Street Sense

Armed only with a Meyer Grant, an English major decamps for Rio de Janeiro, where she digs beneath the city's exported public image in an attempt to find its true self.

Photos and story by Angela Jane Evancie '09

Dona Carmen’s young granddaughter leads me down the stairs to the first floor of the apartment building at 1500 Rua Almirante Alexandrino and presses the buzzer of apartment number 3. Inside, a muffled telephone conversation comes to a slow stop, and a shirtless old man opens the door. “What a shame,” he says, and sets me down on his couch. “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

Having performed her duty, the little girl returns to her grandmother’s home up on the third floor. I had met Dona Carmen, the landlord of the building, just 10 minutes ago, even though I have been subletting from one of her tenants on the second floor for more than two weeks. I had buzzed her apartment from the street below because I had lost my key, a key that I was not supposed to have in the first place, and after I explained my predicament, she let me in and directed me upstairs. I found her standing in her bright, gray living room, arms crossed. “Fabricio is renting to an American again? He should have told me about you,” she tutted. “Well, you all get robbed, and it’s his fault.” She then told me to go see Nicanor.

Nicanor is the shirtless man in Number 3. After letting me in, he slumps into the couch and asks me if this is my first time in Brazil. I tell him it is my first time in Brazil, my first time in Rio de Janeiro, and my first time in Santa Teresa, the bohemian quarter carved from a mountainside overlooking the Guanabara Bay. From Santa Teresa, one is afforded views of both the bay below, with its bright beach resorts of Copacabana and Ipanema, and the ridge of Desterro Hill above, which is accented nicely with a 120-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ. In between sea and sky, clusters of stacked concrete homes, Rio’s infamous favelas —slums—smear the white cityscape with tones of dusty brown.

The view from Nicanor’s veranda reveals the backside of our apartment building, and he takes me out to show off the mango tree that hangs its branches over the railing. He has fashioned a mango picker from a tin plate secured to the end of a broomstick, and he demonstrates the gentle process of loosening the mangoes from the tree and catching them on the plate. He retrieves a few for effect. Scraps of old peels and bread lie on the edge of the wall: food for the monkeys, which Nicanor also likes to lure from the tree. He shows me his storage closet and says something that I cannot understand about the puddle of water on the floor, and we return to the living room.

While Nicanor prepares coffee, I survey the room: a couch with zebra-print pillows, a table covered with Brazil’s popular daily newspaper, O Globo , and a large watercolor of two lovers copulating in front of a giant sunflower. On a table next to the couch, he has several framed photographs and a telephone, which has already rung several times since I have arrived. He has told a number of callers that, yes, he will attend someone’s birthday party on Sunday; he checked with Dona Carmen about when the locksmith will arrive to change the locks (in case the robbers know where I live and try to use my keys to enter); and told everyone he spoke to about the events of my day.

“Yes, she was just out walking, right here in Santa Teresa, right around noon . . . the ladrões took her bag and drove away.”

I think about Luiz, whom I have also met in the past hour. He was five paces from me when the car pulled away; he told me that he would have yelled at the man, but since I was obscured from his view by a telephone pole, he hadn’t figured out what was going on. I was wary to trust him, but he was older, and said, “Nonsense! I live right here. Come in and have a glass of water.” A quiet girl with dark skin was doing dishes in his kitchen, and two small white dogs ran around and peed on the pink wooden floors of his porch.

Luiz let me use his office to look up phone numbers and call the Visa card people and Fabricio. Visa answered; Fabricio did not. Piles of math textbooks and exercises written in English covered Luiz’s dark mahogany desk. He told me he was a math professor and offered to drive me back to my apartment. Along the way, we scoured the back streets for my bag, since Luiz thought the thieves might have tossed what they didn’t want. I was positive that he was in their gang, their gang mathematician, and that he was driving me to my doom. He dropped me off at my front door, wrote down his phone number, and told me to stop by sometime for a beer.

After coffee, Nicanor serves me bread, cheese, and a smoothie made from his collected mangoes. He sits me down at the head of his kitchen table, and we page through the newspaper together. We discuss articles about preparations for the upcoming week of Carnaval (Nicanor will not be attending; he cannot stand the barulho —noise) and rising crime rates. He recounts, one by one, every robbery he has ever witnessed or experienced. My favorite is his story of the omnibus. He was sitting in the back of a bus when a man boarded, waited until they were moving, and proceeded to make his way down the aisle, quietly gesturing with a gun and demanding that passengers relinquish their money and valuables. Nicanor knew that the driver was helpless, and no one was going to stand up to this man. When the thief got to him, Nicanor told him very calmly that he had a cell phone and had called the police, who would be waiting for him at the next intersection. The thief debarked immediately, and Nicanor ends his story in a fit of triumphant laughter. He had been lying to the man; he doesn’t even own a cell phone.

