Chasing Bohemia (5 page)

Escapism was the name of the game. I had worked for ten years in the travel industry in Sydney and London before I'd come to Rio de Janeiro and, before that, had lived twelve years in Canberra. That was enough to send anyone running to Rio. While it would be futile to detail the reasons why Canberra was an unsatisfactory place for a young woman who dreamed of being a cowgirl or cabaret star, most people were surprised when I left the travel industry. ‘But it's so glamorous,' they would whine as I gazed out at the rows of bored sixteen-year-olds selling holidays to Hawaii through grey, plastic headpieces. I was, unfortunately, a success in the travel industry, a result of the high percentage of unskilled single mothers in the industry and my reading of a management-jargon book one afternoon. My boss frequently complained, as I trailed late into management meetings wearing torn jeans, that she never once saw me wear the suit I'd worn on the day of my interview. Aside from the odd dress-code disputes, though, we got along fine. We both drank a lot, and she seemed to like me. I guess that's why it took me so long to really run away. I kept getting paid.

I had tried to split from the mainstream before — once to start a dot-com business in Sydney, another time to move to Barcelona to learn Spanish and, more recently, to find myself in India. But they were all false starts. The guru in Varanasi said it all when he told me that I would encounter what I needed by looking into the bottom of the clay jar he was holding. After a few earth-shattering moments, I looked up, swallowed, and said, ‘But it's empty.' The miserable little cripple just nodded. Anyway, I didn't need enlightenment; I needed money. The heavens opened up the year after the war in Afghanistan, and my prayers were answered — a delicious combination of our biggest competitor folding and a rush of security-conscious travellers booking postponed annual holidays. We smashed our motivating targets by the first quarter, my bonus was ten grand, and I was gone by the next payday. Usually my company gave people a watch at their going-away party. At mine they gave me a harmonica and two hundred bucks.

My friends didn't seem too bothered by the idea of Brazil. Everyone spent three months in South America climbing up mountains and getting high with shamans before going home to Australia to get married, have some brats, and die. So the city of Rio de Janeiro itself was just meant to be a short sun-and-samba stopover before I went on to ride with gauchos at a Brazilian rodeo, meet the Afro-Brazilians of Salvador, canoe up the river with the Amazonian Indians, climb Machu Pichu, buy a terrible Bolivian llama jumper, hunt with revolutionaries in Columbia, and, finally, take tea with Marcos of the Zapatistas in Mexico. At that time, after a decade in the travel industry with free flights and work-sponsored travel, I was a hunter-traveller, slinging countries like pelts on my back before moving onto new territories within a matter of days, boredom my only predator. In retrospect, I should have known better than to underestimate a tiger like Rio de Janeiro, but I guess there comes a time when all hunters become the hunted.

CONTRARY TO THE SOUND ADVICE
of Carina and to the delight of Chiara, the following afternoon I located a ghost bus for Barretos that was departing Rio on a one-off rodeo special on the Sunday evening. It would arrive at some time on Monday morning at the bus station of Barretos. I booked the ticket. Carina's colleague Alex at the Rio Hostel loaned me a tent in case the hammock didn't work out, and I told Carina I was leaving in three days. I was organised. Locked and loaded. Just two more nights in Rio de Janeiro and I would be done with the tropical city of the south and onto my big adventure — an adventure that, I had to admit, always seemed to be one stop down the road and never quite where I was at that moment.

For the rest of the day, I walked up and down what seemed to be the best parts of the ninety-three different stone staircases that link Santa Teresa to the low-lying suburbs that surround her. One of them is even a famous work of art, covered in beautiful tiles from every country in the world. The artist, who lived on the stairs, was a mad Chilean who came to Rio over twenty years before and started tiling the stone staircase for lack of something better to do. Chiara said he had not left the staircase in twenty years. He certainly acted like he owned it — washing it every day, watering its plants, and telling people not to ash their cigarettes on it. He had thousands of hand-painted and rare tiles on some 150 rows of stone, and I asked him if he had one from Australia. He led me excitedly to one on the third flight, which turned out to be a rather disappointing mass-produced Home Base type of bathroom tile decorated in pastel-blue flowers. He said it was from Brisbane. At least it was better than New Zealand's, which was blank.

