SAVING THEMSELVES
I was lingering in the office, taking advantage of the calm after dark to file expenses and listen to the evening news. It was January 2011, and in the few months since I’d returned, the city had sunk deep into the hot, wet Southern Hemisphere summer. Even the walls seemed to sweat. Outside my window, a hard rain fell in sheets that obscured the bay and the Sugarloaf Mountain, and turned the streets below into a congested river of red taillights.
A note of alarm in the announcer’s voice made me look up at the TV flickering in the corner. There was trouble in the mountains that rose fifty miles or so north of the city. The downpour was loosening whole slopes in the craggy range, unleashing avalanches of mud and wiping out entire neighborhoods. It was happening very fast: dozens were confirmed dead already and many more missing.
On a clear day, the craggy peaks of the Serra dos Órgãos are visible from Rio. Their sawtooth outline rises just beyond the bay to more than seven thousand feet, topped with impossibly steep formations like the Dedo de Deus, the Finger of God, a slender column of granite that ensnares clouds drifting in from the ocean. These fluted spires gave the mountains their name; Serra dos Órgãos means the Organ Range. The cool climate of the mountains has long drawn Cariocas looking for relief from the heat of the flats. The Portuguese royal family spent their summers in the Serra’s heights when Brazil was the seat of their empire in the nineteenth century; German and Swiss immigrants settled the lush valleys, leaving their traces in steep-roofed cottages that seem forever in wait of snow. Now Rio’s well-off retreat to weekend homes there, and the gentler climate supports farms that supply nearly all the vegetables and fruit consumed in the city below.
The mountains are also an extreme manifestation of the state’s roller-coaster terrain and its characteristic inequalities. Cities there have grown organically to a great degree, defying grids, squeezing and curling around whatever nature threw in their path: skyscrapers rise against mountains; roads hold lakes and hillocks in boa-constrictor loops; concrete creeps onto marshy bogs. Settlements grew over decades with little or no long-term planning, more often than not without supporting infrastructure and with negligible monitoring for safety or the environment. As a result, housing developments strangle riverbanks, cling to denuded hillsides, spread into floodplains.
This is a landscape in which the man-made and natural have struck a precarious balance. Add to it the relentless sunshine and awesome downpours of the tropics and you’ve got a mixture that is equal parts spectacular and lethal. During the summer months, clouds can gather into great bruised hammerheads and flash-flood streets in the time it takes to gulp down a cafezinho at a corner bar. I’ve seen fifteen minutes of rain send so much water charging through the underground pluvial system that it gushed out of manholes in powerful geysers that popped off the heavy metal lids and kept them dancing more than a foot off the ground. Storms like this could turn a trash-choked creek into a dam that broke violently, and the exposed flanks of a mountain into avalanches of mud. It happened nearly every summer.
In the previous year, 2010, torrential rain had plunged the state of Rio into chaos. Trees were knocked down, taking power lines with them; rivers overflowed their banks, ripped craters into the asphalt, and flooded Avenida Brazil in the middle of the rush hour, forcing drivers to abandon their cars. The fire department had to use rafts to pick up desperate commuters. Mudslides in the resort of Angra dos Reis, in Ilha Grande, and in the city of Niterói across Guanabara Bay added to that year’s death toll of more than three hundred.
This was why downpours such as the one that lashed at my office window that January evening left Cariocas on edge. My parents had a home up in the mountains. I knew the area and I was all too familiar with the way houses grew more modest toward the outskirts of town, until they were just hand-laid brick walls that rested, without foundations, on granite bedrock or topsoil.
Outside my window, branching bolts of lightning coursed through the leaden underbellies of storm clouds like angry veins. The rain worsened. I turned up the TV so I could hear the news over the wind that whistled through the cracks and rattled the glass panes. In between phone calls in which I tried to confirm the extent of the damage, I filed a short piece to the wire. With each phone call, the news was grimmer. The death toll was climbing in leaps. I updated the article with new information as fast as I could get it. It seemed that whole mountains were starting to give way.
By 9 p.m., the news had tipped from tragic to catastrophic. A series of huge landslides had left nearly two hundred dead and hundreds more missing. I had to get up there, but by then it was too dark and dangerous to drive. I’d leave early the next morning.
I was on my way by 5 a.m. with the photographer Felipe and the AP’s veteran cameraman Mário Lobão. Diarlei Rodrigues, a taxi driver who had become a part of the video crew, drove us. The rain fell in sheets that erased every sight and drowned every sound outside the car. Within an hour and a half of creeping along through an eerie, blank landscape, we reached Teresópolis, the city of Teresa, named after the wife of the Portuguese emperor. Petrópolis, named for the emperor himself, Dom Pedro, was also suffering heavy damage.
