At times I dream about what if. I imagine it is a typical way to think for someone about to turn 30. Or is it 40. It could even be 50. It could be any period in a man’s life when he looks back upon what might have been…and gets struck with the realization that life never does take you on a direct path to your planned destination. Velha Infancia as the Tribalistas would sing. I do not recall when I first discovered Brazil. Or when Brazil turned into Brasil. But as soon as I landed in the country as a vagabond and a traveler, it was a strange surreal feeling of intoxication . Whatever the reason, it is now hard to get Brazil out of my heart and soul. I dream about what might be. I create a Shangri-la that no place or time could ever hope to fill. I think about what is missing in my life, and fill in those lonely spaces in my heart with what might be found in this beloved land. Is it the people? Is it the women? Is it being swept away amidst a populace who do not know me…to lose myself in the anonymity of a friendly crowd…yet to be found unique despite my oh-so-ordinary life? I know I am not the only one out there who feels this way. I meet others from all walks of life….Brazil they mutter….looking faraway at a past they wish they could relive. Only men you ask? No…women…men…they all come to its shores and lose their coracoes in a country that defies definition.

So I write to relieve saudade. I write because I long for a country as I longed for the girl next door as a teenage boy. I write because it has been far too long since I wrote and spoke what I truly felt. It is a pity that as one grows old, one begins to lose the ability to see the world as a child. To view people and events with the fascination and joy of an infant. Sometimes I think this is what I enjoy about Brazilians. They ability to see things with enthusiasm and joy. The smile of the children as they play in the streets. The smile of the men as they see the sun set in coast of Ceara. The smile of the girl from Ouro Preto, who sways past me while the local men say Ah….too often I drift into fantasy, idealizing something that should not be idealized. Mixing Jobim with Lula. Gil with Xuxa. Every strange combination that made an impression on me blends into a cocktail more powerful than any cachaca I have ever drank. I have no excuse. I know the realities of Brazilian disparities, but overlook such things because it intrudes upon the world that I create in my mind.

So what is Brazil you ask? Who am I to say. Is it the concrete castles that line Avenida Paulista? Is it the sun beating down on the glowing bodies of Leblon? Or is it the face of a child from the Northeast, whose eyes fill with hope and optimism…that one prays will never dim. For many, it is the search for a sensual touch…very often paid for by the men who descend from the air for their flesh-filled honeymoons. Brazil is what you make of it. And who am I do judge? Can any man resist the temptations of the bunda that Andrade wrote so passionately about. So I write. Creating my own land of beach, forest, and urban development. Mixing fact with fiction. Reality with fantasy.

When will I be able to return? To where will I return? Can any place hope to match the Brasil that floats just out of reach. The sounds of Bossa Nova and Samba drift over my head. I stare into the night and wonder when and where my Brazil can be found.

I often get the general scent of 4x4 stuck in my head while sitting in my office. There is a soap/laundry smell there that will creep up on me sometimes and bring on the saudade pretty hard.

Why do we love Brazil? As you said Bomboa, this country has no definition. How can you qualify a country where you can spend the most delightful night of your entire existence in the arms of the most careful and charming girl on earth and the next morning can be beaten to death by kids starving in the streets?
Why do we love Brazil? Why do we love LIFE?

Something different now: I red in a book somewhere that if the Americans built their country because of their passion for democracy, the Brazilians built their own thanks to their passion for sex. Touché!

Oh yes, Mitch, the scent of 4X4!!! Why don't they sell little bottles of it like their tee-shirts?
Next time the Busterkeatoned receptionnists ask me for a tip, I swear, I will impose my conditions on them: not before you give me the name of the company which manufactures the fragrance I can smell right now in your terma!!!
It will be the only way to get that name...

Ate
Dcool from Paris

Could it be that eucalyptus stuff that they use in the steam room? I smelled that the other day and was also reminded of 4x4.

BTW when the asian receptionist girl asked me for a tip, I told her sure, if she goes to the cabine with me.

I remember my second trip to Rio in 1994 (first was 1986). I met a divorced man, in his late forties who brought down his only son (thirteen or fourteen) for his first time, and first everything! Kiss/BBBJ/Poke, etc. etc.

I was thinking, I wished my divorced Dad brought me down here too, when I was a teenager.

Who know's, maybe the father and son are now members of this great site?

