Portela is Rio’s most legendary Samba School. To arrive at Saturday night’s concert, we took a bus, subway, and a taxi. The street outside the practice hall was full of partiers drinking, eating, and singing. The practice hall was a mass of concrete surrounded by spaces for vendors to sell beer and food. The security guards performed their usual inspection, requiring males to lift up their shirt to ensure we weren’t carrying. Each Samba School is associated with a favela, and there was always potential for violence. Empty beer cans plastic cups filled every table and spilled over to the ground. Only the elderly were sitting down, but everyone was singing. Portela’s band was older and richly traditional. Lead singers would trade off songs in front of fifteen men playing drums, tambourines, and rattles.
The roots of Samba reach back centuries and across to Africa. The Portuguese colonists forced Catholicism upon the slaves, and they in return merged the Catholic Saints with their African deities, creating Candomblé. Candomblé has thrived for four centuries and is practiced by many Brazilians today, whom do not see religion as mutually exclusive. The slave immigrants that practiced Candomble also danced the Samba in the streets of Northern Brazil. In the 1920s several communities in Rio de Janeiro organized parades, developing a storyline and creating music, costumes, sculptures, and choreography. Today there are over 70 Samba Schools in Rio and the preparation for Carnaval is a yearlong endeavor. Volunteers from the favelas who create and dance in their parade are financed by mafia-style bosses. The money for the Carnaval preparations and the structure for asset flow come from the Animal Game.
The head of the Rio de Janeiro Zoo created the Animal Game in the 19th century to increase attendance. The Animal Game is a lottery, anyone can play, and bet any amount of money. Twenty-five animals are each assigned four consecutive numbers and the bettors can make an assortment of bets on the resultant drawing. Odds for a straight animal are 20 to 1.
Sidenote: Brazilians are very superstitious, and place their bets upon a variety of happenings.
The elephant is associated with death in Brazil. If there is a fatal car accident involving a car with one of the elephant’s numbers (45-48) on its license plates, the betting is unusually heavy. (Time, 25 March 1966)
The Animal Game is highly organized and extremely complex. It is also illegal. Police and politicians assigned to crackdown on the game become known as “jockeys” because of the good rides they can get from the payoffs. (Time, 25 March, 1966) Today the Animal Game provides the structure that facilitates countless illegal activities. This is perhaps its most insidious result. Gangsters in the favela who run a more dangerous and dirty form of activity, model their structure off of the Bicheiro. The Bicheiro is a head mobster, and a local God who finances his Samba School. This is just one example of the intricate, fragile, and legally ambiguous institution that is Brazil.
I turn left into Rocinha and walk by Joao’s welding shop. I give him a Brazilian thumbs up and he discreetly returns his own. I think that Joao does not want to be associated with me, which makes me… curious. I continue my walk and see a twenty year-old kid being dragged out by two other young men. His arms are draped across the shoulders of his escorts, and he has blood running down from his forehead. He is crying and muttering something. There is an unusual energy today in Rocinha and I don’t like it. I walk busily past the trafficking stand and a teenager has an AR-15 semi-automatic. He is skinny, about 5’10” tall, very black, and wearing only shorts and flip-flops. He is fascinated by throwing his spinning weapon in the air and catching it. I veer to the right, and out of the way of his less than satisfactory rifle manual skills. I pick up Rogerio at the institute and we walk towards the hall to boxing class. In the alley we see an old man with a perfectly round belly, laughing as he smokes a joint. Rogerio turns back towards me, and tells me how weird it is to see an old man smoking a joint, normally our image of pot-smokers is much younger. I agreed.
We had two young kids in the boxing class. I take the lead for the warm-up and stretches, then Rogerio takes the boxing instruction. Both of these boys are hopeful. One is truly exceptional, he is about 11 years old. When he greets me he shakes my hand confidently and looks me in the eye. During the exercises he follows along perfectly, and instructs the other to do the same. He has discipline and focus. During the class a drunken man enters and begins to practice with us. I can smell him from ten feet away. He yells loudly to the children to “do what the professor is saying”. Rogerio tells him that the adult class is later, and keeps his cool. The children don’t pay much attention, it seems that this scene is normal. I was agitated. How does any child have hope with daily images of hoods with high caliber weapons, the near constant whiff of marijuana, and drunken men in the afternoon.
The next day I make my medicine balls. The walk to the beach from Rocinha takes about 20 minutes. I have four old, used basketballs to pack with sand. I underestimate the weight of all four balls loaded with sand and my walk back was an exercise in patience and perseverance. The last portion of my walk takes me past the trafficking stand. I was not excited to be doing anything unusual in front of the traffickers, like carrying an old bucket filled with three medicine balls, and holding the fourth on my opposite shoulder. I planned my rest breaks so I would not have to stop and rest near the stand. As I walked past the stand, the hoods were up to their usual antics, smoking pot, measuring bags of cocaine, fiddling with their weapons, and joking about something. At this point, nearing completion of awkwardly carrying 80 pounds for over an hour, my patience was thin. It was clear to any onlooker that it took much effort to carry this load, and the 95-degree heat soaked my shirt in sweat. Yet not one attempt to offer assistance. This was the first time I felt anger since I’ve been here.
I delivered the medicine balls to the institute, and needing a juice desperately I left to get something to drink. It had just begun to rain. I heard the birds in the alley for the first time. I looked up, and through the narrow crease between randomly built homes, was silhouetted several bird cages against the cloudy, but bright background. The raindrops came down in a highly irregular pattern. Water finding its way to the alley had to make its descent around misshapen building structure, birdcages, and a jungle of electrical cables. A human trying to avoid getting wet would find no consistent pattern of water flow to avoid, unlike the perfect and symmetrical spilloffs found in highly developed countries, dripping from skyscrapers and overhangs made with perfect, laser-like precision.
Four armed hoods guarded the exterior of the juice stand and adjacent restaurant. I made my way around them and ordered a banana cake and strawberry smoothie. The cake was yellow. The top of the cake was fried and had a thin, sugarcoated slice of banana. The shop owner used his juice machine to make the smoothie. I asked him to add milk and only a little sugar. The rain today kept the flies away from the shop, making my dining experience more pleasurable. As I ate, standing at the shop, I turned and watched the hustle of the street. The four hoods had an assortment of semi-automatic rifles. Each had a vest with many pockets for radios or ammunition. They were spread in a fan-like formation with weapons at the alert carry. My friend, an Iranian-born Swedish boxing champion named Amir, showed up for a juice cocktail. I asked what was going on with the hoods today. The “boca”, or head trafficker of Rocinha was dining at the adjacent restaurant. The boca does not carry weapons, and is always escorted by several fully armed guards. We watched, enjoying our lunch, as a crazy old man began to yell and seemingly taunt the hoods. Something was going to happen so we left.
I have now been in Rio for three weeks. Already it has been an interesting study, both culturally and introspectively. I did not come to Brazil to find out who I am. But as I have shed some old skin to create a life here, I am finding out, albeit shockingly, why I am. The discovery of why you are, and your needs, is highly melodramatic. I find that existentially speaking, the core self is an imperfect form. But this is irrelevant, the clarity achieved from the perfect view upon the self is divine, ushering in calm and acceptance that permits peace in right action and right conduct.
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