Arriving in Brazil

In the immigration queue at the airport, a woman behind us blurted out.
“It’s so great to be back home.”
She informed us she had been in Spain and Portugal and referred to the people there as “povinho chato” which literally means “unpleasant little people.” Her attitude toward Brazil’s former colonizers was one bordering on disdain. In the national culture this manifests itself in jokes being made about the dimwittedness of the Portuguese in the way the Irish are for the English, the Polish for the Americans. She had no idea how we felt about it, whether we had Portuguese ancestry or indeed friends, she just assumed we would think the same.
Armed with these prejudices when I first travelled to Portugal two years ago, I had been surprised by people’s friendliness and general good nature. I had expected dour, short ugly, lugubrious and generally sad (have you ever listened to Fado) people who spoke a language that resembled Slavic or Arabic, not the suave, languid and beautiful Portuguese of Bossa Nova. That they regarded Brazilians as mostly consisting of transvestite prostitutes I was assured many times.
“If we’d been colonized by the English or the Germans, things would have been different. Instead we got the backward, lazy and incompetent Iberians who frittered away all the gold and left us miserable.”
I have heard this refrain, or variations of it, innumerous times as if it was part of a national poem or song. All Brazil’s problems can be traced to Portugal, it is argued.
But I only spent two days in Lisbon and credited the brevity of the stay and good luck to our wholly positive interactions with the city’s population. Maybe I wasn’t understanding their much more guttural form of Portuguese and therefore not catching all the famed negativity contained in the content.
This year we went again, my whole clan renting a magnificent old house near Felguerias, a town 30 miles from Oporto, Portugal’s second city. There we stayed for two weeks, and without question, everyone was not only nice, but absolutely friendly, exuding good will.
Not only were the people exceptional, it’s a beautiful place. Oporto is a wonderful city, its winding, hilly streets lined with often spectacular old and newer buildings, good taste abounds as modernity and innovation are working in near harmony.
It resembles Pelourinho, Salvador’s historic old town, only one worries less about getting mugged. Whenever you leave Brazil, especially going to Europe, the relief of not having to worry about crime is almost immediate. A house of the type we rented, old and filled with antiques and other things of real value, if it were in Brazil, would have to be walled in, and patrolled by Rottweiler’s dogs and armed guards. So maybe we can’t blame the appalling violence we have in Brazil on the Portuguese.
We went to the beach, a very different experience than that of Salvador’s spectacular Sunday beach scene where flesh is proudly on show. Not that the Portuguese are prudes but a steady wind ensures you never really get hot, and regular beach goers have long ago purchased a concoction they stick in the sand to protect against the elements. The water is brutally cold, un-swimmable really except for plashing about in. I’d say we in Bahia win on that score.
A family group at the beach was fascinated by us, in particular Pedro, whose dark skin and hair seemed to put a spell on them. Luiz, the oldest one about 12, constantly stroked Pedro’s hair and skin between kicking a football about and them showing us the sea creatures that they’d collected. Pedro is not fazed by much and did not seem bothered by the attention though he thought it strange. I guess they’d never really seen a black person before, remarkable to think in this day and age.
Despite Portugal’s European façade, one immediately sees where Brazilians get some of their anarchic side. At the local supermarket in Felgueiras, drivers seemed incapable of parking their cars within the designated lines. Here in Salvador I once saw a car (driven by a perfectly intact person) parked horizontally occupying two handicap spaces. I never thought I’d see that again, but sure enough, it was repeated in Felgueiras.
I am now on a mission to correct this misperception of Brazil’s ancestors. I have received skeptical expressions as if maybe I’ve also become dimwitted. But Brazil should embrace this country, from where the great navigators, Vasco da Gama, Magellen, and Cabral set out on little more than bathtubs to open up the world for trade. It’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Brazilian Film