Something I read and which struck me as a very eloquent explanation of why I love Brazil:

"Ultimately, it was in Ipanema that I perceived something about the rhythm of life in Brazil that so differentiated it from other countries. I lay on its beach, strolled in its squares and byways, walked by its lagoon at midnight when the street lamps cast shimmering white banners into the water, chatted in its bars until dawn--then went off to my work. Brazil was life the way one truly wanted to live it.

Other countries, in contrast, came to appear more as life one had to live it. Compressed into it. For all the comforts of American life, its rhythm was dominated by daily schedules, weekly meetings, monthly bills, conferences, reports, even yearly "retreats." The comforts seemed but lubricants for the treadmill."

(Message edited by bomboa on July 20, 2003)

Another of my favorite Brazilian quotes:

"There is no sin south of the Equator"

-Portuguese Explorer and Poet

(Message edited by bomboa on July 20, 2003)

(Message edited by bomboa on July 20, 2003)

This is perhaps the most cerebral, yet totally appropriate posting that I have read here or elsewhere in a very long time. Thank you for sharing, Bomboa!
I am headed to Rio tomorrow night. Your words sharpen the edge of the anticipation that I am feeling. Thanks

On the other hand, as much as I love the place, it's very easy to overly-romanticize Brazil. Hang around with working-class Brasilians and you'll find their lives are also dominated by schedules, meetings, bills, and such. And bureaucracy has been perfected by Brasilians (ever wonder why the movie "Brazil"--an ode to bureaucracy run amok--got it's name when it doesn't take place in Brazil?). Graft and corruption? No comment needed. A popular phrase among Brasilians is "Brasil is the country of the future...always the future but never the present."

For me it's the complexity of the place--yin and yang--that make it so interesting. Brazil is no Nirvana, but it's endlessly interesting.

Bwana:

Exactly. I always shudder when I see someone romantacizing Brasil(especially becuase, deep inside, I do it myself). Brasil is NOT the land of the lotus-eaters, sweet dreams forever. Far from it. And the average brazilain is in just as much a rat-race, if not moreso, than the average american. But he/she is able to step away from it all and just laugh better than anyone else on the planet. Maybe that's what makes Brasil so fascinating. Then again, the same "fun-loving" brazilians can be torturers and murderers of the worst sort (When Caetano Veloso was jailed in the 70's, his jailers would beg him to sing before they started toruturing him - cruel and perverse and typical Brazilain insanity). Still, I love the country, especially as I am half Brasilian.

And the phrase is: "Brazil is the country of the future - and always will be!"

BS

Bwana/Badseed: Thanks for the perspective. Its nice to learn more from this board than just which termas have the pussy and which girls will do hot carl (still looking, btw). One of my funniest moments from my first Rio trip was when I learned that "Ordem e Progresso", the national slogan which is everywhere, means "Order and Progress." The minute you leave GIG, you are faced with the taxi driver debacle (order?) and traffic (progress?) and it continues everywhere. However, I will concede that the terma inventory/billing systems are among the best in the getting-laid industry. Thank Cristo something works!

On a serious note, were things materially better there in the early 90's before the fall of South American economies? I know there has always been poverty (and that it HAS risen, but it seemingly has in every urbanizing 3rd world country), but my sense is the 70s and 80s were better decades for "progress" than the last one or two. E Verdade?

OK, the rest of you can wake up now.

Having lived and worked in Sao Paulo, I can certainly attest to the stresses of modern life that Brazilians go through. Even well-to-do colleagues of mine who lived in Alphaville were over-worked and underpaid.

But I guess what I like about Brazil is the ability to get away from it all. Whether it be parties, spontaneous get-togethers, botequins, girls, or feriados...it's a culture that values "living." I feel like that's largely non-existent here in the U.S...at least in my line of work.

My greatest hope is to return to Brazil as an ex-pat in the coming year and manage my affairs from abroad on a permanent basis. To me, it's worth the gamble.

Bwana;

I've thought the same about the reasoning behind the title of the movie, and there are good arguments to be made that it has something to do with the country. The billboards on the roads leading to/from the airport always remind me of the movie. However, I really don't think that the movie title has anything to do with the country. I really don't know why it was called Brazil, but I would love to find out.

