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.

Preserving the status unequal.

Sometimes I feel a little bit Marxist about Brazil, even though I’m not entirely sure what that means and haven’t read Das Kapital.  However, working on the possibly mistaken assumption that a Marxist critique entails laying bare the economic and social forces which define and oppress individuals, here is a brief account of why Brazil really pisses me off at times.

First of all, the cleaning products don’t clean very well. This may not sound like much, but someone once suggested to me that the reason for keeping these products so shitty is the assumption that the serving classes don’t deserve any better. Indeed, the fact that they require the people who use them to work harder simply to achieve the same results is, according to this hypothesis, an advantage, since it helps to keep them ‘in their place’.

I would never have believed this if I hadn’t recently found an electric vacuum broom (pictured) for sale in an electronics shop.

This seems to me to epitomise the extent of Brazil’s attachment to the preservation of the status quo, or status unequal. Having picked one of these devices up, I can testify that it is excessively heavy and almost certainly (due to the necessity of hefting it up and down) less efficient than similarly priced alternatives such as a vacuum roller or a cheap vacuum cleaner. The only conceivable reason for choosing this device, then, is that it corresponds with the accepted iconography of cleaning in this country. That is to say, people at every level expect this section of society to do hard menial work, and to accept the signifiers of this hard menial work with pathetic gratitude, because that is what ‘they’ are born to and deserve. The fact that many of the people who do this work seem to have no expectation beyond this is heartbreaking, as is the inability of educated, wealthy people to prevent themselves from perpetuating such profound inequality.

Now, I have had occasion in the past to tease Eliana, our cleaning lady, on twitter. The story of how we came to have a cleaning lady is simple: I tried to do it myself, but was rubbish; I tried to clean the floor with wax and my wife came home to find me rocking back and forth amid the carnage. However, to return to Eliana, my teasing of her is only done on the basis that I both respect and like her, and that she knows she can tease me back, as equals, which she frequently does. I also flatter myself to think that our flat provides her with a pleasantly different environment from those in which she normally works, one in which she can be herself and have a laugh. Certainly she’s told me that of all the places where she works, ours is her favourite, and I really appreciate her saying this, since it implies that she doesn't just regard me as a pushover gringo around whom she can run circles of ever-increasing work avoidance. I also remember Eliana once telling me that she only does this extra cleaning work (her main source of income being to clean at my wife’s school) in order to save enough money so that her daughter won't have to use ‘these’ (she gestured at this point to the broom and dustpan she was holding) when she grows up.

My point is that Eliana is manifestly a person with the same concerns and instincts as me. She believes in social justice. She sees the problems in her situations and how they derive from the way her country is organised. She wants to give her daughter a better future than her own. And she is political - she voted for Dilma and hopes that the country’s first female president will improve conditions both for the poor and women. However, the society she lives in does not seem inclined to listen to the voice of Eliana, or the millions like her. Now, armchair socialists such as myself, who go on the occasional protest march and salve our consciences with direct debits to the third world, don’t often have to listen to the voices of real people who suffer and struggle and carry on working without complaint. The country I am from almost unilaterally affords its population enough comfort to forget what true poverty is, or the fact that it still festers even now in neglected margins and up forgotten lanes. We are content to take our vitamins and worry about our next pay rise and talk in benign generalities about the invisible, inaudible and primarily hypothetical mass of suffering humanity which has less than we do. So it's a radical shock to meet people who are actually living through this stuff and yet who feel, with acuteness and urgency, the desire for a better system.

Of course, Eliana would be scandalised to hear herself described as poor. She is more fortunate than many, and grateful for what she has. But she is nonetheless the product of Brazilian inequality, and it is in the received behaviours of her socio-economic milieu which these differences become visible. For example, she won’t use a mop and bucket to clean our floor, preferring instead to use a gigantic squeegee wiper with floor cloths precariously pinned to it. I used to work in a hotel where one of my jobs was mopping and waxing the dance floor, and so I speak from some experience when I say that using a mop is better than her system (which I’ve also tried). As with the vacuum broom, Eliana’s squeegee makes you work harder for less results. Another telling moment came last week when we had some work being done upstairs. As a result, Eliana couldn’t clean up there, and she was frustrated that she was going to have to leave her work undone. I told her it was OK, I’d do it after everyone had gone. Eliana looked worried, ‘But Matt,’ she said with timorous voice, ‘do you know how to clean?’*

