Your Life Is An Impossibility

2012-02-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Back when Your Life Is An Impossibility was a strapping young buck of a blog, and not the shrivelled, empty husk you see before you today, the suggestion was mooted that all this wandering around in search of so-called “real life” (drinking in dingy bars in downtown Recife, risking life and limb on lunatic footballing jaunts across the country, involving oneself in relationships with the womenfolk of a string of nefarious ne’er-do-wells) was all a bit of a waste of time, and that the only thing you really needed to do to understand the beating heart and soul of a place was to tune into local FM “yoof” radio.

YLIAI now feels pretty ashamed about writing such foolishness. Of course listening to local FM “yoof” radio is no way to really grasp the cultural identity of a country or city. What is, however, is TV.

TV! Funny, really, how our lives, our histories, are shadowed by TV. For example, and speaking of ashamed, YLIAI, had his Neighbours years, several decades ago. Then his Brookside years. Then, when he finally wised, up, his Cheers years, and his NYPD Blue years, and his ER years, and his Sopranos years, and his Mad Men years. Each of these programmes, if YLIAI concentrates hard enough, conjures up a time, a place, a job, a living room, a sofa, someone on the sofa for company (or even better, blissful solitude).

Now, it seems, after ducking it for the best part of six years, YLIAI is living through his Brazilian TV years. More specifically, his Globo years. And branded into his mind forever, probably, will be the place, Goiania (sob), and the someone(s) on the sofa for company, Francis Begbie and Flup, the idiot Pekingese.

First up is that world of hard hitting social drama, the Brazilian novela. Fina Estampa, to be exact, which involves a dizzying array of people (all of them upper middle class if not filthy rich, most of them fairly physically attractive, perhaps the novelas single saving grace) involving themselves in shenanigans of a sexual, financial, familial or criminal nature. It’s a bit like Dallas or Dynasty remade for the 21^st century, without the gritty realism.

But wait. That’s not entirely fair. Fina Estampa, in fact, contains dollops of gritty realism. Only it’s gritty realism of an upper middle class Brazilian stripe, and therefore not immediately recognisable as such.

Exhibit A: The middle aged, though still relatively glamorous, psychiatrist Danielle goes to a party in a motorbike shop (why is not really explained). There she is approached by strapping hunk Enzo (who serves no particular purpose other than being a strapping hunk). Danielle rejects Enzo’s advances, and heads for home. Enzo follows Danielle, and in the street, tries his luck again. Danielle tells him firmly where to go. Enzo tells Danielle that “he knows what she needs”, and forces a rather aggressive kiss on her botoxed lips.

Danielle flees to her office, nearby, to compose herself. Visibly shaken, after a moment’s reflection, she realises that despite being an intelligent and successful woman, what she really needs to fill the gaping hole in her life is a bit of Enzo action. She rings down and releases the door to the building. The rather cocksure Enzo, lounging against a nearby tree, springs into action and rushes upstairs. Steamy lovemaking in the style of 1980s Hollywood blockbusters featuring Michael Douglas or Alec Baldwin ensues. Globo’s message to the people of Brazil: if she says no, pin her against the wall in a dark alley and force yourself upon her. She’ll soon realise that she really wants it.

Exhibit B: Plucky lower middle class (she is described in the publicity material as "poor", but isn't really) heroine Grizelda wins the lottery. She then buys a nice house in an upper middle class gated condominium complex. The neighbours in the upper middle class gated condominium complex make it very clear that people of Grizelda’s ilk are not at all welcome as neighbours. Also, Grizelda’s teenage daughter, Amália, is almost burnt to death in a house fire, before almost dying in a car crash because someone has planted a snake in her car. Grizelda’s son Quinzé is poisoned and falls into a swimming pool, where he almost dies. Grizelda falls in love, then has her heart broken, by dashing restaurateur René. Globo’s message to the people of Brazil: Poor folk, know thy place. Social mobility is A Very Bad Thing.

So much for novelas. What could provide a better snapshot of modern Brazilian social mores than Big Brother Brasil? Not much, as long as the modern Brazil you’re looking to discover does not involve any part of the norte, nordeste or centro-oeste of the country – apart from one, lonely, mato-grossense, trapped amongst all the southerners, and referred to continually as “the hick”, and a token Baiana, who didn’t last longer than the first few weeks.

Big Brother Brasil is also prohibited by federal law from including any of the poorer 90% of the Brazilian population, as the ever alert Globo quickly realised that whenever poor Brazilians were allowed in, they tended to win any public votes by a landslide, as well as generally looking a bit scruffy among all the sleekly beautiful people in the house.

There was a black chap on the show for a while (it is not known how he sneaked past security) but he was expelled from the house following a rape scandal, during which, while paralytically drunk, he seemed to be enjoying himself a little too much under the covers with a sleeping, and also paralytically drunk, toothsome female housemate. The case looks destined to end in court, although it seems that Globo, who supplied the copious amounts of alcohol imbibed by the pair, and a single bed for them both to sleep in, as well as asking the female contestants things like “do you like sex? Do you? How much do you like it?” during the first episode, will not be on the stand. Globo’s message to the people of Brazil: By God things would be much better in Brazil if everyone was white, upper middle class and from the sul and sudeste. The rest of you are just bloody savages.

The problem is that YLIAI doesn’t have much interest in what playboyzinhos and patricinhas from Florianopolis, Curitiba and São Paulo get up to in their scanties (well he does, but that’s another story for another time). But wait. What’s this? A Justiceira De Olinda, a drama about love and betrayal, from Pernambuco, and starring Juliana Paes? What fun!

The epically bosomed Janaína is married to Anderson. She spots Anderson cavorting in the kitchen of a blonde neighbour. Horrified, she proceeds to cut off Anderson’s penis with a big knife. It then transpires that the blonde neighbour was in fact Janaína’s friend (played by the genuinely wonderful Leona Cavalli, star of YLIAI’s favourite ever Brazilian film, Amarelo Mango) and the pair were merely planning a surprise party for Janaína’s birthday. Janaína and friend rush Anderson to hospital where his penis is sewn back on.

A few weeks later, Anderson is ready for action. And imagine our couple’s joy when they discover that Anderson’s rather puny member has been accidentally replaced by a much bigger piece of equipment! The final scene shows another woman, in another bedroom in Olinda, discovering that her husband, presumably also back from the hospital, now has a much smaller penis. That this couple are black is surely mere coincidence. What a hilarious mix up, etc. Globo’s message to the people of Brazil: In the nordeste, the only thing that people really worry about is booze, football and cuckoldry. Also, all black men have really big knobs.

YLIAI feels sad. He wanted to like Globo, he really did. But he has no choice. He’s going to have to change channels. Things will be better on the other side, he’s sure of it. What’s this? O Melhor do Brasil with Rodrigo Faro, on Record? Looks like fun. Seems to be a man, blacked up in Black and White Minstrel Show fashion, dancing the Rebolation. He is surrounded by dwarves, also blacked up, also dancing the Rebolation. YLIAI starts to feel a bit sick.

Still, over on Band, there’s some proper crime reporting going on. This should be good. Brasil Urgente, with José Luiz Dantena. And it is. All manner of bloody corpses are dragged across the screen for our viewing pleasure. Mr Dantena is apoplectic. What kind of a country is this? and What barbarism!, he roars over and over. He also, finally, provides just the kind of philosophical sustenance that YLIAI’s troubled soul has been seeking.

Reporting upon the murder of a woman by her businessman husband, who then killed himself, in Minas Gerais, Dantena ponders the meaning of life, the universe and everything. What barbarism! What kind of a country is this? I mean, if you’re going to kill yourself anyway, what’s the point of killing the missus first? It’s not like she’s going to bother you anymore, is it? You’ll be dead anyway, you muppet! Next time, leave the missus alone, and just top yourself!

Quite right, says YLIAI.

2012-01-10T05:52:00.000-08:00

While Noise Noise Noise Noise Muito Noise (Pernambuco Gypsy et al, Caravan Press, 2011) has become the established work on the subject of the deafening bloody racket that is an essential part of life in modern Brazil, a number of recent developments make a further study of the topic worthwhile.

To begin, while there are many that believe the growth of the Brazilian economy is a good thing, in that it has, in theory at least, reduced poverty, meant that hundreds of thousands of Brazilians no longer go to bed hungry, and allowed increased social mobility for members of social classes C and D, Your Life Is An Impossibility does not agree. As far as YLIAI can see, the only real consequence of the improved financial status of millions of Brazilians is that every bastard in the country, glorious or otherwise, can now afford to pack their jalopies with several thousand watts worth of amplifiers, tweeters, woofers, sub woofers and super woofers. In Goiania that can only mean one thing – the blasting of weepingly awful musica sertaneja at teeth rattling, window shattering volumes, 24 hours a day. Ordem e progresso this is defiantly not.

The experience of co-habiting with Francis Begbie has provided further insight into the troubling relationship between Brazil and din. Francis Begbie is Brazilian. Francis Begbie likes to watch television. Which means YLIAI also has to like to watch television. Which is fine, except that Brazilian television is very loud. The choice of programming includes:

Sub Ant and Dec style entertainment shows, which almost always involve drag queens, midgets (chucked or otherwise), a bellowing presenter, a screaming audience and a continuous, terrible musical assault upon the ears (O Melhor Do Brasil is a fine example);

Films, generally sired by Hollywood, almost always of the action genre. Nicholas Cage, Steven Seagal and The Rock appear a great deal on Brazilian television. YLIAI imagines TV Globo executives in their content acquisition meetings, running a finger down their list of essential requirements. Deafening explosion every 30 seconds? Check! 15 tyre-squealing car chases per film? Check! Repeated use of machine gun fire? Check!

Even that staple of Brazilian television, the novela, is no exception. Aside from the endless swooping violins that tell the audience whether a scene is intended to be (a) dramatic, (b) sad, or (c) happy, there will be at least two or three characters in the novela who spend most of their time shouting, presumably for theatrical effect (Tereza Cristina in Fina Estampa is the current leader of the pack). They are, for some reason, usually the villains, which is perhaps in itself a lesson: happy people don’t shout.

YLIAI wonders what the effect of all this noise is. To be sure, it is part of that admirably vibrant, chaotic Brazilian oral culture, where everyone talks all the time, and when they talk at the same time they talk over each other, and barroom arguments are won by whoever can shout the loudest for the longest. This is not such a bad thing, really, though it can often feel like it to sensitive gringo ears.

But maybe there is a negative side too. For in the midst of such a cacophony it is hard not to feel as though someone with rather rough hands and unmanicured nails is squeezing very hard on the sides of your head. As the sertaneja and the novelas and the Michel Telós (and wherever you are in the world, prepare yourself, because it’s coming your way soon, if it hasn’t already) and the explosions and the machine gun fire and the squealing tyres and the screaming audience and the bellowing presenter all rage around YLIAI, it strikes him that of all the corners of God’s, or Bono’s (whoever’s winning these days) garden, this might not be the best spot for introspection, profound thinking, philosophical study or the writing of great works of literature.

Maybe it’s not everywhere. Maybe it's just YLIAI’s current flat in the not entirely salubrious surroundings of Vila Nova, Goiania. Rivers of seemingly formless conversation and a selection of odd knocking noises rumble down from the apartment upstairs. Packs of wild dogs howl in the street. A car roars past every 2-5 seconds. The electric gate leading into the garage whirrs open and clangs shut, whirrs open and clangs shut. Francis Begbie turns on the television.

YLIAI puts his hands over his face and opens his mouth wide in a long, silent scream.

2012-01-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

Your Life Is An Impossibility`s New Year’s Eve is spent in the only way New Year’s Eve should be spent – in torrential rain, watching a duplo sertanejo, in the main square of the otherwise picturesque town of Goiás Velha. Hunger spasms wrack the YLIAI belly – all the bars and restaurants closed at 10pm, meaning the only food on offer now is grilled cat kebabs served by men with blackened fingernails. Things look up when YLIA finds a booze stand flogging whopper shots of Johnny Walker Red Label (what passes for fine whiskey in these parts) for the pittance of R$7. But the allegedly straight Johnny Walker Red Label smells of oranges and tastes like one of those radioactive mixed fruit citrus drinks that make children’s skin turn yellow. YLIAI suspects that the virginal status of the whiskey bottle may not have survived the journey from distillery to booze stand intact.

Still, Francis Begbie is a fine companion for this or any other occasion, and the patter fairly pelts along. The local radio DJ up on the sodden stage thanks someone called Vilas Boas for his part in organizing the show. YLIAI amuses Francis Begbie by telling her that the manager of Chelsea Football Club is also called Vilas Boas, but as a Portugeezer his name must be pronounced Vilash Boash. Francis Begbie hunts for paper and pen so as to prevent this pearl from ever slipping from memory. The influence, or otherwise of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the lyrics of current Brazilian smash hit Ai Se Eu Te Pego (delicía, delicía, assim você me mata, ai se eu te pego/ooh baby, ooh baby, you’re driving me nuts, oooh when I get my paws on you….) is analysed in some detail.

Eventually shelter is taken from the storm behind the kiosk of the corrupter of young whiskeys. The only other punter there is a snail the size of a pony, leaving plenty of space to watch the self-dubbed most shameless duplo sertanejo in Brazil, Cesar & Alessandro. It’s an impressive title, given that even being a duplo sertanejo in the first place surely requires one to be sem vergonha in spades. YLIAI can recommend C&A tune Posto Da Gasolina, or Petrol Station, about why a petrol station is a really good place to pick up chicks.

The New Year is greeted in typical style by the kind of magic and miracles that even YLIA’s godless heart can appreciate, or in other words, fireworks. How original, YLIAI scoffs at the beginning, as he always does, but soon he is oohing and aahing with the best of them, the charms of a bounteous harvest of leggy goianiense youth squeezed into their best, most spray-painted-on, reveillon glad rags forgotten, just for a few moments.

And what of the centro-oeste? First impressions, after almost three months, are not entirely favourable. Not that the jewel of the mid-west, Goiânia, is such a bad place. Nowhere where the eating not only of breakfast, lunch and dinner, but also of jantinha, or little dinner, is compulsory, can be entirely bad. It is a middle-class-ish kind of city – few vertiginous favelas, none of Recife’s river or swamp side shanties. On an evening stroll out to the village-in-upstate-New-England charms of Jaó, Francis Begbie takes a wrong turn, and our pair end up in a grotty neighbourhood down near the abandoned railway line. This is one of the favelas, whispers Francis Begbie, eyes even more saucer-like than usual, which is saying something. Gadzooks, cries YLIAI, if this was in Recife it would be the most expensive square on the Monopolio board! An exaggeration, to be fair, but it’s true to say that even the very worst Goiânia has to offer remains more Jardim São Paulo than Coque.

The red earth of the dry season has turned into red mud now the rains are here, and Goiânia has a muddy feel to it in every sense. This may be a nicer place to live than Recife, in some ways – better roads, less flooding when it rains, less harum scarum street kids hanging off buses, less people getting shot every day. Goiânia boasted a new personal best in 2011, with 444 murders by November, a figure that again had Francis Begbie reeling in extra-wide-eyed horror, while YLIAI chuckled at the feeble efforts of the sertanejo loving baddies: until the admirable progress of the last couple of years, 4,000 homicidios would be a quiet year for the Recife death toll.

But, and herein lies the rubber bullet, Goiânia is not an exciting place to live. When the Dark Lords of the Sith at TV Globo go spinning around Brazil for their New Year’s Eve round up, there’s Avenida Paulista up on the screen, and Copacabana, and the Farol da Barra, and Boa Viagem, and a stage in front of some charmless chunk of Niemeyer in Brasilia, and even Praça Da Estação in Belo Horizonte, but no Goiânia. When the World Cup winning tickets were handed out, the aforementioned usual suspects were all there, slapping each other on the back, along with Porto Alegre and Curitiba, Natal and Fortaleza and Manaus, and even bloody Campo Grande, for Dilma’s sake, but no Goiânia. Come carnaval, Brazil will flood to Olinda and Salvador and Rio and Ouro Preto and the rest, while Goianienses abandon their capital in droves.

There are works of art here, to be fair. The public transport system is a marvellous recreation of last century pre-privatisation slackness: buses are late, ancient and always packed. A plus is the food, which knocks Recife’s namby pamby fishiness into a cocked hat – feijão tropeiro is a marvel of Brazilian culture the equal of any of Machado De Assis’ scribblings or Tom Jobim’s noodling. A negative might the people, though of course it's very, very, very wrong to generalise in such a way. But what the hell. The locals are a guarded bunch, compared to the nordestino's back-slapping chuminess, and on the surface at least, slumped outside bars while the ever present musica sertanej bawls from a nearby car stereo, unlikely to be forming any centro-oeste Algonquin round tables in the near future. The countryside outside the city is pleasanter than the bumpy agreste of Pernambuco, though not as haunting as the sertão. Historic towns such as Goias Velha and Pirenopolis are fine, romantic places to spend a weekend. And, of course, there is the leggy goianiense youth…

But there is nothing to take the breath away, nothing to make the heart soar. Nothing as exhilarating as Arruda filled with 60,000 lost souls, nothing as goosebumping as all those people and all that booze streaming up and down the ladeiras of Olinda during carnaval. Nothing as poetically evocative as the sun setting behind the church in the Patio Santa Cruz, or the view from a bus careering over the bridge into Pina. Goiânia, Recife’s frumpy and better mannered cousin dressed in smarter clothes, is nice, and there’s nothing much worse than being nice.

The problem was, YLIAI thought he’d had it with Recife. Thought four years was enough. Thought it was time to settle down into a life of quiet, goianiense boredom. Turns out he was wrong. Turns out absence really does make the cock grow harder, as YLIAI’s new literary hero John Cheever would surely have said (metaphorically speaking, and with apologies to more sensitive readers). Only where, now, will it all end?

2011-12-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

One of the things Your Life Is An Impossibility misses most about the nordeste is the region`s rich sense of local pride and culture. From the myths and legends of carnaval ,to the rather farfetched idea that Recife B won the Campeonato Brasileiro in 1987, the ghosts of history, both true and imagined, stalk the land.

Even from 2000km away, one name is hard to forget – that of Lampião, the famed robber prince of the sertão. A form of nordestino Robin Hood, Lampião brought terror to the landowners of Pernambuco, Alagoas and beyond during the 1920s and 30s. Despised by the authorities for being a murderer and thief, and for the brutality of his methods, he was lauded by large parts of the population for representing local pride, bravery and honour. Lampião and most of his band of cangaceiros, including his lover Maria Bonita, were slaughtered by police in 1938. Their heads were cut off (Maria Bonita was decapitated while still alive) and paraded publicly as trophies.

But YLIAI has happy news for the good people of the sertão, and beyond. Lampião rides again! At least the robbing and thieving part. Less so, the local pride, bravery and honour.

YLIAI first realised that the spirit of Lampião was alive when dealing with Brazil`s Leading Telephone Company and Internet Provider. The company cannot be named for legal reasons, but we`ll call them Oi. The first signs of banditry came a few months ago. YLIAI, a customer of said company for over four years and nearing the end of his contract, decided to transfer his hard earned loyalty points to another loyalty scheme, as he is apparently entitled to do. No problem, he was informed by BLTCIP. The transfer was soon complete. It was only at the very end of the process that BLTCIP put a gun to YLIAI`s fevered brow and demanded a taxa de adesão, or an administration charge, of R$20, for the internet based, fully automated transfer. As with all the best swindling, YLIAI had to doff his cap to BLTCIP`s derring-do.

Derring-do indeed. Undeterred by the thought of capture, our modern day cangaceiro was soon back at the scene of the crime, demanding further tribute. And what an inventive golpe it was. BLTCIP, when contracted as an internet provider, provide free home installation, and even a free modem. What they don`t provide (and why would they?), is free liberação, and everyone knows an unliberated internet is just no fun at all. R$15 for liberação, muttered the sinister voice on the telephone. It was the kind of voice which implied violence. YLIAI could almost feel the cold steel of the pistol on his forehead.

It was only later that a reeling YLIAI discovered that it wasn`t even BLTCIP doing the robbing! It was one of BLTCIP`s trusty lieutenants, a third party internet provider who again can`t be named for legal reasons, but who we`ll call Terra, to whom BLTCIP had given YLIAI`s number! Dastardly!

And suddenly, the charming rogues were everywhere. Another of Brazil`s upstanding telephone companies, whose proper name again cannot be used here, but who we`ll call TIM, put YLIAI very much in mind of Maria Bonita, the Juliet to Lampião`s Romeo. Unlimited 3G internet, screams Maria`s flashy blue advertising campaign. Unlimited! Caramba! YLIAI is hooked. And sure enough for the first five clicks of the mouse things zip along speedily enough. Then there comes a brring, brring sound, telling YLIAI he has received a message from Maria. Maria`s internet service is unlimited, says the message, but you`ve reached your daily limit, and so your access speed will be reduced until tomorrow. Sure enough, it takes YLIAI a good twenty minutes to open his favourite website, www.cooltinyspeedostowearatthebeach.com.br.

He calls Maria, explains his frustration, and is told with chilling logic that presumably makes sense to someone, somewhere, that Maria`s 3G internet access is unlimited, and if you think about it, it`s just the velocity that might not be.

YLIAI weeps. He releases a great howl of frustration. They`ve taken me for everything I`ve got, he cries, and worse is to come. Creeping through the shadows towards him he can see the cable TV company, and the electricity company, and the vehicle licensing bureau, and….

He resolves to act. Only one man can help. Papers clutched in his sweaty little hand, he runs as fast as he can to the offices of PROCON, the Dark Night of modern day Brazil, here to protect the citizens of Gothania from vagabonds such as Lampião and Maria Bonita.

But as he gets closer he notices the streets are clogged with people, all of them weeping, all of them looking as though they are victims of crime. By the time he can see the building, the crowd is so thick that he can hardly pass. YLIAI looks around with horror, and sees there are thousands of them, all people just like him, all trying to get inside the doors of PROCON, all holding their papers in their sweaty little hands…

2011-11-22T04:26:00.000-08:00

Your Life Is An Impossibility is of the general opinion that the pleasanter the climate, the less productive the race, something that has been neither proved nor disproved during six years in Brazil. What is unquestionably true is that the baking swelter of the midwestern flatlands is not encouraging of great industry. At times, in fact, it is all this Oblomov of the centro-oeste can do to crawl out bed.

Not having very much to do, of course, breeds not doing very much. Oblomov rises early enough, mainly because he doesn`t have much choice, what with the traffic frantically racing by outside the window and the Lord Of The Flies style pre-class ritual beheadings going on in the public school next door.

Though rises is perhaps the wrong word. Oblomov, of course, has no job and no friends in the centro-oeste, and is, like our original Russian hero, entirely free to do as he pleases. So Oblomov of the centro-oeste wakes and stares at the ceiling for a time. His companions, Francis Begbie and Flap*, a Pekinese with severe learning difficulties, slumber on. Eventually Flap stirs and begins to snuffle at the door. Oblomov props himself up on his elbows for a while and surveys the room from this new, encouraging perspective. Then, however, he starts to feel drowsy again and lies back down.

Launch attempt number 2 at least sees Oblomov sitting up. He dangles his feet languorously over the side of the bed, feeling for his slippers (flip-flops, if truth be told). Said slippers are nowhere to be found. The exertion has made Oblomov perspire slightly. Another lie down may be in order.

Eventually, Oblomov rises, perhaps even semi-permanently, this time. He makes his way to the bathroom, feeling sluggish, and bathes, even more sluggishly. Afterwards he sits on the bed for another few minutes, thinking about what clothes he should wear (such intense mental activity can be taxing, and so occasionally an additional few minutes of rest will be required).

With enough concentration, breakfast can be stretched out to an hour or so. Breakfast is a very Oblomovian sort of meal, prolonging, and even avoiding, as it does that terrible moment when the day must truly begin. So Oblomov cuts no corners – coffee, juice, fruit, toast, honey, cheese and ham are all on the menu. Oblomov probably expends more energy preparing his breakfast than he does doing anything else.

After that, perhaps Oblomov will partake in a few desultory rounds of the block with Flap. It should be pointed out that Flap is not a bad dog by any means, and in fact the pooch`s complete lack of vitality or mental spark makes him just the kind of sluggish partner-in-crime that Oblomov requires.

Such tasks, all told, should bring us to almost midmorning. At which point arise the great questions of the day. What should Oblomov do? Should he read? Write? Seek gainful employment? He considers his options.

Reading is pleasant enough, but what good can a man get out of reading, at the end of the day? For the problem with reading is that there are always more books to be read. There is no end of sight. Reading one book means embarking on a task that will last a lifetime. Reading one book means there will forever be a book lurking somewhere, on a shelf or on a table, casting reproachful looks at Oblomov, making Oblomov feel guilty. All in all, in this smothering heat (midday is approaching and the centro-oeste is growing hotter still), reading feels far too much like hard work.

Which makes writing even more of a chore. As the original Oblomov said - to think of being continually engaged in writing, in wasting one`s intellect upon trifles, in changing one`s opinions, in offering one`s brain and one`s imagination for sale, in doing violence to one`s own nature, in giving way to ebullitions of enthusiasm, and of being forced to go on writing, writing, like the wheel of a machine – writing tomorrow, writing the day after! Just reading such a paragraph has exhausted our Oblomov. Imagine, then, what it would be like to write such a beast!

A nap before lunch then, seems like the safest option. But going back to bed at 11am is surely wrong, even for Oblomov, so he instead decamps to the sofa. In a few minutes Francis Begbie will rise. Perhaps she will bring Oblomov a drink or a snack. Perhaps she will amuse Oblomov with some of her observations on life, such as, What`s the point of making the bed? You`re only going to get back into it later on (in its own way expressing a very Oblomovian sentiment), or, He`s from somewhere in Africa, I think, Jamaica, or somewhere like that.*

But Francis Begbie must work, such is her lot, so Oblomov will be deprived of her company soon enough. And Flap is not much of a conversationalist. After lunch, which can realistically only be stretched out to last an hour, what will become of Oblomov then?

Oblomov feels the need to do something. To not waste the day entirely. Correction - to not waste yet another day entirely. What passes for a burst of energy, of vigour, courses through his veins. Sweat breaks upon his brow. A limpid battle for the Oblomovian soul commences. Perhaps a few pages of a book could be read? Perhaps a paragraph of a little piece for some blog or other could be scribbled out?

Yes! Oblomov rises. He seeks out his book. On his way to the bookshelf, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. His colour is palid and unhealthy. His skin sags. He has become flabby and heavy jowled. He sighs.

Eventually - and it is quite a struggle - he finds his book, Italo Calvino`s If One Night A Traveller. Realising he is closer to the bed than the sofa, he observes that the return journey would be entirely wasteful. He slumps upon the comforts of his bed, still warm from the nocturnal stirrings of Francis Begbie. To the womb, again, Oblomov!

It has been sometime since Oblomov last picked up If One Night A Traveller. He reads a few pages. But he finds he can no longer recall which book he is supposed to be following – is it the book within the book, or the book within the book within the book? And even worse, it appears that he, the reader, has somehow become a character in the book. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino`s new novel, If One Night A Traveller, runs the first line. Oblomov is appalled. He did not ask to be a character in a book! Being a character in a book surely involves work, effort, movement, force, the expending of energy of some kind, all anathema to the Oblomovian soul.

But Oblomov, undaunted, stoic, reads on. The book improves greatly. Relax. Concentrate. Let the world around you fade. Outside the window the heat builds, as though a thunderstorm is approaching. The trees feebly rattle their leaves. Sweat breaks once more upon Oblomov`s brow. But the thunderstorm never comes. Instead it just gets hotter. Oblomov reads a few more lines. He feels the most incredible weariness come over him. The book drops onto his chest. Oblomov`s mouth falls open. His eyelids creep shut, with imperceptible slowness…

* Names have been changed to protect innocent pekineses with learning difficulties.

** This is not of course to imply that Francis Begbie, who is probably a genius and can pick out a Mondrian inspired book cover at a 100 paces, suffers from the same learning difficulties as her dog. Rather, it is that things as concrete, real and unmoving as maps and geographical location are far too unimaginative and tedious to be paid much attention. And who`s to argue with that?

2011-11-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

Your Life Is An Impossibility is now three weeks away from Recife, three weeks in the flatlands of the mid west, where all the cultural heartbeats seem to be Man A`s Name and Man B`s Name. Victor and Leo, Bruno and Marrone, Zeze Di Camargo and Luciano. Country music the way the greats – Garth Brooks and Shanaya – used to do it, only more melodic, more romantic, and more awful. No Laurel and Hardy, Cannon and Ball or Morecambe and Wise, more’s the pity. It`s enough time, anyway, for some rudimentary observations on life’s rich pageant, as it’s lived here and there.

There is very little rubbish in Goiania, which makes a pleasant change from Recife’s endless bouquets of trash. It’s safe enough to walk the streets, though YLIAI always thought it was safe enough to walk the streets in Recife too. Try again – it`s nice to walk the streets in Goiania, whereas it wasn’t always nice to walk the streets in Recife, where the pavements are too cracked and fissured, the shade too sparse, the sun too scalding, the traffic too rampant. The traffic’s calmer in Goiania, and the shade more plentiful, and the pavements neater.

There’s no beach in Goiania, but there are parks, and there are no parks in Recife, apart from Parque 13 de Maio, downtown, which is a bit too parched to offer much pastoral relief, and Parque Da Jaqueira, which is full of power walkers and spandex-clad joggers, and doesn`t allow dogs, which makes it a piss poor excuse for a park in YLIAI`s opinion. The parks in Goiania are bucolic bliss, with ponds and pleasant shady spots to sit and everything, though even here lies a hidden danger. Goianiense parents appear to care not when their darling offspring teeter up to the edge of the lakes, and three times YLIAI has had to hook a stray toddler under the arms and spirit him away from a watery grave. It makes relaxing with an ice pop and a good book a challenging experience.

