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December paragraphs from Rio.

By Anthony Howell.

RAIN COMES STEADILY DOWN over the intersection, the green lights’ reflection on the tarmac smearing yellow lines.  Umbrellas are out, and people are making the rain an excuse for sheltering under the awning of the Big Nectar, scooping up tubs of black, frozen, iron-laden acai.  Men bare to the waist are walking home in their Bermudas.  Rain blowing off the roofs and the edges of the overhangs, and dripping down the central runnels of large green leaves.

There are mountains and islands everywhere: great tongues of jungle reach into the heart of the city, and so do great tongues of sea.

Brazil is committed to cleaning up the favelas before they host the World Cup, so the tourists sit on the beach, sipping green coconut juice and getting swept up by the waves, in a town where certain pockets are more or less war zones.

There is a pitched battle going on in one hillside slum, as the police try to wrest control back from the drugs gangs.

Beauty and danger.  But Uncle Xavier says that beauty is connected with danger more often than not:  think of the beauty of a snake.  And some of the most beautiful flowers are deadly.

In order to tot them up, the police carry the corpses of gangsters they have shot back to the police station in supermarket shopping trolleys.

UNCLE XAVIER TELLS HAMILTON that he is exaggerating.  That was just one photograph in a paper, the body crumpled in the trolley from the local supermarket and the big bullet-vested cop reporting the kill on his mobile.

The favelas get the best views.

Roaring onto the beach, the next morning, each sheer wall just keeps on growing until it goes into a curl that sends the crest of its mass toppling into a mane-shaking repercussion.   Wham, bam, boom, bash!  You can’t describe it without timpani.  The extended crash travels all the way down the length of it, and sometimes surfers manage to ride it but more often she sees them sucked up and sent under, sometimes they get tossed, boards and all, as if by a bull.

None of the coast-guards have its shoulders.

Later, they climb upwards, from the Jardim Botanico into the forest.

Thick, red roots, red beneath their verdigris of lichen, fuck the earth, attracting big, rusted insects.

Here are some age-old, blackened ropes of liana, no longer attached to the earth, swaying gently in the breeze like bell-pulls.

Blotched green and grey, young green and reaching….

Wrinkles and shoots; everywhere, wrinkles and shoots.

SHE NOTICES SOME PLATES of liver-coloured fungi like vegetal shells with white rims, burgeoning in serrated contours, and taking on the colour of the rot fed on ferns under tumbled trunks:  fungi fixed to canopy giants finally knocked off their pins. And she gets glimpses of dragon-flies, and above them, wheeling around, glimpsed through the blades of helicopters, those pterodactyls again.

The path twists and turns, taking them up and up in traverses which emerge to reveal another landing stage of a waterfall: water emerging out of the high ferns above them, which will end up in the lake way below. It flows into and out of pools sanded among roots…in trickles, droplets, floated over here by yellow butterflies…a streaming necklace of pearls dropping down a green shoulder-blade where the shadows of overhanging bushes are cast in silhouette.  Water in a long, thin slide, slower than the eye, and nearby there are roots dribbling down outcrops…

And she thinks about what she finds here, and what she thought about Brazil before she got here.

Flying down to Rio…Carmen Miranda…and logging destroying the lungs of the world.  At a barbeque the other night someone told her that the problem was that they left the canopy trees, so that you couldn’t see what was going on below the canopy from a helicopter…hectare after hectare laid bare.

And as for Carmen Miranda – a little woman with enormous nostrils, big lips, big shoulders, big shoes – she wears the whole of Brazil on her head.  Not for her, a single magnolia at the ear. Carmen in her crimson turban, that night in Rio!

Boy, does she impress the double-breasted officer in immaculate whites, who sports the very thinnest of lip moustaches and sings so charmingly about pan-American relations chica-chica-boom. Wow, he wants to salute everyone!  The drums and the marimbas, and the man beating the inside of a tub with his hand.

This is the virtual Rio of the movies, in which the US Navy does the conga, and the Sugar-loaf is just the backdrop to some vast nightclub whose Hollywood girls can’t properly wiggle their hips.

And now, before a rectangular pool where water-lilies float, she dances in bangles, baubles and shells on a chequered marble floor:  splendid isolation of eyes, shoulders, hips…those versatile hips. Hair parted strictly down the centre.

Ay, ay, ay, I like you very much, Ay, ay, ay, I think you’re grand.  Why does my heart do that when I feeel your touch?

