Mash-Up Alley

“Trev’s having a mare” said A, looking out of the kitchen window of our hostel at the alley down below. I put down my lunch and came over to see. Trev was indeed having a mare.

The night before, having a break from our pretty compulsive consumption of episodes of The Wire, we’d surveyed the ongoing soap-opera taking place below our bedroom window, which to be fair has many of the same plotlines. We’re in a pretty nice area of Salvador, but the building next to ours is a derelict shell, which looks a bit like someone has started to tear it down, changed their mind, fixed it up a bit, torn it down again, ad infinitum for time immemorable. It used to be a dancehall, apparently – before that, who knows? The remains of its once-elegant façade, now bearing the complicated scars of many of roughshod attempts to patch it up, yields only a few scintillating clues as to its original design. Until a few months ago, five families were living in shelters constructed on what remains of its open first floor. They’ve since been evicted, the remnants of their homes lying in piles – corrugated iron, bits of wood and plaster. The site is now populated by a lone guy who inhabits a concrete box on the front edge of the building.

Apparently he’s somewhere between
a security guard and a squatter – tolerated by the building’s owners in order to keep others off. We’d watched him sitting in a plastic chair surveying the street, smoking, whilst down by the side of the building in the alley past the locked gate, a man slept on cardboard boxes on the floor.

The next morning, looking out, I’d witnessed an odd exchange where Security Trev let the homeless guy in through the gate and invited him in to the concrete box. He emerged a little while later having had a shower, had a friendly chat with Security Trev, and then went back outside to arrange things on his cart, which contained scrupulously organised piles of cardboard and other things. Walking back from a restaurant that evening, we saw him again, in a different street, minus the cart, asleep on the floor.

Late that night we looked out again. A different couple of Trevs were now huddled in his spot in the alley, smoking crack. Rats the size of small dogs swarmed in and out of the dilapidated building. At one point, Having Some Crack Trev got up and rooted frantically and furtively through the other bloke’s cart, found something, and went back for a bit more of the hard stuff. “Trev’s not gonna be happy about that tomorrow” I observed to A. I went to bed somewhat disturbed. It’s one thing watching The Wire on the laptop last thing before you fall asleep, another watching someone ten metres below getting mash up for real until he’s oblivious to the vermin infestation all around him.

The following day, our cart-owner guy was back, certainly not happy, not because of the cart but seemingly more because he was undergoing some sort of awful illness. Or comedown. We watched transfixed from the kitchen, horrified at our voyeurism, as he staggered up and down the alley wretching, crumpling and shivering. “He really is having a mare” we agreed.

But later that evening Having a Mare Trev was back on form, and, surprisingly for us, had Having Some Crack Trev and his mate round for a little party and was regaling them with animated stories which we wished we could understand.

Can I justify our voyeurism? I can have a crack, if the pun can be excused. A is a documentary photographer, I’m writing it all up – and we do have long, healthy, ongoing debates about a photographer/writer/artists ideological responsibility towards their subject (more of that in another post). An intrinsic part of travelling is about voyeurism; observing human behaviour, interrogating it. We have to make the case to ourselves that it’s done for a higher purpose than solely gratification. But essentially we’re watching these guys playing out their lives because they don’t have a house in which to do it in private.

We’re spending arguably too much time in the hostel at the moment – in part due to the gaggle of affable Scandinavians we’ve fallen in with, but also, it must be said, because since we woz robbed we don’t feel as up for it. Salvador has a different energy to the other cities we’ve been in, we’ve decided. There’s an ever-present white noise of crackling testosterone here, a machismo which often seems on the delicate edge of tipping over into hostility – not directed at us specifically – but it’s a place where you can see that men avoid looking each other dead in the eye. And we do get looked at here; despite our suntans we’re clearly too white to be Bahian. Pretty much anyone who’s been here will tell you that the beggars, hustlers and malandras in Salvador are notoriously persuasive. It’s hard for us to tell how far our experience the other day altered our perception, but at the moment it does feel like there’s a bigger proportion of people out and about who are sizing us up and deciding if they can get something from us one way or another. And (I can picture our parents having kittens as I write this) there are a lot of blokes here with revolvers stuffed down their shorts. I appear to be gun-blind, but A has got a sharp eye and an obsession with firearms (something I tried to get her over by buying her a catapult for Christmas. It didn’t work. But at least we know who to keep out of the way of.)

Therefore we have admittedly gone to ground, and our interaction with the big bad world outside is frequently had from the safety of our roof terrace. Which is maybe why the latest episode of Mash-Up Alley is so enthralling.


A synopsis of the plot-lines as we have now come to understand them. Having A Mare Trev seems to be in charge. He’s got cart, and a little industry going which involves collecting cardboard and sorting and stripping metal. His sidekick, Having Some Crack Trev sometimes helps him out with this in the alleyway, using his machete to hack old radiators to pieces. They are intermittently joined by a third guy, Traffic Trev, who makes his dough working this corner ‘helping’ people park their cars and ‘guarding’ them while they are gone. (Paying these guys to ‘watch’ the car is something we’ve often speculated about in Brazil – what are they gonna do, in reality, if someone tampers with it? But last night we watched Traffic Trev chase someone up the road with a machete, so it’s not all bluff.) Traffic Trev is also quite an entertainer, singing and dancing in the road while Having A Mare Trev surveys it all from the cart on the kerb.

We’re yet to get to grips with the rodent sub-plot, in which all the characters look the same as each other, but we are trying.

Carnival is coming, like a big monster, and will soon consume the city. The other day, we went on a little hostel outing, with Mike, our affable Swedish host, and a pair of affable 6ft foot blond Norwegian blokes, to the pre-Carnival carnival in Itapua, about 40 minutes down the coast. We felt a bit like poor Mike was the dad with four overgrown children, but he knew the drill and kindly guided us through it. Take no valuables and have nothing on you which can be snatched off. Money in the shoe, or down the pants. Basically, be prepared for the fact that your personal space extends no further than your underwear. Go early in the day as the fights kick off about 8pm. Try and find a spot to dance where there’s lots of girls together already. And if the crowd starts getting rowdy, make your way outwards to the side. After mentally galvanising ourselves, we got stuck in.

Festa da Itapua is an amazing, if initially intimidating party, which makes Notting Hill Carnaval feel like a chess-club tea party in comparison. The way carnival works here is that each double-decker lorry (bloco) has a ‘trio’ playing on top, blaring out the music that’s MCed from the front. In front of the lorry is a cordoned-off section which extends maybe 40 metres up the road, the rope controlled by a small army of securidades. You can only get inside this cordon to dance if you’ve bought the tshirt for that bloco (during carnival these go for anything from 50 to 1000 reales). Otherwise, you resign yourself joining the crowds and being ‘pipoca’ (popcorn) on the streets.

Try as you might, there is so much going on that you can’t be aware of it all. Girls grind girls. Boys grind boys. Vendors sell the beer, hustlers collect the empty cans. Strings of young men bowl through the crowd in formation, their fat gold chains, nasty tattoos and warrior expressions paying testament to the fact that they aren’t gonna be the ones to get robbed. Lines of police in helmets like batoned-up beads on a string, their humanity erased behind dark glasses, their vests say state their squad number and then A, B, C, D, E. Easy to tell if one’s gone missing. At the front of the bloco, boys dance in formation, erasing the line between macho and camp. The MC goads the ladies and the ladies cuss him back. Hands go in the air. Other hands go into other people’s pockets. The trio breaks into a new rhythm and everyone goes mental. Suddenly a crowd engulfs you and personal space recedes to zero and it feels like a vacuum is created which takes all notion of individual choice away and the only way to continue is to abandon all sense of human boundaries and become a speck in a huge amorphous mass of people which seen from the helicopters flying overhead must look like organic matter swirling in a gutter or sand sliding down a dune or lava thundering uncompromisingly towards the sea.

