Behind the Casa Rosada, the newspapers report, they have excavated a customs house filled with ghosts, not of damp chambers and electrified beds, but of Spanish merchants with clean coats. And yet it is there that we watched the Madres trampled by police horses, and Juan Pérez shot in the heart. Outside the presidential palace, the Ford Falcons have number plates and a new polish, and the graffiti is fading… Don’t let me forget the tear caught in the white bandanna and the looks of indifference and hate behind the riot shields. For I am afraid of the reflection of your faces or the transparency of looking forward.
‘You can tell we are in France, che,’ said Alejandro Puenzo to Leandro Morandini one July morning in 1983. The two friends from childhood, now junior managers in one of Argentina’s less reputable financial institutions, had begun their family holiday. Not in France, which was still 10,000 kilometres away, but on a skyborne French colony – the Air France Jumbo from Buenos Aires to Paris via Rio de Janeiro.
The plane had risen slowly over the River Plate and was now cruising over Uruguay. Supper was being served. Alejandro was helping himself from a bottle of champagne. When he and Leandro had drunk it, he asked for another one. ‘Yes, you can tell we are in France, che,’ said Leandro. They were both quite drunk now and barely took notice of the bill that had landed on their dinner trays. They were transfixed by the body of the air hostess as she walked away from them down the gangway. ‘Just look at that arse, che,’ said Alejandro. With his moustache and oily black hair, he could have been a tango singer.
With or without them, family life appeared to be proceeding somewhat chaotically. Alejandro’s two young sons had occupied a row of seats and were using them like a trampoline. They were fat and screeched like piglets. The wives of Alejandro and Leandro had occupied a second row of seats and were deeply involved in reading the list of duty-free goods in the airline magazine.
Alejandro offered me a glass of champagne. ‘Allow me to ask you one question,’ he said. ‘What are you doing going to Rio? You look the kind of person who should go to Paris, but the books you’re reading are all about Brazil. ’ I told him that the newspaper I worked for had been on strike for three weeks so I thought it was time to take a holiday in the one place in Latin America I knew I wouldn’t feel like working. Alejandro was drinking another glass of champagne. He found what I had to say so surprising that he spluttered half its contents over his dinner tray.
Leandro had blue eyes and a puffy face. He looked like a younger version of General Galtieri. He said, ‘Hey, che, with an accent like that, you must be Spanish.’
‘Half Spanish, half English,’ I said. Alejandro laughed again. This time he was holding his glass so the laughter came out in a long cackle.
‘Come on, che, give us another, you’re Spanish. How can you be half and half of anything, let alone an Inglés,’ Alejandro said.
I said that I was about as much Spanish as most Argentines and that a lot of Argentines were half ‘Anglo’. Then Cecilia, Alejandro’s three-year-old daughter burst out crying. She was sitting just across the gangway with her mother and Leandro’s wife and small baby. While we were talking, Leandro had tried to forcefeed her some champagne.
‘It tastes horrible, it tastes horrible,’ Cecilia kept repeating between muffled sobs.
‘A right pair of husbands you make,’ said Leandro’s wife.
‘But it’s good for you, my little nightingale,’ said Leandro.
‘Leave her alone, you drunk son of a bitch,’ said Alejandro’s wife, a leonine woman with bright red lipstick and sharp teeth. The two women picked up Cecilia and the baby and strutted off to the toilets.
Alejandro watched them go and then seemed completely to forget what he had been saying. ‘Hey, che, let’s get some duty free. There are bound to be a lot of French things,’ he said.
They returned a few minutes later with cigars the size of pogo sticks in their mouths and a mountain of duty-free gifts under their arms. They sat down and began to play like little boys. ‘Look at this, che,’ said Leandro. He was flicking a gold lighter on and off. Alejandro was doodling on the airline magazine with a gold pen. They deposited the rest of the goods on my lap. Between them they had bought a calculator, a bottle of Johnny Walker (Black Label), 400 Benson & Hedges, four pairs of sunglasses, two boxes of Chanel No. 5, and an assortment of Cuban cigars. ‘Work it out, che, work it out. It’s a real bargain in dollars,’ said Leandro. Alejandro then got to work on his calculator …
Arriving at night in Rio was not like arriving in Paris at all. It was a city you could smell on touchdown – a scent of sweet vegetation mixed with roasted coffee. Most airports seem designed to make you want to get out of them as quickly as possible. But Rio’s was made to hold you in a sensuous grip. It was not just the smell but also its sounds. The flight information was given over the loudspeakers in a soft coaxing voice that seemed to beckon you not so much to fly as to bed. Buenos Aires was by contrast a city that had made a point of anaesthetising any smells it might have once had.