As I implied above, the blame for situations like this cannot entirely be laid at the door of those who benefit from the current system; after all, it is not an easy process to renounce the particular behaviours which society has instilled in you according to the status dictated by your birth, etc. No, the responsibility for reducing the poverty gap, for the benefit of all parties, must ultimately lie with the government: it is their job to create the better education and fairer economic practices which will extend opportunity throughout society. That caveat in place, however, it must also be said that we have encountered portions of the upper and middle classes who seem only too happy to reinforce this unfair system via some fairly unforgivable, and surprisingly unapologetic, demonstrations of prejudice. This isn’t the UK, remember, where people conceal their unsavoury beliefs beneath a correct façade of received opinion until reassured that they're in the right sort of company or have taken too much drink. We have heard of friends being told not to date black men because ‘we’ don’t do that sort of thing, and seen the naked assumptions made in bars and offices and shops against anyone with a darker skin or the look of poverty about them, the wrong clothes, the cheap make-up. We are also occasionally treated to the unlikely sight of well-heeled women attended by their chauffeurs as they go shopping down the São Paulo equivalent of Jermyn Street for their functionaries’ uniforms. This highly visible demarcation of the serving and served has surely not been seen in Britain since the Second World War, and it’s deeply uncomfortable to be around the exercise of such entitlement.

Finally, I want to mention elevators, because that’s always the best way to end a polemic. Specifically, most condos in Brazil have two elevators, one service elevator and one regular elevator. Until fairly recently these elevators were segregated so that all the cleaning staff had to travel in the shitty elevator (bear in mind that most flats have a service toilet, and some also have a service entrance and a maid’s sleeping palette for live-in servitude). However, in the eighties or nineties, a law came into effect which, in theory, forbade this segregation. Nowadays maids and service staff can use the main elevator (which has a mirror, and is therefore essential for Eliana, who is incredibly vain) – only many of them won’t. A lot of people who’ve come up to our flat delivering stuff or whatever insist on using the other lift when they leave.

For a long time, I thought this was just reflexively adopted humility, a hangover from the days of segregation. But when a guy came over to help us with our floor last week, he refused to take the posher elevator. I told him that he should, it was OK, but he said ‘No, no, in this building they don’t like it.’ This faced me with another uncomfortable truth: that the doormen in our building are enforcing a segregation which is not only unjust but illegal. You might be forgiven for thinking that a porter – like a waiter or a receptionist – might feel a natural empathy and desire to emancipate people who have only a little less than themselves. But it seems that quite the opposite is true: in a reversal of all our liberal humanist expectations, the allegiance of these groups is directed upwards, to the people whose fortunes they defend, maintain and covet. This in turn bears out the unsavoury truth that in an unjust society every social strata above the lowest is content and perhaps even relieved to have someone to oppress and thereby vindicate the perception of their own innate superiority. It also means that the cleaning ladies who take the main elevator are facing down prejudice on a daily basis, which is very brave, but also very sad, because they simply shouldn’t have to.

I try and imagine their lives sometimes, from my rich man’s ghetto, when I pass the crowds at the bus stops in a taxi or the aqueous underwater faces of people crammed onto night buses. I try and imagine them heading out to the far peripheries of the city, where the favelas are, those glowing nests of light wavering on the horizon, the hills an imagined darkness behind. I don’t like how it makes me feel. I don’t like to think of these people being dismissed from the unforgivable luxury of our houses and apartments, making the long and thankless journey out to where the roads are potholed and everything in the shops is cheap, like ghosts absolved from our consciences, vanishing into a world it is too convenient to forget. 

*Actually, Eliana said, ‘But Sir Matt, do you know how to clean?’, “Sir Matt” being what she calls me. I rather like the noble ring it has to it, and have taken to calling her Dona Eliana in return, so we sound like a couple of extras from Don Quixote.)

Keep it simple, keep it safe.

On first impressions, the breezy good cheer of most Brazilians seems at best misplaced and at worst mildly dangerous. By this, I mean that you actually worry for their mental health. Surely their reserves of optimism will be exhausted, you think, by contending with the daily round of insane driving, broken and piss-raddled pavements, staggeringly inane bureaucracy, painfully obvious inequality and thoroughly inedible snacks. Then, when they get home of an evening, they must also deal with the improbable laws of Brazilian physics whereby water either comes out of the tap too fast or not at all, a cupboard either won’t close or slams shut on your fingers and a wardrobe door either swings open without you touching it or falls off its hinges if you try and repair it (these examples are all drawn from personal experience).

The funny thing is, though, that Brazilians don’t lose their patience. They just keep on smiling. Worst of all, you even find yourself starting to agree with them; perhaps this or that irritation really isn’t worth bothering about. This is a pretty terrifying inversion of the natural order for an Englishman, because optimism, however small-scale and innocent seeming, threatens to undermine the perpetual whinging which is the cornerstone of our national identity. We whinged our way through Agincourt and Waterloo, we whinged our way through the Blitz, and there can be few who doubt that the Christian Martyrs whinged their way to the scaffold. Our empire, brief and bloody as it was, was an empire built on complaint and the consumption of hot, milky beverages. How, then, forsake it?

