Away from Home by Rona Jaffe

Author:Rona Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504008426
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

CHAPTER 13

Carnival in Rio is a mass explosion, the result of twelve months of frustration, sublimation, hopelessness and hope. At Carnival a beggar can dress as a king. An austere businessman can dress as a clown. A colored girl from the favellas who will have twelve or twenty children and live and die in the favellas can dress as Scarlett O’Hara, and many of them do. A homosexual can walk about in the streets of the city for four days and nights dressed as a woman. You are who you want to be. There is unceasing music for your soul and unceasing dance for your animal spirits, and ether to make your days and nights a waking dream. There is dancing in the ballrooms for the wealthy and dancing in the streets for the poor. But there are no poor at Carnival. There are only the revelers, the transported, the disguised, the dreamers and the orgiastic.

For four days and nights, without sleep, without food, without minds, the dancers jump up and down in a wild, self-hypnotic orgy, together or in a snake dance or alone. At the balls you see old men ready for a coronary attack wetting their handkerchiefs with ether and sniffing at them to get a lift, while holding on with the other hand to the girl in front of them in the snake dance. On the faces of these old men is an expression compounded of ecstasy, agony, exhaustion, and desperation. It is the face of Carnival.

In recent years, of course, as any Carioca will tell you, Carnival has become more commercial. There are television cameras and newsreel cameras and photographers with flashbulbs covering the revelry for magazines. But everything has become more commercial in our day; there are even press agents for wars. The people themselves are the same; the people never change. And the people who say they will not go to another Carnival this year, or that they will only go a little bit, like Sergio Leite Braga, like Margie and Neil Davidow, find themselves involved in the holocaust and happy to be consumed.

On one afternoon of Carnival week Neil Davidow and Mort Baker attired themselves in striped shirts, white trousers, French berets, and face masks, and went to the ball for married men. Actually, as with any of the other balls, it was not restricted to married men and women who wished to meet them; it was merely given the title and held in the afternoon so married men could attend without their wives. Neil had a sense of rising excitement as he walked briskly down the hot street toward the hotel; he was hardly aware of the heat at all. The air was sirupy with heat, and bathers were shrieking on the beach. There were so many people in brightly colored bathing suits that you could hardly see the sand between them. The waves hit the shore wildly, casting up foam like cotton candy ten feet into the air. Neil felt full of energy.

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