The one line description of the film, called Mango Yellow, is that life consists of sex and stomachs. So you get an idea of what it will be like.
Many Brazilian films like to show the underbelly of the country since its elite are on display in the wildly popular soap operas, shown relentlessly from 5:30 to 10:30 every day on the most popular television station, watched by 80% of the country. The opulent lives of the rich and often deplorable characters shown in the soap operas contrast to the physical condition in which most Brazilians live, and it is this side Brazilian filmmakers seem to prefer to portray.
The result is that most Brazilian films can only be made with grants of some form or subsidy, i.e. they don’t make money but are rather patronized. People seem to much prefer to escape into the stories of those better off than them or have two hours where they can watch Tom Cruise hanging from a cliff with two fingers killing multiple bad guys. Despite this, filmmakers here are intent on receiving public subsidies and producing films that hardly anybody, besides critics at obscure film festivals nobody has ever heard of, watches. The French have traditionally been the culture emulated by the Brazilian intelligencia and notions about the utter futility of life rather than the optimistic, American idea of the perfectibility of man are accentuated.
Everything in Mango Yellow happens on one day and revolves around a seedy flophouse, in the city of Recife, the second biggest in Brazil’s northeastern region of around 2 million inhabitants. The city is very much part of the film; some of its best moments are touring around town to a soundtrack of samples of the great and wildly eclectic music produced there. It’s a culturally vibrant place and also a site of many of the world’s shark attacks.
The characters in Mango Yellow lack a certain role model quality. The first scene sets the tone. A woman is filmed, naked and getting out of bed, slinging on a dress (no underwear) and making her way to an adjacent bar, which we assume to be hers as she starts to clean it up. She is blond (maybe a descendent of the Dutch who occupied the city in the 17th century for 25 years) and maybe her one role model quality would be for aspiring fashion models as flesh is all she has.
The bar is messy, there’s a lot of work to be done, and from the Helena’s ensuing monologue, which touches on such existential considerations such as ‘‘life is crazy, during the day it’s lights, at night it’s dark, we live and then we die,” we realize that the picture is not altogether rosy. Her philosophical knowledge seems to have come from unsuccessful self-help books. Helena gets on with her prosaic tasks as the day progresses. The first alcoholic arrives at seven in the morning for a dose of cachaca and appears regularly throughout the day for a top up.
We get to know a middle aged man, Otavio, one of a cast of the flophouse residents that feature in this sanguine film. He is incapable of making a sentence half of which are not swear words, and derives intense sexual pleasure from shooting at bodies of recently dead people (the warmer the better). It is not clear whether he has sex with them, the film doesn’t specify. Certainly that act would likely also be morally acceptable for our hero. For this rather torrid pastime, Otavio provides heaps of pot to a guy who works in a mortuary.
All het up from his latest shooting of a dead person, Otavio takes the supplier of his thrills to Helena’s bar to celebrate. Before they get there, Helena has thrown out two guys who talk about world politics and other intellectual themes while getting outrageously drunk. One had grabbed her and she had struck back like a snake, violently attacking him and cursing his ‘whore’ mother. The expulsion was quick and efficient, the chastened pair, so inebriated as to be barely able to walk, skulked off.
Otavio and his friend are intent on reaching the same level of intoxication as the banished pair and quickly there are many beer bottles besides the table. This Brazilian custom in ‘popular’ restaurants or bars (i.e. which cater to poor people), of leaving the beer bottles at the table so as to avoid accusations of cheating when bills are tallied, is ruthless for giving away the level of drunkenness of the table’s occupants.
Predictably, beer does nothing to sweeten Otavio’s nature and he is soon making outrageously permissive comments to Helena. He asks whether the hair ‘down there’ was also blond and as she sashayed over you remember she has no underwear. She lifts up her leg onto a chair and raises up her skirt. This is full frontal stuff and of a delayed nature not allowed in Hollywood.
Of course Otavio cannot contain his brutish, libidinous nature and tries to accost her at which point the bottles become convenient weapons for her to smash over his head. Mr. Cadaver man quickly splits the scene as Otavio is also repelled with the rage and savagery of Helena. You have to respect her.
Another person we are introduced to is Augusto. He works in a slaughterhouse and we get to see a cow being killed. What a treat. Augusto then goes around in the meat truck and delivers large slabs of meat to supermarkets and hotels. One of the clients is the flop house and Augusto walks into the kitchen to be greeted by the flop house manager who as soon as he popped out of the womb, it was obvious he was gay.
As Augusto cuts the meat, Felipe, in shorts so tight it’s how to imagine how he managed to get them on, taunts him relentlessly and quickly unleashes the side of the macho man who thinks it okay to be the active one, whether with a man or woman. Augusto then goes home to his wife, a born- again full of Christian pudency , thank God according to Augusto, and they eat bread, cheese and drink coffee.
Not only is he sodomizing Felipe, but Augusto also makes eternal promises to Eva, his lover, that he will give up his wife for her. For this, he gets to sleep with her though she swears she will leave him but never does. Felipe, now falling in love with Augusto, and conveniently friends with Eva the lover, arranges for the Christian wife to catch Augusto with Eva up to no good later that evening.
This duly happens, and the born again, in that gesture of female solidarity so common here in South America, immediately attacks the woman and, drawing inspiration from Mike Tyson, bites part of her ear off. It’s a bloody scene. This acts has dislodged Jesus from her heart and on her way home, overtaken by the deadly sin of lust, she gets picked up by the guy who shoots (and maybe screws) cadavers. Their ensuing, wildly ribald tryst confirms her utter abandonment of chaste and obedience to God.
The hotel owner dies, leaving Felipe distraught in a very stereotypical gay way, i.e. endless screaming and carrying on. No one has money, or is willing to give money, to buy a coffin for the wretched owner. It is here we get to know more about the fat woman who never leaves her room and refuses to give a cent toward a dignified burial for the newly deceased owner.
She hints at how bad she has been, pointing out that her family, perfectly decent people, want nothing to do with her. Her breathing is impaired, and for this she constantly is using an oxygen mask. Our parting scene is with her rolling about on the ground with the oxygen mask most definitely not on her mouth but rather glued to her private area, the sounds of her moans more like an old dog than erotic in any way.
The plot, such as it is, is circular. In the end we are back with Helena, who just can’t take it anymore and whales balefully at the injustices of life as she picks up beer bottles and empties ashtrays. I am told the director has produced an even more bleak movie, where life and a sewer are basically interchangeable. I look forward to it.