And this is just the warm-up. Proper Carnival is seven whole days and nights of this. And we are still mightily unsure if we’re ready or willing to submit to it.

Bollocks (Or, What It's Like Getting Robbed at Gunpoint)

Bollocks, I’ve dropped the sports section of the newspaper on the floor of the bus. I should probably pick it up. Actually I don’t really want the sports section, but I don’t want to look bad. Now that lady’s trodden on it. Her shoes are really quite ugly. She’s got off the bus. Better pick the newspaper up. Put it back on my lap. I wonder if anyone else on the bus thinks it’s grubby to pick things up off the floor – they’ve got a funny thing here in Brazil with things that have been on the floor. Have a quick look to see if anyone’s looking at me. They are but I can’t really gauge their expressions. I don’t care, really, it’s too hot. Mull over the front page article again – 12 police killings here in Salvador in the first twenty days of the year. Brazilian police kill more than any other force in the world. They are approaching, here, a million deaths at the hands of police in the last 30 years. The paper posits that the police ought to have a strategy that aims to preserve life. I applaud the paper’s stance but marvel that it needs to be stated. Maybe I should stop looking at the paper and turn round and talk to A on the seat behind me....

Those boys who’ve just got on the bus are making a lot of noise. They’re being extremely rowdy. One of them is shouting. He sounds angry. Someone else sounds panicky. These two marching down the centre aisle – one of them has his hand in his shorts, it looks like he’s pretending he has a gun. He’s shouting as well. Maybe he has got a gun. No, I think he’s pretending. How much does it matter? Is this a robbery? Yes. Clearly this is a robbery. Yep. We’re in the middle of a robbery, with guns, on a bus. Bus 174. Bus 174.

All the other passengers are opening their bags. The two boys in the central aisle are marching up and down directing us. The one who had his hand in his shorts is young, maybe 16, 17? They’re calm. They’re not on crack. They look organised. Wallets and phones are being thrown into the central aisle. The two guys are collecting them. The other one is tall, he has a thin, strange face. It’s quite beautiful in a weird way. He’s got a black revolver. His expression is arrogant, and there’s something in his face that looks like he’s enjoying it.

Someone at the front of the bus near the driver is shouting instructions, forcefully, angrily. I don’t understand what he’s saying, just enough to know that he’s shouting threats of what might happen if people don’t cooperate. The guy who was selling sweets a few moments ago is standing with his back to the front windshield of the bus. He looks calm. He’s completely still.

I think about what I have to do. I know the drill for this, I’ve think of all the times it’s been repeated to me. Just give them anything you’ve got. Stay calm. Don’t fuck them about, don’t make them angry. I look at my bag. It’s a beach bag with a towel sticking out of the top. It doesn’t look valuable. I think about what is in my wallet at the bottom of the bag. 65 reales, two bank cards. I wonder if I can just give them the cash, or just the cash and the cards. I look at the other people. Some of them are opening their wallets and handing over cash. The young boy is letting them keep the small change. I know without looking that A is calmly handing over her wallet and our phone. I see her drop it on the floor behind me. I extract my wallet. I have it in my hand. I want them to see that I’ve offered it up; done what’s required of me, I don’t want them to threaten me or search my bag. I pause with it in my hand long enough to hope he’s seen me. I drop it with the others on the floor. What is everyone else doing? I look around, I look at the two young men, what they’re doing, and how. I think they probably don’t want me to look at them so I look at the back of my seat. Out of the corner of my eye I see that not everybody is yielding everything. People are making decisions about what to give up. Some give their whole bags. The boys are not being too cruel. The younger one hands a woman back her handbag in front of me. I decide I don’t need to say anything to A, that it’s best to be silent, that I don’t want them to hear me speak English. I wonder if the Brazilian newspaper on my lap is providing any kind of disguise.

The thought crosses my mind that I could have probably just yielded the cash. Another thought rapidly follows it; how would I construct the sentence in Portuguese to ask them if I could keep my wallet – can I have it back, please? I am immediately amused at the ludicrous suggestions of my subconscious.

I take stock of how I’m feeling and realise my pulse is not beating too hard. I feel calm. I don’t feel sick. I’m pleased about this. I’m conscious that I’ve slipped into a modality that I’ve adopted here when I feel at threat, unsure. Look calm on the outside, move slowly, keep your eyes steady, breathe normally, don’t show signs of alarm. And it’s working. I’m not frightened.

The man at the front is shouting more and more forcefully. It’s coming from the direction of the driver but I don’t want to look. Is the driver telling us what to do? The bus is taking a diversion. This isn’t the way we’re meant to be going. It’s broad daylight and there’s traffic. Are we being taken somewhere? I assess the situation. They want our valuables, then they want off. They’re working quickly and efficiently. They want this to be over as fast and as painlessly as possible, same as us. Everyone is behaving as if this is a procedure. I decide that we’re not going to become hostages.

The bus is jolting, we’re in a tunnel. The bus stops. The men get off. How many? I don’t know? Are they all off? Is it over? The bus starts driving again. The people in the seats next to me get down low behind their seats. I look backwards. Lots of people are doing the same. I think that they are frightened that they will fire at the bus as it is driving away. Though I can’t rationalise why they would, I crouch down too. I’m unsure if it is all finished.

People start talking. It’s a bit chaotic. Some are getting up. There’s stuff on the floor, people are picking it up. Phones are passed around. People are making phone calls. A couple of guys are taking charge of this situation. A and I ask each other, is it finished? It is. The robotic calmness of the other passengers is giving way. People’s emotions are quickly surfacing. The woman to the right of me is getting upset. She is shaken. Others around are the same. Some men are angry. People are passing mobile phones around, lending them to strangers to make calls. I wonder how come they kept theirs?

A is comforting the woman next to her, who needs to talk. Voce fala ingles? A asks her. The woman shakes her head, continues in rapid shaky portuguese. A is holding her hand. I put mine on her arm, we listen to her and nod sympathetically. She is telling us what they took, repeating what they were shouting.

A and I start to debrief. She tells me that there was a man at the front with a gun to the head of the driver. It was him who was shouting. I vaguely recall his face. I’m amazed that I missed this, didn’t register it. I can’t remember seeing his gun.

We wonder where the bus is going. The bus is stopping. The driver is leaning out of the window, we think perhaps he is being sick. Poor fucker.

Some people crowd to the front, demand to be let off. We consult; should we get off? We don’t have any money to get home and we don’t know where we are. We stay put. The bus starts moving again. I’m amazed that the driver has it so together. He seems to know where to take us all. We wonder where we are going.. We hear someone saying that we are going to the police station. We sit back and let it happen. We’re along for the ride now. I really want a cigarette. I wonder if it would be so awful to smoke one on the bus, decide against it. I check how I’m feeling again. Still calm. I wonder whether it will hit me later, whether I’ll suddenly lose control, or crumple, or wake up in the night tonight or in a month or a year, heart pounding with panic. I decide I don’t want to, and that I am somewhat resolutely not moving from this state of calmness. I ask A how she is. She is fine. I know her well enough to expect that she’s not shaken either. “Happy birthday!” I exclaim. We start laughing.

A has been talking to some other English speakers at the back of the bus. One is Irish. I focus on their conversation. We are all laughing wryly at it. They only arrived in Brazil yesterday. Black humour sets in.

At the police station. I smoke a cigarette. The office is tiny. It’s hard to tell who is and who isn’t a police officer. Everyone looks pretty non-plussed. This is the unit for robberies and high-jackings. One by one all the people from the bus are to take a seat at one of these three desks and gives details. It’s clearly going to take fucking ages. We settle in for a long haul.