YLIAI had thought it impossible that any group of people could be more cheerily rude than recifenses, but goianienses manage it, only without the cheery. Miserable and monosyllabic, the locals make YLIAI’s heart weep for the kindergarten ruckus that is interpersonal relations in the nordeste. You know you’re in trouble when getting on a bus is several hundred times rougher play than this.

At least the food is good, and YLIAI can look forward to a comfy, obese dotage with Francis Begbie feeding him pão de queijo, and feijão tropeiro, and torresmo and other such fine fare. As for the music, while duplos sertanejos make YLIAI`s brains seep painfully out of his ears, they can hardly be worse, and indeed might be a few rungs better than, Naughty Wesley and his satanic bastard cronies.

Football might be the deal breaker, because Goias is to football what Norn Iron is to sumo. Which is odd, because on the face of it there are three big teams here, the same as in Recife, and unlike Recife, at least one of them plays in Serie A. But the thing is that nobody seems to care, and people get much more excited when São Paulo or Corinthians are on the telly. Though a long time ago YLIAI promised he wouldn’t talk about football here, so if you want more, you’ll have to read this.

In the end, despite the odd difference, what's striking is that after a few weeks it becomes clear that whether it’s Recife or Goias, it’s still the bizarre, Alice through the Looking Glass, world of Brazil. YLIAI is comforted, for example, to discover that in an uncertain world at least one thing can be guaranteed, namely that whatever anybody promises to do the following day, or week, or month, you can be sure that will be the one thing they won’t do.

If Mr. Da Silva says I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon, for example, then you will know that Christ may return and walk among us, or dinosaurs may rise again from their prehistoric graves, or nuclear death may rain down on us as soft and silent as cherry blossom, but that the one thing that will resolutely not happen is that Mr. Da Silva will call you tomorrow afternoon. If Mrs. Fonseca says she will deliver your chocolate layer cake a week on Monday, then you know that horses may eat themselves, brush fires may rage across the cerrado, Ricardo Teixeira may say do you know what lads, I think I`ll take a break now and give someone else a chance, but what will surely, definitely, irrevocably not happen is that Mrs. Fonseca will deliver your chocolate layer cake a week on Monday.

Simple, day to day business transactions remain as reassuringly convoluted as possible. The other day YLIAI went to buy a fridge, an oven and an iron. He was immediately approached by a fetching young salesperson. YLIAI described his requirements. Oddly unconcerned with high profit margin items such as the fridge and oven, the fetching young salesperson dragged YLIAI over to the irons. Some hard bargaining ensued. YLIAI chose and paid for his iron, a process that took about twenty minutes, then asked the fetching young salesperson if she might care to assist him with the fridge and oven. Oh I don`t care about those things, said the fetching young salesperson, it`s not my department. You’ll have to talk to someone else about them. If YLIAI had been a cartoon character cartoon steam would have come out of his ears.

Affairs of the heart are little better. On a futebol jaunt to the neighbouring field after field after field state of Mato Grosso, YLIAI makes a new pal. The new pal lectures YLIAI on the wisdom of finding yourself two Francis Begbies instead of just one. One`s no good. You`ll get bored with one. And if she doesn`t know about the other one, then she won`t even mind, will she?

Upon his return to Goiania, YLIAI tells Francis Begbie about his new pal and his philosophy of love. Francis Begbie is not best pleased.

What kind of friend is he, telling you to find yourself another woman? Is he married?

YLIAI informs Francis Begbie that his new pal is not, to the best of his knowledge, married.

So she`s just his girlfriend? I suppose that’s alright then, replies a placated Francis Begbie.

!!!!!, says YLIAI, before going on to query if Francis Begbie really means to say that it’s ok to have a bit on the side if you’re in a long term relationship with someone who is merely your girlfriend or boyfriend, but not ok if you’re married. And, subsequently, and just out of curiosity, what exactly is the relationship status of Francis Begbie and YLIAI?

We`re living together, says Francis Begbie, it`s different.

Different how, asks YLIAI.

Somewhere in the middle, says Francis Begbie, a little too enigmatically for YLIAI's tastes.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, thinks YLIAI, tipping an imaginary cap to Alphonse Karr (and Jon Bon Jovi), reassuring himself with the knowledge that whether in Recife or Goiania, at least a Brazilian bar stool (or plastic chair, to be more accurate) is still the most comfortable place on earth to sit. And, often, the hardest to leave.

2011-10-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

In which after a long absence Your Life Is An Impossibility revisits the sacred (and let`s be frank, not terribly good) art of cordel, with a little piece entitled “Guinness The Dog and Saint Pedro Have An Argument At The Gates Of Heaven”.

It is another long, long day in heaven. Saint Pedro stands at the pearly gates smoking a fag. His face is worn and hangdog. All that beseeching puts years on you, even for a saint. His robes are faded and his cuffs are frayed. The economic crisis has long fingers.

A small black dog with white paws approaches. The dog gives Saint Pedro an easy look.

What`s happening dog?, says Saint Pedro, stubbing out his fag. You know you can`t come in here. Bono`s rules.

Come on, Saint Pedro. Bono`s not the boss of you. I`m the best dog that ever lived.

No can do, says Saint Pedro. Don`t you remember the old Da Lench Mob song? A-to the-K-to the-4-to the-7, little doggies don`t go to heaven. Saint Pedro attempts a white-man-dances-hip-hop shuffle, but gives up after a few seconds.

The small black dog takes a few steps closer to Saint Pedro and bares her teeth.

Now you listen to me, Saint Pedro. I was born on the mean streets of Olinda, and my mother abandoned me before I could even walk. I was adopted by some people who loved me very much, first A Gata Do Bairro, then YLIAI, with a little help from The Argument.

Saint Pedro, not appearing very interested, lights another fag. Derby, of course. That economic crisis again.

And I`ll tell you something else, says the small black dog. Just try and find another dog like me. I'm more polite than half the people in there, and a whole lot more than half of the people down there. Here the small black dog makes a pointing motion with her front paw roughly in the direction of Recife. Didn`t you see me standing on my hind legs for hours on end, just like a real person? Messing about with those skanky kids in Amaro Branco? What about the time my tail got run over by that bollox of a taxi? When I stayed at the vet and didn`t complain once? All those times I played with the little fat girl and her little brother in the flat next door in Boa Vista?

I`ve heard it all before, doggy, sighs Saint Pedro. The whole I did this, I didn`t do this, routine. I helped a granny across the road, I didn`t download music without paying for it. It doesn`t make any difference. Everybody`s got a rap sheet. Except you, of course. And do you know why you haven`t got a rap sheet? Because you`re a bloody dog, that`s why!

The small black dog gives Saint Pedro a pitying look.

And who`s in there?, she says, snorting with derision. I know Bono practically runs things, but who else? John Candy? Steve bloody Jobs? Father Ted? What have they got that I haven`t got? Did they ever chase balls on the beach like I did? Of course not!

Sorry, dog, says Saint Pedro. He gives a hacking, wheezing cough.

On the other side of the pearly gates, the small black dog sees a few doleful looking figures wandering slowly back and forth. Something mawkish by Simply Red (or just something by Simply Red) oozes from the speakers. There is a line of chairs with small white “reserved” signs stuck to them, and underneath each one, a name.

Daniel O`Donnell. Eamon Holmes. Elton John. Faustäo. Galväo Bueno.

The small black dog looks at Saint Pedro. Saint Pedro looks at the small black dog.

He shrugs his shoulders, imperceptibly. It is a look that says, I know, I know. But what can I do?

The small black dog understands. She looks at Saint Pedro gratefully.

I`ll take my chances elsewhere, says the small black dog.

I would if I were you, says Saint Pedro, lighting another fag.

In memoriam, GTD, 2008-2011

2011-09-06T06:59:00.000-07:00

Your Life Is An Impossibility is on holiday until October....

2011-08-12T01:08:00.000-07:00

When living in a violent place, inevitably there comes a time when the shadowy threat of urban crime becomes thicker and the night grows ever darker. When that moment arrives the city landscape changes forever – gloomy corners become more threatening, sinister alleys yet murkier, posses of lumbering youth still more menacing.

Signs of violence are everywhere, in the shape of burnt out cars and glass from a hundred broken windows glittering on the pavement, and a thuggish, heavily-armed police presence ogling gangs of hulking teenagers on every street corner.

There is nothing else to do, then, except stir your courage to the sticking point, gird your loins, and head out into the streets. Face down your fears, my son, as William Bonner once said.

But that’s enough about London. YLIAI wishes he could stay in cosy, peaceful Recife until hell freezes over, or Santa Cruz win the Libertadores (the former being likely to come sooner) but, as previously mentioned, it’s time to put his pé no estribo*.

And so we are plunged once again into the netherworld of international travel.

First encounter is with the zapped silence of Lisbon airport, where some of this was written, and which reminds YLIAI once again that life outside Brazil is life lived with the mute button firmly pressed. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, of course, depends on your point of view.

An exciting moment comes when YLIAI hears last call for Angola Airlines flight 5463, and sees an advertisement for Banco Millennium in downtown Luanda, featuring the talents of Yola Semedo, who might be the Ivete Sangalo of Angola for all that anyone knows. That´s when it hits YLIAI that he is slap bang in the middle of the great Lusophone empire (or really conglomeration of a bunch of countries all of whom have not much in common except language). Still, it’s a rickety, if chummy enough axis, and so YLIAI doffs an imaginary cap to Angola, and Mozambique, and Cape Verde and all the rest.

All this though is nothing compared to what awaits YLIAI, ever the Claude Levi Strauss inspired social anthropologist, at Gate 41. There he will come across a tribe as complex and exotic as any lost children of the Amazon – the English.

It is the elders of the tribe he must confront first. Wiry, pasty folk these, though lightly toasted from days by the pool in an Algarve timeshare, or out on the links overlooking the white capped Atlantic. The language spoken is an odd, almost unintelligible variant of English, with a limited vocabulary, seemingly based around the repetition of several stock phrases, such as taking the M25 then the M4 traffic shouldn´t be too bad really this time of day and you wonder why they don’t just and can’t even get a nice cup of tea.

The younger members of the group are more fascinating still. Curiously, there appears to be very little maturation or intellectual development, particularly amongst the men of the tribe, for very long periods of time. As a result 40 year old tribesmen communicate and behave in a way that is almost identical to their 18 year old counterparts.

Traditional tribal dress is sported constantly – a curious style wherein sexual identity is masked at all times, especially amongst females, seemingly to make the wearer as unattractive as possible to the opposite sex. Social class is similarly disguised by way of a clever trick where very expensive clothes are designed in such a way as to make the wearer resemble an impoverished, perhaps even homeless, humanities student. Plumage is another key part of the appearance of the tribe’s young – the menfolk are required by tribal custom to sport curious hair designs in the so-called boy band styling.

Finally, the day to day activities of the young of the group should be discussed. The idea of work exists here, though the word is understood differently than is common in other parts of the word, here referring exclusively to activities involving advertisement post production, assistant on Channel 4 reality TV show, web designer or new media project manager. Though despite never beginning before 11 o´clock in the morning, work is an important idea and must be talked about constantly. When not at work, the younger members of the group call work constantly, seemingly in order to feel involved with whatever activity is taking place at the office.

YLIAI feels privileged to be able to spend time with this oddest of communities, though also bewildered – there can be no stranger tribe anywhere in all the dark corners of the world, he is sure.**

Funnily enough, though not being born into the tribe, YLIAI spent several years living amongst them, way back in the distant past. And yet now it is a world that appears as distant and alien as any gang of green-skinned Martians.

This is because Brazil, and more specifically Recife, has so obliterated any sense of YLIAI’s previous lives, and has assumed such a strong identity in the mind, that it will, ever after, be the reference point by which everywhere else will be judged.

Prior to all this, YLIAI spent a week in the land of musica sertaneja and little cows doing just that – repeating over and over, much to the frustration of Saci Perere of the Centro-Oeste, that it’s not like that in Recife (perhaps referring to the cleanliness of a public toilet), or people wouldn’t do that in Recife (in connection with cars stopping at zebra crossings).

And now comes the greatest test of YLIAI’s gringo stripes to date – if hurled into the silence and order and politeness of life in Europa, albeit the periferia of Europa (in other words, Norn Iron), which is after all his birthplace, will he still feel at home?

Or will he miss the sweltering crush of a summer afternoon stroll down Conde Da Boa Vista, and the din of the cars and the car stereos and the music pouring from the shops and the bars and the rumble of endless frenetic conversation? Will he pine for the sharp elbow to the kidney in the scrum to get on the bus, and the surliness of just about everybody working in the customer service industry, and the mournful tem troco não shrug of the shop assistant when trying to buy anything with a note higher than r$2?

In short, will he miss Recife? And for how long?

Yes, and forever, probably.

* With thanks to the Poet of Arruda.

** It should be pointed out that as with many indigenous peoples The English are divided into various tribes, of which this, commonly identified as The Southerners, is only one. Other tribal groupings, such as The Northerners and The Brummies are a more recognisable, likeable crowd.

2011-08-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

And then we came to the end, wrote Joshua Ferris, though he was talking about the collapse of the global economic system rather than the end of four years in Recife. And now that it is the end it is, like the end of anything important, hard to believe that it is over.

Recife has always been a place of intense emotions for Your Life Is An Impossibility. Like with another often grim (at the time at least) northern city several thousand kilometres from here, YLIAI fell in love with Recife right from the start. And the beginning is easy to remember even now. That first bus ride down from joyless João Pessoa, then the metro ride in from the bus station. Outside the windows poverty of a depth that YLIAI had not seen before slipped past - a pond of black oily water where naked children played in black oily mud outside shacks of cardboard and plastic bags and jagged planks of wood. It was and probably is somewhere near Joanna Bezzera, though YLIAI is not sure even now.

Nervously calculating, as the train pulled in, if it would be safe to walk from central station to the R$45 a night Hotel São Domingos in Praça Maciel Pinheiro. It shouldn’t have been, really, and yet it always has been, and still is today – the Gods of Recifense street crime have treated YLIAI benevolently.

After that the memories become blurred, because there are so many of them. Drinking, of course, and for the semi-professional drinker there can hardly be a more generous bosom anywhere in the world than Recife. In Praça Maciel Pinheiro, to begin with, in the bar with The Worst Toilet In The World, watching the golden arcs of water leap from the fountain in the middle of the square while a statue of Clarice Lispector, complete with reading lamp and book in hand, looked sternly on.

In that noisy little square behind the big central post office on Avenida Guararapes, where on one of those first nights YLIAI was tempted, by a smile of gleaming white teeth the size of the Capibaribe, to sit nervously at a table of surly youths in Jovem Sport tops (this was a long time ago, it should be remembered, when YLIAI was a novice in the world of Recife football). The surly youths asked the usual questions a gringo gets asked (where/from, what/do, like/Brazil, mulheres/lindas) and forced food and drink down YLIAI’s throat, then refused to accept a penny for the bill. What fun YLIAI might later have had or not had with the owner of the gleaming white teeth shall remain confidential.

Later, funnily enough, there came exchanging testosterone filled chitchat with half of the Inferno Coral in the Beco Da Fome, or boozing out by the reeking canal at Arruda, or simply sitting and reading or thinking or being rejected by Recife’s womenfolk at Cadu’s. When The Ex-Girlfriend showed up, there was drinking a plenty in truly terrible pagode joints (YLIAI should really have known better) all over Boa Vista and beyond. And last but not least there was Jordão, watching the trucks rumble up the hill to deliver water to otherwise parched parts of the netherworld that is Recife’s periferia.

There were other places too – the unforgettable horrors and delights of Cais De Santa Rita, or the all-night awfulness of Garagem in Torre, or in Recife Antigo or out in Olinda or even, from time to time in As Republicas Independentes De Boa Viagem, though all of these now seem frivolous and unimportant (except for Cais De Santa Rita, which could never be described as frivolous) compared with the real business at hand, which was drinking, and is not to be confused with things like fun or having a good time. And drinking in Recife has always, and will always, mean Boa Vista.

Then there are the people, many of whom have populated these pages at one time or another. Pride of place goes to The Big Black, and of course The-Ex Girlfriend, who brought the ghosts of murdered traficantes and police death squads into YLIAI’s otherwise tranquil existence, and made him a richer man today, emotionally speaking, than he was before. There were a string of other Ex-Girlfriends too, though they weren’t ex-girlfriends at the time – The Ex-Girlfriend With Two Kids, The Ex-Girlfriend From A Small Town In The Interior, The Argument. There was Guinness The Dog and Antonio Conselheiro and The Louth Media Mafia and The Accidental Tourist and The Pampas Goat. There was Celine, Mother Sururu aka A Gata Do Bairro, and Parsons, and João 1 and João 2, and Brazil’s Next Top Model, and Mr X and many more. All are gone in one way and in other ways will never be gone at all.

There have been stories too numerous to mention, but which can generally be found somewhere in these pages, particularly from 30^th March 2008 onwards. It is easier to talk of places – streets and squares downtown such as Praça Maciel Pinheiro, where YLIAI has walked a thousand times and which, if you forced him to name a place which represents the heart and soul of Recife, would win the big stuffed toy, and Rua Do Progresso and Rua Manoel Borba and Patio Santa Cruz. There was the small house out in Amaro Branco, Olinda, and once again, the darkness on the edge of town that is Jardim Jordão. There is also, of course, Arruda, where all the good and bad things that ever happened in Recife are re-enacted on a regular basis on a small patch of grass and where it sometimes feels as if the entire population of the city has shown up to watch this particular reflection of their own sorry fates. YLIAI makes no apology for using the present tense for this last one as the idea that watching games at Arruda is something that has passed into memory is too difficult to even think about.

But like all great romances (or at least all great romances in YLIAI’s life, which is perhaps a larger part of the problem than he would care to admit) love winters on the vine, the heart turns cold or at least really quite pissed off, and the idea is born that perhaps, perhaps, it’s time to move on. There is never any good reason for it – and God knows YLIAI, with over 40 addresses and counting, has done it often enough – merely the sense that the moment has arrived.

The remarkable things about Recife then start to feel less uplifting, and the bad things – of which there are many, including excruciating traffic and potholes and the godawful service in shops and bars and the suffocating bulk of nordeste culture and so on and so on – begin to feel unbearable. The grass of other places becomes much greener – in this case the land of cows and musica sertaneja, and more importantly of Saci Pererê of the Centro Oeste, that is Goiania. Excuses are made to others and to oneself, justifying it all and explaining why it just has to be now. And then the decision is made, and everything is arranged, and before you know it, you are gone.

And so now we really have come to the end. Not of Your Life Is An Impossibility, of course, though Brasão only knows what I´ll write about in Goiania, where the plan is to have a life of such sweet middle class intellectual laziness that there will be no possibility of adventures of any kind. Before that will be two months in Norn Iron which, ironically enough, has become in the heart a destination so distant and exotic that a spell there will surely inspire some kind of Theroux-esque travelogue in these pages.

But none of that is important, finally. What is important, and what I must say before I go, before the sun sets over Boa Vista for me for the last time, is that if there is one reason for the exercise in vanity and foolishness and idleness that is Your Life Is An Impossibility, in fact if there is one reason why any of this exists at all, then it is to be a love letter to Recife.

A love letter telling everyone who reads it that, in a way that is impossible to explain or understand or justify, for at least one lonely soul trapped thousands of miles from home, Recife will, and always be, The Greatest, Most Exciting City On Earth. That it may not feel like it now is hardly the point - it felt like it once, and that is more than most places will ever be able to say.

2011-07-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

Revenge is a dish best served cold, as Ana Maria Braga once said. Really Your Life Is An Impossibility has never been one for revenge, because to seek it you presumably need to suffer in some way to begin with, and YLIAI, charmed life that he has led, doesn’t feel that he has suffered all that much.

Though it appears, given the events of the Sunday just past, that YLIAI has done a terrible wrong to someone, somewhere. He wracks his brains trying to think who it might have been. A baby kitten? Eamonn Holmes? Parsons? Then he remembers. Feels vaguely guilty. Remembers why he did it in the first place. Stops feeling guilty. The victim? The capital of Paraíba, geographical if not spiritual neighbour of Pernambuco, João Pessoa. The crime? Saying bad things about the capital of Paraíba, over a four year period.

As regular readers might know, YLIAI spent a miserable year living in João Pessoa, or Jampa as the locals, presumably ironically aping São Paulo’s Sampa moniker, like to call the place. During this year he had no friends, no girlfriends (Ex or otherwise), no dog, no luck, no love. He found João Pessoa, pretty as it is, to be a desolate, godless place, filled with a particularly well heeled, smug stripe of gringo, contentedly sliding into unthinking senility by the beach at Cabo Branco alongside the slack-jawed locals, who in their turn stubbornly refuse to accept even a little of the dramatic progress the rest of the nordeste is making.

It is the kind of place where people stare, open-mouthed and pointing, at the sky when a plane passes over, no doubt thinking the great metal bird has returned to punish us. It has no football, no carnaval, no teeming downtown boozers, no manic energy, no hustle, no bustle, no buzz. Two of the city’s newspapers don’t come out on Mondays. Nobody seems to know why this might be. It has only a fraction of Recife’s vibrancy. In fact it has only a fraction of Campina Grande’s, or Caruaru’s vibrancy, and it’s three or four times bigger than either of those places. It doesn’t even have much urban ultra-violence for God’s sake, which makes it a piss poor example of a Brazilian city, in YLIAI’s opinion.

But João Pessoa has had the last laugh, as things turn out, and YLIAI supposes that this at least deserves a doffing of the cap. He should have known – the rain is biblical in the days leading up to Sunday’s trip. The rumours (which turn out to be wrong, but only slightly) are that a bridge has been swept away near Goiana, closing the BR. But in the end the journey there, and the occasion itself (Santa Cruz vs Alecrim in Serie D of the Campeonato Brasileiro, of which more here) pass smoothly enough. It is on the way home that things get interesting.

A few miles out of João Pessoa the traffic grinds to a halt. YLIAI immediately gets a mild bout of the willies and feels that this will be a bad one – up ahead there is nothing but an endless ribbon of red, blinking brake lights stretching into the darkness. And a bad one it is – two hours later the van pulls into darkened gas station, having moved all of 2km. The gas station has closed, though, for fear (unjustifiably) of being ransacked by marauding Inferno Coral gangs. This overlooks the fact that the marauding Inferno Coral gangs probably just want to get home like everyone else.

Back on the road progress continues to be measured by the inch rather than the mile. Car engines are switched off and passengers stretch their legs along the hard shoulder. One car rolls past pouring out gruesome funk. Four teenage boys sit on the roof, their legs dangling. Every so often another group of teenage boys wander past, their eyes roving, possibly – possibly – on the lookout for easy to swipe treasures – a wallet left on a dashboard by an open window, a cell phone loosely clasped to an ear. In YLIAI’s van middle class Brazilian panic is in full swing – que cara do ladrão! Feche as janelas! and so on. In truth the boys soon wander back to their car, pockets far from bulging. It seems they were just visiting their equally face of a thief pals in another bus. Off the road the darkness is immense, immeasurable.

It is about half past ten by the time the van gets to the front of the queue, only to be told by the nice policeman that the BR, and the city of Goiana, are under a metre or two of water. There are two choices – go via Pedras De Fogo, where the road is terrible and is also flooded, and where vans can’t pass anyway, or via Campina Grande, Caruaru, and finally Recife, a detour of about 400kms. YLIAI feels very sad indeed, and is sure he can hear, way back in the distance, a city quietly snickering.

The dubious decision is made to return to João Pessoa, have something to eat, and wait it out, though no-one knows what it might be. Maybe the water level will magically go down in the space of half an hour, maybe the van will sprout wings, maybe Jampa will develop a strong sense of its own identity and a lively cultural scene. The rest of the van head off to Bob’s Burgers. YLIAI settles for a tapioca, a beer and a reviving whiskey. At about midnight the van leaves to try again. Fearing the possibility of ten hours in a cramped minibus, YLIAI elects to stay in João Pessoa and catch a normal bus back the next day.

Only – and here Jampa really has its fun – of the 16,000 tricolores who came here for the game it appears that at least 15,980 have been marooned in this Village Of The Damned and there are no hotel rooms. Anywhere. YLIAI wanders the streets for over an hour, knocking at the door of at least six hotels around Tambaú, only to be told each time, with a slightly smug shake of the head, that there’s no room at the inn, porra. YLIAI thinks he might cry, and one point starts to consider the possibility that he may very well have to spend the night on a park bench, in the rain, in João Pessoa (though he knows he probably won’t – even without hotels there are still a boatload of sex motels out on the BR that’ll rent him a room by the hour, and might even throw in a bit of female companionship at the same time, should YLIAI desire it).

Eventually inspiration strikes. YLIAI is, to his chagrin, an old João Pessoa stager, probably unlike the majority of his tricolor companheiros. Most of them will have headed straight to the better known hotels at the beach. Fewer will have ventured downtown. YLIAI jumps into a cab and heads for the really rather beautiful Lagoã, where in a grotty side street he nabs The Last Hotel Room in João Pessoa.

And that is basically it, except that the next day there are no buses until 14.00, and when YLIAI gets to the ticket window he is told that the last ticket has just been sold to the person in front of him. So YLIAI gets the 16.30, and gets home, finally, at about 20.00, having taken around twenty six hours to complete what is normally a two hour journey. And on the bus, drooping gently into sleep, he can hear The Village Of The Damned snickering all the way.

2011-07-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

Your Life Is An Impossibility is drawn to Jordão Baixo like Sherlock Holmes is drawn to opium dens. There is something about the place – the quiet maybe, or the vaguely rural air of the place, or the down at heel simplicity. Because after all Jordão Baixo offers all that the serious drinker requires – a (reasonably) sturdy table, a chair with four legs (sometimes), a glass and a bottle, and, most importantly, the knowledge that one won’t be disturbed by such leprous intrusions as big screen TVs, musica ao vivo, leggy blondes, pushy waiters, pushy blondes, leggy waiters.

Maybe it´s because YLIAI’s drinking partner in Jordão Baixo is The Big Black, and you would have to go from here to Santarém to find a finer man. After a week happily spent in the centro-oeste, all blue skies and crisp winter sunshine, and the kind of refreshing ethnic diversity (a bar that´s also a Lebanese delicatessen!) that Recife, redoubtable bastion of all things nordestino that it is, sadly lacks, YLIAI is less than happy to be turfed off the plane and into the sweltering recifense drizzle.

Particularly as his new home, playing the happy couple with The Pampas Goat, is a dingy apartment building in the middle of one of Recife’s grimmer mini-favelas, hard by the canal in, officially, As Republicas Independentes De Boa Viagem. YLIAI never imagined that he´d be disappointed not to be nearer to the heart of As Republicas, but now he is, which just goes to show something or other.

And a brief aside – whatever happened to the favelas of YLIAI’s memory, filled with happy smiling children and toothsome females wearing the kind of tiny shorts and skirts so beloved of The Ex-Girlfriend? YLIAI doesn’t know, but suspects it might all have been a trick of the easily enraptured gringo mind. That, or the happy smiling children and the toothsome females, are just plain better looking in Belo Horizonte than they are in Recife.

The Pampas Goat is a fine fellow indeed, though not without his defects. One of these is that he has a healthily Latin disregard for fussy official red tape like drink driving laws, which can be a problem when he´s driving YLIAI’s Ferrari. Another is that he´s about as reliable as a r$10 watch bought from a man with dirty fingernails in rock ‘em and sock ‘em downtown Recife.

What happens is that the keys to the flat that The Pampas Goat has given to YLIAI don´t work. YLIAI calls The Pampas Goat. The Pampas Goat is at a party in Aldéia, a distant suburb of Recife. The Pampas Goat tells YLIAI that he’ll be home soon, slurring his words only a little. YLIAI expresses some doubt as to the veracity of this claim.

A few hours later the rain has gotten heavier and there is no sign of The Pampas Goat. YLIAI, growing weary of standing under a tree outside the dingy apartment building, decides to call The Big Black. Let´s have a drink, he says, when The Big Black answers (The Big Black always answers). Ok, says The Big Black, I´ll come and pick you up. Turn right just after the canal, says YLIAI, and I’m at the end of the street, in front of a car wash.

Half an hour later The Big Black calls. I can´t find you, he says. I went down the street on the left after the canal and there was no car wash. The street on the right, says YLIAI. Oh, says The Big Black. Ok. I´ll be there in five minutes.

Half an hour later The Big Black calls again. Nope, he says. I went to the end of the street and there was no car wash. No-one I asked has even heard of this car wash. That’s impossible, says YLIAI. Did you take the first street on the right? Yes, says The Big Black, though it might have been the second. I´ll try again.

Half an hour later The Big Black calls again. Nope, he says, no car wash. I'll never find you. I´m going home. YLIAI asks The Big Black where he is, and then walks a few hundred metres in the pouring rain to find him. They drive through rain that makes the storm in Seven look like a light summer shower, to Jordão, taking the back way in because the main road is flooded. The back way in involves crawling through tiny, twisting alleys where cars have fallen into potholes and the roofs, and sometimes the walls, of the tiny shacks have tumbled into the street, and everything is covered in filthy black mud. Imagining what it must be like to live in such a place, YLIAI resolves to never, ever, complain about anything again.

The Big Black takes YLIAI to his house, where The Big Black’s aged mother gives them both soup. A conversation starts up about being black, though YLIAI doesn’t know why. My mother was white, says The Big Black’s aged mother, who is blacker than The Big Black. YLIAI raises an eyebrow. My husband was black, she continues, and he didn’t amount to much. I wouldn’t marry a black man again. The Big Black’s aged mother is approximately 105. His girlfriend is blacker than you, says The Big Black to his aged mother. He is talking of course of Saci-Perere of the Centro-Oeste, who, as well as being the most beautiful woman this side of Beyonce’s left buttock, is indeed black. She never is, says The Big Black’s aged mother, I don’t believe it. Come on, The Big Black says to YLIAI, let’s go to the pub.