Beyond the airport building, the sweetness was less of vegetation than of diesel. It was hot and humid and very dark. There were black figures everywhere. Kidge and I took a taxi – a VW Beetle owned by Waldo Lima. He had a very thick neck and fat arms and seemed to take up most of the vehicle. I only just managed to squeeze in behind him. Taxis in Rio do not have door handles; they have ropes. So a taxi-man has one hand on the steering wheel and another on the rope. A taxi swerves from side to side because its driver is like the captain of a sailing boat, tacking in response to the shifting directions of the traffic. Waldo was driving thus when suddenly he braked. Ahead of us, a set of coloured lights were blinking in the midst of a gathering crowd. The crowd separated, letting through two men in white overalls carrying a body on a stretcher. They were followed by an old woman in a torn dress. She was walking with difficulty and was holding a bloodied handkerchief to her face. Beyond there was a wrecked car with a body dangling out of a door like a puppet.
‘Fuck this, it’s getting late,’ said Waldo with a shrug of his shoulders. Before the crowd had joined up again, he had taken advantage of the space opened up by the ambulance and was once again driving like a maniac through the dark night. It is not that I cannot remember more of the journey. All my notes tell me is that I was so petrified by Waldo’s driving that I spent the bulk of the trip from the airport just staring at his thick neck, flabby and grey like that of a hippopotamus.
I had the address of John Arden, a freelance Australian film-maker I had befriended in Buenos Aires during the Falklands War. John had performed the herculean task of ensuring that, for the three months the conflict lasted, all the best film material the Argentine military could produce on the islands found its way to the BBC, long before it was ever seen by the Argentines themselves.
John lived down a quiet street, well out of the city mayhem. ‘You look worn out, mate,’ he said as he stood in the doorway. Waldo was beside me holding my suitcase like a gangster. John and I had an argument with him about the cost of the taxi ride – Waldo wanted to charge me extra for the stop-over at the scene of the accident – and then he left.
That night I drank half a bottle of whisky as we watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was the video John had left us as a joke before he went to a party. It was about a man who ran amok in the United States in the 1960s, carving up his victims with a chainsaw. Each victim was stashed away in the basement of a house so that towards the end of the film bits and pieces of flesh were tumbling out all over the place like Jack in the boxes. I switched off after watching a scene in which someone was hung up on a cattle hook before having his legs sawn off. I finished the whisky and went straight to sleep. I had a dream about Waldo being a cannibal and wanting to chop me up for dinner.
The next morning we woke late, only to be greeted by John with the news that he had decided to have a party at home that evening. His guests were a small assortment of expatriates, mostly journalists who got drunk very quickly. One of them, who had a neutral English accent, described a party given by the Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs.
Ronnie was an introducer; he arranged his own publicity and allowed others to give it form and substance. He gathered together just about everyone who was anyone. Those who came to his parties were friends, contacts, hangers-on, anyone remotely desirous of having fun: government officials, writers, samba dancers, actresses, prostitutes, priests, petty thiefs, racketeers, diplomats (rumour had it that the British Ambassador was always invited and always politely declined) and, of course, journalists. Although everyone was carefully screened and sworn to secrecy, Ronnie was thought to be quite amenable to being interviewed as long as the price was right.
‘It was a mixture of beggars’ banquet and a tropical Dallas,’ said the journalist. ‘Everyone was remarkably well behaved, though.’ I thought, if Ronnie was anything like his photographs, he was no doubt wearing a pair of floral bermudas and canvas shoes and looking – thanks to the nose job he had had done to avoid recognition by Interpol – like a movie star. But the journalist seemed too drunk to remember much detail.
Ronnie had come a long way since first helping his mates cosh an employee of British Rail to death and then heading off with two and a half million pounds in bank notes. The inhabitants of most of the countries he had run to had denounced him to intrepid journalists anxious for the ‘scoop’ of Biggs’s arrest. But in Rio he had been saved by a steamy night of lovemaking with a local girl called Raimunda. The offspring of that brief encounter had been stamped with the characteristics of Ronnie’s original nose; the rest of the baby was the mother’s. But there was sufficient evidence of the union to ensure Brazilian nationality for Ronnie – as the ‘naturalised’ father of a child born in Brazil – and immunity for one of the most wanted of British criminals.
The British public, at least those who read the popular press, were outraged. But in Brazil, the Biggs story, with its photographs of the Anglo-Saxon Ronnie passionately embracing the half-caste Raimunda, was held up as an example of the country’s ‘enlightened’ racial policy. By producing his baby, Ronnie, the Great Train Robber, had followed in the tradition of Luis Correa, a Portuguese sailor who, after being marooned in the fifteenth century near a remote Indian colony in north-east Brazil, populated an entire new village with his children and grandchildren. Modern Brazil, with its cauldron of different races including half-breeds and quarter-breeds of mixed Indian, white and negroid stock, is thought to spring from this prolific progenitor who went about impregnating the local population well before Portuguese rule had been formally established. Thus Ronnie – without a gene of colour in him – had contributed to that age-old sociological process by which the extramarital relations of white men with lower-class ‘natives’ had constantly added to the proportion of white blood in the Brazilian population as a whole. Raimunda was dusky, but baby Ronnie had turned out white enough to be a state senator.
We moved into the one block of apartments in a street filled with large houses. Most of the houses had high walls and security systems, but the apartment block had only a night watchman who was always sleeping whenever we came in late. From the roof of the block I could see the city in all its contrasts: in the distance, the ocean with its wisps of white foam, then the oily lakes a little further inland and a mass of buildings of different tone and shape, from wooden huts to tall skyscrapers made of glass. But somehow the constructions of the city seemed a mere appendix to the surrounding landscape thick with tropical vegetation.