When I got back in the afternoon, I saw that Chiara had left me a note to go to her capoeira night. The note read to meet her at a place called Ta' Na' Rua in Lapa.

‘Where is Ta' Na' Rua?' I asked Carina.

‘Somewhere dirty and strange, knowing Chiara,' she mumbled from beneath the reception desk. Our conversation coincided with the daily return of the ‘Don't be a Tourist: be a Local
'
favela tour group. One of the Scandinavians was at the front with a glum face.

‘How was it?' I asked him.

‘Alright,' he mumbled with a shrug.

‘Alright?' I probed.

‘Well, it wasn't what I expected.'

‘What did you expect?'

‘I don't know. It wasn't
that
poor. Nobody was starving there. There was even a bank there.'

‘It's disappointing, isn't it?'

‘Yeah. I did slum tour in Soweto, man. Now those guys are seriously poor.'

As I left, the tour guide offered me a lift down to the capoeira in his black four-wheel drive with tinted windows. He was a big man, with that overfed look of the Brazilian upper class about him, dark curly hair, and an even bigger smile. English pop music poured from the CD player. He told me about his business and asked if I could connect him up with STA Travel in London.

‘So where you gonna live in Rio?' he asked.

‘I'm not going to live in Rio.'

‘Oh!' he exclaimed, ‘Why not?'

‘Because I live in Australia,' I shrugged. There was a moment's silence.

As we pulled into Lapa, he looked across at me.

‘Well, whatever happens, Santa Teresa is going to be a long way to come when you're my girlfriend.' And then he gave a big cheeky laugh, as though not even he could believe what he'd just said.

We parked in Lapa, he threw a one-real note to an old guy without shoes, and we walked the rest of the way to the bar. It was a hollowed-out crumbling terrace painted fire-engine red, with a sign saying ‘Ta' Na' Rua' and a drawing of a juggling clown hanging rakishly above it. Some ragged-looking hippies with armfuls of seed and leather jewellery stood outside, drinking and smoking weed. Inside, a beautiful black girl dressed in torn punkish clothes with waist-length plaits flipped the pages of a magazine laid open on the top of the bar.

At the back of the dimly lit terrace, Chiara's capoeira group were practising their ‘game'. It was the first time I'd seen a real game of capoeira. Up until then, I only knew it as some sort of Afro-Brazilian martial-arts hybrid that seemed to get hold of people with the voracity of an evangelist cult. One week you would be drinking at the local with your mate; the next week, he would have disappeared, re-emerging some months later wearing white, carrying a tambourine, and speaking in strange musical tongues.

In front of the stage at Ta' Na' Rua, a circle of people, including Chiara, surrounded two men in play. The game was in full swing. A strong older man in a small, black, peaked hat crouched beneath the kicking legs of a fit young man dressed only in white trousers. The tour guide and I moved in closer to have a look, and Chiara glanced across at us briefly. I started to smile, but she had already looked back to the game.

The younger one was a marvel to behold. Like a gymnast swinging and straining against the floor rather than bars. He moved swiftly and expertly, twisting his lithe, beautiful body in clean-cut moves to the rhythm of three drums behind him. He rolled effortlessly onto his hands and held both legs up in the air, perfectly still like a forked tree, lingering for a second before one leg swung down. The room gasped as he brought his knee close to the temple of the older player and then withdrew, as though he wanted to remind his audience that he was controlling the game. The audience breathed a sigh of relief, and the tour guide looked around at the spectators.

By contrast, his opponent was calm, even subdued. He was probably around forty, but he had the measured movements of someone much older. He seemed to be moving through the game reactively — unhurried, perhaps, by youthful enthusiasm. I watched him carefully. His eyes didn't blink. Meanwhile, the young man, emboldened by his near victory, played on with more energy. Sweat began to glisten on his chest and arms. He spun once more in the air, kicked his legs up to his side, and balanced on one arm. His muscles rippled. The sweat flew off him. He seemed inspired by the admiration of the crowd; but then, somehow, only moments later, it seemed to tire him. His game lagged briefly. The older man continued at the same steady pace.