As it turns out, it’s really not that difficult. All you have to do is get up on Saturday morning, wander through the quiet sun splashed streets to your favourite café, order a pão na chapa (a bread roll slathered with butter and squished on the hotplate), watermelon juice and açai na tigela and break your fast in the most delicious and leisurely fashion as you watch the traders at the Saturday market chat and drink coffee and vaguely attend to setting up their stalls. This, then, is the perfect spot to reflect on why it is that Brazilians remain, in spite of enough irritations to unseat the reason of most Europeans, so sanguine.

The fact of the matter is that Brazilians actually like themselves – I know, I know: so weird. I’m not saying they’re blind to the faults of their country. But, on balance, they still come out in favour of it. They think it has the best beaches, the most beautiful women, the greatest football teams, the strongest cocktails, the dancingest samba and the wisest attitude towards the unsightly problem of work (the latter being summed up as ‘all in good time’). An indirect consequence of this nationalism is that Brazilians also seem inclined to like each other, and to tolerate each other’s foibles – hence the inability of the cupboards, plumbing and pavements to exercise them. Another decided benefit of this ability to like themselves is that it reduces their perception of lack: even the well-travelled and wealthy who have seen the bright lights and alluring plumbing of other countries don’t seem to spend as much time as we do pining after the next elusive, unattainable pleasure. 

This is why Brazilian tastes can seem narrow and repetitive to foreign eyes; they are content with a limited palate – with their corner cafés and bakeries, their caipirinhas and samba, their rituals of feijoada and churrascaria. The cafés are a particularly illustrative example of this blithe disposition. These little places are open daily from seven in the morning until 11 or 12 at night, and they’re always busy, with people popping in to buy cigarettes or ice cream or an água de coco, or sitting down to a meal or a snack. The secret of their popularity is that they offer good food at affordable prices. The menu is limited, and the same items are offered at nearly every one (which is why the waiters and waitresses generally don’t offer you a menu but expect you to know what you want).

Bearing in mind the simplicity and economy of these places, you might expect them to appeal only to those with less money. But that’s not the case. You see all kinds mixing in there: rich, perfumed women with faces like relief maps of the Andes; labourers in dust-stained jeans and flip-flops; businesspeople; a shy policeman in his bulletproof vest; rowdy students and school kids, old men in pressed shirts and slacks.

The cross-cultural appeal of these cafés says something about Brazilians. First and foremost, it shows that they are, at least on a cultural level, inherently resistant to globalisation. Yes, they do have McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, and they enjoy them. But they also appropriate and edit these global icons to suit their tastes – and the corporations are canny enough to allow this to happen. And yet, if you ever tried to take away from them their uniquely Brazilian pleasures – the feijoadas and churrascarias, corner cafés and bakeries –, you would have a revolution on your hands. That’s because these places and pastimes aren’t merely signifiers of national identity, they’re also symbols of what makes this nation special – its diversity, its lack of pretension and, above all, its faith in equality.

Perhaps Brazil is not as eclectic in its tastes as London or New York. But sometimes less choice is liberating. Provided the food is fresh and delicious, what have we to complain about, what have we to yearn after? On a broader level, Brazilian society is enriched by its relaxed and forgiving self-perception and, on the basis of a very rough quantitative assessment, people of broadly similar economic and social background are happier than their counterparts in the UK. And that can’t be bad.

Questions of Travel.

I never heard of Elizabeth Bishop until this morning, when I listened to Andrew Motion's brilliant essay on her poem 'Questions of Travel' in his series The Path and The Poem. I wanted to paste it up here because it's the best poem about Brazil I've yet read. It captures absolutely the simultaneously enchanting and frustrating irregularities of the lifestyle (e.g. the discordant clogs) and the country's mind-bending natural beauty (the cloud-swaddled mountains and waterfalls remind me of approaching Ilha Grande by boat, during an afternoon storm, and the precise duration of a summer deluge is spot on; we are just now entering the season when you can almost set your watch by them). I also like her open, unanswered questions about why we succumb to the longing for other places (the programme reveals that the poet lived a determinedly itinerant life), and whether travel constitutes an a priori virtue or a form of escape. I also relished Motion's point about the poem espousing a view of the imagination as a positive force which requires mediation or correspondence with lived experience, with the mundane matter of existence; seen in the right way, i.e. with the eyes of the imagination, the mute phenomena are revealed as a wellspring of wonder and, as Motion puts it, 'a proof of life'. This reminds me of Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford' and another wonderful poem, whose title I can't remember now (how I miss my books, entombed in a shed near Ipswich!), which somehow manages to find a harmony between his dream of 'a bue Cycladic dawn' and the soap suds in his Portrush sink. I also think that the likening of fireflies to bubbles in champagne, from another poem by Bishop, is incredibly exciting. Anyway, here's the poem with, below it, a link to Motion's radio essay (which will be taken down in six days and which does a much better job of describing the poem).