One end of the street where we were staying smelt of fruit. It was there that one day I came across a young mulatto crushing the juice out of mangoes and guavas in a wooden casket. Near him was a large woman in a billowing skirt. I was watching her fingering a pile of bananas when down the road came a very thin tramp. He was about as black as the woman, but he was grinning from ear to ear and his eyes were bloodshot and protruded like a frog’s. He was dancing a samba as he held an empty Coca-Cola tin to his right ear. I could not hear any music. But the woman laid the bananas to one side and started moving her hips; as she swayed from side to side, her skirt seemed to spread out across most of the shop front, covering it in a wave of coloured flowers.
The tramp shuffled over to where I was standing and began singing in a flat voice, ‘Come and join me, come and join me, I’m the man from Coca-Cola Inc.’ I said I couldn’t hear the music. He put the can up to my right ear. I could hear the tapping of his fingers. I could smell the rum on his breath. And his face was just a mass of white teeth. The woman said, ‘Don’t take any notice of him, he’s quite mad.’ She pushed him to one side and then returned to fingering her bananas. ‘Wilson has never killed anyone, or hurt anyone, or robbed anything. It’s just that he likes smoking and drinking too much.’
‘And women,’ said Wilson, as he stumbled over to the woman, and buried his face in her huge breasts. I told Wilson his music was very good and then left him alone with his Coke can, cradled in the woman’s lap like a child.
On another morning I got up very early and went down to the beach. It was dark when I left the apartment and when I reached the beach it was covered in mist. Treading on the sand, I imagined, was like walking on the moon. I had no idea of where I was or where I was going or if the beach really existed. So I sat down, listening to the waves lapping on to the shore, and waited for the mist to lift.
The mist lingered like a London fog. Then it parted just a little. I could hear a dog barking far away, and then a man’s voice shout, ‘Dio, Dio, come over here.’ Somewhere a woman giggled, and then somebody was thumping the sand. From nowhere, two figures were running at me: as they came through the mist, they seemed to be floating as they ran. It was frightening to see them, growing bigger, blacker, in silence. I was about to get up and scream, when the figures stopped. Now their hands were moving in an arc, drawing rainbows in the morning dew, and thumping, thumping the sand. From behind me, I heard the sound repeated, almost on top of me and a jogger passed by me quickly. He had a Walkman wrapped around his ears. As the mist lifted, I saw hundreds of naked legs pacing, kicking, stamping, jumping, in a mass gymnastic display. This was midweek and along the seafront cars and buses were already making their way to the city’s business centre, but the focus of activity was here on the beach. There was not a spotty shoulder or flabby stomach to be seen. It was all broad backs and hard biceps. It was hard to believe there was another side to Rio.
Favelas looked pretty, warm, and beckoning, but then I had always seen them from a distance. At night from a plane, I had gazed down on them. They looked like candles flickering on water. In daytime out of the apartment building, the favela was rusty coloured. Then at night-time again the favela, on the ridge across the valley, was filled with the soft light of lanterns. There was also a distant dog bark and the sporadic cry of a child.
We caught a taxi along the seafront and then walked to Vidigal, the largest favela of them all. This particular shanty town was set on a hill just behind the Sheraton Hotel. We were met by Father Jesus, a Spanish Jesuit. He was reading his breviary by a rubbish tip. He took us to a building where there was a school and a chapel and invited us to join him for Mass. The chapel was built like a garage – its walls decorated with children’s drawings and slogans evoking the Church’s social conscience. There were no chairs, so people either stood or sat around the altar – a bare table on which were set a jug, a wooden cross and some loaves of bread. There was a lot of singing, and when it came to ‘Our Father’ everyone stood in a circle and held hands.
‘There is a greater sense of community here than in any neighbourhood in Rio,’ said Father Jesus. But he knew that in other favelas there was not so much a sense of community as of ghetto. Outsiders were quickly identified and disposed of. To be allowed in, you had to prove yourself a mugger or murderer. Thus, Ronnie Biggs was among the few non-Brazilian whitemen to have access to the rougher favelas. He had earned the respect of the inhabitants by pulling off one of the greatest train robberies in history and getting away with it. ‘Heroes’ like Biggs were created by the armed gangs – the margináis or marginal ones as they are euphemistically called by the Brazilians – who fought over the protection and domination of the favelas. Often these gangs would fight it out for days without anyone intervening. The police were usually part of the racket and the Church had beaten a tactical retreat to Vidigal. Whoever came out victorious ventured forth again into the outside world, robbing more banks and ensuring themselves of a still larger cut on drug sales and prostitution.
