The quest for codeine

Isa’s cough wasn’t going away, no matter how much cough syrup we threw at it. By the fourth day of a constant dry cough that wouldn’t let her sleep, we finally got a doctor on the job. We walked out of the clinic with a battery of anti-inflammatories, anti-biotics, and a cough suppressant called Codelasa. Trouble was pharmacies seemed to be just plain fresh out of that last remedy, which I started to suspect was the proverbial good stuff.

The first four letters should have tipped me off. Codelasa is the real deal. The medication that inspired a Beavis and Butthead episode about teenagers using cough medicine to get high.

Codelasa is codeine. And nobody had it.

Isa hadn’t slept in three days and was starting to lose it, increasingly feeling the urge to tear her own throat out.

It wasn’t until we got to the fourth pharmacy that someone explained why we weren’t finding this stuff. The prescription said Codelasa in tablet form, but the tablet form had been discontinued years earlier. The same medication was available in liquid form, but the pharmacy couldn’t sell that one to me. The controls on codeine were such that whatever they dispense had to exactly match the prescription.

Huh?

I did a double take. An exact prescription required in Venezuela?

I spent enough time here to know that this was really weird. Controls on just about anything were trifling and easily overcome. Drunk driving fines can be erased for $100. Airport baggage handlers can renew a passport on a dime for $200. Doctors rewrite medical reports to get things paid for by insurance.

I used to joke around with people that in Caracas you could walk into a pharmacy and ask for valium and they’d hand it to you over the counter. I went in to one to find out if it was true. The attendant glared at me for a couple seconds, and finally said “What? Fifty milligrams or a hundred milligrams?” Turns out it wasn’t a joke. (Never much of a drugstore cowboy, I didn’t actually buy it.)

Maybe it’s a change, or maybe it’s just codeine, but the usual grab bag of Venezuela tricks wasn’t working. We went back to the clinic, got the doctor to change the prescription to say Codelasa in liquid. Another half hour later Isa had the bottle in hand. Hallelujah.

I’m glad to see Venezuela’s taking this stuff a bit more seriously, just lousy luck of the draw that it had to start happening while my wife was suffering the worst coughing fits of her life. You spend long enough in a place like Venezuela and the charm of being in a place with no rules starts to wear off. Once you start to realize that it sucks when nobody stops at stoplights, gets anywhere on time or does anything by the book. You start to see how societies corrode, how lives are compromised, how people die unnecessarily.

I’ll never forget a conversation with my friend Nestor about exactly this. Sure, he said, recognizing my boring North American institutionalist approach to getting things right. “But you have to admit,” he pointed out, “this anarchy is fun.”

His words rang through my head during our four-hour quest for cough suppressant, as I remembered the virtues of a system that does things the wrong way.

Venezuela’s explosive Christmas cheer

Ah, it’s that time of the year again. Exploding ear drums, cracked windows and constantly tripping car alarms. Christmas celebration is never complete in this country without “fireworks” that are often more accurately described as “explosives.” Happy holidays!

Imagine the juvenile obsession with fireworks that grips America in late June and early July, but without any of the rules about what can’t be set off where. It’s that adolescent instinct to find the most dangerous possible way to have fun, without a cranky adult coming along to tell everyone to cut it out and go home. Vendors on just about every corner, with no permit or license, are selling fireworks to adults, kids, teenagers, or anyone that can pay for them. And it’s not like in the United States people want the brightest colors and craziest designs that Chinese fireworks makers can come up. Here it’s just the bang. And it hurts the ear drums. It really does.

My mother-in-law’s neighbor Lenin a few years back into a competition with the guys on the block to see who could set off the loudest firecracker. That cracked the car window of a cousin who was parked on the block. He was pissed, and didn’t come back for a few days. Everyone thought the whole incident was really funny. Just about everyone.

“Eso siempre me ha parecido una diversion medio guevona,” said Isa’s uncle Freddy, commenting on what dumb way that was to have fun.

I remember the first December in Venezuela, 12 years ago, when I came to go backpacking with my brother. We went with some friends to a “patinata” outside of Caracas, where kids rode skateboards down a very steep hill, while sitting down or lying down. And the kids spiced up the event by sprinkling the place really loud firecrackers that had cute names like the matasuegra (mother-in-law-killer) or the tumbarancho (shack destroyer) which after 9/11 was dubbed the bin Laden. We pretty quickly learned to look around us every minute or so to make sure one of those things didn’t go off behind us, because it really did impair the hearing. An hour into the fun some kids decided to put an entire stack of them on top of a nearby transformer. They all went off at the same time, knocking out power on the entire block. We fled the scene of the crime.

“Go to a clinic right now and what you’ll find are kids with burned fingers,” one nurse told me at a party one December. Every year stories of explosions and fires and fireworks warehouses start popping up in the news. Then they go away, and come back again the next December.

A little over a week and the firecrackers get put away until next year. As usual, 2011 will end with a bang.

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.