Carnival
all stories and essays by Avram Klein
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Re: Avram
Disturbing
She has a great dry sense of humor and said she loved things we were doing and seeing, when she really just wanted to sit and have a beer. As we left Sito do Conde, entering the northern reaches of the Bahia coast, the landscape became untamed and deserted. The asphalt fell away from the roads and the towns began to disappear behind fields of banana trees. By the time we reached Mangue do Seco, we seemed to be completely alone.
On television, Brazil was falling into chaos. It was the week before Carnival, and there were a lot of things going wrong. The first of which was a high school samba competition that turned into a brawl. A car was set on fire and few of the students died.
During a futbol match between two Sao Paulo teams, the stands turned into a riot. The cops rushed the crowd with billy clubs, forcing everyone to one end of the bleachers. The crowd broke the gate at the bottom of the stands, and the men fell out onto the field like a pail of water being poured on the ground.
Rio seemed to be losing control. On the news it looked as if the entire city was rioting. It turned out that a truck of pure cocaine was being brought into the city and the drug traffickers had their henchmen cause a riot to create a diversion.
But the riot got out of control and some busses were burned with people inside them. By the end of the Carnival, more than 70 buses had been burned.
We pulled up to Mangue de Seco during the evening by motorboat. The town was seemingly deserted, and every square inch of the place was covered with the fluttering wings of termites. We found a posada filled with photos from a film shot in the town based on a George Amado novel.
There were some nice 70s wet t-shirt shots, gold chains, Afros. The next day, we took off to the beach on a dune buggy which crossed the giant sand dunes crowned by a fake historic home built for the film.
The beach was a little less deserted than the town. There was a topless elderly woman in a string thong bikini letting the surf drag her limp body across the sand. There was a hugely muscular weightlifting girl playing paddle ball with her boyfriend. There were some European tourists, including a Norwegian family.
The family had three matching boys with matching arm floaties, white heads of hair, and naked white tushies. The whole beach watched while the boys became petrified by a yellow crab walking on the beach. The father busted out his video camera, and Karen decided to get a closer look.
As she walked by the family to dip her feet in the water, the father started filming her ass. The guy was nearly seven feet tall and was from the land of ice. Exuberated by the sight, he suddenly put the camera away, ran toward the surf, and dove headlong into about six inches of water.
It would have been great to sit in the sun and get shitfaced, but I had just quit drinking, so we did yoga and walked on the beach. We had been spending as much time naked as possible and found some beach to claim as our own and stabbed the fierce beast of a sun with our nudity.
We then took a boat to Porto do Mate, which was just a pull-off where the freeway goes over a small river. We stopped to rest for a few days in the small metropolitan of Maceo. It is a pretty nice little city, but while we were there we went to see a movie that was a little more freaky than we had anticipated.
I don't know what the name of it was because in Brazil the movies are in English with subtitles, but the titles are in Portuguese. This fucking movie is about a video that kills you seven days after you watch it. It was the most ridiculous movie, because the first thing they do is show you the fucking video.
I covered my eyes, but they watch the movie a bunch of fucking times. They watch it over and over again, dubbing it and showing it to other people. Anyway, after you watch this movie, you end up spending the next week wondering if you're going to die. And it was Carnival that week, so we were a little tripped out by the film.
Also, the air conditioning on the bus from Maceo to Recife was like zero degrees and all I had on was a tank top. I was trying to shield myself from the air conditioning with Karen's oversized straw hat for four hours. The freezing temperature and the crazy-ass movie made me think maybe my whole life was just one big scary-ass movie. I started to remember all the lonely walks home from school through the woods and the lady in the candy store with gnarled hands. I started to think of scary shit I hadn't thought about in years.
Karen hated the damn movie. She was disappointed because it had the girl from Mulholland Drive in it and would complain bitterly, pointing out holes in the plot or anything she could think of to dilute the films impact.
We pulled into Recife at midnight on the first day of Carnival. We were exhausted from the bus ride, so we found a posada, watched the Sao Paulo Carnival on TV, and got ready for the next day in Olinda.
Go to Olinda, Recife, Olinda, Recife
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