Mitchc-
The movie is only obliquely related to the country. The soundtrack features the song "Brazil", a late 1930's anthem written by Arry Barroso, which is one of the most famous songs in Brazil. Terry Gillam picked it because he thought it communicated an air of pure escapism. The movie title comes from the song. He also considered ""1984 1/2" and "The Ministry of Torture" as possible titles. Gilliam makes reference to the bureaucracy of Brazil in some of his comments on the making of the film, but it is more purely a satire of modern technology and government run amok.

Seaman,
The answer to your question (were things better before) depends on who you ask. Economic stability was greater, certainly, but Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship from 1964-1985, and things were very bad for those who took exception to the policies of the dictatorship (per Badseed's comments about Caetano Veloso). And much of the economic stability came at the expense of social progress. Most Brasiliams I know think of those years as the bad old days, and while they hope for greater economic stability and growth, they wouldn't trade it for a return to the kind of political and social oppression that took place in the 60s-80s.

Bomboa:

I didn't mean to knock you for being romantic about Brazil - as I wrote, I'm just as romantic and sentimental. And I know that you are very aware of the reality of Brazil. Your last comment though, is what says it all best - despite everything , Brazilians know how to LIVE. I've been in billionare's mansions swilling champagne, I've been in fishermen's huts roasting a freshly-caught fish over an open fire - it's all so much more alive than our day-to-day here in the States. And yes, I've worked for years in Brasil with a pitiful, how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-pay-the-bills salary working (hustling) 12 hour days and dealing with 4-6 buses a day....

Seaman: As for your question, I think that Brazil is steadily getting better over the decades. I've experienced Brazil in a kind of "snapshot" mode over the past 30-some odd years - go there for a few weeks or years, come back the U.S., go back. You wind up seeing both more and less than someone who's living there the whole time and can't see the forest for the trees (of course, I can't see the trees..). When I was a kid, the average worker didn't have a car or phone, now they do. The average worker lived in a favela, now most have homes (plenty of exceptions, of course). It wasn't unusual at all to see someone walking around downtown literally dressed in rags, now it is very rare. Most people have shoes. Those are all little things, maybe, but poverty where there once was abject misery is still progress.

Still, Brazil has a long way to go, and it seems (to me and many Brazilians), that the bar is always being raised higher. Brazil finally has a (pretty much) self-sufficient industry (as in, if you want to buy a computer made in Brasil, you can. 30 years ago almost everything was imported), but now globalization is wrecking all that and Brazilian companies are just as eager as American ones were to send their manufacturing to China. And there's a lot of internal pressures - large agribussiness is slowly but surely taking over the rural areas, meaning less farm workers are needed and they are (as they've always been) flooding into the cities, looking for jobs, making the favelas expand. And let's not even mention the drug cartels which have taken over the favelas...

SO it's a mix... no-one wants to go back to the days of the military dictatorship (least of all the military!), but everyone wants the army to occupy the favelas (for instance). Which they don't want to do becuase they don't want to get involved in politics... Everyone decries globalization, but there are "dollar stores" (actually R$1.99) opening all over the place, selling cheap shit from China. Like any other country, no-one sits back and looks at the real consequences of what they are doing....

In the meantime, can us gringo (or half gringo-half brazilian) expats still carve out a little corner of peace for ourselves in Brazil? Absolutely! But be very careful of what you really wish for and if you can really afford to pay the price...

BS

Thanks for the 411. Sounds like a typical emerging country issue. Everyone knows times are tough now but tries to stick with it in the spirit of progress. Key is to avoid blips like Venezuela 2002 or Argentina 2001 (or, Germany 1938?), when people get pissed and lose perspective. I guess that is Lula's appeal...if we're gonna globalize, let's have "one of us" do it.

BTW, a great book on globalization is "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" by Tom Friedman (NYTimes guy). He's a little full of himself but good stuff. And remember, while globalization will kill the brazilian computer industry, it also fueled the export of brazilian natural resources and, of course, shoes (those cole haans i'm wearing today are made in brasil). Remember too that agribusiness still works better long term that subsidized (via funding or trade tariffs) family farms.

Carving out a piece of paradise for myself in Brazil has always been my ultimate goal.

But as someone once said...the funny thing about paradise is that as soon as it becomes known as such, it goes straight to hell ;-)

Bwana,

Thanks. That was very informative. I used to have a copy of a poster that hang at an Italian movie theater for the movie, but lost it. I found it on St. Marks place back in 1989 for like $20. I loved that poster. Now it's gone. Great movie.