Outside for a cigarette, A and I realise that we’ve lost, with the phone, the answer phone message which we had meant to record for posterity because it has been making us laugh so much, from our posh antique dealer middle aged ex pat friend in Rio. We lament this, the only irreplaceable thing, and then cheer ourselves up by repeating it to each other for about the hundredth time. “Hello girls, it’s Gaaaaregory! Wondered if you’d like to hook up for a little good-bye drinky-poo….I’ve had a greeeat day, went to the samba school, danced my arse off, then I went to a feijada and had some frankly atrocious food, tasted like a cow had died in it…” etc etc etc.

This is police station, this situation, today, is not the worst place I’ve ever been. Everyone is making friends, they need to talk. We wish we had the language to join in with the general debrief. We get the dictionary out and attempt to get stuck in.

This was a fairly unusual incident, we discover, a bus being hijacked in broad daylight. Before we came here we managed to freak ourselves out at the thought of something like this happening. Since we’ve been here, we’ve calmed down and accepted that it might, if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that there’s no point being frightened in advance. And then it happens - it happens and then it’s over. We don’t feel angry or upset. It happened and then it finished, and no one was harmed. What we lost is irrelevant to us - a couple of credit cards, twenty quid, and a phone that didn’t work properly anyway. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that.

But as we eventually get to the front of the queue to have our place in this recorded by the police officer, A and I decide that, if we have been here facing our demons, seeking a thrill (which we’ve talked about quite a bit, interrogating our motives) then we’re now definitely over it. Thanks Brazil, I’ve had my robbed-at-gunpoint moment. It’ll be a good story in the pub one day. But don’t need any more of it, ta.

In and out of the favela

Running the risk of sounding wanky, I am finding myself frequently struck by the thought these days that some things don’t actually mean anything until you’ve seen them in much closer proximity than is actually comfortable.

So, A and I decided, after our visit to see the Morrinho in Favela Pereira da Silva, that we’d really like to spend more time in the neighbourhood. The favela is a safe one, and they are fairly used to visitors coming in to see the Morrinho. There’s even a pousada there – Favelinha – run by a formidable Brazilian woman and her German partner.

As always we left everything to the last moment and there were no rooms in the Favelinha, and so we asked our friend Daniella who had originally introduced us to the Morrinho, whether she thought there might be anyone who’d be willing to rent us a room for a bit. A few phonecalls later and she’d set us up to stay with Maristella, the girlfriend of Nelcirlan, one of the boys who started the Morrinho. “It’s a simple place” she told us “Maristhella’s only been there a couple of months and she doesn’t have much stuff.” Is there a bed, a shower and a toilet, we asked – turns out there is – so yeah, we’re in.

Favela Pereira Da Silva is a wicked little community. It’s actually a pretty tiny favela, just off the edge of the artsy, decadent Santa Teresa, where by this point we’d spent a fair bit of time. Santa Teresa by all agreement has retained its charm – and is populated mainly by bohemians – because its hilly streets are surrounded on pretty much all sides by favelas and as a result the developers haven’t had the balls to fuck it up yet. Whilst some of the other favelas just hundreds of metres away are still pretty dodge, Pereira Da Silva has had trafficking eradicated six or so years ago, and remains fairly problem-free as a result.

I’ve written a bit before about what the word ‘favela’ conjures up in the mind – a no-go zone of violence and anarchy controlled by drug-lords, criminals and gangsters. When the term favela is translated, it is most often as ‘slum’ or ‘shanty town’. Like with most things in life, what you perceive depends on the angle you look at it from.

The way I’m coming to see it, a favela is a community which has been built by people who have no legal claim to the land that they live on. For the most part, favelas are situated on land that was perceived as valueless – in Rio, the steep sides of the hills. As a result of being settlements that grow outside of State recognition, the communities are not provided with the amenities that the rest of the city would assume as rights. There has been a shift in attitude towards the favelas since the sixties – when popular/government opinion was that they were ghettos that should be expunged – towards their recognition as communities that are here to stay, and which Brazilian government and society needs to develop a policy of properly recognising and living with – a process which is in some ways happening. As a result, favelas have running water, sewage systems, electricity. Some have cash points.

A favela looks like many of the poor (but legally recognised) towns and villages that I saw in Central America when I was there, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras. Buildings are basic, electricity and water supply are shambolic but functional, roads are not always paved. The difference in Brazil being that these communities exist right slap bang up against the rich parts of the city, where people live a lifestyle that differs little in terms of quality to major European cities.

To understand the existence of favelas one has to take into consideration the fact that Brazil is a colonial country which was built on slavery, the last country to abolish it, in 1876 – only a few generations back. Without going into a rant about the not-wholly-ideological reasons for abolition, the country’s legal and power structures, designed by (and to protect the rights of) those with money and power, at their foundation took negligible account of those without either. Favelas are a remnant of the two tier colonial hierarchy which Brazil grew from. These communities remain outside the law because the law was never designed with them in mind, and does not serve them. The weight of time and history, not any conscious, current choice, keeps favela communites and the people who live in them outside the boundaries of State jurisdiction. The ongoing struggle between the state, those who are employed to protect it, and those who fall outside of that equation is one of the most striking things for me about Brazil.

In reality nowadays, in some ways favelas are not too different from housing estates in the UK. People inside them work outside of them, go to school, university, the supermarket, get a taxi back with their shopping and go home. It’s normal life, ongoing. The lives of the people who live in favelas are impeded by their unrecognised status which means that the communities are never afforded the developments that progress provides. And, obviously, favela life is often affected massively by the drug trafficking, the police attempts to prevent it, and the ensuing war which persistently invades these communities.

I’m not going to get into the trafficking/gang/police situation in this post, as aside from what I’ve read about it I don’t think at this point I understand it well enough to have anything valuable to say. Pereira Da Silva isn’t your average favela (if there is such a thing), partly due, as I’ve explained in a previous post, to the Morrinho and the NGO working there, and the fact that partly as a result the drug-trafficking industry has no hold there, and as a result life is pretty peaceful.

So, having got a bit closer and stepped away again and had a think, what did we take away from the whole shebang? A lot of stuff – it’s proving incredibly difficult to write about, particularly as I’m aware at times of sounding a bit like a bad anthropologist, the thought of which horrifies me. I’m also realising the impossibility of stating my position on any of this, as my thinking changes by the day as I come to understand more and more about the complexity of it all. That futility acknowledged, I’ll crack on.

Pereira da Silva, from my first impressions, was one of the friendliest communities I’ve had the pleasure to be part of. On your way up and down and around the twisting streets, everybody greets each other, stops and says hello, has a chat. We realised after a day or so – once we’d got over the fact that we had to leave all our expensive technological equipment in a room with a door lock that you could get through in about 20 seconds – that we felt safer inside the favela than we had done pretty much anywhere else in Rio. If you’re part of the community, people look after each other. It became clearer and clearer while we were there, however, quite how complex this balance is.

There is (I would say, has to be) a kind of entrance policy for favelas, which we came to understand better while we were there. In a community that’s policing itself, and which as a result requires the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium of mutual trust, strangers are noticed immediately. We felt a massive responsibility not to muck up this equilibrium. In order for the fragile and incredibly complicated trust system which exists there to be maintained, people, quite rightly, want to know why you’re there. We made it as clear as we could that were in Pereira da Silva to spend more time checking out the Morrinho (of which the whole community seems rightly to be very proud), and as such, we felt, we were welcomed.

We were adopted on our first evening by Ingrid, the young wife of Junior, one of the Morrinho boys. (We didn’t realise how young she was until we’d been in her company a few hours, and she told us she was 16 – and married a year already). Ingrid took us up to see the Morrinho at night – the boys were working/playing on it, its tiny streets lit up by fairy lights. One of the guys was conducting what looked like an audit of a battalion – his tiny lego soldiers with camoflauge hats standing in regiments, their weapons laid out in rows on the ground.