Happy Birthday Parties in Bahia

It sounds a bit pathetic, but ninety percent of my social life consists of attending birthday parties. In fact, in the last two weeks I have gone to two. And both of the people whose birthday was being celebrated will have absolutely no recollection of these events because they are one and two respectively. This does not seem to bother most Brazilians, who go to great expense to give a party that really is just a pretext for getting family and friends together.

The difference in the way birthdays are perceived here as opposed to the English speaking world is straight away obvious from the songs.

Let’s face it, ‘Happy Birthday to you’ is hardly the most inspiring song around, though apparently the most played. What a lame song that is.

The Brazilian equivalent is a veritable poem, accompanied by clapping and impassioned exhortation.

Congratulations to you, on this special date
Much happiness, many years of life.

It starts off with a bang, to be alive is a great joy, reaching milestones something to celebrate. Then the Brazilian one outdistances the others for length.

It’s now the time to blow out the candles, let’s sing that little song
Congratulations to You, congratulations to you on this your birthday
That God gives you much health and peace, and the angels say amen
Congratulations to You, congratulations to you on this your birthday.
Boom, boom vatiboom ( a word nobody seems to know what it means).

The party last week was at a close friend of Claudia who she grew up with and whose family she knows well. We have been to many of their parties and are pretty typical of what goes on elsewhere.

The first essential component for my possible enjoyment of such a gathering is beer. If there is beer, then everything is much easier. There are parties, however, where there is beer but the waiters have been instructed to serve as little of it as possible.

This is the result of two reasons: either the guy is too poor to buy enough beer to satisfy everyone but doesn’t want to lose face; Or the guy giving the birthday party is cheap and controlling, two things which tend to go hand in hand.

The only people who give evening birthday parties without beer are evangelists and I don’t ever seem to be invited to their parties, thank God.

This party was none of that, given by a doctor married to Claudia’s beautiful friend. Someone analyzing this couple would immediately notice the great discrepancy in looks since many positive things the husband undoubtedly is, but calling him anything approaching physically attractive in any way would be a stretch. My father, a wise man, once said to me, “you can be bald or fat, but not bald and fat for women to still look at you. Or of course, you can be rich, then it doesn’t matter how you look.” This may have been an illustrative case. I knew from experience the beer would be plentiful, a great relief.

It was in what they call the ‘playground’ pronounced ‘plegrownji’ as the mezzanine levels of apartment buildings are known here which are equipped with areas to give parties. What was immediately noticeable was the incredible amount of balloons, all in shapes of princesses and other Disney figures.

