Chasing Bohemia (23 page)

‘Favela tours?' Chiara asked, staring at me.

‘Lapa walking tours?' I offered meekly.

‘Samba tours,' corrected Fabio.

Her face twisted into a horrified expression. ‘How could you?' she raged. ‘How could you engage in this blatant commercialisation of culture?'

‘We're broke,' I explained weakly.

The truth was that I partly agreed with her, but I felt I had no choice. Making money was messy, but someone had to do it. Whatever way I looked at it, there was going to have to be some humiliation to suffer. That's just the way work is. I could drag ten gringos around every couple of nights to my favourite spots and get to live in Rio de Janeiro, or I could go home and become a corporate whore.

Fabio, for his part, was less concerned with the morality of money-making than with the question of how much we could make before Carnaval. He had an idea to fly to Havana after Carnaval (with or without me, I was never entirely sure) and, with the green light from Carina, he was planning a one-stop shop of tourism services to her unsuspecting clients with such illuminating names as the ‘Rio Porn Adventure', ‘The Art of Hustling in Rio de Janeiro', or ‘Find a Cheaper Mistress — Rio Love Tours'. I only really drew the line when he started talking about favela tours. I didn't want to dampen his entrepreneurial enthusiasm, but I had not jumped out of corporate slavery to land in the moral quagmire of poverty tourism.

Chiara turned blue with rage at the prospect. ‘You don't even live in the favela, you filthy opportunist!' she spat, launching a moral missile attack on Fabio.

‘My father and brothers died there, so I think I probably qualify,' Fabio said slowly with a warning smile.

But Chiara dived right in, as usual. ‘It is blatant exploitation of the people who live in marginal communities.'

‘And what exactly is it that you are doing, running up and down the favelas every day?' Fabio hit back. ‘Studying black men? Why are you here?'

‘I am here because I love this country.'

‘Only you can afford to, darling.'

Chiara tossed her head arrogantly, spun on her heel, and walked out.

She needn't have worried. In the end, we only ran the tours for a month or so. They ended when I paid Fabio again — leading swiftly to his second disappearance. By that stage, Lonely Planet had published a Lapa section and Carina said they didn't need tours anyway. With no desire to jump aboard the pirate ship of favela touring, it left my bohemian aspirations at yet another loose end. It had all seemed so gloatingly achievable with my ten-thousand pound bonus in my pocket; but now the money had run out, things were looking a little grim. Despite its initially carefree image, Brazilian bohemia was shaping up as having more entry barriers than the English upper class. You had to either be born into it (like Fabio) or have it bankrolled for you (like Chiara). Not to mention the taboo of sponsorship. Even the filthiest jewellery-seller on Joaquim Silva had some old bird tucked away who they flattered for the rent. For myself, the middle road down to those wild individualist pastures seemed much harder. It was a rocky road strewn with the obstacles of puritan guilt and, far more pressingly, finances. There is certainly no joy in being free and poor if you are thinking about how to make money all the time. And there was no way of cheating, either — going back to university/job/life after six months would result in immediate disqualification from the global world order of bohemia. You can't just be on holidays from the real world. You have to cut the ropes completely.

AT THIS STAGE
, having finally accepted the fact that my grandmother was not an English baroness, Gustavo gave me ‘The Talk'.

‘A lazy woman like you needs a rich man, darling.'

‘I just couldn't sleep with a man for money,' I said with a sigh, and not in the least bit piously. The truth was that I would have done just about anything to stay in Rio. But I just couldn't undertake marriage for money.

‘Oh, you are so fresh, aren't you?' he imitated my voice. ‘How else do you think all these women laze around on Ipanema Beach? It's not because they are married to malandros, my dear, I can assure you.'

‘Fabio is not a malandro,' I protested, but he waved me away.

I was in bohemian no-man's land. Were these really the only two options open to me? Marry a rich ugly man or live like a filthy, backpacking bastard, hustling tourists, never knowing where I would be next, and never knowing when I would have enough to pay the rent? I felt like an eighteenth-century suffragette. Was life so cruel?

‘No,' said my father dryly, forever the beacon of unwanted rationality. ‘You could get a job … for example.'

In my financial desperation, I did consider a dull corporate job in São Paulo. The prospect was inducing waves of nausea in me; but, upon hearing that it paid five thousand reals per month, Fabio abandoned everything in his life and channelled his energy into convincing me to go for it. This was our big chance, he said — our chance at the big time. He just didn't understand. In the end, I think I only went to the interview for him (and my dad).

The interview was in São Paulo at an anonymous high-rise around number 49,000 on the 285-lane highway of Avenida Paulista. Flying low into the airport at Garulhos, I nearly cried. The miles and miles of white skyscrapers made the outskirts of Buenos Aires look like a country village. It was like
Blade Runner
without the technology. Dozens of angry little helicopters darted back and forth through the smoky-brown pollution haze while the traffic below inched its way along the main streets. It was a surreal afternoon, only made possible because a friend of mine arranged absolutely everything, down to the suit I had to borrow. Fabio brought me the bag, a gleaming black leather number that his theatre group used for playing executives.

I sat in the interview listening to a blonde corporate helmet called Priscilla rattle on about management performance-indicators and how Europeans work only thirty-five hours a week while in São Paulo they work sixty — and why? Because they were damn-well committed, that was why … and I felt myself exiting my body to float out of the shiny high-rise windows and to commit suicide on the highway below. As I left the building an hour later, fighting through the crush of workers returning from their lunchbreak, I slumped against a wall, stared at the shiny black theatre bag, and thought about why my life always seemed to return to these points of desperation.

