Chasing Bohemia (3 page)

Carina was even shorter than me, and the reception desk at the Rio Hostel was enormous. Eventually a pair of friendly brown eyes popped up above the ledge.

‘Hi,' she said in a high voice. ‘You must be Carmen.'

She got to her feet, adding another ten centimetres to her height. ‘We were expecting you earlier,' she said with a friendly smile. She was wearing a loud strapless candy-striped tube dress, and brightly coloured jewellery swung from her ears and around her neck.

‘I came …' I began apologetically, but she interrupted me with a cock of her head.

‘… but you went out and got laid, right?'

I felt an Anglo-Saxon bristle work its way up my spine, but Carina just giggled. She was only being friendly. It was a joke. That always happened at the start of any trip. It took at least three days to shake off that English frigidity.

‘Yeah, something like that,' I mumbled, and she disappeared underneath the ledge again, saying as she did, ‘Well, don't worry. Everyone disappears in Rio de Janeiro at some stage or another.'

She allocated me a bed and told me to get some sleep. As I reached the dormitory door, she called me back.

‘By the way, how long are you staying?'

‘Just a few days,' I replied. ‘I'm travelling.'

‘Famous last words,' she said with raised eyebrows and a mischievous smile.

The room was dark when I entered, so I dumped my things on the floor, turned on the fan, and went to sleep.

I didn't wake up until two the following morning when a tall, thin, dark-haired woman in the top bunk opposite turned on the light and started reading a book, her leg dangling lazily over the side. Behind the leg, I could make out a sign stuck to the mirror scrawled in pen that read: ‘
Could SOME guests please not treate the hostel if it were there own house. Chiara that means YOU!'

The girl in the bed opposite me turned in her bed and grumbled, ‘It's two in the morning. You could read outside.'

The dark-haired woman just shrugged and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing in bed in Rio de Janeiro at this time anyway?'

–2–

Copacabana

Too good to be true.

–
JOHN UPDIKE
on Rio

T
he truth is that I didn't really like Rio when I first arrived. It was partly Rio, but it was mostly me. After ten years of working in the travel industry, compiling enthusiastic texts for glossy brochures or hunting down new, hidden destinations to expose even the most exotic of places had started blurring into a confusion of repetitive adjectives: …
relax on white pristine beaches, wander through quaint villages steeped in history, not to mention meet the charming friendly locals
… blah, blah. In the fast-fading glamour of the travel industry, my love of travel had very nearly imploded. I was going to South America because it was travel, and that's what I did. It was the last continent on earth I hadn't done. Like half of Australian under-thirty-five-year-olds, I'd lived in a commune in London, hitched through Europe on $10 a day, lost myself in India, bummed out in South-East Asia, and been ripped off in the Middle East. By the time I got to Rio de Janeiro, I was cynical as hell.

When I woke late the next day, Carina invited me to share breakfast,
café da manha
, together in the breakfast room. She had swapped her tube dress for a bright pink t-shirt with a print of Shiva on the front. She was truly tiny — no doubt the reason her business partner called her ‘the Midget' — and a beautiful woman with long, wavy brown hair and sparkling coffee-coloured eyes. She was very well groomed, like Latin American woman always seemed to be, and lounged easily beside me on cushions on the floor.

We exchanged a few obligatory details about ourselves, and she told me that she had set up the hostel on her own after working in the five-star hotel market for several years. Her friends said she was crazy, that Santa Teresa was dangerous, but she didn't care. ‘I would rather get robbed in Santa than go back to working for other people,' she said, and laughed lightly.

At the start I thought she was younger than me, due to her supple, unlined olive skin; but, as it turned out, she was a year older. She was of Lebanese ancestry, presumably part of the Arab diaspora that had flooded into the Americas between the world wars.

‘Is there a large community of Arabic people in Brazil? Do you have a Muslim community here also?' I asked.

‘I don't know,' she admitted apologetically. ‘My grandfather did not like to talk about Lebanon …'

She looked away, sucked in her lips, and let a polite moment pass before brightening up and moving swiftly on to a topic that would surely be of more interest to both of us than the tired minutiae of multiculturalism. The topic that, I was to soon discover, the good people of Rio de Janeiro — at any age, of any orientation, and of any religious persuasion — never ever tire of discussing, with anyone. Sex, of course.