Ingrid took us into her home, where she lives with Junior’s mother. We asked her about her own family. She doesn’t have parents, she told us, simply. Eager to introduce her new friends, she then took us next door to meet her neighbours, where we sat in the kitchen and had guarana and home-made icecream with X, his wife Lisa and their elderly Siamese cat. He has to keep the cat on a leash, Ingrid’s neighbour explained, because otherwise it climbs into people’s bags and gets lost. The couple had a huge affection for Ingrid. “Ela e minha filha maravilliosa” he told us, giving her a squeeze. Ingrid was desperate for us to come and stay with her in her house, but we’d already made an agreement, we explained. She was more than a little disappointed, and we wished we were able to take her up on her offer.

We found ourselves rapidly being adopted by new friends. Maristhella, the girl whose room we were staying in, took us to the beach the next day. We really liked Maristhella – she didn’t say much, at least to us – but her unique brand of defiant independence was awe-inspiring. She’d only been in the favela a couple of months, having moved down from Salvador, and was working hard to establish a life for herself in Rio. On Saturdays, she explained, she went to college, studying nursing. A truly beautiful girl, the streets crackled with male attention as she walked past in tiny clothes we’d never dare wearing – her handling it with an untouchable expertise we knew we’d never be able to pull off.

On our last night there, we met a Finnish bloke, Matti, who was about our age, in the local bar at the bottom entrance to the favela. Like us, Matti had initially come to stay in the favela, ended up staying way longer than he intended, and was now building a house there with his East German friend. Over a couple of beers with him, we began to see the combination of human qualities that were enabling him to ride such a unique situation. An amazing guy – we just thought he was brilliant. A real free-thinker, and endowed with an unwavering determination, he was also incredibly socially adept, polite but firm, obviously well-liked for his utterly genuine friendliness, but able to quietly hold the line when it mattered. He was having a couple of beers at the end of a day’s hard work with his builder, Peri (the father, as it turned out, of the guy who started the Morrinho who’s girlfriend’s house we’d stayed in). Peri was a right character – a muscular Rastafarian in perpetual motion, he seemed to be constantly off-balance, swaying and weaving, interjecting into the conversation loudly whenever he had a thought for us, at which point the assembled company stopped obligingly to listen to him. He was obviously a guy who holds a fair amount of sway there (having seemingly built half the town) and on the way up to the top of the favela with them both, he gave us a little tour, stopping at the top of each set of steps to catch his breath, knock on a door to introduce us, or to regale us with a story about something. At one point he proudly pointed out the shrine which overlooks the main square. “This is my best piece of work” he told us “the thing I’m most proud of building”. We said goodbye to him at his front door and he told us he liked us. “You can stay here” he announced. “I’ll build a house for you.”

Once Peri had taken himself home, Matti was able to explain a few things to us. How do you get permission to build here, we asked. Apparently, you have to put in a request (which in his case, was done on his behalf by friends he’s made here) with a guy who takes on the role of a kind of town mayor. It’s not just one powerful man, he explained, the role is rotated through some kind of system. Anyway, you put forward a case to him, and he yay- or nay- says it. Clearly, you have to earn your stripes to be tolerated there, and if you’re not welcome then there’s a kind of committee system that makes sure you don’t stay. Justice works in a similar way. As we were talking to him the conversation suddenly stopped as a young bloke sauntered past, Matti giving him an uncompromising stare. “He robbed my phone” explained Matti. “I left my stuff on the floor over there while I was building and he took it – 100% it was him.” He shifted uncomfortably before continuing “The thing is here, if someone steals something, people will kill him for it, that’s the punishment. Even if it’s just a phone. It’s not tolerated.” It was clearly a difficult situation for Matti to negotiate. It struck me that this is why, outside in the big cities, houses have 12 foot fences with barbed wire and about four locks to get in the front door, and inside the favelas, everybody’s door is open.

On our way home that night, having said goodbye to Matti far sooner than we would have liked, we talked about how much we admired what he was managing to achieve – but also, how much it appeared to be costing him. A naturally gentle and sensitive guy, the hardness he was having to learn to live in this environment was clearly etched in his wiry body.

By the end of our stay it was hard to leave. We’d started to work out whose door you needed to knock at to get homemade ice cream, or some fried cheese balls, or to use the internet. And our last night, we did the weekly Sunday night party, held on the football square – an unforgettably fun affair with a live band followed by a DJ playing forro, hip hop and baile-funk, everyone out, kids, parents, teenagers. The atmosphere was something like a bizarre mix between a church-hall wedding and a Peckham bump n grind night. Everyone round the outside of the square, kids running around in flocks, teenage girls in tiny shorts standing in a line at the edge, proudly weaving complicated patterns with their arses, gaggles of boys sharing bottles of beer, amorous couples in dark corners, the local drunk-uncle (Be Careful Trev, we’d named him, based on the gist of his oft-repeated monologue to us) commandeering the centre of the dance floor and demonstrating quite how astonishingly low an old man can grind it.

All this positivity aside, we came to understand how hard it is to live like this. Physically, it’s not comfortable. The town clings to the side of the hill. It’s really, really fucking hard work getting from the bottom to the top – maybe a 200m distance as the crow flies, it can take an hour to wind your way up the pathways in the 35 degree heat. You can’t buy fresh food there, or indeed, buy anything without cash (and it’s a long long walk to the cash point, if you’re fortunate enough to have a bank account with money in it). It’s hot, and often damp, all the time, day and night. And that’s before you even start on the psychological reality of living in place where you’re essentially exiled from the benefits enjoyed by the other half of the city which you can see stretched out before you, the shopping malls, the yachts in the harbour. Where what you can hope for for your children is massively restricted, because public education is abysmal unless you can afford the private sector (the average Brazilian, as a result, has only 5.5 years of education, we have since been told). And where the real possibility of your community being overtaken once again by the ongoing drug wars, and once again being controlled by ruthlessly powerful traffickers with AK47s, is ever-present. That’s how it works in the favela a couple of hundred metres away, on the other side of the road.

We did a lot of examining our consciences while we were there, and it made me realise the limits of my idealism. Let’s go and live in a favela, we had decided, let’s experience it properly…but then when it smells funny and the water doesn’t work and the fan is so loud you have to stuff your ears to sleep, and there’s an insect smashing around in the room that’s so big it sounds like a human being breaking in, then when your posh antique dealer middle-aged-ex-pat friend rings it’s very tempting to jump ship and go and have dinner in a nice restaurant with air con. And no matter how good our intentions, and how much we wanted to understand it, we never really can. Cos, as Jarvis Cocker so wryly puts it: You can never understand, cos even when you’re trying to get it right, when you’re lying in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall*, then you can call your dad and he’ll stop it all yeah.

(*Just to clarify, there weren’t any roaches. Well, we didn’t see any.)

We met some wicked people in Pereira da Silva, though. And if the Morrinho comes to London, which we really hope it does, we would take a lot of pleasure in returning the hospitality that we were shown.

Caranguejo

There are some Portuguese words that entered my vocabulary because they’re the capoeira names of people I know. (Capoeiristas get baptised with a ‘nom de guerre’, bestowed on them by their mestre based on some physical or personality trait – it’s a kind of street name which you’re known by in the world of capoeira. Mine is Simpatia). Thus I know duck (Pato), gafanhoto (grasshopper) onca pintada (a type of jaguar), bicho do mato (amusingly, beast of the weeds or undergrowth), beija-flor (hummingbird, literally, flower-kisser), arco-iris (rainbow), caranguejo (crab) – and all of these words when I see or hear them pleasantly call to mind people from home.

Caranguejo was a guy I only had the fortune to meet once, a very good friend of a very good friend, a capoeirista from Grupo Abolicao in Oxford (the nucleus of the group I play with). One of those people whose astounding personal qualities burn themselves onto you from the first moment, Caranguejo was clearly searingly intelligent, beautifully witty, inciteful, loyal, unstoppably playful, humble, wise way beyond his years and an incredibly complex deep thinker – one of those people who seems about ten times more alive, in every sense of the word, than most people. He was also, when I met him, in the advanced stages of a savage and pretty much unstoppable brain cancer. He died last year, by all accounts facing his unfathomably cruel illness and far far far too early death with a staggering humour, courage and acceptance that deeply marked all who knew him.