“Eight thousand,’ my host told me after I’d commented on the brightness of the place.

The little girl for whom all the hoopla was being laid on ran around full of coca cola and sugar, being obliged to greet guests who kissed her and said how lovely she was before depositing their gifts in a massive box off to the corner. They’ll have to dig new landfills for the amount of presents she received.

There were tables full of finger food and others full of sweets and chocolates. Waiters paraded with trays of soft drinks, beer and whiskey and not just any whiskey, but Ballantines. Whiskey has real symbolic value here and being able to lavish it on many guests is proof of your prosperity.

But our host was not happy. The electrical system had collapsed under the weight of all that was being demanded of it which included sky lights, an air slide, a sound system, a film projector. It’s when things like this happen that you wonder why the hell you would ever want to give a party.

We sat down and savored the many snacks and liquids that passed our way through waiters whose efficiency on a scale of one to ten was five, which is good in Bahia. The idea of swift service seems alien to some people here, unfortunate especially when they work in the service industry. What’s the big deal if something comes two minutes later? They have a point.

The sound system spring to life and we were blessed with the kind of children’s music whose dreadfulness diplomats might kindly call grating. Untrained choirs of children’s voices should be banned, they are so painfully cheesy, in appalling bad taste and any other adjective or phrase to describe something that causes embarrassment and discomfort. We got the extra treat of having a DJ introduce each song and encourage us to dance. Pedro showed no desire at all to do that, we thanked Christ.

People like to get dressed up and were fastidious. I talked to a nephew of Claudia’s friend who had just returned from Winnipeg and a six month exchange program. It had got to minus forty degrees, the kind of temperature where your snot freezes and the outdoors hostile and dangerous. The balmy weather of Bahia must have seemed like another planet from there.

His sister, who just turned 19, had recently decided to have liposuction. I thought, unfairly perhaps, as I watched her down three glasses of coca cola and eat things that immediately make your stomach bloat, “maybe if you get off your fat ass, do some exercise and eat properly, you wouldn’t need to go through a surgical procedure.”

Rather than externalizing these snide contemplations, I kissed her on the cheek and shook hands with her boyfriend who looked like he’d much rather be somewhere else. He looked like he’d made a deal. ‘I’ll go to your family party, you put out later.’ Men are bad, and twenty year old men, in sexual terms, are one small step up from dogs.

My wife’s friend has a stream of relatives who all seem to show up at these family events. Warts are not a particularly attractive feature on any part of the body, and on the face, with a little hair sticking out from them, do not enhance the person’s appearance. In addition, all of the aunts had massive cheeks which spilled over into other areas of their face where they didn’t fit, invading, for instance, an area rightly belonging to the chin. This seemed to be a family trait among our friend’s aunts, who are a little scary to kiss on the cheek given what you have to avoid.

Meanwhile, our host was frantic. As we walked in there was a slide show being projected onto a big screen, mostly of the birthday girl with various relatives. There was background music to this moving photo display, the kind of music that Michael Jackson might sing to the kids who slept in his bed; or some Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that for some unfathomable reason attracts hordes of people who have made him a very wealthy and even more obnoxious man. This slide show had suddenly failed to work, a great deprivation for us, and our host was none too pleased.

“I’m going home to get the other copy of the presentation,” he declared to his wife, he thought it a poor idea. “I spent hours compiling this thing so I’m bloody well going to show it!”

You had to admire his tenacity if dread having to put through more photos displays which describing with the word ‘corny’ is far too mild given its cringe-making nature. So off he went to speed half way around the city to fetch the other copy. He finally returned and we were treated to more moving pictures of his daughter. It was a fine way to end the evening.

The only remarkable thing about the other birthday party, equally ornate and with beer flowing, was the complete racial diversity of the guests. The little girl is lily white with blond locks; this despite having a grandfather who is black. This is considered a success story in a Brazil that claims racism is minimal but which nonetheless from its very inception sought to ‘whitify’ the race. Our friends have done a great job, and if this girl ends up marrying a pure bred European, then all vestiges of the African continent in her off-spring will be wiped out. Congratulations, indeed.

