23 december.
Marcelo. This kills me and I don’t think I can write about it much, but I will lay out a few notes. Tall, maybe 6’1” or 2”, shorthaired and thin. Sharp nose, sensitive eyes, etc. Sweating from the uphill bike ride back from the early morning chicken processing plant where he works each day from 4am to 4pm. We sit, Felix and I, with his mother and sister taking teredé – cold mate tea – and discussing. A woman or child pops through the gate periodically offering cakes or breads in exchange for a small sum of guaranís. Knocking on the door here means clapping five times rapidly. There look not to be gates to shut now on which to knock. We had hunted for this house for some time, trundling through small crop fields tied to the main road by a rust red dirt one, now partially paved with stones. The bus ride was over an hour and this green semi-urbanness on the outskirts is rejuvenating after Asuncion’s smoggy bustling. …. Marcelo has supported the family for the last five or so years – since he graduated from high school at the top of his class. He is bright and radiates upon seeing Felix, who attended the same high school during a portion of his study abroad in Paraguay some years ago. He is one of the few people my age I have heard during my time abroad care about his use of Spanish, that is, mold phrases and choose words, really use it. He is clever and can turn a phrase, is au courant with the proceedings at the international climate summit. …
We spend a deeply humbled bus trip back through the graffiti-lined streets, not crying but not not crying either. … The air is dark and enters through the bus windows partially slid open. Orbs of yellow light sidewalk barbecues and small plastic tables under glass leaders of beer. Reggaetón shouting from rooftop speakers seems to fill the streets with many more people than are actually there. Two teenagers dash across lanes of traffic, popping sandals with the assurance of sliding past a swerving motorbike. I wipe the orange grit from my right ankle to the roof of my left foot. People standing in the isle hold on to the metal support bar, brandishing their armpits to those seated beneath after hours of sweaty work. A man with deflated rubber skin slumps with the day’s exhaustion in the seat next to me like a crumpled butterfly. The bus too is tired and says so.
24 diciembre el jueves
Definitely the funniest Christmas eve I've ever passed (24 hour bud rise to Rio with friends. Beware, only crazies take the overnight XMAS eve route. Literally, smelly giant chinese men eating chicken legs out of a plastic bag and farting and sleeping in the passageway at my feet. A brazilian with a portentous tattoo pulls up his pants and straddles your seat to show you and tell you that it means he's killed Xnumber of people. Another collecting money from passengers to bribe the chauffeur not to stop at customs so they can pass through with what ever "goods" they might be bringing from Paraguay. Angry arguments between the Sao Paulo hairdresser and the Peruvian/Italian yoga teacher going to Rio for an undetermined amount of time to teach yoga on the beach. Reaches Rio, realizes that it's impossible to find a hotel at this time of year, and returns the same day to Buenos Aires, 48 more hours on the bus! (see santa cluas below) ha!)
With Felix, arrive at the sidewalk kiosk at 9.30am to buy the bus ticket from Asunción to Ciudad del Este, the eastern-most city in Paraguay on the way to Brazil. It’s Christmas eve and have a bus that leaves for Rio from Foz de Iguazu en Brazil at 6.45 in the afternoon. This first ride is 5 hours, but once I get to Ciudad del Este I have to take a bus to the bridge connecting Paraguay and Brazil (while skirting Paraguay customs since I entered illegally), and then take another moto to the bus terminal to catch the Pluma to Rio. To make things short, the sleezeball salesman sold me a ticket to C del Este at 10 on a bus that didn’t exist. Arguing does nothing against his sidestepping excuses and false business. Whatever, I have to get on any bus I can. IT doesn’t come until 12. In the end I get on another bus at 11, where I stand for three hours, sit for 2, and arrive at 6. I’m gonna make it to Rio!
Countryside leading into Rio:
26 diciembre el sábado
Morning at the beach beneath Caesar Park sunbrellas that cast a roving shade. We burn on our feet and shoulders as the sun slides across its blue arching track. Tourist Rio is a place of eyes and Ipanema (though less than neighboring Copacabana) beach is center stage. It’s a spectacle, scintillating with eye-to-body contact. Exteriority, glance, and performance. Though there is something wonderful here, liberating, because the gym geeks aren’t the only ones relishing in a dearth of swimwear fabric. THe proverbial all shapes and sizes, which seems quite fitting here in Brazil as in the US, bare their flesh to the greedy sun without being abashed by imperious corporal cultural norms. They’re like children in an odd fleshy way. And whoever coined the term “sun bathing” was being subversive. The cooking analogy is more apt. And it’s rare in Brazil that you’re anything less than well done. Superficially at least, it is a culture of bodies and physicality that is, I have to say again, the culture of Brazilian tourists with pockets deep enough to perform on Ipanema. The shoulders and abs are like the jutting hills along the coast and the bikinis are tricks played by Brazilian designers in attempt to market the skimpy vestiges of more important projects.
