Chasing Bohemia (12 page)

The obedient traffic and organised streets, the recognisable menus, and the homogenised inner-city fashion seemed almost offensive. The dull stamps of globalisation deflated the last of my expectations. I could sense the heavy hum of the telesales centres lurking behind the Parisian-inspired facades, and feel the sapping tedium of the people who worked in there. I felt as though I had flown out of the third world and straight into the London central business district. I did not want to be there. I took a taxi to San Telmo, hoping to take refuge in the ‘bohemian' bairro and to minimise the traces of the first world, only to be confronted with her grotesque manipulations of Borges' (or was it Madonna's) Buenos Aires. One whiff of the English-menu tango restaurants and an awful little ‘olde worlde' bar on the corner of Plaza Dorrego, full of Americans and Germans, and I could smell a culture in an advanced state of decomposition.

I spent two weeks in Buenos Aires — one day more than the time it took to get a visa, and that was only because of the tango, an eighty-three-year-old called Eduardo, and La Catedrál. With my heart yearning for Rio de Janeiro and her plunging cliffs, the flat diagonal avenues of Buenos Aires bluntly refused to come to life for me. They presented themselves as unnecessarily pretentious — the buildings, the food, and even the bland blend of inner-city radical chic fawned shamelessly to Europeans.

Americans, given half a chance, would lean over to my taberna table and say, ‘Oh, gawd. It's so cheap here. Whiskey is only five dollars, hotels are only $75, shoes are only $25 …' until they had given me the complete inflation index of South America and I was left wondering why they travelled. Was it really just to go shopping? Was it so thrilling to save five dollars on a sandwich?

I sourly imagined the conversations before they went.

‘Honey, I want to go to Spain, to finally fulfil my dream of seeing the birthplace of my favourite writer Cervantes, to see the studios of Dali, and to walk on the old streets of the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona.'

‘O.K. Let's go to Buenos Aires then.'

‘But that's not in Spain.'

‘Yeah, but they speak Spanish. And it's cheaper.'

I met Eduardo on the second day. I had just returned from visiting La Boca, where the only men ‘on pink corners' were Bolivian souvenir-vendors selling football shirts to American tourists. I was sulking around the shady back streets of San Telmo with a fearsome expression when I heard the tango planks from a real piano. I stepped off the street to see where the music was coming from, and entered a tiny room with wooden floors off the side of a bar. Nobody noticed as I slid silently into the room and against the back wall. A row of old widows dressed in black was sitting to my right along a wooden bench. They were watching Eduardo dance, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, with a tall, orange-haired woman. The last of the daylight spun red through the stained-glass windows, and blue plumes of smoke from Eduardo's cigarette wound their way sinuously to the ceiling. It was just a case of hanging around long enough before Eduardo asked me to dance by raising his eyebrows. I didn't speak Spanish, and he didn't need me to. He stepped me through the basic eight-step wordlessly, and after that I went back every day.

Eduardo always danced smoking a cigarette over my right shoulder and tapping me on the back lightly with his left forefinger when I got it wrong. In the late afternoon, the rest of his extended family would arrive, watch as I stumbled over the eight-step scissor, and murmur words of gentle encouragement. Not that I got to actually dance it. I was thrown off the dance floor in one club for not having had three years of practice (which was fair enough), and thrown out of another club by a bloke who I refused a dance. ‘Tango is a man's dance,' he roared at me with theatrical arrogance. ‘The first lesson you can learn is that you never say no to a man who asks you to dance. You are a mere accessory.'

Really, the tango said it all about Argentina. In Brazil, samba is still a poor man's dance. The middle class loves it, but it is the poor who dance it, sing it, and keep it alive. Amongst young people in Argentina nowadays, tango is a dance of middle-class intellectuals at best, and even most of them admit they were only attracted to it after all the tourists came down seeking it out. The sad reality, for all those tourists running around San Telmo looking for Tango Buenos Aires, is that the good locals of Buenos Aires now prefer raves and rock ‘n' roll. And the poor like Cumbia Villera, a Latin version of no other music on earth; but nobody talks about that because, not unlike tango some century ago, exploding into the seedy back streets of Palermo and La Boca, its vulgarity offends the middle classes. Truth be known, it sounded like a bit of a racket to me, too, but then I'm not an eighteen-year-old Latin girl with three kids living in a slum whose only escape is a mixer and a microphone. And perhaps that was the crux of it, after all. I was a twenty-eight-year-old tourist, and Buenos Aires was brusquely refusing to let me be anything else.

