The roof

When I arrived in December to my father’s house, it was the rainy season. And what a rainy season… Actually it wasn’t that bad compared to the one time that it rained for my 30 day vacation… nonstop. Then, I thought I was going to become moss.

It rained only for a week straight this time. It was just enough to see the maid get the pail hidden somewhere in the living room and place it on the marble table in front of the sofa just under the iron chandelier. “What’s that for?” I pretended not to know. “It leaks here through the chandelier.”

In this particularly comfortable room a window opens on one side to a small garden of cocoa and banana trees, and a double door on another side to the miniature rain forest in the yard. My father keeps both window and doors closed. With the infiltration, the room becomes an even better environment for the growth of black mold, so prevalent in the tropics I thought it was normal until I moved to the U.S.

It was time to do something about it.

First of course, I had to have the house rewired. A refrigerator, a TV set, and a stereo had all broke recently because of the poor quality of the aged wiring. Lights flickered. I talked with Salvador, his name being Portuguese for “savior.” To make a long story short, he is a Black man, father of the young maid Ciane who works for my dad on weekends. We know Ciane since she was born, and, of course, Salvador has many stories to tell about his work as construction handyman. With little formal education, he knows everything that needs to be known about how to build a house. “I have built three houses for your relatives in Sao Pedro da Aldeia,” he told me on a bus ride to buy roof tiles.

Salvador and his son worked on the rewiring while I was working in the Northeast of Brazil. I paid the bills to buy the new wires and cement, and they changed everything, always pointing out the areas where the wires were so corroded that we were a just a short circuit away from a house fire. Actually, my brother, who has been going though a terrifically mean-spirited phase, so mean I actually tried to exorcise him, said that it would be better if the whole thing, meaning the house, caught fire. Oh, well. New wiring.

That paid off, Salvador gave me a new estimate for the roof. Better, half of the roof. The house has two parts. He gave me an estimate for the one on top of the living room, dining room, downstairs bathroom, kitchen and service area. One very rainy day we went with my sister to buy tiles and wood. These were delivered the next day. They waited through another week or maybe a few more days, all during Carnaval, so that the men could have sun to start their work.

I was at my sister’s during Carnaval. Dennis Parsons was visiting and I wanted to be free to take him places as well as to experience Carnaval myself, something I had not done since my youth. When I returned to my father’s, construction had started in the first sunny day!

My brother was visiting and said something nice. “I admire you for doing the roof. If it were me, I would let the whole thing collapse. I would move the old man to the little house until that too collapsed. By the way, have you seen all the stuff he collected under the roof?”

I was amazed. “No, what stuff. I thought all the stuff was in the small rooms outside.” I was wrong. Indeed, there was a hole under the said roof where over 40 years my father collected all manner of useless things, old furniture, many, many pieces of wood of all sides, old doors, wires, my mother’s old sewing machine taken apart, metal lamps, ceiling lamps, toys, scrap metal, tools, cart wheels, tire, and part of its body, pictures. I found an old picture of mine that used to hang in my grandmother’s house… “OK, I thought. Time to clean and let go.”

“Salvador! Give me the additional estimate to clean this stuff.”

Salvador said nothing and to my surprise dedicated a whole day to clean the mess. It occupied the entire carport. The trash was so much that it could have been the continuation of Carnaval and its trash on the streets of Rio. What to do with the stuff?

“Salvador, you did the work without contracting a price! Now what?” Salvador had worked with two sons from morning to late evening. He had taken a shower in the little house so he could be clean and cool from the hot sun and the effort. He was sitting on the varanda, looking at me and putting his eyes down alternatively as he usually does, talking very, very, very slowly and quietly, in a manner that I have learned to respect and be patient. He finally looked at me and said, “$250 reais.” Dirt cheap, about $150 weak dollars.

I was relieved and feeling guilty at the same time. They had worked inordinately hard, up and down the ladder, under the new roof, with ropes and pulleys for the heavier stuff. They carried it all through the yard to the car port. Slaves. I am part of a slave system, still. Minding my money too, pulled between social consciousness, personal relations with the workers, especially Salvador (we are the same age and have birthdays on the same month), the immense distance between me and them, the desire to pay them a million dollars and three million in gratitude. The old bourgeois (me) agrees and thanks him, asks how we are going to get rid of the stuff, he talks about renting a truck.

“There is stuff here that people can use, fix, sell,” I thought to myself. I asked the guard in the watch house of the gated community where my father’s house is located. He said a car comes twice a week looking for stuff. I asked him to flag them. “Don’t give it for free” he said. “They make money out of it.”

Yesterday Salvador said we were missing tiles to finish the roof. My sister was coming around in the morning and I thought about asking her to take us to by tiles again, saving a bus ride through the favela Rio das Pedras into the Anil district. She couldn’t come in the morning, she was taking care of her office. I asked Salvador to go with me. We talked, bought the tiles from a man named Mundo Libre, the grandson of a Spanish anarchist (seriously, I am not kidding. I am not making this up). The sun was very hot and for the first time I bought a Skol beer at the Tia Vera Bar in the corner from my father’s, just to the right of the gate, where our smaller favela starts.

