Night Bus To Juréia

For the first few miles you weave down enclosed streets past smoked glass offices and busy cafés, large old houses converted into medical centres or ad agencies, expensive car dealerships in modernistic chromium showrooms, sprinklers turning over switchgrass lawns. Then you pass out onto Marginal: three lanes of traffic droning endlessly on either side of the Pinheiros river, a murky brown god hemmed between concrete walls. Beside the road, behind sagging wire fencing, loom the skeleton of a disused rollercoaster and last year’s carnival floats, the papier maché faces falling away to reveal the twisted frames underneath.

Now the city’s hinterland opens up before you: the low tenement housing sprouting satellite dishes and lines of laundry, the open-fronted bars, the castellated compounds of the love motels which cater for the truck drivers and homeward office workers. In the distance high rises float on the horizon like mirages, images from another world; here it is only piles of tyres or stacks of granite or swimming pools propped on their sides which reach towards the sun; here the favelas start to show, crazed mosaics of shape and colour, scavenged materials and dirt roads. Outside on the embankments, kids play beneath images of beautiful women in lingerie and men with white teeth in surf gear, placed there to infiltrate the dreams of the never-ending stream of moneyed traffic which passes by and never stops for them.

You must have fallen asleep. The jungle bored you, its impenetrable barrier of trees, purple-headed barriguda and cassava and Brazilian sassafras; the sad sight of men by the side of the road sheltering under tarpaulin, selling bunches of bananas or corn cobs or manioc root brought back from the waiting jungle. Now twilight is falling and you are approaching the first of the beach-ward towns. It’s a poor place, a rat-run of dusty streets. The shops are little more than stalls: knife sharpeners and key cutters, bags of concrete and toilet seats, hairdressers and discount clothes; all open to the street, all united in squalor. A man delivers giant brass collars from a motorbike. A kid pushes himself along on his bicycle, steel pins in his shin and his crutch grasped in his free hand. Fat women shout outside a bar. A gaudy sign offers express English courses, promising a ticket away from here.

Meanwhile the jungle waits on the edge of town to reclaim this outpost for its own; it has already overtaken the stained concrete shells of empty houses and abandoned chapels, some petrol pumps and street signs. As you leave it behind, the last thing you see is a girl in a truck-stop, bored, staring after the cars and air-conditioned coaches of the rich, wondering if she’ll ever escape the leering fat truck drivers, the endless nights, the cold eyes of older women.

Once darkness falls completely the roadside kiosks light up like toy castles, selling beer and cigarettes, soap and matches, paraffin and plastic toys from China. On a deserted stretch of road a couple sit on the wall beside a concrete bus shelter, she in his lap, the jungle silent and massive behind them. Their bus won’t arrive for hours. They’ve got absolutely nothing. They’re the most beautiful couple in the world.

When you arrive at your destination, you drink and swim and eat with the others, then walk down to the beach. The stars tremble and the Milky Way is a hot spray of weltering light. Frogs baritone-burp and cicadas bow their music to the waiting universe. You stand there half-drunk in the dark, the warm seawater on your feet. Phosphorescence lines the breaking waves and shimmers when you move your feet, so it seems that the horizon itself has been effaced; there is no up or down now, stars above and stars below, and you floating lost among them. Far out to sea a storm unfolds, the lightning among the clouds looks like the voice of God.