Brazil, Canoa Quebrada. Not just the ocean.
Posted on April 24, 2007
Filed Under Brazil, Reportage, Video |
NB Click on the picture to enlarge.
After two months travelling North and South in the Brazilian inland I will take a break. Will go to Marino, who lives at Canoa Quebrada, Ceará. Everything has its price, even low-budget flight. You have to sell your time. Then I’ll take off from São Paulo at 11 pm and will land in Fortaleza, capital of the Norteast state of Ceará, at 2 am. To save up even more, I take three different buses of the public transport network to get to Guarulhos Airport from São Paulo centre - two hours instead of one. But, as I get lost, as usual, I need three hours. After one hour I’m walking in a semi-desert village outside the capital, under a thin rain, more apt to London indeed, with a slim boy wearing his flip-flops, bermuda and T-shirt, the Brazilian uniform. He’s extremely happy to speak with someone on his way back home - a European, in addition. I wear flip-flops, bermuda and T-shirt plus a plastic bag as luggage - not Italian high fashion, but a perfect dress to go everywhere, apart good restaurants. In half an hour, the guy absorbes as much information about Europe as he can.
When I land in Fortaleza there are no buses, only taxi. There is an abandoned amusement room. I slip under a flipper and sleep until dawn. I wake up, I take my first picture, a coffee and a bus to the bus station, the rodoviaria. 
Breakfast, avocado milkshake and cake, and ticket to Canoa Quebrada, broken canoe. In the slanting morning light the huge concrete umbrellas look peeled flower left there by some queer architect from the 50s. Gorgeus, in short. Then, to Canoa, to Marino, whom I meet in 2000 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and seen again in Martellago, close to Venice, some years later. After half an hour wandering around the village, I find him on a hammock with Marta, his girlfriend, close to him. Hugs and kisses, kisses and hugs.
Canoa was “discovered” in the 80s by some hippies. In Brazil a hippy is anyone travels getting money by selling handicraft on the street. And Canoa is to handicraft as Detroit to car production - the height of glory is in the past, but production is not dead. The Henry Ford of the handicraft is still working and alive: the Chilean. The laboratory is a tumbledown castle where many handcrafter are at work. People carving stones, weaving silver bracelet. Hammer, dental drilling machines, music, smoke, the loud harsh bray of a donkey. The Chilean is short and stocky, a pirate smile, happy to show his palace.
Another personage in this play is the Master, a white-haired man in his 60s keen on metaphysical speculations. The dialogues between him and me become increasingly confused with the number of cigarettes we smoke (no one uses tobacco). After some time I have the impression I have explained him how my libertarian nihilism is perfectly compatible with a spiritual vision of the world - a miracle only possible under a tropical starry sky.
It’s a small world. Marino introduces to me Carlo, Italian, and we discovered we were in the same middle school. Carlo is going to have a baby, and his partner is in Italy. He lives producing chillum - he’s a hippy in Brazil, in Europe a craftsman.
To craft a chillum as Shiva commands is not trivial at all, he explains to me. An ordinary chillum is immediately recognizable: the inner exagonal stone does not fit tightly in the inner surface of the cone. It is not valid, of course, to use stamps. Like a huge cannellone, it must be rolled and well-finished at the end. During summer, Carlo travels around Italy selling chillums; during winter, he travels in Latin America and India. Not a bad life, but in Canoa is not that bad either. For dinner we cook lobsters oil and garlic with spaghetti and a more than decent white wine.
Food is not everything. Marino has decided I must really have rest and forget computers and lectures. If we all sacrifice ourselves to have a better society, he says, no one could profit from such a perfect society. Then let’s profit from Canoa’s beaches. On a dune buggy, nostalgically linked to Watch out, we are mad. After some driving, we meet a jangada, the ancestor of the windsurf described by Orson Wells in It’s all true, the documentary edited after Wells’ death. The boats do not look really safe, a big wave could easily drag you into the ocean - and the protagonist of the documentary actually died in that way. The old guy in the picture either is the reincarnation of the old fisherman of Hemingway, or has read the book and makes fun of me. He says the big fishes have to get tired. Once hooked the fishermen have to follow them for hours. One day or more following the beast.
Canoa is half a fishermen village, half a tourist place. On North-West there a whole tourist village is supposed to be built - small villas, squared streets, commercial centres. The process was: in the 80s the hippies; in the 90s the young Brazilian tourists looking for a nice place, cheap, with a lot of people. The Ceará state is quite tourist. Fortaleza is always crowded, and in the West there is Jericoacoara, crowded as well. Then, few years ago, electricity and concrete road arrived in Canoa, and richer tourists with them.
Notwithstanding the ads, advertorials and reportages on many national magazines, Canoa is not (yet) crowded - I was there during holiday time. Some nice posada, small hotel, clean and silent and some restaurant where you can eat good fish for nothing. Like the restaurant of El Negro. El Negro is a bit crazy, nothing strange then, is not black at all, is white, slim, bald and Argentine. After quite a few years in Brazil he still speaks a laboured Portueguese full of chè and vos and sois. He also knows Bolivia, but does not have any happy memories of the country. 
Apparently he had some problem with the juridical system and was forced to stay there more than he would have desired. When he finally got out, he moved to North Brazil and arrived in Canoa without a cent. Met a woman, who still is his partner, and set up the little restaurant. He still speaks with tears in his eyes remembering her woman helping him - him, a tramp! - with her little saving to begin with the restaurant.
“The less you have, the keener you are to donate, my dear!” When they eventually got married he discovered that she did not have any document. I wonder - how could she vote? Just to be clear, she’s no more than forty, she’s not an old native woman just expelled from the forest, she lived at two hours from the capital of Cearà, on the coast (more “civilised” than the inland). Nonetheless, in 1995, the Brazilian state for her still did not exist.
But now she’s married with el Negro, who’s not black. She’s black. El Negro is white, nice and bald.
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