By the time I rang Fabio ten minutes later from a blue telephone on the corner, I had resolved not only to not accept the job should I be offered it, but to never return to São Paulo as long as I lived. My distress had transformed into a cold anger at the barbed trappings of capitalism. The phone was answered after one ring. (Fabio had bought a mobile the day before in anticipation of our new high-flying status.)

‘How did it go, darling?' he cried eagerly.

‘I can't.' There was a long pause at the other end.

‘What do you mean, can't?'

‘I simply cannot, Fabio,' I repeated.

‘
Ta' louca mulher
?' he shrieked. ‘Five thousand, Carmen. Five thousand. Return immediately and accept.'

But to return was a physical impossibility.

‘
Accept!
' he bellowed.

‘Five thousand is not worth the price of my soul.'

‘Do it for a month,' he said, switching to a more conciliatory tone under the pressure of losing.

‘You can't do these things for a month. They are nasty little traps with iron teeth and red eyes and barbs for fingers,' I said resolutely.

‘Bullshit, baby,' he said in English, and hung up.

–12–

My Brilliant Career

I first saw you in a Lapa cabaret
Smoking a cigar, spilling champagne on your soiree.
We danced a samba, swapped a tango for a kiss,
And only left after the orchestra finished.
Out front, a good car waited
But you went home your own way.
One more day that I would walk the Arches,
Searching for the lady of Cabaret.

–
NOEL ROSA
, ‘Dama do Cabaré'

B
y January, I gave in to the tide around me and allowed myself to believe that my problems didn't exist. After all, reality was far from an absolute concept in Rio de Janeiro. One look at Winston Churchill trying to convince his new Dutch lover that he was at home on Tuesday night was enough to convince anyone of that.
I was there, but I was not really there. It's a spiritual thing. You know what I mean?
Perhaps my problems would go away, too, if I denied their existence hard enough. The only hitch with subjective realities is the existence of conflicting subjective realities in other people — no trivial snag in a society of such flamboyant individualists. It was all very well when you were out there on the open road, but up there in Santa Teresa there were so many realities running around it was like a north Rio intersection: buses in the wrong lane, cars backed up over the lights, and train crossings and motorbikes jamming up the gaps.

My mother, for example, was calling me on an increasingly regular basis with irritating tidbits of her own realities. She had cunningly established a secret line of communication with Gustavo, and I would frequently return to the house to find Gustavo whispering furtively into the mouthpiece. ‘No. Yes. No. Yes. I can't talk now. She's here.'

Her latest bugbear was that I had no money left.

‘Depends on what you call no money,' I said, employing Winston Churchill's creative sense of reality.

‘Your bank is sending you red letters.'

‘Is it really a red letter or does it just seem like a red letter?'

‘It seems like a red letter and it is a red letter.'

‘Well, that's a very unfortunate perspective, then.'

‘Aren't you illegal there?' she asked, switching the subject.

‘Everyone is illegal,' I responded nonchalantly.

‘Well what are you doing there?'

I fended her off by telling her that I was learning Portuguese, that mother of all the useful languages on the planet. I sensed, correctly, that while I was requesting a small loan of $1000 it wasn't the time to be talking of samba, subjective reality, or revolutionary new theories of fidelity.

It was a lie, of course. My Portuguese was as terrible as ever, and so rooted in the slang of Lapa that it was hardly going to be of use to anyone in the real world, except perhaps for interpreting for a criminal caught smuggling cocaine into Kingsford Smith Airport. I could see I was in a bit of a bind, but what could I do? Now that I had given in to my desire to become a bohemian hedonist, I couldn't let an earthly restraint such as money stop me from achieving my true vocation.

I mulled it over as I wandered around the shady backstreets of Santa Teresa, depressed by the inflexibility of the Australian banking system and its incompatibility with my system of phenomenological reality, and thinking about whether I had done anything of value with my life in the past six months. After all, I grumbled to myself, foreigners didn't move to Rio de Janeiro to put some structure in their lives. We didn't come down here to get a steady job in an office, find a husband, and settle down. We came down here to run away, to be hedonists, to find inappropriate partners, to enjoy our lives for once rather than to be constantly achieving things that never really seemed to feel like an achievement. Certainly, some of us clung vainly to the notion that we were progressing in our lives by learning the guitar and studying capoeira, but most of us were just dropping out.

This didn't solve my problems, though, as the prospect of dropping
back in
was looming on my horizons. What had I to show for my time in Rio except that I was capable of extraordinary indolence? Perhaps it was my proximity to deportation from Brazil, or perhaps it was simply another miserable swing of the pendulum of values, but dangerous thoughts entered my mind about what I could possibly achieve in Brazil before my inevitable departure. I was going to need more than my samba song-and-dance number to cut it with the high achievers when I was eventually forced to go home. The days when you got accolades with the home crowds for just having existed overseas were well and truly gone.
You made it through Africa for three months? So what? Did you do it on horseback through a civil war zone? Did you get captured by a tribe unknown to man, and survive their cannibalistic rituals?
Even travel, that mother of all excuses for doing nothing, had become an art form.

So I guess it was only natural that when my friend Dominique came to visit for Carnaval, we took the opportunity to shine up our idle lifestyles with a glamorous side-career in cabaret. Dominique was another anthropologist who shared my original dream of becoming a Saint Tropez heiress. She also harboured fantasies of becoming a Brazilian soap star. Needless to say, she and Gustavo became firm friends. Dominique was an old friend from my rodeo days, when I'd first arrived in Rio de Janeiro, and she'd been plotting and scheming her return ever since. I wasn't surprised to see her again. From my experience of seeing dozens of travellers come and go, Brazil is the kind of the place that works a little hole into your soul without you even realising it. It's the kind of place that really makes its impact once you get home and have to abide by everyday laws, go to work, read letters from your bank, and perform all those other trying little tasks of living in an orderly society.