We parked as close as possible to the disintegrating slopes, then rushed toward them on foot, against the flow of families escaping with whatever belongings they could carry: sodden pillows, a stereo wrapped in plastic, supermarket bags lumpy with photo albums, clothes, shoes. The cobblestoned road that led past my family’s home was washed out. There were deep muddy craters where the black stones had been. We worked as we walked, talking to survivors streaming downhill in the rain. It took us most of the morning to reach the foot of one of the avalanched mountains—a distance of no more than two miles.
At the fringes of town, whole slopes had crumbled, turning entire communities into sliding graveyards. The immense furrows left behind looked like open wounds that continued to disgorge a viscous red mud.
We decided to split up the team. Felipe and I wanted to go farther up to search for survivors who might be stranded and see what rescue efforts were under way, but the video camera made Mário far less mobile. He and Rodrigues would remain at the bottom of the slopes that day. Felipe and I picked one gouged mountainside and clambered as we could, clinging to trees and roots to follow the path of a blown-out creek that had swept away its bridge and scores of homes along its bank.
Flanking this trail of devastation there were cars and trucks flipped like toys, and several buildings ripped open by the force of the flash flood to reveal the strangely intact half of a living room or the remnants of a bathroom. Within the great churning trough, there were the remnants of entire homes and lives—PVC pipes, sheets, plastic buckets, bits of a dinner table, a mattress, a teddy bear, shattered bricks, broken glass, a family portrait in a plastic frame.
There were also bodies in the mud. Sometimes they were mangled into something shapeless, a torso stripped of clothing by the water, the bones inside smashed and breaking through the skin, sometimes distinctly human—a manicured hand sticking up through the sludge, or a man’s face frozen in a moment of wide-eyed terror, his mouth and nose stuffed full of mud.
For hour upon hour we worked, trying to gauge the degree of destruction and interviewing survivors about the extent of their loss as warm rain continued to lash the saturated terrain. The sky was leaden and close, with a low, oppressive cloud ceiling. The dense greenery of the forest that bordered the mudslides heaved and pulsed under the storm’s blows, giving the impression the land was gasping for breath.
Terrified families cowered in the houses that remained, unsure of what to do as an angry red river rushed a few feet away. The loose soil around the small brick homes melted away, the danger far from over. There was no visible government help at that point. It wouldn’t come for days: the rain and fog obscured the jagged peaks, keeping away the helicopters. The government later justified their lack of action by saying that the terrain was too steep and rough for safe rescue operations.
In the absence of the state, people rescued themselves. Families dug up and carried their dead on makeshift gurneys as I watched. One father put his twelve-year-old son’s body inside a refrigerator tossed up by the mud to protect his boy from the roaming dogs as he turned back to dig for three other children and his wife. He’d put their photos inside a plastic folder and showed them to whoever passed by; he’d ask if they’d seen his missing family, and clung to the hope one of them had escaped. One elderly man with rheumy blue eyes sat on a log, beyond concern for the rain spattering his face, running through the stubble of his gray hair. His sodden T-shirt hung from his wiry frame. He’d lost his entire family, the thirteen people who’d lived in three side-by-side homes, and would not leave the ground in which they lay. There was nothing else for him, he said, but to sit with them, his hands helpless on his knees, big farmer’s hands, thick and knobby-jointed like uprooted trees, dark with mud.
When Felipe and I hiked back to town at the end of the afternoon, we walked past long lines of mud-covered wretches who were trudging back up, navigating the slippery muck in flip-flops, picking around sharp metal edges and tile shards, their hands wrapped around plastic supermarket bags bulging with food and water for survivors who were too old, too young, or too hurt to make the trek themselves.
After filing our stories and images from the car, we went looking for the local cemetery. Night was falling and it still rained when we found it. The rust-colored soil was churned and pitted with open graves. Those holes in the ground were terrible things: a hundred gaping maws in the earth, surrounded by a glutinous mud that sucked at our shoes when we walked.
Diggers wore masks to keep out the smell as they worked. The morgue overflowed in the first few hours, and bodies needed to be buried fast. The summer heat worked quickly on the drenched corpses. Families gathered around fresh mounds topped with simple crosses of unfinished pine.
One family was lowering a small casket under the rain into the wet hole in the ground. I approached them, looking for one more story that would help carry this tragedy to readers who’d never heard of Teresópolis. A man, the uncle of the child being buried, stood dry-eyed and silent. He showed me the photo of a little boy not yet three years old. A woman who might have been the child’s mother, or an aunt, held a blue plastic truck with big black wheels. Behind me, someone by another grave site was keening, screaming a name: “Maicon! Maicon!”
