Psychogeography

Hitler in Rio

São Paulo was — to adopt an idiom — way too much. The ride in from the airport through asteroid belt of the favelas, and then the planetary scale of the urban mass itself. Sitting in a restaurant atop the highest building in the city, I could see what looked like a snaggle of teeth on the horizon some twenty miles away, but when I scrutinised them carefully I saw that they too were equally vast edifices. The comprehension gap was as disorienting as the culture shock. In my four-star hotel I couldn’t find one staff member who spoke more than rudimentary English or French; if you wanted to get anywhere here you needed Portuguese or German.

I couldn’t get my plastic to work in the cash machines, so one afternoon I set out to find a bank where I could draw some money. I walked and I walked. As well as being illimitable São Paulo seemed to have little or no comprehensible street plan. It was like an unholy miscegenation between London and Los Angeles: mighty metropolises, grey and golden and exhaust-stained, humping at the place of dead roads. In some dusty square, metal-tortured boulevard or another, I fell in with an elderly German who spoke sinisterly good English. I say sinisterly because everything about him was sinister to my paranoiac mind. What was he doing here? Why did he talk about himself so circumspectly, but want to know all about me? I could almost visualise the death’s head badges of the SS on his faded Hawaiian shirt.

The minibar in the hotel was no help. It was called the Selfbar — so I took it personally and downed the lot: the scotches, the vodkas, the gins and the Amazonian armpit aguardientes. Then I howled down the lift shaft. My Brazilian translator, the redoubtable Hamilton dos Santos, seeing the state I was getting into, suggested a little R&R in Rio. I flew there on a Varig flight for which there was no internal security. This was ten years ago, and perhaps things have changed since, but in those days the explanation Brazilians gave me for the lack of metal detectors at their airports was that everyone insisted on packing guns.

It was drizzling in Rio when I arrived, and the scuzzy grey shanty towns on the surrounding peaks threatened to topple on to Copacabana. In place of the sparkling strand of my imagination — crowded with promenading, steatopygous lovelies, their café-au-lait buttocks cloven by itsy-bitsy G-strings — I found instead three men in anoraks fishing the angry Atlantic while seated on collapsible stools. Shit! I admonished myself; I need never have left East Finchley after all!

If São Paulo was threatening, Rio was terrifying, but I had nothing to read, which is the most frightening thing of all when abroad. I went out with my money in my sock to find an English-language bookshop and couldn’t, anywhere. Eventually I discovered one a bus ride away at a shopping mall in an outer suburb. They had three shelves of airport dross and one copy of William L. Shirer’s magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I snapped it up.

I spent the next week snuggled up to the tiny zinc-topped bar of the tiny café opposite my hotel, assiduously working my way through Shirer. In the scary atmosphere of Rio the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis seemed almost gemütlich. I’d also, sensibly, switched to beer. Gradually, day by day, I felt the chaotic life around me beginning to assume some kind of coherence. I noticed that the street urchins, the hawkers, the washerwomen, the service workers for the skyscraper hotels lining the beach — the whole population of this quarter in fact — all knew one another and looked out for each other. Every individual had its niche in the living reef, and if a new creature came into the area its character — and potential to be a threat — was instantly noted. Far from being a soulless adjunct to the dubious delights of Copacabana, in this, the off-season, I could appreciate the tightly knit community I found myself in.

On the final night I spent in Rio I broached the language barrier and fell in with a couple of good-time girls. I say ‘girls’ advisedly, because although they looked younger than me, such were the concertinaed demographics of Brazil that one of them turned out to be a grandmother. Anyway, by a combination of signs and pidgin English I managed to convey to these two the extent of my sociological observations of Copacabana. ‘Oh yes,’ Vittoria replied, ‘we know everyone here, and if anyone new comes and we don’t know their name, they get given a nickname so we can easily identify them.’

‘So,’ I asked, not a little incurious, ‘have I got a nickname?’

‘Of course!’ She gestured at the prominent swastika on the cover of my Shirer. ‘We call you Hitler.’