It has stopped raining and the crickets are chirping, and the sound of water being sloshed out of houses, and of water dripping from gutters and roofs, is everywhere. The Big Black and YLIAI go to a bar, and drink and talk about things. The talk is generally on the gloomy side. At about nine o´clock The Pampas Goat calls. I´ll be home in about an hour, he says, the car has two flat tyres. YLIAI tells The Pampas Goat not to worry about it, and also not to drive home, given that most of Recife is underwater, and that The Pampas Goat sounds either very drunk or heavily sedated.

Then YLIAI and The Big Black go to another bar. At one of the tables are two men and a woman wearing Sport shirts. They are friends of The Big Black. Hello, says The Big Black. Hello Big Black, say the men and the woman. Are shit t-shirts on sale at Lojas Americanas today, asks YLIAI, which makes everyone laugh. They are clearly a generous audience, thinks YLIAI.

Everyone sits and talks and drinks. You speak Portuguese very well, lies the woman. I don’t really, says YLIAI, and I can’t write it at all. Bet you can write it better than me, says the woman, I’m illiterate. No you’re not, says YLIAI. Am too, says the woman, proudly.

YLIAI doesn’t know what to say. He has never met anyone who has professed to being illiterate before. He opts for constructive. There are lots of courses where you can learn to read and write, these days, he says. Ah, says the woman, making a disdainful gesture with her hand. I don’t need to read or write on the market stall, and anyway I probably wouldn’t be able to understand the course anyway. Of course you would, says YLIAI. Nah, says the woman, I´m pretty stupid, though she doesn’t seem to be. The Lord gave me what he gave me, she says, and he didn’t give me the ability to read or write, so what am I going to do? That’s the way he wants it, so that’s the way it’ll be.

She nods her head a few times, as though agreeing with what she has just said, and smiles at YLIAI. There is a hint of triumph in her smile, as though she is pleased with her argument. Then it is time to go home.

In the taxi on the way home, as the rain falls and the holes in the roads grow bigger and more numerous, and the end of the world descends upon Recife, YLIAI thinks about the woman and her faultless logic. He decides he may apply it to the meanderings of his own life. Author of pointless blog scribblings instead of famed writer of classic novels, standing astride the world of letters like a titan?

The Lord gives you what he gives you, so what are you going to do?

Not for the first time, YLIAI decides he feels like a drink. And when he gets home, he finds The Pampas Goat safely tucked up in bed, snoring the snores of a very drunk man. The Ferrari, tyres and everything else intact, sits snugly in its bay under the dingy apartment building. YLIAI feels at peace with the world, and all its mysterious rhythms.

2011-06-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

Your Life Is An Impossibility realises with alarm that he is pushing 40. A bout of self-examination is quickly undertaken. Memory: has been an empty husk for years. Hair: thinning, but not too much. Vision: fading, but not too fast. Waistline: spreading, but not too abundantly. YLIAI feels relieved. There may be a few years of pointless wittering in the old dog yet.

And then he considers the positives. Because 40, truly, might be the best age, and is certainly the first age when you can truly say that you are no longer stupid (though there are of course plenty of stupid 40 year olds). You are no longer stupid because by 40 it has become apparent that in all probability you have failed, and worse, or better, that this failure is unlikely to change.

You learn that there are no great surprises lurking around the corner – no Bookers or Pulitzers, no Bolas De Ouro. Before 40, it is quite possible that you have maintained faint hope that all dreams will come true. Now, you know they won’t.

This is not a bad thing, of course, and other things can change – love, and its opposite number, not love anymore, can sprout like weeds at any time. The appearance of children remains an ever present threat.

But overall life may even be better after 40. Because now, free from pressure, filled with the knowledge that disappointing self-awareness brings, life can go on, better than before, the work becoming more important than whether people like it or not.

At 40, if you are lucky, you will no longer believe you are more intelligent, more able, more alpha, than the next man. You will know simply that you are you; unremarkable, average, even happy, hopefully.

Having written this YLIAI feels wiser than ever, which might be defeating the object a little. He feels, perhaps, that it is time for a new theory on Brazilian life. He believes that he might be just the man to write it. He picks up his pen (or turns on his computer) and thinks of....

Geometry, oddly enough. Recently YLIAI took a trip to Brazil’s most geometric, and also most unloveable, city, Brasilia. He waited patiently in line at the TV Tower, then rode up a hundred metres or so in an elevator. At the top, he peered out over Mr Costa's and Mr Niemeyer’s* marvellously symmetrical handiwork.

Brasilia is a masterpiece of urban planning, with only one small oversight. Mr Costa and Mr Niemeyer forgot to put any poor people in. The poor in Brasilia, with a few exceptions, don´t live in Brasilia, at least not in the Plano Piloto. Instead they´re shipped off to the cidade satélites, where, without the resources of the capital’s police force to take care of things, they’re basically left to tear each other to bits as best they can. The cidades satélites are Brazil’s new murder hotspots.

But Costa and Niemeyer (and YLIAI finds himself overcoming an almost insurmountable urge to type Neymar every time he has to use Oscar’s name) were onto something when they dreamt of a geometric Brazil. In other words, simply put: horizontal relations = good, vertical relations = bad.

If life is lived here on a simple plane, then it is a tolerable enough business. An honest day’s work will bring in enough of an honest day’s pay to afford a decent lunch of rice, beans and chicken most days, plus a few palavras at the weekend, and maybe the price of a ticket to the football too. With credit cards flying around like confetti, these days even social classes C1 or C2 might be able to afford the price of a plane ticket down to see Auntie Edicleide and the kids in São Paulo, though they´ll spend the next ten months paying it off. All so good, all so horizontal.

What you must avoid like the dengue, if you can, is any kind of vertical relationship. Our friends in social classes C1 or C2 can take a trip to the big supermarkets like Carrefour or Hyper Bom Preço like anyone else, but shouldn’t let their eyes stray over to the imported cheeses section. If they do they’ll either be appalled or amused to see that 100gs of Stilton will cost them r$379**. Stilton is not part of their reality, therefore to covet it is to desire a vertical relationship, where you are situated below the item you desire – such a relationship will only bring pain and suffering.

Vertical relationships also appear wherever someone has power over someone else. This can take many forms. In a previous life YLIAI lived in an old apartment in Boa Vista, downtown Recife (long-term readers will remember this as being the era of days spent looking over one’s shoulder in case a hired gun, out to get The Ex-Girlfriend, was lurking behind a bush). One balmy summer night thieves broke in and stole the water pump. We´ll all chip in and get a new one, the owner of the apartment building informed YLIAI. YLIAI was perplexed. Isn’t the water supply, and all its workings, rather the responsibility of the building owner? he asked. No, came the retort, and while we´re at it you still owe me for the copy of the keys I cut for you when you moved in. A better example – when vacating an apartment, it is the responsibility of tenants to paint the property, regardless of its state upon arrival. Landlords above, tenants below = pain and suffering.

Worse lies in store at work. Brazilian employers tell their employees when the employees are going on holiday, not the other way round. When fired in Brazil (a common enough experience, given that many employers still believe themselves to be living in the days of the Casa Grande and the Senzala) the shamed ex-employee must come skulking back a few weeks later to sign his exit papers and receive whatever pittance is owed to him. YLIAI knows of a case where a particular ex-employee was forced to return time and time again, as on each occasion his former employer had been called away on urgent business – a long leisurely lunch, a round of golf, a post-prandial nap. Boss above, worker below = pain and suffering. YLIAI could throw the plight of live-in nannies, cleaners and housekeepers, into the mix here, but doesn’t think he needs to – the image of his own (oh the hypocrisy!) once every two weeks cleaning lady eating her lunch while sitting on a paint pot in the spare room, because that’s what her other employers expected her to do, probably says it all.

Even in his free time the Brazilian (and even the gringo) must wade through great rivers of torment and agony. In some places, YLIAI has heard, there exists the maxim the customer is always right. Translated into Brazilian Portuguese, and then back again into English, this becomes: the customer is to be ignored where possible, tolerated when unavoidable, and fobbed off with promises never to be upheld when there is absolutely no other option remaining. Brazilian banks charge their clients when they withdraw money, when they deposit money, when they print off receipts confirming the withdrawal or the depositing of money, when they use their telephone banking services, when they use their internet banking services, even sometimes when they want to use the car park in front of the bank (hats off to Santander/Banco Real in As Republicas for this one).

They have this in common with Brazilian shopping malls, who charge hefty parking fees to people who want to buy things at the shops inside the shopping mall. Bills issued by the country’s telecommunications giants Oi, Tim, Claro, Vivo and friends are ~~almost always~~ often wrong, and by calling to complain the customer unknowingly enters into one of the Seven Circles of Hell, where he will be required to give his name, CPF, identity card number, address, date of birth, and explain the nature of his complaint, to no less than six different company representatives before finally being attended to in a (loosely) satisfactory manner. Quite often he will be cut off somewhere between representatives, and be required to go through the entire process all over again. Big business above, lowly client below = pain and suffering.

All this, of course, is just the creamy icing on the cake, with the real issue lurking somewhere amongst the glacê cherries, raisins and nuts that lie below. The Big Black, resident of harum scarum Jordão Baixo, has no rich or even middle class friends, and probably never will. He doesn’t go anywhere where he is likely to meet anyone from outside of his own social class. If he did, he would likely be met with some suspicion – handbags would be clutched tighter to chests, wallets secured in inner pockets.

On the other hand, YLIAI’s upper middle class friends don’t know any poor people, other than their nannies, cleaners, and housekeepers. A recent survey taken amongst a group of upper middle class teenagers showed that they wouldn´t mind going out with a black boy or girl, but that they couldn´t imagine going out with someone from a lower social class. Horizontal rules ok.

YLIAI has a friend from Norn Iron, no-one’s example of a shining example of anything, who grew up in the 1980s on state benefits in Taughmonagh, or Tintown, in South Belfast, a place where at night even the rottweillers prefer to attend to their necessisities indoors. But YLIAI’s friend, who we might call The Argonaut, is a clever chap (though not as clever as YLIAI), and did terribly well at school, and went to Oxford, and is now a big cheese headmaster at an awfully good private school somewhere in England.

If this happened in Brazil, not only would the big computer that makes up mathematics formulae based on Brazilian society explode, but someone would make a documentary about The Argonaut, and he would become a media celebrity and appear on programmes like Domingão Do Faustão and Fantastico.

YLIAI doesn’t know where he´s going with all of this, but he knows he has probably been banging on for long enough now. He also realises that none of the above is particularly new, save for the lame geometry gag. Oh well. He feels a craving for something to eat. He weighs his options, being careful not to consider anywhere situated at an angle of more than 45° above his current social position, and heads out into the night.

* Following the concrete abhorrence that is Mr Niemeyer’s latest work, Parque Dona Lindu in Recife, YLIAI would like to declare himself no longer a fan of Brazil’s Greatest Ever Architect ™. Instead, a round of applause to Mr Niemeyer’s Brasilia cohorts, top gardener (though no Percy Thrower) Roberto Burle Marx and painter, sculptor and mosaic maker (is there a better word?) Athos Bulcão, the men who humanised Niemeyer’s cement and white paint brutality.

** This, it must be confessed, is a fictitious example, because YLIAI didn´t have time to go to Carrefour to check just how much posh cheese costs, or what posh cheese is in stock. But the principle is pretty much true.

2011-06-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

Recently Your Life Is An Impossibility has felt Recife getting him down. The worst traffic this side of Cairo, witless modern forro (and a special mention here to the Prince Hal of modern forro Wesley Safadão, aka Very Naughty Wesley, vocalist of Garota Safada, aka Naughty Girl) booming from every corner, witless locals standing on every corner listening to the witless forro. The usual deluge of dispiriting crime stories in the papers, generally involving young men killing other men for small quantities of cash or drugs, or not always so young men chopping up their wives, girlfriends or mothers-in-law because they sat next to another man on the bus (crimes of passion, as they´re dubiously known). Nothing ever working ever, contemptuously disinterested service in bars, restaurants and shops, autumn foliage drifting on the breeze replaced with plastic bags and crisp packets, and so on and so on. If you let it get to you, it can be a dispiriting kind of place.

Though as is often the case maybe it doesn´t have that much to do with Recife, and more to do with YLIAI’s state of mind. Too much pining for Saci Perere of the Centro-Oeste, too much time spent gloomily stalking the echoing corridors of YLIAI Towers, too much (or many) cigarettes and alcohol. Though he knows well that by engaging in such moaning he’s guilty of the terrible crime of complaining with a full belly.

Anyway, at such times the angsty soul needs to hear the sound of a quiet, soothing voice murmuring sweet nothings in its ear. Always contrary, YLIAI seeks solace not in the hills of Gravata or Triunfo, or amongst the whispering palms of the litoral sul beaches, but in Jardim Jordão, though it might not seem to be the most obvious place to go to find such peace. Huddled amidst a few craggy hills just behind the gleaming glass and chrome domes of Recife International Airport, surrounded by similarly hard knock neighbourhoods Ibura and Muribeca, Jardim Jordão is as grim as grim Brazilian reality gets. Or rather – it’s not really, because things can get a hell of a lot grimmer than Jardim Jordão, but in terms of non-favela reality it’s as grim as things get.

YLIAI remembers wandering round the place with The Argument, no stranger to grimness herself. Away from the relatively (but not really) respectable main road, the streets drop away and things get very quiet and nature pretty much takes over. There are shacks, unconnected to either mains water or electricity supplies, clumped together beneath stands of trees, and naked tots play amongst wandering sheep and goats. On a sunny day it’s bucolic enough, but during the torrential June rains it must be hellish. The Argument, who lives only a couple of miles away, shook her head. I didn’t know people lived like this, she said.

But Jardim Jordão has always treated YLIAI well. More than well, in fact. It was where Recife first clutched him to its bosom, after a trying year in the nordeste’s Village Of The Damned, João Pessoa, and the bosom felt so nice that he spent three years working (voluntarily, it should be noted, and if Harold Camping is reading then YLIAI would like these Christian Soldier points included in his passport to eternal happiness) at a tumbledown school in the neighbourhood. After most classes he was sent on his way with a Tupperware box of rice and beans or soup clutched under his arm.

It was also where YLIAI met The Big Black, probably his bestest friend in Recife. The Big Black (note to concerned liberals: calling black people The Big Black (o negão) or The Little Black Chick (a pretinha) is apparently perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese, at least in the not quite reconstructed nordeste, there being of course no racial discrimination whatsoever in Brazil) is a prince of a man, sullen, morose and given to talking a lot about both Jesus and his mum. But, as the saying goes, you can’t choose your family or your friends.

And it was The Big Black who found, also in Jordão, the Ferrari, YLIAI´s trusty steed for over a year now. The Ferrari is such a fantastic beast that not only does it rarely get sick and need to go to the doctors, despite being in reality not a Ferrari but a 20 year old Fiat Uno, but it can even swim, performing a mean doggy paddle along Avenida Recife a few weeks ago when, in the midst of the aforementioned torrential rains, the only other vehicle on the streets was a large wooden taxi driven by a man called Noah.

There is a kind of peace to the place, a slummy pastoralism, that makes Jardim Jordão feel special. Descending from the onibus you wade a fetid stream of puddles (the bairro suffers from a shoddy water supply and a malfunctioning drainage system, meaning there are usually pools of water that have spilled from rumbling water trucks lying stagnant) to cross the street, and then turning left by the Jordão Canal, over a small bridge, you walk up a tiny mud street where there are kids playing and old men and women sitting outside small, inelegant houses. If you peer inside there is invariably a picture of a relieved looking Jesus on the wall, though this is one of the those lonely corners of his 'hood where the flock should surely demand its money back.

Then there is the school where YLIAI taught for a while, and a little bar has sprung up in front. The Big Black is there waiting, slurping down icy Skol. We sit there for a while, and a few locals roll up, and everyone says hello in quiet, tired voices. A joke starts up relating to the bar owner’s name and the possible clues it provides as to his suspected latent homosexuality. These being working class Brazilians the joke is repeated and stretched out and revisited many times. It is about half an hour before the laughter subsides, and it wasn´t even a very complicated (or funny) joke.

After a couple of hours The Big Black and I clamber onto his motorbike and bump off down the street. We are heading to a pagode, and pagode is not always a good thing, but this is not the monstrous ladees free all nite meat market kind of place that springs to mind when you think of pagode . Really it is a small tent on an intersection of two streets, with four young boys playing a really quite pleasant, plaintive kind of pagode, with not even that much evidence of the standard innuendo soaked lyrics. A hundred or so people from the neighbourhood are standing around drinking and talking, and a few teenage girls are dancing, and a few teenage boys are watching the teenage girls dancing.

When we arrive the singer of the band says hello to The Big Black over the microphone, because The Big Black used to play pagode with the boys. Everyone stops talking and looks over at The Big Black, who grins sheepishly. After that, we stand around and drink for a while longer, and then it´s time to get the bus, and this being Recife the bus takes about two hours to show up, but when it does it´s a hop, skip and a jump back to Boa Vista and home, batteries recharged, Recife once again the owner of a special corner of YLIAI’s heart.

2011-05-12T05:23:00.000-07:00

Recife, Pernambuco, Your Life Is An Impossibility’s spiritual home, is not just a wild and dusty cracked jewel of a city perched on the bony shoulder of America Do Sul. It is also capital of many things – of the state of Pernambuco, of overweight gentlemen pumping deafening (and ear-wreckingly awful) music from their car stereos whilst sucking down litres of Skol, of large polystyrene chickens standing mute sentinel over two million carnaval revellers, and of epically and romantically doomed sleeping football giants (which sounds like a subject for another blog), as well as of pitted and cracked tarmac passing as roads.

But enough of the positives. It is also the capital of people losing their rag for no good reason, and of beeping car horns (which also sounds like a subject for another blog), and, most of all, of complaining.

Recifenses complain about everything, particularly the burghers of As Republicas Independentes of Boa Viagem (and environs both physical and spiritual). Following recent fluvial excesses in the region a street protest was mounted against rain. Banners and placards were waved at sullen skies. Sullen skies took the protesters’ complaints on board and responded eloquently – by raining a bit more.

The culture of complaining is an intricate one. People who will never and would never take the bus complain about the appalling public transport system (which is in fact comparable to public transport systems in many similar sized cities across the world – a load of buses and a skimpy two line metro service). They also complain about the terrible traffic, which of course is a direct result of their decision not to use the appalling public transport system, and subsequently clog the roads by virtue of 2km spins to the supermarket or to pick junior up from school.

They complain, as previously mentioned, about the rain, or at least about the flooding, while at the same time lobbing crisp packets, used condoms, second hand nappies and those little packets of mayonnaise and ketchup you get with street vendor hotdogs or hamburgers into the street. The detritus, remarkably, does not miraculously biodegrade or make its happy way to heaven, but clogs the drains, which of course leads to all the flooding, if not the rain. It is really quite Nietzschean Will To Power, if you think about it – I wish to complain about the rain and the flooding, therefore I shall throw my garbage in the street to facilitate said flooding and enable myself to achieve my objective.

They complain about anti drink driving laws, which as well as reducing road deaths have the unwelcome side effect of making it a bit harder to get home when in a state of alcohol induced relaxation. They complain about why este pais nunca vai para frente, the reason for which is generally cited as being a glut of corruption, law breaking and lack of civic responsibility, while engaging in a glut of (admittedly minor level) law breaking and lack of civic responsibility themselves (driving the wrong way down one way streets, parking on top of pavements, jumping queues, buying pirate products from DVDs to edible underwear, and so on and so on).

The greatest complaint of all, however, is reserved for the most dastardly of villains seen since Bluebeard was a lad. The Brazilians. Ah, that´s the Brazilians for you, one Brazilian will say. Brazilians are like that, what can you do, cries another. Brazilians don’t respect arrangements made with other people, bemoans a third Brazilian, who doesn’t seem to be all that hot on respecting arrangements made with other people himself. It gets very confusing, trying to work out who the Brazilians are who are not the Brazilians who the Brazilians are complaining about.

YLIAI doesn’t mind. As is usually the case, he´s seen it all before. People in Norn Iron were fond of a good moan themselves. Really it boils down to the same thing – the poor get along as best they can with what they´ve got (poor Brazilians don´t complain half as much as better off Brazilians, and generally tend to adopt a grin and bear it kind of approach), the rich are happy enough because they´re rich but not as happy as they should be because they´re not as rich as they´d like to be or are scared of suddenly not being rich anymore, and the middle classes (especially the upper middle classes) aren’t poor enough to be grateful for what they have and aren´t as rich as they´d like to be, and don´t like it one bit, hence the complaining.

The dream of the upper middle class Brazilian, of course, is to hot tail it out of this godforsaken place and play house in the Never Never Land that is Europe or the USA, where as everyone knows there is no crime, pollution, traffic, holes in the road or overweight people on buses. YLIAI would like to draw attention to the plight of these poor souls – maybe an emergency fund could be set up, where people could make charitable donations inversely based on their earnings level, or in other words poor people would pay more while rich would pay less. The ultimate goal would be to buy plane tickets (one way of course) for all the wannabe exiles, who will no doubt be terribly missed.

Given that this is unlikely to happen, there is a cheaper solution for all those who complain about high taxes whilst not actually paying any tax, and all those who complain about the rubbish in the street whilst throwing rubbish in the street, and all those who complain about the traffic while making endless unnecessary car journeys and eschewing the public transport system. Simply put, sit them down and make them listen to a bit of the King Solomon of grouching, Mark E Smith and the peerless The Fall.

It was the fault of the government...

I was walking down the street when I tripped up on a discarded banana skin

And on my way down I caught the side of my head on a protruding brick chip

It was the government's fault.

I was very let down.

From the budget I was expecting a one million quid handout.

I was very disappointed.

It was the government's fault.

I think I'll emigrate to Sweden or Poland

and get looked after properly by the government...

NB: If the above photo is any example, those who complain about lawlessness in Brazil are wide of the mark. After all if I´m walking in the hills near Petropolis, Goias, surrounded by abandoned quarries, it is comforting to know that anyone in the vicinity who fancies blowing stuff up will be carrying his "blaster licence".

2011-04-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

Japan and Haiti have their earthquakes, Thailand its tsunamis, New Orleans and other sweaty southern parts of os estados unidos their hurricanes and floods. No such wreckage in the balmy tropics of the nordeste, you might think, only you´d be wrong.

In place of proper natural disasters Recife, and plenty of other parts of Brazil, have their rain. Deadly, apocalyptic rain. When it rains in Recife, as its doing now and will do for the next three months or so, it really rains. And this is from someone who comes from the world capital of rain, Norn Iron.

But Belfast’s endless dreary drizzle doesn’t have much in common with rain in Recife. When it rains in Recife it rains for five, or six days without stopping. And it rains hard. If it starts to rain at 11 o´clock in the morning, a thick grey thunderous curtain, it will rain all day and far into the night.

Worse, Recife is built to withstand rain like houses of straw were designed to withstand big-lunged wolves. Within half an hour or so most of the main thoroughfares in the city are flooded to knee height, due to a combination of blocked drains (a result of prehistoric engineering practices and the recifense’s favourite sport of throwing litter in the street) and the city’s altitude (or lack of), crouched as it is a few metres below sea-level.

Unfortunate pedestrians gather on street corners, peering doubtfully across the watery expanse. Just how deep is it? Are there rats under there? How many infectious diseases will I catch if I risk it? The social heirarchy is reversed. In the watery kingdom the man in cheap plastic sandals is king, while those in shopping mall bought leather moccasins are marooned.

Mammoth queues form at bus stops as the hardy wait for buses that are stuck in monstrous traffic jams several miles away. Everything grinds to a halt – stories of journeys that normally take 30 minutes turning into Odyssyean quests of five or six hours are common.

Never the most stalwart of characters, the locals soon switch into panic mode. Someone calls the radio station to report that gangsters are taking advantage of so many trapped cars and robbing drivers at gunpoint, and 200,000 motorists cower behind their steering wheels. No matter that it was probably an opportunist kid with a water pistol, miles from here.

Traffic lights fail, there are energy blackouts, houses flood, horses eat themselves. Recife goes into meltdown. Though creativity and the entrepeneurial are never far away – on Avenida Recife the locals remove the concrete blocks that separate the two traffic lanes, allowing desperate drivers to perform U-turns and head for home. Though there’s no such thing as a free U-turn in Recife – if you want to get through you´ll have to pay, R$5 for Brazilian made cars, R$10 for imports.

Not funny at all is life in the periferia when the rains hit. Recife is not overly blessed with vertiginous favelas but there are plenty of ramshackle houses perched on towering cliff tops, particularly out towards Jordão and Muribeca, and the Altos of Pascoal, José Bonifaço, José Do Pinho, and the Morro da Conceição. After enough water has poured from the sky the earth starts to move, and mudslides and tumbling masonry and roof tiles kill dozens every year.

None of this jars well, of course, with the gringo stereotype of endless beaches and blazing sun. Interestingly enough, Recife has around 2,000mm of rainfall every year, while in the godforsaken uplands of County Tyrone the total averages out at around 1950mm a year. So it’s official – it rains as much, if not more, in Recife as it does in Norn Iron!

Only it doesn’t really. Because it only rains, as thick and heavy as treacle, for three months at best in Recife, whereas in the Killeter Forest it rains every single day, for ever and ever. Which makes things worse for Recife – all that rain in three months is hard to stomach. During the first 21 days of April, for example, it rained 503mm, and it felt like truly the end of days had arrived.

Though maybe it’s a good thing. Pernambucanos are a blasé lot when it comes to the weather. When it doesn’t rain, which is nine months of the year, the skies are a towering, endless blue, the sun a blazing gold, and the temperature never drops below 30c, not even at night. Worthy of comment, you might think, at least to the chilly northern European. What a beautiful day, YLIAI has ventured, every now and again. Mmnnyeh, is the usual disinterested response, which roughly translated means, is it? I hadn’t really noticed. Isn’t this what every day is like? Don’t you have weather like this where you come from?

No ,I bloody don’t, you complacent oaf, YLIAI thinks about saying. And the influence of all this good weather cannot be understated. You’re all so cold and unfriendly, runs the argument, you should be like us, more relaxed and easy-going, more friendly. To which YLIAI wants to respond, you´re only so bloody friendly and relaxed and easy-going because it’s sunny! Try living in the chilly grey murk for a year or ten, and then see how cheerful and fun-loving you turn out to be!

So when there is proper weather, the kind of weather that tears the roofs off houses and throws trees around as though they were matchsticks, YLIAI thinks happily of Flaubert, and his mutterings after a hail storm wrecked an outdoor party. Gustavinho, the eternal cynic, declared himself pleased. The sun isn’t just there to help the cabbages along, goes the gag.

So to finish- sun and blue skies encourage nothing more than flopping on the beach and sucking down Skol. Keening winds and steely blue temperatures stimulate the writing of Russian style novels. Or in other words, good weather bad, bad weather good.

2011-04-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

Warning: the following contains far too much national stereotyping.

Not much irks the average Brazilian (street crime, potholes and thieving politicians aside) than being lumped in with the sorry bunch known as the third world. Rightfully and unrightfully so – rightfully as carving the globe up into only two groups is as foolish an idea as milk cartons, unrightfully so as all good Brazilians spend their time telling everyone about what a disastrous mess their country is and then complain furiously if it’s described as such by anyone from a fora.

It’s a nasty term, anyway, the third world, even if we ignore for a moment the big question elephant in the room, or in other words – whatever happened to the second world? It rather sounds, in fact, that while we don’t much need a New American Language*, we could certainly do with another way of describing countries, given that First World or Third World, Developed or Developing, BRICS or Floor Tiles don’t quite seem to cut the mustard.

And who better than Your Life Is An Impossibility to step into the breach? From this moment on then, there’ll be no more First World or Third World but instead we’ll have Crap Countries, Countries That Think Themselves (which might only make sense to Portuguese speakers) and Countries That Are A Bit of A Waste of Time, All Things Considered.

Countries That Think Themselves is easy enough, though experience of having grown up in, or at least having spent a long time in, a country that doesn’t think itself is generally essential if you’re going to identify one that does. USA! USA!, obviously, Germany, Ingerland, France and so on. Funnily enough people from these countries aren’t always aware that they’re living in a CTTT (or a CTTI). The Ingerlish, for example, often see themselves as long-suffering and downtrodden, at least in comparison with parts of Europe, and even talk every now and again about reducing poverty in parts of the country, even though from a Brazilian perspective poverty in Ingerland generally means having an I-Pod that’s not quite the latest model.

Countries That Are A Bit of A Waste of Time, All Things Considered is harder to pin down, though is perhaps best summed up as everyone who is neither a CTTT or a Crap Country and inspires great amounts of neither love nor loathing. Australia, New Zealand and Canada spring to mind.

Which brings us to the Crap Countries, a group of which Brazil is undoubtedly a proud member. Before anyone gets all steamed up, it should be explained that being a Crap Country doesn’t mean that the people in that country are crap, or that the scenery or the food or the culture is crap, or that it’s crap to live there. What it means is that given the premise that a country, or at least a government, should be able to take care of its people by organising decent public health care and education systems, by guaranteeing at least a minimal level of public security and safety, and by building and maintaining things like roads and public transport systems, any country that doesn’t manage to do that, or at least doesn’t do it very well, is pretty much a Crap Country.

No cries either of neo-imperialist European running dog, if you don’t mind. As regular readers will know Your Life Is An Impossibility is from Norn Iron, one of the Crappiest Countries of them all, given that a Country That Thinks Itself threw zillions of pounds at it for decades and it still couldn’t sort itself out. For those who are wondering Oirland, home of the Louth Media Mafia, is a Crap Country too, though it managed to clamber into the Countries That Are A Bit of A Waste Of Time division for a few years back before recently tumbling back to its rightful level.