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

--A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

--Never to have studied history in

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

--And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

Andrew Motion Essay from The Path and the Poem

http://bbc.in/c5kSIR

Photo Essay.

To offset yesterday's ridiculously long entry, here’s a text-light ramble based on some of the weirder things I've seen round Sao Paulo of late. Sorry for the picture quality – my phone is absolute dog droppings.

First things first, here’s a photo from our friend’s balcony taken just before our joint birthday/housewarming party.

She’s up on the 18^th floor and the view below is of the close-packed mausoleums which make up the Necropolo de Sao Paulo. Each mausoleum extends downwards about thirty feet with three or four tiers for coffins; space is a premium here in SP, so you build upwards for the living and downwards for the dead. I once saw some unspecified event taking place there at night from up on this balcony, some vigil or internment by candlelight, the flickering light of which was swamped within the hundreds of metres of darkness and tombs stretching off in every direction; it made me feel like getting out my Cure albums. Behind the cemetery you can see Vila Madalena sloping upwards to the horizon. If stared at for long enough, this view starts to feel like that bit in Inception where the street slowly curves up and tilts over your head. At least, it does for me.

In the foreground is a can of Devassa beer, with its current ad campaign offering the chance for four lucky young men (I'm not being sexist here - that's what the copy specifies) to go to L.A. and meet Paris Hilton if they dial the number and hear her voice; losers only hear their dignity sobbing and self-harming at the other end. Employing Paris Hilton for this campaign is a wonderfully backhanded compliment because ‘devassa’ is slang for ‘slapper’ and the strapline for the beer is ‘bem loura’, which translates as ‘well blond’, with the derogatory double meaning present in the original language. Thus, in addition to her numerous high-profile campaigns on the international stage for moral decency and the public good (which include taking legal action to allow public distribution of her sex tape only on the condition that she received a percentage of the profits), Ms. Hilton can also congratulate herself for striking a blow for feminism right here in Brazil. 

Moving on, the next shot is of a wedding dress shop near where we live. They routinely feature in their windows the nastiest wedding dresses my wife or I have ever seen. One had a v-shaped décolletage (I know this word because I am a pervert) which plunged down all the way to the navel. Another presented a woman holding a bouquet of brown and pink flowers roughly the same shape, size and density as a football, which may have been because it was the World Cup at the time.

The dress featured here attracted our attention not simply because of the dress (though it is lovely), but because of the mannequin’s suspiciously powerful arms and the wonderful way the dresser has made the mannequin look completely gormless. You are in love. She’s your fiancé. It’s OK, you don't need to deny it. I love her too.

Here is a photo of another window display, this time of a sex shop down our street.

I don’t want you to think that we live in Sodom and Gomorrah, though. It’s actually very posh where we live. I mean, this shop is actually opposite a very popular children’s nursery, so you can rest assured that it’s a thoroughly wholesome area. Incidentally, this is by far the least shocking item in the window, so I don’t know how parents explain it to their kids. Presumably they say it’s a fancy dress shop for mummies and daddies and then bundle them into the car as quickly as possible before they can ask any more questions/start screaming at the lady in the crotchless nurse's uniform. Anyway, I know that the moment you finish reading this you'll all be pestering me to place an order on your behalf for your very own thong + bow tie + Mickey Mouse ears combo, but can I please ask that you BE PATIENT: the demand for this item is off the hook. I’ve been going in there everyday for the past six weeks to see if mine's arrived, but they just keep giving me that regretful, slow head-shake like they did when J. R. Hartley went into that bookshop to ask if they had a copy of Fly-Fishing by J.R. Hartley. (He was such an egomaniac, though, right? I mean, browse some other books or something while you're in there. I hear they publish new books all the time - you should check them out.)

But I digress. The next photo is from a posh supermarket, showing that it’s not all squalor in my life: the ratio of squalor to inexplicable is in fact steady at around 90% to 10%. 

So, this is a box of chocolates. The chocolate is called ‘Language of the Cat’. Assuming that the title alone might not be enough to tempt you, the designer has kindly photoshopped the head of a stuffed kitten onto the cover. Because the lady loves stuffed kittens.

Finally, because I like to end on a note of mystery like I’m a sort of modern Count of Monte Cristo, here is a photo of a storm drain. Faintly arousing, no?