Here Be Monsters

After a couple of days on Ipanema beach – one of them recovering from over-indulgence in Caipirinhas the previous night – I found myself growing rather restless. Maybe I’m just not overworked enough for that kind of holiday vibe, but I found myself craving the stimulation of previous days. Nice as it was, the three of us had become ensconced in a little English bubble, with days punctuated by little more than the need to eat (although we did find an amazing healthy kilo restaurant which we decided we would be happy to eat at pretty much every day for the rest of our lives). So yesterday we sacked off the plan to go and see Jesus (it was too cloudy – he really is a fair-weather friend here) and executed plan B, which was to go into the centre of Rio and get lost.

A and I share a strategy for getting lost and discovering a city. Armed with a jointly good sense of direction and A’s excellent visual memory, we do a pretty good job of looking for the most part like we know where we’re going. It is (like most places) stupid to look like a lost tourist with an expensive camera over here, so we do our best to blend in. We sneak peeks at the map and the compass (we know it’s geeky but it’s very useful) down alleyways and in café toilets, and A has got blindingly fast at whipping her camera out of her non-descript bag and back in while I keep an eye out, create a distraction or pretend to pose as necessary for her to get the shot she’s after.

We left the compass at home on this occasion but did stop off to buy a good street map of Rio. I love maps, particularly maps of cities. They always yield up stories and interesting clues as to why a city has grown the way it has. Cities are like giant organisms, morphing and mutating and multiplying, a battleground of order and chaos, imposed structure and organic growth. Rio is a particularly visual example, and you can see on a map the way that humankind has carved out a place between the sheer mountains and the sea, the favelas pushing up the sides of the hills, swanky buildings facing towards the light like flowers turning their faces to the sun. All cities follow a certain amount of the same logic in terms how different districts jostle together and overlap, and I reckon a couple of days walking about and following your instincts makes the map make sense so that you know which way is up.

There’s something joyous about walking without knowing what you’re looking for, and just turning street corners as they take your fancy. The pace of a city forbids ambling, (in any case I’m awful at walking slowly) and our purposeful pace makes us cover distance, sights and sounds assailing us as one district gives way to another. The little treats that the city offers up are so much more succulent than the ones you find written up in the guidebook and schlep to sample. We stopped off for a very cheap but hearty lunch of chicken, rice and beans in an incredible simple local, family-run joint and ate side by side at a bar off plastic trays. The afternoon telenovela (a kind of brazilian Sunset Beach) was playing on a little television balanced on one of the fridges and we had immense fun speculating about the storylines, which seemed to involve huge amounts of female jealousy and a small armadillo.

On another street, we happened upon a little gallery which was hosting a children’s community art project, girls and boys in paint-streaked aprons proudly hanging their canvases on the walls. We bought a couple of fridge magnets (OK I do like fridge magnets) and chatted to the kids, who jostled for attention and were fairly delighted with the fact that we spoke English and demanded a demonstration. We’ve decided that the best way to practice Portuguese is chatting with children and old people, as both are more than willing to overlook the matter of whether you’re conjugating your verbs correctly. We also managed to pack in a couple of exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Do Brasil (sponsored, like a lot of art things here, by Caixa, a bank) which had an amazing exhibition by a Viennese artist Thomas Vargas, who travelled to Rio on a ship in 1817. His incredibly precise and detailed watercolours and drawings documented incredibly methodically the life of the city in its early years.

We made a move today from Ipanema to Santa Teresa, a creative, bohemian neighbourhood up in the hills. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, winding streets full of old colonial houses in a state of decadent decay, backed by forest. We’re only a few miles away from Ipanema but it feels like it could be a different country, somehow reminiscent of the south of France but fringed with jungle. VW Beetles in sun-faded pastel hues line the streets, underneath trees adorned with spectacularly orange flowers. Turning a corner or peering through a fence will suddenly afford a stunning view across the city centre, of Corcovado, or of one of the many favelas that fringe the area.

