Arvon in Brazil - Day Five

‘If a dark avenging angel swept away all the books of France, France would not exist. If the same angel swept away music, Brazil would not exist.’

So says writer Suzannae Vargas.  She looks like Susan Sontag and carries herself like her too. She wants to change Brazillian culture and increase respect and participation in literature. 11 years ago, she founded the nearest organisation to Arvon I have yet encountered. She is fiercely proud and passionate about what she has achieved: the Estacao das Letras – which teaches creative writing in many genres – form a tiny apple green space in a shopping centre in Rio. It had started in her own house. Now she barely has time to write her own work – she is so busy helping others and raising funds for writing. She is entrepreneurial, smart and passionate – with an administrator who looks like Gisele the Brazillian super model.

When we say goodbye, I feel as we have both spoken the same language. It’s not only that my Portuguese is getting better – I can understand most things now on day 4- - but the heart of what she is doing and the struggles and problems she faces on some level are similar.

Then lunch on a rooftop with the new young literary lion of Brazil. 29 year only Joao Paulo Cuenca, is very, very smart and very funny too. He is also very self possessed and wears the knowledge that he is doing what he was born to do with self confidence and pride. He trained as an Economist, and started working professionally as one. Then got a book published. Now two novels later, and with a weekly column in the popular newspaper O Globo, he is writing full time. He is just finishing his third novel – a love story. He presents me with his books  Corpo Presente and O Dia Mastroianni. Like everything in Brazil, they are wonderfully designed. The graphic design and the cover are impeccable – playful and distinctive, as well as beautiful.  I know that I am going to love what I read between the pages too. I must buy a Portuguese dictionary.

Joao is introducing and interviewing me tonight at the bookshop.  Again, I sense it is going to be the beginning of many conversations which have started on this trip.

Snapshots of Rio life – Rio is full of them. Glances out of cars. Peeks from the walk ways. Stares on the streets.

A girl cycles past with an orange surfboard in one hand her handlebars held in the other…golden cocker spaniels  pull on sparkling jewelled leads….a man with a barbeque in his hand walks along Copacabana beach….sushi on the beach…beer on the beach…buying anything and everything on the beach… and I suddenly realise I am staying right on Ipanema beach…HIS beach…and I remember how  it was one of his Desert Island Discs…how he came to South America on assignment and danced samba, writing to me about sneaking into a private party on a hotel roof and dancing til 5 in the morning…and how now, here I am, on his beach, present in past time, once more hearing his words on the answer machine when he  flew to  Afghanistan…I kept them for a month, spooling them  backwards and forwards like an incantation until he came back safely from the warzone…. the phonecall from Somalia when I heard birds in the background….our amazement that our lives glanced and criss-crossed each other for years but we never met…how  we had both touched down at Tirana airbase during the Kosovo crisis the same day on the same runway…only not to connect…and then this year, I am running down an escalator, late for dinner with two Italian friends, running, running along a day full of portents…finishing  reading my  now then, then now boyfriend’s novel, with its heart-freezing scene of the girl self-encased in cement… ‘Don’t lose your nerve,’ shouts a tramp as I cycle by…then a silver-slick lorry glances past me,  the words Eternity: Cement Set for All Time’ emblazoned on its side… These days…Oh these days and more…. And  then here I am, running, running…down past a girl with blonde hair, a woman with blonde hair and glasses, and then I fall into his eyes and it’s him….him…right here in the wrong country…right now on these moving stairs for  the Piccadilly line…him still and standing…and his wife and his child who both happened after we never happened… and now here I am in this  happening…me running and running and running down down down…moving past him still and there… stilly beside her and her…the they I never met until this moment…right here ….and me  running with time, and along time and  out of time for dinner, for getting where I am going and all this on this moving toothed ladder of time  whilst he stands still, stilly there. There.

The next day I email him.

Was that you on the escalator at Green Park? What are you doing here? On the other side of the world?

Yes. It was me on that  escalator. Why did you not stop? Next time stop. Stop right where you are.

STOP.

It seems right somehow I think of him here and right now. The city where he sambaed. The city whose song he loved. The beat of his heart. The skip of his words. For that moment. Just now.
This. His. Is.

The lecture that evening starts late. ‘We Caracoa always start late’ explains Anna Paulo the British Council’s Rio Project officer now in charge of my itinerary and language confusion with her colleague the bubbly Raquel. ‘We caracoa are always  elegantly late. Never on time. There are too many things to do. Like walk along the beach, drink, stay in the sunshine, or get stuck in the traffic.’

That explains it. I am Caracoa to the soles of my boots – a born Rio girl - even at home. Joao’s introduction is beautiful. He quotes the beginning of a book about how a trapeze artist breaks rules. We discuss about the imagination and personal freedom. At one point, I am so tired, that I pause to listen to the translation of my English into Portuguese every time it is spoken. I obviously think I am in the language labs of a previous meeting that day. This whirling has finally got to me. I explain – and the audience laughs. Ice is always broken when the human being breaks through.

That night a tropical rainstorm strikes and cracks open the sky.. I am eating tuna coated in sesame seeds on the hotel terrace. The rain roars like canon fire on the pavements. Men walk by in bathing trunks nonchantly as if they are going for a stroll in the park. A couple step out, the man carrying a yellow rose in one hand, clasping his girlfriend’s hand in another.  Everyone wears the rain as if it were a second skin.   No pace is quickened. No umbrellas flare up into the liquid night.  No sheltering is snatched.  This just is. This is  Rio. This moment. Here. Now. No other moment exists. It - just  - is. Learn from this. Walk in the rain…Be. Here.