The directors of the samba school are distributing paper fans that contain your school’s song. Since you haven’t been rehearsing all year, and were on the gringo flight from New York the night before, you have one hour to learn. It’s important to make an effort so the judges won’t notice and deduct points. You are in Rio de Janeiro, Carnaval Capital, and the crime rate has dropped this week because even the thieves are dancing.
You’ve escaped the snow and cold of your own country, and are being taught by two Brazilians how to gate-crash in the tropics. One has an “in” with the doorman of three ex-boyfriends ago. Arnaldo, the doorman, makes a few calls, and takes you to meet Maria, a big-shot samba director, who looks at you and the German tourist you are hanging with and shakes her head. Later, you will realize she has already typecast you both as “non-dancers” and wants you at the end of her parade. She writes an address on a scrap of paper, and sends you to the house of a seamstress who gives you both sparkly Bermudas and a brightly-colored shirt. Actually, you are relieved. You were afraid it was going to be a tiny bikini bottom and nothing else. Your costume is almost chaste. If this were a Christmas pageant; you have been assigned the role of a Shepherd.
Now, it is Saturday night and your school is waiting backstage at the entrance of the Sambodromo. Chocolate. Your school’s theme this year is chocolate. When you look around, everyone looks chocolate, either tanned by three months’ of summer sun or painted by nature, as they say. Your group shimmers with sequins, two hundred people with the same costume; you are all ice cream vendors complete with Styrofoam coolers strapped over one shoulder. This proves to be too authentic for the locals, who cut through your crowd of dancers as if this were a public street, and ask if you have beer or water to sell since it’s so HOT. A school organizer stoops in front of you and covers the blue stripes on your tennis shoes with white tape and great authority. You didn’t get the memo about the all-white shoes.
The float ahead contains numerous feather-covered dancers: statuesque women with peacock-like headdresses and thigh-high white boots. Perched on the wobbly platforms, they stand with their wings closed, and await the performance. The men who steer the floats crawl underneath its stage. No motors are allowed. Just strong dark arms that direct the float like an old vessel.
You try to clear your head, but have a fast and panicked thought about the fate of the rental car that you left near the stadium. Did you check that box for insurance? You paid a boy five dollars to watch the car, and know that he could make a hundred if he took your tires or even the radio. Maybe by now, the car was already on its way to Paraguay? The crowd lurches forward and you stop worrying. The other members of your parade are filing into place, the Bahianas with their impossibly large colonial skirts, the musicians beating on small tambourine-sized drums, and other dancers with impossibly heavy, head pieces that they touch gingerly with one hand to steady. The colors are orange, white, blue, and violet. Bodies are covered in more paint than costumes with bare skin everywhere. The crowd moves and turns together, arms and torsos bump into you, and glide away. Arms pressing on your shoulders indicate that someone is trying to squeeze past you. The real vendors join the parade, finally! They sell salvation in the form of beer and water. Beer is spilled with the movement of the crowd, trickles down your legs, and sloshes into your shoes.
“When do we begin?” the crowd asks. Your group is rehearsing the song.
“Just learn the chorus,” a woman says who hears you struggling. Some voices complain loudly that their costumes are hurting them.
“Help me,” a blond Indian princess begs. Her eyes are full of tears and she points to the red welt on her shoulders where the metal frame is digging into flesh. You tear off a strip of fabric from the fringe on her dress and wrap the shoulder frame for her.
Carnaval is like an overzealous lover. Once it starts on Saturday night it doesn’t stop, day and night until Wednesday. It pulls you against its warm chest and makes your heart beat with the same rhythm of the drums. It tumbles with you in humid sheets, and reaches after you if you try to sneak away. No matter how much you feign exhaustion, Carnaval goes on all around you.
Since last February, when they announced the winners, the schools have been preparing for tonight. The favela leaders organize their residents and artists collaborate to create new songs and themes each year. Some of the production money comes from the participants themselves and gringos like you who come parachuting in at the last moment. The drug lords fund the gap. A fleet of sewing machines races over waves of new fabric to create the new fantasias: costumes. This is serious competition, complete with spies from other schools who want to infiltrate. School members are expected to show complete loyalty, because of the reward: an hour and twenty minutes under the hot lights, in front of the crowds in the over packed stadium and the television cameras who broadcast images for the entire samba-loving world to see. The rich stadium spectators tell the mostly poor performers, the same people they resent during all the other days of the year, “You are beautiful.” For tonight, you are before a society of equals. This is the real fantasy of Carnaval.
You are still waiting with your school to enter the stadium. It is more crowded now; everyone is ready, wired with nervous energy, and listening for the final instructions. Your German friend practices a dance move. Maybe Maria was right about your place at the end of the parade?
“Hats all forward,” yells one of the school directors and your group adjusts the bills of the costume hats.
“Here we go,” someone in the crowd shouts. You are nearly crushed in a human pile-up with everyone pushing forward.
The float directly ahead of you begins to move and turns a wide and arching left; so wide that a feathered bird woman, perched on one of the platforms, is now careening towards a tree. People shout for her to grab a branch. Her large headdress makes her movements slow and awkward. Everyone starts screaming, the float makes a dull thud against the tree trunk, and she starts to fall with her arms outstretched like a white swan. Her arms catch a branch and she struggles to keep her grip. The float continues without her, because your school has officially entered the stadium and the clock is running. The woman’s perch is empty and her frantic movements cause leaves and broken branches to shower the people below her.
“Get out of the way!” A flat-bed lift pulls up under the tree and in an instant has risen to her height, but the man can’t quite reach her.
“Let go,” he asks. She does and falls five feet into his arms. The crowd gasps with relief. Her white-ribbon tail feathers are still snagged in the tree. The man cradles the woman, tugs twice on the ribbons, and then rips them from the tree until they snap. They race after the rolling float, and the man is able to return the woman to her platform just in time. At that moment, the crowd in the stadium sees the float making its grand entrance and a deafening cheer erupts. The white-swan woman raises one hand in the air, like a gymnast, and arches her back. She is all smiles and the sequins on her costume shine brilliantly under the stadium lights.
Your song begins and you dance and sing, as if you’ve been doing this all your life. You are under the lights of the stadium on a blinding world stage, and you jump, and are pushed, and shake your hips and sing. And for a few moments you are in synch with a larger rhythm, as your heart beats and your blood pumps with the motion of the world spinning around the sun. Even the angels in the heavens seem to pound on your temples, with their chubby fists, and join you in your laughter. There is the sound of rapid-fire explosions in the air; a sound your ears struggle to recognize. It’s a burst of automatic gunfire from the slum hill at the rear of the stadium that is filled with white lights that compete with the stars of the night sky.
“They are watching us,” the man next to you says. “And saluting our school.”
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