Brazil! What fantasies, mainly erotic, are conjured up by that word! At Salvador airport, as promised, leaning over the rail bearing a sign with my name on it, was a man sent to drive me to the hotel. I gave him a nod (I was too tired to smile) and without further ado he led the way outside to his car, a taxi, baking in the 30-degree heat of a Brazilian afternoon.
It was a very small taxi. The knuckles of his right hand shoved my knee aside as he pushed the gearstick into third. Hanging from the rear-view mirror was a crucifix with a tiny Christ figure realistically convulsed in its death agony. Once he’d turned on to the expressway into town, the taxi man turned to me and began to shout at me in Portuguese. The voice was deep and gruff, but the face was kind. I shrugged at him. He shouted louder. I shrugged again. ‘Portuguese — no?’ he roared. ‘No,’ I said. He looked surprised, incredulous, even a little hurt by my not speaking his language.
‘Français?’ I said, thinking this might be a solution. He looked at me as if the suggestion were preposterous. ‘Deutsch?’ I ventured. If my first suggestion was preposterous, my second was pure madness. He looked pityingly at me. ‘Swahili?’ I said, my last throw of the dice. ‘Swahili!’ he yelled. Now his exasperation turned to amusement. He turned away and shook his head sorrowfully at the passenger in the car moving parallel with us. The kinds of people he was forced to do business with these days!
The expressway between Salvador airport and the city centre passes through high-rise housing, with the occasional shopping mall and filling station on either side. Nearly every car on the expressway was a compact car.
He started shouting at me in Portuguese again. ‘Hotel! Hotel!’ he yelled. I gathered that he wanted to know which hotel I wanted to go to. I took out my phone and located the relevant email. Possibly the Convento do Carmo, it said. Or possibly a different hotel. Nobody knew for certain, it said. All would be revealed, however, on my arrival at the airport, where I would be met by someone who would probably know. I showed him the email with my thumb underlining the Convento do Carmo.
I tried to convey to him, in mime, the sentence, ‘But I thought you knew!’ but it was hopeless. In any case, he was now more interested in my new smartphone. Impressed, he cradled it in his arms, gently rocked it to and fro, and sung it a lullaby. Presumably this was his way of telling me that Salvador was a roughish sort of a place and I must protect it from potential robbers and pickpockets. The production of my new phone seemed to mark a watershed in our relationship and after this he became more relaxed and jovial.
He switched on the radio. As one might have expected, the music consisted mainly of cheerful trumpets and an insanely happy female singer. He turned it up loud and began to sing along, waggling his head from side to side. He knew all the words. The next track was a slow, sad and possibly romantic ballad. He knew the words to this one as well, and sang them with all his heart, showing me that he wasn’t afraid, in his gruff way, to reveal that he too had loved and lost.
After about an hour he turned off the expressway. Soon we were driving up a steep, narrow, cobbled street in what was presumably the old town. At the top of the hill a police car was parked laterally across the road, blocking access. The taxi man wound down the window and the conversation with the blue-shirted copper leaning on the car bonnet went something like this. Taxi man: ‘What’s up?’ Policeman: ‘It’s as far as you can go. Who’s that in the car with you? What nationality?’ I deduced this is how the exchange went, because the taxi man then said, ‘Swahili’ — at which both of them chuckled.
The police car was acting as a road block because a procession was forming up in the cobbled square beyond it. About 100 young people, among them a fair sprinkling of potential Miss World contestants, were dancing and singing to trumpets and tom-tom band. The taxi man and I abandoned his car and we set off on foot, pushing our way through the dancers and drummers, with me dragging my heavy Samsonite suitcase across the cobbles. Before we could get through it, however, the procession moved off, taking us with it.
And this was how I arrived in style at the hotel on my first day. Brazil! What a place! And how wonderful and strange to arrive in a country that conforms exactly to one’s fantasies about it!
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