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.

Getting Somewhere

Somewhere is not the sort of movie I would have chosen on my own. And I didn’t even truly appreciate it until I saw the interview with the director afterward, which is probably the first time any of those DVD extras has really done anything for me. It was almost as if I had spent an hour staring at some Jackson Pollock-type modern art painting that meant nothing to me until the artist stepped in to make it clear. And suddenly I got it.

I had expected more from a film that won so many prizes. By “more” I guess I mean more plot, more action, more tension and resolution. The movie chronicles the life of a wealthy and famous movie star who’s bored and unfulfilled. He calmly watches strippers dance for him for ten minutes or so (this is in real time in the film as well), he inhabits non-descript luxury apartments and attends parties he doesn’t seem to have much interest in. Hot women show up at his door for sex. The only thing he really seems to enjoy in life his daughter, who he has to share with an estranged ex-wife.

Sofia Coppola was trying to show the underside of the dazzling movie-stars life. Sometimes it’s quite boring, which I have to say was in many ways reflected in the movie. It literally wasn’t until the directors’ interview that it clicked for me, when she said she wanted the movie to feel something like a poem. At that point I realized that’s what it was.

And it immediately reminded me of  a book I’d once read called Songdogs, which was crafted in such artful prose that’s its general lack of coherent plot and slow-moving pace made it an almost literary counterpoint to Somewhere. My general literary impatience, much like the impatience in the rest of my life, left my friend JB surprised that I was so keen on it. I’ve had such fond memories of the book since I read it four of five years ago, mostly the scenes that the author painted and the constant unspoken tension between the protagonist and other characters including the protagonist’s father. The funny thing is that I could barely even remember much of the book’s plot, and in fact it took me quite some time to even remember the title or author. But there were things that really stuck with me. I remembered that it involved Ireland and San Francisco, and in reading the reviews more recently remembered that his father was photographer and that it also involved Mexico.

It was maybe a bizarre connection to make. Sometimes literature can do that for me. When it’s written in such a way that it feels like poetry, yet more accessible.
A mystery that you’re given some clues to rather than a blank canvas that you’re supposed to fill in with your own mind.

I guess if novels can be poetry, it shouldn’t surprise me that movies can too. I’m glad that in the end, I got Somewhere.

Reaching the end of Midnight's Children

After three years and at least five attempts, I've finally finished Midnight's Children. I think my reaction to it is as convoluted as the book itself.

For historical fiction about the rise of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there's really nothing like it. The transfer of power from Britain to the newly independent India (the famous optimism bug that I talked about here), the various wars and skirmishes  between India and its neighbors Pakistan and China, the civil war that splits West Pakistan from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) are all chronicled in Rushdie's inimitably sardonic and luxuriously adorned prose. I also liked the account of Indira Ghandi's emergency powers crackdown, during which the fictional Saleem Sinai sees the government arrest his cohort of children who can communicate telepathically with one another by virtue of all having been born in the first hour after the midnight of India's independence (hence Midnight's Children). One particular segment rang like a literary version of a Ray Bradbury type sci-fi saga, which was the tale of Saleem and two other deserters from the Pakistani civil war end up in a cave of illusions that slowly starts to consume them and drain their will to leave (which in the end they do).

The actual experience of reading the book, however, reminded me a lot of reading Julio Cortazar's Rayuela. I read it in Spanish, mostly to prove how tough I was, at great detriment to my actual comprehension of the already convoluted text. The book is set up such that after each chapter you're told to flip to another non-sequential chapter, which takes you through the book in the non-chronological order the author determined (This Cortazar described as the “masculine” form of reading the book, as opposed to the “feminine” style which involved reading the chapters sequentially. Fortunately much has changed since the book’s publication in 1961). I made this even more interesting by jumping to the wrong chapter at least once. The experience of reading Latin America's version of Ulysses suddenly became a bit more like reading a version of Ulysses with the pages mixed up.

My stop-start approach to Rushdie's cornerstone work led to much the same experience. I could never quite tell if I had read something already, had read it years earlier on a previous attempt, had accidentally bookmarked the wrong spot, or if the story line was simply repeating itself. I couldn't remeber why The Hummingbird was killed. I couldn't remember why Mumtaz slept in a basement with Nadir Khan. I couldn't remember the story of the fire at the godown that destroyed Saleem's father's bicycles, or the related mafia extorsion that was somehow linked to a family of bats living in a church steeple (I think).