Occasionally the outside world played into their hands. I knew of a journalist, then the Rio correspondent of an English newspaper, who on arriving in Brazil at the start of his posting had rented himself a house which bordered the outer perimeter of one of Rio’s most notorious favelas. The journalist, a veteran of rougher Third World places, calculated that the risk was worth the space and the view the house offered at what was then widely considered a bargain price. So enthused was he with the place that he moved in the Persian carpets he had picked up on his last posting and started drawing up plans to convert half the house into an art gallery. His plans were cut short brutally one night when a gang of marginais broke into the house with machine-guns, tied the journalist naked to his bed, and ran off with his money, his paintings and his Persian carpets.
In Vidigal, by the grace of God, things were different. The local community, helped by Father Jesus, had organised their own electricity and internal water supply, their own schooling and health service. The money that was used here came from the Church and the government. The funds might not have been so forthcoming had it not been for the recent visit of Pope John Paul II, who had been shown Vidigal by the authorities as the ‘City of the Poor’. The military blamed the poverty on the unscrupulous behaviour of the foreign banks, conveniently forgetting that it takes two to create a debt.
We walked down endless alleyways and stopped off at numerous huts made of metal sheeting and rough wood. There were canaries in cages, and parrots on clothes lines, chickens pecking on bits of corn and children kicking footballs; there seemed to be few men around the place, but there were a lot of women sweeping their floors fastidiously. At the top of the hill was a small chapel, marking the place where the Pope had celebrated Mass. Inside was a small glass box containing a large gold ring with the inscription, ‘This ring was donated by Pope John Paul II on the occasion of his visit to Vidigal.’
‘Why didn’t you sell the ring and use the money on the favela,’ I asked Father Jesus when we got back to the chapel. He told me that he had held a ballot on the subject of the ring and everyone in the favela had voted to keep it or give it to the city’s museum. ‘You see, it’s not money people have here, it’s social coexistence,’ he said.
As we walked away from Vidigal I thought that here in a sense humanity had not so much progressed as turned full circle to the days when Brazil’s underclass of Indians were herded together in their moneyless communities under the benign yet paternalistic rule of the Jesuit missions. These missions were in the end broken up by the bandeirantes and the Indians were taken off to forced labour, to places where the demand for more workers was more important than the kind of living quarters that could be created in the Brazilian wilderness. Father Jesus waved goodbye. He looked at peace with himself and others. But I was worried by the few men I had seen in Vidigal.
Perhaps some of the men were lurking in the shadows of the square just behind Copacabana beach. At night groups of them gathered and plotted. This was the area of Rio most tourists had read about in their guidebooks. When we were there it had been declared a virtual no-go area by the police. The police usually stood in pairs on either side of the square but nearly always walked round the perimeter. They told tourists they could cross it at their peril. We crossed the square. There was a smell of marihuana. Under the dim yellow light of a street lamp, a black figure was playing with a knife. He was standing near a night club advertising a live sex show. ‘Fuckie, fuckie, good girls,’ a voice hissed from the doorway. We were half-way across the square. I turned round and looked for the man with the knife. He was still there, white on black and covered in yellow haze. But we decided to run anyway and kept on running until we’d found the busiest terrace café on the seafront. Over a couple of caipirinhas, the local ‘tonic’ of lime juice and alcohol, we watched the street theatre of prostitutes haggling with the tourists. The prostitutes were tall, and wide-hipped. They were mostly mulattas who swaggered rather than walked. They operated in pairs and occasionally gathered in larger groups. They talked a lot, excitedly among themselves, as they touched up their make-up and rearranged their miniskirts.
At one point, one of these groups caught sight of a man of some distinction. He was wearing a navy blue jacket and a pair of beige slacks. He had been walking fairly briskly until he reached the group. Then he started walking more slowly. He kept looking at the ground, anxiously waiting for a shadow to follow him. I recognised Leandro Morandini, one of my companions on the Air France Jumbo. Two prostitutes caught up with him, one on either side, and took him by the arm. He nodded his head. The prostitutes nodded theirs. Leandro disengaged himself from their grip and started walking quickly. They caught up with him again, and this time one of them blocked his path while the other stood behind. For a moment Leandro was buried out of sight. When he re-emerged, his shirt was hanging out of his trousers and he was without shoes. Leandro looked distinctly harassed. The three began arguing again and then one of the prostitutes unstrapped a hangbag from her shoulder, stepped back and swung it in Leandro’s face. It hit him hard across the nose. Then the other prostitute started running away. She was clutching a wallet in her hands. Her colleague went on swiping the man repeatedly with her bag. Locked in battle, they grappled and groped their way along the seafront. They passed packed terraces of people drinking caipirinhas, a man selling ice-cream, and a police box with no policeman. Then I watched them disappear into the night. They were followed by a posse of women in short skirts and high heels.
Within a few hours we were catching a slow tram up a steep mountainside to one of the highest peaks overlooking Rio. The tram left the beach behind and climbed between the favelas. At first it was filled with tourists. They sat intermingled with the washerwomen from the favelas who were carrying baskets of clothes. Then the washerwomen left and the tourists started taking pictures. When we reached the top of the mountain we lost them. The Corcovado, which the guidebook translated as a ‘hunch-backed peak’, was covered in thick fog and we searched blindly for the forty-metre-high statue of Christ the Redeemer whose huge arms stretch out to embrace the city of sin and compassion. We heard the tram move away and the high-pitched sound of Americans complaining they had not seen anything. We decided to sit and wait.