So, the word caranguejo – usually just a word on a menu - makes me think of him. You get crabs here as a kind of bar snack by the unit for about 80p. I’ve yet to sample one in Brazil, but last night, our first night in Salvador (a place Caranguejo had been to – the capoeira Mecca - and loved) I thought it apt to crack into one in his honour.

So, A and I ordered a caranguejo along with our beer and a couple of other sea-food based bits and pieces, thinking we’d have a kind of tapas-style lucky dip and not knowing really what to expect. A few minutes later the waiter returns and sets on the table before us a large bowl containing one huge, whole, hot and rather angry looking crab, accompanied by a plastic bucket and a large white solid stick-like object, which on closer examination turned out to be made of heavy plastic.

A and I looked at all these things, then at each other, and realised we were completely flummoxed and had absolutely no idea how to extract anything edible out of the assembled items. I picked up the stick and examined it tentatively. Maybe we have to smash it with this? I propositioned. We both looked at the crab. It looked back at us with an expression in its dead little beady eyes which I can only describe as deliberately unhelpful. Gingerly A flipped it over. The bottom of it yielded no further clues as to where to begin. “I think the good stuff might be in there” I said, pointing to its stomach. We wielded the stick over the crab. It looked utterly impenetrable. We put the stick down again. By this point, we were utterly helpless with laughter, as were most of the people watching us from adjacent tables. Attempting to take charge of the situation, A picked up the crab, with the expression of someone who’s about to defuse a bomb, and getting some purchase on its face with her nails, levered its head off to reveal a frothy black mess of unidentifiable innards. We looked at each other, horrified, and swiftly shut the crab and put it back in its basket, from whence the crustacean stared at us triumphantly.

At this point we knew we had been well and truly beaten. Crying with laughter, we realised that we had no option but to sit there with the crab between us until something else happened. Obviously enjoying the situation immensely, the waiter generously allowed everyone to appreciate the spectacle we had created for several minutes before he stepped in to our rescue and gallantly ripped the crab’s leg off, deftly cracked it, and offered me the meat it the claw.

Once the waiter had gone, seeing that we were still completely lost on how to continue, and so weak with laughter we were barely able to lift the crab-smashing club, the guys on the next table stepped in and continued the lesson in how to get meat out of a crab, which is not too far removed from getting blood out of a stone. Despite their admirable attempts not to make us appear any more stupid than we already did (a pretty impossible feat), we couldn’t help feeling, as A put it, like little children being spoon-fed as we bemusedly handed bits of discombobulated crab-anatomy to them to deal with. All in all, I think that crab went down in a blaze of glory, yielding as it did an incredibly puny amount of food in relation to the immense amount of laughter at our expense from everyone in the vicinity. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed eating anything more.

As an atheist I struggle with the idea of an afterlife, but it suddenly struck me in that moment, drunk on beer and laughing, that if there is one, I’d like to conceptualise it as a state of total access to all the knowledge and joy and pleasure, unfettered by all the pain, struggle and inconvenience, that life presents us with. And I hoped that Caranguejo, somehow, was enjoying the moment as much as we were.

Trevorama

Given that neither of us has any interest or inclination in romantic liaisons while we’re here. A and I were initially pleasantly surprised at the lack of male attention we attracted in Brazil. Emphatically not wanting to tar them all with the same brush, Brazilian men do have a reputation for being Lotharios. Perhaps the reputation is undeserved, we speculated optimistically in those early days – or perhaps we’re just not their bag? However, for some reason or other – either because we’re no longer bottle-white, or perhaps because we’re now on our own and out of the company of our Sao Paulo friends, we’re now getting hit on with increasing frequency, which is a bit of a hassle, as you think you’re just having a pleasant chat with someone, and two minutes later they’ve got the guns out.

We have observed that there seems to be a different etiquette in terms of (what I’ll generously term) courting here. Men actually form a physical queue in order to talk to girls – there seems to be an unspoken agreement between men that once you’ve had a go and been proved unsuccessful, you move aside to make way for the next one. We’ve actually had the situation where we’ve been talking to one bloke, only to have another tap him on the shoulder, and (assuming we can’t understand him) tell him he’s taken too long and would he please move aside so the next one can have a go. Perhaps in reaction to this environment, Brazilian men tend to go in for the kill with alarming swiftness – five minutes into their company they’re declaring love and asking if they can kiss you. All in all it on some evenings it can be fairly exhausting, as one becomes aware that, a bit like Zorro in one of those extended sword battles, as soon as you’ve dispensed with one, there’s going to be another one straight in behind him.

One bored night in Paraty, we stayed in our hotel room and watched a Brazilian dating show. The concept appeared to be that a selection of very very groomed women sit on stools in a line, and one after the other the host brings out a selection of men, who have about a minute to pitch to them all. At this point the girls all get asked in turn if they’ll take what’s on offer, which they mostly answer with a sneery ‘nao’ (occasionally quantified with a comment such as ‘he’s too short’). If one of them caves, (hedging her bets that the next one they bring out will be worse) then the two get paired off and sent off to sit on a sofa. This process is repeated until everyone is paired off – the danger for the girls being, if you turn down too many times at the beginning, you might just end up with the leftovers at the end. Occasionally, a siren goes off and the girl who’s currently in the spotlight has to get up and do sexy dancing under duress with the man currently on offer. Basically it’s a TV studio simulation of club nightlife. At the end, all the pairs slow dance with each other to Celine Dion, apart from any men who didn’t score, who have to dance on their own with stupid hats on and desperately try to convince the men in couples to swap with them, which they may do if they’ve since decided (during the sofa time) that they don’t like what they ended up with.

Anyhow, lacking the linguistic weaponry to parry away these assaults with any grace or aplomb, I feel a little like all I’m left with is the equivalent of a verbal club to disperse with them, which I feel disinclined to use, mainly because I still feel like I’m the visitor and everyone else is my host and I must be polite to them. My polite ‘thanks but no thanks’ in Portuguese get me nowhere. Nor is telling them you have a boyfriend in London (at this point I must stress that A's boyfriend in London seems to be a more effective deterent than mine, quite feasably because he actually exists - though I swear my imaginary one is getting realler by the day) As we have discovered, the stock response to that ripost is “but you don’t have a boyfriend in Brazil? So just don’t tell him about it!” Basically, the way they seem to see it, if he’s not in the room he’s irrelevant. We feel rather differently on this point, but the argument at that juncture becomes far too complex for my limited vocabulary.

I ask a Brazilian friend, Pedro, for help. What’s the magic phrase, I ask him, that gets rid of them without causing offence? “There is no such thing” he replies. How do the Brazilian women deal with it, I ask him. “The only way do get rid of them is to pointedly ignore them.” So, that rules out having a friendly chat with 50% of the humans in this country? Yes, according to Pedro. “Over here, ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘no’, it means, ‘not now, try again in a bit’.” A disturbing sentiment for any post-feminist to hear. “You’re too much of a good prospect” he continues “Nice gringos, they’re thinking maybe they can fuck you, and then you’ll move on and they won’t have to deal with any consequences. So they’ve got absolutely nothing to lose by keeping trying.” Almost enough to send one running for the concrete knickers.

It often seems that the only defence against unwanted male attention seems to be to be in the company of men already. All in all it’s a pretty unsatisfactory situation but one which it’s very difficult to get out of. Plumping for the ones that are least likely to hit on us, we recently have frequently found ourselves in the company mainly of middle-aged ex-pats. For the most part this is a mutually agreeable situation, and we have genuinely enjoyed their company (maybe just because we are craving conversation in English with anyone other than each other). These guys seem to enjoy being in the company of two young twenty-somethings and keep insisting on paying for our dinner (which it must be said, we are never angling for). Happily for us they don’t expect they’re going to get anything other than conversation in return. Thus we find ourselves unwilling participants dancing the ancient dance of male patronage, the only consolation for the massive reduction in our normal independence being that at least we eating better for it.