I can already hear my eight-year-old niece in fifteen years' time asking me, ‘Did you go to the Cumbia Villera clubs? You were in Buenos Aires at
the
time it was all just starting.' And I'll probably lie and say, ‘Yeah I went to a few,' and then she'll listen with wide eyes because by that stage there would have been a film like
City of God
but about Cumbia Villera, and she will have her own set of vague and disconnected images to chase across the globe. But it will all be after the fact, like Chiara said — hopping like one-legged crows over the carcasses of culture, because everything is always after it happened.

That said, I did permit myself to love the club of La Catedrál in the heart of north Buenos Aires. I had to climb through a shop window to get in there, and all the waiters were dressed as punks. I hoped they were really punks. Tango punks. The local trust-fund babies of Buenos Aires kicked up a storm the night I went, smashing up the dance floor in punk tango jabs. I went alone and met three gorgeous twenty-one-year old Buenos Aires artistés. One, a stormy-eyed revolutionary called Raphael, grumbled, as he sat drinking his wine, that his friends had only learned tango to pick up tourist chicks.

The next day, with my new visa shining like a green emerald in my passport, I made one final visit to the graveyard of Evita, where a black cat with blue eyes led me to her black-marble tomb, and women in black threw themselves prostrate at its entrance, whimpering for the spirit of their most glamorous whore-feminist. Later, I didn't think twice as I slapped down two hundred pesos for my ticket at the bus station. I was desperate to get out of there. It wasn't until the bus departed and started cutting its way through the sweeping diagonal avenues, and I saw the setting sun casting a soft, rose-coloured glow over the baroque stone buildings and handsome groups of Argentines gathering on street corners, that I felt a pang of regret. I hadn't even given it a chance.

What sort of traveller was I? How could I so easily dismiss one of the most famous cities of Argentina; the birthplace of Borges and tango, the stage of Evita, and the location of the most important historical events of Latin America, not to mention the most handsome people in the world? What was happening to me? I even tried to convince myself to turn around and try again, but I knew in my heart that I would not. Rio had blinded me — the wild beaches, the overgrown forests, the filthy, crumbling colonial streets of Lapa, and her irreverent hedonists. Someone once said to me that South America was like your first love. Whichever city you landed in, to it you would remain forever bound. Maybe they were right. I could think of nothing else. The rest of South America was cast in shadow, and the spotlight was on Rio.

Making that descent from the stunning black cliffs that encircle Rio de Janeiro into the white spume of the city below, I resolved to stay just one more month. When I arrived back at the Casa Amarela, Paulo laughed madly. ‘You will never leave. Rio got you. Rio got you.' I went upstairs, unpacked the UB, and flung the shuttered doors of the Chinese princess room open to the street outside. Chimes sounded gently, and the sweet smell of the honeysuckle that grew on our neighbour's wall wafted into the room. As I stepped out onto the balcony, the yellow tram rattled by with a clank of its iron tracks and a ring of its ancient bell. The passengers looked up at me and I looked away, down the curve of Rua Joaquim Murtinho to the Bay of Guanabara, where the sparkling ocean shimmered under the blue sky of Rio de Janeiro, and I breathed in an enormous sigh. It was of relief and trepidation, all rolled into one.

–7–

A Patron of Bar Claudio

That's how I am.
Take me or leave me.
Because I live for today,
Not for the day that will be.