Brazil is trying hard to not be a Crap Country these days, and is even getting it right in some places – new hospitals spring up like daisies, the previously calamitously cracked and fissured BR101 motorway here in the nordeste is now (almost) as smooth as an Oscar night red carpet, social welfare programmes mean not many people die of starvation anymore, and there’s even the odd bit of public housing here and there.

This talk of countries being crap or not leads to an interesting question about gringo life. Even putting aside for the fact that most Brazilians don’t distinguish much between one stripe of gringo or another, which countries prepare one best for living in Brazil in general, or Recife in particular?

It depends, is as always the quickest and best answer, but there are gringo tribes just like there are tribes everywhere else. There are the ex-pat retirees littering the beaches of the nordeste (particularly João Pessoa), who are almost always British or Estadunidense, and who consider themselves fully immersed in local culture if they manage to buy an agua de coco in front of their apartment buildings of a morning without getting shot.

There are the pousada and restaurant owners, who very often (and no-one knows why) are Dutch, Scandinavian, Spanish or Argentinean), and the hapless teachers of English As A Second Language, a tribe which unfortunately includes YLIA, who obviously enough are mostly English, Oirish or Estadunidense. Then there are the scheming property developers (again almost always English or Estadunidense), roaming Recife in their 4x4s, heart-broken (or overjoyed, who knows) at the rampant real and the limp libra or dollar.

Certain national characteristics go well with living in Brazil, and plenty don’t. Being English (a bit aloof, a little too concerned with punctuality, slightly snooty) is probably more of a hindrance than a help in knockabout, intensely intimate, always late Brazil. Ditto being German.

Vested interests apart, when travelling YLIAI has always felt slightly blessed to be from Norn Iron, in marked contrast to how he feels about being Norn Irish whilst at home.Growing up in the Black North during the 80s and 90s taught a person to laugh at the things that otherwise shroud life in darkness, and also, in marked contrast to the mindset of upper middle class Brazilians, that whatever danger lurks around the corner should be looked steadily in the eye, and should not be allowed to drive one inside to hide behind electric fences and locked doors.

There is, between the Brazilian and the native of other Crap Countries, a certain shared knowledge that Bad Things Have Always Happened And Always Will Happen, which helps. This is unlike the experience of, say, the Canadian, who arrives in Brazil and is immediately appalled to find that there are countries where poverty exists, hundreds of people are murdered every week, and people don’t put eh? at the end of every sentence.

And the more liberal breed of Estadunidense in Brazil must undergo his own Road To Damascus moment. Shocked to find that everyone in Brazil and South America, generally speaking, sees him or her as a millionaire neo-colonialist warmonger, our Freedom And Democracy loving chum must declare himself or herself ashamed to be American, proclaim that Bush/Obama/Clinton/Kennedy/Bieber is the devil, and leave odd Facebook messages saying how they think that Mr Amadinejad seems to be quite a nice fellow really.

Someone somewhere should make a list of the Top Ten Gringos ever (YLIA feels a future piece coming on). Peter Robb, author of A Death In Brazil would be on it, as would super-Serb footballer Petkovic, after over eleven years of playing in Brazil.

Maybe top of the list, though, would be a certain Bernard O’Brien, an Irishman who shipped up in the Amazon in the 1600s, around the time when the Portuguese were chopping Indians up for fun. Rather than join in the slaughter, O’Brien chummed up with the Aruã Indians, trading mirrors, combs and axes for a few jars of the local moonshine. O’Brien ended up defending the Aruã against the Portuguese at Fort Tauregue in Amapá, before being defeated and imprisoned. Eventually exiled to live amongst the supposedly man-eating Cururi Indians, O’Brien instead made bestest friends with the cannibals, learning their language and exploring the “rivers, forests and medicines and secrets of the Indians.”

Top Gringo!

Note: Information on Bernard O’Brien taken from John Hemming’s fantastic book Tree Of Rivers, lent to me by the Louth Media Mafia, to whom thanks are due.

* I have no idea who the people in this video are, but they seem quite nice, despite being Estadunidense, and watching it gave me a strange feeling of nostalgia, as though I was watching people that I had once been close to but no longer knew, or worse, people that I had once known but who were now longer alive.

2011-04-11T03:27:00.000-07:00

Those wishing to understand the soul of the urban monster that is Recife waste their time reading Gilberto Freyre, seeking out cordel or trailing Mestre Brasão round Olinda’s cobbled streets.

Really the heart of any city is to be found in its witless FM radio stations, pouring out dreadful US imported pop and even more dreadful Brazilian Blink 182 cover bands. The banal yelpings of the presenters are perfectly in tune with Recife’s white middle-class youth, and as Wacko taught us the children are our future, and Brazil is turning middle-class, and so on, and so on.

The problem is that more than 10 seconds of the stuff makes your brains bleed out of your ears, and so an alternative guide is required. And where better to look than the local rag?

Newspapers reflect the identity of a city as well as anything else. Manchester’s Manchester Evening News used to be a proud, gritty journal, matching its proud, gritty home. Now it’s a vapid plate glass and aluminium Danish theme bar of a newspaper, matching the identikit Ikea urban renovation of the city. London’s Evening Standard is as infuriatingly conceited as the place itself, or at least it was before it transformed into a throwaway freesheet.

It’s the same in Brazil. São Paulo has its weighty and serious-minded Folha De São Paulo, BH its slightly less weighty and slightly less serious-minded Estado De Minas. João Pessoa is served by its appropriately mind-crushingly provincial Jornal Da Paraiba.

Recife is not much better off. Both the Jornal Do Commercio and the Diario De Pernambuco are dispiriting affairs, concentrating only on the very worst things in recifense life – people getting killed (more correctly the middle-classes getting killed, unless a poor person gets killed in a particularly salacious way, or a lot of poor people get killed at the same time), roads flooding, workers going on strike, the failings of various public service sectors, political graft. And football, of course. There are also supplements of biblical proportions dedicated to the buying and selling of cars or apartments.

They are kept company by scurrilous scandal sheets Aqui and Folha De Pernambuco, which dispense with all of the above except for people getting killed (the category is broadened to include the poor) and football. In compensation pictures of semi-naked women and soap opera gossip are included, not to mention some of the most graphic photographs of the bodies of the recently murdered you´re likely to see this side of http://www.snuffmoviesareace.com/.

Still perservere we must. Our research will include a quick scan of the front pages of JC and the Diario over the last few weeks to see if Recife’s pulse can be accurately taken.

A lot depends on what day you buy your jornal. On Monday or Thursday half of the front page will usually be dominated by the previous day’s football – The Sky is Tricolor! shrilled a recent headline after Santa Cruz had beaten Recife’s Unmentionables, Sport.

On this day it’s business as usual. A couple of shootouts in a couple of bars, the kidnapping of a business man in Muribeca that ends up with two kidnappers dead. A bus runs into a lorry out on the highway near Caruaru – three dead. There can seldom have been a country where so many people find so many different ways to die.

Any positive article will automatically be tinged with salt. A park opens up in Boa Viagem, named after Dona Lindu, Lula’s mum. No matter that it’s 917 days late, or that it’s another concrete monstrosity from the deadening hand of Oscar Niemeyer. A park’s a park, surely. Not in Recife – the newspaper runs a story revealing how you can’t buy any water inside the park but have to go outside (a walk of about 50 metres) to get some. It’s all que absurdo, screeches the war cry of Recife’s professional moaners (or in other words, almost everybody).

Recife’s papers also love stories about fear and terror amongst the general public. A few months back a wonky plug caused half of the nordeste to lose power for the night. Once again all of us are hostages to darkness, klaxoned the Diario, a night of darkness, isolation, panic and violence. Lazy jokers might argue that this pretty well describes every night in Recife, but there’s a serious side. Jittery media hysteria drives the upper middle classes further into their warrens and leaves the streets to the spooks, the ghouls, the spectres...and everyone else who’s none of those things.

Still, the papers can sometimes get it right, and last Friday the Diario De Pernambuco wrote something that, for once, touched the heart. Fourteen dead, ran the headline, and one hundred and ninety million wounded.

2011-03-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

Scorching heat pours incandescent from the March skies, the furies are abroad in Recife, and Brasil and the nordeste seems a long way from the shiny happy people fantasies of lore. Is it (and this has been asked before) simple jaundice?

Four years is the longest Your Life Is An Impossibility has ever held down a job, back in the days of the Middle Sized London Record Company, and four years is fast approaching at the Palace of Swords Reversed Medium Sized Language School. Four years in Recife also looms large in the rear view mirror, and four years is a long time to live in Tombstone City (Rio Doce replacing the OK Corral). But boredom cannot be blamed for everything.

There is no doubt that Recife is a fearsome place and it seems to be getting fearsomer. Que povo bravo, observes Saci-Pererê of the Centro-Oeste, here on a carnaval visit. And worse still is that Your Life Is An Impossibility is getting bravo-er himself. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Southern California once, but leave before it makes you soft, says Mary Schmich (and later Baz Luhrmann, which proves that it’s only the very worst songs that stick in your head).

To which Your Life Is An Impossibility would add live in Recife once, but leave before it makes you too bravo. Chagrin oozes from the gutters, pique seethes between the bumpers, umbrage hovers like a vulture on every street corner. Raiva wafts in the air alongside the pungent whiff of the drains and the sweet fragrance of the bougainvillea blossoms.

There’s traffic raiva, of course. Slowly creeping across a junction where he has right of way, YLIAI is surprised to see a glistening, behemoth 4x4 roaring towards him. YLIAI brakes and waves a warning arm in the direction of the 4x4. The driver of the 4x4, who has two small children perched on the passenger seat beside him, twists his face into a mask of fury and extends two stiff little middle fingers. YLIAI expresses surprise. The driver of the 4x4 makes to descend from his chariot. Startled and confused, YLIAI drives off.

There’s getting a taxi to go to the game raiva. Taxi to Arruda, says YLIAI, standing with The Louth Media Mafia, The Pampas Goat, and The Accidental Tourist at a taxi rank in downtown Recife. It´s the day of the Huns vs the Visigoths, or the Santa Cruz vs Sport Recife classico. Are you crazy, says the taxi driver, I’m not going up there, not today. What, exclaims YLIAI, you’re a taxi aren’t you, what’s the problem? It’s your problem, mate, not mine, go and get another taxi. YLIAI gets angry at this dereliction of duty. Go and f*** your mother, he shouts, or words to that effect. What did you say? What did you say? Piece of shit! screams taxi driver. Chests are (almost) pushed against other chests, foreheads (almost) bumped against other foreheads, handbags (almost) swung in anger, until YLIAI and company find another taxi.

There’s showing your age raiva. In Recife Antigo, before the bacchanal of carnaval gets under way, YLIAI and the Louth Media Mafia (I and II) and the Jam Tart go a-drinking. A group of young people are cavorting (meaning drinking cachaça from the bottle and sniffing poppers from a Coke can, something YLIAI would never, ever do) nearby. An inebriated young EMO-er slams accidentally into YLIAI. Apologies are offered and accepted. A few minutes later the same young EMO-er again slams accidentally into YLIAI. Apologies are once more offered and accepted, albeit slightly more reluctantly. When it happens a third time, the red mist descends and YLIAI picks up the young EMO-er and throws him into the gutter.

There’s walking along the pavement in Olinda raiva. Heading for a romantic dinner at the Oficina Do Sabor with Saci-Pererê of the Centro-Oeste, YLIAI finds himself in the middle of a post carnaval frenzy. Bloco follows bloco, even though it´s the Saturday after carnaval. Bah humbug, cries YLIAI, don’t these people have work to do? Isn’t two months of pre-carnaval and a week of carnaval enough? Trapped in a narrow street, YLIAI and SP head onto the pavement, which is blocked by A Strapping Lass sitting on a stool. YLIAI requests permission to pass. Twice. Permission is silently refused. The red mist descends again. Inspired by recent events in the Arab world, YLIAI decides to overthrow the dictator. Tapping strapping lass on the knee he pushes past, dragging SP with him. What the hell’s the matter with you, roars A Strapping Lass, running after YLIAI and SP, meaty fists aloft. Soon she is joined by A Strapping Lad, shouting do you fackin’ want some, do you fackin’ want some. Clearly A Strapping Lad has spent some time on the mean streets of Bromley and Croydon. Thankfully Strapping Lad and Lass are soon trapped amongst the revellers, and YLIAI and SP can make their escape.

And there is buying something raiva, or ordering a meal raiva, or having any dealings with any type of customer service at all raiva. YLIAI and SP order Sunday lunch at a downtown restaurant. YLIAI and SP ask for the chicken. Excellent choice, says the waiter, won’t be long. Half an hour later the waiter comes back. Sorry, no chicken, is the belated news from the kitchen frontlines. At a street corner kiosk, YLIAI tries to buy some chewing gum for r$1. He has 95c in change and a r$2 note. No-one ever has any change in Recife, so he offers the 95c, hoping to be helpful. His kind offer is refused. No problem, thinks YLIAI, and proffers his r$2 note. Sorry, no change, says the man in the street corner kiosk. YLIAI feels very crossness whispering sweet nothings in his ear.

Then there is former lover raiva, about which the less said the better. Why don’t you get the hell out of Recife, YLIAI is told, this isn’t the place for you. YLIAI feels sad that it has come to this, though is starting to think the sender is perhaps right.

Here there is darkness on the edge of town and in the middle of town and in the suburbs and along the beach. YLIAI thinks he needs a new strategy. From the long ago past in Olinda comes a distant memory. A small Chinese woman. Pensioners stretched in obscene positions on blue rubber mats. A sunlit room. The smell of incense. Nonsensical chanting – onimashibaya onimashibaya (at least that’s what it sounded like) ommmmm ommmmm ommmmm. Could it be that yoga is the only way to survive life in Recife?

2011-03-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

There follows the third and final part of the short story 'Ocean', described by the always excellent Pernambuco Gypsy as 'saucy and well written'. Parts I and II can be found below.

Here the garden is thick and a heavy striped green and the dark leaves push noisily up against my window. It is where I came after things ended with my husband. Here is by the ocean. There was not by the ocean. After my husband, it seemed important to go from somewhere that was not by the ocean to somewhere that was by the ocean.

But being by the ocean here is not really like being by the ocean. Here the ocean is like water in a warm grey swimming pool lapping desultorily against the shore.

It is not bracing.

Bracing is what I had in mind.

Our Portuguese was coming on like gangbusters, as they say. Sometimes now I did not go to self-service restaurants but to real restaurants, and I asked for the cardapio and then I ordered picanha with arroz and feijao.

Dark lights lit the night, the streets, when we went out. Now we did not go just out, but we went out. Would you like to go for a meal, my husband would say, or, let’s go dancing on Friday, and we would go to forro clubs and watch Brazilians dancing while we shimmered palely with our drinks in the corner.

Sometimes we would not come home until five am when the sun rose and spread pink warm light along the tops of the mountains.

We tried to speak Portuguese together. At first it was like walking through long tangled grass. But then it got better. Once, we even had an argument in Portuguese.

Do you think she is beautiful, I said. We were sitting in a bar. The beer we had drunk we marked by the thick brown bottles at our feet. Of course he thought she was beautiful. I thought she was beautiful, the lustrous shank of her hair, the gleam of her midriff, the cling of her jeans.

Not very, he said. His eyes followed her thirstily as she swung through the crowd and disappeared.

Liar, I said.

Shut up, he said. Not everyone is the same as you, he said.

Fuck you, I said, and I tipped my glass over so that the beer ran across the table and fell in small waterfalls onto his lap.

Though as I walked home I thought it would be a good inscription for my headstone.

Not everyone is the same as you.

Who, really, is the same as anyone?

All of this, remember, in Portuguese.

When he came home my husband looked for me and found me. I was in bed pretending to sleep.

He rolled me over.

Sorry, he said.

I’m sorry too, I said, feeling I should.

He kissed me, and then he took off my t-shirt and my shorts and we made love.

As we made love my husband used a lot of Portuguese sex words, many of which I did not understand.

This time, I more than just liked it.

I almost really liked it. I liked it more, I think, because of the Portuguese sex words, and because I was a little drunk, and being a little drunk made my husband’s hands softer and my skin warmer and the room smaller.

Afterwards, I wondered where he learnt the Portuguese sex words.

I ask my friend Marcia what she thought. Marcia is French and therefore understands such matters.

Maybe he learnt them from his friends at work, she says.

Maybe he learnt them from a book or a movie, she says.

Maybe, oh, I don’t know, she says.

Later I found out, of course, that he had learnt the Portuguese sex words from the Brazilian girl he was fucking.

You were wrong, I told Marcia.

At first I was not angry.

My first thought was, you scored, husband, you scored, one-one!

But then I was angry.

You can’t be angry, he said. You did it too.

This made me more angry. If this was a movie, I said, and the actor said what you just said, you would walk out of the cinema in disgust.

It isn’t like stealing from the biscuit jar, I said. Even I did not know what I meant by this.

Can’t you forgive me, he said, like I forgave you?

Do you know what the funny thing is, I said.

What, he said.

The funny thing is, I said, no, I can’t.

In the kitchen I hear Paolo Two talking to Maria. Maria is the woman who cleans and cooks breakfast. Maria lives a long way from here and gets up at five am in order to get here at six am and cook breakfast. Maria has been married to her husband for longer than I have been alive. If you think of each month I was married to my husband as being one year, like dog years except twelve over one not seven over one, Maria has still been married to her husband for more years than I was married to my husband.

The smell of breakfast creeps in through the crack beneath my door, fresh rolls and coffee and eggs and sausages. Paolo Two and Maria talk for a long time. Here, people like to talk.

Sometimes they talk for hours. When I listen to them talking I try and understand but I feel like a mountaineer clinging to a ledge, and I know I can hang on for the first few minutes, but after that my grip will begin to weaken and I will feel myself slipping, falling into the chasm of not-understanding-anything.

I hear Paolo Two’s other girlfriend come downstairs. The sunlight through the tangle of green is silver and weak. A cock crows in the garden next door, strangled and throaty. It crows over and over. I had thought cocks just crowed once, and then went back to whatever else it is cocks do.

But it seems as though I was wrong about this too.

I hear Paolo Two talking to his girlfriend. I have decided I will call her the girlfriend from now on, not the other girlfriend, for I am not really his other girlfriend, and if I am not his other girlfriend, then she is not his other girlfriend either.

I am not really anything.

Still, as I lie in bed I wonder if Paolo Two is looking at my door, thinking about me, as he talks to his girlfriend.

They are laughing about something.

It starts to rain, hissing tropical through the leaves and into the swimming pool, chopping up the water. The sky turns black.

I know they will exclaim and comment on the rain, and they do. Why, wherever you are, do people always comment on rain?

I hear the girlfriend leave for work. I hear them kiss.

Eu te amo, she says.

Te amo tambem, he says.

Ha, I think.

I jump out of bed and open my door. I am wearing a small t-shirt and underwear. I stretch drowsily, lift my arms above my head. Paolo watches me. I know it. I close one eye, lazy as a cat, and say, morning.

I do not mind that Paolo sneaks into the girlfriend’s room. After all the girlfriend was here before me.

For I am unbetrayable, alone, above.

I am beyond.

2011-03-01T03:45:00.000-08:00

Five long years living under in Brazil under liquor’s sweet balm makes for some rude awakenings when it’s finally time to (almost) sober up, particularly when the Brazil in question is not quite a Swiss finishing school for polite young ladies, or in other words, is the decidedly rough round the edges nordeste.

There may be other factors at play of course – five years is enough time for the novelty of living somewhere else to wear off, and even the previously life-saving mantra I am living perched on the north eastern shoulder of South America doesn’t cut the molho de pimenta much any longer. All the responsibilities previously shucked have returned in spades – the toad work, overdrafts, supermarket queues. Life, in other words, is back with a vengeance.

But in the main it’s the sauce, or the lack of the sauce, that done it. Like the reformed smoker the reformed semi-professional boozer soon finds himself seeing evil in the demon drink. Tut tut, thinks Your Life Is An Impossibility as he walks the dog at six o´clock on a Saturday morning and passes the sweaty cheeked all night drinkers howling at the sun in front of Zita’s. For shame, he moans while observing via the miracle of television the lasciviousness of 800,000 lager lager lager shouting hairy-chested Brazilian males dressed as babies and prostitutes at the Virgems De Olinda parade. Christ on a bike, he exclaims as he comes to realise that booze flows like rivers around Recife, and in fact is pretty much the lifeblood of the city, because everyone seems to be at it, all the time.

And it’s not just the poison nectar. This is not a place for the effete of heart. Brutality abounds - in language, for there is no poetry in hearing oxe minha gente repeated three thousand times a day, nor seeing the constant and erroneous appropriation of English words into what was and should still be a proud Portuguese language (a Boa Vista hairdresser offers, alongside the local stylistic choices, the intriguing option of getting yourself some Mega Hair). And on the roads - driving makes YLIAI want to kill himself or if not himself then most of his fellow motorists, as indicating, or being overtaken, is seen as an affront to nordestino masculinity. Music too in these parts, at least the music that bursts from shop doorways and restuarants and car stereos, is an aural hate crime as bad as anything perpetrated by Adolf and Joe, and being attended to in shops or restaurants might make one pine for the death camps. Queue jumping, elbow barging, and general slack-jawed thinking along the lines of what, there are other people in the world besides me? sap the spirit and poke needles at the heart. Carnaval is approaching, and the debauchery and the excess and the crowds and the piss stained streets and the heat and the torrents of Skol and Pitú will reach tsunami levels.

But then YLIAI remembers that probably, really, none of this matters. Meaty-headedness and inelegance is to be found everywhere, not just in Recife, and the only way to avoid it is to lock yourself away amongst gilded luxury, which is as poor a way of living your life as ever was invented.

And there is grace to be found here too, even during carnaval, amongst the giant beer stands and the smoke and bile belching trio eletricos, if you know where to look. YLIAI doesn’t, particularly, but he does remember a couple of years back sitting in the Largo Da Santa Cruz, not more than two hundred metres from where he writes now, and watching hundreds of five and six year old children from Coelhos and Coque dancing and skipping and jumping as part of a frevo competition, which poked needles at the heart too, except in a good way. Sitting in the square in the late afternoon as the sun dips down behind the church, perhaps even nursing a little drink, would seem as good a place as any to spend the day.

And this being the first day of the month it is time to turn the page on the Famous Irish Writers calendar, and Mr. March is Patrick Kavanagh, no mean drinker himself, and to whom in closing tribute will be paid: I inclined/ to lose my faith in Roda De Fogo and Bomba De Hemetério/Til Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind/He said: I made the Iliad from such/A local row./Gods make their own importance.

Which seems to sum it all up well enough.

2011-02-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

The second part of the short story 'Ocean' follows. Part one can be found below. Obviously if you plan to read part two it would be a reasonable idea to read part one first.

Paolo Two has a girlfriend. Or should I say another girlfriend, besides me? Or am I not a girlfriend, not really? What would he call me? Does Paolo Two get to define how things are, or are there hard and fast rules? The girlfriend, the other girlfriend, lives here too. Paolo Two and the girlfriend have separate rooms, and sometimes he will sneak into the girlfriend’s room when it is late and everyone else is asleep. He sneaks into the girlfriend’s room more often, I think, than he sneaks into my room. I like to assume he does this out of obligation to their relationship status, rather than from preference. Though if you assume something because you want it to be true, can you really say you assume?

In some ways Paolo Two is not the point of the story, not at all.

It is just that he is the same as my husband and the same as me and the same as everyone.

My husband and I lived not here but there, in a city two-thousand-two-hundred kilometres away. After my husband moved out and then moved back in we decided to do more things together as a couple.

One of these things was to attend Portuguese classes. Before, my husband had learnt faster than me because some days he spoke to people, in the street or at work, whereas I never spoke to people, ever. Apparently, the speaking to people part makes a difference when you are learning a language.

My husband moved out because I slept with someone also called Paolo, who is now Paolo One though at the time he was just Paolo, because at the time there was no Paolo Two. The sleeping with Paolo One was not my fault. I only slept with Paolo One because my husband did not speak to me enough and when he came home from work and asked me if I wanted to go out I would say where and he would say I don’t know, nowhere special, just out.

And I thought, at the time, I came twelve thousand kilometres for this?

So you see it was not all my fault.

It is surprising how easy it is not to speak to people if you do not want to speak to people. Think of all the things you can do, the places you can go, where you do not need to speak. Need to buy food? Go to the supermarket. No speaking necessary. Hungry? Go to a self-service restaurant. Need to go somewhere that is not where you are? Take the bus.

My life was, smile, give money to supermarket or restaurant or bus company representative. Smile again. Pass on.

Not speaking, ever.

My husband did not learn Portuguese as fast as he thought. I smirked when waiters shrugged their shoulders at him as he mumbled our order in restaurants. Because of this most of the time he went to self-service restaurants too.

Your accent is terrible, I told him. Even I can’t understand you, and I’m your wife.
He would rustle his Herald Tribune and look at me with a face like a small boy told it is time to get out of the swimming pool.

Sometimes I felt bad about this, but other times I didn’t.

Here is a long way to come if all you do when you go out is go just out.

Still, after my husband moved back in, and we did things together, like the Portuguese classes, it got better. Though the Portuguese classes were not really that good. There were twenty students in the class and the teacher asked each student to repeat everything she said at least once, sometimes more than once. This took a long time.

The students from other South American countries, who spoke Spanish, were the best students and made everyone else feel stupid.

I asked the word for mosquito.

It was the same word in Portuguese.

In our tests I got fifty five percent and my husband got fifty four percent.

I win, I said, you lose.

In English, of course.

Practice your Portuguese whenever you can, the teacher said. In the street. In the supermarket. I wanted to tell her what I already knew, that nobody says anything in the supermarket.

Go and see Brazilian movies, she said. Practice your Portuguese in bed, she said, winking a lascivious Brazilian wink.

That night I asked my husband if he knew any Portuguese sex words.

No, he said.

None?, I said.

He thought for a while. When he concentrates he opens his mouth and the tip of his tongue becomes visible like a tiny pink shark fin.

None, he said.

He thought for a while longer. The shark fin bobbed up and down.

Piriquita, he said.

I told him I didn’t know what that meant.

The same as boceta, he said.
I knew what that meant.

Do you like my piriquita, I said, shooting for coquettish.

My husband looked uncomfortable, like he had been invited to a party by people whose company he could not stand yet did not wish to proffer an impolite decline of the invitation.

Later, in bed, we made love. I liked it, of course. Who doesn’t like it, even when it is not good?

Even when it is not good it is better than reading Thomas Hardy.

Perhaps if everyone thought like this the world would be a happier place. Perhaps there would be less expectation and less disappointment, less anger related traffic incidents.

My husband did not say any Portuguese words when we made love. He did not say anything at all.

Once I asked him did he ever think about me and Paolo One. No, never, he said, then he slapped me, which I know I should think was wrong of him. Only all I could think was if he had slept with a Brazilian woman, and months afterwards, after I had moved out then moved back in, he had asked me if I ever thought about them together, I would have slapped him too.

Or worse, whatever worse is.

2011-02-14T05:07:00.000-08:00

Here, near the ocean, the mosquitoes keep me awake. That and other things. But the mosquitoes are what it is easiest to talk about.

Every few minutes when I think, with an exclamation mark at the end, I cannot take it anymore, I turn on the light and pace the room like a big game hunter. When I find a mosquito I kill it with a newspaper and think, good, now for sleep.

But there are always more of them, they are without end. And soon I hear a whine-sound close to my ear. I do not know what makes the whine-sound, is it the mosquito’s wings beating faster than I can imagine, or is it something else?

Sometimes after I think I have killed all the mosquitoes I hear the whine-sound and I do not know if I am imagining it or if it is real. In this way the mosquitoes, the whine-sound, remind me a lot of love.

In the darkness when the whine-sound grows loudest and I think the mosquito is close to my ear I hit my ear, hard, with the palm of my hand. Most times there is silence after that, only the ringing of my ear in the darkness.

But then the whine-sound starts again, for I almost always miss the mosquito.

Here, which is near the ocean, is the second greenest city in the world, so they say. After Paris. I wonder what Paris thinks about this, to be number one to here, to have pipped here at the post.

It is Sunday night and it is after midnight, a time when no-one who can think of any reason to be happy has an excuse to be awake. It is quiet, apart from the insect noises outside my window and the hum of the fridge and the rush and rattle of the garden. And the mosquitoes.

I do not think I would be able to sleep even if there were no mosquitoes. I have been trying to sleep for too long and my thoughts are tangled up like the bedclothes crowded at my feet.

But maybe it will be better in the morning.

I think I sleep sometime around four. When I wake it is light and already as hot as the sulks and I can hear voices in the kitchen outside my door. One of the voices is Paolo Two’s voice.

Paolo Two and I sleep in different rooms though sometimes he will sneak into my room when it is late and everyone else is asleep.

Two nights ago he snuck into my room.

I was sleeping but I opened the door when he knocked. Outside in the night sky a quarter moon peeked out behind the ghosts of some clouds. Bats flitted across the swimming pool behind the trees.

Can I come in, Paolo Two said. Are you sleeping.

You can come in, I said, I’m not sleeping, though the light was off and the bed was a turbulent scene.

Paolo Two sat beside me on the bed in just his shorts. I looked at the hair on his chest and on his legs. I sat with my bare knees hugged up tight and looked at him.

We can’t keep doing this, I said to Paolo Two.

I know, he said, then he kissed me and rubbed my bare knees.

Afterwards he peeled our skins apart and went back to his room.

Sometimes I think it is my fault, that I am too accommodating. Though maybe accommodating is too nice a way to say it, as though I am a flight attendant who has held the plane back for late arrivals. Perhaps I should have told Paolo Two, no, not tonight. Told him the plane was already on the runway, already somewhere over the Atlantic. But really, was I going to do that?