I started to feel physically sick. So far, I’d controlled my own feelings by focusing on the work: reporting, calling in information, going out for more. But after fourteen hours of this, I was beginning to crack. Leaving the family, I walked quickly past the wailing mother, who by now was trying to throw herself into her son’s grave, still calling his name. I was running by the time I got to the edge of the cemetery and found Rodrigues’s taxi. It was empty. I pulled open the door and took refuge in the back. The image of the three-year-old boy stayed with me; he was my nephew’s age. These people spoke Portuguese, a language that for much of my life I had used only with family. Their pain felt close, personal. Alone for the first time that day, I cried hard, punching the seat in front of me. More than crying, it felt like vomiting. I could no longer hold the contents of the day.
When it became too dark to shoot, the crew returned to the car. The cameraman took in the scene with a glimmer of sarcasm in his eyes. He’d been doing this kind of work for nearly as long as I’d been alive, and he kept feelings at bay. As we drove off, he went on to mimic the scene from the cemetery, starting with his version of my dash to the car. From then on, any overt sign of emotion on my part drew sniggers from the guys and high-pitched cries of “Maicon! Maicon!”
I didn’t cry again, but over the next six days, my frustration over the inefficiency of the rescue effort grew. The worst of the disaster happened on January 11 and 12. It wasn’t until January 15 that I saw the first representative of the state, a national defense soldier, on the devastated bank of a river where houses had been razed days earlier. With a clean uniform and a rifle across his chest he stood out as an island of order and tranquility amid the chaos. I stopped.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Our work here today is to prevent looting,” he answered.
There was not an intact house left within view. Nearby, a line of men and women trudged uphill with their supplies in plastic sacks, heads bent earthward, without a glance for the soldier.
I hiked miles each day, hoping to understand the extent of the destruction, but had seen only a few dozen slides. At the end of the week, when the rain eased into occasional showers, the mist lifted, and rescue personnel showed up in greater numbers, I begged a ride on a helicopter. Only then I did I understand the immensity of what had happened. There were thousands of shredded mountainsides. Rivers had changed course. Roads were destroyed, bridges washed out. Many of these slides were in isolated areas where families remained for days, rationing their food and praying for help.
I probed those I interviewed for what I imagined was their shared indignation. Many of them had suffered losses I couldn’t fathom—their entire family, their home, their neighborhoods were gone. What I heard was bewildering: “We’re in the hands of God,” they said, shrugging, wrapping the handles of their wet plastic bags once more around their hands. “Deus dará.” God will provide.
They talked about their dead with feeling, but my questions about expectations of help from the government were met with blank stares. I looked for revolt and found a forbearance I took for passivity.
Only six months later, when I returned to the same neighborhoods and found everything virtually unchanged, the houses still ripped open, roads still obliterated, the mud now dried and cracking, and the mayors of the two most affected towns indicted for funneling away the recovery money, did I begin to grasp the reason for their equanimity.
The people there had expected nothing, anticipated no help, and so were not disappointed when it didn’t come. They did what they could for their own and for their neighbors. Just as they’d rescued themselves, they now chipped away with pickaxes and shovels at the mud that held fast like cement, unearthing what was left of their homes one wheelbarrow at a time.
Two years later, I visited again. None of the five thousand homes promised by the state’s governor and financed with federal money had been built. This was bewildering to me, but the residents shrugged it off. They had no time or energy to waste clamoring for help that wouldn’t come, at least not in this lifetime. They saved themselves. What they couldn’t do, “Deus dará.”
I spent six days in Teresópolis during the rains. After the first day and a half, Rodrigues, the cameraman, and the photographer had taken off for the neighboring town, Nova Friburgo. Its downtown had been washed out. They’d left me with Bira, the driver who’d helped me during the Alemão siege.
He was as broad and deep as a chest of drawers, raised in the working-class suburbs of Rio, evangelical, married with children. Their photos were framed next to the steering wheel. While I did my work he sat in the car, smoking. We didn’t talk about much other than logistics. That’s what we were doing late one evening at our hotel when he asked, between bites of a soggy white bread and ham sandwich, why I’d never married. I ignored the question and turned to the TV. I was too tired for a line of questioning I’d heard too often since my return. He pressed on: Did I have a boyfriend? Cleaned up, I’d look okay, he offered.
I nodded and took another swig of Johnnie Walker, the hotel bar’s only offering other than a fiery cachaça. I saw myself through his eyes: disheveled, dirty, unmarried, so different from the women he knew. He meant well, but the last few days, and for that matter, the months since I’d returned to Brazil, had been bewildering enough without a reminder of how little I fit in. I knocked off the whiskey and went to my room.
We left for Rio the following afternoon. The hour-and-a-half ride back to my apartment was silent. As he dropped me off, he looked for something to say: “Do something to your hair. You’ll feel better.”
