Decoding a samba-enredo

Let´s back up now... to Carnaval weekend.

The Grupo A parade night was overwhelming. Because of the scandal last year, in which the lowest two escolas did not get demoted as they should have, Grupo A was overloaded this year. It´s got 12 different escolas that all had to parade on the same night! (Grupo Especial only does 6 escolas per night.) Yes, each parade is shorter than in Grupo Especial, just 55 minutes in Grupo A compared to 1:22 in Especial. But that´s still 12 hours of parades for Grupo A, and the problem is that the last escola or two ends up parading past dawn.

The last escola on this Saturday parade night was Cubango. (which means Cubango would really be parading early Sunday morning.) I´d already paraded with Imperio Serrano earlier that evening, in an ala. I´d met up with Imperio at about 6pm, spend several hours finding my ala (a 45 min process), socializing and singing the song and getting ready and getting lined up and getting through security and getting excited, then the parade, then the post-parade festivities and singing and chatting and... so, it was nearly midnight and I was already completed exhausted and footsore and hoarse. I limped all the way back home (on foot from the Sambodromo) to change my costume. Cubango wouldn´t go on till maybe 6am and in theory I had time to take a little nap. But I was way too wound up. How could anybody sleep when there were ESCOLA PARADES going on at the Sambodromo?

(I had a friend who had twisted my arm into letting him crash on my apartment floor, and he actually WAS trying to sleep. Yes, he had the impossible and bizarre plan of actually SLEEPING during the nights on Carnaval weekend. It was then that I discovered that escola people and non-escola people really are two different species. OK, so, here´s a warning to ANYBODY who EVER tries to crash with me during Carnaval weekend, especially if you spring it on me unexpectedly: I will be up ALL night, EVERY night, till PAST DAWN, and I will be running in and out of the apartment CONSTANTLY, right past you, and I will need to TURN ON THE LIGHT, and I will be moving enormous costumes and hats around, and I will have the TV constantly on to see which escola is currently parading. DON´T SAY YOU HAVEN´T BEEN WARNED.)

OK, so, I was trying to change into my Cubango bateria fantasia. There are 270 drummers in the bateria and we were all dressed up as 270 identical Philippe Pinels. Philippe Pinel, as I´m sure you know, was the founder of the first insane asylum in Rio de Janeiro.

So before I go any further, I need to explain about Cubango´s enredo (the parade theme) and the samba (the song).

Like a good puppy I´d been spending the last couple weeks carefully memorizing the Cubango samba. (Because I think it is critically important, if you are a gringo parading with an escola, to make sure you know the entire song. Especially because otherwise you can make other gringos look bad. Like it or not, you are representing All Gringos Worldwide when you are in an escola, and your actions will affect the fate of other gringos there in the future.) Anyway. I´d been carrying around a tiny little wadded-up scrap of paper with the lyrics to the Cubango samba, which I would pull out and study whenever I was on a bus. The Cubango samba was, as usual for samba-enredos, very long and completely mystifying. I had dutifully looked up all the words that I didn´t know. But it still wasn´t making any sense! The title didn´t even make any sense! ("The crazies of the beach called nostalgia") And then there were all these mystifying phrases about "shirts of force taking memories" and "haunted, the artist painted" and "bossa nova, a hymn against oppression and a scandalous nudity" and "I raised my flag of rights now... with painted face, I went to protest". I could just barely discern a thread of narrative about protesting the government and about crazy kings, but what on earth was it all about?

The thing about these samba-enredos is, every one of those strange phrases is usually a fascinating little morsel of Brazilian history, all rolled up into a dense, impenetrable little packet. If you can decode it, unpack it, you actually will learn a lot about Brazil.

I turned to my friends Renata and Brian one night for help, in the Sambodromo as we were waiting for an escola rehearsal. Renata, a Brazilian who grew up in Sao Paulo, took one look at the second verse ("rights now... painted faces...")and immediately said "Rights now! Painted faces! I did that! When I was a student! I was there!" Turns out this was a reference to the great student protests a decade back, when busloads of thousands of idealistic young college students painted their faces (to hide their identities) and went to Brasilia to try to impeach the president. And they were all carrying banners and placards that bore the slogan of the protest movement, "Rights now!" (Diretas ja.)

AHA. That explained maybe 1/4 of the song.

However, the rest of the song was still eluding us. We puzzled over the "shirts of force" and the "bossa nova...forbidden nudity" and the "crazies on the beach called nostalgia" and we developed some very poetic and creative explanations that I was rather pleased with.

Till Daniel (my Cubango friend) said one day "You know the song is about Rio´s first insane asylum, right?" What?!

Sooo, Daniel had the inside scoop because he´d actually been at Cubango on the night when the carnavalesco was explaining all about the parade theme. So. Here´s the deal. Rio de Janeiro´s first insane asylum was built, years ago, on a beach in Urca. It´s now called the Red Beach. But that beach used to be called...back in the old days... wait for it... NOSTALGIA BEACH. (Praia de Saudade.) "The crazies of the beach called nostalgia." AHA. Nostalgia is the NAME OF THE BEACH, duh! (So much for my super-creative poetic explanation for that line of the song...) The "shirts of force" is not a circuitously metaphorical reference to governmental powers; "shirts of force" are STRAITJACKETS. (There goes creative explanation #2...) The "haunted artist" was an actual famous artist who did some famous paintings while he was in the insane asylum. (There goes creative explanation #3...)