Later in the day an old man with a hand pushed cart rang the bell with the guard, who introduced us. “Gente boa” he said, “good people”, meaning I could trust the old chump, Jose. Senhor Jose talked about himself, that he works with scraps, looked at all the stuff with big eyes, as if he had seen heaven itself. “My father and my contractor are out shopping, I need to wait for them to make sure it is OK.”

While we waited, Senhor Jose told me he was from Pernambuco (Paulo Freire’s state I had visited recently), though I did not recognize the name of his small town. He had been married but his wife had passed away in 2005. He started crying while telling me this. “I am so sorry,” I said. He continued to tell me she did not want to die in Rio. She wanted to die “in her land” as we say here. He took her by bus, the whole of 900 miles or more. She died the next day. “She only wanted to die there. We had ten children, five men and five women. I am in good standing with all my children, thank to God.”

Senhor Jose was going to tell me more, in his manner of oral historian traditional in the Northeast. But Salvador and my father arrived from buying trash bags and we moved to contracting, “among three respectful men and one lady”, as Senhor Jose put it. He would remove all the stuff, the good and the bad by Monday. For free. We gave him the spoils.
My bourgeois consciousness is almost relieved. Jose is going to make some money. But, after all, I do not know where he is going to dispose of the trash part of the spoils…

The roof is almost ready. Tiles come Monday, the day of my departure. It is a sunny Sunday today, and perhaps rain is not coming this week. Children have started in schools and fall is coming this week too. Even the time changed today, back one hour.

Carnaval 2008

Dennis arrived about 8 p.m. on February 2. Mause, my sister, Elisa, her daughter Joana and her boyfriend Vinicius, and I were sitting at a bench on Visconde de Pirajá Avenue in front of Mause’s apartment building waiting for him. We waited for about 2 hours since his phone call from the bus depot. I was getting a bit anxious, imagining scenarios which I would tell the others: “Pehaps de cab driver saw the gringo and is taking him all over Rio with the excuse that certain streets are closed for the Carnaval parade. It will cost a fortune to get here.” (This was the most benign of the reasons…) Someone said, “Better than the bandits kidnapping him and taking him up the favela hill to ask for ransom…” And so it went, with each minute counting, with all of us minding the hundreds of yellow taxi cabs passing by, hoping that the next one would stop with Dennis, his smile and his backpack in it.

Well, as we know now, the people at tourist counter in the bus station had told him it was much better to take the bus into Ipanema because it would be faster, given the condition of the city. When we saw Dennis, he was just walking toward us with his backpack. We were happy to see him. There was the obligatory group hug, I took pictures, hugged him and introduced him around.

This was a perfect day to arrive. February 2 celebrates the sea goddess, Yemanjá. It was also Saturday, the first official day of Carnaval, an auspicious day to come to this crazy city, Rio. Welcome to a country that, according to many, because its contrasts and contradictions, “doesn’t exist”!

Sunday February 3 was raining. The rain let go a bit in the afternoon just for us to go to the “concentration”--as it is called—of the Carnaval group, “bloco” or block named Que Merda é Esta? I beg your pardon to translate this, “What Shit Is This?” Concentration is people coming together to a pre-determined place to meet for the event. This particular bloco, meets in front of the restaurant “Peace and Love” just around the corner from Elisa’s apartment. Hundreds of people, most in costumes, gather to drink (a lot) and sing along with the musicians the one song written for the bloco for this year’s celebration.

I do not know about other years, but in 2008 the song ended saying that the question, “What shit is this?” is always pertinent, especially in politics. The rest of the song discussed public scandals involving celebrities such as athletes, artists, and politicians. Some people where carrying political signs. One said, George Bush, por que no te calas? (Why don’t you shut up, GB?} Another told several leaders, including Lula, Brazilian President, and Chavez, the Venezuelan, to shut up also.

In summary, while it is Carnaval, an opportunity to dance, sing, drink and be merry, the bloco also provides an opportunity for political voice, for dissent. The crowd is multiage, of course, from young children to older people, though most who attend are young people, teens and adults. Whatever you dress, whatever you do, you are welcome and perfect for the occasion. Anything goes, just about, though there is also some comportment…

There are musicians up on a truck with sound equipment. The sound is loud and the music repetitive. (Dennis, like many of us, was getting tired of it.) But the bateria is something else. This is a large group of percussion musicians playing the rhythms of samba. The crowd gets to our feet as soon as the cadence starts…

One pair, man and woman, carries the bloco’s flag. In this case, it was an older woman and a young man, perhaps mother and son (though it could have been her lover, you know, this is Rio…) Another man carried a large tray with a big piece of molded (artificial, of course) SHIT. He danced around with this tray, exhibiting it to everyone. This was the symbol of the bloco, after all.

Mause, Elisa, Joana, Vinicius, Dennis and I stayed for about 2 hours, observing the crowd and practicing some steps. When the bloco left to dance through the streets to Ipanema beach, we left to go to another bloco, this time one where Paula plays. Dennis and I were so very uncomfortable with the mass of people there, no space to breath, really, that Mause guided us out to safety. The only other Carnaval related activity that day was watching the schools of samba parade on television. We had enough of noise and crowds… Went on to a great meal prepared at home, and caipirinha, of course…

Today is Fat Tuesday, last day of Carnaval. Yesterday, because of the rain, we just watched the beautiful schools parade… I still want to dance, and today is the only chance.