Brazilian Tequila: A Journey into the Interior
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About this ebook
Gus, a middle-aged Irishman, finds that his life in London has gone cold. An epidemiologist without an epidemic, a poet who cannot write poems, he decides to transmigrate to a warmer climate, namely Brazil, where he hopes to winter himself back to spring. He flies around Brazil, learning things that challenge his preconceptions. Pandemic corruption seeps into everything and nobody seems bothered, including his friend, Pedrinho. Even the first democratic elections for decades are being conspicuously rigged.
Throughout his travels, Gus meets the real victims, particularly the poor and the young, and their cheerful passivity take him aback. However, his European side begins to revolt against what he sees as a ‘moral no-man’s-land.’ Torn between his love of being there and his concept of justice, his engagement becomes disturbingly personal. When Gus travels with Pedrinho to his hometown (which is suffering a ten-year drought), it leads to a confrontation and a moral twist that throws his cherished certitudes into confusion. His affections threaten to take over from his principles. How will Gus cope? Will he see Brazil in the same eyes ever again?
Inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Brazilian Tequila will appeal to those who enjoy travel stories and are interested in Brazil.
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Brazilian Tequila - Augustus Young
Contents
Prologue O Altitudo
Part 1
My Voyage of the Imagination
There
Towards the Oasis
On Not Meeting Ubaldo Ribeiro
Break Down
Pink Bikes
The Turning of the Worm
Brazilian Tequila
Interim Stop
The Red Scorpion
A Perfect Desert Flower
‘An Evening Meal in the Widower’s Heaven’
On Not Meeting Ubaldo Ribeiro (Again)
A Letter to Senhor Joậo Ubaldo Ribeiro
Part 2
I’ll Go With You
The Homecoming
The Last Colonel
The Visits
What Pinto Thinks
Old Friends
The Girls
Edifying Discourses
Pedrinho’s Farewell Party
If the Heart is Big Enough
Epilogue
Lexicon of Brazilian words
Itinerary (Key places)
Music in the Text
Note and Poem
A Journey into the Interior
Brief Biography of the Author
Photographs by Alice and Gilbert
Cartoon by Paulo Setúbal
Brazilian Miniatures by Axi Leskoschek (Circle Press 1974)
Prologue
O Altitudo
I first see Dr Pedrinho Diaz in the lobby of the Cumberland Hotel, holding a large parcel wrapped in brown paper: a shambling panda of a man, clothes crumpled from the tour group treadmill. He looks lost, and older than fifty-five. His wife, Suzanna, sleek and watchful as a fox, catches my wave. And Pedrinho lumbers over. Could this imploded figure be the author of ten years of letters, ornate in feelings, eloquent in ideas?
It’s the end of the 1980s. The correspondence began a decade before with an Oxfam project in Brazil – colleagues working together for the good of humanity. It went well enough: a few showpiece projects. The dispatches diversified. I procured offprints for his doctoral thesis in Public Health. Pedrinho responded with chocolate box photos of his two daughters, one married. His style grew flowery. Opening with ‘Revėred colleague,’ closing with ‘warm embraces’: in between Virgil, Unamuno, Emily Bronte and matters of life and love. ‘All things are possible if the heart is big enough.’
The O Altitudo thrilled me. Not quite ‘Hallo clouds, hallo sun,’ but sometimes close. I introduced him to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and lines like ‘another Athens will arise’ became a touchstone. His passionate espousal of Shelley’s ideas on freedom and ‘the common good’ touched me as a lapsed anarchist. ‘Governments lock us up in institutions to save us from ourselves. Society, on the other hand, if left alone, brings out the best in people. Only by eliminating guilt can the mutual trust necessary to support an equitable community be possible. We release ourselves to promote happiness.’ A far cry from the creeping paralysis of cynicism that was overtaking my London friends. As the pendulum of the sixties began to swing the other way, Madame de Stael’s contention that ‘happiness is a concept that’s alien to Europeans’ had come home to roost.
It’s a stuffy July evening and my flat is like a humidor. Pipe smoke lingering in the air evaporates. Over steak and kidney pie the talk is not of higher things. Apart from his lunar notion that the Common Market should have an Emperor, the conversation is a bit of a comedown. ‘Tipico’ English dishes, cost of living comparisons, ways around inflation and the dustbin strike in West Hampstead. He speaks sadly of the struggle Brazilian professionals have to keep in the middle-class. It is not the Pedrinho of the letters, until I open the French window and the wild life drones in. He dispatches a dragonfly and, at home at last, unwraps the parcel.