It was eerie, the silence and the fog and the fear of being discovered. Now that the tourists had gone I imagined a group of marginais gathering to mug me. I had been told that muggings near the Christ were as frequent these days as in Copacabana. Then the mist began to lift and we realised that the patch of ground we were sitting on was just a few feet away from the base of the statue. The tall robed figure – almost Virgin-like – revealed itself like a vision, which is probably what the person who carved it in the first place intended. The prostitutes disappeared into the night, the marginais hid in the favelas, the military ruled at a distance, but Christ the Redeemer was ever-present, lurking behind the clouds, and appearing when you least expected him.
John had said that if we ever had a free weekend we should go to Parati, a small colonial fishing town a few hundred kilometres south-west of Rio. He would take time off from his journalistic commitments and show us what he claimed was the ‘most beautiful beach’ in Brazil. I had come to Rio to escape from my journalistic commitments, but on our sixth day there we were joined in the apartment by two colleagues from my newspaper. One of them was Patrick, the son of Claud Cockburn, who was on his way to Moscow. We went for supper to a Japanese restaurant where we sat on the floor eating raw fish served out by mulattas posing as ‘geishas’, and argued about politics. We declared ourselves social democrats, labourites, environmentalists, anything but Thatcherites. We agreed that she seemed very remote to our South American experience. Beyond the Falklands, she seemed not to care a damn for it. We also laid bets on how long the strike at our newspaper would last and all hoped that it would be as long as possible so we could enjoy a lengthy holiday. I then rang up John and said that we were ready for Parati.
We set out in convoy, Kidge and myself in one car, John and his Brazilian girlfriend Flávia in another, and Oliver and Rosie, a local English couple, bringing up the rear. On the outskirts of Rio we stopped off by a hut overlooking the ocean and had a breakfast of fried fish and firewater. The beach there was already crowded with people playing ball games and exercising their limbs. Occasionally, hang gliders swooped down from a near-by cliff, narrowly missing our heads before plunging into the sea. There was a heavy scent of coconut oil.
‘Just look at those women, doesn’t it make you feel sick?’ said Rosie. The women she had seen could not have been more than thirty between them. Each was wearing a small triangle between the thighs and a string over the crevice at the back. Two bits of material the size of buttons covered the nipples. Naked, they would have had very little else to show except the colour of their pubic hair. They were gyrating as they walked, as if in a slow-motion samba. Rosie stared out towards the ocean, but her gaze seemed to take in the whole of Brazil. ‘Brazil’s all right for men. They can fantasise their hearts out, kid themselves that these women are really asking for it all the time. But what is there in it for a woman when her arse can only waddle like a marshmallow?’
‘The trouble is that most Brazilian men are gay,’ Flávia said.
What was certainly true was that there had to be few places in the world where ‘body culture’, as Rosie preferred to call it, played such a central and exaggerated role as here. Gilberto Freyre, one of Brazil’s best-known sociologists, had written volumes about the physical characteristics of the Indians, blacks and Portuguese in defence of what he considered the country’s unique hybrid society. ‘The milieu in which Brazilian life began,’ wrote Freyre with all seriousness in his classic treatise The Masters and the Slaves, ‘was one of sexual intoxication. No sooner had the European leaped ashore than he … became contaminated with licentiousness. The women were the first to rub themselves against the legs of these beings whom they supposed to be gods. They would give themselves to the European for a comb or a broken mirror.’
Freyre’s writings have been strongly criticised as a racist simplification of a complex social, political and cultural history. But the definition of what constitutes Brazil in purely sexual terms or imagery has persisted in the country’s mass culture: the heroines of Brazil’s best-known twentieth-century novelist, Jorge Amado, spend more time making love than talking. In the United States Amado has earned a reputation less as a master storyteller than as a skilful, if exotic, weaver of sexy tales. Brazil’s best-known film actress, Sónia Braga – she played the leading role in two of Amado’s most popular screen plays, Dona Flore seus dois maridos and Gabriela – is the quintessential mulatta Freyre saw ‘invented’ in the early days of colonisation. A woman of few words but sufficiently interesting sexually to the reader of Playboy magazine to be the ultimate fantasy of how a half-caste should perform. She was sexy in a crude ‘jungly’ kind of way, not at all like the usual Playmate of the Month. The contrast seemed to invoke the old Brazilian saying, ‘White woman for marriage, negro woman for work, mulatto woman for fucking.’ It was mulatto women that the Brazilian Tourist Board had on their posters suggestively licking on a straw, mulatto women tourists came looking for in their search for a primitive whore at carnival time.
‘I don’t know about the men,’ said Flávia as we walked back to the cars, ‘but I do know what a lot of us women feel. We don’t like foreigners taking a fancy to us just because of our bodies. The Argentines are the worst – they cross the border convinced every Brazilian woman wants to jump into bed with them.’