Because I like the way hair continues to grow on Paolo Two’s chest and shoulders and back, as though he is still a boy turning into a man. Once I plucked some of the hairs from his back with my tweezers while he slept, amazed all the while he did not wake but slept on, his body heavy, brown, long, beside me on the bed.

Last night he did not sneak into my room.

Extract from the story 'Ocean', included in the collection The Psychological Benefits Of Exercise. Further extracts will be published here on a reasonably regular basis, if anyone wants.

2011-02-06T04:14:00.001-08:00

I wake up on a hot Recife morning and immediately feel, not that I´m a minotaur, but that I owe money to someone, somewhere, and that the someone is talking about me, and saying, that fecker never paid me back the money he owes me. But I can’t remember who it is, only that I feel terribly guilty about it. I finally remember at lunchtime that I owe a real to the fruit and veg woman at Mercado Boa Vista, and by that time I don’t really care anymore because I’m more concerned about what to have with chips for lunch. Though I should probably pay her back and thank her for providing this clunking link into a few words on (dis)honesty.

An ex-denizen of As Republicas writes on a Facebook (whatever that is) page somewhere about losing a cell phone and a wallet in Germany. The phone and wallet were promptly returned. That’s Germany, says the ex-denizen, there of course having been no crime or unpleasantness of any sort in Germany, ever. The accompanying inference, of course, is that were you to lose your cell phone or wallet in Brazil you’d have about as much chance of getting it back as chips have of ever being nicer than macaxeira frita (10 points for spotting the fried potatoes theme to this week’s bletherings).

Because as everyone knows Brazil is a pais de ladrões. Politicians vote themselves massive pay hikes minutes after getting elected and keep the brown envelopes flowing at the same time, police grifters stop and check more cars on Fridays than any other day as they fill their pockets for a weekend’s boozing, and you can’t walk down the street/take the bus/stop your car at traffic lights at night for fear someone will stick a water pistol in your face and demand your I-pod, and then how will you listen to Lady Gaga (or whoever) on the way to work?

All of which is both true and not true – true in the sense that it happens, not true in the sense that it doesn’t happen all the time, which is the impression sometimes people like to give. On Thursday, for example, Recife and half the nordeste was bought to a thrilling standstill at about 23.30 after a CELPE (or somesuch) technician wired a plug wrongly at the national grid. The perfect opportunity to wander the streets and see what Recife looks like in the even darker than normal. And it’s much the same, no city of light this at the best of times, though there’s a kick to be had from the ghouls and spectres that come looming out of the gloom, and here and there a bar lit with candles and car headlights, suspended like a satellite yards above the invisible pavement.

There is a hushed and ghostly feel to the streets, but it´s almost midnight on a Thursday and Boa Vista is still awaiting its 24 hour Starbucks and Japanese restaurants, so there aren’t usually that many people around anyway. So it comes as a great surprise to read in the Diario De Pernambuco the next day that Recife had experienced a madrugada (late night/early morning) of isolation, panic and violence, in which everyone was a hostage to the darkness. Twitter (whatever that is II) carried messages in which recifenses talked of their terror and anguish at being at the mercy of the night. Presumably the writer is not a veteran of foreign campaigns in Mogadishu or the lower rent bits of real estate near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Even better, the paper also devoted their Saturday front page to the same national (or regional) disaster.*

Which leads to another great Brazilian dichotomy, or even more than one. First of all, why is it that most people brought up in hard as nails spots like (no blowing of own trumpet intended) 1980s Belfast or 1990 New York (a Brazilian urban area type 2,245 homicides that year) adopt an ah sure it’s not that bad at all is it sure it’s only a few bombs/sectarian killings/crack addicts with knives, while many Brazilians become as timid as field mice, crying you’re going to take the bus? Are you mad? as though taking the bus in Recife is as good an idea as a member of the Mubarak clan taking a quick constitutional in downtown Cairo any time soon. Your Life Is An Impossibility had always thought that hardship and danger was meant to toughen you up, and not the opposite. Yes, urban violence can reach horrific levels in Recife and Brazil in general, but the vast majority of it affects the favelas and the periferia. Beyond that, in the middler class parts of town, it is not much more than a risk, or possibility, higher than in Berne sure enough, but hardly certain death. Hum.

The other funny thing is the mild schizophrenia that affects many Brazilians when it comes to violence (The V Word) and crime. Because while everyone complains about The V Word and has their personal freedom limited by The V Word, there is, somewhere deep in the soul, a perverse and sneaky pride in being from somewhere with phenomenally high crime rates. It’s the same with scousers (who are, if it need be said, lovely folk). Any accusation that some of Liverpool’s fame for having more than a few light-fingered citizens might be deserved is met with howls of outrage, while at the same time a fat walleted Londoner will be mocked mercilessly for paying over the odds for a pint in a Dale Street pub, or even for being robbed on his way out of said pub. He´s from London, what do you expect, would run the logic, he´s not hard as nails/street smart like we are. Cue cheeky Scouse grin. The same is true in Brazil, and why wouldn’t it be? Your Life Is An Impossibility has long campaigned for Brazil to be recognised as being a lot more like everywhere else than people (including Brazilians) think. The gringo (that word again) or even paulista being politely relieved of his wallet after blundering into the wrong shady alley should, really, have known better, so the thinking goes. YLIA has lost count how many times he has heard a recifense talk about violence and crime and then, with a resigned and embattled but also quite pleased with oneself smile, say, mas é Recife, né, vai fazer o que? It’s Recife, innit, so what do you expect?

Your Life Is An Impossibility knows what he wants to say but suspects he isn’t explaining it very well, so it might be time to take his leave. It’s Sunday morning, after all, and the sun is shining, and no matter that he was once told he could bribe his way through his driving test if he was feeling nervous (the price was uma Guarana, a teeth rotting Brazilian soft drink, which caused no end of confusion before YLIA realised it was slang for a few quid), or that he gets cheap internet access by illegally dividing up one connection amongst six of his neighbours, or that later on he might watch a few of the pirate DVDs he bought in the street on Saturday. Even affairs of the heart can’t escape – long time online dating aficionado Mr X tells of how no-one pays any more on Brazil’s leading luuurve site, but that budding Romeus and Julietas simply create a free profile and craftily use their email address as a nickname, rather than using the paid-for site email system.

YLIA’s frowns sternly upon o jeitinho brasileiro, and thinks everyone should play by the rules. But, and here’s the rub, sometimes it’s just so hard to be good.

* An honourable mention and a scout’s badge for anti-social behaviour must go to the scallywags who created road blocks of burning tires during the blackout (or the not that hard to remember blecaute in Portuguese) and proceeded to rob motorists by the hundred.

2011-01-23T03:11:00.000-08:00

On Friday I watch a programme about minotaurs, or rather, The Minotaur. On Friday night I dream about minotaurs, and on Saturday morning I wake up thinking I am a minotaur. Actually without knowing it maybe I have hit on a fine metaphor for gringoism – unloved, condemned and exiled, hidden away from society amidst a labyrinth of language schools and private English classes.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, this minotaur eats a healthy breakfast. Freshly squeezed kiwi, water melon and mango juice (the minotaur doesn’t know why either), hot coffee, queijo coalho toasties and honey bread from the padaria Santa Cruz. What could be better? The minotaur lies back on the sofa, replete.

And feels an obscure, wheedling itch in his soul. What can it be? He thinks hard. And remembers. The minotaur has given up drinking. Not for ever, but for now. At least until carnaval.

This is not easy for the minotaur.

Because for good or bad Brazil has always been about the sauce. Everything comes about through booze. Booze is memory. The minotaur remembers his first night out in Belo Horizonte. A street side barbecue joint, packed with bellowing, hair-tossing young people. The First Ex-Girlfriend and her leggy cousins. Picanha. Yum yum. What would you like to drink, minotaur? A beer, says the minotaur. The beer arrives, a big brown icy cold bottle. There are four glasses. The minotaur doesn´t know why. He fills his glass and drinks it down. He fills it again. Drinks it down again. And so on. Until he notices the staring and things are explained to him. Oh, the minotaur says, it´s for sharing. He doesn´t think he likes the sharing. He wants his own beer. This is the gringo way. Only later will he come to realise that sharing is nice, sharing is good. Sharing is a thousand times more civilised than swilling down a lukewarm pint of half weak beer and half strong backspit.

The first carnaval, though not really a carnaval, in Tupi or Guarani, the minotaur can´t remember, one of the squalid outer suburbs of BH. Do you like wine, the minotaur is asked, as he stares at the crowds of (no doubt) pistol packing youngsters from galoucura and mafia azul on their way up to the front, where there are bands, or at least where there is something. It is raining. The minotaur thinks it an odd place to drink wine, but accepts readily enough. When in Rome (or Crete) and all that. The wine, in true Brazilian fashion, is red, ice cold, and very very sweet. The minotaur protests. Then realises that this children´s party wine is in fact much nicer than the expensive, tart stuff he has spent his life pretending to like. It is like alcoholic Ribena. Could anything be better? The minotaur asks for more.

No talk of boozing in Brazil would be complete without mentioning the gringo favourite caipirinha and it´s just-out-of-prison-and-gearing-up-for-the-next-bank-job-stepfather, cachaça. The minotaur doesn´t drink cachaça anymore. Cachaça is The Bad Thing. Cachaça hurts. But it doesn’t matter. Choice is not limited. Agua De Coco and rum. A taste sensation. And if everything is brasilianised, that is alright too. Whiskey comes in a tall glass filled with ice, and, what do you know, it´s better that way.

Lying back on the sofa the minotaur remembers some great drinkers he has had. Christmas Eve in downtown BH with The Ex-Girlfriend, rolling in and out of shady speakeasys until The Ex-Girlfriend decided she needed to throw up. Jaime and his palavras and free homemade cachaça. Lonely drinking in João Pessoa - and if further proof of that city´s spiritual vacancy is needed it is that people don’t drink in João Pessoa, or at least people don´t drink properly – preferring a beer or two to wash down the bar snacks at the beach, or slurping down Skol at home, or worse, in front of their cars, with the boot open and the stereo playing satanic forró. But if you thirst for a quiet beer on your way home from work you will be disappointed, and you will drink alone, while the waiters look on disapprovingly.

Drinking a bottle of wine in a monk´s cell in the Caraça monastery in Minas (the monk wasn´t there and the monastery functions as a hotel too) as the cold drew in through the foot thick walls and the little leaded glass window, while the minotaur waited to see the wolves come down from the hills for their nightly snack of prime rib. Drinking too much in the Papagaio favela in BH (though just at the bottom of the hill, which is the fancy part) with The Ex-Girlfriend, then fighting with The Ex-Girlfriend, then making up with The Ex-Girlfriend. Drinking before and after Santa Cruz and Atlético games. Drinking during carnaval and the World Cup. Drinking with Canute, and The Big Black, and the Pampas Goat, and the Louth Media Mafia, and a cast of maybe two hundred others who the minotaur has forgotten.

Drinking to meet women – for what Brazilian mice can resist the cheese of the lonely gringo minotaur at table, soulfully sipping his way into oblivion, drawing elegantly on a cigarette, a bit like a minotaur Alain Delon, he thinks. There has always been a very clear correlation between what success the minotaur has had with Brazilian minotauresses, and his level of inebriation. Drinking loosens the tongue and the legs, drinking puts words in the minotaur´s mouth, drinking frees the minotaur´s hands to wander hither and thither, innocently of course, upon unsuspecting forearms and kneecaps, so making the minotaur´s intentions quite clear, leaving no minotaur doubt in the minotaur air.

The minotaur thinks back through all The Ex Girlfriends. There have been a few. The minotaur tries to think of which ones he met when sober. He can think of two. The minotaur decides he is not going to list all The Ex Girlfriends now, as this would be self-indulgent.

And the bars. Jaime´s, Cadu´s, Amarelinha (the yellow place found in both BH and Recife), Deca’s, Cais De Santa Rita, bars in Bom Jesus (BH), bars in Santa Teresa (BH), bars in centro (BH). Bars in Recife Antigo, bars in a cidade (downtown Recife), bars strung along the foul litter strewn canal outside Arruda. Bars in Olinda. Bars in the other, nordestino BH, Bomba Do Hemetério. Bars in Jordão Baixo, where the beer comes in plastic cups with the name of an airline emblazoned along the side. Jordão Baixo is very close to the airport, so perhaps the plastic cups walked there themselves. Zita’s. Matuto’s (The Hick’s). Mercado Da Boa Vista. Praças Maciel Pinheiro and Santa Cruz. Bars with the worst toilets in the world, bars where you find a dead rat on the floor before you make it to the toilet. Bars where there have been fights (not many these, not compared to the carnage wreaked at last orders in Belfast or Liverpool or Manchester or Thornton Heath or Bromley) , bars where the minotaur has struck up welcome conversation with a stranger and spent the night thus, talking and drinking. Sometimes the minotaur pays the bill, sometimes the stranger. It evens out, if you’re a minotaur.

The minotaur knows he is forgetting a lot of places and people. The minotaur knows he is forgetting these things because of all the booze. The minotaur knows this (and other things – like the minotaur’s spreading belly) is one of the reasons why he should stop drinking.

But what will he do? For there is nothing better on a hot Recife night, with the moon hanging fat and orange like a piñata (excuse cross-cultural references), than to wander out and find a place where you feel a welcome, maybe with a book or a newspaper, and to drink two or three or seven cold beers, and to think about the way things are. Maybe there will be someone there to meet you, maybe there will not. Maybe there will be conversation to be had with strangers, maybe there will be a forearm to be accidentally on purpose brushed against. Then home, the bill paid, the mind and bladder full.

And now that is gone, at least for now. What will the minotaur do now? Clearly he will never have sex again, though that might not have much to do with the drinking. He will have to find other leisure activities. He will probably go to the cinema a lot. Really a lot. He remembers a desperate time in a desperate town when another minotaur suggested similar drastic measures. Let´s not have a drink today, said the other minotaur, let’s do something else. Like what, the minotaur said caustically, go for a walk? Play tennis? Go to a museum? Both the minotaurs laughed uproariously. You’re right, the first minotaur said, it was a stupid idea. They went to the pub.

And this is what lies ahead for the minotaur now. True, there are benefits. Money will be saved. Bowels will rebuild themselves upon rock solid foundations. Time will be gained, stress levels lowered, bellies will no longer resemble landfill sites.

But where will the minotaur go? Who will the minotaur talk to? What, finally, will become of the minotaur?

Note: Apologies to Steven Sherrill, whose book I only remembered after writing this. I swear. Blame the booze.

2011-01-13T05:26:00.000-08:00

After the standard bewildering overnight bus trek from Brazil’s Gotham the quiet charms of São João Del Rei seem a world away to Mr X. Though not quite – São João Del Rei still has a bustling energy to it that puts the easeless mind on edge. More peace is needed, and that peace comes in the form of Tiradentes, named after the famous teeth-puller dentist of the inconfidência mineira.

It is odd how you have to go away to find out what you have left behind. Belo Horizonte and Minas was abandoned in a veil of tears a long time ago after Mr X convinced himself that he was embroiled in a very Brazilian Romeo and Juliet (armalites replacing scabbards) with The Ex Girlfriend. The four years spent in the nordeste have represented the second part of his Brazilian education (the first being favela fun with The Ex herself) and it has not been four years wasted, so much so that previously terrifying urban hotspots such as BH´s Avenida Parana now seem as cosseted and luxurious as any Milanese fashion precinct.

Tiradentes is not Belo Horizonte but it is close enough for a weekend away, and there cannot be a more soothing (not even Pernambuco´s often rowdy beaches) place in Brazil. It is late afternoon becoming evening in the photograph above, and Mr X is sitting in the garden of the Pousada Do Ô with a chilled palavra on the table and a copy of Ryszard Kapusinski’s The Emperor beside it and also a packet of snouts the smoking of which Mr X will definitely definitely quit in 2011. It is chilly and someone has lit a fire in a house nearby and the smoke rises blue against the mountains. Somewhere, someone is playing a saxophone, and the notes float into the air, soft and melancholy, along with the smoke. Up on the hill behind the pousada the lights of the Matriz Do Santo Antônio church are already lit and stand sentinel against the night. Mr X, at peace at last, has nothing more pressing on his mind than whether to opt for faux European sofisticate (a crepe) or hearty comida mineira (the best in Brazil – feijão tropeiro, torresmo (better known as pork scratchings), tutu) to help wash down his evening whiskey. Tiradentes is very heaven, Mr X decides.

But nothing ever lasts forever, as someone once sang, and on this journey nothing that can go wrong ever really goes right. Mr X has been waiting all trip to take a ride on the Maria Fumaça steam train from Tiradentes to São João Del Rei. On Thursday he goes to the station to check the train is running the next day. Of course it is sir, why wouldn´t it be? comes the answer. He arrives in plenty of time on the Friday. Sorry sir, no train today. Terrible rain we´ve been having. Mr X is perplexed. But you said it was running yesterday, and it hasn´t rained since then. In reply he recieves a shrug and a smile that says you know it´s bollox, I know it´s bollox, but what can you do? It would be like complaining about the way the earth turns on its axis.

There is a bus stop across the road and it is only 12.40 and it is a mere 25 minutes to SJDR so there is no real crisis anyway, just the loss of an opportunity to make woo woo and chuff chuff steam train noises for half an hour. Only the 12.50 bus never turns up and in the end Mr X catches the 13.35 and ends up running across the bus station in SJDR to catch his 14.00 connection to Belo Horizonte. What happened to the 12.50, he asks the ticket collector on the 13.35. What do you mean, what happened, it ran normally, says the ticket collector. No it didn´t, I was waiting at the stop from 12.40. Ah you mustn´t have seen it go past then, says the ticket collector, in what is a very Brazilian Father Ted moment. Mr X wants to point out that the road from Tiradentes to SJDR is not exactly 5th Avenue and there is only one bus that goes along the road and that he has been standing looking in the direction of where the bus is supposed to come from for almost an hour and unless he suffered from a flash blackout or temporary amnesia or blindness it would have been very difficult for a bus to sneak past unnoticed. But there doesn´t seem much point. It would be like complaining about the way the earth turns on its axis.

And what of the unlovely mineiran capital itself? Lovelier than is remembered. Hundreds of CCTV cameras have transformed centro, previously a shadowy ghost town at night, into a bustling, pleasant place, filled with young couples eating ice-creams and bars and restaurants doing brisk business. Mr X decides he is in love with BH again and quickly resolves that he must live there, imagining pleasant weekends – reading the paper in the elegant Parque Muncipal on Saturday mornings, buying wheels of cheese at the Mercado Central, watching Atlético on Sundays, trips down to Ouro Preto once a month, regular visits to the jaw dropping (and bizarrely little known) artistic wonder that is Inhotim. It would be a fine life, and Mr X muses on it for a while before remembering that he does this every time he goes on holiday (previous I´m going to move there locations include Copenhagen, Helsinki, and a handful of unremembered Greek Islands).

He is also, after a while, wracked by guilt. He has been bad-mouthing his adopted home all trip, forgetting that Recife is a marriage (with all the pain and hardship that this entails) while Tiradentes and Belo Horizonte are mere rolls in the hay with whatever bit of skirt happens to catch the eye. Because how could Mr X ever leave O Mais Querido, and ear rattling forro in every bar, and burning heat 365 days a year, and the slack jawed street corner gawpers, and oxe and bone shaking bouncing over pot holes? The answer is he couldn´t, even though god only knows he thinks he´d like to every once in a while.

Ultimately though it doesn´t make that much difference where you are, Mr X decides. Show me the way to shake off memory, as Bill Callahan says, and it´s not always that easy. The first thing Mr X reads in the paper when he gets to BH is that a teenager has been shot and killed in Primeiro De Maio, the tough as old boots neighbourhood where The Ex Girlfriend and various chums were shot a couple of years ago. And no matter where you are the two great black dogs of Brazilian society stalk you – urban uber violence and fantastic jealousy. In Recife a man shoots his bride and best man at the wedding party, in BH a boyfriend stabs his girlfriend (who is also his co-worker and has just been promoted above him) twenty times, leaving her a paraplegic. Following a luta-livre (kick boxing crossed with every martial art known to man) championship in middle class BH suburb São Pedro 41 members of Atletico Mineiro´s galocura, testosterone no doubt pumping furiously, beat a Cruzerio fan to death in the street, a horror story that would make even the Inferno Coral blush.

What Mr X has been wondering all trip, from the parched and impoverished (though fast growing) nordeste to the billionaires of Avenida Paulista, is if a gringo from one of the less salubrious parts of gringoland might arguably have more in common with hard scrabble Brazilians than such Brazilians might have in common with their well heeled cousins down south. Mr X has previous – a few years back while on the way to visit Recife´s famed tits and arses sculptor Ricardo Brennand he had to help a pasty faced and clownishly dressed paulista (complete with expensive camera hung from his neck) extricate himself from a grubby part of Varzea, as said paulista´s nasal diction and rolling r’s had rendered him incomprehensible and foreign to the locals in a way that Mr X, no stranger to rolling r’s himself but by now acclimatised to all things recifense, was not.

The answer is, as the answer usually is, is that Mr X hasn’t got a bloody clue. Class lines, as always, are perhaps more important than borders – a wealthy carioca lawyer would be more out of place drinking in Jordão Baixo than would a Romanian farm worker. The good burghers of As Republicas have more in common with the good burghers of similarly nobre neighbourhoods in BH or São Paulo than they might with those who live two miles away in Coque or Coelhos.

Nordestinos, particularly the less well off, tend to look on the sul and sudeste as a palace of glittering delights that cares not a jot for life north of Espirito Santo (the Watford gap of Brazil). And yet as mentioned before life’s common themes – survival, crime, sex, arroz and feijao, football, and booze run in the blood of the sergipano as they do the santa catarinense. And finally, for Mr X, life is good and bad in Recife as it would be good and bad anywhere, whether it be Norn Iron, Avenida Paulista, or Belo Horizonte.

2011-01-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

When terrible things happen it is time to call on Mr X, for Mr X is Your Life Is An Impossibility´s fearless chronicler of all things dark and frightening, as regular readers will know. Be warned, then – the following is not for the squeamish.

Travel broadens the mind, they say, which may be true, but what is of more importance to a worried man like Mr X is that it also limits the mind. Because when you hit the road all choice and stress and worry drops away and everything becomes the journey – a world of boarding passes and baggage reclaim and delays and airport buses and street maps. This is a welcome thing when, like Mr X, you´re feeling tired of the everyday life.

Travel also teaches you more and more about where you live, because you can´t really say much about home unless you know what at least a few places that are not home are like. A day before this trip Mr X is talking to Mrs X about falling standards in recifense customer service (they were previously abysmal, now they´re really fucking awful).

I can´t take Brazil anymore, I´ve had it up to here!, Mr X whines. Hum, says Mrs X, I know what you mean, but have you thought that it might not be Brazil that´s the problem, but Recife? The nordeste?

Mrs X may be right – Brazil more than most places is a country of wild divergence, oscilating from lives as luxurious as any lived at the court of Louis XVI to places as grim as any in downtown Mogadishu. The nordeste is not Mogadishu but it can be hard and wearying. And so Mr X resolves to travel to São Paulo, the nation´s cultural, economic and pretty much everything else except governmental, capital, to see how the other half live.*

If Tennessee is, according to David Berman, a land of club soda unbridled and hot middle aged women, then São Paulo is a land of fabulously expensive 24 hour bakeries with dog parking outside the door. Mr X is excited – he has been hardscrabbling it for a while in Recife and can hear the siren call of a bit of luxury and sophistication.

Only when he arrives, mid-afternoon on New Year´s Eve, the São Paulo he finds is as desolate and empty as the London in 28 Days Later. Avenida Paulista, the biggest and brashest street in the (Latin) Americas is closed and filled only with tumbleweeds. Where are the famed 42km traffic jams? The licence plate rodizio that permits only cars with even numbered plates on the roads on Monday and Wednesday, and only cars with odd numbered plates on the roads on Tuesday and Thursday? (Presumably Friday is a free for all of Mad Max style transit armageddon).**

But Mr X is not downheartened, because it´s early, and soon two million people will be standing on the very same spot watching fireworks and going ooooh and aaaah a lot. And they do, and Mr X says oooh and aaah a bit himself, and then when it´s all over he feels the call of the wild or at least the bar and wanders off down Rua Augusta in search of fun and foolishness.

Which would be fine, except that three hours later he is still wandering up and down Rua Augusta in search of fun and foolishness. Because Rua Augusta, supposedly the edgiest street in town, this night offers only (a) throbbing techno leather fetish bars (b) come on in sir look at the lovely girls we have waiting for you tonight style flesh pots (c) bars and clubs with valet parking (and all that that entails) and (d) unlovely dungeons filled with EMO teenagers dancing to Nine Inch Nails (or the like – who can tell these days?). Mr X accepts his fate – he is old and weary – and ends the night in Galeria Dos Paes drinking hilariously expensive coffee and feeling sorry for himself.***

He can at least amuse himself by tuning into the accents – regional twangs are always a marvellous hoot for the gringo who has been here long enough to notice them. Paulistas roll their Rs more than Rab from the Gorbals, and talk very loudly, so that a large group of them sounds like a kindergarten class full of toddlers all of whom have just been kicked hard in the shins by other, more alpha-male, toddlers.

It is a taste of things to come. Rain sets in on Saturday night, and it doesn´t stop for four days. On Sunday Mr X identifies the São Cristovão bar in nearby Vila Madalena as a fine place to eat and sup and woo some Paulista Princesses. Mr X walks four kilometres in the rain to the bar. The bar is closed, for no apparent reason. Mr X goes to another place, less nice but still thrillingly pricy, and eats some fried cod balls. The Paulistas, princesses or otherwise, remain unimpressed by his soulful gringo gazing.

On Monday Mr X decides to climb up to the Banespa building to take in what are said to be the best views in the city. But when he gets there the viewing terrace is closed because of the rain. He walks several miles amidst a monsoon that would have sunk the Ark to see the Mercado Municipal and the Catedral Da Sé. He is told he should go to the Circolo Italiano building because the view from the top there is just as good as at the Banespa building. Upon arrival he asks the man on reception if the viewing terrace is open. Yes sir, says the man on reception. He spends ten minutes waiting for the lift and then five minutes going up 50 odd floors to the top. When he gets there the lift operator says sorry sir the viewing terrace is closed because of the rain. On the way out he asks the man on reception if there is a toilet in the 50 storey building. No, says the man on reception.

On Tuesday he goes to the Memorial Dos Immigrantes out at Bresser. He checks on the internet to see if the museum is open. Only as he gets closer, walking past a homeless shelter, the whiff of urine on tarmac rising up to meet him, he says to an imaginary friend I wouldn´t be remotely surprised if this place was bloody closed too. When he gets there a security guard tells him that the Memorial is closed for a year for refurbishment. Mr X feels very sad. A couple of homeless men sympathise. Pisser, says one. Yeah, says the other, I hate it when you trek half way across the city to see an exhibition and it´s closed.

That night Mr X takes his leave of São Paulo, perhaps never to return. It isn´t that he didn´t like the place – quite the opposite. He loved it and could quite imagine himself living there one day. But for a holiday, at New Year’s, without a Mrs X to console him, in the rain...ninguem merece.

* A quote from the rarely mentioned Your Life Is An Impossibility Sr, this, who confused a young Your Life Is An Impossibility no end by driving around Belfast´s well heeled Malone Road district every now and again while shaking his head and saying just shows you how the other half live, and then repeating the trick while driving around the tough as your boots Lower Shankill, leaving young YLIAI in some doubt as to which half he belonged. A doubt that remains to this day, funnily enough, and that has not been soothed any by immersion into the maelstrom of Brazilian social class structure.

** Actually I don´t know how it works exactly, but it must be something like this.

*** He shouldn´t have felt sorry for himself at all - Galeria Dos Paes is the best bakery in the world and it´s open 24 hours, which is a truly marvellous thing, especially when you consider that the only things in Recife that are open 24 hours are the crack houses. Mr X thinks it would be nice to be a Paulista and live in Jardins and chomp on bagels at Galeria Dos Paes every day and buy his y-fronts at Ralph Lauren, until he remembers that the problem with such fantasies is that they are dependent on the tricky to manage pre-requisite of becoming really rich without having to do any work.

2010-12-29T08:33:00.001-08:00

Christmas in Recife is the usual tawdry affair and no amount of blink blinks draped over council offices and bridges and floating Christmas trees on the river can make up for the almost satanic lack of respect for biblical tradition – do Brazilians not know that the first thing that Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus did on Christmas Day in far away B´Town was sit down to a roast turkey dinner with sprouts, carrots, parsnips, three types of potato (roast, boiled and mashed), sausages, bacon and boiled ham, followed by Christmas pudding, mince pies, Christmas cake, cheese and biscuits, ginger snaps, and a banana? Damn them all to hell, says Your Life Is An Impossibility, who, having long ago discovered that Christmas sucks in Brazil, has decided to avoid it all together.

Which meant that the highlight of this (or probably any other) Christmas was trooping off to Marco Zero this week to see the living incarnation of Papai Noel, President Luis Inácio Da Silva, aka Lula, hang up his boots for the last time (at least until he resurfaces, Jordan (Michael, not Katie) like, in four years).

Lula is, as everyone knows, The Greatest Brazilian President Ever, or at least he is if you´re poor or working class or from Pernambuco, his home state, where he has a 4000% approval rating. Lula is also a pretty good indicator of who you are as a person – if you think he is an embarrassing peasant jester then you´re probably a monied Brazilian who once voted for Fernando Collor, if you think he is the second coming of Jesus Cristo then you´re probably one of the people mentioned in the second line of this paragraph, if you think he inherited most of his policies from chess grandmaster FHC and hasn´t done too much else apart from fuck things up then you´re likely to be a clever clogs type who just likes to have a different opinion to everyone else, and if you think he´s pretty great but didn´t do enough to improve public education or cut Brazil´s cancerous civil service dependent culture then you´re probably a fantastically talented writer on the cusp of literary stardom who writes a blog called Your Life Is An Impossibility.

