Brazil: In the samba spirit

By MARK GRAHAM

Wild juxtapositions are everywhere in Brazil, from its body-beautiful beaches to its forbiddingly awful slums. The contrasts creep in at every juncture: gloriously wealthy diners listening to serenading samba bands, oblivious to their sleeves being tugged by snot-nosed urchins.

Nowhere is the difference more brutal, or bizarre, than at Rio's manmade edifice to religion on Corcovado mountain, where a towering, stretched-arm statue of Jesus Christ beams down benevolently at the city.

Look, marvel and feel penitent before tottering a few steps downhill, where the seamier side of the city is in instant and plentiful abundance.

Next to pretty postcards depicting the white marble religious icon are hardcore videotapes offering a salacious celluloid glimpse of the sex for sale on the streets. Sex, and suggestive body language, are interwoven into the fabric of life in the beachside city.

After a car spat, drivers engage in a macho arm-waving charade, with the crowds invited to judge by cheers or jeers which motorist should shoulder the blame. If the argument is near Copacabana or Ipanema beaches, onlookers will include lithe sun-worshippers wearing poor excuses for bikinis.

Whatever the life - and there are some awfully poor existences in Brazil - it is there to be enjoyed to the full, dreaming all the while of riches, fortune or fame. The soccer ball-dribbling kid on the beach aims to be another Pele or Zico; the sassy girl on the samba stage aspires to be spotted by an international showbiz scout; the taxi driver wants to be a second Ayrton Senna.

Few will realise the dream of climbing out of the poverty trap which shackles the majority of Brazilians. Its choked cities are added to daily by a stream of job-seeking chancers from the interior. Most end up in the slums - known as favellas - scratching to earn an honest living; it is all too easy to fall into a fife of brutal crime, earning a living by mugging less fortunates, preying on tourists and slinking back into the safe-from-arrest network of hillside hovels.

Brazil is a country where street kids are preyed on by both levels of society. The gutter-sleeping youngsters are ignored by the rich elements of Brazil, used, abused and even murdered by its unscrupulous gangster element.

But South America's largest country, which has around 150 million people, is not quite the cesspit of desperate iniquity it often appears to be. It is one of the few countries in the world where integration, at least to the superficial observer, has been achieved with minimal social unrest.

In Sao Paolo, the melting pot of blacks, Portuguese, Indians and mixed-race also has an extra, Asian-style ingredient in the ethnic mix. Last century about a million Japanese went there in search of a new life, forming their own self-contained community.

Within the space of a few downtown blocks it is possible to worship at a European church, watch black kids sniffing glue, listen to a mestizo brass band playing vigorously, eat Japanese-style sushi, and buy Indian herbs from the deep Amazon jungle.

For Amazon people, the big-city experience is something they know of only vaguely and care about even less. The only significant conurbation in the Amazon's upper reaches is Manaus, once a base for European entrepreneurs who wanted a recreation of home as they went about making fortunes from the plunder of the people and natural resources.

Today, the most visible symbol of that high-on-the-hog expatriate lifestyle is the opera house, built to money-no-object specifications. Even now, almost 100 years after it was built, it seems an unreal edifice.

A few kilometres upstream a wanderer could still get lost - for ever - in the thick, unforgiving forest of the Amazon. This is the luxuriant wood which makes loggers salivate at the potential profit, regardless of the effect on the ozone layer or the people who once eked a living from co-existing with nature.

Religion played a major role in opening up the interior, with missionaries heading up uncharted rivers and through unmapped jungle in search of loin-clothed souls to save.

The most famous of the priestly explorers was portrayed in the movie The Mission, with Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro. The real star of that piece of celluloid was Iguacu Falls, a collection of 250 different streams cascading in one stupendous roar of white water.

After a heavy rainfall, it is an unnerving sight of how powerful nature can be: a cappuccino-coloured mass of foamy water spews over the rocks, framed by a hovering rainbow.

The falls mark the border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and tourist hordes arrive by the thousand every day. Brazil was blessed with the best close-up view, enhancing the vantage point by a pontoon-style bridge, which takes viewers to the spray-belching zone immediately beneath the fiercest flow.

If Iguacu and the Amazon are Brazil's natural highlights, its fleshier manmade attractions are contained in and around Rio de Janeiro, where carnal pleasures are taken without hint of inhibition, leisure time enjoyed with no fear of divine retribution. Rio has the long lunch, the never ending night and the extended weekend.

It appears at times as if the whole place is working part-time. Deals are done by the ocean - a quick chat, handshake, then back to the serious business of enjoying the sun and surf.

Rio nightlife begins flamboyantly in mid-evening, picks up to a frenetic pace by the early hours and winds down as light dawns.

Rio - and the rest of Brazil - has insidious violence, pitiful poverty and nasty political corruption, but it also has style, of the samba variety, and an irrepressible urge to live life to the full.