Adding to that, the plotlines were as difficult to follow and remember as the thematic and metaphorical undertones they evoked. Ok, let me see if I can get this straight. Saleem is the son of General Aziz and his wife Amina Sinai (formerly known as Mumtaz), only he is switched at birth from the hands of his actual parents, a poor British street entertainer named Wee Willy Winkie and his servant wife. Nanny Mary Pereira (married to a man named Joseph -- metaphorical maybe?) takes baby Saleem out of his poor-family crib into the lap of wealth, condemning the true son Shiva, who will turn out to be Saleem's arch-rival, to a life of poverty. However, Saleem, it turns out, is not his father's son, because his servant mother had been sleeping with the wealthy British landlord known as Lord Methwold.

Again, let me see if I can get all these metaphors straight. The bastard Muslim son of India, born to a cuckolded father who is not his father, is switched at birth by conniving Christians who steal the birthright of Hindu boy? I can't even remember how many times I had to flip back and reread that saga.

I will hand it to Rushdie, he really can write like nobody else. At the same time I will admit on several occasions feeling like I was going to shout out loud "OK, Mr. Rushdie, lovely writing, but can we get ON with it PLEASE!!!"

Reading my first Stieg Larsson book earlier this year made me understand why the average person doesn't read books like Midnight's Children. I read all of The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo at the same time as I fumbled through about 25 pages of the Rushdie classic. I've got thick literary teeth, as my brother likes to say.

Midnight’s Children was one I really had to fight my way through. It reminded me of other books that I enjoyed but had to battle my way through, unlike the seductive and almost narcotic pull of Larson's detective fiction (the inevitable deus-ex-machinas felt a bit cheap, but still, I get the appeal). I remember pushing my way through Mario Vargas Llosa's La Fiesta del Chivo, the novelistic take on the fall of Dominican dictator Trujillo, while sitting in my hot living room in Puerto Rico, finishing the last pages with an almost breathless urgency of wanting be done with this epic (I did like it, in fact). Or plowing through the end of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll's authoritative and unparalleled journalistic account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the ensuing civil war and rise of the Taliban, while on a plane from Caracas to San Francisco. You fight through books and you remember them.

Midnight's Children still does not top what I consider to be the most readable Rushdie -- The Ground Beneath her Feet, the tale of a rock star Indian couple that take a ten-year vow of celibacy. I also read, around the same time, a Rushdie book called Shame which was about Pakistan. I definitely did not get much of what was being said there. I do remember a character named the Virgin Ironpants, who years later I learned was Benazir Bhutto (might have helped to know that).

I spied a copy of The Moor's Last Sigh on my dad's bookshelf when - was at his house last month. I decided to leave that for some future endeavor, while I read something else -- and continue to figure out what I thought of Midnight's Children.

Riocha Cardosa

It was our last day of real vacation travel, with half of it taken up by the trip back to São Luis. It ended up being a relaxed river tubing excursion down the Riocha Cardosa river. It took about an hour of driving through the largely unpopulated cerrado forest to reach a place were we could begin floating down the river on inner tubes. We were joined by a crowd of mostly female senior citizens who were chatty and friendly.
No pictures unfortunately because our camera isn´s water proof. We stopped at the house of a local family that made us tapioca and coffee. I also for the first time ate cashew nuts that had been roasted by a human being, sold to me by a cute five year old girl.They were toasted unevenly, meaning each one tasted slightly
different.

The trip also took as past a bizarre bridge to nowhere put up about 15 miles from the nearest paved road. I took a fleeting picture of it  from the truck. It looked like it was made from poured concrete (did they drive concrete mixers for an hour across the sand road?) supported by 10 pillars. It does not connect to the sand road on either side, but does have a rickety hand-made wooden ladder leaned up against one side in case anyone wants to climb up and look around. The truck we were in did fine driving across what appeared to be a small wooden pedestrian bridge that went across the small gully that this Sara Palin-inspired work of civil engineering was attempting to span. Fortunately someone had taken advantage of the structure to set up a
small bar with a pool table underneath it. At least it was providing shade.

Lencois Maranhenses

The Lencois Maranhenses were probably the biggest draw for this trip.  They did not disappoint. They were just the postcard idyll I imagined from looking at pictures online of the blue-green lagoons in the  middle of sand dunes. They form during the rainy season as the rain fills up the spaces between dunes, and then most of them totally dry up between October and December as the rains stop. And they migrate.  Each year the wind blows the dunes to one side or another, meaning that the rainfall fills up the craters in a different place each time.


