rio, baby

carioca

When you come from a city whose life revolves around the beach, such as Rio, and you're lucky enough to have been raised near the beachfront, and your mother lives one block from the best beach in the city, the first thing you'd probably do after a year away would be to spend a day toasting in the sun. But that's you. She was different. She'd never really liked going to the beach – she'd felt fat and ugly for as long as she could remember, and she had memories of being dragged to the beach by her parents and of hiding under a towel with a book until it was time to go home – and things had only gotten worse over time. Now, after a few years of rather painful practice, she could tolerate it, barely, depending on how good the book was, but it was still something she kept at the very bottom of her list of priorities. Instead, she took the subway and went downtown.

Living in a small town did wonderful things for one's quality of life, but lately she'd been craving the three Cs – city, crowd and chaos – more and more each day. She missed the confusion, the rush hour, the commuting, the challenges of navigating the absurd public transportation system, the hordes of people going places in order to do things, the exhausting babbling around her, the sounds of vehicles screeching, of street vendors shoving their goods at passers-by, of old buses braking and of their drivers yelling and laughing at each other across the avenue, of whistles blowing as traffic officers very unsuccessfully, and half-heartedly, attempted to set things to order. Order didn't belong here. Nothing in this country made any sense whatsoever, and she smiled to herself wondering how on earth a foreigner must feel when forced to deal with it, how utterly impossible Brazil must seem to anyone used to an orderly life. This is a country that drives people crazy, she thought, not for the first time that day, as she climbed the escalators out of the Carioca station. This is a country that shouldn't exist, by all laws of logic and physics.

It wasn't the closest station to where she was going, but it was her favorite one. Not for any reason in particular other than because it was called Carioca, the demonym used to describe those born in Rio de Janeiro. Like countless others adopted by the Brazilian variation of Portuguese, this word came from the Tupi language, and meant "white man's house". She loved the way it sounded in her own carioca accent, the "o" sound made longer than it should. The large square of the same name was a notorious hunting ground for pick pockets, and a strange, dreamlike place where Christian fanatics preached all kinds of crap about hell, and the end of the world, and Jeebus, and whatever; where reporters interviewed people about all kinds of stuff and TV shows sometimes made live cooking sessions for no reason whatsoever that made sense; where you could buy food from other Brazilian states, sold by women wearing African dresses and turbans; where you could buy hard candy, pirate Windows Office CDs and your soccer team merchandise all at the same newsstand, for your convenience. She crossed the square, tripping over the badly kept Portuguese black and white cobbles that she loved, bumping into people, overhearing snatches of conversation, trying to figure out where people were going, what they were up to, what they wanted from their lives. She waited to cross the street, and wondered, for the thousandth time, what strange urge made Cariocas unable to wait for the traffic lights with their feet on the sidewalk. An anthropologic mystery of sorts, she thought. It only made traffic worse, if that was even possible, as it forced cars to slow down so as not to run into people, and yet everyone always did it, always, everywhere in the city, all the time. There they were again, everyone standing in the street, leaning forward into the traffic, and here came the taxis honking as they crawled along, and the buses generally being the assholes they always are in Rio, and the freaking traffic lights finally showed the green walking man and she crossed the street, shaking her head and smiling at the same time.

She basked in the crowd and in the confusion, inhaling the smog, the crazy and not always pleasant smells of all kinds of crappy and intestinally dangerous street food coming from pretty much everywhere – churros, tapioca, boiled corn on the cob, sugar-coated peanuts, hot-dogs, popcorn, all sorts of diabetes-inducing delicacies. She was very much aware of how lucky she was to be able to simply stroll around, purposeless, in the downtown area of this busy and extremely complicated city, made even more so by the works to build the tracks for the new tram that would connect downtown and the new harbor area, works which, of course, would never be ready in time for the 2016 Olympics. She remembered when she used to work here, and whenever she walked these streets, it was go to somewhere to get things done, or to buy something, or to grab a guilty bite. Today she could walk around, get lost in the old, narrow streets with names she remembered from the classics she had to read for school, admire the beautiful French architecture, stare at people, listen to the accent, her accent, that she loved so much, pay attention to the heavy swearing that was typical of the city, to the informal speech taken to extremes, to the physical closeness people always assumed when speaking, to how everyone called everyone else friend, captain, buddy, brother, love, madam, beautiful, cat. That's when she found herself walking past the huge mirrors of Confeitaria Colombo, and she grinned, and backtracked and went in, past the clot of tourists taking pictures of the awe-inspiring art-deco interior, as well they should, ordered a fresh-squeezed passion fruit juice, which is simply the best thing in the world, and had one of those moments.

A few years back, she was coming out of the gym, after a tough spin class, a banana in her hand – a real one, mind you, not the plastic-tasting variety that gets exported to the northern hemisphere – and turning a corner that she knew like the palm of her hands, when a banzo moment hit her like a brick. Banzo is an African word, brought, like so many others, by slaves, to describe the feeling of longing one has for one's own lost home. Now, sitting here in this much loved place, sipping her passion fruit juice, she closed her eyes and could relive every little snatch of feeling of that morning: how time seemed to have stopped, as did her heartbeat, and how she'd looked around as if she'd been underwater, seeing the people, her people, the women in leggings and sneakers, or in bikinis and flip-flops, the men in jeans and Ts, or in swim trunks and surfboards, nobody rushing, not even those who were rushing, and feeling the taste of that real banana in her mouth, and feeling the tropical winter sun burning the back of her neck, and reading the words in her own language everywhere around her, and the old, old fast food joint in the corner, and the butcher's turned mini-market across the street, which had been there forever, and the bus lines that she knew by heart, and everything clicked into place, and some voice, her own voice, said "THIS is your place, baby" inside her head. And she knew, then as now, in the peaceful company of the passion fruit juice, that no matter what, or where, or when, and no matter how much she hated tattoos, that should she, for some reason, ever have to have one made, that's the word she would choose to mark her skin: Carioca. Because she was by no means a typical Carioca, and yet that's all she was ever going to be, more so as time went by, the spirit of the city growing unchecked inside her and threatening to burst into a grin or into tears, or both, at the most inconvenient moments throughout the day. She would never be anything but a Carioca – and there was nothing else she wanted to be.

So she left and went to have a haircut.