Between the Bay of All Saints ….
Between the Bay of All Saints and the Southern Atlantic Ocean a piece of land sticks out, a promontory with water on three sides and the sky above. On the promontory sits the city of Salvador, caught like a precious stone or a piece of glass held up against the light, the light always bouncing and reflecting itself from sky, to sea, to land and back again, and nowhere shadow, nowhere to hide, except under the old trees that have survived from the tropical forest before, and sometimes the skyscrapers, the apartment blocks that have risen in the forest’s place and now demand the sky.
Once the colonial capital of Portuguese Brazil, the Portuguese commissioned their rich and multicoloured houses on top of the promontory and imported slaves into the port beneath. The slaves came from Benin, Angola and Mozambique, the latter two, the Portuguese African colonies the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The slaves built Salvador, houses rich and poor, and the plantations of sugar, tobacco and coffee beyond. In the city they originally lived near the port and the docks. The port exported wood, Brazil wood, that’s how Brazil got its name, agricultural products, gold and silver and precious stones. In a period spanning the 18th and 19th centuries Salvador was the largest exporter of precious stones in the world, diamonds, emeralds, tourmaline and topaz, stones that bedazzled in the heat, stones that caught the light.
There is a road in Salvador, the ‘Avenida Sete de Setembro’, marking the date in 1822 when Brazil became independent from colonial Portugal. The road runs down the northern side of the promontory, starting at the bottom of the ‘Centro Historico’ area, on up through the modern ‘Centro’ district, curving gently around the park at the ‘Campo Grande’ and on again through the upmarket area of Vitoria, over a roundabout and then down to the point, to Barra, with its iconic lighthouse and its ever popular beaches. The road could be read as a history of modern Salvador, and in part also, as a history of Brazil itself.
In the ‘Centro Historico’ area, the brightly coloured, colonial houses, the incredible ‘new world’ baroque churches, the grand administrative buildings of the past speak of the exuberance of arrival, the arrival, five hundred years ago, of Portuguese adventurers and speculators, religious zealots and visionaries intoxicated by the light and the heat, yet all too aware of their limitations. They were few in number compared to their Tupi, (indigenous), neighbours and the African population they later imported, and needed therefore to use the skills, knowledge and labours of each. So began that particular set of contradictions that is uniquely Brazilian, as witnessed here, on the one hand, at the ‘Pelourinho’, the public whipping post, with its harsh and oppressive history, and on the other, here in the Centro Historico , that great mixture of colours and styles, of architecture, dress, food, music, language, a mixture of Portuguese, Tupi and African folk cultures.
After several centuries this area was abandoned by its original inhabitants, its families grown too large and factious, its members seeking various and other lives, the stuff of Brazilian novels and telenovelas. In the 20th century, many of the original African/Brazilian inhabitants at the bottom of the hill moved up and in, especially after the end of slavery in 1888, setting up homes and businesses, only to be evicted in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, to make a space to put the tourists and the new institutions of ‘culture’ and ‘history’. Most of the tourists are from the rest of Brazil, seeking the story of the origins of their country, as well as those from abroad, seeking inspiration for theirs. They wander or stand around taking selfies or posing with the locals, a little in awe, a little confused perhaps as to what piece of history they have wandered into, a stage set in which the play finished only yesterday, or did it? Are they the actors now, the tourists and the locals who would interact with them, exchanging food, music, crafts, money and ideas, in the bright, sparkling light?
If you stand at the bottom of the Centro Historico area, where the Avenida Sete de Setembro begins, you may notice an office block of more modern style standing empty and derelict. Once squatted, some of its windows are broken, and in those that are not and on its outside walls, posters and graffiti protest the makeover of the Centro Historico area. Below, some military policemen stand eyeing the traffic and answering questions from tourists in danger of losing their way, while on the opposite side of the road. taxi drivers, their cars parked in a neat row, eat ice creams, waiting for their next fare.
And on up a little, past a newly restored colonial building turned into a beautiful municipal library, past another grand church, and we seem to have moved on in more ways than one. The road straightens out for five or six blocks, and here shops, shops and more shops, market stalls and pavement stalls, alleyways and side streets leading to more of the same, cafes, ‘lanchonetes’, restaurants and more. The pavements are jammed with people of all skin tones, smiling eyes, a quip or a quick call, all hoping for a bargain and not a tourist in sight. The shops are wide, some going back the full block, their entrances open to the street. Shop assistants, young and good looking, in bright, matching t-shirts and trainers beckon you inside or give a running commentary on their microphones of the shop’s particular prices and wares. Here are the many wonderful fruits and vegetables of Brazil, the food and drink, the high quality clothes and textiles not seen in Europe, the furniture and electrical goods of ‘Industria Brasileira’. Here are banks and insurance agencies, offices for lawyers, estate agents, a post office, shops for money transfer, mobile phones and services, for ‘variadades’, art and craft supplies, and travel agencies for holidays to other parts of Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Mexico and the United States, even Europe, so far away. On the pavements are stalls selling football shirts, mugs and flags, Bahia and Vitoria, the two rival teams of Salvador. Others sell cheap watches and jewellery, and behind them some shops with more expensive versions of the same. Rings and brooches and necklaces with small cut diamonds and other stones peer out through their windows, glistening and glittering in the hubbub and the heat.
At the end of several blocks the street widens out some more and curves around the park at the Largo do Campo Grande. A grand public space with avenues and pavements and pediments and seats to sit on and be calm. The palm and other tropical trees grow tall above you and shade you from the ever pressing light, a little from the heat. A single policemen stands watchful and an older woman with a stall selling bottled water is grateful for a couple of ‘reais’, ‘Obrigada amigo’.