“You have to be careful these days; you always have to pay attention.” Nicanor has lived in Santa Teresa for decades and assures me that it has not always been like this. “Nothing was as dangerous as it is today,” he tells me; “I used to go to the favelas for churrasco , the best barbecue I ever had. Nobody had bars up in front of their doors back then.”
Maybe he’s right. Along Santa Teresa’s steep cobblestone streets, bright mansions and mosaic-tiled staircases of yester-century alternate with modern apartment buildings, all with tall, spiked, wrought-iron gates protecting their front doors and potted plants.

Santa Teresa has recently undergone a bohemian overhaul (the New York Times called it the “Anti-Rio”), and its main drag has all the classic symptoms of gentrification: sushi bars, small storefronts displaying psychedelic art and furniture made from found objects, German barbecue, smiling proprietors. But in the gaps between these beacons of renewal, tarp-covered stoops shade the entrances to small concrete homes and long staircases into the favelas below. When I walk home each evening, knocking my knees against blue-plastic grocery bags filled with mangoes, eggs, and beans for my dinner, I know I walk a fine, porous boundary between safety and danger. But I have no idea what that danger is. Will an iron gate really protect me?

A few vistas on the way up the steep streets offer wide views of the city below, where favelas climb up from behind the white resorts at sea level to Santa Teresa’s perch 600 feet above. After several sightings of fireworks blasting up from the crowded, piled neighborhoods, I had asked Fabricio why everyone was celebrating all the time. He told me that the flares could mean one of three things:

One. The drugs have arrived.

Two. The police have arrived.

Three. Another gang has arrived.

The latter two often result in a troca de balas , an exchange of bullets between gang and authority or gang and gang, although I gathered from many apathetic Santa Teresa residents that there isn’t much difference between the two. Nicanor seems to feel the same way. “Awful, just awful,” he says. “ Não agüento mais .” I’ve had enough.

Nicanor avoids leaving his apartment, except to see his girlfriend, who lives right around the corner. He divorced years ago, but explains to me that he prefers the bachelor lifestyle and having his own space. “She comes here, I go there, but it’s important to do your own thing.” When she calls again, my eye returns to the watercolor of the lovers above the couch. 

Fabricio’s romantic escapades are a little more sporadic: occasionally he’ll return with a man, cordially introduce me, and they’ll disappear into Fabricio’s room. I see him in the mornings, when I’m on my way out. He’s usually smoking a cigarette in his boxers on our veranda, playing his guitar and singing Caetano Veloso’s English lyrics until he’s ready to go to the gym. He works in the evenings, performing in Anjo Malaquais , a two-man tribute to the poet Mario Quintana, at the Centro Cultural Justiça Federal in Cinlândia, in which he plays the accordion and guitar. The only section of O Globo that I ever see him read is the theater review.

One day Fabricio took me to the Mercado Popular, six blocks of stores selling the same things for different degrees of cheap and all crammed with teenagers walking several paces behind their families. He wanted fabric to reupholster the chairs on the veranda. They had to match the pillows in the living room, a stipulation that I could not grasp, and we went from one bulk fabric store to the next, searching for the proper color and texture. All of the stores were much larger and loftier than their fronts suggested, and all were doing steady business with people preparing to make their wedding dresses and Carnaval costumes by hand. We went to four stores before Fabricio decided to return to the first.

I’m beginning to think that I prefer Nicanor and Fabricio’s homebody approach. I spend my days walking around different parts of the city and looking for good places to sit down. I buy nothing; the street vendors sell only cheap purses, cell phones, and sunglasses. Instead of an ice-cream stand or a café on every corner, there’s an auto-body shop or a locksmith. I spend my evenings eating modest dinners on the veranda and reading Elizabeth Bishop, an American poet who spent 15 years living in Petrópolis, just north of Rio. In Questions of Travel , she writes:

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
Inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But this time, I speak a truth that I have not yet revealed to myself: “I don’t know.” I eye Nicanor shamefully. He laughs and asks me if I’m still hungry.