John said the road to Parati was beautiful but long, the kind we might want to linger over. He and the others were anxious to get there as soon as possible. So we decided to split up the convoy and meet later. The road ran parallel to the ocean. It was lined with rubber trees, thick with foliage which was deep green and glistening in the sun after the rains. Below, the sand was very white and the water pale blue except where the rocks had made it darker or where the vegetation, left to itself, had grown beyond the land. There was a breeze blowing in from the ocean. We were thinking how clean and empty it all seemed after Rio when we suddenly saw a huge spider walking slowly across the road. I stopped the car and we watched its progress from a safe distance. It was covered in a thin coat of rough brown hair and had a hammer head and bulbous eyes. It was bigger than a man’s foot and was dragging itself along a calculated if seemingly anarchic route, like a giant crab. Kidge, who had studied biology at school, guessed it was a tarantula and we walked rapidly back to the car.
We left the vegetation behind us, driving over a hill of coarse grass filled with wild flowers, and past an oil refinery built where there had once been a quiet fishing village with extraordinary views of the ocean. There was a big flame and clouds of yellowish smoke and the air was acrid. As we pondered on how the Brazilians had done far greater ecological massacres in the Amazon for the sake of economic progress, I was stopped by the police for driving without a licence.
Comissário Alves was a great hulk of a policeman. When one of his men brought me to see him, he was sitting behind a desk smoking a large, roughly rolled cigar. There was a wooden fan spinning from the roof. Lying in my teeth, I explained in Portuguese that I had left my driving licence on the beach and that it had since been stolen. Comissário Alves sucked deeply on his cigar and then gave me one of those black smiles that seem to cover a whole face. He said, ‘Very well, then why didn’t you report the robbery to the delegacia policial?’
‘I was just about to,’ I said.
‘But you were driving past when we stopped you.’ Comissário Alves had risen now. Standing he seemed to take up most of the room. He handed me a piece of paper on which was written the equivalent of 150 US dollars in two sets of 35,000 cruzeiros.
I asked him why he was fining me twice.
‘This is why,’ said Alves. He had picked up a dusty book and was shaking it as if it were a bible and he an evangelist. ‘This is why: driving without a licence; driving a car without a licence.’
I asked – for Alves showed no intention of letting go of the book – whether the rules specified the fine for each offence. Alves looked at me, blew on his cigar and gave a big smile again. ‘Aha, my friend, we are no longer talking about rules but about the meaning of charity. For you have no doubt heard that Brazil is the land of co-existence and compassion. So, you would like me to pardon you. Is that it?’
‘Oh no I’m not asking for a pardon … no, perhaps I am,’ I said.
‘At last we understand each other,’ Alves said, reaching out and embracing me. ‘You pay one fine only and I’ll tear up the piece of paper. Then we can forget this ever happened.’
When he had torn up the fine and thrown it in a waste bin, I handed him 20,000 cruzeiros. It was the final price we had haggled about over a cup of coffee.
‘You look unhappy, my friend. You shouldn’t. After all you come from a rich country. We are only poor here. We have to make our living somehow. But what’s twenty thousand here or there? It’s a memorandum of understanding, nothing more, the kind of stuff we sign with the International Monetary Fund … only promise you won’t be a journalist and go writing about this afterwards.’
Parati, with its black-painted wooden shutters and whitewashed walls and coloured fishing boats, seemed little changed since the Portuguese had built it over three hundred years ago. It had that timeless, effortless air shared by any town in which the local authorities have had the good sense to ban traffic. We left the car by a large iron gate and walked through a rose garden to our hotel. Oliver and Rosie were sitting on a small veranda reading the newspapers. That evening, with John and Flávia, we all got very drunk as a result of a lengthy ‘tasting’ session in the local cachaça factory. We sat in a room smelling of wet wood and old tobacco drinking the firewater made from sugar cane. Outside in a courtyard a wild cat was chained to a cypress tree. When we stumbled out into the street, a horse-drawn cart was clattering on the cobblestones and an old tramp was sleeping by an oil lamp. Somewhere in the distance there was the sound of samba but it seemed far away. We zigzagged our way back towards the hotel.
John did not allow a hangover to disrupt our plans. The next day we climbed into his car and allowed him to take us to the ocean. ‘No one has driven along this road before us. It’s a secret path known only to hermits,’ he said. We drove along a dirt track with deep pot-holes and ditches on either side. When the track climbed steeply we had to get out and push the car. When the track dipped downwards the car seemed to lose control. It slid on the loose stones and sand until the next upward gradient. It was like riding on a toboggan.
Once we had reached the ocean, John took us walking for miles along a deserted coastline. On the way, we met Wilson Santos. He had long black hair and an untamed beard and deep satanic eyes. He reminded me of a photograph of Charles Manson, the American hippie, after he had been arrested for the mass murder of some of the Hollywood jet set. Wilson was lying on a hammock and, quite literally, contemplating his navel. His son, Joãozinho, a small boy with bleached blond hair, was playing with a group of chickens. Beyond them both was the wife and mother, Aspásia. She had spiky hair, and was very thin. She was sitting on a wooden box, peeling some bananas.
