The Permanent Erection
Ever since I heard my Uncle Lucho describe the magic and revelry of Carnaval in Rio when I was just a boy, I’ve dreamed of seeing it up close, and if possible from the inside, in flesh and blood. And now I have. At the age of sixty-two, with frequent attacks of dyspepsia and a lumbar hernia, I may not be in optimal shape to enjoy it, but the experience has been enlightening, and I declare that if all humanity could take part, there would be fewer wars and less prejudice, racism, ugliness, and sadness in the world, although probably more hunger, inequality, and madness and a cataclysmic rise in birthrates and AIDS.
How is the experience enlightening? In a number of senses, beginning with the philological. No one who has not felt the sizzle of the Sambodrome during the parade of the fourteen Samba Schools (forty-nine thousand participants, sixty-five thousand spectators) or been at some of the 250 public balls or hundreds of spontaneous street dances springing up around the city can even dream of the rich and multifarious meanings acquired by words that elsewhere are shadowed with a suspicion of vulgarity, like “tits” and “ass.” Here, they become the most splendid and generous terms in the language, each one a dizzying universe of variations on the subject of curves, sinuosities, consistencies, projections, tonalities, and granulations.
I cite these two examples so as not to speak in the abstract, but I could just as well conjure up any other organ or part of the human anatomy, since the scrap of cloth (the famous thong called “dental floss”) worn everywhere during Carnaval in Rio lets people reveal themselves with a confidence, glee, and freedom that I believed had disappeared ever since Christian morality replaced paganism and tried to shroud and condemn the human body in the name of modesty. From head to toe, belly button to armpits, elbow to shoulders and neck, the people flaunt their bodies with amazing confidence and pride, proving to the ignorant—and reminding the forgetful—that no corner of the marvelous physical architecture of the human being can’t be beautiful and a source of excitement and pleasure, requiring nothing like the fervor and reverence favored by tradition and romantic poetry with its careful descriptions of eyes, necks, hands, waists, and so on. Not the least of the marvels of Carnaval is the ascription of erotic appeal to body parts like fingernails and the Adam’s apple, seemingly anodyne extras in the game of love (“That menina has a lovely skull,” I heard one old man enthuse on Flamengo Beach) transformed by the rhythm, color, and contagious effervescence of the festivities, with everyone in a trancelike state of exhibitionism. It comes as no surprise, then, that the focus of the Samba School Caprichosos de Pilares this year was none other than the plastic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy, whose skill with the scalpel and rejuvenating genius have erased signs of aging on the faces and bodies of many beauties (female and male) of this frivolous era. Singing like a teenager on top of his float, Pitanguy himself, an immortal sixty-year-old whose presence and contortions drove the audience wild, brought up the rear of the Caprichosos parade.
When the euphoria, dancing, conviviality, songs, heat, and frenzy reach combustion point in the early-morning hours, the spectacle reveals what the great pagan celebrations of the past must have been like, especially the Bacchic revels, those Dionysian cult rituals with their copious libations intended to stifle reason and the survival instinct, their orgies and bloody sacrifices. Here, the blood doesn’t flow on the actual stage of the fiesta, but it surrounds it, lapping at its edges and leaving corpses in its wake (70 shot in the four days of Carnaval, which proves that Rio is a peace-loving city: in São Paulo the total was 240).
What does one death more or less matter in this mad explosion of multitudinous joy, in this performance that seems, with its separate spaces and scenery, designed to confirm Huizinga’s theories on the game-based evolution of culture and history, a performance in which for four days and four nights a whole city is disguised and transformed, giving up its worries and fears, prejudices and hopes, morals and beliefs, likes and dislikes? Taking on a whole new personality—that of the disguise they are wearing—the participants abandon themselves to revelry, excess, and outrageous behavior that they would never have permitted themselves the day before and won’t permit themselves tomorrow, when they recover their identities and once again become the desperate unemployed worker, the anxious secretary, the bureaucrat whose salary is shrinking every day because of growing inflation, the businessman overwhelmed by rising taxes, the professor who has been prevented from traveling abroad by the fall of the real, and the trade unionist who blames the crisis on the International Monetary Fund and its ultraliberal impositions.
