Chasing Bohemia (34 page)

Saturday night was back to Avenida Rio Branco, where hardline Carnavalistas the
Chiefs of Ramos
would hold drum slanging-matches with the bloco of
Beer Breath
. Sunday was our very own Santa Teresa bloco of
Carmelitas
— where everyone dressed as nuns in homage to the original rebel nun Carmelita, who ran away from the Santa Teresa Convent sometime in the 1920s to join the Carnaval festivities — and Monday was the
Lazy Dog
at Flamengo. The final days of Carnaval spawned the vagabundo blocos like the
I would rather starve than work
and the inevitable
Don't push, you'll only make it worse
blocos of Iraja, the unambiguous
If you give it to me, I'll eat it
bloco around Tijuca, the conciliatory
I'll be home soon, darling
bloco and, when that ran out of steam, its competitor
Come home for what?

There were hundreds more spontaneous blocos of twenty or thirty people that had sprung up like fresh mushrooms wherever a bar was open or someone sold caipirinhas. Fabio started one just by getting off the tram with his drum. We had not eaten for days at that time, and had been heading out for dinner, when we got off the tram into a concentration of a couple of hundred punters without a band. ‘It was my responsibility to help them,' Fabio said when he came home twelve hours later, having led 100-odd orphans through the streets of Santa and over the perilous rail track on the top of the arches of Lapa, ‘I couldn't leave them without a drum. Anyway, it is not a time for eating. It's Lent.'

My favourites, though, were the old school-street blocos, the kind that started at sunrise, where families and bohemians alike would run down the city streets, forcing traffic to a standstill and everyone out onto their windowsills. The
Sky in the Earth
and the
Cordon of the Fire Serpent
were the most popular, with dozens of trumpets and horns and drums floating down the streets of old Rio, playing bright circus marches and swallowing up the cars and buses. For me, that was the Carioca at their best — the crowds streaming with ribbons and feathers, holding aloft gaudy crepe paper umbrellas, shimmering banners of São George, and enormous papier-maché heads bobbing above the procession, as bearded men on stilts wove their way through the crowd, people in the houses threw water on our heads, and children ran between our legs. This was pure Carioca chaos. The
Cordon of the Fire Serpent
would not even announce the time of their bloco, and instead just turned up on some square in the city at 6.00 a.m. and waited for their friends to call their friends who called their friends.

I had three changes of costume by Monday, and most, owing to my acquisitions at the Barretos Rodeo, revolved around cowgirl themes: a rodeo cowgirl, a belly-dancing cowgirl, and a nursing cowgirl. Fabio stuck mainly to women's clothes, his most successful outfit being a closed-face burka underneath which he would triumphantly reveal a red fishnet bodysuit with army boots. It was vulgar and in terrible taste, particularly when he started dancing Carioca funk with a girl dressed as Bin Laden, and Carina didn't like it one bit. ‘How can you let him go out like that?' she said one afternoon as he flashed her on the street. ‘I'm afraid he's out of my control,' I responded. The world seemed to have turned upside down: men dressed as women, women dressed as men, playboys dressed as whores, Maria dressed as a king, and Winston Churchill dressed as a nun. I did wonder that first year in Rio why there were not more people dressing to take the piss out of corrupt politicians and bent policemen; but I guess, as the sociologists argue, Carnaval is not so much about protest as it is about reaffirming all the structures of society. Okay, now you play Indians and we will be cowboys. Or, in the case of the Cariocas: Okay, now you put on the gimp suit and I will beat you with the cat-of-nine-tails. ‘The tables are turned,' shouted a homeless king to nobody in particular one night in Lapa. ‘Until Wednesday,' shouted someone else dressed as a whore, ‘And then we will turn them back.'

Gustavo went to his Copacabana Palace Ball, and when he returned he told me it was the most glamorous place on earth, although the balance between old people and models could have been fairer. The next day he appeared in the society column of the daily newspaper, resplendent in his shells and seaweed. We shared a drink on the terrace at Casa Amarela as he described the costumes in perfect detail right down to the very last sequin.

On the only evening we spent together, on the Monday night, we went to the Sambadrome parade. Gustavo was appalled to discover upon our arrival that I had unknowingly bought us the cheap 40-real tickets to Section 11, the people's stadium.

‘We cannot go there. You don't understand,' he said shaking his head.

‘Why?'

‘It's where the poor people go. It's terrible. Crowded and noisy … fighting to go to the toilet and to see the parade.'

‘I don't care about sitting with the people,' I shrugged.

‘Sitting?' Gustavo yelled as we made our way through the mud and muck on the outskirts of the Sambadrome to the last section of bleachers, the lanes clogged with drinks salesmen, and people pissing on our heads from the stadium above. ‘We will be lucky to be sitting,
minha filha
.'

It was like boarding economy-class on the Delhi-Varanasi Express — that sinking feeling you get as you make your way down past nice, orderly carriages filled with clean, polite people only to discover yours is the carriage on the end vibrating with noise and overflowing with glistening arms and legs. There appeared to be no limit to the number of tickets that had been sold for Section 11. People thronged at the entrance and spilled over the back of the rafters as security guards shoved them back with batons, and the crowd surged closer again. People had been queuing for the concrete bleachers since 7.00 a.m. with their eskies and collapsible chairs and hordes of undisciplined children. By the time we hauled ourselves into the section through the masses of brown, lithe bodies, the bleachers were ridiculously overcrowded, and generosity was in short supply.

‘Get out, you fucking gringos,' a fat woman abused us as we pushed our way through the rafters. ‘What a fucking insult. You have money, but you choose to come and crowd the locals' stands. Are you trying to humiliate us by sitting in the poor people's stands, you foreign bitch?' I withdrew in shame and began to look for another place, but Gustavo had kicked into survival mode.

‘Shut up, you disgusting woman! I am
a Brazilian
!' Gustavo screamed back. ‘And move over! We are sitting here,' he said emphatically, and squashed himself between her and another drunk Lycra-clad sea lion. I wedged my bottom in uncomfortably beside my abuser, but as soon as I was sitting she leaned in conspiratorially with beery breath and said, ‘Okay, now you have sat down. Any newcomers, we use the same strategy, yeah?'

We spent the next two hours hurling abuse at any newcomers until the parade started, and everyone went crazy jumping up and down, forgetting that they even had a seat.

That year, the biggest scandals were inside the Sambadrome. The Carnaval parades were not exactly known for their modesty — the definition of ‘dressed' being the covering-up of nipples and vulvas and the occasional anus — but even the Cariocas had their limits when it came to vulgarity. The inner-city samba school of Grande Rio took it all too far with their radical theme of ‘wear a condom in the garden of evil' and had an entire float censured by the Public Ministry of the Duque de Caxias (rumoured to be backed by the church) for vulgarity. The float was said to contain vulgar statues of people in Karma Sutra positions, but we couldn't see it. They were covered in an enormous sheet of black plastic. Still, they were probably on a higher moral plane than the year before, when the school received two million reals from a presidential candidate from the state of Maranhão to run a theme singing homage to his hometown during election time. Anyway, who cared about politics? The schools could have used the floats to promote slavery, and everyone would have still cheered.

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'

M
y 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.