Unfortunately (infelizmente) I fear that our only other option to get rid of the have-a-goes is to get ruder and be blunter. Tis a quandary, and essentially, none of this leaves me feeling very good about myself. But you have to laugh at it all. We’ve begun ascribing names to them all in order to reference them later – Winky Trev, Be Careful Trev, Favela Trev, Licky Trev (I just didn’t get out of the way quick enough on that one), Super Trev, Singy Trev – and have amassed a great little collection of middle-aged-ex-pat drawls to entertain each other with.

State of the Art

I haven’t seen much theatre yet, despite my best intentions before I came (save a piece of puppet theatre in Paraty which featured a female puppet masturbating to very intricately-observed climax - powerful stuff but another story entirely.) My excuse is that real life is providing more than enough to reflect on right now, and I don’t think there’d be much point in me seeing much stuff until a) my Portuguese is better and b) I understand the context in which it’s being made a bit more thoroughly. Hence A and I are now living in a favela - the one which the Morrinho is situated, in Rio, staying in the house of the girlfriend of one of the Morrinho boys - more of which later.

Anyway. Back in London, the theatre world is up in arms about recently-announced changes to Arts Council England funding processes. I haven’t been able to get to grips with the complexities of the furore, but I’m getting twenty emails a day via the Young Vic Genesis Directors project, as the ensuing debate rages and arts professionals organise protests and meetings. Equity has the big guns out, and 500 people attended a packed-out meeting at the Young Vic theatre, unanimously voting a motion of no confidence in the Arts Council.

I imagine a fair amount of media coverage and debate is currently surrounding the recent Arts Council changes. Here in Rio, the situation of arts funding is even more dire, though the response far less vociferous or organised. By coincidence, my attention was brought to the issue via an interesting feature on the front page of the Sunday Arts section in one of the Rio broadsheets last weekend (I’ve been patiently translating it over breakfast for the past few days.)

Apparently, there are only 16 theatrical works on in Rio at the start of this year, compared to 30 last January; a 60% drop in cultural output, due to a combination of factors. Projects are funded here through a combination of state funding, via the Ministry of Culture, and ‘patrocinismo’, or sponsorship, mainly through large corporations. Caixa, one of the major banks, seems to fund visual arts spaces and exhibitions, the film industry is buoyed up by Petrobras, the state-owned petrol company, and the theatre industry by Electrobras. In 2007 though, Electrobras made no public announcement about the normal open competition for funding awards, and instead funded a few projects, privately selected. In the same year, state funding was radically affected by a strike in the Ministry of Culture, and much chopping and changing, sacking and reappointment amongst cultural ministers and the secretariat. Funding decisions were radically delayed – a flurry of delayed funding decisions came through in the last two weeks of December, generally seen by the theatre community as a pacifying gesture, but much of this money was unusable as projects had faltered as other funding relationships dried up during the delay. Theatre producers rightly complain of an indifference in cultural politics – indeed, a lack of cultural policy, full stop. Without any reliable and publicly accountable system of arts funding, the industry here is in a state of crisis.

Of course, creative output under these conditions is fiendishly difficult – but of course, the issue of theatrical funding is pretty low on both the media and political agendas. I’ve been keeping an eye out since I saw that article, but the issue seems to have once again submerged under the weight of fear-inducing articles about car-jackings, drug traffickers, political corruption, police counter-crime manoeuvres and people being arrested for forging Bolsa Familial coupons (food stamps).

There’s certainly no shortage of subject material in Brazil to make art about, and certainly no shortage of artists wanting to make it. You can feel the creativity bursting out here – it’s in the Morrinho, in the incredibly skilful grafitti, it’s in the musicians gathering informally on street corners, the rodas de samba, the rodas de capoeira (every young guy here commands a decent ginga and can throw a respectable martelo or meia lua de frente, it seems). It’s on little stalls at the side of the roads that sell beautiful naïve sculptures made of junk, it’s in the sketches of the boy in the local shop here in the favela who’s refining his self-taught drawing skills in order to become a tattoo artist (“it’s one of the only ways to make money as an artist here’ he told us).

Believing as I do in art’s function as a space for society to debate issues, in its essential transformative process (O Morrinho stands as indisputable evidence of that) it’s incredibly saddening to comprehend the massive problems that the creative industries here have to overcome. Concerned as I am about the issues at home, I at least feel reassured by the instant, forceful and vociferous response that threat to artistic output engenders, which I’d be part of if I was there. But right now, I’m much more consumed by the crisis in Brazil - about the things here that are dying to be creatively explored, but for which there is virtually no endorsement, no platform, no money and no structure of political support. The social and political problems here, obviously, are manifold and complex – and nearly everyone is massively affected by them, one way or another. Clearly, in a county where basic access to the essentials (housing, healthcare, education, even food) isn’t happening, theatre is a luxury that’s hard to pay for. But art here has the potential to be incendiary, radical – to break through the sinister silence that serves to maintain the incredible disparity in living standards here, and which underpins the extreme anger (and resultant violence) which is such a marked feature of Brazilian everyday life.

A and I have been discussing recently how the only Brazilian films which break the international consciousness are those about the violence and crime here – the only ones that have hit our local arthouse cinema in London in recent years are Carandiru (about the prison riot in Sao Paulo), Bus 174, (the documentary about a bus hold up in Rio), and of course, the ubiquitous City of God. I dunno what that tells you really – maybe our radars need to tune in to the other stuff that must be being made. Maybe the violence is what fascinates us about Brazil. Maybe that’s why we’ve ended up, for all the hassle it is, eschewing the nice comfy pousada up the road and living in a favela.

A got our first dose of guns this morning. On the way from our room in the favela to the NGO offices, we walked through the little gaggle of young men who sit on the corner at the entrance to the favela. We said hello to them, they gave us slightly odd looks and asked us if we were lost. When we said we weren’t thanks, they decided amongst themselves that we must either be staying in the Favelinha or going to get the bus. When A walked back past them all a bit later, they had the guns out, they clearly wanted her to see they had it, passing it from one to the other as she walked past. We’ve had a chat with the women at the NGO about our situation here; they said, you need to make it clear that you’re living here and have friends here, and are not just dim gringos walking around with cameras. They’ve clearly got their turf to protect and their business to look out for. We just have to make it clear that we have no intention of messing about with it, and make sure we’re not rocking the boat. We’re hoping that friendliness will prevail, and that we are sharp enough to judge the intricacies of the situation and not disturb the existing equilibrium that keeps this favela trouble free. “No-one wants the police here” said Gabriella, “because if they come, it’s a war.”

Death of the Transformador

In our early days in Sao Paulo we discovered to our dismay that our epilator did not work on the paltry 110V brazilian electricity supply. Its normal vigorous action was reduced to a lazy and ineffective buzz. This was of some concern to us, as we foresaw (correctly) lots of time spent on beaches baring our very white flesh alongside the Brazilian women, who are of course world-renowned for their legendary depilatory standards. (Depilation is of course one of the most thankless tasks known to woman. It’s painful and boring and takes ages, and of course, like painting the Severn Bridge, it seems as soon as you’ve finished it has all started growing back and you have to begin again. We have spent much time discussing the miraculous efforts of the Brazilian women, as they all seem to be utterly devoid of any body hair, anywhere, all the time. How do they do it? There are no methods in our female repertoire that could achieve such results. They must be cheating.)

