Financial Times, 22 November 2008
Mid-November . . . so it’s spring, or it is in Brazil, which meant that that’s where I had to be to get out of the way of autumn in New York: pumpkins, the dirge-like descent of leaves, a lot of suburban happy talk about crisp weather when I’m still lamenting the departure of uncrisp summer, the time of sweaty rot that’s my idea of perfect climate. And it was just possible I’d said all I could ever say (for a while, at least) about Barack Obama, so time to change the subject and talk to 800 Brazilians about Picasso and Goya for a change. Well, they had asked for it.
‘They’ were the benevolent patrons of a university seminar in Porto Alegre, right on the southern border with Argentina and Uruguay, called ‘Boundaries of Thought’, across which, I assumed, one was invited to stride. Camille Paglia, a boundary-crosser if ever there was one, had been there last year talking about sex in art – for two-and-a-half hours, the sponsors said. They looked at me earnestly as they said it and winced, I thought, at that much sex from Professor Paglia. But my subject was calamity and an hour of that seemed more than enough.
I had been to Brazil ten years before to promote the translation of Landscape and Memory and was easily infatuated. Glimpses of heaven and hell opened up: tall women glided on the street rather than walked, as if they were tuning up their samba moves; herons and egrets nested amid sewage and detergent scum on the canal between the airport and São Paulo; the innocent intensity of journalists wanting to be told the history of a free press in Britain when they were still cagey about liberating theirs after the military dictatorship; being trapped happily in the embrace of an immense hulk of a man, glittering with sequins, who grinned and said: ‘I am Roberto, king of the favela, now you must come and talk to us . . .’
‘Sim!’ I said, ‘yes!’, while my publisher, a sweet but fretful soul, swung his head from side to side while rolling his eyes (no small feat even for a Brazilian), which I gathered was a no. Despondent, Roberto planted a juicy kiss full on my mouth, which was a first for a book tour, but did nothing to alter the publisher’s irrevocable ban. In Rio, at Ipanema, long-legged kids booted footballs on the beach while others demanded money when you parked the car, promising to ‘look after it’ – the alternative being not worth thinking about.
Oh, yes, I love Brazil, but Porto Alegre was different: less tropical; more, sigh, European. There is much talk about the Germans and the Italians who came there, and on to the plane came a pack of the former, drunk at noon; planting themselves wherever seats seemed to beckon, despising mere boarding-pass seat assignment; mighty shouts of ‘Markus’ and ‘Thomas’ roaring down the aisles for no particular reason anyone could make out except as an expression of Kameradschaft in the southern hemisphere. The plane skirted the Atlantic coast, breakers curling below while the flight attendants pretended to have run out of beer.
Porto Alegre is an instantly appealing place, foaming with blue jacaranda blossoms, merry with sidewalk cafés set between nineteenth-century Brazilian town houses, their gables as curly as a gaucho’s whiskers with snazzy touches of crimson or gold paint. It was Sunday, which meant, even in the Sheraton, that feijoada was on; a gamut of darkly stewed meats together with the manioc farofa I remember loving on that first trip and did again: it’s fluffy and gritty at the same time, which doesn’t sound enticing, but somehow is. In the park, a boy pulled out his guitar and sang samba to impress, while a circle of capoeira devotees went through their clambering motions to a dull drum beat.
A book fair was in swing; not the kind boasting marquee events with the usual suspects, but a pretty, shady plaza laid out with fifty or so stalls, each the size of a bouquiniste, displaying the wares of local publishers and booksellers. The organisers were proud of the egalitarian principle, and it was astonishing in the age when the death of print is prematurely announced to find a smallish Brazilian city where little presses seemed to be around every corner. Charles Kiefer, the handsome professor with whom we had lunch, walked us over to one of the stalls and showed us the thirty-odd volumes that collected the fiction of his students. Another year, another volume, and the professor couldn’t have been happier. If Brazilian fiction were ever in danger, it wouldn’t be his fault. Myself, I was reading The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, novellas by the Colombian author Alvaro Mutis so richly, spectacularly, sensually wondrous that you hate him for ever stopping. ‘Ah,’ said Kiefer, ‘so good’, as if he had filled his mouth with fine wine, and then, sighing a little, thought I might, in that case, enjoy a small exhibition over at the local bank devoted to Gilberto Freyre. Freyre! I hadn’t thought about him for forty-odd years: a poet among historians; a romancer of the Brazilian difference: slavery and the Casa Grande, somehow made less brutal by miscegenation; the cradle of a mixed-blood culture. Oh sure. Samba slavery. Doesn’t count. I had wised up to the fantasy a long time ago, but there was, nonetheless, something wickedly beautiful about Freyre’s dreamy writing, and the show beneath the stained-glass ceiling advertising ‘Prudence’, ‘Enterprise’ and such like unerringly harvested the spell. Displays of Freyre’s tropically coloured paintings were set above trays of sand; peeling cabinets with drawers were opened to reveal faded banquet menus, dog-eared photographs and diary entries. You entered the whole thing through the skirts of a giant carnival mannequin. Another Brazilian seduction; and I could feel my portion of northern scepticism draining away into the gentle afternoon.
The lecture was delivered: a generously receptive 800, most of whom seemed to want to ask questions, and most of them did. Eventually our hosts ushered us off to an upscale French restaurant where it would have been churlish to turn down the foie gras. It wasn’t until our last night in São Paulo that we were taken, by Marcello Dantas, the designer of many of Brazil’s most brilliant museums and exhibitions, to a place that boasted serious native cooking: Amazon fish (‘neither salt nor freshwater,’ said Dantas, beaming, ‘just packed with big river nutrients’); fresh hearts of palm, warm and silky on the tongue; stupendously subtle banana ice cream (a contradiction in terms, but go figure). The place is called Brasil a Gosto. It’s better than anywhere in London.
If you fly in to São Paulo from another Brazilian city, you’ll land (if you use the local airport) in a startling place: bristling with tower blocks set close and white like the model for Blade Runner; a city 120 kilometres across; piled up favela slums; stunning fashion by designers such as Rosa Cha and Gloria Coelho, who does things with sequins that I can’t begin to explain in the Financial Times. And yet, this wild, teeming antheap of a place has no billboards. The mayor, Gilberto Kassab, a Syrian-Paulista, decided they were ‘visual pollution’ and gave owners thirty days to get rid of them. The fine for failing to do so was 10,000 reals (about £2,500) a day. So the place throbs along beneath its pall of traffic fumes; just eleven million Paulistas trying to get to the end of the week. A place for heroes.
On the way back to New York, my nose in Alvaro Mutis’s journeyings of Maqroll the Lookout, I’d look out myself to the fading shoreline of the tropic forest and feel wistful. Brazil is one of the places where your nerve-endings work overtime and you never want them to stop their dancing little hum and buzz.
Back in the Hudson Valley, everything decelerated. The farmers’ market at the local train station was loaded with good stuff. People bustled autumnally, chirpy with the delight of a fine new president.