‘So, tell me,' she asked eagerly, ‘Are Australian men really good in bed?
Is
what they say about them untrue?'

As I struggled with the quantum leap from Arab communities in Brazil to the standard of Australian men in bed, torn between staying silent and seeming prudish to the flamboyant Brazilian, or answering and giving too much of myself away, Carina tapped her foot impatiently.

‘I don't know, really,' I eventually began with an evasive tone. ‘Maybe … I've had a lot of foreign boyfriends.'

‘Well, from my limited experience, which is only three,' Carina dragged the conversation along, ‘they were terrible. They were just like, bluuurghhhh …' This last sound was accompanied by an expansive slump of her shoulders. I swallowed a gulp of my coffee with an instinctive splutter of offence.

‘So many from such a small country!' I exclaimed, a rare patriotism rising within me. ‘But, I mean, who are my dear countrymen's competition? From which luminous nation is your main sample-base derived?'

‘Luminous sample …
what
?'

‘I mean, where do your lovers mostly come from?'

Then came the devastating answer. ‘England.'

The conversation plundered on, hewing and smiting male egos from Reykjavik to the Rio Negro, pillaging a veritable United Nations of lovers, clearly none of whom stood a chance against the sheer might of the lusty Brazilians, until eventually, disappointed at my reluctance to contribute the more sordid details of my fellow countrymen's sexual prowess (or lack thereof), Carina got bored and dismissed me with a map.

‘Go and see the sights. You know, Copacabana and all that hustle. Then we can have a drink at Bar do Mineiro here in Santa Teresa later tonight, if you want.'

I stayed in the hostel for a while after she left, watching as the travellers came in and out in a blur of voices and accents.

THE HOSTEL WAS HALFWAY
up one of the steep hills that surround the city of Rio de Janeiro in a natural amphitheatre. It was a city built into the contours of the land, the buildings flowing over the mounds and into the grooves. Different epochs of the city lay side by side before the dramatic backdrop of the Bay of Guanabara: a solitary white stone convent of early times; the staggered terracotta roofs of a colonial era; and a scattering of the obligatory property-development disasters of the seventies. Two enormous futuristic structures dominated the centre: the first, a modernist construction in the form of a metal and glass Rubik's cube, with some cubes pulled out to form open-air garden terraces; and the second, a giant stained-glass pyramid which Carina had informed me earlier was the Metropolitan Church of São Sebastião.

It was an arresting cityscape with the mark of visionaries in its making, even if there was something that remained unfulfilled about it. The dramatic avenues, which one could imagine should have connected this modernist vision to its colonial past, were now crowded with ugly condominiums, robbing the structures of their grandeur. More inescapable yet was the opposing hill: a dramatic stone escarpment, which might have been nature's contribution to the cityscape, but was encrusted in the red-rust bricks of favela. The eye should have followed the avenues down to the ports, but I found my gaze unavoidably drawn to that disturbing peak, crowned among the shacks by a lonely white chapel which was obscured at intervals by the enormous blue neon light of a Brazilian bank, the sign flashing each floor-sized letter …
I, I-T, I-T-A, I-T-A-U
, with Hong Kong-style monotony.

Once outside the hostel, I crossed the road and lit a cigarette. On the wall opposite were the flaming remains of some sort of offering involving a candle, a bottle of strong-smelling rum, and some old prawns in a clay bowl. As I walked, Carina came out on the balcony and screamed down, ‘Watch out for thieves!!!' When I looked back up at her, she grinned and waved happily. I turned away and walked down to the city below, feeling as conspicuous as a giant red archery target. I flagged down a blue-and-white bus at random from a sea of filthy polluting vehicles, reassured by the words ‘The Real Bus' emblazoned on its side, and told the fare collector ‘Co-pa-ca-bana'. She smiled pleasantly and pointed with a short bright-red fingernail to a single seat beside her. I squeezed my way in through the world's smallest and most inconvenient turnstile and sat down. The other passengers stared back at me shamelessly. There was a sea of curious dark-brown eyes. One woman stuck her neck out to get a better look. It was probably the seat for clueless foreigners. Which was fine, I rationalised to myself, because that's what I was.