What he is, undeniably, is a politician who is grippingly in tune with his people. This is a rare thing and not to be underestimated, because it´s what makes Lula great. To the unknowing witness Lula is cheese, or brega. Watching him stomp up and down the stage, sweating and beating his chubby chest with his chubby four fingered hand and shouting about companheiros and companheiras is the public speaking equivalent of listening to Frank Sinatra at Christmas. It gets you in the mood and presses all the right buttons.

Lula talks about being a filho do sertão and the crowd roars approval (I´m a filho do sertão, everyone thinks). Lula talks about o povo brasileiro and the crowd shrieks with delight and applauds wildly (I´m one of the povo brasileiro, everyone thinks). Lula wheels on an urchin from the Coque (notoriously grim Recife favela) Children´s Youth Orchestra and the crowd spontaneously combusts (I could be a child from the Coque Children´s Youth Orchestra, everyone thinks, though they couldn´t).

But what saves Lula from brega overkill is the fact that everyone knows he´s walked the walk – when he bangs on about riding the flatbed truck 2000kms down to São Paulo with Dona Lindu at the wheel you know he really did ride the flatbed truck 2000kms down to São Paulo with Dona Lindu at the wheel, and when he rails about poor Brazilians having cow pats for Christmas dinner you know he really did have cow pats for Christmas dinner. This is what the FHC mob forget – the occasionally admirable Fernando Henrique kicked off many of Lula´s social welfare programmes, but he would never have gone far enough, because as a wealthy Brazilian the poor for FHC remained a squalid, amorphous mass that had to be handled somehow, but without much hope that they could ever be humanised completely.

It´s this, finally, that makes Lula, for this writer at least, one of the great public speakers of our times, up there with such estimable company as Hitler, Stalin, Martin Luther King and Paisley. It´s the thrilling realness of it all, the knowledge that you are watching one of the few politicians who, whatever his faults, really gives a monkey´s toenail about any of it.

He even means it while he´s being as smooth an operator as any New Labour spin doctor, playing the it´s all the paises ricos’ fault card for the twentieth time tonight (guaranteed to get the goat of any gringo not from a pais rico (rich country)) because he knows it appeals to Brazilians’ them and us mentality and gets the troops on board. There´s no grease anywhere to be seen except in his stubby whorls of brillo pad hair.

And so with apologies for schoolgirl crushes on middle aged Brazilian politicians and with mixed animal metaphors dancing through the brain, it´s homeward bound, and the usual thrilling trawl up Conde Da Boa Vista, one of the few pleasures which have not yet fallen prey to your writer´s current Recife jaundice. At ten o´clock at night this is the kind of Travis Bickle’s New York urban hell that bolsa familia and the like have not really helped (the pittance paid out by such schemes has had more effect in rural areas where starvation was until recently a valid life choice) – the streets are scattered with the cadaverous bodies of the homeless, street children scavenging through rubbish bins, and malandros of every stripe.

But it is life, and you have to live it, and so you wind your way home thinking about stopping of for a palavra or two in one of the seedier bars so you can watch more of it, until you feel bad about wanting to watch more of it, because for the people living it there are, of course, no such cushy life choices to be made.

And so, with not much else to do, it´s onwards, onwards.

Art: Ciranda (1988) by Glênio Bianchetti (Bagê, Rio Grande Do Sul)

NB: For those with appetites whetted for more of the Reverend Ian, I´m happy to suggest this.

2010-12-27T09:51:00.000-08:00

This (now pretentiuous quote free) blog has talked about the Hull librarian’s toad work before, I´m sure of it, though your correspondent has neither the energy nor the inclination to go back and find out where.

Moving to Brazil is one way of driving the fat amphibian off with a pitchfork, and no doubt explains early season gringo euphoria once off the boat and onto dry Brazilian land. Mortgages and oyster cards and career glass ceilings have all been left behind with the charcoal weather and the world seems a brighter, bluer, happier place. Of course you´ll have to work a bit, but it´s only teaching English, which as any gringo* knows isn’t like a real job, and there’s a fair chance that you’ll be free at eleven o’clock some mornings (the holy forbidden fruit grail of every working drone) to wander up and down the street or go to the park or beach or read the paper or just have a nice, entirely power free, nap.

And so life morphs for a while into a kind of pre-lapserian paradise. It´s sunny every day, the beer is cold and the women are warm (being the polar opposite of how you remember it back home) and you don’t work very much. Probably you get paid cash in hand, so you don’t even pay taxes.

The question is whether such daydreaming can sustain, or if the paradise will soon turn out to be a fool’s one. Five years and counting now for this guinea pig, and it feels as though as though nooses are being tightened all around.

The frolicing carefree days of giving the odd English class here and there have been replaced with a fairly hefty workload (up at six every morning and home too late to watch The Big Bang Theory!) and recently when catching myself beating Guinness The Dog over the head with a newspaper it occurred to me that even the earwig stress (toad work´s second cousin) might be becoming an issue.

The muscular real has stomped all over the weakling pound in recent years, so the days of dipping into the savings to splurge a tenner on four or five beers and a kilo or so of prime barbecued picanha are long gone.

Things have accumulated – cars, credit cards, middling expensive rented apartments – meaning that more money must be made to pay for them all and more time spent organising paperwork and queuing in banks.

Sooner or later there will be little Your Life Is An Impossibilities to think about and then will come the big decision of whether to stump up for private health care and schools or whether to hurl them screaming from the parapet into the bedlam of the Brazilian public system.

The realities of the Brazilian market must be confronted, namely that the poor never used to exist as a retail force** so everything fancier than rice and beans is still aimed exclusively at the middle classes, and the middle classes are seemingly happy enough to pay through the nose for anything at all as long as it´s sold at the shopping mall – you´re right sir, it is a very shoddy two seater couch, and even better, it´s only R$1500!

In other words like anywhere else the more you build a life the more you find life has been built on top of you. What is sad about this is that there was a time when this writer wrote the following:

It was at moments like these that The Luck came to me again and as my imagined future with Ana stretched out before me, a small house in a quiet, lower middle-class area like Santa Teresa or Santa Ines, a garden and perhaps a dog, later a scattering of children, I wanted to kneel and pray before it.

and genuinely believed that such a life was possible and was all that anyone needed to be happy, whereas now it seems like it would be a very hard thing to do to reduce my life back down to the level of simplicity and contentment that I once felt and would need to feel again were I try and live in such a way.

So we are left with the holidays to remember what a life sem sapo would be like. And Your Life Is An Impossibility is on holiday now, which means days spent the way days should be spent – a swim at the Salesiano College at 6am, a stroll down to the market to buy bread and cheese, the rest of the morning spent lolling at the beach, two or three good solid hours writing and reading in the afternoon before the evening’s carousing begins. Though of course the saddest thing is that even in the happiness of such days we can already feel the bitter sweet taste of their hurried passing.

*other than this gringo, who has never been so fulfilled and driven (career wise) in his life, honest, boss.

** now changing – today social classes C and D are spending more money than A and B.

2010-12-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

You wanna go where everybody knows your name goes the song in the theme tune to the best show about a bar on TV – though it´s a big fat gringo bar, as we know now, with shiny wooden tables and clean toilets and beer nuts and coasters.

It would be nice if in downtown Recife there was a bar I could go to where everybody knew my name, or even after I´ve told everybody my name they could say it right and not pronunce it JEMIS (that’s two syllables if you’re counting).

There once was such a bar in Brazil, as frequent readers will know – Bar Do Jaime in the bairro of Santo Antonio in far away Belo Horizonte, where Jaime doles out free cachaça to the regulars and calls beers palavras, or words.

Ever since then it’s been harder going. First there was a year in the dry county that is João Pessoa – people drink in Paraiba, but they drink at home or standing outside their cars with the doors open and the stereo saying clownish forro really loud, or sometimes they go and have a little drink at one of the beach bars, but they don’t drink.

People in Recife drink, particularly downtown and out in suburbia. Even As Republicas has its barbecue joints the size of football pitches (with thanks to Peter Robb), and its never hard to find a beer at the beach, only now it comes in cans and as everyone knows beer tastes oddly different and metallic and generally unpleasant in a can.

There isn’t much that is pretty about most of the bars downtown though Bar Central has its xique merits if you don’t mind paying R$7 for a sausage. Really most of the bars downtown are grim little dives – holes in the wall with a fridge and sometimes a reeking toilet, or a shabby kiosk perched on a street corner with a few plastic tables and chairs scattered nearby.

But to complain about the lack of creature comforts would be to miss the point – such places exist so people can drink, and talk, and stare at women walking past, and for that what more do you need than a plastic chair and table and a fridge full of beer?

Cadu's is not Bar Do Jaime, though it has Jaime’s reeking toilet and sticky tables. At Cadu’s the tables spill onto the street, and it is a quiet, shady street, overhung by stooping jaca trees. There are more wild street dogs and more homeless people at Cadu's, for Santo Antonio is a bairro nobre of Belo Horizonte which in itself is a city considerably more nobre (though not half as interesting) as Recife, and Boa Vista is not even a nobre area of Recife, though it used to be.

Most of all, Cadu is not Jaime, for Jaime is small and dapper in a faded way, and charming and eager to please, whereas Cadu is basically a miserable fucker. But the bar is quiet at night and no-one parks their car in front and pounds out the ubsequious and awful forro, and you can sit and read a book and drink a beer or three, and you can even call them palavras if you want, though Cadu won’t know what you’re talking about it.

What is best about Cadu's is that it attracts a dog eared but bohemian crowd, and if you go there alone you can usually attach yourself to a nearby group of bearded students or trade union representatives or university professors, particularly if you are a blog as charming as YLIAI.

It is here that things like this* can happen, whereas things like this almost never happen in As Republicas.

I went to Cadu’s last week for the first time in a long time. I went because it was a holiday and I went because I wanted a drink. I sat and I read a book for a long time and I thought about the 21 year old boy who had thrown himself off the tenth floor balcony of the apartment building behind this one that same day, and I had a little drink and then a boisterous group of people (students and trade union reps and professors perhaps) arrived. So I wandered over and asked if I could sit with them, and they said yes and we sat and talked until three o´clock and then it was time to go home to bed, only just before I left Cadu asked me if he could buy a copy of my book and if I would sign it, because he wanted to put it on the shelf next to the cash register. And I suppose of such small triumphs the part of life that makes things bearable is both made and unmade.

Note: The painting at the beginning of this piece is Seculo XVIII by João Câmara.

* Entry dated 2/5/2008.

2010-12-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

In Recife, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, langourous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.* While Rio burns Pernambuco fiddles with its unmentionables, and it seems that no ill could exist in such a place. Wrong, wrong, wrong, of course: while the death count in our beloved state capital is down 39% in the last two years it’s still enough to make an Iraqi wince.

The vengance wrought by a YMCA-esque trinity of 12,000 policemen, sailors and soldiers in Rio not only brings back sweet memories of a blissful Irish childhood – look Ma there’s a tank in the middle of the street – but also has a biblical air about it which makes one think of religion. Not the my church is better than your church kind of religion but the old fashioned fire and brimstone thou shalt not do this that and the other type of religion. Such foolishness is grist to the mill of the idle mind responsible for this blog and segues nicely into a new series of occasional articles entitled The Ten Brazilian Commandments, with Faustão as Moses/The Voice Of God, Luciano Huck reprising Yul Bryner’s Rameses and Dilma Rouseff as Nefertiti.

Number 1 (adopt Faustão style Voice Of God) - Thou shalt not trust anyone else, ever.

Over in As Republicas YLIAI is struck down by bird/pig/summer flu and the world of Brazilian education must struggle wearily on alone for a few days. No major problem here – a couple of days sweating in bed (the only type of sweating done in this bed for quite some time, more’s the pity) and he´ll be right as a tropical rainstorm. And he is and all is well, and he returns to work the conquering hero, passed from hand to hand over the chanting masses assembled outside the gates.

Only what he doesn’t know of course, is that to get paid for any sickness related absence in Brazil you need a doctor’s note, whether it’s one day off or 365 days off. This is a cultural sticking point – anyone from Norn Iron (or even the weak sister Dirty South) grows up knowing that the best cure for a broken leg is to walk it off, whereas the average Brazilian runs squealing to the hospital when he or she breaks a fingernail.

Independent research (mine) has shown that this puts great strain on an already creaking and underfunded national health service. Further argument – that YLIA knew it was flu, that it would pass in a few days, and that going out in the noon day sun to stand in line at the health centre (afroth with tropical bacteria) might possibly make things worse rather than better – cuts no ice. If you don’t get a doctor’s note, how do I know you’re not lying, runs the logic, because of course: thou shalt not trust anyone else, ever, particularly when one of the parties is employer and the other employee.

It doesn’t take a Melvin Bragg radio programme to work out why – the first employers were our old friends Mr and Mrs Casa Grande, and the first employees their escravos, and the escravos were probably out to half-inch the family silver, and let´s face it, not much has really changed, has it?

This is why supermarket check out girls get any discrepancies deducted from their wages, and why the good burghers of As Republicas live in fear of being robbed by their domestic help. I had my first whiff of this a few months ago when a well-heeled acquaintance offered the loan of the famed Dona Maria one day a fortnight (don’t look so surprised – who would have the time to produce all these literary wonders and clean the bathroom too?). She’s a pessoa da confianca, stage whispered well-heeled acquaintance, accompanied by much raising of eyebrows and covering of mouth with hand, there aren’t many of them around. Or in other words – she’s trustworthy, and that’s hard to find, 'cos most of them are bloody crooks.

It’s not hard to find more examples. Check it first, growl the office managers who pay YLIAI in cash. That´s nice, he thinks, counting the money carefully, they want to make sure it’s right. Only they don’t really, or at least not entirely, they just want to make sure you’ve said it’s right, because then you can’t come back and say it wasn’t later.

Things came to a head recently when Brazilian pin-up Juliana Paes made the news after she signed an autograph and was then invited by her admirer to accompany him down to the local cartorio to have her signature authenticated. She declined, of course, but the fan argued successfully that a signature is worth nothing in Brazil unless it’s authenticated at a government registry office. Our Juliana was forced to get the number 57 bus down to the nearest cartorio to have her signature stamped by a titular councilor seventh grade who had matched it with the copy of the signature that the office had on record.**

So where does it all come from? Can it really be the fault of the sweaty Portuguese and their mustachioed wives all those centuries ago? That’s the theory – everyone started off by robbing everything they could get their hands on, and it’s pretty much continued that way ever since. Throw in a healthy seasoning of masters and servants and the educated rich and the sweaty thieving dishonest masses and there you have it – Brazilian society in a nutshell.

And in closing if religion is to be discussed an honourable mention must go to The Ex-Girlfriend, who recently informed YLIA that she is to become an evangelico, the hardest core of Brazil’s many hardcore churches, whose members must not drink, smoke, wear skimpy clothes or use make-up, listen to rock music or have sex before marriage. This either means that The Ex-Girlfriend has already stamped her first class ticket straight to hell, or she means to renounce her old ways, which will make it a sad day for manufacturerers of figure hugging, organ revealing shorts and tops (BC is the term in these parts, with B meaning beira (border or edge of) and C standing for, well, cu, a rude word that translates roughly as, um, asshole) the world over.

Lastly, following inspiration provided by the state bank number 3 sponsored art exhibition currently touring the capitals of Brazil, the artwork above is Independência, a 1969 work by the late Rio painter Di Cavalcanti.

* With apologies to Richard Ford.

** Not strictly true, this part.

2010-11-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

I hate women who only want bits of me. I offer her the enormous totality of me, and she says yes, I´ll have the conversation bit, and the company bit, but not the bed bit, or even the handsonmybigtits bit. I hate the partial livers, I’m an allornothinger.

So says Albert Angelo, a creation of BS Johnson, who cut holes in his books so that readers could see through to the bits that were coming up, and published The Unfortunates in 27 unbound sections in a box. BS is obviously a hero of this column (and would be even more so if I´d read any of his books other than Christie Malry´s Own Double Entry). Especially when it was discovered in Jonathan Coe´s brilliant biography of the Hammersmith Beckett, Like A Fiery Elephant, that for most of his life, from the time he was a chubby sexless undergraduate through to his years working in the accounts departments of poxy suburban London companies like The Standard Vacuum Oil Company, believed that he was a writer, and a great one at that.

This is as usual nothing very much to do with anything, except that YLIAI can identify strongly. Real life gets in the way of dreams, as Tiririca said, and if you’re not careful you can find your life full of too much real life. YLIAI has been, at various junctures, the following: paper boy, builders’ yard skivvy, shopboy (sweet shop/launderette/greengrocers), distributor of flyers, distributor of illicit substances (details unavailable at time of going to press), obscure government department office lackey, door to door salesman (cleaning products), licker of envelopes, cloakroom boy (nightclub), box office clerk (nightclub), telephone company office lackey, record company tea boy (royalties department), record company high flying pretend lawyer, teacher of English to disinterested Brazilian teenagers. All of these were both awful and wonderful at the same time, though plenty of times the scale tipped way too far over to the former, and only rarely did it land much on the side of the latter.

The writing nonsense probably arrived somewhere in the middle of all that (it was understandably not that much in evidence in the hopes and dreams of a suburban Belfast teenager, for whom cassette based computer games and hitting girls with sticks because they couldn’t play football were far more important), and has dawdled on ever since, despite a stunning lack of commercial success.

It has been tied in a sack and thrown in the river more than a few times, and has been beaten to a pulp by the idiot glamour of London clubs and bars and back stage passes to Stereophonics (I know) shows. But is still there today, hence the awful machinations of this blog and the undiscovered gems (I promise) contained in The Psychological Benefits Of Exercise and to a lesser extent Your Life Is An Impossibility.

This is all rather narcissistic, of course, and so apologies. But there is some relevance to things brasileiro, I swear. It is this - with all this idle reminiscing about the past one cannot help but put one´s life into an overall context, to look for the grand plan, and with mine I cannot help but think there has not been one life but several.

Many will surely say the same, but of course I am not just talking about the ugly duckling into uglier swan transformation of aforementioned unloveable Belfast schoolboy into equally unloveable Manchester based university stooodent. Those two are simply phases of life, and everyone has them.

But not everyone has their period of Madchester cops and robbers nightclub door security based shenanigans (so you sell the tickets on the door, then I´ll get them off the punters at the top of the stairs, then I´ll give them back to you and you sell them again only this time you put the money in your pocket then we divvy it up again at the end of the night), coupled with being involved at the very lowest level of the equally aforementioned illicit substances trade (and YLIAI must stress that his participation never really amounted to more than putting one “friend” in touch with another “friend” and he certainly never got his hands dirty or did anything that was even remotely, um, illegal, officer).

Not everyone either, then goes all Dick Whittington and heads off to London and achieves a modicum (the bare minimum of a modicum, for readers of a recent piece) of success in the tawdry bauble that is the music industry, which is ironic because anyone could, given that all you need is a bit of common sense and a sense of humility that leaves you just short of believing you are Genghis Khan, as said industry is almost entirely bereft of both such qualities (common sense and humility, if anyone got lost in that wordy tangle).

And then, getting up to speed, not everyone decides to jack it all in and move to a ramshackle and often bloodily violent bespeckled jewel of a city in the sometimes parched, sometimes lush, occasionally brutal and depressing, almost always thrilling nordeste of Brazil (artistic licence here, because regular readers will know that before Recife came Belo Horizonte, which is almost none of these things, and after Belo Horizonte came João Pessoa, which is really just bloody awful).

It is Brazil that gives most claim to the theory of having lived more than one life, because this is life now and it is entirely different from life as it was a long time ago, and the memories of life as it was a long time ago are fading fast. Mistakes are made when speaking English – the long time gringo talks of marking a meeting with friends, or says it depends of the weather, and he’ll spell it Brasil and not Brazil even without wanting to. The silence and order of more rigid (and let´s face it, better organised) societies up on the other side of the equator appear odd and repressed, and it seems peculiar that people should care about their friends or colleagues arriving ten or twenty minutes late, because since when is time really that important anyway?

It is only really this – the sense of being torn from the womb of one´s cosy and comfortable motherland and hurled (bumpy landing guaranteed) into the whirl and jumble of an entirely different type of place, where you don´t speak the lingo and everything seems odd and vaguely threatening, that gives one a sense of being in the middle of another life. Phases, or stages, of life – marriage-divorce-motherhood-oldage-death – are a different plate of rice and beans altogether.

So then – not better (at time of writing living in Recife feels like chewing glass, though this is probably a product of work and financially related stress, and spending too much time embroiled in the city’s hellish traffic network), not worse (it’s still sunny, even in the longest traffic jam in the world), but different. Wow. Take that, Einstein.

And to end, a quick tribute to BS Johnson, who as almost nobody knows killed himself in 1973, aged 40:

Now I have met a girl here named Chris who lives in the flat below us, and is My Sort in the natural way of things, we get on in almost everything except religion, and religion unfortunately affects sex from her point of view. In fact it proves an insuperable barrier to everything except kissing and a little gentle ear-chewing, and even this latter is regarded as devillish and will probably be confessed in due time. The rot started the first time we went out, the morning after coming home from a dance at three in the morning. I asked her how she had slept; she replied that she was so tired that she had fallen asleep in the middle of her prayers. I restrained myself, but with an effort, and I had to lean against the wall to stop myself from falling. I can´t remember the last time I knew a girl who said her prayers – wait, yes I can, I was four at the time, and she was three; I think I had just seen through God, and I was annoyed at him for not existing. Anyway, I flatter myself into thinking that Chris is praying for my conversion, though conversion from what I don´t know, since I have no beliefs to be converted from. It´s embarrasing, to say the least, out in the street, for whenever we pass a catholic church she crosses herself; not protestant ones, she says ‘that one’s yours’, whenever we pass one she has not crossed herself for; I, of course, hotly deny ownership. Ah, well. ‘Tis enough to drive one to rape, or something. (From letter to Stuart Crampin, August 6th 1959)

2010-11-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking said Nietzsche (or Justin Bieber), an opinion YLIAI heartily agrees with. And where better to go for an urban walk than downtown Recife on a Saturday night, particularly with the prospect of a palavra or four waiting at the end?

So you go out the door of your apartment and down three flights of stairs, then through the doors of the building and out the gate and into the street, where the church across the road is lit up in shimmering red and green and orange for a wedding. It is a muggy but breezy night and your shirt is already sticking to your back. You turn left on the corner, touching Zita on the arm as you pass the corner beer hut. Zita is setting out the tables that later will be filled with drinkers but still she stops and looks up at you and peers at you through her glasses and she says tudo bom meu filho and you wave and walk on.

You press play and it is Greg Dulli singing tonight tonight I say goodbye to everyone who loves me just as you walk past a policeman going into the strip club slash brothel. Two fat men are trying to light the charcoal of their barbecue stand against the soft warm whip of the wind and across the street on the third floor of the flop house hotel a man is leaning out of his window and smoking and watching everything that is happening down below.

Turining left towards the avenida you pass a strip of bars. Two of them have been plunged into darkness though the drinkers drink on, sloshing down their Skol and their cachaça and laughing in the murky gloam of the light cast by the bigger gaudier barbecue joint on the corner.

Then just behind the shopping center you weave your way through Recife’s very own Sodom and Gomorrah, or Bar Pithausen, where on Saturdays and Sundays the street becomes a Noah’s Ark of adolescent sexual ingenuity – hetrosexual and homosexual and bisexual and trisexual and asexual cavorting merrily until the early hours. It is the same story in Mustang, the big bar on the avenida, though here the gay abandon is diluted by the surliness of the non-sexually liberated and more hardened recifense drinkers.

In the bank all the machines are out so you head down the avenida where the wind has picked up and the buses rattle past and the mendicants and hawkers and scavengers are out in force. The hawkers are selling Barbie dolls and water and pirate DVDs and bus passes and everything in between and the scavengers and the mendicants are eyeing the crowds hungrily for prey. As long as you walk fast and with steely determination you will probably not become a victim.

Everywhere along the avenida tucked into doorways or stretched along ledges or gutters are stick thin homeless people huddled under cardboard and tarpaulin, oblivious to all the people stepping over and around and sometimes on them.

When you get to Sete De Setembro you turn left and walk through the hot dog and the newspaper stands, past the dire pagode clubs and behind the beautiful big white law college building where the palm trees wave their fronds. Then you are at the park where through the fence and in the dark you can see swans, and you zig zag along the bottom side nearest the river and then you turn right and there is the gaggle of bars that you have been looking for.

So you sit down then and rest your legs, and of course there is drink and always, always, something to see happening around you, and just as you sit down there is Greg Dulli again, singing up on the ladder they sing how high does a brother have to climb to touch the light? won´t you take me up there with you you said you would, no-one ever could shake that ladder like i could, which for some reason (maybe it´s the echoes of an old slave refrain, maybe it’s the sense of deperation and regret) seems as fitting an end as anything.

2010-10-25T07:24:00.000-07:00

YLIAI has always been a bare minimum kind of chap. Blessed (if that´s the word) with the bare minimum of charm and brains, he has throughout his life devoted the bare minimum amount of time and effort to study, work and personal betterment, and has, as a result, at the ripe old age of nineteen times two, achieved the bare minimum of prosperity and success.

He’s not complaining. In some way the bare minimum is the only road to follow, as it allows one to devote the maximum time possible to more pleasurable activites than work or study, such as daydreaming, reading, watching bad football teams, and semi-professional drinking, and not feel too bad about it.

But, and contrary to common gringo stereotypes, Brazil is not at all a bare minimum kind of place. Or rather it can be; Faustão only knows that the the country has more (far, far, far more) than its fair share of idling wastrels and vagabonds, a great many of whom inhabit the realms of the Brazilian civil service, but some of whom can even be found in the private sector - on a recent shopping trip YLIAI was somewhat affronted to find, upon asking if there were any books by little known Brazilian authors Machado De Assis or Jorge Amado to be found in the vicinity, shop assistant number 3452 slouching off to the computer to check. YLIAI wouldn’t have minded, but it was a bookshop after all, and the writers in question are pretty much the equivalents of Shakespeare and Parsons* in the Brazilian literary world. It was a bit like going into a fish shop and asking if they had any fish, and your helpful assistant of choice running off to ask.

Fans of non-sequitors will find themselves in very heaven – shop or bank or restaurant dialogues along the lines of do you have any cheese/bread/coffee/rat poison – no – do you know when you might be getting some in – no – oh – can i help you with anything else sir are more common than fruit flies.

So far, so standard Latin American amanha and siesta prejudice. But it’s not half the story, particularly amongst the young. From the study drones of As Republicas heading off to the (free, ironically) federal university to do law or medicine or eningeering, to the hundreds of thousands of lower middle class and working class worker ants doing nursing or business administration degrees at often shoddy private (and paid for, ironically) universities downtown and in the suburbs, sometimes it seems like all of Recife is hitting the books.

YLIAI doesn’t have much interest in the former, who are really only oiling the wheels of the conveyer belt to success. But what has always brought a moistness to his eyes is the sight of the bus stops of Boa Vista at ten o´clock on another steam bath of a recifense night, packed to the gills with nineteen to twenty-five year olds on their way home to Caxanga or Rio Doce or Muribeca. All have been working all day and then have been in class from six or seven to ten. Behind the high-fives and the hugs on the bus all look as knackered as Chilean miners.

It is the same with the garçons (the waiters – and what a disappointment to find there were to be no waitresses in class - waiting tables is an almost exclusively male affair in Brazil) that YLIAI teaches at a swanky seafood restaurant in As Republicas. All knock off at around one and wait for the night bus to take them to the palace of earthly delights that is Cais Da Santa Rita, where they will wait until two for another bus to take them home (all invariably live in some of Recife’s grimiest and most remote neighbourhoods). They will probably get to bed at around three, and then are up again in the watery early light (six thirty or seven) in order to make it back to the restaurant for English class.

All this is done in the hope of a better future and a better life, and all of it makes the heart swell with admiration. YLIAI should know how hard it is – in a previous incarnation he attempted to combine the responsibilities of high-flying-pretend-music-industry-lawyer-by-day with dedicated-law-student-by-night. He lasted about six months, whereupon the road forked and he ended up in Brazil and a life of quietly pleasant boozy mediocrity. Not that he’s complaining, you understand.

* See post dated 26/3/08

2010-10-18T17:21:00.000-07:00

Even after all this time (five years certainly feels like a long time) one can find new perspectives on Brazil, or at least fresh reminders of perspectives once known and now forgotten.

These fresh vistas and reminders can be found in the strangest of places. As regular readers will know YLIAI works at a private language center in As Republicas, where he is fortunate enough to receive, on a regular basis, refreshing insights into politics, socialism and the liberal arts from colleagues and students alike. Private language centers in Brazil, occasionally and dubiously referred to as schools, are the 21st century equivalent of Australia´s penal colonies – unfortunate gringoes are shipped to Brazil in their hundreds to do penance for the sins of the past, and while the work is not as arduous as rock breaking it is only occasionally any more interesting.

The CDs used in the classroom provide a not entirely welcome reminder of how things work in the Old World (most specifically the part around London). There are people discussing what restaurant to go to (“what do you fancy dear? Oh, I’m not sure, I’m quite in the mood for a chinese”), people talking about a film they watched the night before (“the acting was quite good – Tom Cruise was in it. Oh, I do like him”!), people ruminating on their most passionate, most hidden desires (“I went out with Tom on Saturday. Oh, I like Tom. Me too. We had a really nice time”).

All of the conversations are oddly stilted and quaintly coy, which you might put down to the fact that English grammar book publishers probably don´t spend that much on the actors they use on their CDs. You would only think this, of course, if you didn’t know that this is how people really speak in certain parts of the outside (many Brazilians like to refer to the rest of the world that isn´t Brazil as a fora, or the outside, which is all very Isaac Asimov).

