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.