– ‘My World is Today', a samba by
WILSON BATISTA

T
hree weeks may not seem like a lengthy grieving period after such a traumatic break-up, but given: (a) that entire trees are said to have grown overnight in Rio de Janeiro; b) that I was living in the most hedonistic city on earth; and (c) that my ex was Winston Churchill, it seemed a more than reasonable interval before I met Fabio Barreto. It was midday on a Tuesday at Bar Claudio, on Joaquim Silva. The bar owner, Black Claude, was trying to shut the garage-style door on two drunken musicians who were threatening violence if she didn't stay open. The last people who had paid for drinks for the musicians had left hours before, and Black Claude said that she wanted to go home. The musicians kept singing, the neighbours kept throwing water out of their windows, and eventually she just yanked the door down. Two of them tried to roll under the door just before it closed, so she beat at their legs with a wooden broom. They cried real tears, and told her that she had betrayed them when they needed her most. But Black Claude didn't respond. I had learned in my first rowdy months at the bar, as her patrons danced on the tables, cheerfully smashing beer bottles and taunting the local police, that Black Claude rarely responded to anything.

The musicians eventually accepted that it was over and drifted away, and I was left on the kerb with one of the musicians who had rolled under the door. He asked me whether I would like to busk with him on the street. We could buy some dried goat and broccoli rice at Nova Capella, which was still open on Tuesday lunchtime, he said, after these ‘lightweights that aren't worth a bohemian's bootlace' had closed, and I said yes. He was tall, elegant, and covered in the grime of Black Claude's floor, and by the time we had got to the bend in Rua Joaquim Silva I had signed up for my first Brazilian guitar lessons.

We arranged to squeeze them in between my daily rota of gossipy late-morning breakfasts with Gustavo, my afternoon walks in the mountains and, now that summer had made her breathtaking entrance, my visits to the
barracas,
or beach tents, on Ipanema. My old routine of bohemian indolence had resumed the day after my return from Buenos. It was as though I had never left. As Gustavo had predicted, the heat was off me about Winston. The tongues of Santa Teresa had started wagging about another malandro, a white version of Winston Churchill who worked the upper-class women of Rio. The word was out on the street that he had turned bisexual and that his girlfriend had been on the street only the night before fighting with his male lover. She'd won. ‘He didn't stand a chance,' Gustavo explained. ‘Women are so much better practised in relationship wars than men.'

Chiara was ecstatic with approval of my new relationship. ‘You are going to live, eat, sleep, and breathe samba, baby,' she told me the day before my first lesson in a favela in the north of Rio. I had promised to accompany her on a lunch to her capoeira mestre's house in exchange for translating for my guitar lesson later that afternoon. We got off the train at the station of Vicente de Carvalho and walked down into the bustling streets that surround it. Far from the picture-postcard landscapes of south Rio, the suburbs of north Rio often have the feeling of an African market town: noisy, dirty streets lined with street sellers; wooden stalls selling religious fetishes; bunches of green healing herbs piled up on rickety tables; coconut-water stands; stolen mobile phones laid out on rugs; bright, cheap jewellery hung on lines; and, of course, rack after rack of the official Lapa uniform of breast-busting Lycra tops and skin-painted denim jeans (recently christened ‘Brazilian AIDS' jeans in the other Portuguese colony of Angola).

North and south Rio were like two separate worlds. In the plush south zone, clothes were displayed on typical underweight plastic Barbie mannequins with blonde hair and glassy blue eyes, but up in north Rio there were no such delusions. They cut straight to the chase with a line of size fourteen plastic bums protruding onto the uneven sidewalks. No heads, no waists—just denim-clad bums, in which Chiara was starting to demonstrate an unhealthy interest. Since meeting her at the hostel as the diehard capoeirista, I had already seen a not-so-subtle transformation in her fashion style — from the white-belted trousers of the capoeiristas to the tight denim jeans of the Lapa locals. I had so far resisted the skin-painted look of the Cariocas, with the consequence that the worldly Lapa locals now called me ‘the lesbian'. I wouldn't have minded so much, since that broadly meant feminist in Brazil, except that the person who told me, Chiara's little friend Regina, was dressed at the time in a shiny blue Lycra cat-suit split up the leg to the hip and cut away at the stomach, to reveal her six-months' pregnant belly.

‘I can hardly play the guitar, Chiara, so don't get too excited about it,' I warned as we reached the local motor-taxi stand, but Chiara's enthusiasm did not waver.