Mangoes and avocadoes like footballs, apples, Brazil nuts, and dried fruits arrayed in neat pyramiding lattices, price tags definitively centered beneath. Isles, shelves, rows, swept and shining tile floors, and space – most of all space. Space as a premium luxury and the atmosphere of space, of leisure, of disposal and limitlessness. Lazy green Christmas garlands loop down from hooks in the ceiling and numerous sharply uniformed employees solicit idly at corners or by stacks and rows. It’s 10pm in the grocery store and there are more of them than customers. Yesterday I saw a young skinny black guy setting up beach chairs for tourists and wearing a shirt imprinted with: “Welcome to Rio. Have a pleasant stay and I am at your disposal.” The next line, had there been one, would have read: “Ask me about my low prices.” Hand printed and locally translated, maybe, but the idea of a human as a hand wipe, as disposable and at your disposal doesn’t sound like luxury to me. Slavery? Now, I may be a slave to the oppression game, the most popular one in leftist ideological academic theory, but I can’t help but feel a strong visceral repulsion; what I felt when I had to leave the grocery store tonight. A shock, a contrast that splits you like dry pine under a hatchet strike.
What does it mean to be a tourist? What makes Corcavado a tourist attraction? Why was it built for the centennial, only 35 years after the official story’s end of slavery? Why is it a thing to go, as others go, to wait behind others in line, to snap the same photos everyone else will upload onto their computers and then make the same comments and tell the same story to their friends as everyone else just did? That’s why exactly, it’s the thing to, as Heidegger might say. Hammering is what makes it a hammer – it’s just what you do with hammers. It’s just what you do to make yourself a tourist. I ramble into fear and oppression games, perceiving oppression? Perceiving monetary problems means supplying monetary answers and the serpent bites its tail. To what degree is perceiving suffering useful? Just imagine the luxury imbedded in that question.
27 diciembre 2009
Man on high after stepping out on to the helipad after an as advertised 8-9 minute loop over Ipanema, Copacabana, the Sugar Loaf, and Corcavado – the exalted massive stone Christ spreading his arms high above Rio. It gives you sea legs. And it turns with its tail, the helicopter, which is disconcerting to us animals built to lead with our noses. It rolls barrel-like and leans like a top wobbling jus before nicking the floor and crashing. Rio is perfect terrain for a spin in a helicopter: ocean reflecting glassy blue and a serpentine tide line licking light sandy beaches, garlanded with high-rise apartment buildings and hotels bookended by egg-carton stone hills crowned in green. Whale-hump striped stone islands break the horizon, which melts as the Atlantic and the heavens shine to an equal silver. Disconcertingly thin black funicular cables tie the sugar loaf, which looks more like a dinosaur egg, to the shorter stouter sister mountain. Corcavado lords over the city and oval tourist lagoon laid in the basin between rising green stumps of land. For 8-9 minutes I forget the metaphor – the reality – of looking down upon the city: elite freedom, the masses of shoeless children and three-walled houses – and roll in the vertigo of this Einstein-haired crazed inventor’s dream machine.
29 diciembre 2009 el martes
In Buzios. The green bay shimmers like the diamond vestments the patrons decorating this boutique believe themselves to be wearing. It’s the spectacle of Copacabana but wrap the bronzed skin in hammocks of white silk. That is, antiqued stone tile floors lead to a rich wooden balcony yearning toward a bay of small tethered fishing schooners and dinosaur dorsal islets. The tinkling of polished silverware syncopates the smooth beat of 5th Ave. perfume shop music in the poolside restaurant above. Sleep or read while tanning? I’d rather be working, delivering the caipirinhas and limes. The bay from beneath a white awning is not the same bay seen from a bobbing fishing boat, is not the same bay seen from the summit after a sweaty hike, nor the same as from under the precarious weight of sweating glasses on a waiter’s tray. All white sarongs. Manikins frozen in the AC of their display windows. Buzios. This little town is great. This rotting stripmall land reaks with the ripe stench of the oppression of international exchange rates and power addictions. It is both I suppose. Do you feel powerful atop your summit? I feel powerless, debilitated, dependent on the working hands that realize the structure supporting such height. We on top, where did we begin our climb? Two steps down? Two steps up? Thanks to our parents. Thanks to our parents. But again, money fixation – from above or below – does little but self-perpetuate. Language is power.
31 diciembre 2009
Take the arranged car back from Buzios to the airport in Río, where I say goodbye to Nate and Laura before taking a bus to Copacabana for the massive Near Year’s Eve blowout. The driver is not happy about going into Río this day, as the traffic leaving is horrific. I arrive and walk to the Caesar Park where we had stayed earlier that week, hoping to stash my bag at the hotel in order to make the night possible. It works! I’m hungry so I wander over to the grocery store, no plans. And at the entrance I run into my friend Alex from Santiago (from Belgium) and her boyfriend Benoit! We do our shopping and they invite me back to their hostel. Hostels are ridiculous in Rio during the holidays. This one is 125 reals per night – about 75$ - and you have to commit to four nights in a row. Fortunately they have 2 beds, so they agree to share one and give me the other. What a charmed day! We hang out at the hostel with other hostelers and wander over to the beach between 10 and 11 with six others. There are three stages with music and we only make it to the first (about 2 miles of walking), which turns out to be the most fun anyway. I remember a really cool older lady dancing with us, Alex and Benoit whirling the swing together in the sand and the Brazilians around us all cheering them on. I love the reversal of roles. I lose my sandals in the ocean trying to complete the tradition of jumping over 7 waves. As the sky begins to glow with morning, we follow the curve of the coast in search of place to watch the sunrise. We find a rocky outcropping beyond the end of Ipanema where there are dozens of people grouped quietly, watching the purple orb rise out of the Atlantic.
Waking up on the beach in Paraty, Brazil after spending a restless sandy night in January, refusing to pay the outrageous sum for a hostel. A man worked all night near us raking sand like an tropical zen garden, and I awoke gradually to the sounds of metal teeth stroking neat particles of golden sand.