Prisons and Brazil

I just finished reading a rather disturbing book by a German guy who in his youth had been caught trying to smuggle a kilogram of cocaine from Brazil and served four years in prison as a result. I think a couple of screenings Midnight Express and a reading of this book will convince Pedro that selling drugs is just not an intelligent career option. The inevitability in prison of getting constantly abused, humiliated, and engaged in sodomy, willingly, makes it something you want to avoid. Especially among damn foreigners.

Not for the German guy, though, who declares everything, including himself, to be wholly positive. It’s a typical tourist story of some rather innocent Western kid who comes to Rio, immediately falls victim to its many carnal attractions which include cocaine and plentiful women. This is facilitated, the author informs us, by his good looks and let’s us know that girls for him were easy in Germany as well; he’s not one of those ugly foreign geezers able to get woman only because they were foreign. Modesty is not something that comes through with this guy although he’d list modesty as one of his many attributes.

After his first visit in a bacchanal role, he decided that bringing back a kilogram of coke was doable and even advisable. He’d left home at 15, worked as a cook (an excellent one, he kindly informs us), had severed contact with his family and was independent and strong. And pretty fucking stupid.

The first scene is him getting strip searched and he spares us no details of having his orifices perforated by policemen intent on humiliating him. The narrative traced back how he had come to this point, his forays into the favela facilitated by his excellent Portuguese, and the friendships he made here. It was clear that he was no ordinary tourist, and had immersed himself into the real Brazil which in his mind consisted of men who dealt drugs and woman who did them and sold their bodies to get more.

On his second and fatal visit to Brazil, he teamed up with a transvestite and seemed to have no problem with the sexual ambiguity involved in that. He bought a brick of cocaine for eight thousand dollars off a guy known as the ‘boliviano’. He packed it into the epaulettes of his jacket and was caught.

I visited a prison in DC once with some lawyers from Hungary. The woman accompanying us from some civil organization was rather chunky and as soon as we entered the main building, from the cells above came the chants which included such welcomes as ‘come on fat bitch, I want to fuck you right now.’ It was a rather awkward moment for our group, here to see first hand American prisons. But God, what a grim place to be in an environment where hope was actively stamped out.

Prisons in Brazil are ten times worse than that and are smoldering cauldrons of pent up violence that constantly flairs. One hundred and eleven inmates were killed in the Carandiru prison riots in 1992 and death is a constant in these overburdened hellholes that house people society not only doesn’t care about, but actively disdains.

You don’t want to be a paedophile or rapist and be sent to a Brazilian jail. Not only will you surely die, you will have a shitty time getting to that point. Literally, at least according to our esteemed author, these poor bastards are tied up next to the toilet and you can imagine what they are made to do. In a macho society, rapists are considered losers because they’re incapable of getting a woman in a conventional sense and have to resort to violence.

He spent his first eighteen months in an institution where he couldn’t go outside. He was inside a massive warehouse, the cells divided by twenty meter walls that had an opening above them. The inmates would go between the cells on this wall where if you fell you’d be dead. Our author was in a cell with other foreigners, including three Nigerians, best of mates it seemed initially, who smoked crack for three days straight and then when there was nothing left tried to kill each other.

Because of his affability and now native Portuguese, the author gets on with everybody and is accepted by everybody. It seems he can’t help being cool. There is a transvestite wing in the jail, that does a good business but Monica, ‘a stunning woman’ (well sort of) falls for our hero and doesn’t charge him.

He becomes friendly with some Czech guy who’s a big time dealer and the two of them try, by way of payment to the main gang leader in the prison, to escape. This proves a dud business because the gang leader split the money with the guards and gave away the details of the plot.

He is moved to another prison with a football field where he shines and proves to Brazilians that he can play. He becomes the hero of the prison in the organized game against the local police team. He starts a Portuguese class with a man who later becomes his protégé and mentor in some religion called Rational Christianity. He quickly becomes top of the class, predictably in a sense.

He sees some appalling manifestations of savagery in the jails both between inmates themselves and they and the institution: death by beating, shooting, stabbing, strangling, machine guns mowing down inmates who’d just decapitated one of the guards, the beloved prison cat being horribly killed, brutal collective beatings by the police. His best friend commits suicide, and he loses seven teeth over the period. It was certainly no holiday in the sun.

