Chasing Bohemia (30 page)

Once, when walking down to Lapa, we were surrounded by a gang of screwdriver-wielding street kids. I jumped with fright and said, ‘It's OK, we are locals. We know Fabio.' Chiara fell apart on the street laughing. ‘Shut up, you idiot. How embarrassing,' she said, and pushed them out of her way. They let us go and, as we walked on down to Lapa, she imitated my voice in a cruel parody: ‘It's OK … I know Fabio. Fabio? What does he know about anything?' She could walk on the most dangerous streets of Rio de Janeiro without the slightest risk. Her madness was her protection.

It was a long way from Capoeira Chiara, and this fact didn't escape the people around us. But Chiara didn't care. She didn't care what people thought. That's just the way she was. As her closest friend in Rio, this had several implications for my own life. In particular, our circle of friends and places to go out to together shrunk dramatically. Her new rule that all places outside the favela were dull and void (except Lapa), and that all people not living in the favela were dull and elitist, meant the elimination of restaurants, clubs, parks, bairros of legal housing, not to mention Gustavo and Carina's parties, and any event of any description in Santa Teresa. Even artists and bohemians were out. It was ‘Catra this' and ‘Catra that' until we were all mad. Thank God that the people from the favela liked to go to the beach; otherwise, Ipanema might have been on the black list, too.

‘What happened to capoeira?' I asked her once.

‘Capoeira died,' she said.

‘What happened?'

She looked away, edgy and reluctant to explain, and then turned back to me, as though maybe if she told me once, she wouldn't have to think about it anymore.

‘I studied it and studied it and studied it until it died. I wanted it to be there. I looked so hard for a meaning in it all, but the more I studied it, the more it slipped away.'

I BOUGHT
ten more minutes of
Snakes and Ladders
, enough to see Cleo get put in a mental institution (think of Mac from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
... pre-lobotomy), before we left the house and made our way down the southern stone staircase of Travessa Cassiono and into the bairro of Gloria.

The Church of Our Lady of Gloria, perched uneasily on a small hill on the other side of Rua da Lapa, connected to the city below by a steep, winding, cobbled lane. It was an elegant, white, baroque building typical of the colonial era. The soft hills of Rio de Janeiro made a natural canvas for the architects of the church and, from the heights of Santa Teresa, you can still see one after the other of the elegant, white colonial steeples perched on their lonely hilltops. In the old days, they would have been landmarks for weary travellers moving through the thick jungle with their horses and bullocks, signalling a small village perhaps; but now the valleys in between are filled with the urban sprawl of low-cost housing.

To the north of the church, the hill led down through a series of mathematically arranged gardens and monuments: a monument to the discovery of Brazil; a mounted statue of Riachuello; and then Praça Paris, a rectangular park filled with ponds and shaped plants and a few Greek-looking sculptures apparently inspired by the Tuileries.

Sometimes we would go to Praça Paris on Sundays after gorging ourselves on coconuts and meat pastries at the Gloria open-air market, although Fabio preferred the shadowy paths of Passeio Publico, a diagonally adjacent park backing onto Lapa. He thought Praça Paris was kitsch, but at least it didn't smell like an overflowing toilet. You had to fight the masses for a bench at Passeio Publico; and in the event that you did manage to secure a greasy plank of wood to yourselves, you would be inundated with everything from requests for money to the mad ravings of a starving philosopher. ‘It has soul,' Fabio would say. ‘It's Sunday,' I would respond. ‘Haven't you had enough of other people's souls by Sunday?'

From Praça Paris there was a direct line of vision into the power centre of Rio de Janeiro, where grand art-nouveau buildings jostled third-world skyscrapers and a forty-storey billboard of supermodel Giselle Bündchen advertising mobile phones winked at the traffic.

Regina had a mobile phone. It was quite disproportionately flash for a woman of her social means, too, but then calls were her line of business. She used to stuff it down the front of her racy, pink maternity bras with wads of cash and drugs. Chiara had met her in Lapa one night, with her knack of arriving anywhere and sifting through all the normal, well-balanced people until she was left with the most desperately marginal among them. They had become immediate friends.

She was a twenty-six-year-old, HIV positive, single mother, with three children, and, for as long as I knew her, with no father in sight. She was also beautiful and black. We hadn't seen her for a couple of weeks, since she'd hit us up for 1000 reals to pay off her drug debts. Chiara had avoided her for a while, thinking that maybe it was the kind of problem that would disappear if we left it alone. It came back, of course, like they always do. Gustavo told us to stay out of it and Fabio didn't even want to hear about it. He had been around Lapa too long to believe that anything we could do was going to change anything.

When we arrived at the church, a young man was waiting. He was a new friend of Regina's, someone who had known her for less time than we had, and his hands trembled a little as he opened up the gate for us. Chiara greeted him and they kissed each other on both cheeks. She asked him what was happening and he shook his head. ‘Better you ask Regina.' He told us to wait and disappeared down a stone staircase, stopping briefly at the bottom to remind us again to wait and not to leave. We sat down on the staircase, and dark shadows of street sleepers moved back and forth in the park below as the heavy, humid night closed in around us and a deafening chorus of cicadas filled the air.

It was not an easy situation. Her demographics may have told one story, but Regina was no typical victim of marginalisation. For a start, she was a businesswoman, and a good one at that. She ran the Lapa subsidiary of one of the drug factions, a tight network of drug dealers to the Thursday-night and Friday-night punters on Joaquim Silva, under the guise of selling canned drinks. I admit that learning about her debts came as a surprise to me. I had always had the impression she was good with money. She could do sums in her head instantaneously, counted money like a bank-teller, and understood the concept of cash flow better than most accountants. Regina had a diversified portfolio of customers, preferred terms with her suppliers (her brother was second-in-charge at the source), and managed a small portfolio of loans out. And since the police were bought off easily enough, her main business risk was keeping track of supplies. Margins were low but reasonable, contained by the fact that the main source of drugs was less than a ten-minute taxi-ride away, and her selling point was the convenient supply of reasonable-quality drugs in the middle of the nightlife zone. Generally, she kept her contract salespeople on a tight leash —she gave them the drugs on credit, and they would sell them that night and return the revenue and profits less than twelve hours later. She rarely contracted users.

She was not the first drug dealer to have risked her life, and she wouldn't be the last, but this situation still seemed unfair. Her downfall, from the lofty heights of a shack in a favela north of Lapa to living rough under a bridge in Gloria, was the result of a single bad decision in December. One of her contractors defaulted on a payment of 500 reals, and since she could not afford to front up the payment — she had just bought a fridge for the shanty — she had agreed to lend him more to get him out of trouble. It happened to the best of business people; after all, the guy had been working with her for a long time.

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.