‘A carranca.’ He places the head of a devil-man carved in wood on the window ledge. ‘Back to the light, front to the living. Otherwise it brings bad luck. You’re now protected from the evil eye.’
Pointy ears, voracious teeth, and eyes squinting at a flat nose, the fetish takes me aback. ‘What eye could be more evil than that?’
‘Your own.’ Pedrinho laughs, but he is serious.
‘So it is protecting me from myself.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
Suzanne changes the subject, and we’re back to where we began.
* * *
After Pedrinho’s trip to Europe, Shelley’s anarchist ideal is no longer mentioned. Before he balanced the rarefied with the earthy. Now the dark side of his lunar notions are leavened with ‘the terrible bite of necessity’ (Montaigne). He is not shy to confide the fiscal chicaneries needed to keep in the middle-class: for instance, how to offset the ravages of inflation by opportunist buying and selling of motorcars. Some of the ruses are so ingenious that he can’t contain his delight in them. I meet halfway his justification – ‘small corruptions are the enemy of greater ones’ – as it echoes my maverick hero Bertolt Brecht.
Brazil is moving towards democracy, and Pedrinho is sceptical. ‘It has been tried periodically and failed.’ He blames it for the untimely death of Getulio Dorneles Vargas. ‘Vargas ruled for sixteen years as a benign dictator, and brought Brazil into the modern world. But three years as the democratically elected President drove him to suicide.’ However, he welcomes democracy. ‘We Brazilians live in hope. But it needs a Head of State, like the Queen of England, to give it ballast. Reinstating the House of Braganza is the answer. Under Emperor Pedro II the country prospered.’
In London when he spoke of the struggle to stay in the middle class, I thought he was talking about his unmarried daughter. I had just gathered from Suzanna that she failed to get a professional qualification, and was unreasonably shy for a pretty girl of thirty. Her only boyfriend was an unemployed dentist. And so I am relieved to receive her wedding photograph. She has married a lawyer who plans to practice in Portugal.
* * *
I commemorate my fiftieth birthday, toasting the sands of time with a bottle of Brazilian tequila. I need an oasis on the horizon. Not that life is a desert, but the grass is growing less green every year. As an epidemiologist in London I found myself working on Aids, a disease without a treatment. Since finding solutions to problems is what I make my living from, I’m frustrated. I ought to take a break from population research, and get back to writing poetry. But poems cannot be forced. They only come when you stop trying.
In his last letter, Pedrinho told me he dreamt of taking me to see his friend Ubaldo Ribeiro, and the legendary Lilian, in the island of Itaparica. It is a dream I can share. I’ve just finished Ubaldo’s novel, Viva O Brasil, and his concept of vara intrigues me: if a problem doesn’t have a solution, then it isn’t a problem.
His counterbalance to vara is the Literature of the Cordel. This popular street poetry of the Northeast takes up controversial subjects and run with them, not to solve the problems of the world, but to keep them in the public eye, so they don’t disappear into desuetude. Pedrinho often encloses a cordel with his letters. I’m the proud possessor of numerous hand-press booklets with woodcuts on the covers. Maybe an on-the-spot study of verse- with-a-purpose would help me to make the muse of my poems less self-referral. My last effort got stuck after two stanzas:
A turban on my head
the pipe I smoke is not
for other men to puff,
unless they serve to swat
the flies, and breathe my breath,
and give me right of love.
I stand for my portrait
beside myself with pride
against a canvass of blue;
the artists I’ve tried
sketch my image with hate
and with wonder too…
Embarrassed, I want to tear it up, but don’t. It’s conclusion will be a nice come-uppance.
I toast Pedrinho and Ubaldo, and, while thumbing through my album of cordels – witty, pious, sexy, angry, sad – I hear myself humming, ‘I’m going to Brazil,’ a current hit. I had not considered before that you could just go there, other than in a voyage of the imagination. It is simply a matter of buying a plane ticket. I could be there next week and stay as long as I like (I work freelance). Above all, Brazil would be an escape from Nietzsche’s ‘sombre reflection in which the self becomes its own object of relentless scrutiny and self-punishment’ (The Death Penalty). He, like Madame de Stael, exaggerates, but the European disease is we think too much, I thought.
