The Dog and the Fiat

Shaggy came to us as an adult. Therefore we cannot be held responsible for her being a terrible racist. This is embarrassing in a city that is 80% in some way descended from Africans. An otherwise docile, loving bitch, on seeing black children or women, she would growl and transform herself to something approaching dangerous.

“Racism is a crime without bail,” joked the man who works in our condominium during the day. Despite Adailton being both gentle and friendly, Shaggy never truly warmed to him, on account of his dark skin.

In Brazil, if someone calls you a racial epitaph and there are witnesses, the person can be put in jail and only freed after the trial. The most famous case was when an Argentine player racially insulted a Brazilian player whose nickname was ‘Graphite’ because of his skin color. The visiting player was hauled off to jail and there was a big hoopla since he was Argentine and Brazilians are prickly about Porteños. But he got out quickly.

Shaggy was also a black dog and its previous owners were friends of ours who were moving back to the States. They were the opposite of white racists, they loved everybody and embraced diversity with fervor, the good Americans a lot of people doubt exist. The problem was they both worked and our poor Shaggy was left alone with a maid and her kids who must have terrorized her.

I’d never had a dog before as an adult and since I’m white, Shaggy liked me immediately. As dogs do, they become family, sometimes better because they can’t talk.

About the same time we got Shaggy, we acquired a Fiat from one of our neighbors who was moving away. He was from Uruguay, and seemed a perfectly decent sort as most people from that nice but rather innocuous country are. His wife was from the south of Brazil and they had a baby daughter.

She was not the cutest thing in the world but of course you can’t say that and coo at her and say how adorable she is instead. It’s lucky you don’t turn a certain color when you’re being hypocritical.

The car seemed in good shape although knowing nothing about cars, my judgment about that type of thing is pretty baseless. I paid him and happily went off to register the car, which proved impossible because he hadn’t paid the yearly tax.

“How the fuck do you sell me a car and not tell me about that?” was what I wanted to say but being a polite bloke I left out the ‘fuck’.

He was moving away the next day and was sheepishly apologetic when I confronted him. He swore he would pay and would send proof of that through the mail. So I could have been screwed since, realistically, was I really going to drive 1500 miles to get the three hundred and fifty bucks?
They asked to spend the last night at our house having moved out all their stuff. Fortunately I was away, for as guests they were slightly crass. Some couples spend a lot of time just sniping at each other, it’s awkward. These guys seemed to loathe each other. The guy would say things like:

“Come on you fat bitch, get on with the washing.” He would pretend it was a joke but it wasn’t really. She was equally derogatory calling him slow, a fool, a fucking foreigner. They were a delight to be around. Amazingly, he sent the payment the next week.

Our Fiat was what are called ‘popular’ cars here. That means a 1.0 litre engine and in our case, no frills at all except a radio that died almost immediately. No air-conditioning, no power steering, just basic. I was taking the carbon footprint bullshit seriously. But it was reliable and only seemed to break down in convenient places like next to a garage.

So we had our car and Shaggy and were starting out a life together. We had to be careful about walking Shaggy because she had a mortal enemy within the condominium. Marie, a King James Spaniel, would cause a transformation in Shaggy, ‘a race without definition’ as mutts are called here, who became an attack dog. She was like one of those Bolsheviks who’d found some wretched nobleman and pummeled him to death.

One dreadful time, Shaggy attacked Marie while the owner, a man who masculinity pretty much left alone, screamed and failed to do anything. I had to drag Shaggy away, while the owner and Marie whimpered.

“She has a heart condition,’ he said accusingly.

He is a professor at the state university and is keen to let you know how many conferences he speaks at and how hard he works. His specialty is fungal genetics so you can imagine what fun those conferences must be to attend. His wife is also an academic and expert in obscure ancient languages. She feels the need to explain things she suspects lesser intellects than herself, i.e. us, will be confounded by. So you learn fascinating stuff about archaic Greek or Aramaic and such. Shaggy outlived poor Marie whose heart eventually pushed her from this world.

Dogs and cars get older, and both start to cost you money, cars particularly. I think I practically replaced the entire engine over these nearly ten years of owning our reliable Fiat. I thought this would be a good experience, since I’d learn how a car worked, but if you don’t have a mechanical mind, the mechanics of a car are boring as shit.

By the time I managed to sell the car, the headlights were so pathetic you prayed the street lamps were good. Many years before the back windshield wiper had fallen off and all that remained was the metal stub, which would miraculously come to life and start scratching the fuck out of the back window. You had to stop the car and remove the stub which could be inconvenient. We had to measure the gasoline tank by the amount of kilometers we’d gone since the little gas indicator packed in. The left blinker was dodgy, often failing to function, causing heaps of indignation from other drivers. The muffler was full of holes, which meant you could tell from a couple of miles away when we were arriving.