Our guide picked us up at the resort and drove around 20 minutes on a sand road and parked the pickup alongside several others that had already brought tourists to the area. We walked less than five minutes
when we were already at the first lagoon. The turqoise freshwater is  really breathtaking. They lagoons got bigger as we walked further in,each one beautiful than the next. I made a routine at each lagoon of
swimming across it, then climbing up the dune and charging back down into the water.

The pictures really are worth a thousand words (see them on my Facebook page). Our guide took us to a nearby house where the woman who lived there cooked us an amazing fish lunch. The charming little farm house had a refreshing breeze and great views of the open cerrado wildnerness and  the dunes in the distance. We chowed on cashew fruit picked from the trees outside. I´ve eaten cashew nuts all my life but really never
came across the fruit until I got to Brazil – I never once saw it in Venezuela. You can get it at juice bars in Rio, though its often from concentrate.

We drove back to the hotel along the sand track. The sun beat down on  the leaves and the shrubs, the scent reminded me of the smell that hot northern California sun creates when it beats down on eucalyptus and
pine in the summer.

Barreirinhas

The next stretch of the trip takes us by boat along the Rio Preguicas to Barreirinhas, the main jump-off point for seeing the Lencois Maranhenses. We were picked by our third guide of a trip, and older man by the name of Xico, who piled all suitcases into the back of a launch and took us more or less across the river to a nearby town called Mandacaru that hosts an old lighthouse and a sleepy naval base. Cabure made me feel like I was in a hostile desert environment largely cut off from the convienences of modern life. Mandacaru made me realize I was basically across the river from them.

The latter is relatively isolated but still has power connected to the national grid and a wide range of  commerce including small grocery stores and artisan shops. Cattle roam the area, cashew trees dot the sand. We entered the town via a small dock next to an outdoor bar boasting its cashew-fruit caipirinhas. Eight-thirty a.m. was a bit on the early side for that sort of thing, at least for me. I got to chatting with a guy who called himself Enoc, who said the growth of tourism had for years been creating new employment opportunities in an area traditionally dominated by fishing. Even more recently, oil and gas discoveries by Petrobras and start-up oil company OGX had created new transportation routes and new demand for labor. A geological
prospecting service that used small aircraft for surveying had started carrying passengers from remote areas of Maranhao that previously relied on slow and unreliable bus transport. This sort of thing seemed
to be happening all over Brazil. I remember one of my earliest experiences in Rio was becoming a regular at one of the increasingly common juice bars in Copacabana. A particular chain called BigB was started by a man from Ceara, the state that´s home to Jericoacoara, and he mostly hired workers who had migrated from there to Rio. One of  the staff there named Olivio said he used to take a bus for five days  to get back to see his family for a month. Now he flies, not only  because its faster – it´s cheaper. A changing nation.

Xico drove us along the river to Barreirinhas, stopping at a dune-centric tourist stop called Vassouras that offered sodas, coconut  juice, snack, and arts and crafts. It also proudly displayed a set of domesticated monkeys that did tricks like hanging from rafters or walking across tight-ropes in exchange for bits of apple or coconut. I actually found the dunes more interesting, in part because monkeys are pretty common in Rio (once you spend a bit of time around them you start to realize that they´re generally a bunch of bastards). Xico dropped us off at the business end of Barreirinhas, where most of the restaurants and commerce were, a bit of a hike from the swanky resort we would check into.

We were picked up in a taxi by a man who identified himself as Ue, originally from São Paulo. He came four
years ago, following his brother who had set up a business a decade back. That´s when the tourism to the Lencois really took off, he said. Now Ue has two boats and a couple cars to work the tourism circuit.
You can leave your car open, you can walk around at night by yourself, it´s not like São Paulo. Barreirinhas is a good place to live. The real game changer for the Lencois was the road linking Barreirinhas to São Luis. Previously it was only the most determined traveller that would make the eight hour journey across the unpaved road to see the world´s most spectacular lagoons (pardon my editorializing). Today it takes about three hours – and the journey is still a complicated one, as these posts have pointed out. It´s the sort of thing you see all over Brazil. It´s a country bursting at the seams, its growth constrained by airports that are overcrowded to the point of chaos, ports that are in disastrous overuse, railroad lines without capacity to carry goods. It´s well-known – almost to the point of cliche – that trucking grain from the center-west of the country to the coast can  cost as much as half the value of the grain. It makes me wonder what Barreirinhas would look like if the remaining difficulties in making this journey – particularly for foreigners – were somehow straightened out. Brazil´s expensive for a lot of reasons, one of them is that fact that it´s just not easy to get
around.

