“TAKE OFF your shirt now!” yelled my partner Thiago over the sounds of revelers dancing and enjoying themselves to the music of the trio eléctricos passing by.
We were in the middle of Carnaval in Salvador, Bahia, last February, trying to make our way up through the crowds on the coastal road in the Rio Vermelho neighborhood of the city.
“Everyone is looking at our abadás, so take it off!” Thiago explained. He had already swiftly taken off his black and white tank top, otherwise known as an abadá in Portuguese. I struggled with my Mardi Gras beads, and when Thiago saw that I couldn’t extricate myself from them fast enough, he just yanked down on them sharply until they snapped. I quickly took my tank top off, and off we went up the hill, bare-chested but slightly less frightened of being jumped for our abadás.
Every trio eléctrico and camarote, or VIP lounge area, had a different abadá for every day of the seven days of Carnaval in Salvador. This was the easiest and fastest way to see who had paid the required hefty fees to dance behind the musical floats in the Carnaval parade or watch from the safety of the camarotes, where beer flowed freely. Those who could not afford to pay for either had to make do standing on the sidelines of the parade route, squeezed between thousands of people who were often rowdy and many times erupted into fights. These people are referred to in slang Portuguese as the pipocada, or the popcorn, a reference to how they look like corn being popped as they jump up and down to the sounds of axé music.
After twenty minutes of relentlessly pushing our way through the excited crowds of revelers, we finally arrived at our camarote, tired and slightly dazed at having survived the madding crowds.
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LUCKILY, we arrived in Salvador from Brasilia a few days before the actual Carnaval parades kicked off, which meant we had some time to explore the city and get our bearings. It was my first time in Salvador, the first capital of Brazil and the old port where most of Brazil’s slaves arrived from Africa to work on sugar cane plantations here. For Thiago, this was to be his fourth Carnaval in Salvador, which comforted me by knowing that at least one of us knew the city already.
The historic neighborhood of Pelorinho, with its cobbled streets, historic buildings and colonial churches, was the most interesting for me. Guidebooks claim that there are 365 colonial churches in Salvador, one for every day of the year!
A ghoulish fact of the Pelorinho’s past came to my attention as I leafed through a lavish coffee-table book on Salvador in our hotel room. It said, in almost nonchalant terms, that slaves who misbehaved in colonial times were often strung up in public squares in the district and whipped as a warning to other to slaves not to misbehave.
Brazil was one of the last countries in the world to outlaw slavery in 1888. The fact that Salvador was the port of entry of so many African slaves into the country, means that the city to this day remains the most important center of Brazilian-African culture in the nation.
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THE NIGHT before Thiago and I went to see the Beyoncé concert at the exhibition center out by the airport, we were eating dinner in the Pelorinho district when I noticed several strikingly beautiful black American women and men who were also eating in the same restaurant.
“Look Thiago,” I said. “Don’t you think these are musicians and backup singers for Beyoncé?”
And sure enough the next night at the concert, we recognized several of them on the stage with Beyoncé.
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URINATING in public becomes a major issue during Carnaval in Salvador. Thousands of people dancing in the streets at the same time, while swilling down rivers of ice cold beer, leads to one insurmountable problem: Too much pee and not enough public bathrooms.
The city of Salvador tries to cope by putting up chemical toilets along the various parade routes, but this year they were never enough and many times were locked shut.
On one occasion, both Thiago and I had to pee at the same time when we were dancing with a trio eléctrico. In order to battle our way through the pipocada crowd to get to a bathroom and return in one piece, we asked one of the burly security guards if he would escort us on this mission. He readily agreed, and we followed him as he carved a path through the pulsating human river of people in front of us.
After walking through several blocks of side streets, and still not finding any chemical toilets, we finally stopped and just did as others were already doing and peed on the gate of a house on one of the side streets. Once relieved, we were escorted back to the parade, and we gave the guard a generous tip for his help. I can only imagine how horrifying it must be for women who find themselves in a similar predicament. If I were female and dancing in Carnaval, I would avoid drinking most any kind of liquid. The danger there, of course, with the heat and humidity, is keeling over from heat exhaustion and dehydration!
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