The problem is you know just the kind of guy the author is and can’t garner any affection for him. He blows his fucking trumpet the whole time, it’s like he’s read all those books about how you should love yourself and overdosed. It’s amazing some editor or the translator didn’t say, ‘look, dude, you kind of sound like an asshole, you don’t have to remind the reader for the ninth time how well you speak Portuguese.’

But he has a book published and these observations may just be sour grapes from one without such a distinction. I hope never to go through what he has; experiences you can get a book out of even if you write like shit. Such is life.

Meeting Farouk

I got a call the other day from a guy with quite a posh English accent but Indian name who was a friend of the owner, Danny from Birmingham, for whose English School I worked. I’ll digress.

I had done a course on the internet where you could easily cheat if you didn’t know the answer and it gets you a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. It means bollocks of course, but so much in life can be bought, in this case for the $300 I’d spent on this chicanery.

The interview with Danny had not been stellar, having concluded with a thoroughly unwanted teasing on my part in questioning him on why, after nine years in Bahia, he hadn’t ended up with a Bahian wife.

“The women here are exceptional, don’t you think?” This is a common thread of conversation among ex-pat men, lots of whom, like me, succumb to the charms of the female half of the population here.

He looked a bit embarrassed and may have blushed. In fact, he was much more interested in the Bahian men and was the boyfriend of the other owner. My ‘gadar’ had obviously been impaired, he’d been in the army, in Northern Ireland actually, so I had, with great prejudice, assumed he liked woman. Why would any gay man want to join an institution most of whose members actively disliked or at least were suspicious of them? It seems a little incongruous, like a black man wanting to join the Klu Klux Klan.

Initially I was excited to hear from Farouk because this could mean some work, although Howdy Doody paid much less than most other English schools. But Howdy Doody occasionally handed out large translation jobs, rewarding the most keen teachers, which meant I rarely benefited, but you never knew.

The other owner of the English school, Danny’s lover, worked for the state tax collecting agency but had special prices at the school for people who paid for their classes under the table. When in Rome. The books they used were oriented towards business, and seemed purposefully designed to be as dull as fucking possible.

Danny himself was not personable in any outward way and liked to show occasional irritation to reiterate who was in charge.

So in other words, Farouk’s path to me was not through a person I’d garnered a lot of sympathy for. And almost immediately it became clear he wasn’t a source of work but wanted to, in his capacity as a financial planner, have my money for him to invest and take care of my retirement needs.

“There are plenty of good ways to make your wealth grow exponentially and I’d love to get together and go over some details with you about how better to manage your money with immediate benefit and long term stability.”

Business shibboleth sounds as if it was invented by a computer, too hygienic. This all seemed dandy, though, and I’m always looking for new experiences. I agreed to meet him the next time he was in Salvador. But I sent him an email afterwards to make sure I wasn’t misleading him.

“I think Danny thinks because I was late collecting a couple of pay checks that I’m rich. Unfortunately, this is not the case, but if you hear of any schemes that will throw money my way I’d greatly appreciate it.”

Financial planners cannot afford to be put off by the cynicism of jaded expats who worry they’ll have to work until they die for lack of financial planning. He wrote back that he’d be delighted to meet with me and was not only concerned with rich people but interested in ‘communicating the possibilities’ for all levels of wealth.

We agreed to meet in a Coconut Highway Shopping Mall. Malls are a stalwart feature of middle class life here where consumerism, in a safe environment (with occasional lapses as is inevitable anywhere in Brazil) becomes a leisure option for many. This seems to be a phenomena around the world, depressing for those of us yet to warm to the shopping mall’s many allures. Shopping has become a noun in Portuguese, so you go to the ‘shopping.’

I arrived early and almost went into an evangelical bookstore, but chickened out for fear I’d be immediately snuffed as an imposter by someone convinced of their virtue due to their belief in Christ. Tons of enticing looking CDs and books were on display in the window, though the content of both were slightly one dimensional. Is there nothing in this world besides Jesus and God for these people?

I moved on and ordered a coffee. A text message came through.

“Was hoping for British timing but this taxi isn’t playing ball.”

The waitress, also, took her time as she served a rather rotund chap a plate of ‘bread cheese’ (as the doughy concoction shaped in a ball is called), and a coke. If you are what you eat, this guy did kind of look like rising dough; healthy was not how you would describe his appearance.