YLIAI’s favourite CD involves a phone call between a woman working in Milan and her friend back in London. Said friend has decided to give up his college course and move to Italy. The whole set-up, needless to say, crackles with latent sexual tension. If I do come, friend asks, can I stay at your place for a while? That´s easier said than done, says our heroine, you haven´t seen the size of my flat, and anyway I share with another girl, so I’ll have to ask her. Stick it up your jacksy, in other words. Pandemonium in the Brazilian classroom. Que mulher chata, né professor, opine the little scamps, quickly followed by cries of que amiga ruim. Yes, I say, what an annoying woman, what a terrible friend. There is considerable confusion while everyone debates why the woman won´t let friend sleep on her floor. Maybe she’s his ex and she put the horns on him, is one very nordestino interpretation. Maybe she´s a big shoe, is another, though quite why the woman’s being a lesbyterian or not would make any difference is not explained. Finally we have a winner. It’s because they´re gringoes, and gringoes are like that, says someone, which, while not always being true, seems in this case as good an answer as any. Gold stars for everyone!

Moving away from the classroom, we might turn to the world of books are great innit. Re-reading a bit of ol’ Dostoevsky, YLIAI is struck by the thought that all Brazilian society might be explained by a quick delve through Russian literature.

Gogol´s Dead Souls is an obvious opener, for what could be more poltico Brasileiro than a story about the buying and selling of the souls of dead serfs as a tax scam? The latifundiarios might have done the same thing if they’d had their wits about them, and you can run the same wheeze all the way up to the present day and Fernando and Rosane Collor´s imaginary water trucks not taking imaginary water (all not imaginarily paid for with public money) to the definitely not imaginary thirsty masses in the sertão.

The titular councillors and other elements of oficialdom so beloved of Gogol and Dostoevsky and the rest (and that was how he became Akaky Akakievich. The child was christened and during the ceremony he burst into tears and made such a face it was plain that he knew there and then that he was fated to be a titular councillor...subsequently everyone came to believe that he had come into this world already equipped for his job, complete with uniform and bald patch) are simply the Brazilian funcionario publicos transplated to another age, though the former are thrusting bull market entrepeneurs or manic dot.com pioneers compared to the latter.

And there might even be a little of Raskolnikov´s Napoleon complex in every drug overlord up on the morro. YLIAI hopes so, for the sake of the sanity of all involved, because that would at least be one way of rationalising, if not justifying, the taking of life on such a fantastic scale.

So far, so pseudo-pretentious. But really none of this is any use at all when it comes to analysing the differences between Brazil and Not-Brazil. What we need is a virgin traveller from a fora, apple of cheek and shiny of eye. Into which breach steps YLIAI´s sister, urban sofisticate of the thrumming metropolis of Dundrum, County Down, Norn Iron, and recently departed from these shores following a rollicking two week mini-break in Recife.

In her way YLIAI´s sister is as much an anthropolgist as Lévi-Strauss or Gilberto Freyre, even if the literary or scientific merit of her chosen medium, the postcard, is not always widely acknowledged. Dear Auntie Ivy, she writes, having a lovely time in Brazil. Weather nice but a bit hot. People are very friendly. Food not bad. See you soon.

And is there really anything more that needs to be said?

2010-10-03T17:45:00.000-07:00

A whirl and flurry of activity has descended on Recife – roads are being torn up and relaid, praças given a bit of a tidy up, a fresh lick of paint on the odd council building here and there. All of which must mean it’s election time again, and the incumbents (gubernatorial downwards) are showing just how hard they’re trying – look, your tax dollars at work!

It also means a constant rodizio of campaign vans, bikes and helicopters (ok – I made the helicopters up), blaring out an endless stream of sloganeering jingles (at local level in Brazil policy is hardly mentioned and your best chance of winning is The Three C’s – a catchy name, a catchy candidate number and a catchy song).

The comedic aspects of Brazilian electioneering are manna to the average gringo blog writer and Your Life Is An Impossibility is no different. This blog’s favourite hopeful is Edmar De Oliveira (3131), who has staked his chances on getting to the Casa Civil entirely on the pena da morte (death penalty) card. His jingle is a winning adaptation of Tropa De Elite by São Paulo alternative rock band Tihuana – Edmar De Oliveira, he´s as stubborn as a bull, you raped and murdered so now you´re gonna get it too, Edmar De Olvieira, he´s got the courage, you´ve got the vote. And so on.

The song originally became famous in Brazil when it was used as the theme music to the film of the same name, though it doesn’t really have much to do with police death squads and the like. Unfortunately YLIAI couldn´t find much information about Tihuana’s views on the death penalty. Boasting as they do the requisite goatee and skater pants alternative rock look, however, means it’s worth a bet that they might not be Old Sparky’s biggest fans. When it boils down to it, though, who cares about Tihuana? They only wrote the song, after all, and intellectual copyright in Brazil is the legal equivalent of the Loch Ness monster – there have been rumoured sightings but no-one really believes it exists.

YLIAI first came across Edmar a few weeks ago, when his entourage decided to use the Colegio Salesiano car park as a meeting-up point for a pre-election roll around the city (one wonders what the priests thought of it all). There were enough blacked out HUVs to make P Diddy blanch, and standing around between the cars smoking were scrums of hulking security guard types in berets and dark glasses (wonderfully capturing that oh so difficult hard but camp look previously perfected only by Nazi prison guards (leather boots, tight pants, choir-boy complexions) and 1980s and 90s UVF marchers (sunglasses, muscle tops, big moustaches).

After a few minutes cigarettes were hurled violently to the ground and crushed under heels. Engines were revved and Edmar’s tune echoed around the neighbourhood. YLIAI felt a bit scared.

Who knows if Edmar will win or not? He probably has as good a chance as any of the other jokers (sorry, candidates) running for deputado federal. The Three Cs are all in place and his would-be terrifying entourage is certainly visible and memorable. Even better, he seems to only have one policy, which means he can’t get caught out on any tricky idiosyncracies like Marina Silva, everyone´s favourite third wheel, who gets top marks for liking trees and education but null point for not liking homosexuals very much.

And with the death penalty schtick he´s tapping into a pretty chunky percentile – half the country, it seems, is addicted to schock (and shlock) gonzo TV shows such as Bronca Pesada, a true Shakespearean bloodbath for the age, involving footage of the corpses of murder victims lying in the street interspersed by ranting man-on-the-Jordão-Baixo-onibus Cardinot shouting into the camera about how can these animals be allowed to get away with it! Because it´s Brazil, and in Brazil impunity is king!

Furthermore a recent straw poll of as many as five teenage boys* from As Republicas revealed that 100% of respondents supported life imprisonment or the death penalty for those found guilty of any crime whatsoever, including pick-pocketing. At least race wasn´t an issue – our survey revealed that respondents said race didn´t matter at all, as all criminals are black and brown anyway.

So forget wishy-washy time wasters such as Dilma or Serra**, and step aside limp-wristed pinkos like Marcelo D2 (‘o estado não tem o direito de matar ninguem’). Edmar is on his way.

* YLIA knows that you can't really take teenage boys' opinions seriously. But it fitted in well with the argument, so.

**José must have known from the outset that he was going to get whup assed – he was the only one of the three main presidential candidates to be referred to only by his last name, making him a cold fish by default (he is anyway) and not all warm and cuddly like Marina and Dilma. This, it might be pointed out, is perhaps the only time anywhere that the words "warm and cuddly" and "Dilma" will appear in the same sentence.

2010-09-21T05:51:00.001-07:00

Spring has sprung and summer is almost upon Recife, and everywhere you go (or at least the greener parts, or at least away from the canal) the scent of bougainvillea and jasmine hangs heavy in the air. Despite the distance and the differences in seasons September remains a time for renewal – back home it was autumn’s new school jotters and a crisp bite to the air, in the nordeste of Brazil it is the balmy thud of summer's arrival and the promise of nine months or so of obligatory evening boozing to ease the night sweats, the occasional weekend spent idly lollying on the beach, and trying to avoid going outside between 10am and 3pm because it’s too bloody hot. But it is a kind of renewal all the same. And with renewal comes fresh inspiration, and fresh inspiration comes today at 6am while crawling lazy laps of the Salesiano college pool.

And so with aplogies to Christian Lander, Your Life Is An Impossibility is proud to present the first in a series of, well, at least two or three, entitled Stuff That Folk From As Republicas Like.

Stuff That Folk From As Republicas Like – Number 1: Disney

Folk From As Republicas (FFAR(s) - pronounced fif-far) love Disney like tea loves biscuits. For FFARs, Orlando, Florida is the Thebes, the Athens, the Constantinople of the dwindling twilight of the 20th century and the watery daybreak of the 21st. Ask a FFAR teenager what´s his favourite city in the world – he´ll tell you Orlando. And why not? Orlando is where FFAR families go to stock up on I-pods and I-phones and Playstation 3s (all of which cost the equivalent of a small apartment in Recife) and designer label t-shirts emblazoned with slogans written in English that no-one back home will be able to understand. Orlando is where mum and dad can sit back and see for themselves the results of all those hours of private English classes they´ve paid for (and for which Your Life Is An Impossibility must admit to having blood on his hands). Orlando is clean and organised and safe (at least compared to Recife). Most of all, Orlando is close to Disney.

But while Orlando and Disney are great with the family, the whole experience only really makes sense if you´re a bright of tooth, flawless of skin FFAR teenager, lucky enough to be booked sem mae e pai on a Disney package holiday. The whole thing starts months in advance with a big party or two for all the lucky viajantes at one of Recife´s hottest nightspots – usually Nox (it’s a matinee, under-age affair, so coke and crisps only). Here you can see your friends, get a free Disney t-shirt and talk about how great it´s going to be when you finally get there. The toniest parties even boast an appearance by a (to be named later) TV Globo soap opera (B-list) superstar! Caralho meu irmão!

Then comes the big day. Pockets stuffed with wads of dollars, little Eduarda and Eduardo board the Disney Express jet, ready to broaden the mind, learn about new cultures, experience life on the crazy highway of independent travel, and shake the hand of a man (or woman) dressed as Mickey Mouse.

There´s nothing wrong with it, I suppose, and I know if I was a 16 year old FFAR I probably couldn´t imagine anything more exciting than two weeks of illicit underage drinking and attempted mucky-touching with the recifense equivalent of Sharon Blenkinsop from the lower sixth. But Your Life Is An Impossibility is by now far too old and bitter for such carryings-on, so.

And so let them have their fun, Your Life Is An Impossibility says. For surely only the most bah humbug of churls would suggest that for the money spent on those two weeks, the FFARs could just as easily go to Patagonia or New Orleans, Barcelona or Cairo, London or Lesotho. In all of these places they might just learn something that would dent their unshakeable FFAR confidence and lead them to question a little more the world around them. Which might be, you know, nice. Though maybe I´m wrong - maybe Goofy is more the philosopher than we thought.

* For newer readers, As Republicas is taken to mean As Republicas Independentes De *** ******, which could in turn be taken to be a well-heeled beach front neighbourhood in the south of the city. For legal reasons, of course, it must be pointed out that such a neighbourhood is definitely not Boa Viagem, and any resemblance to such is coincidental and probably entirely in the mind of the reader.

2010-09-16T06:08:00.000-07:00

It is a galling moment for someone who has spent a considerable length of time waging subtle war on As Republicas and their ilk. Your Life Is An Impossibility is outside Arruda, waiting for a bus which will take him over 1,000 kms to Sobral in Ceará to watch a football match. On the way to the meeting point YLIAI bumps into Nel, a comandante of the Inferno Coral. YLIAI knows Nel quite well, from bars and football matches, and once conducted a very amateurish but very enjoyable interview with him and a few Inferno chums.

Nel seems pleased. Vai viajar, he asks, and YLIAI tells him of course he's going to viajar. It is hard to imagine why else one would be outside Arruda on a Saturday afternoon with a backpack when there is no game that day. What bus are you on? Did you buy a ticket yet? Why don´t you come with us? YLIAI is relieved to tell him he has already secured a ticket for another bus – not that there´s anything wrong with the Inferno bus, but there comes a time when one is a bit too old and tired, not to mention too gringo, for such fun and games.

Then his chum, who we might call Derek, pipes up. Of course he won´t come with us, look at him, he´s a playboy. He´s got an apartment face! An apartment face! What can it mean? It means of course that YLIAI looks like he lives in an apartment, which subsequently means he's middle or upper middle class or even, gulp, rich, as opposed to living in a small house in Ibura or Casa Amarela, which would be the stamp of working class authenticity. It´s true, YLIAI admits, I live in an apartment. Ha, says Derek, I knew it. Look at his playboy face!

Nel stumbles rather than leaps to YLIAI's defence. He´s one of us, he says (YLIAI isn't, though sometimes he thinks he´d like to be – it looks like a lot of fun), he´s quite humble (clearly YLIAI's lower middle class gringo masquerading as working class Brazilian schtick has been effective). But Derek is unconvinced and continues to crow. Then Tom Wolfe´s little Irish donkey kicks in and YLIAI sees red. I´m a gringo, knobcheese, he rashly shouts, what kind of face do you think I should have? Am I going to have plastic surgery so I can look like I´m a See You Next Tuesday from Ibura like you? Derek’s face clouds over. He does not look happy. Nel ushers him away.

It is the start of another foolish and ridiculously long journey to an unappealing destination across miles and miles of arid desert. The first of these was from Belo Horizonte to Salvador (48 hours there and back) with The Ex-Girlfriend (still living in Recife and alarmingly single these days). Then there was Belo Horizonte to João Pessoa to start a new life (52 hours there, with no back, more's the pity) – which didn´t really go very well at all, given that João Pessoa is an elephant´s graveyard of a town where people go to retire if not to die a happy death. Then there was Recife to São Luis and then on to Belém in search of, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of skirt (40 hours (or more) there and 40 hours back). And now there is Recife to Sobral (34 hours there and back) to watch a game of football.

All such journeys are dizzyingly exciting at the outset and occasionally intoxicating during – ghostly truck stops in towns lost amidst thousands of miles of desert covered by blankets of stars and endless tropical night. Huddled villages clustered along the roadside where, again, lives impossible to imagine are being lived – glowing yellow lights shining out from tiny windows and from under rough wooden doors, children playing in the dirt along the side of the road, adults staring glumly out at the bus roaring past.

All are thrilling but exhausting and confusing to the mind – hours of driving in the dark across some of the worst roads outside Somalia make it hard to remember the hour, let alone the day. The mind warps and the belly revolts – seven coxinhas are no replacement for a proper dinner. On the outward journey Paul Auster´s tedious Invisible is read, on the way back, drained by the outward journey and drinking and defeat, YLIAI gets fifty or so pages into Conrad´s The Secret Agent. Both, good or bad, save his mind if not his life.

For it is a funny bunch on the bus – none of the sparky wit of the younger crowd that went to watch Santa in Maceió or Campina Grande. This is a dull, mouthy, middle-aged lot who clearly spend far too much time travelling much too far to watch Santa Cruz lose football games. Ciro (precocious and only reasonably reprehensible star striker of Santa´s arch-rivals Sport) says he´s depressed, opines one passenger, which just goes to show he´s a fag. Only fags get depressed.

YLIAI's seat partner refers to him as the gringo for the entire thirty four hour journey, which gets a little wearing. He only stops when YLIAI starts calling him paraibano, which is about the worst thing you can say to a pernambucano. Later, he starts telling YLIAI how the planes that hit the World Trade Center were well targeted, which shows two things (a) that he´s an idiot, and (b) that Brazilian anti-American feeling runs deep in plenty of places.

One of the drivers, no doubt (un)happily married, has brought a scantily dressed young friend with him to play I-Spy and sing Ten Green Bottles and generally while away the time in a more pleasant fashion. The womenfolk on the bus are not impressed. He´d better get us there quick, because if he doesn´t I´ll call his boss and tell him about the little piriguete he´s brought with him! And I´ll find his wife and tell her too! I hope she cuts his balls off! shrieks the one behind YLIAI, just as he is dozing into restful sleep.

Other than that there are the truck stops, shared with the Inferno - we are travelling in convoy - and at every stop everyone gets out to eat and drink and smoke and piss and sing songs. YLIAI is wondrously asked to tell his (footballing) life story to Brazilian national (footballing) television*. We roll through the spooky prehistoric sertão of Rio Grande Do Norte, and see the sun rising above the hills of Ceará, and finally we reach our miserable, baking destination, Sobral, where everything goes wrong and then it is back again, the mind narrower rather than broader, despite all the travel. Maybe Xavier De Maistre, author of A Journey Around My Room, had the right idea.

* Link available on request, though I can assure you it´s not worth the effort.

2010-09-05T06:35:00.000-07:00

A momentous week in Brazil – it is Independence Day on Tuesday and today marks the publication of the 100th article/entry/bit of nonsense on Your Life Is An Impossibility. Anyone who leaves a nice comment wins a Your Life Is An Impossibility pen and t-shirt pack, though you´ll have to come to Recife and get it.

I had thought to write something else this week but then sometimes days of national celebration give pause and make us look inward and back and so I thought I would jot down a few scribblings about the last five years and what Brazil has come to mean to me.

We might start with the cast. To name just a few: The Ex-Girlfriend, Celine, The Louth Media Mafia, Antonio Conselheiro, Mr X, The Argument, Inferno Coral, Joãos 1+2, Mother Sururu aka A Gata Do Bairro, Miss São Luis, Guinness The Dog, and of special importance today of all days (see http://www.seeadarkness.blogspot.com/ for further information) Brasão. All (with the exception of Celine, who is Canadian, The Louth Media Mafia, who is from Louth, and Mr X, who doesn´t exist) are people the like of which I would never have met had I not flung drunken half-baked chat up lines in the direction of a decidedly non-plussed Brazilian girl on a late night train from London Victoria to Beckenham about six years ago. All have made my life richer and all have taught me things (especially Guinness The Dog) I would not otherwise have learnt.

And that is what I give thanks for today and every other day (or at least when I remember). Brazil made me intelligent, said Fernand Braudel, and Brazil has made me intelligent, and more patient, and more open and considerate and even caring.

Compare and contrast - (1) during large chunks of my time in Brazil I have given up quite a lot of my time to voluntary work in poor neighbourhoods. In London I worked for Ministry of Sound (2) in Brazil I no longer get too worked up about long queues and things not always working the way they should. In London I once threw a shoe at a London Underground employee because the tube I was waiting for was delayed and wouldn´t arrive for about 9 minutes* (3) in Brazil my objective is to work as little as humanly possible so as to have more time to write, and I am quite happy for my standard of living to suffer as a result. In London I once spent more than a year campaigning for my job title to be changed from Business Affairs Assistant to Business Affairs Manager, and I once bid more than the asking price for an apartment because I was an acolyte of Ministry of Sound´s demonic and despotic leader James Palumbo, and Palumbo and Ministry´s business strategy was called Total War and involved paying over the odds for everything in order to blow the competition out of the water.

I have thought about things here that I would never have thought about had I continued my happy enough but emotionally and intellectually limited life at home – history, social inequality, politics and corruption, justice and policing, racism and prejudice.

I have seen things I would never have seen – great bursts of verdant tropical undergrowth bursting between derelict buildings, a million stars in a velvet South American night sky, the earth stretching to a horizon so far away that it is impossible to imagine – and heard things I would never have heard – hundreds of crickets chirping as soft evening melts into night, church bells chiming in front of my window, ten thousand young people singing songs from their grandparents´ time during carnaval, hissing pounding drums at football stadiums, the voice of Milton Nascimento and the songs of Chico Buarque.

Brazil, oddly for a country where there is so much that is wrong, has come to represent everything that is right. There are many foolish laws but not many recently passed laws have been foolish – when the government banned humorous attacks on presidential candidates recently it was a shock because it did not seem a very Brazilian thing to do.

Now when I read The Economist (have I mentioned that I read The Economist?) I read about what Brazil has done to reduce poverty while in the UK section there are arguments about how people´s rubbish should be divided up and incomprehensible marketing/political vocabulary such as “Big Society”, whatever that might be. Brazil is a country where things are markedly becoming better where other countries seem staid and bored and with not much left to think about anymore.

Brazil has taught me that it is nice to talk to people (though it is less nice to talk to people from As Republicas) at bus stops and on street corners, whereas in London I would cross my fingers and toes that the seat next to me on the bus would remain vacant until I reached home. Brazil has made me envious that I am not Brazilian in that I am not really friends with my cousins (with one honourable Canadian exception) and there are not regularly seven or eight people at my house for Sunday dinner, even though I would hate this, but I would hate it because I am not Brazilian, and if I was Brazilian I would like it.

Brazil has shown me hospitality and generosity that has made my eyes water and my heart swell. Brazil has shown me that there is beauty in the ugliest places and happiness where people have least reason to be happy.

And so it is Sunday and I wake today before six and the sun is shining and the sky is an endless blue. I take Guinness The Dog to the beach and throw a ball for her to chase. There are palm trees waving spindly fingers and a few lonely joggers and women setting out deck chairs at the beach bars. Then I go home and make pineapple juice and scrambled eggs and listen to Chico Buarque De Holanda**. Now I am writing this and in a couple of hours I will have lunch with The Argument and then I will catch a bus to Arruda where I will join a raucous throng of 50,000 or more to watch Santa Cruz play a football game in the bottom division of the Brazilian championship. I will meet some friends there and we will drink too much cold beer in little glasses by the side of the rotting canal. We will feel the sun on our backs as we drink and there will be fireworks and car stereos blaring and grilled meat on spits. After the game I will catch the bus home and maybe have a last drink in Cadu´s or somewhere like that and I will think about the day and then I will go home to bed.

* A note to new readers – every entry on Your Life Is An Impossibility will contain at least one example of artistic licence. But while I might not have thrown a shoe, I did get very cross indeed. Nowadays if a bus or other form of public transport arrives or leaves only nine minutes late I am deeply grateful and give a short prayer of thanks to Brasão.

** I know this sounds like I´m laying it on a bit thick, and I don´t really listen to Chico Buarque very much, but a sunny Sunday morning is the perfect time to listen to Chico Buarque or Elis Regina or João Gilberto, so.

2010-08-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

I go out drinking with the Louth Media Mafia and The Pampas Goat and as is the way of things deadlines slide past and I am left with two options home – a R$25 taxi ride or one bus and then another via the storied Cais De Santa Rita. Like any right thinking wastrel/scribe/human being I choose the latter and so I wander off towards the bus stop thinking I will catch an empty late night bus home.

Only the bus when it comes bears the fruit of Recife´s other rush hour – that of the waiters and the pot cleaners and the floor scrubbers of the city´s (or As Republicas) better restaurants. It is packed and it is very loud because everyone is talking to one another which is remarkable in itself because they are all getting off twelve or fourteen hour shifts. I am immediately aware that I am the only person on the bus who is not like the other people on the bus.

There are no women because Recife´s restaurant staff are almost exclusively male (women deemed perhaps too susceptible a prey to the machisto clientele) but the chatter rolls on undaunted. The men themselves are a mixture – ugly and beautiful and fat and thin and young and old. All of them are wearing plastic sandals and sleeveless shirts and most of them are wearing baseball caps. I am both sadly and happily acquainted with lives such as theirs – happily because they are good lives to know and be a part of, sadly because they should be better than they are.

They are travelling miles to small houses on unpaved streets in distant neighbourhoods such as Sitio Novo and Janga and Agua Fria and Chão De Estrelas where they will creep into tiny living rooms and then on to bedrooms where the stale breath of wives and girlfriends and children hangs sweet and heavy. It is a life that I once considered I could be part of and who is to say that I could not or if I would be more or less happy than I am today. It is also a heroic life because these are men who work to buy clothes and food for their families and not much else and it makes me feel heroic (but also, with my relatively pampered life, slightly false) to be close to them.

The bus stops in front of the Cais which is or are being redeveloped so there are red plastic fences everywhere and great holes in the pavement and the street and it is even more chaotic than usual. Across the river is the Paço Alfandega shopping center where a t-shirt might cost R$400 which is most of a month´s salary for most of the people getting off the bus.

I wait for another bus which at two o’clock comes and it races through the downtown streets and over another bridge with the black water glittering underneath. Then we are on Conde Da Boa Vista and caught in this reverie I almost miss my stop and only at the last minute do I manage to pull myself up and ring the bell. The bus stops and I get off and wander home through the beautiful and amazing streets of Boa Vista which are amazing because they are neither the streets where my fellow passengers boarded the bus nor the streets to where they are going to, but are instead the streets where I live.

2010-08-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

It is Sunday and it is odd to be out in the spectral Recife dawn – at the taxi rank beery cab drivers hoot obscenities at a pair of drag queens traipsing their way to home or somewhere better and a gaggle of hardcore drinkers stare morosely at the pavement in front of Zita´s. I am old enough now for the thought of approaching the dawn from their side - the nighthawk side - to no longer appeal much and I am happy enough to be up and about and to feel reasonably at peace with the world.

The reason for all this early morning activity is that later on today Santa Cruz will play a very important game four hours or so south of here and I am going to the game and in an hour or so I must be outside Arruda where I will board a supporter´s coach with a group of people (men, mostly) I do not know. The Argument has wisely declined my invitation to spend a romantic Sunday with the Inferno Coral. And while I know that I have promised not to write any more about football on these pages this story is about the journey, not the game, so please, quiet at the back.

It is not always very Brazilian to do things on your own. The unloveable tools of my (paying) trade – English grammar books – occasionally make the mistake of suggesting student conversation topics along the lines of do you prefer to spend time alone or with other people. This provides the cue for amateur night at the local church theatre where auditions for “terror-struck victim” are in session. Mouths hang agape, eyes widen and bulge, hands are raked through hair. Practising English is no longer an option - the very idea of going to the cinema or a bar or restaurant on one´s own is just too horrendous to contemplate.

But there is a good side to all this emotional dependency. I manage to get through about half an hour as lonely as a cloud until the bus breaks down somewhere near the Wheel Of Fire favela (we are about 20 minutes into the journey and still in Recife) and I have no choice but to engage my neighbours in conversation while we wait for another bus.* Once I do that within minutes I have been invited to be best man at the wedding of the chap behind me, to be godfather to the newborn son of the chap beside me, and to marry the minxish 19 year old daughter of the chap in front of me (she goes like the clappers, he almost says but doesn´t), the last of which would seem to be the more pleasureable of the three duties. Whatever happens the five of us (six including Lolita) will eat and drink and frolic and carouse the streets of Maceio until the early hours, or at least until the bus leaves again which will be at about seven o´clock. All of this is not something that easily happens in chillier climes.

Then the second bus turns up (or rather doesn´t turn up – we must stomp along the margins of the BR101 for twenty minutes before we find it) and we are on our way. Turn the music on, someone shouts, and three men jump up and try to crank up the DVD and the TV. This proves more difficult than you would think. Every time there is some progress – someone manages to turn the TV on, or the red standby light comes on on the DVD – there is riotous applause.

Brazilians love music as much as they love rice and beans and they love rice and beans a lot. Just the week before I had watched the Libertadores final in a bar near home. There had been a forró CD playing. The waiter turned the sound down on the stereo and the volume up on the TV. What the hell do you think you´re doing, a woman with a tattoo on her shoulder demanded. The waiter explained that people wanted to watch the game and that he would turn the music back on afterwards. The woman was flabbergasted. No music? In a bar? Long after the game had started I looked over at her. She sat disconsolate, every so often giving a troubled, unbelieving shake of the head.

And then – and this has nothing much to do with anything – I had a very interesting conversation about music with a friend of mine who we might call Steffi because she loves tennis. We are looking at one of the unloved tools I mentioned earlier and the book is asking Steffi which she thinks is the more difficult and admirable profession to dedicate one´s life to. The choices are scientist, musician, dancer, or athlete. Scientist, says Steffi, because the Brazilian government doesn´t invest enough money in science. Anyone can be a musician – just look at the bands that are famous today. And it´s true. While huge groups of Brazilians love to jig about to such witless toss as Aviões Do Forró (The Forró Planes), and Garota Safada (Naughty Girl, led by the Ziggy era Bowie of the age, Naughty Wesley), and Calcinha Preta (Black Underwear), no-one really gives much of a monkey’s as to who is who, or really holds them up as being artists. Music is music, it´s not hard to do, everyone does it, and no-one makes even that much money out of it (piracy is rampant so most of the money comes from touring).

It´s all a far cry from the days when demi-gods like Chico and Caetano and Gilberto and Milton and the rest strode the land, and it´s even different from places like the First World (tm), where clueless pop stars achieve such levels of fame as to remove themselves entirely from the common herd. Here pimple brained Wesley might be famous, but he´s not that different from the pimple brain who parks his car in front of Zita´s every night and blasts forth Wesley´s obras primas from a set of twelve storey speaker stacks.

When it comes to art (music and films mainly) Brazilians generally speaking have not yet developed the cynicism that other places have (some might say thankfully) and so if the song is alright, and you can dance to it, then that´s pretty much all that matters. It´s a love of music in the general rather than the specific sense. All this in some way goes to justify the truly dreadful cacophony that will issue forth from the coach´s speakers over the next four hours, once they get the DVD player working.

And then in grey slicks of rain we roll out through Recife´s hideous industrial outskirts and then further out into the interior. It´s a strange interior this one – heading south towards Maceió rather than west into the more storied sertão. In the rain everything seems more miserable than it might do in the sunshine. Men sit gloomily in village bars staring out at the rain as toddlers skip over puddles of mud. Teenage (or pre-teenage) girls in skimpy clothes promenade half-heartedly in front of disinterested boys. It is a life the living of which is hard to imagine.

The poverty is terrible in places – on the edge of the sprawling fields are clutches of mud hovels where the sugar cane cutters and their families are staying or perhaps even living. Many of the houses have been destroyed by wind and rain and the residents are throwing more mud at the walls to strengthen their defences. This is the kind of rural poverty that has been stayed at least but not much improved by the government´s social welfare programmes – nobody dies of hunger anymore, but life is still pretty miserable and there is no chance of it getting much better.

