Brazil

Most tourists get the wrong idea about Brazilian sexuality.

The media hype Brazil as a land of easy sex in order to draw millions of foreign men each year to enjoy the Carnival. And like any major sex tourist destination the local call girls are waiting to take the dumb gringos for all they can.

Funny thing is, a good deal of them aren’t aware of the fact. I saw four young English guys sitting in the street in the Olinda Carnival, each of them with a mulata in his lap and looking for all the world like they’d won the lottery. They clearly thought they’d encountered some of that well-known loose sexuality that Brazil is famous for. It didn’t occur to any of them that they had ‘just happened’ to meet four girls who ‘just happened’ to be really into them, even though they had few words in common. They didn’t realise they were prostitutes because the girls didn’t ask for any money to start with. By the end of their stay it was a sure thing they would get it though. Lambs to the slaughter.

In Carnival, no one is supposed to ‘belong to anyone else’. The Brazilian men took the spirit of Carnival to heart, posing in gangs with short hair cuts and muscular torsos, grabbing the hands of the girls as they passed. Maybe this tactic worked with the drunker girls and their plan seemed to be to grab 100 girls and maybe one of them would stay.

I was sat at the edge of the street, resting my feet from 5 hours dancing when my favourite fantasy passed by. She was a mulata dressed as a schoolgirl complete with loose blouse, short skirt and samba thighs. She blew me a kiss and I turned to follow her, wondering if I’d find the courage to start a conversation. Smalltalk was the last thing on the minds of the two guys who raced ahead of me. They pursued her the length of the street, the most persistent of them forcing her into a kiss. She twisted away and I finally caught up with her.

As a result of mixed parentage she had thick Negro lips and light brown skin. Curvaceous and strong, I relied upon Luciana to protect me the rest of the afternoon. We walked hand in hand down towards a samba troupe where she danced evocatively in front of me and I pulled her close; with the street singing samba and her hops gyrating against mine, life seemed worth living again.

After making love that night she told me her story. She’d been pressured into marrying at 16 to a man twice her age and he now had custody of her 5 year old son. The husband had been violent and possessive and to escape she had shaved her head, dressed up as a boy and slipped out on a bus to the north. With her changed appearance none of the detectives he had hired were able to locate her.

Now things were calmer, she said. She worked as an interior designer in Recife and went to visit her son once a month in Maceio to the south. It was clearly painful for her to be separated from her son but evidently all the emotions were also tied up with the cruel marriage she’d endured like a jail sentence.

We headed out to Carnival the next day and met up with her friend on the gay/lesbian street. The phone rang and she hung up after a brief, angry exchange.

“That was my ex-boyfriend.” She casually told me. Apparently since they’d split a month ago he’d been following her everywhere. She told me that he’d seen her drinking a beer in a club with some guy and he walked up and stood by the table for half an hour, threatening them. Finally he smashed a bottle on the floor and the security guards threw him out.

The cell phone rang again and from the noise he could tell she was in Olinda but she wouldn’t say where. I bean to get a little nervous.

Luciana and her friend were sniffing lana, a type of chloroform that you spray from a can onto a piece of cloth and hold to your mouth. The street was even more vibrant than the day before and, on her new high, Luciana hopped around even more. She caught me looking at another girl and pretending to be jealous, ran away from me through the crowd. I chased after her, laughing and suddenly saw that she had been caught by an ugly gorilla of a man who grabbed her arm and shouted angrily. The ex-boyfriend.

He was about three times my size and in any case I wasn’t nearly drunk or dumb enough to think about intervening. He’d hunted her down among half a million people and was now pleading:

“Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do. I want to marry you. I want you to have my children.”

She kept shaking her head and trying to break away but he grabbed her again and again. She twisted free and fled down the street and he pushed through the crowd after her. She span back, ducking low and took refuge behind the samba band. A few minutes later he doubled back and passed without seeing her. There were tears in his eyes.

Luciana rejoined me with a whoop and began dancing and kissing me like nothing had happened. I was beginning to be a little wary of these dramas that seemed to surround her.

I stood around for the rest of that day in the sun, paranoid that Mr Heartbreak would return and break my head against the wall. The heat and confusion were intense and people walked around squirting water pistols at the crowds. It has to be said the pretty girls got the worst of it.

By now I was getting sick of Carnival. The mass of faces, voices and bodies had got too much for me. There wasn’t much room to really dance, just hop around and I’d already had three days of that. The attraction of a crowd of half a million Brazilians had been that half of them were female. But now I had my girl and didn’t need to roam in search any more.

The Brazilians were still partying like crazy but the fatigue was setting in and the Carnival began to get rough around the edges after so much drink and drugs. A law had been passed against the manhandling of girls in the street but there was no one to stop the Brazilian guys from grabbing anything in a skirt. Interestingly, it was only the middle class men doing this; the poor Brazilians had more education.

The festivities were due to last another day but we had enough. Luciana and I fled to her apartment on the other side of Recife to make our own finale to that year’s Carnival in Brazil.

Tom has been traveling non-stop since the age of 18 and co-founded Road Junky in 2004. Follow him @tomglaister

He’s the author of Hand to Mouth to India, an account of hitchhiking from England to India with no money and which will soon be rereleased by Road Junky Books.

Tales of a Road Junky featuring tales of breaking people out of jail in Delhi, selling fake Rolexes in Japan and other adventures in Israel and Brazil will be out later this year.

He also writes fiction for anyone who never really grew up and his latest novel is Bozo and the Storyteller – download the audio book for free or even buy a copy…

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