Let us not forget that Carnaval comes this year in the middle of an economic crisis that has the international financial community biting its nails for fear of what might happen in Brazil. If the very strict fiscal adjustment program—which has allowed the Brazilian government, presided over by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to take out loans for the astronomical sum of four billion dollars—fails, the Brazilian collapse will ruin not just Brazil but the other Mercosur countries as well, and the shock waves of the catastrophe will rock the stock markets and economies of the whole planet, as much as or more than the drums of the Samba Schools shake the hips of the dancers from Bahia. Does anyone dwell on such gloomy trivialities at this time of happy uproar? Yes, a few wretched sociologists who shout themselves hoarse in the papers criticizing the supposed “alienation” of the Brazilian people. Their fellow citizens are not worried at all, of course; they howl with laughter at the crisis and poke fun at it, exorcising it in the grotesque puppets of their allegorical floats, which are cheered madly by the crowds. And so that no one may doubt the general consensus, this year the Samba Schools spent 20 percent more than last year on costumes and floats for the parade, and the authorities increased the budget for orchestras, fireworks, performances, and prizes by several million reals. Does this extravagance defy all reason and common sense? Of course it does. Because this is still an authentic carnival, a carnival in the ancient and primitive sense of the word, from a time when sense and reason were still rarities and men and women practiced potlatch and were essentially creatures of emotion, intuition, and instinct, their feelings on the surface.
The best explanation I’ve found for what is happening this week in Rio de Janeiro comes not from Nietzsche, with his vision of Dionysian man, or even from my anthropologist friend Roberto da Matta and his magnificent essay on Carnaval, but from a Russian literary critic who never set foot in Brazil and who struggled to live and teach in a remote corner of the Russian Steppes, where he was banished by the Soviet regime: Mikhail Bakhtin. Everything I’ve seen and heard this astonishing week in Rio seems a living illustration of the theory of popular culture he developed in his dazzling book on Rabelais. Yes, here, from the bowels of society comes that brazen, irreverent, fiercely sarcastic response to established patterns of morality and beauty, that vociferous negation of the social categories and borders that so often divide and stratify races, classes, and individuals, in a celebration that equalizes and mixes everyone, rich and poor, white and black, employee and employer, master and servant. Prejudice and distance are temporarily wiped out, and in an ellipsis of illusion and a fantasy land of unending sex and music the “backwards world” from the poem by José Agustín Goytisolo is established, where princesses are dark and street sweepers blond, beggars happy and millionaires miserable, ugly women beautiful and beautiful women hideous, day night and night day; where those “below” triumph over those “above” and impose their carnal freedom, their sweaty materialism, their insatiable appetites, and their exuberant vulgarity as the apotheosis of life; where the “fresh offerings” of flesh lauded by Rubén Darío are universally exalted as the most valuable of human aspirations.
By confining the Samba Schools parade to the Sambodrome—the project of a progressive sociologist, the late Darcy Ribeiro—the establishment more or less got control of Carnaval and made it subject to certain conventions, but on the street it hasn’t lost any of its insolent and rebellious roots or its anarchic aura, not just in the poor neighborhoods but also in the more proper ones. One night on the main street of very bourgeois Ipanema, for instance, I ran into a company of a thousand or fifteen hundred transvestites, boys and full-grown men, who, dressed as women or semi-naked, frenetically danced the samba behind a truck carrying a band and kissed, embraced, and practically made love before their amused, indifferent, or enthusiastic neighbors, who bantered with them from windows, applauded, and threw confetti and streamers.
The protagonists of Carnaval are the human body, as I have already said, and the music—enveloping, imperious, joyful, blind—in which it thrives and trumpets its desires. But at dawn, what prevails and pervades the milky morning—over and above the designer perfumes, expensive lotions, sweat, smells of cooking and alcohol—is the thick aroma of semen, of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of orgasms, masculine, feminine, precocious or venerable, slow or quick, vaginal or rectal, oral or manual or mental, a dense vapor of animal satisfaction that fills the air and is breathed in by the dazed, semiconscious Carnaval-goers, who, in the final moments of revelry, return to their lairs or collapse in parks and on paths for a brief rest, after which they’ll be restored and ready to samba some more.
The conservatives can sleep easy: so long as Carnaval exists, there will be no social revolution in Brazil. Any plans to control the libido of its fast-growing population, already nearing 170 million, will be futile. President Cardoso will sweat blood and tears trying to impose austerity and economic discipline on the nation that elected him. And if the hell that Catholics believe in really exists, there will surely be more Brazilians there than people from every other country in the world combined (which comes as a relief for an unredeemed sinner like the author of these pages). But so long as Carnaval exists in Rio, those who have lived it or who remember it or even just imagine it will know a life better than the rubbish it usually is, a life that, for a few days—as Uncle Lucho swore—attains the heights of dreams and meshes with the magic of fiction.