Rio De Janeiro, 1973.
I stood watching it cross the straight little bridge high up in the air and clatter off rhythmically around a corner up a windy street into the hills and on the other side, disappearing behind an ancient faded yellow building that emerged through a jungle of banana trees and billowing clotheslines. An old negro lady stood surrounded by a group of ragged kids playing on a cluttered open veranda in the humid rum soaked twilight. It was like a camera shutter snapped suddenly behind my eyes and the image was engraved indelibly on the landscape of my soul, never to be forgotten, as though I’d been standing there all along, like an Easter Island statue since before time began.
I stared dumbly into the hills in the growing dusk in the wake of that joyous clattering contraption from another era and I thought of Black Orpheus at the helm of his poetic destiny, rattling up those timeless streets on that very same street car or something very much like it, a ghostlike freeze frame stopped in the time warp of a vagabond heart.
And so I wandered, aimless, through the humid dusty winding streets of shabby neighborhoods, eventually skirting one of the foul-smelling, garbage-strewn rag-tag alleyways that gave entry to a long dusty path leading up into the sprawling squalor of a looming favela beyond, where skeletal shadows of men and women bearing unfathomable burdens began the nearly straight ascent up precarious endless steps up into the crowded miserable shantytown lining the hillside. At the entrance stood a battered black and white paddy wagon where a group of shabby looking grey-uniformed officers lounged smoking cigarettes, compact and menacing little battered black machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. Ghostly dirt patina-ed naked children played mechanically in oblivious patterns of faded joy and ball-chasing frenzy in the septic dusty, shit-stained dirt plaza.
Venturing a hundred yards or so into the low lying part of the favela, I soon sensed myself in a strangely organized sub-world. A weirdly structured “other” city within a very strange city, a place with its own rules and unspoken codes of conduct. The general sense was somewhat mundane, that of normal people living normal lives, but in a totally alien setting, wholly on the black margins of a half crazed society… the outside world beyond. It was hard to fathom something so curious yet unintrusive in the way you could feel, rather than see people’s eyes on you as you strolled along, as though trying ever so subtly to divine your purpose in being there, not unlike the feeling I’d become so used to over so many years of travel when walking the strange but endlessly familiar streets of small villages in the middle of nowhere. But it was much different here, more casual, more disguised, none of the usual gawking stares of children and adults. More of just a vague feeling as the whole place was made of unseen eyes and as the feeling was absorbed and assimilated I could actually feel myself adapting, feel new eyes growing and opening in the back of my own head.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.
“and I thought of Black Orpheus at the helm of his poetic destiny, rattling up those timeless streets on that very same street car or something very much like it, a ghostlike freeze frame stopped in the time warp of a vagabond heart.”
— beautiful. out of place, out of time, but standing still within one’s own destiny.