Wilson and Aspásia were psychoanalysts by training. ‘All that smoke and violence in São Paulo, no good, man, so get out, we just had to get out,’ said Aspásia. For a dollar a head she had invited us to a lunch of banana cakes, ‘seaweed soup’, and coconut milk. I sat staring at her hairy legs, remembering a story I’d been told once about Norman Mailer. The author had gone to his doctor one day in New York to ask his advice about how to dry out. He had been drinking a lot and this had begun to affect his powers of concentration. Mailer picked on Brazil and flew to São Paulo, the only city other than Rio that tempted his curiosity. On the first night there, he got completely drunk. The next day he woke up. Bleary eyed, he looked out of the hotel window and saw for the first time the polluted city with tall buildings. ‘Christ, it’s Chicago,’ he screamed. He took the next plane back to New York.
I asked Aspásia if she had ever read anything by Norman Mailer. ‘We have no need of books here,’ she said.
About two miles on from where Wilson and his family lived we found the most beautiful beach in Brazil. John couldn’t tell us how he’d found it in the first place. He just said, ‘That’s it, the most beautiful beach in Brazil.’ Down from the mountains the river had flowed and formed a clear-water lagoon behind the rocks; on the other side of these rocks, but enclosed by a further group of boulders, the waters of the ocean were similarly tamed. From the edge of the mountains, the vegetation leaned over the water of the first lagoon, and was reflected in pockets of dark shadow. There was a scarcely contained tension in the water with the river water pressing on the rocks and the waves of the sea occasionally gushing through the gaps. All around the white sand shimmered in sunlight.
From Parati, we drove back to Rio and caught a plane to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, the fifth largest city of Brazil, 1,700 kilometres further north. ‘You can’t understand Brazil, without going to Bahia,’ Aspásia had said. She had also recommended that we should accompany her to São Paulo. But I had been there during a brief work tour in 1981 and felt there was nothing new for me to discover. It was a city that I had identified with work: paulistas said that the people of Rio, the cariocas, were superficial and flippant and beach bums; the cariocas said that São Paulo stank of pollution and bankers making money and children dying of malnutrition. I found that paulistas took themselves much too seriously. Salvador was a town I had read about. I was anxious to discover if the reality matched up. ‘Salvador’s population is about 1,050,000. It was founded in 1549, and was till 1763 the capital of Brazil. Most of the 135 churches, the fortifications, and some other buildings date from the 17th and 18th centuries.’ That much I had read about in my guidebook. The Salvador I wanted to put to the test was the Salvador in which Dona Flor had been haunted by the erotic spirits of her late first husband, Vaidinho, and ‘where these and other acts of magic occur without startling anybody’.
Dona Flor’s creator, Jorge Amado, had described Salvador as a town where ‘sex ran rife’. Gilberto Freyre, the sociologist, had written about the ‘infectious cheerfulness of the Bahians … their grace, their spontaneity, their courtesy, their heart and contagious laughter. In Bahia one has the impression that every day is a feast day.’
We followed Dona Flor’s footsteps out of the church of São Francisco and into the square of Terreiro de Jesus. The urchins, the offspring of the whores of that district, were there much as Amado had described them. They were ‘scattered about the overflowing square, running between the legs of itinerant photographers, trying to swipe an orange, a lime, a tangerine, a hot plum, a sapoti from the vendors’ baskets’. They were beating out the syncopated rhythms of the samba on empty guava paste tins, making lewd remarks about Kidge’s ‘fine bum’. (The Brazilian word for a woman’s bottom is bunda. The word evokes something wholesome, and to many Brazilians, it is more important than any other part of the anatomy.)
There was a man holding a bucket with a snake round his neck. He was a street magician trying to get two urchins to help him make huge pieces of ‘magic bread’ disappear. The bread was shrivelled and mouldy, but the magician was applauded by a small crowd every time he stuffed the stale flour down the boys’ throats. In the bread went, roll after roll, like handkerchiefs into a hat. For about two minutes the boys swallowed every piece whole without uttering a sound. Then suddenly one of them began to choke. He coughed and spluttered and his eyes opened up like huge planets, and all the time the magician with his snake around his neck tried to force more bread down. The snake perked its head up and squirted a jet of green liquid all over his master’s arm, and, in that very instant, the boy was sick into the bucket. Everyone applauded.
In another corner of the square, by a convent, there was a group of half-naked blacks, frantically beating some drums with their hands. Their bodies were covered in sweat and their eyes reflected the frenzy of their beating, which was getting louder and louder as if working up to an explosive climax. In front of them another, larger crowd had gathered. They were all blacks except for a few young tourists. One blond and tall German seemed unable to maintain his balance in the surging crowd of dancing people. As he was pushed forward, a black woman leaned back and began rubbing herself against him. He tried to put his arms around her but as he did so he was suddenly jolted violently from the side. It was all a distraction which allowed a third protagonist to slice the money belt around the boy’s waist before merging back into the crowd. On the steps of the convent, a Swedish girl in short pants and sandals was dancing with two black youths. One of them was licking her back like an ice-cream; another was whispering in her ear.