The bus ricocheted along at the speed of light, ramming into potholes and stopping only when a waiting passenger was actually standing in the middle of the road. In those instances, the bus would slide to a stop at the valiant passenger's feet, a bunch of old ladies would appear from nowhere and jump onboard, and the driver would be off again, flinging the new arrivals around like passengers on the cha-cha at the Royal Show. We made our way around the bay and past palm-filled parks. The postcard peaks of Sugar Loaf Mountain flashed by to my left, grainy like an old photo through the smeared windows of the bus. We sped through a fume-filled tunnel. Homeless kids sat against carbon-stained walls. Horns sounded. The road opened up again into an avenue crowded with high-rises tagged by graffiti, and I caught a glimmer of blue sky above. Two barefoot black kids, one standing on the other's shoulders, juggled balls at the traffic lights and then ran around begging for money. We took off around a corner and were thrown from our seats once more as the bus screeched to a halt. This time the fare collector thumbed me off. I ran gratefully down to the end of the bus and called out a thank you as I leapt onto the safety of the pavement. I almost had sea legs. The driver and fare collector waved at me with big, friendly Brazilian smiles, and sped off in a cloud of blue smoke.

From ground level, the first thing that hit me about Copacabana was its sheer magnitude: four miles in length, gaping sand banks, and a six-lane highway that splits the wide pavements. It is enormous, excessive, and dramatic. The second thing that hit me was how shitty it all looks. The quartz-like explosions of condominiums that I had seen from the air revealed themselves to have few more architectural design merits than a north London housing estate. Flat blocks with cheap aluminium window frames and salt-dusted windows, the buildings were sea-faded but without the charm of a seaside city. Unlike classical stone edifices, which seem to crumble beautifully back into the earth, modern glass seaside constructions do not grow old gracefully. They just look cheap and messy. I could see a smattering of interesting art deco architecture, but only enough to remind me of what was lacking. The only real exception to the crush of beach condominiums was the Copacabana Palace Hotel, a creamy pavlova of white stucco, even though its pool was now overlooked by a dirty glass high-rise.

I always had the impression that Copacabana was an extraordinarily glamorous place sometime around the fifties. Perhaps it was all the Carmen Miranda films that my mother used to play, or the Peter Allen song, but I had an image of cool tropical mansions by the water, swaying palm trees, and decadent women with lush red lips being pursued by wealthy wayward counts. Like most of the world's famous beaches, Copacabana was once just a stretch of sleepy seaside houses joined together by empty sandy roads. It only really became famous in 1923 when the Copacabana Palace Hotel was built, and every Hollywood starlet and her director flew down to grace her creamy terraces. Copacabana opened for business, and Brazil's wealthiest have been crushing into the four-mile strip of land between the sea and the lake behind it ever since. Now it is said that if all the people of Copacabana came down out of their condominiums there wouldn't be enough room for them on the streets.

There seemed to be only one building left from the old era on Avenida Atlantica. A flag flapping in the front yard indicated that it was now the Austrian embassy. Next door was the Syndicate of Chopp, a beer house whose sign competed loudly with two evangelist churches on the second floor: the International Church of God's Grace and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

I crossed over the six-lane highway behind two middle-aged tourists in badly cut swimsuits, their pale, glutinous cellulite shaking at each step, and stopped to look out at the sea. Waves were crashing wildly on the shore, sending up plumes of sea spray onto rows of empty deckchairs. The sand had a dull, oily sheen, and a suspicious brown scum clung hardily to the surface of the water. There were no Amazonian queens in feathers, no muscle men on the jungle gym blowing me kisses, and certainly no Carmen Miranda. A city of tourist clichés without the actual tourist clichés was hardly going to be any fun. It was August, after all. It was the middle of winter for Rio de Janeiro. The sky was a blanked-out winter white, and the tops of the palm trees shook in the winter breeze. There was even a chill in the air.