In the meantime, our neighbors have new cars every couple of years. In our case, the difference in car standards is because we travel abroad every year. The world is accessible to middle class people who don’t get too hooked on material things.

The name Shaggy caused some estrangement to English relatives. When my nephew called and was given the message (by my wife) that I was with Shaggy on the beach, in wonderment he told his mother (my sister) that I was shagging on the beach. Brazil is really liberal, he must have thought.

There had been an early trauma in Shaggy’s life with us. We had had an adorable Cocker Spaniel puppy (well mixed, this is Brazil after all) foisted on us and stupidly did not resist. Shaggy, the darling of a childless couple, suddenly competed with an cute dog who spent a good deal of the rest of his life humping her. She eventually succumbed to his charm (at times well hidden) and would often reciprocate the humping in a role reversal that maybe was indicative of some latent butch lesbianism on Shaggy’s part. Tragically the spaniel was killed and like us, Shaggy was distraught.

Another jolt ultimately re-compensated but nevertheless discombobulating to Shaggy’s world view was our adoption of a black child, another unwelcome entrant into the house with racial baggage to boot. But she came to love him, as he did her.

Very suddenly, things started to go down hill for Shaggy. She had trouble breathing and began having seizures, normally brought on by too much excitement. Like an epileptic, she would writhe around on the floor, mouth foaming, peeing and crapping uncontrollably. We spent a good deal of money to find out she had a bad heart, for which she needed more regular expensive medication. But what are you going to do, let the dog die because it’s straining your budget?

Unable to be convinced that the car would last another day, we decided to sell it. The characteristics outlined earlier didn’t give it mouth watering appeal to a second-hand car salesman. In addition, its particular shade of blue was the only kind that makes blue look ugly, there were two small dents and the horn had developed a habit of going off all the time, most consistently when you were trying to get out of parking spaces. Worse, the chassis number had been obliterated by rust.

The car would therefore have to be sold on the street. This is done by going to a certain part of town where men stand on street corners and flash their fingers at passing cars offering to buy them. As a salesman, I am unbelievably bad and since I knew the car was a piece of shit, how was I going to convince anybody else otherwise?

So I enlisted a more street wise friend of mine, who miraculously managed to sell the thing for almost four thousand dollars. The world is unfair. The US is fifteen times as rich as Brazil yet things like cars are outrageously expensive here. For four thousands dollars, you can get a decent car in the US. Here, well you get something like my old wreck.

The last night of Shaggy’s life she paced around, unable to lie down because of the pressure on her bloated heart. She looked at us beseechingly, it was heart wrenching. The next day she was exhausted and we decided to take her to the vet. On the way she died in the arms of my nephew who thought I’d been shagging on the beach. She was thirteen, she’d had a good life.

So the car and Shaggy are gone. Both were faithful souls and are positively etched in our memories, all that we can ask for of the past.

Buying a Car in Bahia

The only thing good about waiting in line while the Brazilian bureaucracy badly attends to its citizens who pay for it to function, is meeting people. Bahia is one of the places in the world where every time you go out and have interaction with strangers, you will have a laugh, a pleasurable or at least interesting experience. So cheerful and friendly are baianos that even wasting hours of your life trying to resolve bureaucratic shit does not damper their humor.

This is not the case with me. I glower and sulk and dry-heave indignation as the cogs of the machinery grind at an abominably slow rate. As a result, I try and minimize any contact with the bureaucracy, which in Brazil you can do by hiring a professional called a ‘dispatcher’, whose expertise is working the bureaucracy. Besides taking care of your paper work, his other function is greasing the palms of state employees who magically transform the one- month waiting time for many documents into ten minutes.

But this time I could not avoid contact with the beast. Having bought a car I had to have my signature ‘recognized’ as they say here. A normal signature is worthless without the stamp of the notary for anything official; everyone agrees this is a totally pointless procedure that takes millions of hours of labor away from the market. But it continues.

The previous owner of the car was a rather mousy American woman long resident in Brazil. Americans who stay here for a long time adopt a kind of sing-song English, where emphasis is put as it would be in a Portuguese phrase that sounds strange in English though it’s being delivered by a native speaker. She lived in a nice house and like many of her status had a couple of house servants, one which she rather obscenely referred to as her house boy. The young man was 25 and looked surly, maybe being addressed as a boy didn’t agree with him. The car was practically new and a good deal, so all was well.

To guarantee service at the Notary Public (at least mine), you have to get there way before opening hours. In my case, I arrived at 6:30 a.m. and still found twenty people in front of me. I calculated two hours as a wait, which was stupid since if your wait exceeds that, you really get fucking mad.

There was a young man in front of me who was reading a paper. As he looked at the picture of an unfortunate French tourist who had almost had his ear sliced off, he turned to me and said of the gang who perpetrated this barbarity and had been caught.

“They need to be beaten badly. A lot of hits. For me, the cops should have killed them then and there.”

