Couchsurfing South America: Fireworks in Rio
Brianna’s clothes flap like artificial tree leaves under thin, wooden boards and recycled clothesline pins adjacent to the windowsill. Under bobbing red curls, she smiles precariously.
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Litro #114: Rio
Cover illustration by Filipe Jardim, a Brazillian artist who specialises in fashion and travel illustration, spending half of his year in his native city of Rio de Janeiro and the rest circulating the globe. Filipe first made his mark when invited to produce Louis Vuitton’s Rio de Janeiro “Carnet de Voyage”. This beautifully produced book was the perfect showcase for his work and resulted in further commissions for Hermes and Issa. Recently he was asked to provide illustrations to launch the Wall Street Tiffany store in New York, whilst continuing editorial work for The New Yorker and S/N magazine.
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Nilton Resende – The Crack
“Sky-blue,” the boy hears, as he sweeps the yard and feels the broom come to a sudden halt. He looks to one side with a start, then behind him, then up, and sees his cousin clutching the handle as she crouches down. She takes his face, cupping it with her hands. She pulls back a little as she looks at him, taking his face out of the shade and thrusting it into the sun. He closes his eyes, but she asks him to open them. He obeys, slowly, his eyelids trembling, as the woman in front of him, half her body silhouetted against the light, arms outstretched and stroking his head, says, “Like an angel.” She then returns him to the zone of shade and rest as she kisses his forehead. “Your eyes are sky-blue.” She looks towards the porch. “He’s such a beautiful boy.”
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Lúcia Bettencourt – Summertime
Since November the temperature had been rising steadily. It had reached more than thirty degrees and nothing, not even the downpours that fell every so often, could reduce the sweltering daytime humidity. Those headed to work, dressed in their polyester uniforms, cotton shirts if they were lucky, sighed with envy, looking at the playboys in their skimpy swimsuits or baggy trunks, who mingled with a crowd of women in bikinis, or in bikini tops and shorts rolled down beneath their waists to hold iPods, or even those lycra shorts that cut into bum cracks and coloured the world of buttocks with hot, vibrant colours, stamping jiggling cheeks with flowers and stripes that became almost obscene with movement. Inside the van, the passengers were sweating and suffocating from the lack of air conditioning.
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A two-person monologue by Leonardo Villa-Forte
He started by telling me that it was all interconnected: the colt, the earth, the skirt, the strawberry and so on; because it had all been very well thought out, the relationship between the colours, the clothes, how the rooms were separated and even the way the man scratched his ear, a small homage to his ex-wife who, despite being far away, was undeniably present in everything around him; and so, because all the elements were there together, there was a sense of urgency in the air and the congruence of these things provoked a flurry of poetry which would inevitably be perceived by anyone, pushing into the background all the care taken with technique leaving only the odour of sanctity...
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João Paulo Cuenca – The Tattooist
It's just after midday. I sit on the train watching people come and go, their sullen faces, absent expressions. I see them carrying packages, handbags, holdalls. They unfold newspapers, read books, open magazines, or sit with their arms spread wide, taking up their own space as well as that of another.
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Sérgio Rodrigues – The Stapfnunsk report: A Decent Man
The witness Olaf Stapfnunsk, born in Stockholm, naturalised Brazilian, 48 years of age, owner of a private gym, resident of … street in the city of ..., after swearing by the Law, stated that: by 9am on Thursday 7th October this year, he had arrived at his gym, located on ... street, and went straight up to the office, where he couldn’t help noticing the absence of Totó, his subordinate, full name Alceu Gouveia Nunes, who should have been there by then; this fact made him swear angrily in Swedish (subba was the word he swore, deemed untranslatable by the witness) and, in fury over Totó’s lack of professionalism, grab the phone and get on alone with the scheduled morning task of the month, namely, telemarketing to the neighbourhood...
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Tatiana Salem Levy – Desert
The water has been lapping his feet for a while, since he arrived at the beach and installed himself there, on the shore. Every day he performs the same ritual: he wakes up at half-past five, has a cup of black coffee and goes down to the beach. He walks from the entrance of his building, located in the inner part of Copacabana, to the sand. Then he doesn’t walk anymore. They’ve already told him that he should walk, that it’s good for the heart, especially at his age. But his heart prefers to admire the sea, which isn’t very rough today, but does have waves, the kind which break little by little, they reach the shore without rushing, caressing the sand.
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The Wait by Antônio Moura
Waiting, standing, on the rock,
between the sea’s green sphere
and the star that nears
every night, you speak
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Two poems by Angélica Freitas
at eleven years old
behind my grandmother’s house
in fishing village z-3
i smoked a gol cigarette bought
singly in a boteco
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Monkey Hill
When Rio won the 2016 Olympics it was as if the whole city pinched itself. Euphoric crowds sang and danced on the beach while, on the big screen above their heads, President Lula and Sergio Cabral, the state governor, hugged and wept. On buses and in backstreets people went about their business in quiet surprise. Although cariocas are dreamers, years of decline and disappointment have tempered their natural exuberance. But the next day it seemed that everyone was thinking the same thing: maybe, just maybe, life in Rio might improve.
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Bennett Paris — Exu’s Fedora
Franklin had left Jersey City during the real estate boom. They sold their house, he and his Brazilian wife, and with the profit, built a small house on land her parents had given them, and settled in to pursue the simple deliberate life in a former fishing village called Beira Mar. He set up a small tourism business, the income from which turned out to be not more than pocket change, but it kept him busy.
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The True Meaning of Children’s Day
It was really Noel Rosa who convinced me to go. If I'm trying to decide where to go out and Dama do Cabaré comes up in my playlist, I head obediently over to Lapa. In this case, happily enough, the song was De Qualquer Maneira. I hadn't sworn any oaths, I hadn't promised anyone, and sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of taking life advice from random Noel Rosa songs but dammit, eu ia na Penha.
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Nana Howton — Interquad
My first cousin Daniel liked to sleep with his penis between my thighs when we shared his mother's bed while she worked a graveyard shift in the local hospital. I know what most people would think: what kind of 13-year-old slut lets her 14-year-old cousin do that night after night for a whole month of vacation? Well, the kind that lived in a Catholic orphanage with 60 girls and six nuns and was never told what a penis was.
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A Thirty-year-old Kiss
I started as a research assistant at the Instituto Moreira Salles back in June. I'd been thinking about it ever since they told me it was there, hidden away in some white box in the innards of the archive. Now my research was done, and today was my last day at the university. I could count my days left here on a blind butcher's fingers. So I finally mustered up the courage to ask them to let me see it. The manuscript of A Hora da Estrela.
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Searching for Carmen
A concrete building, too small to be a UFO but too big to be a public bathroom, in a dusty, abandoned playground between two highways. Unfortunately, I was in the right place. I'd finally found the Carmen Miranda Museum. Throughout my search, I'd spoken with at least half a dozen cariocas who had no idea it existed. It was more than ignorance; they were convinced that it did not, in fact, exist. "I've been living here my whole life," said a silver-haired jogger, "and I've never heard of the Carmen Miranda Museum."
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#Rio
- This month in Litro #148 we explore the notion of what Going Home – means to us. Is it a familiar physical space? A refuge? A feeling? A state of mind? Or is home actually to be found in another human being – maybe your partner, your parents? How do you know when you have found it? Continue reading »
- Welcome to Litro #147 - the Space issue. In this issue we explore the world’s ever-evolving urban social landscape. We’ve got art, stories, essays, cartoons, interviews - all examining the ways in which individuals and groups carve out their own spaces, dare to take up space and make their built environment(s) distinctly their own. Continue reading »
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