It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but the favelas don’t start and stop with any kind of demarcation, apart from in one’s head. I’m having a right old time trying to work out where I’ve got these ideas from and actually how much is reality and how much myth. The legend that the word conjures up – a ghetto of lawlessness, guns, drug crime and desperation – where did I get that from? It can’t just be from City of God, can it? All advice for tourists on Brazil advocates complete avoidance of these areas, and one the maps, they are marked in red, in capital letters, like a warning. FAVELA BARONESA. FAVELA RATA. FAVELA PEREIRA DA SILVA. FAVELA JULIO OTONI. FAVELA MORRO DOS PRAZERES. FAVELA MORRO DA COROA. FAVELA TAVARES BASTOS. FAVELA CERRO CORAS. FAVELA SANTA ALEXANDRINA. Hundreds of separate districts, some only a few streets deep, some, like Rocinha, sweeping around the whole side of a hill. It reminds me of old maps of the world, where the cartographer’s knowledge of an area ran dry, so they just drew monsters instead. On a map, roads just look like they kind of peter out. In reality, streets just become a bit more shambolic and run down and sort of slide from organisation into something a little more chaotic. We realised this today when we came back from our little afternoon saunter around the local area and looked at where we’d walked on the map, and realised that it seemed we’d gone through one.

Is there a war going on here? Some social commentators will tell you there is. Demographically, the population of Brazil shows the same disproportionately low number of young men that a population at war would do. Luis Eduardo Soaves, a sociologist interviewed for the Brazilian documentary Bus 174, comments that Brazil is experiencing ‘a war without frontiers,’ a hugely divided society where 12 million people live in favelas. He posits that the transition to democracy in Brazil was never completed, and that a huge section of society were left out of the process, and aren’t served by the most basic benefits and social advances of a democratic system. The Brazilian middle- and upper-classes, he claims, live as if they are not part of this war;
“We rationalise, and deny the facts” he insists “because if we confronted this reality we’d be forced to put our lives on hold until the problem was fixed.” This seems born out in Ipanema and Leblon, the monied districts of Rio, where we saw children asleep on the pavement directly outside the gates of some of the more wealthy houses – you’d have to step over them to get in or out of the front door.

Talk to middle-class Brazilians and they’ll say “it’s not a war” in the same breath as warning you to be careful on the streets.

In the centre of the city, there seemed to be policemen or security guards on every corner. In the busy areas, it feels like you’re never more than a couple of hundred metres from a man with a uniform and a gun, which is either reassuring or deeply disturbing depending on whether at that moment in time you’re more concerned about your camera or your civil liberties.

Fernando and I discuss the Brazilian police system, and I ask him questions about it. Who is in charge of the military police? I asked him. “The drug lords!” he batted back. We both laughed, but there’s a lot of truth in it.

Brazil has a strange two-tier police system, with both civil and military police, who apparently don’t work in particularly effective partnership. I´m still trying to get a handle on how this actually works, but I found a really interesting and in-depth explanation of the Brazilian police systems and its inherent problems at http://www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/confreports/hr02.pdf. Well worth a read.

The elite police force, BOPE, who deal with trafficking in the favelas, are certainly due a rebrand - their logo is of a white skull and crossbones on a black circle. Tells you what you need to know about how BOPE view their role in this interaction.

So, yesterday’s newspaper story of note: Father Christmas got shot at as he flew in a helicopter over a favela. Theories about the attack vary; some say that the gangs mistook the copter for a police crew, others speculate that the helicopter got caught in the crossfire in a spat between two rival gangs. One sad fact for certain, Santa’s had enough. “I just don’t know if I can continue doing this” the actor said. “I’ve got two children to think about.”

I asked our new friend, Leao, one of the beach traders, why Pai Natal was in a helicopter in the first place. It’s hardly traditional, I said. Maybe he’s actually a big-time drug trafficker, said Leao. Who knows what’s in all those sacks or what he’s actually delivering?