We spent the remainder of the day lounging in the Porto Preguicas Resort, an upscale tourist haven with suburbanesque identical red-roofed cabins and manicured lawns. My instinct to pass it off as the usual tourism industry fare turned out to be entirely wrong. Along with the expected amenities like a pool, sauna, game room and river kayaks, the place had some unusual extras including an orchard that provided a considerable part of the kitchen´s food. It grew everything from mangoes and bananas to parsely and cilantro, and composted used coffee grounds along with spent charcoal. Left-over food scraps from the restaurant didn´t go into the trash, they were fed to a gaggle of chickens and goats. The restaurant´s menu included “galinha caipira,” Brazil´s way of saying chicken that´s not factory farmed (Brazil is now one of the world´s largest producers of factor farmed poultry).

The chickens in the coop in the back scrapped over a piece of lettuce that looked a lot like the one Isa and I had left on our plates the day before. They provided eggs that were also used in the kitchen. The garden hand, Jefferson, has been on the job for three months, formerly working as a painter. He knew how to tend a garden because he had one at home. The resort also houses a pottery production center with two pottery wheels being used by two teenage guests under the eye of a local resident who works there. The entire resort is filled with vases and pots that are made on site and fired in a wood-burning kiln. Next to that is a wood shop where other Barreirinhas residents make furniture used in the resort. I have to admit I was pleasantly
suprised.

Isa and I enjoyed a meal of slow-cooked chicken, possibly one of the ones we had seen earlier. I think this was my first locavore meal ever. Isa joked that eating recently killed chicken with our hands while drinking beer under a chandeliered wood-decorated dining area made it feel like we were in the Middle Ages. She hummed Holy Grail-esque flute sounding medieval tunes as we ate.

Cabure

We stayed the night in Parnaiba, and then the next morning drove two hours through thick vegetation known as cerrado until we reached the  town of Tutoia. Winding through some of the back trails in town we were
back on the sand dunes, and we headed west along the beach another half hour. The scrub grass struggled to grow through the sand, making the whole thing look like a lawn with a covering or snow on it. A group of
fisherman's huts made from palm fronds dotted the beachline next to a tall  antennae-like pole being used to test the area for wind generation.The beach was dotted with blackened stumps that poked out of the sand
as if they´d been buried. This is in fact what happened. Ten years ago  this was a mangrove swamp, but the wind slowly covered it with sand and left the mangroves strangled. Constant flux.

We arrived at the town of Cabure, which is in fact simply a group of  three different pousadas set back from the beach. There´s only power available half the day, provided by a diesel generator. The Rio Preguicas sits on the other side of the pousadas, and is the usual mode of transport for most people and goods and that come in and out.

Our pousada is a set of cabins set behind a large dune to shelter them from the wind, but the breeze is still so strong that it feels as if the rooms have fans blowing air through them all the time. Isa and  spent the afternoon on the beach, not swimming much because of the bizarre wave patterns and weird currents that make you feel as if something is sucking your legs out to sea. So we lay in the tidepools that form just back from where the waves break, skipping shells and chatting about nothing. I could barely feel the sunshine because of the wind blowing off the ocean.

The pools vary in depth from about an inch to about a foot, which gives them a variation in color. I really
only noticed this because I tripped and nearly twisted my ankle on one of them. A buzzard sits watching us from the remains of some abandoned structure. Beauty and hostility all rolled into one. Life´s not easy here, says the manager of the pousada, Irai. The spectactular beauty of the place keeps people coming back, to watch the sunsets of the Rio Preguicas, to see the stars at night, to fall  asleep to the sound of the wind and the waves. I love the sand and I love the water. But there´s so much to do that I often don´t get out there. And people come here complaining about all sorts of things.They say there´s so much sand, it´s too windy, they want air conditioning.

We took an afternoon tour to watch the sun set over the  river and watched the bright pink guara birds play overhead. We went back to our room and read until the lights went out. It´s been a while since I put down a book on account of lights out rules.