And to seem a bit taller, what can she wear? – in that bowed era of white waistcoats and brilliantine.  Blooms and plumes, a mountain of fruit, even a chandelier. And platform shoes – she is credited with their invention.

In ’43, in The Gang’s all Here! the SS Brazil docks in New York. The Yanks have to keep Brazil onside. Stevedores carry her props into the nearest nightspot. Ay, ay, ay, I like your lips, your eyes.

Born of a poor barber in Portugal..  and the family arrive in Rio… and she ends up on Broadway, falling in love on the way with oarsmen from Flamengo, playboys from Santa Theresa, and then no doubt with batsmen from the Bronx, gangsters from little Italy.

BUT FIRST SHE FLITS from one hatshop to another, and this is the age of hats, from neat little numbers worn at a pill-box tilt with a natty fringe of lace setting off your blond ringlets to ice-cream sundaes mountainous as any consumed along the Croisette in Cannes.

Carmen dances with a cast of real live monkeys chattering among the fronds of papier-mâché palms, where a thousand bathing beauties awake from their abandoned sleep on the shores of desert islands. And they start to weave in their swim-suits on sea-blue studio floors around tall peaks of bananas.

Carmen’s headgear is of course a concoction of bananas and strawberries, and she plays a circular banana xylophone; the band in bright bandannas – while rows of hands now partner rows of feet.  After that, larger-than-life-guard bananas open their yellow claws, as the bathing belles open their legs, revealing their big-time, bright-red strawberries inside an amulet of banana kaleidoscope floor-work.

And this is why the whole of Brazil is a nightclub floating on a wooden sea among islands where the Japs haven’t dug in.

Brazil is an integral part of the US food-chain, and they sing about Padooka and play the clarinet in their spectacles and the lady in the kooky kooky hat contributes her samba to the war-effort, battling the bad Dago tango from Buenos Aires where they like Hitler.

Beat me up, daddy:  I’ll beat you right back.

So wear the jacaranda attached to your close-fitting turban, dear…Build yourself up, build yourself up.

But actually they like Hitler everywhere in Latin-America.

I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. The band-leader conducts with one hand while nesting a Chihuahua in the other:  for Hollywood blithely mixes up Mexico, Brazil, Spain and Argentina, bolero, flamenco, tango and samba… what does it matter?  It’s all fucking Latino!

Carmen makes her eyes into slits, shutting them tightly in order to open them up, wide as her grin, and boy, can she take it on the chin! For in 1940 she’s back in Rio, getting an icy reception from the stalls.  This is the Estado Nova.  None of the generals like her. She’s become a gringa – this midget singer from Carioca – only fit for Alan Ladd.  Enough of her platforms!  Jackboots are their style.

If you hear him ring your bell, he hasn’t got a thing to sell: no umbrellas, no bananas, no mandolins or violins or pianas….

And wasn’t she even more Americanised by the botched nose-job of ’43? – disguised by a dollop of makeup.

Shifting her eyeballs from corner to corner, her neck from shoulder to shoulder, now in yellow platforms, and her robe a la mode – Egyptian this year – she’s the Cleopatra of Copacabana, and let’s do it, the Copacabana that comes directly from…the canyons of Manhattan.

BUT ARRAYED IN BUTTERFLY broaches, bow-tie shoes, sequin sheathes and pneumatic bracelets, she was still going into the fifties, spinning like some musical box fairy on revolving stages between clowns with tambourines in Greenwich Village, or Beverley Hills, and she always wanted her hips to say hip hip, hip hip hooray, dancing tap to the samba with Groucho in one musical, no mean toe at tap, that one.

Carmen kept herself going on barbiturates and amphetamines and added alcohol to the cocktail, then was given electric shock treatment to deal with this diet in ’52 and died in ’55 of a heart-attack, more or less on stage. Always more nice than naughty, she averaged 2.28 shows a day – that’s four hundred and twelve in the first half of 1940.

Hamilton drives them to a restaurant on the other side of the lake that’s black as ink except for its necklace of street-lights and a myriad twinklings from the Christmas tree that floats there. Covered now in glittering sleigh-bells, now in dancing reindeer, this tubular steel pagoda of a tree is running through its repertoire. All the changes that it rings are reflected in the dark still water. Somehow it reminds her of that Brazilian dynamo, even though of course it’s far taller.


A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell reports from the UK and, during the winter, from South America. He teaches the tango at his studio/gallery The Room in Tottenham Hale and is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice.


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