When Carnival Comes A-Calling...
Last updated 1/7/2008 9:37:50 AM
It is the city of Sugar Loaf Mountain; the statue of Christ the Redeemer, towering high above Corcovado; the beaches at Copacabana and Ipanema and perhaps above all the annual carnival during the week leading up to Lent, billed as one of the greatest, most glitzy and glamorous events of the world. But there’s precious little of that glitz and glamour to be found in the part of Brazil’s capital city where I have wound up.
I have been waiting for the best part of an hour outside an enormous building which looks as though it may once have been an aircraft hangar, somewhere in the less than salubrious downtown area of Rio de Janeiro, at what I am told is one of the best known samba schools in the city, waiting for the show to start.
With plenty of time to kill, the man I take to be in charge has already proudly shown me sheds full of what he says are props used in the parade during past years’ Rio carnivals. There’s the trailer part of a very rusty lorry bearing what appears to be a badly-battered full-scale model of a cow, or perhaps it is a bull. There’s a papier-mâché giant’s head, sadly now permanently detached from its body and part of the torso of a reclining woman, which seems to have done battle with the elements in a big way – and lost. It’s the sort of thing which could well compete for exhibition floor space at some avant-garde European gallery, “Reclining Nude post Rio Carnival”, perhaps.
Outside the hangar, amid rusting cars, old truck wheels, discarded mattresses and difficult to identify pieces of sequin-encrusted cloth I am about to give up waiting and head back to the comfort of the beach and my hotel, the Copacabana Palace, in an area actually considered safe enough for unaccompanied tourists to wander about on their own, when there seems to be something happening.
Suddenly a pile of drums of varying sizes has appeared just outside the doors to the main hangar and what looks like an entire football team of smiling youths are piling out of a couple of cars, hardly less rusty and decrepit than the discarded carnival props inside. The young men form themselves and their instruments into a couple of lines and their leader, clearly the conductor, takes his place in front.