El vigilante

Today was one of those few days I when I thought about these people that are in every corner of my life. I was looking for a key to our stairway door, and popped by the security guard’s window on the way out of the apartment.

You’ll have to ask the concierge, I can’t go up those stairs. Or even go into the lobby or the parking lot. They barely even let me in here, he said, pointing to the small, cramped security guard booth.

It’s the sort of job most likely to go to Venezuela’s most luckless. These are folks that live in and don’t have highschool degrees or marketable skills. It’s a clear isolation on the other side of the luxurious office towers and swanky apartment buildings to industrial warehouses and buildings in construction. With crime an increasing concern in Venezuela, the vigilante is a fixture of life.

Fifty years ago maybe they would have been cutting cane, lifting blocks or hauling salt. Today that manual labor has been replaced with constant boredom, texting and fiddling with a cell phone, and the struggle to stay awake on shifts that often last 24 hours at a time – one day on, one day off. A one-liner I heard not long ago summed it up fairly well – Ando mas ladillado que un vigilante sin saldo … I’m in a worse mood that a security guard with no credit on his phone.

I’ve always thought it questionable what sort of security they can really provide under these circumstances, particularly given that they’re going to be the first in the line of fire if something does happen. Nobody with any means would consider living in a building without a vigilante, but almost nobody trusts them.

“Whenever something goes wrong, the first one they blame is the vigilante,” said the security guard at my mother-in-law’s lower-middle-class gated community after a house was robbed a block away. The kid’s got a technical degree and trying to finish highschool but he can’t get his studies done while on the job. My in-laws get along well with him and his coworkers, taking them food on holidays and cracking jokes on the way in and out of the gate.

That’s not the usual relationship. In one apartment I lived in, the landlord was shocked when I asked him to leave the key with the security guards. “With those criminals? Are you crazy?”

Trouble is I can understand the mistrust. These are folks at the edge of poverty and simultaneously at the edge of opulence. They live in hillside slums that generally function as little villages, everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everybody’s business. My gut instinct says it’s not the security guards themselves that get mixed up in crime. But something tells me it’s only a matter of time before some true criminal approaches them and asks them for some small piece of information that would enable a break-in, a car theft, a kidnapping. Many would probably back away. I can imagine many others would not.

Investigations of apartment break-ins nearly always turn up evidence that the people who did the hit had some kind of inside information that helped them do it. That is almost always followed by genuine shock and consternation that such information could have gotten out. People in Caracas do all sorts of other things to take their security seriously – a battery of car alarms, triple locks on doors, electric fences and security cameras. Rarely does anyone mention the idea of paying for security guards whose social conditions might allow them to live further away from the criminal elements they are supposed to protect folks from.

Goodbye, Rio

My last act before stepping into the airport check-in line was to hand over my cell phone, which left me suddenly stripped of my connection to the outside world. No more idle Facebook status updates, no more tweeting stray thoughts in efforts of turning them into profound revelations. So I´m back to the old fashioned and forgotten past-time known as blogging.

My last days in Rio were rushed, cluttered with absurd paperwork that I actually managed to turn into a story, and shrouded in cloudy skies, a cold breeze and driving rain. This left me without the time or disposition for nostalgic goodbyes or accumulation of saudades for the place I was about to leave. In the preceding months I had kicked around the idea of a Rio “bucket list” of all the things I never did in the city that I could go ticking off in the waning days and weeks. It just didn’t work out that way. There was too much to do to keep adding last minute adventures.

I did feel a few tugging heart-strings in the final days. I remember in the newsroom seeing out of the corner of my eye one of those panoramic Globo helicopter shots of the entire city, the lagoon flanked by the mountains and Corcovado keeping watch over Guanabara Bay. Am I really leaving this? My next thought was something like Wait, did we have to get the shipment manifest notarized before we take it to the consulate?  And so it went. Between the rain and the stress of moving, we didn’t shed a tear for Rio, as my wife wisely quipped.

Over the last couple days I got a few more of those “What’s wrong weeth you, Steeeemppy?!?!” sort of comments, but at this point I’m shrugging them off. Yes, I’m happy to be going back to Venezuela, no they didn’t twist my arm, and no I’m not clinically insane. If you want to know more, please ask.

A thought I had the other day summed it up for me – O Brasil nao precisa mais ninguem torcendo por ele. This is the famous “hora do Brasil,” the time when Brazil’s finally emerging from so many years of having everything go wrong. Or to put another way, the crowd of multicultural globe-trotters who were as fascinated by the country’s folkloric economic chaos as its music, dance and culture has been eclipsed by bankers, industrial magnates and project developers who want to make money off the place.  Brazil’s got enough fans. It doesn’t need more people rooting for it. The country is living its equivalent of the U.S. post-World War II economic boom. There are a lot of other places on the globe, including my home country, that are in need of the sort of optimism Brazil lives and breathes today.

At the same time, my fascination with distant and exotic places will put Brazil on my radar screen in a way that it wasn’t while I was living there. Yes, I’ll admit it. I spent a good portion of my first months in Rio studying Arabic and reading books about China. Eventually, I figured it out, and started a blog. And toward the end I was finally watching Brazilian football and actually kinda getting it (I didn’t manage to watch last night’s Vasco game, but did see bits and pieces of it from TV screens in corner bars while walking through Copa, and then concluded they had won from the fireworks and celebratory shrieks).

And my good friends EM and AT made me a two-CD set of musica popular brasileira, the all encompassing genre that stretches from early samba and chorinho to bossa of Joao Gilberto and the bizarre rock of Ney Matogrosso. These are all the songs that I heard on the streets, and in clubs in Lapa, our would overhear through the windows when my neighbors were having a Sunday afternoon pagode. Ok, plus several thousand more songs, because this is a set of 3,500 tunes. I didn’t want to leave Brazil without knowing the words to Mais que nada (you know, ooooooooooooooooooooooaaaeeeaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeoooooo, oaaa oaaa oaaa), but it didn’t work out. So now I’m going to learn it in exile, or diaspora, or in nostalgic ex-pat indulgence. Maybe this is a bit like how I barely dipped my toe into salsa when I lived for a year in Puerto Rico, where most of the world’s salsa comes from (feel free to complain and protest, it’s true), but really learned my way around the legends of salsa in Caracas while listening to the bootleg CDs I bought down the street from Congress.

And I hope I can jump into a few Brazilian circles here and there. I’m already part of a Facebook group for the DC Brazilian and Brazil-enthusiast community. I know there’s a small group of Brazilans in Caracas, maybe they get together and make pao de queijo and watch the brasilerao on some special cable channel, or maybe they hide in their respective circles and keep the saudadistas out.

I put it on Facebook just before I had to surrender my phone – this doesn’t feel like the end. It must mean that its not.