I read myself asleep with Ubaldo’s latest novel, The Lizard’s Smile. Not finishing the bottle, I don’t find the worms in the dregs.
Part 1
Chapter 1
My Voyage of the Imagination
As a boy my Brazil was dusty Victorian tomes with tissue over the prints. Jungle art with clusters of over-ripe fruits and the bred and butter facts of wilderness studies (Richard Burton and W.H. Hudson). I advanced to the literary adventurers, less Ian Fleming than Theodore Roosevelt. With his pipes, hairnets and plus fours, he explored uncharted territories, sleeping in dugouts and living on armadillos and grasshoppers. Roquette-Pinto and Claude Levi-Strauss introduced a reality beyond adventure into my quest for the exotic unknown. But it was only in my late twenties that Euclides da Cunha, the great chronicler of the backlands of Brazil – Darwin crossed with Balzac and Goya – made me realise that this reality could be understood in terms other than The National Geographic Magazine. I plundered the shelves of libraries for the literature it inspired.
The Brazilian authors I learned to cherish wrote mostly about the impoverished Northeast. Graciliano Ramos’s tales of the backlands, barren lives briefly flowering like desert plants, begot Mario de Andrade, Jorge Amado, and that Peruvian cuckoo Vargas Llosa, whose War of the End of the World remade Brazilian history into Fenimore Cooper for the twentieth century. But most intriguingly Joào Ubaldo Ribeiro, whose novel of the interior, Sergeant Getulio, had led me to the peasant Literature of the Cordel. A brutish sergeant is taking a prisoner across the northeast for a jail transfer. Although Getulio comes to realize his charge is innocent, he regretfully delivers him, a prisoner himself, to duty. The cordel on which the novel bases itself is sympathetic to both..
I discovered that with mass migration from the Northeast the cordel flourished all over Brazil. Sung by their makers at street-markets, and on the beaches, they sell in millions. No subject is taboo: banditry, religious cults, football, food, sex, and above all politics. They are the radical pamphlets of the poor and dispossessed. But, unlike samba, their emphasis is fatalistic rather than radically political. They humour life and life humours them. Sociologists and novelists draw unashamedly from their vitality, and telenovelas – soap operas that are watched by everybody.
In my forties I came upon the operatic grandeur of Brazilian cinema. Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes is the masterpiece. Peasants with nothing in nowhere places revolt against invisible forces (the devil, Republican Rio and drought). Led by a Christ-like visionary, they gang up with bandits in a rebellion against the dethroning of Emperor Pedro. The poetry of hopelessness is ritualised: square dances, jangly music; the prophet has his virgin Mary, a placid beauty in wedding white. The Colonel, the priest, the schoolteacher, and the local puta, watch on, bickering with one another.
When the Government troops arrive mad arias of slaughter end the film. Rocha’s political parables are never far from current reality. His camera catches in arriĕre plan another world: the New Brazil trucking past on state highways. The Southern cities’s heavy industries, and arterial bypasses, have nothing to do with the poor of the Northeast. But they co-exist.
Brazil’s cultural history, I found, was a riot of paradoxes, and they meet in Minas Gerais, the province that brokers the European South and the Indian North. In the royal city of Ouro Preto, the carvings of Aleijandrinho, a humble artist in wood, outshine the colonial gold. At thirty, he lost the use of his legs and hands and, with hammer and chisel strapped to his arms, advanced 18th century art in Brazil from Portuguese Baroque to a fine, graceful, native rococo.
Dualities abound: Tiradentes, dentist and doomed republican hero: Getulio Dorneles Vargas, functionary-supreme and inexplicable suicide: Brasilia, the Capital city built in the desert, a modernist Walhalla for the people (where there were no people). The swooping optimism of Villa Lobos’ concert hall cadenzas and the chopped up recitatives of samba can be heard in football stadiums, a musical marriage of beauty and the beast for the rich and poor. Generosity of spirit embraces both, it’s said, as long as your team is winning. Someone has to lose. But though stadiums may collapse football riots are rare.