It´s not the fault of the social welfare programmes themselves of course, which by and large do what they are supposed to do. It may be that there is no real solution to lives like these – a life eked out in backbreaking, unprotected, manual labour, earning barely enough to live on – other than huge investment and the attraction of new business to these areas, massive land reform, or everyone moving to the cities. The first two are a long way off and as for the last the cities are pretty crowded as it is.

We drive through the town of Palmares, wrecked by the recent floods in which over a hundred thousand people lost their homes. The town is astonishing – a river of mud crawls sluggishly down the main drag, and upon closer inspection the buildings are simply façades – everything from the front door backwards has slid into the river. The flood water has gathered up mountains of trash and shit and spread it, as unpretty as two day old snow, over the town. Broken, abandoned things – bicycles, chairs, hatstands, lie everywhere and lost, gollum like figures creep from alley to alley. The people on the bus are amazed – everyone crowds to the window and photos are taken, which just goes to show that even poverty has a heirarchy – none of these people are rich at all and many live in relatively impoverished neighbourhoods in Recife. But they have never seen anything like this.

And we drive on, bumping across the terrible roads. Towards Maceio the skies clear and the rain stops and the roads get better and we pass other cars and buses bearing Santa Cruz flags and badges (around 4,000 people are making the same journey). And then we are there, and the music is turned off and people begin to clap their hands and sing football songs, and we are off the bus and into the soft balmy air of Maceio on a Sunday afternoon.

* Brazil´s interstate buses are by and large as safe and as comfy as travelling business class on a 747 (though there are rickety exceptions, such as the line from São Luis to Belém) but the football supporters, church groups, and university students on their way to or from the interior who rent private hire buses take their lives into their own hands. I´ve taken three such trips now and every time the bus has broken down, which is better at least than crashing into a tree.

2010-08-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Bowing to public demand, the team behind Your Life Is An Impossibility is pleased to announce the launch of a new blog/diary/waste of time entitled www.seeadarkness.blogspot.com, devoted to all things related to Santa Cruz Futebol Clube. It goes without saying, of course, that it will most likely be unfeckinmissable.

2010-08-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Every Brazilian, even the most lilywhite and golden haired, carries in his soul, if not his soul and his body...the colour, or at least a hint of the colour, of the indigenous people of the country or the negro. Along the coast, from Maranhão to Rio Grande Do Sul, and in Minas Gerais, principally the negro. The influence, whether direct or distant, of the African. So writes Gilberto Freyre in his masterpiece of Brazilian social anthropolgy, Casa Grande e Senzala, or The Big House and The Slave Quarters (or The Masters and The Slaves in its English language edition).

Such a declaration horrified many Brazilians when the book was published in the 1930s, and there are even some today who would be affronted at the idea of even a spot of black blood flowing through their veins. A Disney (more of this later) loving acquaintance once stared, appalled, at a gringo produced text book that showed black and brown Brazilian children playing in a park. What, do they think we´re all like that in Brazil? came the cry. It´s not entirely her fault – there are very few black or brown people in As Republicas Independentes (where everyone is eggshell or off eggshell, or at least believes themselves to be) or in Brazilian soap operas. When they do appear on the novela das oito they are either sultry damsels or poor but ‘appy. Go out to Ibura or Jordão, on the other hand, and there is hardly a white face to be seen. But then said acquaintance, being a good burgher of As Republicas Independentes, wouldn´t have much call to go out to Ibura or Jordão.

In truth its hard to count just who is what in Brazil – I once sat around a table at the Bears´ house, the table littered with beer and cachaça bottles, and asked each person to say what they thought number the other people around the table would be on the Dulux colour chart. Well he´s black, Lighter Skinned Bear said, pointing at Papa Bear. Am I fuck, said Papa Bear, I´m moreno. Are you bollocks, said Lighter Skinned Bear, I´m moreno, so how can you be moreno? You´re moreno claro, dipshit, came the reply.

An open ended survey question on colour in the 1970s produced 135 different colour categories, though pity the poor soul who described himself as purple. Numbers change according to the vocabulary – no-one really wants to say they´re pardo, but change it to moreno and the numbers skyrocket. Races move in and out of fashion, so look out for a big jump in black and brown in this year´s census – there are positive discrimination university places at stake. Interestingly, the most commonly used term in ordinary conversation, moreno, has never appeared on the census forms. Its day to day popularity might be because it allows people to play down racial differences (I´m moreno, he´s moreno, she´s moreno, everybody´s moreno!) and so allows the continuation of the great Brazilian myth of the country as a non-racially divided society.

What would put the browny-white cat amongst the slightly darker shade of brown leaning towards black pigeons would be if the census takers adopted the terminology of the Afro-Brazilian movement, which asks people to simply decide if they are black or white. But even though wily old FHC was a fan, it probably wouldn´t work in Brazil – black and white is the system of racial classification in North America, where protestant settlers thought mucky-touching their slaves would mean burning in the hellfires of eternal damnation, hence no morenos in sight. Down in Brazil however, whites, slaves and indians were all at it like rabbits, resulting in the heady racial brew described by the Bears above. And for all that it can appear otherwise, Brazilians are a conciliatory bunch, who generally prefer intermediate to extremist terms – all well and good when it comes to a quiet life, but not so good when it comes to addressing the fact that blacks earn about half as much as whites and get around five years of education to their counterparts´eight.

All this is wandering off the point (to the extent that there ever is a point, of course). Casa Grande E Senzala is a beautiful and fascinating book, as well as being a very nordestino one. It´s the kind of book you don´t even need to read in order to love – instead you can hold it close to your face, and smell it, and weigh it´s heft in your hands. And slightly nerdy Gilberto Freyre was a very clever boy indeed. Reading the book, I can´t help but wish he was alive today to hold a mirror up to modern Brazil, particularly the Brazil of As Republicas. He isn´t, of course, so it is up to Your Life Is An Impossibility, another epic anthropological work, to carry his torch from the past to the present, from The Big House and The Slave Quarters to The Apartment On Avenida Boa Viagem and The Area De Servicio.

The modern day engenhos (sugar cane plantations) are much smaller than their ancestors, though no less luxurious. Most will boast three or four bedrooms, a sala or two, at least two bathrooms, and a large kitchen. Estate agent literature will also list the number of vagas, or car parking spaces, the apartment owner is entitled to in the big parking garage downstairs – essential information for any three or four car family. There will probably be a swimming pool downstairs, and a mini football or basketball court where the children of Mr Casa Grande might frolic. There will be a balcony too, with perhaps a view of the milky green Atlantic stretching (ironically enough) towards Africa. There will also the infamous area de servicio, which may be as simple as a space with a sink and somewhere to hang clothes, or might be grand enough to also boast a shower and a bedroom for one´s, ahem, maid, to sleep (disappointingly for would be Donos e Donas da Casa Grande such splendour is hard to find these days). Of course the area de servicio isn´t necessarily for one´s maid – one might very well wash one´s smalls oneself. But Mrs Casa Grande wouldn´t, on the whole, dream of such a thing.

It is an odd thing for one to get used to, coming from a country where the market in servitude is a disappointingly pale shadow of its former self – the fleets of muted figures who hang around apartments and company foyers, obviously in the employ of someone though no-one seems to know who. They are the maids and the cooks and the cleaners and the nannys and the drivers of the more affluent chunks of Brazilian society – occasionally smiling, generally silent, always deferent, always brown or black. Many is the gringo who when dining in the house of such a well to do Brazilian family as the Casa Grandes has asked the host and is she your cousin/sister?, referring to the silent figure lurking in the kitchen. No, comes the answer, accompanied by hoots of laughter, she´s our maid.

Though of course the life of the pampered (one might say spoilt) modern day maid is nothing like the slavery of Gilberto´s book. She will be permitted, a few times a day, to nip downstairs for a quick fag, if she feels like it, where she might even chat with the other maids. She will be allowed home at the weekends to see her own family, and will even be paid a small salary. When the Casa Grandes sit down to dinner, she will be allowed to eat the same food, though of course she must eat it in her own quarters, or perhaps in the kitchen, where she might be permitted to sit on a bucket. Other than that, hers are the normal workaday tasks – washing Mr Casa Grande´s socks, preparing Junior Casa Grande´s morning juice, making lunch for all the Casa Grandes, cleaning the Casa Grande´s bog, taking the Casa Grande´s poodle for a walk. And at night, when she gets her few hours of rest and settles down to watch the evening soaps on a little TV in her room, it´s a pity she doesn´t have a copy of Gilberto´s book, because if she wasn´t so knackered and had the energy to flick through it, she might recognise a few things.

Finally, a quick note of thanks to The Argument for spending most of her monthly salary on Casa Grande, and for thrusting it into my sweaty hands as a undeserved birthday present, so condemning me to six or so months of trying to wade through its 700 or so pages before giving up and going back to Parsons.

2010-08-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

I hate travelling and explorers...is it worth my while taking up my pen to perpetuate such a useless shred of memory or pitiable recollection as the following: ‘at five thirty in the morning we entered the harbour at Recife surrounded by the shrill cries of gulls, while a fleet of boats laden with tropical fruits clustered round the hull´?

So writes Claude Levi-Strausse in the opening to Tristes Tropiques, and it´s hard to imagine a more thumping kick in the kneecaps to the world of travel writers, gap year Indiana Joneses, and of course indefatigable fluffers of the gigantic virtual erection that is known as the blogosphere, an entity of which Your Life Is An Impossibility is both ashamed, surprised and guiltily pleased to find itself part.

What Mr Levi-Strausse is trying to say though is not that travelling or even travel writing is in itself a sin more worthy of spending the afterlife in the hellfires of eternal damnation than being the possessor of a ticket for the upcoming Cranberries* show in Recife, but that any such tales of adventurous derring-do can only really detract from the true work of the anthropologist, which is of course the study and recording of the behaviour and culture of the human species in all its stripes. This admirable theory, of course, is worthy of further consideration – how can we properly evaluate a place if it will always be filtered through the goggles of our own very particular and very idiosyncratic world view and by our own human experience? Or in other words – if we are tired, fighting with our Arguments, and suffering from a gigantic cachaça hangover we might not enjoy a day spent walking the streets of Olinda, but if we are well rested, have recently quenched our sexual thirsts and have just finished a nice hotel breakfast of manga and mamão and bread and cheese and cake and pineapple juice and coffee, we might just have a very pleasant time indeed.

I, for example, hate João Pessoa with a burning passion and hold the place up to be a truly dreadful example of all that modern (or really in the case of João Pessoa not so modern) society is capable. I feel justified in saying this as I spent a year living there. But then that year was a particularly unhappy one for me – I had no friends, no The Argument, and fairly miserable career prospects. I had just moved from Belo Horizonte and the provincial calm and Deliverance airs of João Pessoa chilled me to my soul. With all this negative psychological baggage, can I then be trusted to give an accurate impression of the place? Probably not. What I do know is that I´ve been back to João Pessoa and found that it is not really so terrible. Indeed it´s quite a pleasant place, where the visitor might happily while away thirty or thirty five minutes without getting even slightly bored.

But back to Claude. Although his travels amongst the Indians in Brazil are legendary the posthumous adventure he enjoyed on Saturday might have put them all to shame (which of course is quite a machadian idea in the first place). As The Argument was spending the evening drinking heavily with her friends The Bears, I had the evening to myself. I did not really feel like drinking heavily, because I was saving myself for Santa´s big game on Sunday (and watch out for a new, entirely Santa Cruz related blog coming soon from the author of Your Life Is An Impossibility). But at around ten I felt a stirring in my throat if not my loins and I wandered out into the gusty streets of downtown Recife in search of a drink (I had a craving for whiskey, if that matters). I took Tristes Tropiques with me.

The first bar I tried, just around the corner, had, in a novel marketing move, erected a giant TV screen on which were playing a selection of live forro shows at deafening volume, and as forro is to music what João Pessoa is to urban life I resolved to move on. I decided to wander down to Patio Santa Cruz, because Patio Santa Cruz is decrepit and quiet and does not have giant TVs. But on my way past the little kiosk bar on the corner of my street (I have not tried here because I´m pretty sure they have no whiskey) I am accosted.

Stranger! someone shouts, in a kind of English, pronouncing the a like in granny. I walk on. Stranger! comes the shout again, come and have a drink with us! This part mercifully in Portuguese. There are three of them – old friends from the sertão in various stages of matrimonial difficulty getting together on a Saturday night to slake their thirsts. I try as hard as I can to escape – I´m metting a friend somewhere else, I have swine flu, I don´t like Lula very much and I think Brazil needs a more educated, more middle class President from the south east. But they are undaunted and I am strongarmed to the table and forced to drink whiskey, which the bar surprisingly serves. At the end they – we might call them Larry, Curly and Moe - pay the bill, which is the kind of casual, unthinking generosity that Brazilians have that other places don´t and that still, even after five years, makes me swoon, just a little.

But before that there is Claude´s great journey. We get onto the subject of religion, and as is usually the case, things get heated. At least I restrain myself from the roaring religious politics of my childhood and refrain from suggesting that the Pope is in fact the anti-christ. But the other three are in full swing. Larry is evangelico (which makes a bar a strange place for a get together, but never mind) and is suggesting to his colleagues that he will go to a far better place than they when celestial last orders are called. Curly and Moe are indignant. What, cries Curly, do you think that all that crowd that walk around with their Bibles under their arms like this - and here he borrows Claude and tucks it under his perhaps aromatic, perhaps not aromatic armpit - do you think they´re all going to heaven? No, says Larry, taking Claude and putting it under his aromatic (and so on) armpit, I don´t think they are. It´s not about walking around like this – here he takes Claude and puts it under his other armpit – it´s about believing in God and following His word. Whatever, says Moe, let´s have another drink, and he takes Claude and puts it on the table, and when the beer comes he puts the bottle on top of it.

At which point, of course, the argument, bizarrely, starts again, with Curly tucking Claude under his arm and saying pretty much what he said the first time around, and Larry rebutting his arguments (with Claude under his arm) in pretty much the same way as before. I don´t really mind – it´s all very anthropological, in the end, so I`m sure Claude would approve – and I drink three whiskeys courtesy of Larry, Curly and Moe, and then I wander home, another Saturday night in Recife left to settle in the dust of memory.

*Brave pioneers and torchbearers these, battling against the local forro, axé and sertanejo hordes, and following in the footsteps of other bright young things from the vanguard of popular gringo music, such as A-ha,McFly, Alanis Morrissette, Tony Bennet and Simply Red.

2010-07-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

Beach house! For those from sandily-challenged places such as the writer of this blog/article/diary/nonsense the words summon a parade of tantalising images - drifting in an Olympic sized swimming pool atop a Mickey Mouse inflatable bed, a pink drink by one´s side...a two hour massage from a bevvy of scantily clad and lightly oiled Larissa Riquelme lookalikes (happy ending optional)...lightly swaying in a hammock while reading The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore...and so on. Only rich people have beach houses, runs the logic, and therefore all beach houses are palaces of limitless luxury and depthless delight.

Though as Alex Higgins (RIP) once said, the dull cloth of the lives we live may not sew the same garment as the brighter cloth of our dreams. And so it proves this weekend at a beach house in Ponta De Pedras, a rickety fishing village on the north coast of Pernambuco, hard by the more glamourously named Carne Da Vaca (Cow Meat) beach. It is raining as I, The Argument and Skinny Bear head out of Recife. The road is very bad, though it is being rebuilt now and will hopefully be ready for the World Cup (not the one in 2014 - the one after that in 2054).

Dinner was a simple picnic on the porch, paper plates in laps, the only conversation a debate as to which was the better grip for throwing (horse)shoes.

We arrive at the beach house. Outside is the biggest pig I have ever seen. The pig is eating rubbish. The beach house is quite big but not luxurious at all and has beds made of concrete. There is no Olympic sized swimming pool and no Larissa Riquelme lookalike masseuses, lightly oiled or otherwise. It is five o´clock and it is raining so we start drinking. We drink for a very long time.

After dinner, the horseshoes were handed out, the post pounded in, the rules reviewed with a new rule added due to falling down shorts. The new rule: Have attire.

The reason we are at the beach house is that it is somebody´s (Middle Sized Bear´s) birthday. It is always somebody´s birthday in Brazil - if you go to a restaurant or a bar and it is not somebody´s birthday then a volunteer must step forward and pretend it is his or her birthday so that no-one that night will be denied the pleasure of singing parabens para voce. Middle Sized Bear´s mulher brings out a cake. There is Mama Bear and Papa Bear and Skinny Bear and lots of other people there and we all sing parabens para voce. Only because of the wind no-one can get all the candles to burn at the same time so we sing parabens para voce once for each candle - there are four candles, so we sing it four times.

The women smoked on the porch, the smoke repelling mosquitoes, and the men and children played on even after dusk, when it got so dark that a candle was rigged to balance on top of the post, and was knocked off and blown out by every single almost-ringer.

Someone - Papa Bear - drives his car round to where we are drinking and opens the boot and turns up the volume. The boot is full of speakers. The music is as loud as four 747s taking off at the same time, with a ship´s horn blaring in the background, interspersed with a construction company drilling the foundations for a 24 storey building. We play a game - someone is chosen to be dragged underneath the cold-water shower in the garden. I am chosen fourth. I decide not to accept my fate and a minor fight breaks out. The result is that I am forced to roll in the mud before I am forced to stand underneath the cold shower. Then we play dominoes and drink some more. I hate dominoes.

Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women´s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

In Ponta De Pedras the women do not think stay, they think, I feel sick I am going to bed. Papa Bear and Middle Sized Bear and Skinny Bear do not go to bed - they keep on drinking. At three o´clock the cigarette cupboard is empty. Someone volunteers to go and get some. But where? Everywhere in the village closed around five in the afternoon. João Pessoa? someone suggests. João Pessoa is about 100kms away. A pack of cigarettes are found - crisis averted.

And in the morning we go to the beach and swim - the sea is murky grey and it is chilly and it starts to rain again. The Bears eat arrumadinho and drink beer and cachaça. It is nine o´clock in the morning. Then we go home - driving miles across the coastal plain, passing through village after village filled with the inestimable sadness of rural poverty, nothing but small houses and shacks and gangs of shirtless, shoeless young men sitting by the side of the road, watching the traffic drive past with a dull blankness in their eyes. Many of them will never visit Recife or João Pessoa, let alone Rio or São Paulo. They have no jobs because where they live there are no jobs and it is impossible to imagine how a job might come into existence - there are no factories or shops or libraries or municipal buildings of any description. As the car slows to avoid potholes and puddles my eyes meet theirs, and though there is no unfriendliness I have to look away, for I who have been lucky enough to live a different life cannot imagine what it is like to live their lives.

* Extracts in italics taken from Weekend by Amy Hempel.

2010-07-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Heard while listening to Recife´s leading news and sport radio station, which we might call Radio Maracatu, in the aftermath of Santa Cruz´s disastrous 1-0 defeat by CSA of Alagoas, which probably means the team with the biggest support in the nordeste will spend another year (their third) amidst the horrors of Serie D, also known as the fourth division of the Brazilian league championship:

Commercial for medical assistance with erectile disfunction/premature ejaculation fades into background...

Presenter Eric (not his real name): So, did you go the game today Eddie?

Presenter Ernie (also not his real name): No Eric, not today, I spent the afternoon on the sofa listening to my beloved friends at Radio Maracatu commentating from the stadium.

Eric: How beautiful, Ernie, how beautiful! Now listen to this Ernie, because it just goes to show the difference between Brazilian footballers and footballers in other countries.

Ernie: Now you mustn´t generalise Eric...

Eric: Generalise, no, of course not, but you know, it just goes to show.

Ernie: Well that still sounds like generalising, but go on....

Eric: So Cristiano Ronaldo, he gets some girl pregnant, and what does he do, he tries to give her R$10 million to keep schtum, which, well, you know, isn´t exactly responsible parenting, it´s a bit naughty, but...

Ernie: But it´s better than cutting her head off and feeding her to his dogs, isn´t it, Bruno!

Eric: Exactly, exactly! Better than cutting her head off and feeding her to the dogs like our friend Bruno!

Ernie: I see your point, Eric, but still, we mustn´t generalise...

Eric: No, of course not, but you know, just goes to show, they pay them off, we cut their heads off. Anyway another thing, this girl, beautiful girl by the way, beautiful ovaries too no doubt...

Ernie: Nothing like a beautiful ovary....

Eric: No indeed. Anyway she says that old Cristiano wasn´t much of a ladies´ man, didn´t really, you know, hunt her down, go in for the kill, so to speak. By all accounts he was the perfect gentleman. She even says she told him he should take up ju-jitsu or something so that people wouldn´t think he was a poof!*

Ernie: Well now again that´s kind of a generalisation, not all poofs are, you know, as limp as last week´s lettuce.

Eric: No, of course not, you know, but....

Ernie: There was that character in Rio, what was his name, in the 30s, Madame Satã, wasn´t it?

Eric: Madame Satã, yes, like the film, there was a film wasn´t there?

Ernie: There was indeed, anyway, he was a poof, a rent boy even, but Christ he could handle himself! He was a proper man!

Eric: He was, and then there was the bloke up here, Lolita, do you remember, the gangster, and when they took him in they needed six men to hold him down! He was hard as nails! And he was a poof!

Ernie: Fantastic, so there you go, anyway, back to the game, for me the problem with Santa today was...

Show continues. Both Eric and Ernie are in their late fifties or early sixties, and both are well-respected sports broadcasters. Ernie, as it happens, was responsible for one of the all time great Brazil vs R.O.W. comments when, while discussing exiled Brazilian footballers returning home, he reminisced about his time in Paris during the 1998 World Cup...

Ernie: So you´re in Paris, and you think, fantastic, I´m in Paris, and you have a coffee on the Champs Elysees, and you look at the nice buildings and the pretty girls, magic. And then on your second day you go up the Eiffel Tower, cracking, pure magic. Day Three – the Louvre, wonderful. Then after that.....what the hell are you going to do in Paris? You can´t go to the beach, you can´t go round your mate´s or your mum´s house, there´s no barbecues, no football, no cachaça, no samba, Christ, no wonder Adriano and Ronaldo wanted to come home! There´s nothing to bloody do in Europe!

And he´s only half right. Or half wrong. I can´t decide.

And so Santa´s bright new dawn becomes yet another terror twilight - an awful crush on the way in should have told me, as should have the Inferno Coral flags draped funearally on the ground as their teenage wavers waited for space to clear on the terraces. The Inferno banners around the pitch are hung upside down too - a way of showing deep displeasure with the way things are currently in as Republicas. There is no space anywhere downstairs, but plenty upstairs. The state government have recently digitalised the Todas Com A Nota program, which allows anyone with r$100 worth of supermarket receipts to claim a free ticket. The problem is Santa´s core support, coming mainly from the mass of Recife´s poor, are not yet digitalised themselves, and no-one has got around to registering for the free electronic swipe cards.

When things start the game is terrible, Santa are terrible, everything is terrible. A man is carried out of the crowd on a stretcher, his neck in a brace, while his son, maybe nine or ten years old, watches anxiously. As the game deteriorates even further a young man in a pork pie hat and sunglasses runs on to the pitch waving a Santa flag. Chico Science he would no doubt love to be but Chico Science he is not. The crowd goes beserk - a pitch invasion like this could cost Santa the use of Arruda for future games. Brasão escorts him off. A policeman intervenes and pushes Brasão. Brasão squares up to the policeman. Two other policemen grab the young man and put him in a headlock. There are ten minutes left. CSA score, and the 500 or so Mancha Azul in the corner go crazy. The final whistle blows. There is running and fighting outside the ground - Inferno Ibura are in town. Then there are gun shots near the bus stop in Encruzilhada, but it´s probably the police firing in the air. Probably. I walk to another bus stop past groups of youngsters sitting on the ground surrounded by police, their hands behind their heads, and another perfect day watching Santa Cruz comes to an end.

* Their words, not mine, so apologies. Your Life Is An Impossibility is an entirely prejduice free zone, other than prejudice against the Welsh, the Canadians, or people from Louth.

2010-07-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

The World Cup is a blowsy tart of a mistress, swanning into town in shocking pink lipstick and painted-on leopardskin mini-dress. Us doltish menfolk moon around her for four short weeks, drooling and babbling and forgetting work, children and, worst of all, our long-suffering partners. We pretend we´ve always known we were too good for this humdrum life, and dream for a moment that it might always be like this – champagne football and super-craques. And then suddenly it´s over, and we realise we never really had a chance anyway, and we creep back home to our frumpy and decidedly unglamorous spouses with our tail between our legs, begging forgiveness, swearing it´ll never happen again, vowing that it didn´t mean a thing. They, of course– in my case Santa Cruz Futebol Clube – always forgive us. They don´t have much choice. They need us as much as we need them.

The World Cup once Brazil are out – at least if you live in Brazil – is a bit like being at a wedding once the bride and groom have left for their two weeks in Magaluf. The band´s still playing and the bar´s still open, so you may as well stay for a bit, but really it´s a bit pointless, and everybody is trying hard not to look at their watches and think about taxis home.

There´s no colder shower then than heading off to Arruda on a dripping wet Wednesday in Recife. I am feeling flush, and lazy, so I plump, for the second time in my life, for an upstairs grandstand seat under the roof. The first time I came up here was when elderly Ma Your Life Is An Impossibility was over, doing her best town mouse – city mouse routine: oh what lovely flags, she proclaimed, as the bottles flew over our heads and Inferno Coral Ibura tried to kick seven bells out of Inferno Coral Rio Doce. The occasion is Santa vs. Vitoria, one of Salvador´s big two and one of only two nordestino teams in Brazil´s Serie A, and the motive is the Nordestão, the recently revived dust-up between the lame and the lost of professional football in the nordeste of Brazil.

Really there´s not much to say – the game is as soothingly dull an affair as you might expect, it turns a little chilly as night draws in, the small crowd, bored, turn on the Santa players after about 40 minutes. In fact Santa play quite well – Dado Cavalcanti should clearly be the next Brazil coach, Menezes is a coltish, good-looking arrival at center-half, Paulo Cesar and Osmar fine full backs. Brasão, of course, is still Brasão, hurling himself after every ball as though it is the last minute of the World Cup Final itself. Vitoria score first, after a cock-up in the Santa defence, but after that Santa take over, and should score more than the one they do get, a Brasão penalty. After the game the players and the crowd drift off, idly chatting, and it is as though no-one would really have minded that much if they´d lost.

And I wonder then, sitting up in the draughty stands, what it must be like for professional footballers to watch other professional footballers playing at the very pinnacle of the game while they toil in ignominy in the trenches. Most of them, of course, are old enough and far enough away from stardom to know that they are probably not going to become true estrelas – they won´t play in the World Cup or even for the seleção, the majority of them will never make it to Serie A, let alone Europe. Do they feel resentment or pain? Do they watch scornfully, bitterly muttering to themselves I could do better than that, or if it wasn´t for that torn cruciate in 2004 that would be me up there instead of Julio frickin´Baptista?

Or do they beatifically accept their lot, and strive only to be the Prince of Pernambuco, realising that football is still a pretty good way to earn a pretty good living in these parts - top names at this level can earn around R$50,000 or so a month, more than twice what your average Recife lawyer might hope for? Looking at the faces it´s hard to tell, for they are the usual athletes’ faces – little of the emnity those in the stands might expect, instead plenty of camaraderie and the quiet elation that comes from intense physical activity.

And then there are the younger players, like Natan and Elvis, skinny and hungry and restless. They are easier to read, as much from their play as from their faces. The ball is never willingly given up, even to a teammate, and even when glory trail after glory trail runs itself into a blind alley, they barely look up or acknowledge their own selfishness. What, say the purposely lowered eyes and bowed head, did you think I was going to give it to you? What would you do with it?

It´s all the seven ages of man, I suppose, and full of lessons for all of us, though I can´t quite think what they might be. Some, I´m sure, would relate to the toiling work of anonymity that is this blog, though I chose writing as my particular route to fame and fortune because, well, your dreams die much later, and you can still be a young literary sensation at 38. Or at least I hope you can.

Sticking with Brazilian football just for a moment, a man who clearly hasn´t learnt any lessons at all is Flamengo goalkeeper Bruno, currently accused of killing a young woman who was also the mother of a child who may or not be is. It is Brazil´s very own OJ Simpson, though even juicier – Bruno allegedly hired a friendly traficante to do the dirty work, and once the girl was dead (strangled) she was cut into small pieces, her bones buried in cement, and the rest of her fed to Bruno´s rottweilers, who might be the only ones in the tale to actually feel very happy about the way things turned out. The story is gruesome and spectacular enough to not really say very much about Brazil, because it could happen anywhere, though there are plenty of very Brazilian motifs if you look hard enough – the slippery nature of extra marital paternal responsibilities (though the normal trick is to run away and deny all knowledge, rather than actually kill the woman in question), the exploitative sexual atmosphere (did you sleep with her at the party, Bruno was asked in a magazine article, yes, we all did, he replied, hinting at quite the bacchanal), and the social classifying (if all the players slept with her then that makes her a whore, and if she´s a whore then what´s all the fuss about, she´s just a whore, who cares if she´s dead, Bruno´s lawyer´s argument might well run in a few months). In any case it´s saved Dunga and Felipe Melo from being Brazil´s most reviled footballers a few weeks earlier than scheduled.

I think about all this as I walk around Recife on a chilly Thursday night. The night before I watched Cormac McCarthy´s The Road, which may well have been a mistake, for I am sensitive of soul. Armed gangs roaming the streets, taking whatever they please? Check. The weak and starving begging for assistance, eating anything they can get their hands on? Check. An endless, dismal sky, promising storms and heavy rain? Check (it´s winter). General air of desolation, abandoned buildings as far as the eye can see? Check. I quicken my step, nervously, and walk on, anxious for home.