|
|
|
|
Corcovado Christ,the Redeemer statueby Jean-Michel MAULPOIX Translated into English from the original French by Catherine Wieder
In the
night at 5 a.m. under the wings of the 747, Rio looks like a
film star : paste strass and glitter dust, studded in purple
silks and black satins of the Sugar Loaves swaying their
hips. Brazil glimmers under very lightly misty streets. It
mistakes the top for the below : the poverty of the favellas
collects diamonds. It sparkles. Rio plays the
stereotype. In
truth, Brazil is a country where men and women are always
waiting for the bus : the country of wheelbarrows,
lipsticks, tennis shoes and white ants. On the
ground, it's winter. Stripped of its sunlights, the South
American star sinks into a bottomless melancholy. The city
is but a stifling cloud of exhaust gas. The passers-by wear
poor clothes. Their tanned faces turn grey. Rio is crippled.
Take away its sun, the only thing that remains is the
promise of its return. Is it
because at this very moment my heart wishes to be elsewhere
? I visit with a sad eye the world-famous capital city of
pleasures and madness. I try in vain to find the silhouette
of the Ipanema girl and meet more broken lives than samba
dancers. Rua Uruguaiana, on the walls of the Maria das
Gracias church, between the painted wooden panels of the Way
of the Cross five blade ventilators are planted. At the
entrance, candles and ex votos are sold, the latter look
like fractured heads, club feet, stomachs, digestive tracts
and hands with broken phalanxes. In a small side room, dim
and vaulted like a grotto, women endlessly mumble in front
of thousands of candles emanating a thick smoke. The
miracle court pinned its canvas stalls &endash;
sometimes just a small square of blue material strewn over
the ground &endash; between a handful of skyscrapers and
a few colonial buildings, pathetic symbols of wealth are
poorly sold : children's toys, calculators, digital watches,
cordless phones, radios and alarm-clocks ring alone in
Indian file. The evangelical CD is this week's special offer
at $ 14 each. On one
of the walls of the harbour, three underwater divers are
painted : they sweep the bottom of the sea, collect papers
and dust the fishes. Above, there's an inscription :
Limpieza da Baia da Guanabara. The most beautiful city in
the world is also one of the dirtiest. The
ferry taking me to Paqueta island stirs up thick urine
colour water in which cans, tins and plastic bags float. The
water tank of the toilets holds with strings. The
siren painted in pink on the blue walls of the restaurant
(the food is prepared in a kind of tiled garage) has large
thighs and wears a starfish on the front. The Brazilians
have heavy bums and hair (people say that the United States
are the country of breasts and Brazil that of rumps). The
samba is the art of the stirring of the bunda. On that land
of cannibals, people also say that in the old days the
Indians were interested in the flavour of the bodies of the
Europeans. On
Sunday, in Copacabana, from the terrace of the Hotel
California, I watch a people of ghosts go by, they run,
pedal, skate, perspire, show their bodies, play the American
way but, when all is said, reveals itself to be but that
very dream it strives to look like. In the
mirrors of the Confiteria Columbo waiters wearing
waistcoats, head clerks with braces and greedy 70 year old
ladies with permed white hair loiter. For fear of hold ups,
the cashier is in a cage. Her name is Coco. On my
way to Ouro Preto, a man walks and discusses with the road.
The ground all around is brick-coloured. The cows have grey
skin and flat heads. Roped up workmen in orange overalls
mend their falling mountains. Termites dig the red clay,
looking for invisible diamonds. They erect crumbly steles to
the numerous gods of the under-world and of fertility. The
earth is full of dreams. It grows in trunks, palm-trees and
blossoms in scarlet flowers. The pattern for that entangled
country is a bush of bamboos. Brazil
is crumbly, like thoughts, loves, palavers, movements, the
earth gullied by the rains and the insecure brick-sheds of
the favellas. On this far too huge territory, the eye floats
without ever knowing how to land. Only few signs direct it.
Everywhere huge trenches going nowhere are being dug by
bulldozers. What are the plans of such a delightfully rough
people ? The vastness of territories, like the
inter-breeding of faces add enclosures impossible to be
federated. Tropical nature opens itself and closes to
whoever comes close. It is plentiful, it shares, wraps up,
and dismisses. Its generosity begets an infinite sadness.
Would man be more than everywhere else uncalled for on that
very land which is self-sufficient and which seems to have
only to pick up fallen fruits ? Brazil can't be confronted,
one flees from it or consents in the same way as the mind is
defeated by matter and the primitive energy of
life. Golden
skies, golden volutes, golden beams and pillars, the baroque
church is a stage on which bleeding Christs watch the poor
congregation from their golden boxes. Saints here have hair.
They strike a pose and simper. The altar is a palace whose
stairs climb to heaven. Omnia per manus Maris. Mary
triumphes in her blue dress among cherubs and bunches of
carnation. Crossing the Atlantic means exchanging Porto for Rio, the fado for the samba, the « brackish sadness » of he who endlessly watches the sea dreaming of outward bounds for another more acrid sadness, probably even more desperate, that surges from a surfeiting of beauty. Exchanging contradiction for entanglement feeling for sensation Ö Such was my trip meant to be. But nothing is so simple. I cross the Atlantic to free my heart and it makes it both wider and gives me pangs. The stone arms of the Corcovado Christ the Redeemer are wide open on to the void. From Brazil, I remember pain : young children sleeping in the streets, crowds of prostitutes and transvestites in front of the hotel, the kitchen knife of the adolescent boy who rifled my pockets on the beach, demanding « money, money », the unreachable and omnipresent favelas and the dissimulation of misfortune under the blooming lie of the Tropics. |
Review of Literature and criticism 