I ran the two floors up to my apartment, still in the muddy jeans, socks, and shoes I’d worn all week. It all reeked of death. Each morning in the mountains I had pulled these things on and tried not to think of all that was embedded in that dirt. As soon as I walked through my door I tore these off, stuffed them in a plastic bag, and tossed them down the trash chute. I wanted to leave that behind, clean myself, scrub off the grit under my nails, and wash the stench that lingered in my nose and on my skin.
I put on a bathing suit and ran to the beach, looking for the Rio fix: the sun-flecked sea, warm breeze against the skin. But the hour-and-a-half ride had not put enough distance between what I’d seen in the mountains and the sparkle of Ipanema on a hot summer day. The beach was packed. The golden light, the free-floating libido of Rio in the months between New Year’s and Carnaval, all those bodies so juicy with life—it all struck me as grotesque.
I headed back to my still-empty apartment. Curled up on the camping pad that served as my bed, I shut out the brightness of Rio’s summer and let the events of the last few days swell and take over my thoughts. This was not my tragedy and the pain wasn’t mine to feel, but some of that suffering had made its way in, like the mud that had become embedded in my clothes, my shoes, under my nails. I carried scraps of lives with me, bits that never made it into articles: there was the family that had saved for years to build a house and then had died in it; there was the mother mourning her little girl who had been so smart, so good in school, there was the nephew who took me along as he looked for the bodies of his aunt and uncle in the ravine below where their house had stood. For the next few hours, I gave myself over to grieving for these people, these names and faces that I knew only briefly but whose stories were now meshed with my own.
Felipe, the photographer, had stayed behind in the mountains, working in the town of Nova Friburgo in increasingly appalling conditions for nearly three weeks. Later he told me that he couldn’t wash the smell away. He took several showers, scrubbing himself, but couldn’t get rid of the stink of death. Eventually he realized it had permeated the hair on his body. He had to shave himself entirely to get rid of it.
“It was fucked-up, man. Fucked-up,” he said, shaking his head.
In a bizarre coda to that week, Bira, the taxi driver, suffered a freak accident after dropping me off. He’d stopped at a gas station to refuel. His cab ran on natural gas, as many in Rio do. Something went horribly wrong; the car exploded in flames. He’d been inside. The cab’s doors and windows locked automatically. Bira was strong enough to break the window on his side and hoist much of his torso out through it, but he was left with severe burns over much of his body. I learned about it at the office on Monday. We took up a collection to help his family.
I went home reeling from the news. I’d been in Brazil for two months. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. My daydreams of return had been suffused with feelings of belonging, of being surrounded by people who looked like me, who spoke the language of my grandparents. I knew there would be surprises, but this homecoming was tougher than I’d anticipated.
There was no welcoming glint of recognition in anyone’s eye, no identification of the latent Brazilian under the rather American way I carried myself. I walked too fast and asked direct questions. At parties, I found myself awkwardly inching back, trying to keep an arm’s length between myself and some Carioca who would inevitably step in to close the gap. Even the cadence of my speech alerted others that there was something off. I wasn’t from around these parts.
Instead of letting me feel finally at home, life in Rio was a series of reminders of the strange, hybrid creature I’d become. I’d come to expect that moment when whoever I was talking to looked at me askance and asked, “Where are you really from?” Taxi drivers who picked up on my foreignness ran me in loops around town; waiters added surcharges to the bill. I’d never felt so out of place as in those first few months back “home.”
One of the aspects of Rio that I found most difficult was the violence that permeates life. This could be the violence inherent to very unequal societies, reflected in the neglect of people and the environment I’d seen in the mountains; or the overt aggression represented by the shoot-outs in the hills and the police patrol cars that rolled by, their windows spiked with nozzles of semi-automatics. Cariocas lived with this and carried on with a resilience and calm that eluded me.
Nearly one thousand people died in the mountains around Teresópolis; more than two hundred were never found. Over the next few years I returned dozens of times and would always look for scars in the mountains’ great sloping shoulders. I’d fall into distraction and find my eyes combing the landscape for particularly steep gradients, clear-cut hillsides, or poorly anchored homes where the land would give if there were another sustained storm. I saw potential tragedy everywhere.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. After the destruction, the media had pointed to existing surveys done in all three of the most heavily damaged towns that outlined the risks. The rainfall had been heavy and targeted: at the peak of the storm, as much water came down in one day as was expected in two weeks. But this is not unusual for a tropical summer. Massive storms do happen and could happen again. There were people living in danger all around the state. Everyone knew this.
Little has changed since then. Data from Rio’s geological services released in September 2013 showed there were more than 207,000 people living in areas of risk in Rio de Janeiro State, nearly all of them in favelas. About 100,000 of them are in the capital, followed by the same outlying cities that were struck in 2011: Nova Friburgo, Teresópolis, and Petrópolis.