouldn't have been good enough for Hemingway, I thought. Well, Hemingway
didn't ride a motorcycle eighteen thousand miles through Africa and Brazil. And I don't stop every hour for a frozen daiquiri either, I thought. Then I laughed at myself.
'What are you laughing, Tedjy?' I laughed again.
'Just happy,' I said. I did feel very happy. I made a mental note that I wished I would give up smoking, but couldn't. Even that didn't spoil my happiness.
I took a looping inland circuit from Rio to see the old gold rush towns of Ouro Preto and Tiradentes, and the ethereally lovely church of Con-gonhas, before coming south to Sao Paulo. There I delivered the sword to my Egyptian friend, who to my amazement had got there before me. I don't know which of us was more astonished. He told me that he had given sums of money to a dozen strangers like myself to post on for him, never less than $2,000, and every one had honoured his promise.
The two hundred and fifty miles from Sao Paulo to Curitiba were extremely uncomfortable, dirty and dangerous. The road was breaking up, and ran along the crown of a range of hills often in cloud. Heavy diesel traffic charged the fog with oil droplets, and covered the visor with tar. Both the throttle and clutch cable seized and the ordeal lasted non-stop for eight hours. I arrived frozen, filthy and wet, but the natural balance of pain and pleasure was rapidly restored. A motorcycle enthusiast snatched me off the streets and gave me a warm shower, food, a bed and an introduction to the kind of civilization that southern Brazil can offer.
He was a fat, warm teddy bear of a man with a limp and big bushy moustache, and his neat and pretty wife adored him. He and his friends, the 'motoqueros', all owned expensive three-cylinder Suzukis, and kept every spoke polished. They gathered in a special place in the evenings, like a floating motorcycle showroom, and looked enviously at my scuffed and battered work-horse parked among them. I could not help being saddened that so much fine machinery was so completely under-used. It felt almost sinful. If only machines could speak to each other, I thought, that would be a conversation I would like to overhear.
I noticed that my friend, Marcio, was not the only one with a paunch. Since Rio most of the men I met seemed well fed and fondled their stomachs often through their jersey knitwear. It struck me that I could scarcely remember a fat man north of Rio, but I did recall a conversation with a black shoe-shine boy who had been amazed when I described how I travelled. He thought it would be impossible for me to get enough to eat. 'You have to eat so many more things than us,' he said, patting his very hard flat stomach. I realized with a shock that he really believed I belonged to a different species and required a quite different diet. Now I had to admit that I did seem to be among a different species, and in a different country.
At Iguacu, where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet, I chose Argentina, and wandered down past the old Jesuit settlements of Missiones into the great beefy heartland of Argentina. The sad and violent history of Argentin
a was erupting all around me. There were daily shootings. Revolution and ever greater repression were inevitable. Fine sentiments were like froth on the lips of a dying man. Every shout of 'Liberty' drove another nail in the coffin, and 'Democracy' came to sound to me like a dirty word.
Yet in this big open land all the vanity and venom of public life seemed like the squabbling of children in the wings of a vast and empty stage. Only the chocolate melancholy of the tango followed me across the Pampa.
I think it was in Argentina that I turned professional. I had been on the road for a year; I had been very high and very low, and everywhere in between. The world no longer threatened me as it had; I felt I had the measure of it.
It must have helped that I was in horse country. I felt very much that I shared something of the gaucho's view of the world, and my seat certainly fitted my saddle as closely as his. Riding the bike was as natural as sitting on a chair. It scarcely tired me at all. I could pack and unpack the bike with the automatic familiarity of shaving, and I did not allow the prospect of it to annoy me. The same was true for minor maintenance problems: a puncture, cleaning a chain, aligning the wheels, whatever it was. I did it without giving a thought to the inconvenience. These things were facts of life. I slept on the ground more often, and my bones began to arrange themselves accordingly. The air bed was punctured and I did not bother with it much. I had a hammock, a wonderful old hammock made for a married couple, and bequeathed to me by Lulu's grandmother. I treasured it and used it as often as possible, finding it very comfortable.
I felt very much tried and seasoned, and no longer expected to make silly mistakes or confront unexpected hazards. I had also developed a battery of useful instincts. I knew when there were thieves around, when the bike had to be protected, and when it was safe. More often than not it was safe. I knew when to expect trouble from strangers, and how to defuse it. I knew what drivers of cars and lorries were going to do before they knew it themselves. At times I think I could even read the minds of stray dogs, though it was a rarity to see one on the highway that was not already a pulped carcass at the roadside.