I want to tell him that I am dying to get back home, that I would do anything for just one day of a cloudy Vermont sky. I think that of all people, this contentedly cynical man will understand my contempt for sunny, cloudless days. Bluebird skies rob the world of its deep, wet hues and its foggy dimension, rendering us all actors on a giant, two-dimensional set where front doors open to nothing and trees flop over in the wind. I have had too many of these days in Santa Teresa, and I am strangely satisfied with the fact that I got robbed on one of them: another black mark against the bright day.

When I arrived in Brazil, it took me almost a week to make myself go to the beach, Rio’s claim to paradisiacal fame. I walked across the hot sand, swarming with blazing bodies, until I found a couple who looked trustworthy enough to guard my things while I swam. I welcomed myself into the shade of their umbrella and struck up a conversation. They understood neither my Portuguese nor my Spanish, so I tried English. They finally replied in British accents. The husband told me they were expats of seven years, most recently installed in São Paulo and vacationing in Copacabana. It was the first time I had been in the company of people who actually purchased what the aggressive vendors offered: Guaraná soda from Styrofoam coolers and wrinkled empanadas. “It’s wonderful,” the man said. “Sit here long enough, and they’ll bring you anything.”

The mother bought olive empanadas for their two sons, who were playing at the edge of the umbrella’s shade. The boys said little to one another and worked diligently on buttressing their sand castles. They beheld their surroundings with squinting eyes, and I wondered what place they would ever think of as home. Or would they always play in new places, speak English with one another, and build their homes out of sand?

I left the couple with an anthology of travel writing to peruse while I swam. The water was warm, and a swaying line of froth where waves broke carried wrappers and cigarette butts. When I returned, the man told me he had chosen Clive Irving’s piece, “The First Drink of the Day,” which I found telling, even though I hadn’t read it yet. When I gathered my things to leave, he asked me how long it took to return to Santa Teresa. I told him that it took one bus, one metro, and one bonde : a long time, but I preferred not to keep track. “Right,” he said. “Just another thing to fill the day.” He and his wife looked out in different directions from the silent shade of their umbrella, and the boys dug deep holes for their feet.

The man’s words rang in my ears: “Just another thing to fill the day.” He was completely right, and I boarded the metro, thankful that it would be the end of another one by the time I made it back.

Nicanor and I continue to wait for Fabricio to return so that I can get into my apartment. Hours have passed, and two cups of coffee and two mango smoothies later I am beginning to feel as if I am imposing. But Nicanor is just warming up to me. He tells me that I remind him of his daughter and disappears into a closet to retrieve his photo albums. We spread them out over the newspaper that still covers the table and flip through the glossy years of her life. “She always knew she wanted to leave Brazil,” Nicanor says, and although I strain to hear disappointment in his voice, it eludes me. He tells me that she has settled in Sydney, Australia, a line I can tell he loves to drop. We turn to the albums preserving his memories of trips to visit her—cruises, casinos, opera, aquariums.

Suddenly, the pictures begin to look fake. How could this man, comfortably living his two-room life, ever have gone or been anywhere else? How did he get himself there? If everyone is transient, what happens to the places we leave behind?

Soon Fabricio arrives, and I kiss Nicanor farewell. He sends me off like he received me: while in the middle of a telephone conversation. I’m tempted to ask him for his number.

I see Nicanor once more before I leave Santa Teresa. On the day before I catch my bus, an afternoon downpour floods Rua Almirante Alexandrino, and I watch from my bedroom window as sticks and leaves and Haviana flip-flops clog the sewer drains. Backed-up water begins to cascade straight into our basement parking-garage, and Dona Carmen appears, high stepping through the rushing sludge with a broom. I watch her poke the handle into the clogged sewer gate in vain, and I descend with a broom of my own.

A wrought-iron door perpendicular to the garage entrance has caught masses of debris in its rungs, and the rush of brown water is subsequently rising into the garage. We literally open the floodgates and hurry the stuff down a staircase, but in a futile effort to protect, what? The cars inside; the television that Alex, the building’s handyman, keeps on the floor and is perpetually repairing; the locked bicycles that I always wish I could use?

Nicanor appears on his veranda above and calls out to me, “Careful! This water is toxic. It comes from the favelas .”

And I look down at my bare feet, pruning in the murky, milky water, and I fear and hate what Nicanor has said. This water comes from the air, it comes from the Atlantic. It comes from the days your daughter still lived here, and it will wash these streets clean. Perhaps Nicanor resents the water’s transience; perhaps I envy it.

In the bus station, the agent tells me that my ticket is invalid; due to a fluke computer error, my seat was canceled and sold to someone else. Think of the long trip home . I ask the woman behind me if this kind of thing is normal.

“Daughter,” she tells me, “in South America, everything is normal.”