After some investigation, we were told that the solution to our lazy epilator problem was to purchase a “transformador”, and we thus allocated an afternoon in Sao Paulo to achieving this objective (see what glamorous travellers we are?) Luckily, we were able to enlist the assistance of Fabian on this venture, as the procurement of a transformador was no easy feat, involving as it did a trip to the district in Sao Paulo which is home to a myriad of electrical shops, where we eventually located a transformador, after asking many people, through an unmarked door, up a flight of stairs, down a corridor to a little kiosk which just sold transformadors of many kinds. We were relieved to discover that the transformador was not too enormous, as when we’d asked Fabian how big they were he had indicated something the size of a piano and told us we’d also need to buy a trolley to carry it on.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after a couple of weeks of resultant happy epilation, we are saddened to discover today that the transformador appears to have died, which puts us back at hairy square one.

One month down and two to go

Having had enough of the complicated logistics of getting from A to B, the lovely A and I decided not to go back to Rio just yet, and have found ourselves a nice little pousada in Paraty (we’re getting better at bargaining on the rates, in the absence of any vocabulary for negotiating, mainly by putting on a series of pained faces until the price is dropped) and are now just sort of taking it easy and waiting for a plan to reveal itself to us.

To illustrate the extent of our ´blowing in the wind-ness´, today it took us several hours to get to the bus station in Paraty (a five-minute walk) because on the way we decided to follow a horse which seemed to be wandering about on its own, which led us on a little excursion around the outer fringes of Paraty. A lovely excursion actually - neighbourhood Sunday life playing out on the streets, the real life of this city revealing itself once you look past the facade that is offered up to tourists in the scenic centre. Birds in cages hanging from trees, a man painting his cart, kids on bicycles and skateboards and with kids richocheting from house to house, the smell of church cook-ups wafting out of buildings, balcony gardens blooming, dogs flopping in doorways, groups of old men everywhere sitting around putting the world to rights outside a row of little food stalls. But I digress....

All the deadlines we’ve had so far which have driven us from place to place (friends arriving, Christmas, New Year etc) have passed, and now we are in the liberating but somewhat incomprehensible position of having absolutely no commitments to anything or anyone until the 4th of March, when we are supposed to be flying back to London.

So what’s changed in a month? Let´s have a little audit.

In no particular order....

We’ve pared down what we carry to the essentials. Anything too hot, too impractical, too heavy or too bulky has been sent back to Sao Paulo (including my leather jacket. Why did I bring a leather jacket to Brazil? We´ve been attempting to bribe each other to put it on for half an hour in this excruciating heat, but the price was never high enough). Vanity has to be relegated: I have very low expectations of what I might look like when I look in the mirror. Hair is either clean or not – I have had to relinquish control over anything else it might choose to do. I am bored to the state of total apathy with my tiny clothes collection and choose what to wear based on what is clean and not too hot. My shoe collection here is now entirely Brazilian-made. I’m living in Havainas and loving it. I reckon that at any one time, 80% of the population of Brazil is wearing a pair of Havainas, and for good reason. I’m a complete convert – they allow you to be barefoot in seconds, they come in a dazzling array of colours, and when they eventually wear out you can buy another pair from the next supermarket for about 3 quid. Makes one laugh when one considers how much you pay for a pair in Urban Outfitters in London. When the terrain is too hard for flip-flops, it’s into the capoeira shoes, which again come in all the colours under the sun, go in the washing machine when they’re dirty, take up no room in my bag, and cost about 8 quid.

We are browner than we were despite liberal application of factor 30 and are no longer always the whitest people in sight.

The Portuguese is coming along – the musicality of the language is revealing itself now since someone patiently explained the accent marks to me, which tell you on the page how to say the word, its stress and cadence. I’ve discovered that there’s no point rushing when I speak and that slow and drawn out works better. There´s none of the rapid staccato tatatatata that you get with Spanish. I can read the newspaper with less frequent recourse to the dictionary, and occasionally realise that I have understood something that I’ve overheard without consciously trying to.

My relationship with time has changed; usually I have no means of telling it. Quite a lot of it just disappears, and then you wonder where it went. The Brazilians, it has to be said, have a very different relationship with time than we do. I think it´s quite interesting that they use the word ´finalmente´ (finally) but not really ever `eventualmente´ (eventually) to describe when someone turned up. ´Eventually´, I think, implies that you were more impatient while you were waiting.

I carry very little on my person and wonder why in London I’m always lugging a huge bag around.

We’ve stopped being ridiculously paranoid about getting robbed. Everything matters less.

Frequently (and this is a little sad) we realise we have stopped being surprised at our surroundings.

I haven’t had a cup of tea for a month and have developed an intense liking for feijao and arroz (got to learn to cook beans like they do here), and found a plethora of new ways to consume cheese. (Last week’s discovery: Pastel de quejo – deep-fried cheese pie. I’m going to end up the size of a house.)

My slipped disc seems to have unslipped (touch wood) and I can touch my toes again and have stopped worrying unduly about hurting myself.

Most profoundly, I feel far away enough from the life I’ve constructed for myself back home to have a good long look at it and to decide which bits of it matter to me. Before we left everything seemed inextricable and unchangeable. Now I’m more and more wondering what exactly I need to go back for. Whilst ambition is obviously a wonderful thing, it’s incredibly liberating to rediscover what it is that you actually want to do in the moment that you’re doing it, and to realise that even the best laid and grandest plans are changeable.

And the next two months? We’re both feeling itchy to do something more constructive, to get off the road, settle down a bit and get stuck into something. I’ve got a new play brewing and am on the look out for somewhere with a nice veranda or balcony from which to start to write it.

Back on radar in 2008

It´s been a while...but we´ve been off radar since last year in a land where electricity, let alone the internet, didn´t exist. Settle in for a long digest....

Continuing with our strategy of not having a plan and just riding the tide of our Brazilian friends, we abandoned the original plan of New Year’s Eve in Rio and instead opted to accept the invitation to their party. As in previous years, they had made a plan to rent a house for a week in a remote fishing village called Ponta Negra. Anatole arranged all the details, and we had very little idea of what to expect, being reliant on his series of sometimes rather cryptic emails. We got the general gist that things would be pretty basic, and that we’d need to bring food; as he put it “there are two restaurants there, but it can take a long time to get any food. No one has ever died of starvation, but people have been known to get very upset.”

So, following his email instructions we took a bus to a tiny place called Laranjeiras, and then, after a long confusing conversation with an old man in very gruff Portuguese, eventually managed to find someone arranging Combis to where the boats were stationed. Having not quite managed to decode quite how basic the shops were in Laranjeiras from Tole’s email, we raided the shop for what it had left, deciding to overcompensate for our sorry looking vegetables with large amounts of alcohol, and so ended up in a little boat with bottles of vodka and onions rolling around our feet – off out into the sea, around the uninhabited forested coast, to pitch up twenty minutes later on a tiny but exquisite beach; forest fringed, bracketed by smooth climbable boulders, pristine water as still as a pond.

Ponta Negra really is a remote place – a fishing village of about 150 inhabitants. Most of the (pretty basic) houses are hidden by the forest which comes down to the beach, so from the sea, it looks like there are just a couple of simple beach shacks and some wooden boats. It’s charms have been discovered by young Paulistanos, and over the festive season, the locals rent out their houses to those who make it to the beach. The nearest road is a two hour walk away, otherwise it is access by boat only, if you can find someone with one and get them to take you. Our house was a couple of steps up from camping – a basic concrete three room structure, with a veranda, containing enough beds for about 70% of the people who we were expecting, a gas cooker (with bottled gas), a table, two chairs, a bench, two hammocks, and a bathroom with cold shower. We swiftly discovered that there was no electricity, rendering our immense collection of technology redundant. Tole pointed out with some amusement progress is occurring – since last year, a public telephone has been installed in the village. We dug our torches out and set off to procure some candles.

I love places like Ponta Negra. As we swiftly discovered, it’s a place where you find you have everything you really need – but absolutely nothing more. The guy who’d rented us the house wasn’t overly keen on providing us with anything else – every time he saw Anatole coming, he actually hid in the nearest bush – but the bars have a great little operation going to satiate the needs of the incoming hoards. Within a couple of hours, we’d set up what was to become a very very long bar tab and were busy getting stuck into the first of many “pingas com mel” – short drinks of cachaca and very very runny honey, which, as with most things here, you share.