I had not uttered a word to this guy and sort of said something completely non-committal, burying my head in my book trying not to get drawn into a conversation on the rights and wrongs of extra-judicial killing.

There was a child running about going up to people in the line and being cute in front of them. This being Brazil, of course everyone smiled and cooed at him, a couple of people actually held his hand and took him for a little walk. His mother looked on from afar, not more than 18, one of her front teeth already missing and the kind of clothes that give away the fact that the person wearing them is extremely poor. Her skirt was frayed, her flip-flops worn; her tee-shirt featured a smiling politician known for his brazen corruption. Little John, despite being cute, was probably condemned to a life of material squalor. He’d better enjoy it since people will pay fond attention to poor children but not at all to poor adults.

Eight o’clock passed and it had not opened yet. The guy in front of me, he who wanted to exterminate criminals, had switched his cellular to become a radio and the tinny sound of carnival music piped out. The woman behind me started dancing and singing; she knew all the words to the songs. Not dancing exaggeratedly, but moving and letting the music be with her. Here I was stewing in resentment, saturated with the American ‘time is money’ theory, and she was dancing and smiling. I think her attitude is probably more correct.

Finally, the doors were opened by a middle aged woman, who sighed as she said, “I almost didn’t open this morning, you know. Two of my workers called in sick, it’s going to be a terrible time for me today.”

I hated this woman immediately. She made us, some of whom had waited for two hours, feel she was doing us a favor. And she had an earnest smile. ‘You should be apologizing to us for our inconvenience, you bitch,’ was the way I saw it.

We ambled in, my number 19, seemed years off being serviced. The woman, after ushering the lucky ones in, began turning away others who would have to wait until 12 to get a number for service starting at 14:00. She locked the doors with a crude chain. She was perpetuating an outrageous affront to a long suffering public and she still had that matronly fucking smile on her face. Hellish thoughts were jumping around my head, such as going up and seizing her and shaking her and…..

After ten minutes the first person was still being served, a guy stood up and started to complain.

“What are all those people doing back there?” he asked as he pointed to people who seemed to be scurrying around doing nothing.

He was confronted by a stern looking supervisor, a young woman with short hair who explained with great rigor how their repeated requests for more staff had been ignored by authorities higher than her.

“That’s a disgrace,” the man said, his voice rising to a level that started to cause some concern. “Brazil doesn’t advance because of this shit.”

Some people have charisma, others don’t. This guy did not, was unattractive and rude and people were starting to get sick of him.

“Sit down, sit down,” a couple of the people said aggressively. Eventually he left, but all his points were valid, everyone knew this. I have witnessed many similar instances, in bank queues, and other place where you are required to wait. The strangling bureaucracy thwarts progress and gets a few people indignant enough to shout about it. If the majority did, there’d be a revolution but, let’s face it, most people do not want to get caught up in a revolution.

As the clock began to show an hour, then an hour and a half had passed, ire ate at me like some corrosive acid, no wonder they call it one of the Capital Sins. I watched the woman working, as a hawk watches its prey. She seemed to work in slow motion and insisted on making chit chat to each customer. Seconds were wasted on these meaningless banters, and I resented them.

Some compensation was acquired from complaining with the people sitting next to me, in this case two attractive and friendly women.

“It’s absolutely absurd, one employee to serve fifty people. A lack of respect, a shame.”

We all agreed. Later, I felt betrayed by my former allies when their transaction, one ahead of mine, was taking ages mainly due to some fucking chit chat they insisted on engaging with the hated employee. Those last ten minutes were agony. It’s lucky that in Brazil I can’t go to Walmart and pick up a gun and start shooting people. If Americans had to go through this, there’d be even more mass shootings than there are now.

It was nine-forty in the morning when I finally managed to escape with what I wanted. I called my fix-it man, Goofy. That’s what it says on his card, Papeta, ‘the good dispatcher’. We had gone to get the car inspected together so had a certain intimacy; attainable here between complete strangers in good moods.

On the way to the inspection place, he told me about some poor bastard he had seen, trying to get a free ride by hanging onto the back of a truck, who had fallen off and been run over. I felt stupid when I asked if the guy had died, which Papeta replied with an ‘isn’t it fucking obvious’ look on his face. He was cool.

The inspection process is surprisingly efficient. The first car I bought in Brazil had a cracked windshield and was missing a bumper. Employing a guy like Goofy, I managed to get it through and legitimized without a single authority having a look at the car. It was magical, corruption benefiting the small guy, in this case me and the fix-it man.

That was 14 years ago. This time they inspected the car, well sort of, they forgot a couple of things but the guy knows Papeta so well and money may have changed hands. But not enough, apparently, as the inspector insisted he couldn’t get the chassis number off the engine and this required a form with my recognized signature. And hence the nightmare.

Goofy just called to say all was well. The new document is ready. It does work out in the end, but the system certainly does not make it easy. And as my wife says, I ‘should grow some patience.’