The insane asylum was eventually shuttered and the building sat empty for some years. Much later, it was re-opened to be used as a university, and became famous as the site of many of student protests... including some students who painted their faces and took those protest buses to Brasilia! aha!

As for the bossa nova and the nudity: In the late 1950s a music show was scheduled at one of Rio´s Catholic universities. It was to featuring several young players and songwriters who were developing a "new way" of playing samba, with sophisticated harmonic structures and a distinctive phrasing to their songs. But the Catholic university discovered that the hostess of the show would be an actress who had once done an infamous nude scene in a movie. This did not sit well with the Catholic priests of the 1950s. So they booted the whole show off their campus. So at the last second the concert organizers had to find a new venue for the show, and they found one: at a different university, in Urca, right by Nostalgia Beach, in a building that had once been an insane asylum. That show became one of the most famous Rio shows ever, because it was the birth of "bossa nova"...the "new way" of playing samba.

See what I mean? I learned so much Brazilian history, and Rio history, and cultural history and music history, from this one Cubango song!

So anyway. That´s why the entire bateria was all dressed up as Philippe Pinel, one of the first psychiatrists in the world and an advocate of the benefits of actually treating mentally people instead of just exiling them to the streets. He was born in 1745 in France. So our outfit was:

an enormous french lieutenant´s hat with a fake white wig
A golden vest, covered by
an enormous knee-length white surcoat decorated in gold braid, tied shut by
A huge golden tie, tied around the neck, and
two big lacy golden-decorated cuffs around the long sleeves of the coat
a pair of green velvet trousers
White knee-high socks
and a pair of white leather shoes with big brass buckles.

The sun was going to rise during our parade. It was going to be about 95F.

All in the service to our beloved escola CUBANGO!

Os Niveis

I've been away from email again - just switched apartments and now I am crashing with a friend in Botafogo who does not have internet in her apartment. So, apologies for the lack of blog posts. I might not be able to catch up till I am out at Chapada Diamantina in Bahia later this week... (Because that's exactly why you take a plane ride and then a 6 hr bus ride to a remote beautiful national park full of gorgeous hiking trails: to spend all your time on your laptop holed up in your pousada writing blog posts. Right??)

Anyway - last Saturday I went scuba diving at a little town east of Rio with two friends, my dear rock-climbing friend Andrezza, and a friend of hers, a professional circus performer called Vera. Vera had just recently finished a full year's tour of the United States in a high-end travelling circus, where she performs aerial acrobatics - she's one of those people who twirl around, high above the ground, on long lengths of fabric.

We'd only just begun the scuba day when Vera said something under her breath that got Andrezza doubled over in stitches. Turned out Vera had referred to our handsome scuba instructor as "Altamente Pegável" - "Highly Pick-up-able". Later on, in the car ride back home, Andrezza repeated this to me and as we were both buckled over laughing about it, Vera calmly undertook to instruct us both in the concept of Altamente Pegável, saying, "Vou explicar as niveis." (I will explain the levels.) Which turned out to be:

1. De jeito nenhum. (No way / Under no circumstances.)
2. Feio. (Ugly)
3. Quase Feio. (Almost ugly.)
4. Normal. (Normal, or rather, "nor-MOW")
5. Bonito. (Pretty.)
6. Muito Bonito. (Very pretty.)
7. Lindo. (Lovely/beautiful. hm, interesting that Lindo is better than Bonito)
8. Altamente Pegável. (Highly Pick-Up-Able. Someone you'd definitely sleep with.)
9. Altamente Ficável. (Highly Stay-With-Able. Someone you'd actually live with.)
10. Nirvana.

See, you something new every day here! My favorite Portuguese lessons always come from my friends....

Later, after the scuba (which was fantastic!), we were all at a little corner shop having an açaí. A crazy man was wandering in and out of the shop - seriously, he seemed truly deranged, full of hallucinations and delusions. (He reminded me of the time I met the Devil in a coffeeshop in Seattle, or at least a fellow who believed he was the Devil.) He was chattering so fast and slurring his words so much that I couldn't quite make out what he was saying, but he seemed to be saying he was an international pilot who flew frequently to New York and who used to fly the Concorde. Okay...not that this is impossible, but, coming from a rather odd man in a tiny fishing town on the coast of Brazil, it seemed a bit unlikely. We must have looked skeptical, so the man asked Vera:

"So what are you then, a psychologist?"

And she said,

"No, I'm a circus acrobat."

Oh, the LOOK ON HIS FACE! He yelled "MENTIRA!!!" (Lie!), got extremely excited, went off on a huge rant and stormed out of the açaí shop.

The best thing was, she really is a circus acrobat! She was only telling the truth!

He wasn't too mad for long, though - he came running back in a few minutes later with a tiny portable radio held up to his ear, yelling "I AM DETECTING SIGNS OF LIFE!"

It was that kind of day. To sum it up... I was surrounded by strange and beautiful Brazilian wildlife all day.