And so began an amazing week of utter relaxation in beautiful surroundings, enjoying truly excellent company. Slowly our group expanded to eleven, including Ju and Fabian (with whom I used to share the flat that A and I now inhabit in London) and their respective partners, a couple of Fabian’s friends who I’d previously met in Madrid, and one of Anatole’s friends from school, Junior (who, it emerged, was like an incredibly courteous Tarzan). Everyone somehow interlinked, and between us all, when you added up how long everyone had known each other, there was over 150 years worth of solid friendship to be exploited.


Time quickly became an irrelevant concept as we settled into a pretty blissful soporific hedonism. We spent a lot of time discussing, planning and practising for a Grand Beach Olympics (designed around making use of the Christmas catapult) – but in the end, even that amount of organisation was too much for us, collectively. Days came and went with long hours spent in hammocks, on the beach, talking, playing, laughing, swimming, eating vast quantities of freshly caught calamari, getting slowly drunk on ice-cold Itaipava beers, caipirinhas and pingas and slowly caned on gentle brazilian ganga, continuing by candlelight as night fell and utter pitch darkness descended until eventually everyone fell asleep, or didn’t, in a bed or hammock, or until sun rose and it all began again.

And after all, it was the most incredible New Years celebration, and I ended the year with one of the most pleasant days I can ever remember. I decided that I’d done too much work in 2007 and needed to redress the balance, and so stationed myself firmly in a hammock and abstained from decision making, which led to a delicious slow state of soporific absorption as I gratefully imbibed anything that was passed to me. The Brazilians got stuck into preparing a huge meal of different fish stews, rice and lentils which was left to cook for about 10 hours while we all took ourselves off to the beach. I worked off the morning’s laziness in the afternoon by heading off into the sea with Junior for our daily ‘expeditions’, swimming, diving, looking at fish, rock-climbing and floating about for a couple of hours until our fingers were completely pickled. We headed back to the house after dark and prepared our feast on a table in the garden, finishing up with our (English) contribution of bananas done in foil in the oven with chocolate and whisky. As 2008 rolled in we headed back to the beach, which had become a party with lanterns in the sand, music from the bars, and local boys setting off huge fireworks from bamboo canons. We jumped the waves and made wishes for luck (in the Brazilian tradition), swam in the sea with the phosphorus, and danced in the sand until the early hours, finally stumbling back to the house and falling asleep on the cushions in the garden under the stars.

The week’s only moment of high drama occurred in the early hours of New Year’s Day when the lovely A stumbled to the toilet and discovered that the shower head was on fire, having been melted by the candle which had been burning on top of it to illuminate the toilet in the night. A spent some time frantically running back and forth from the kitchen attempting to dowse the growing inferno with pans of water and trying unsuccessfully to wake up the men. She eventually managed to rouse Junior from where he’d been sleeping in the garden. Not understanding her panicky English, it took quite an urgent mime show on A’s part before she could drag him into the bathroom, where he sensibly turned on the shower, which put out the fire. The first day of the year was spent with A telling us all how she’s saved us all from burning to death in the night and Junior massively downplaying his firefighting prowess. In the end, the owner of the house didn’t mind about the immolated shower head (and, bizarrely, we thought, didn’t even ask how it had happened).

There’s something about places like Ponta Negra that are incredibly restorative – the absence of all but the essentials. It all served to make me think how extrapolated city-living is from the way human beings are naturally evolved to function. Of course it’s easy to naively idealise the simplicity of the pastoral idyll, and of course it would be hard to forgo the advantages that city life has to offer (variety, intellectual stimulation, culture, innovation, etc etc), but I do feel quite strongly that city living does have profoundly unhealthy effects on us.

In the absence of the loud white noise of advertising that you get living in a city, all craving leaves you and you stop wanting anything that you don’t have. Where I live in London, our living room overlooks the high street, where you can purchase more or less anything you could imagine wanting, pretty much on a whim, pretty much at any time of day or night. As a result you become very divorced from appreciating where any of these things come from. It’s never dark there, so night and day don’t have the same meaning. Aside from the plants on my windowsill, we don’t see things grow or die.

In cities, I think, people develop a malaise of empathy fatigue: you come into contact with so many people on a daily basis that you can’t possibly care about all of them, so you end up unresponsive to the needs and emotional states of all but those closest to you. In London, this distrust of strangers is particularly pronounced; if someone even looks at you on the Tube, you presume that they must be mad and move away from them. How is it possible, we often wondered in Rio de Janeiro, for people to walk past young children living on the streets? – before realising that it’s just an extension of the same alienating function that allows us to ignore homeless adults in our own city, telling ourselves that they’re not our personal responsibility. In Ponta Negra, everyone is treated as a friend and looked after from the word go. This was borne out on our last night in the village. A visiting family with two children had gone off on one of the trails through the forest to visit another beach and had not returned. The locals had noticed their absence at nightfall when they had not appeared at either of the beach bars for dinner, and a search party was mounted to look for them. In the end they were located at the only other bar in the village which is halfway up the hill. The same principle applied with the local alcoholic who would wander over a couple of times a day to cadge cigarettes. As Anatole put it “it’s a small place and we’re gonna see him over and over again, we can’t ignore him, so we might as well make the interaction as pleasant as possible”.

It was a type of friendliness we found at times difficult to get our heads around. One night, fancying a change of scene, we decided to seek out a place where the year before, a guy called Pedro had run a bar from his house, which is constructed around a massive boulder in the middle of the forest. This was possibly the most remote bar in the world, up through the winding forest paths. “It’s not too far” Anatole had told us “but you do have to cross two small rivers on the way” – no easy feat, as we discovered, by torchlight when slightly inebriated. We arrived to find that Pedro had decided not to bother this year and was not in business. However, he was more than happy for us to sit on his decking and treat it as a bar, so we retrieved our own cachaca and limes and somewhat oddly, found ourselves conducting a little party in their front garden and popping in every now and again to use their toilet, before an even more difficult stumble across the rivers and back to our place in the wee hours.

The children in Ponta Negra have an amazing freedom. School being out, they spend their days on the beach, mucking about in boats, collectively looked after, when needs be, by anyone who’s around. On one of our expeditions one day, Junior and I came across a boy of about five rowing his way out into the cove in a plastic tub, out in deeper water than some of our adult party were happy to swim in. I remarked to Junior how incredible it seemed to me. “Ellos são os filhos dos pescadors” he shrugged. (They’re the sons of fishermen).

When it came to time to leave, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to do it, and ended up staying another day. This wouldn’t have mattered overly, as we’d allowed ourselves a day in Rio before our friend E had to fly back to London. Unfortunately, the next morning, as we were packing, E checked her plane tickets and realised that she was actually flying a day earlier than we thought, which meant that at 6.30pm she needed to be in Rio airport which was a boat ride, a combi-van, a 1 hour local bus, a four hour coach ride and a taxi away, a matter made no easier by the fact that we were still firmly ensconced in a place where time and urgency were negligible concepts.

Somehow we managed to get ourselves to the bus station back in Paraty by about 2pm, having formed a plan B of sending E to Sao Paulo instead of Rio to pick up the second leg of her flight at 10pm - only to be told at the bus ticket kiosk that all bus tickets to Sao Paulo had been sold. A rather unkind reintroduction to the real world, we tried everything we could think of, E on the phone trying to change flights, me trying to bribe the ticket seller, the bus driver and the other passengers in my crap Portuguese to no avail. In the end, with little time to spare, we commandeered a taxi and bundled her in it for a very expensive four hour drive to Sao Paulo airport, with the scribbled phone numbers of everyone we knew in Sao Paulo just in case, and strict instructions to email us as soon as she could to let us know that she made the flight.