I twiddled about as one does when waiting for someone. These are the kind of situations when you miss cigarettes, the perfect filler of small time gaps.

Farouk arrived at seven after ten, very apologetic and flustered because he had ‘kept the client waiting.” I hadn’t realized we had that kind of intimacy.

Things I learned immediately were that he was from London, went to Bristol University and had been living in Brazil for the past two years. I asked how old he was and he asked me to guess. I didn’t fall into that lame trap and he divulged it to be 33.

“The age of Christ,” I said with great cultural authority. Brazilians equate thirty three with Christ’s death so getting through thirty three unblemished is better than Jesus managed. I didn’t ask whether he was married or not, I’m not a complete fool having learnt from the experience with Danny, Farouk’s friend.

He lived in a city called Vitoria, the capital of Espirito Santo, a state that borders Bahia to the south. I have never met another foreigner who lives there, but it’s referred to as the smaller version of Rio and quite pretty.

“God, the heat here is terrible.” Farouk said as if he’d come from Alaska or something. Vitoria is not that fucking far away.

We were not here to learn about each other’s favorite philosophers so we quickly moved onto financial sorcery.

He handed me a card, with his company’s name, WadeGlobal, and its logotype that looked somewhat like waves. He was a senior partner it informed me. On the back was the mission statement of the company. ‘Keeping your investments afloat’ is not that reassuring a slogan. And ‘providing independant advice where financial goals can be achieved.’ You shouldn’t have a spelling mistake in your mission statement. They had a virtual office in London to add to their legitimacy.

Farouk pulled out a couple of folders from his briefcase, a blank sheet of paper and a couple of pages with numbers on them.

He specialized on emerging markets and long term investments. China and India continued to be ‘fantastic bets’, particularly India with its human capital. I wanted to ask whether he’d read ‘The White Tiger’, which kind of exposes India’s underbelly and the other 800 million wretchedly poor people absent from the economic statistics. But he was of Indian descent so might be offended.

This had happened to me once in Heathrow airport. On one of those interminable human conveyer belts, I was behind an Indian man and his family who were trying to pass by two guys. Politely he squeezed through and suddenly one of the guys shouted, ‘Oi, you, watch it. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

This was a plain case of naked racism. A verbal raucous ensued and in my great moral certitude, I sided with the Indian, who said he was a doctor and in the United States people wouldn’t dare say that to him, not like ‘you English bastards.” After the police arrived and said they couldn’t do anything, I asked the Indian guy if he’d seen the just released film, Gandhi. My credibility with him went out the window.

From Farouk I learned that Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man were excellent and safe bets for long term investment, having no taxation. That was good to know.

Russia was presenting ‘very positive conditions for a healthy investment climate.’ I nodded my head attentively, thinking never in a million years would I put my money in the Russia of Putin, the Mafia and all that still afflicts that volatile place.

“The middle class is growing rapidly,” was Farouk’s take on it.

His company was keen on Brazil, Chile and Mexico though the latter is ‘going through a difficult period.’ That’s kind of an understatement; there’s open warfare between the government and drug dealers in the north of the country, a festering Indian problem in Chiapas, and high kidnapping rates in Mexico City.

I was informed that Mauritius, Bermuda and Luxemburg were also great places for off-shore investments. What about the Cayman Islands? I asked with a rather haughty chuckle considering that place is the synonym for financial shenanigans.

“Oh, that was just one bad case and now the government is being much more strict about whose money it handles. As they are in Panama.”

Thank goodness for that. Back to China, which was, of course, on track for indefinite growth. Here Farouk drew one of the many graphs he whipped up on the stationary of WadeGlobal. It just went up and up in a straight line like the Washington Monument. Other graphs had more of a gradient, though obviously never going down.

All this optimism was making me dizzy. According to Farouk the current economic malaise was in fact a good thing, giving the financial system a needed jolt to grow robustly in the years to come. In fact any mention of potential ill in the future was slapped down as ‘well that’s what the doomsayers might say’ attitudes, and more statistics showing how superb everything was.

His proposal was to have me pay five hundred dollars a month into some infallible fund, which he would handle. Once I had $10,000 accumulated, I then would “let the money sit and do its thing,” like it was a stew or something but have no access to it for two years. After that, however, it would be as if I had won the lottery.