The other players around them clapped louder as if aware of an imminent finish. The young man came back on the attack, conscious that the game had slipped away a little from him, but still confident. Big, bold moves followed, but still the older man escaped easily from underneath him. It went on for minutes like this, consistency wearing away at stamina, until the younger man's exhaustion finally brought a moment of confusion. In an instant's fatal hesitation, he allowed the older man to move to the centre. The young man was suddenly underneath. The game had turned. The clapping grew louder. He extracted himself crudely in a last escape and then threw his body forward again, but he was blocked at every move. His flailing, deer-like limbs collapsed against the circling predator. It was impossible to tell if this was a game, a fight, a play, or two animals in a darkened wood, but eventually the circle closed with the older man wound around the young man like a snake in the grass. The game was over.

‘CHIARA!' I EXCLAIMED,
after the game had finished. ‘That was incredible.' But she didn't respond. She was looking past me at the departing tour guide.

‘What's the tour guide doing here?' she asked.

I looked back over my shoulder.

‘He gave me a lift.'

‘Well, don't bring him here again,' she said with flashing eyes. ‘Ararei's capoeira is clean of those tour sharks … and
that's
the way we're going to keep it.'

The disagreement that followed showed the classic traveller's dilemma. I argued that the tours might offer a way for the instructors to sustain themselves so that rich foreigners like Chiara could play for free without the ignominy of feeling like they were buying culture. Chiara argued in turn that there was no more certain sign of the death of a culture than the existence of a tour. I broadly agreed with her, even if it was less for the moral reasons than for the fact that they were downright embarrassing. Paying $50 for Massai women to leave their cooking and cleaning to jump up and down for a while, or travelling through slums in a bullet-proof van was not so much of a moral issue to me as it was one of individual pride. It was like an admission that either you were so awkward that you couldn't find your own local connections to something as readily available as a poor person or, alternatively, so dumb you couldn't see the contrivances behind it all.

I shrugged the argument off. I didn't want to think about it. I had learned in my long career in tourism, as bucket-and-spade tour operators ripped up paradise beaches and low-cost airlines destroyed quaint European villages with a force unknown since World War II, that it was best not to think about anything too much whilst travelling. This was an opinion not shared by Chiara, of course. She was a mad Brazilophile, and was in Rio after living in Salvador, where she had apprenticed herself to learn the art of capoeira. She was a warrior. Unlike my decision to go to the rodeo, her passion for Brazil had been turned and shaped over years, manifesting itself in her studies of anthropology at Trinity College in Ireland and her dedicated following of capoeira. She was tall and willowy with long, dark hair when I met her, but on her passport photo she had a peroxided mohawk.

‘My punk days,' she explained, as we made our way out of Ta' Na' Rua and onto the street outside. It was dark by then, and the white, stone aqueduct of Lapa shimmered up ahead of us in the moonlight. The arches stood eighty feet above the deepest ground, connecting the hills of Santa Teresa with the city below in a dramatic sweep of Roman-style arches. It was one of the first constructions of Rio, and the surrounding buildings wrapped themselves around it. Carina told me that they had once carried water from the springs of Corcovado, but now it was just a tram track. We stopped underneath it for a moment while Chiara yelled up into the convex so I could hear the acoustics before moving on up the stairs towards the centre of Lapa.

The night was sleazily inviting, the air moist, and the light split yellow and black like a tiger's eye. A thick cluster of people hung together at the head of the cobblestone cross between two streets called Joaquim Silva and the Ladeira of Lapa, and from the steps of Bar Antonio they looked like bees moving up and down a trail of honey. There was a terrific noise ricocheting between a group of drummers under the arches and somebody's car-boot stereo. It made the drunks and tourists wild, their pupils dilated and their feet stamping, but the locals looked less perturbed. The men lounged alone, predatory on the white, stone staircases, watching squads of young girls in bright miniskirts walk arm-in-arm, atop marching walls of brown legs.