A Favela Visit in Rio
June 24, 2009 | Margaret WillsonSaturday 6pm
A blonde woman sits on the fake leather couch across from me in the common room of the youth hostel in Rio. She flips her long hair as she turns a page, glances across the room: she is not interested in her book; she is hoping someone will notice her and come up to chat. She is a bit bored and lost, looking for a companion to venture out with her to explore the city. Samba-reggae, clearly selected by the hostel staff who would know and like this music, blasts above our heads, flashing images gyrate from a mute television screen, cigarette smoke. I listen to the shouts and conversation that swirl through the music around us. I hear scattered among the languages the Portuguese of young Brazilians visiting Rio, most of who apparently speak little of the English, French and Spanish that are the predominant languages I hear among the foreigners.
Time and circumstances: how they change us. Or perhaps they meld into our perspectives that we think we have built independently. I have not been to a youth hostel in—perhaps twenty years. In my twenties, as I trekked around the planet, they were havens, refuges where I made friends and found comfort in encountering what I perceived as similar in countries and societies that to me seemed strange. Youth hostels gave me balance. Now, staying in this hostel full of tourists in a country that has become almost a part of my identity, I feel nostalgia, a certain melancholy. I consider slipping out to the street where I will likely find a café and make easier connections than I feel here.
But, I stay, now the observer, smiling at this hostel society that is, and is not, still part of me. The hostel is a half block from Ipanema beach in Leblon which, I am told, is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of the city. It is what I consider a ‘good’ hostel: clean, close to the beach, safe, helpful staff, decent breakfasts, a reasonably pleasant common space. I have my own separate room; most others are in the dorms upstairs.
A slender, loose-limbed man sits beside the blonde woman, asking her in English if she knows the time breakfast is served. A decent opening line, I think. She glances up from her book as if he has startled her from a deep and profound reverie; she deigns to give him a smile. She isn’t sure about breakfast but, where is he from? They will be leaving shortly for a drink, I decide, both pleased to meet someone who speaks the same language at least—selection is not too fussy at this point.
I rise, nod a good bye for politeness sake, they respond for the same reason. Outside, I enter a still, thick twilight that here lasts but the merest microsecond.
I meander past bars: chic, slashes of color, black glass, polished granite and marble. The outside stools of open bars are already filling with drinkers, a dangled high heel slipping from a bare foot, tight jeans just above her ankle, heads thrown back in laughter, painted nails on green and gold drinks: anticipation. I stop at a dimly lit café, order a coffee and sit at an outside table. I am here at the invitation of Anna, an English Program Director of an NGO that is working in Rio. She lives in this neighborhood, so selected a hostel for me near her apartment. I feel coddled and safe. It’s an odd feeling, knowing Bahia so well after all these years, but so unfamiliar with the South, with Rio and this neighborhood that could be a completely different country from the Brazil I know.
I recently heard on the radio that China has just surpassed Brazil in the competition for countries with the most inequality in the world. But this competition rests on economics. Where does the violence come in— how do we account for that? I think of the favela we visited today. Anna wants me to see three. This one is high on a mountainside, an old part of the city, Santa Theresa, planned by a Swiss fellow in the 1930s, I think. A cable train takes residents and visitors up an almost impossible incline where gracious stone houses sit, clamped—hopefully secure—along cobbled streets so steep they would torture any car transmission.
This is where many of the wealthy of Rio used to live. Now most have moved away, their homes moldering and devalued because others fear to come. This is because of the favela that has grown on the back hillside where forest used to stand.
We drive to the mountaintop along roads that curve and twist their way up ravines and along ridge sides. At the top, Anna asks a policeman who is standing beside his glass-windowed security post if we can leave her car at the curb beside him. He generously guides her into a tight parking spot. He can see that we are both foreigners, we are white and certainly middle-class.
Anna cell phones her friend Adriana whom we have come to see. The reception is not good, but Adriana says she will send her niece to accompany us “down the hill.”
Anna frets as we wait, but eventually the niece arrives and we walk down the backside of Santa Teresa on a steep cobbled hillside. One side of the road is encased by a stone wall fifty feet high. We approach an alley so narrow it seems a crack, a portal. I almost expect to see a gate that shuts at dark.
At this entrance of the favela—for this clearly is what it is—stand six or seven young men, calmly doing nothing much, some no more than twelve years old. At least two hold submachine guns, one a highly polished semi-automatic rifle. Two more have pistols hanging loosely from their fingertips. One is missing an arm.
We pass into the alley under the watchful eyes of the sentries who, in their turn, carefully pretend they are not watching us at all.
With the niece leading the way, we pick our way down the passageway, a virtual canyon, each turning more narrow than the last, steps cut into the steep hill, a labyrinth. We walk at the belly of a living chasm of stone and cement. I listen for an echo, but hear the quiet shuffling of soles. I watch for slippage in the wall. In wide pockets, white spaces in the gloom, people sit or stand as they watch us pass. If we meet in the lane, we squeeze flat, sucking in bellies to rub past, smiling in acknowledgment of the momentary intimacy.
We stop before a door, seemingly cut into this wall of nothingness, a single door in the surface. This is Adriana’s? No, the niece tells me, it is not Adriana’s. She is just here collecting food for a party at the church. These are friends who have a freezer she is using.
A freezer? I think. Homes in Salvador favelas do not have freezers.
We step over the threshold into a narrow living room, a solid closed space with no windows, only this door. But, despite the lack of light, the room is homey. The floors are tiled, and the family has a computer on a nice desk with a nice chair where a young boy sits playing video games. Behind the living room, a kitchen and the famous freezer.
Adriana and members of this family, I learn, have jobs. Adriana works for an NGO with which Anna is involved. She is eight months pregnant with her third child. We chat, joke and laugh while she and Anna exchange gossip. She offers us some passion-fruit mousse she made for the church party.
“Should we take this?” I ask, taking the proffered cup with no pause. I love passion-fruit mousse. “Isn’t it supposed to be for the church?”
“I’ve made tons,” Adriana says. She hands another small cup to Anna. I gobble mine down.
“Can we help you carry all that?” Anna asks as we prepare to leave.
“My niece and one of the neighbors can do it,” Adriana says. “Don’t worry. And come back soon,” she says to Anna. “It’s been too long.”
“I will,” Anna says as they embrace. The boy at the computer looks up for the first time. “Bye brancinha (little white one)!” he says to me.
Brancinha? I’m five foot ten and a lot older then him. I make a mental note—which I later forget—to ask Anna about this slang.
The niece leads us back up the twisting constructed canyons. We are all soon sweating in the still, humid and cloistered air. As we near the top, I smell marijuana smoke. The guards are smoking. We walk past them quickly, not overtly watching anything, then burst into the cobbled street.
We hug the niece. Then she turns, waves and slips back into the portal, past the sentries, behind the wall, out of sight.
“It was calm today,” Anna says as we walk up the street toward her car, “but eventually something happens. It’s strange like that, it seems tranquil, then there is an explosion of violence from nowhere.”
“Yes,” I say, “that—and the hugs, gossip and mousse—are about the only parts of here that remind me of Salvador.”
We drive back through one neighborhood after another to Leblon, Anna’s apartment and my hostel. Another world, almost another country, a space of expectant laughter as the sun begins to set.
