From the earliest days of Carnaval in Rio and elsewhere, it’s been a tradition that anything goes during these four days, and there are loads of hoary myths about masked couples kissing and then discovering they’re husband and wife, or brother and sister (I am quoting an official source here). This should obviously be taken with a pinch of salt, although the number of by-the-hour motels does beg a few questions, but it’s unquestionable that the tradition of indiscriminate kissing is still a huge part of the carnival spirit.
As a resolute spectator – this time round! – from that point of view, it was actually very funny to look round for a friend every so often and see just the back of her head, firmly clamped to a stranger’s by his hand… or possibly just the power of suction. You have to be careful though; merely catching someone’s eye and smiling is invitation enough, and since I was grinning like a loon pretty much all the time, I must have spent the whole four nights looking like a particularly incompetent liar.
It could be sordid, I suppose, but waxing drunkenly lyrical later, it seemed like the happy and natural result of a concentration of youth, health and sexuality – what the world could have been like had *strenuously avoids the R word* people’s endless desire to control each other not got in the way. [That’s enough uninformed opinion. Ed]
Anyway, this was our night in a bloco, which the girls were very excited about (and in fact, I think, this was their favourite night). The blocos consist of two huge lorries with the band on top of one and the toilets, bar and first aid on the other, plus the surrounding groups of up to two thousand people, all wearing the official vests to show they’ve paid for the privilege. There’s a whole street of makeshift tailor’s shops, where the girls take their vests in the daytime to be customised almost into oblivion; it’s like a competition to see who can leave the smallest amount of material while still being identifiable by the bloco security and allowed within the ropes.
The unsung heroes of carnival are the cordeiros, the several hundred rope-holders who circle each bloco, keeping the whole thing together with no more protection from the coarse rope and the mayhem on the street than a pair of old gloves. They’re mostly black and invariably poor, and are paid around £4.50 for at least eight hours of hauling, straining and acting as a human shield for the people in the bloco. The bloco fills most of the road, leaving only the pavement for the stalls and vendors, plus all the pipoca (the ‘popcorn’ crowds, remember?) to squeeze into, and the cordeiros bear the brunt of the resulting chaos. None of this occurred to me until I read – kind of – an article in the paper the next day about a journalist who’d gone ‘undercover’ as a cordeira. It was quite sobering to hear that the euphoria of the choruses is also the part the cordeiros dread; she said that the worst time for fights was, unsurprisingly, when everything goes mad during the most popular ones.
There are large, cross security men every ten yards or so within the bloco, and they are as bad as the police in many ways – the second there’s any kind of trouble, they pile in at warp speed with extraordinary violence, and don’t bother with the asking questions later. However, the police have more power and (perhaps as a result) added spite. As one of their five-man files passed at one point, there was a can-collector scrabbling around in front of them, trying to grab the few cans that had just been tossed aside from the bloco. This is what some people live and feed families on; the R$3 (75p) they earn from each kilo of cans, but even so he was very careful to stay out of the police’s way. As he straightened up with his back to the last policeman, however, off-balance as he counted his cans, the policeman turned back to give him a great full-bodied shove into the line of cordeiros, leaving one of them holding her face where his shoulder had smashed into it. I bet the miserable bastard beats his wife.
Anyway, as a pasty gringa with a bloco vest on, I was relatively safe from such kind attentions, and this, plus the fact that the bloco had assembled in the early afternoon, plus the fact that I hadn’t eaten much, meant that I drank not wisely but too well. The final hours passed in a merry blur and I forgot about our meeting point at the end and struck out to find my own way home, carrying my shoes to save my filthy, aching feet. I promptly got lost and may have burst briefly into tears at one point, although this last information was obtained from a highly unreliable witness, ie myself.
It was a good experience, and fun in many ways, but I guess I’m just a peasant really, as I still prefer the streets. It’s easy to romanticise things as a foreigner, and the girls I was with are very wary of the pipoca (although being middle class, their natural environment would be a bloco or camarote), but on the other hand, only a hundred thousand or so of Salvador’s two million enthusiastic revellers are foreigners, so clearly some people like it.
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I won’t do a separate post about the last night, as it was a bit of an anti-climax; more of the same, but half-heartedly so as Janaina was headachy and Meire was a bit tearful about not having been able to meet up again with some guy, plus we were leaving really early the next day (when my fears about the roads were sadly proved correct – of the two major crashes we saw, one certainly involved multiple fatalities). It had been a second once-in-a-lifetime experience, though, if that makes any sense at all, and apparently, there’s another major festival in June…
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