Suddenly, Salvador struck me as rather nasty, like Brixton or Notting Hill at carnival time. The Salvador Amado and Freyre had written about was a tropical jungle of scented flowers and blazing colours; Amado’s characters were humorous, sensuous beings, their love play echoing a world that was both warm and exuberant. But the Salvador I now experienced seemed little more than the consequence of three hundred years of inequality and racial abuse. Freyre has written about the explosions of racial hatred and cultural earthquakes that have periodically shattered Brazil’s veneer of co-existence and compassion: cultural earthquakes ‘on the part of oppressed cultures bursting forth in order not to die of suffocation and breaking through the encrustations of the dominant culture that they might be able to breathe’. Such was the case with the negro movement of Bahia in 1835 in which the sons and grandsons of former slaves erupted into an orgy of messianic violence. There hadn’t been anything on such a scale since. But it was no coincidence that Salvador now had one of the highest crime rates in Brazil. Salvador’s carnival, unlike Rio’s, belonged to its people and was regarded as much too dangerous for outsiders. The only visible reminder of the last carnival when I arrived in Salvador was a boldly painted graffiti across the walls of the convent where the Swedish girl reclined. ‘Black Power’, it proclaimed.
There were many tourists in Salvador when we were there. They were mostly Argentines. Few of them tempted fate by crossing Terreiro de Jesus. Instead they sat in one of the numerous tower-block hotels along the road to the airport, or else in the Convento do Carmo, a former Carmelite convent which had been converted into a luxury hotel in the old quarter of town. In 1620, Portuguese and Spanish troops were billeted in the Convento do Carmo before battling with the Dutch in a war between Empires. Now the cells had been converted into bedrooms with TV, and the cloisters into a swimming pool and adjoining restaurant. We looked for the voluptuous mulattas whom Vaidinho, Dona Flor’s rakish husband, had spent the last hours of his life bedding and gambling with; we investigated the private alleyways that I had heard led to the spellworkers and voodoo centres of macumba, the smell of chicken’s blood and incense, and the altar of Oxóssi, one of the pagan gods worshipped by the Africans. But that year, the whores of Salvador’s red-light district were withered pathetic creatures – old women with running make-up and torn skirts, and their daughters – mostly drug addicts, the precursors of Brazil’s Aids epidemic. The only mulattas we saw were in a folklore show the local tourist board put up on alternate nights in a restaurant close to the convent. They danced a samba while their men did a ‘war dance’. The evening included a buffet of fifty Bahian dishes – a ‘sample of the typical food eaten by Bahians’, announced the menu. We sat in a restaurant – self-billed as the most important centre of Afro-Brazilian cooking in Brazil – chewing and burping our way through dishes I had seen no whore or urchin eating. One of the finest offerings was the acarajé. ‘It is made of beans (feijão-fradinho) grated on the stone, with a dressing of onions and salt. It is heated in a clay frying pan into which is poured a little dendê oil.’ There was a dish cooked in palm oil and manioc, a chicken tossed in peanut butter, turtle soup, rice pudding, tapioca, fried bananas … the banquet seemed endless. Dona Flor had taken to such cooking to get her mind off Vaidinho once her late husband began to haunt her. I felt Bahia was being packaged. So when the porter at the hotel came up one evening and asked me if I’d like to go and see some macumba, I told him we were booking out next morning.
I have no doubt that as we stuffed ourselves at the banquet, all the orixás or high priestesses of the occult had assembled to bury the spirit of Vaidinho that lurks in each one of us. ‘Lightning and thunder, whirlwind, steel against steel, and black blood …’ Oxumaré in the form of a huge snake, the goddess of the Sea, Iemanjá dressed all in blue, with her long hair of foam and crabs, and all the deities of Angola and the Congo. I was sure that devils and all those born on the wrong side of the bed covers were at that moment floating out to sea, just as Amado had written, along with their houses and mansions and that in the Terreiro de Jesus ‘fish were sprouting among the flowers and stars were ripening in the trees’. But as surely as it all existed, it was also out of sight, behind the scenes, held in reserve. It was pouring with rain as we left the folk show. A man in a raincoat with a loud Texas drawl went up to one of the mulattas and said, ‘Why, babe, you sure are beautiful.’
We caught a ferry to Itaparica, a small tropical island off the coast of Bahia. The guidebook said that Itaparica was the first stretch of land spotted by the Portuguese when they set out to discover Brazil. In Spain I had spent much of my life near Palos from where Columbus set off on his voyage to America, so I wanted to end this voyage here in Itaparica where the old world had linked up with the new. Like Luis Correa – the washed-up sailor and primogenitor of the Brazilian race – I settled with Kidge into a tree hut surrounded by palm trees and ocean. Our only neighbours were three parrots and a monkey who spent most of the day trying to imitate each other. Across the bay, we watched three fishermen punting silently from long dug-out canoes. There was also a group of young boys wading through the shallow water with giant octopuses dangling from the tips of primitive harpoons. The boys had long hair and were naked. They looked like hunters returning from a hard-fought battle. Then I got a message from London that the strike at my newspaper was over and we flew back to Buenos Aires.