“You have to start planning for your retirement and take control of your finances. With this, it’s a win, win, situation.”

I think Farouk by that point realized I was ‘like an ashtray on a motorbike’ in terms of utility to him. In one last-ditched effort he asked if I knew any English people with pensions. There was some government loophole, soon to be closed, and for those drawing government pensions, ‘the time to act was now.’ There seems to be no problem with using clichés in business speak. I said I’d put him in touch with the many English people I know drawing pensions, approximately zero.

He was a pleasant guy, though, and I wished him luck with attracting more risk-friendly people than me.

“Next time you’re in town, we should have a beer and you being a single man, can check out the girls.” I said with slightly feigned enthusiasm. His half-smile told me I’d made the same mistake again as I had done with Danny.

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.’

Veja Magazine

I have read Veja, Brazil’s principal weekly magazine, religiously for the almost 15 years of my residence here in Brazil. I find the tone of the journalists horribly condescending, ideologically predictable and in coverage of foreign news, suspiciously similar to what came out in The Economist the week before. But I read on.

One becomes accustomed to format in things we read and perhaps this is the magazine’s great strength.

They always have an interview and this week is was with an Israeli mathematician and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for economics. He has a very long beard, which makes anybody look strange.

He is an expert on something called Game Theory, which apparently is a good base from which to conduct negotiation. He uses the example of Mutually Assured Destruction to portray how peace was kept between the US and USSR during the cold war, and Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich to show how placating or trying to hard to assuage your adversary can be extremely dangerous.

All good stuff, until he talks about how Israel has been too weak with the Palestinians, citing the settlement pullout from the Gaza Strip as proof of a pattern of craven concessions to the Arabs. There is a tendency among many, though by no means all, Israelis to ignore the fact that 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the creation of Israel. This delegitimized his argument slightly.

The ‘Panorama Page’ features a picture of the carnage wrought by a recent suicide bomb in a market in Pakistan that went off just when mothers were picking up their kids from school. Most of the victims, therefore, were women and children. Yet the non-existent outcry, Veja disdainfully declared, from those who decry the FMI, World Bank and other pillars of global capitalism, was significant for its absence. Pakistan seems like a complete basket case.

A few statistics are interwoven to articles, of interest this time was the fact that Brazil’s carbon emissions increased 25% between 1990 and 2005; 15% of the Brazilian population is Evangelical and the economy is running a 7.6 billion real deficit. The governor of Paraná State also declared that the recent cases of breast cancer among men have been caused by all these gay parades.

An article on the crack epidemic, exemplified by a nice middle class boy who strangled his girlfriend under the influence, points out that 16,000 psychiatric beds have been removed from hospitals in the past few years. The ‘generous’ health insurance companies, maintained by those few who can afford them, agree to pay for 15 days of counseling for drug addicts and no more, hardly sufficient time for chronic cases. Whoever invented crack is in the same league as hackers, destroying society for kicks.

A disheartening article on the principals of public schools in Brazil, 80% of who are women, stated that while 98% don’t think it’s their fault that their students perform so horrendously, 64% judge themselves unprepared for their responsibilities. Contradictions are many in this country and galling when the middle class pays 37% of its income to the government for universal health and education that is so bad they have to use the private sector.

The international feature story was about Venezuela. This is like asking a victim of crime to say something positive about their attacker. Chavez is the devil incarnate for Veja, his Bolivaran revolution close to as dangerous as the Ebola virus. Endless evils are cited, including those attesting to plummeting industrial and agricultural production. Not to defend Chavez, a pretty rancid guy, but if Venezuela was so great before, why in this country full of oil, land and a small population were most people poor? And why is it different when the president of Colombia, Alvoro Uribe, amends his country’s constitution to perpetuate his rule, as opposed to Chavez and his other leftist clones in Latin America?

Despite its obvious bias, Veja is not without a sense of humor. In the section entitled People, devoted mostly to celebrities, it reported on the rapper Diddy’s latest song on Brazil. It goes something like this, translated by the author:

Booties, booties, booties.
First class booties, round booties, everywhere
It’s a Tsunami of booties.

And remember, Diddy went out with Jenifer Lopez so knows a thing or two about “booties.’

Salvador, Bahia, 03/11/09