At the centre of the park a large column rises up, like the one in Trafalgar Square in London with Admiral Nelson on its top, but here at its peak stands the figure of an indigenous warrior. He stands four metres tall, of cast iron, his weight leaning forward into action, his chest bare, his headdress of feathers, his hands pressing a spear downwards into a dragon at his feet. The statue commemorates the struggle for the independence of Bahia from Portugal, which was part of the larger struggle for the independence of Brazil from the Portuguese monarchy, some of whose main events happened here between 1821 and 1823, in Salvador. In particular the statue marks the role that Tupi Brazilians played in that struggle not just as fighters but as planners and organisers too. On the one hand the statue looks for all the world like a European caricature of an ‘Indian’, but on the other, standing in a place where generals and admirals and political leaders might claim to be remembered, a fitting statement to the real independence of Bahia and Brazil, its spiritual and cultural foundations. The present governor of Bahia is of indigenous descent too, his first name is Jeronimo, an engineer by profession, his hair is grey, his open-necked, white shirts well pressed, his smiles and handshakes and interviews with the press open and engaging. Perhaps one day there will be a statue to him too.
After the park, the road enters a straight section again as it passes through the upmarket area of Vitoria. On either side the road is lined with trees, old, and tropical, with roots pushing up through the pavement, trailing lianas from high up down to the ground. The road resembles a forest avenue, perhaps it was, once. The light presses down through the leaves in pools and puddles, bouncing off the car windscreens as they pass down the road, reflecting back off the windows and walls of the skyscrapers either side. The road is busy, a constant flow of vehicles and people back and forth, but all seems strangely calm, as if passing down the long aisle of a church, whose columns take their inspiration, architecturally, from an avenue of trees, of course.
On the pavement, under the trees, the people walk, residents, workers, travellers. Some are rich, by the standards of Salvador, or middle class, many retired, some related perhaps to the big families of old, swapping their crumbling and unmanageable houses in the Centro Historico area several decades ago for large apartments here either side of the road. They go out, in jeans and t-shirts, jogging bottoms and trainers, to the shops, to lunch, to walk the dog, speaking to the security guards at their gates, to the street vendors in their pavement kiosks. Now and then a gate slides open and a big shiny car backs carefully out for a trip to the office, to the shopping mall, or the beach. Others, guards and cleaners, maintenance and service workers, weave in and out, up and down the road, going to and from work. Into a large hole in the ground between two of the tower blocks, concrete, steel and men’s labour is being poured, wage labour, not slave labour now, the minimum wage unlikely though to be able to buy or rent one of the new apartment blocks that will rise up above. The road is blocked off for a minute or two as others in fluorescent jackets direct the traffic around the delivery of more building supplies. Day trippers pass, down to the beach, from the ‘bairros’, from the ‘favelas’ uptown, walking, not taking the bus, a free day out, grandma and the grand-kids, carrying beach towels and plastic buckets and spades. The security guards call out a friendly ‘hello’, neighbours from uptown, all neighbours here, whose town is this anyway? And ice cream sellers, water, mango and coconut sellers, pushing their trolleys down to the beach, and hopefully, a little later, empty, coming back up. Two guys go from gate to gate with buckets of fresh langoustines caught in the bay that morning. They hustle the security guards about how to access their clients in the apartments above, a chance to earn some good money, a practice that must go back and back, A few homeless men, just wearing shorts, barefoot, lie asleep on sheets of cardboard on the pavement. A few others carry large bags of empty plastic bottles to be recycled, a few ‘reais’ for a days work.
And the gateways, the fences guarded and watched over by cameras, and men and women in uniforms, in guard houses, some armed, some not. And beyond them the skyscrapers themselves, the apartment blocks like an avenue to a halfway democracy. One wonders, in this day and age, who is being kept in and who is being kept out? As if some of the ‘favelas’ uptown didn’t have their armed guards and gatekeepers too. Some of the tower blocks are fifty, sixty years old, with tropical moss or mould growing up their sides, their window frames a little rusty, their paint distressed. Others are brand new, modern, sparkling, sky-leaning dreams. On the right hand side of the road as you walk down, the apartments look out over the bay, the biggest such bay in the Americas, blue/grey and shimmering all through the afternoon. The sun passes high over the road and slowly descends to the west, bringing sunset views to the residents whose windows look out on that side of the road. The apartments here are the most desirable and most expensive, hotel rooms with similar views subject to upgrades at upgrade prices. They are the same views, though, that are witnessed down at the bottom of the hill by locals who have campaigned and resisted with some success the march of the skyscrapers, resist and cling on in the little communities at the waters edge, at Gamboa de Baixo and elsewhere. Some of the tourists seem to like these areas too, searching for something a little more down-home, where they can eat seafood prepared by local families, feel the sand beneath their feet and paddle in the water. Young men row their boats from here out around the bay for tourists and commuters alike. The light flickers off the water, silver and emerald and aquamarine, confusing the eye until you are not sure whether it is sea or sky you are looking at. Only the boys in their boats seem to know how to navigate it.
Back along the road at intervals between some of the apartment blocks, older grander houses survive of the grand merchants and speculators of the past, institutes for this or that, ambitions of an earlier century on the rise. Some stand decaying, waiting for demolition, or inspiration, one turned into an occasional restaurant, a couple of others outlying parts of Salvador University. One of the latter seems unused, at some point occupied by students, their posters sharing the eyeline through the gate with the overhanging vegetation and a sign advertising organic honey from the ‘Chapada Diamantina’ in the interior of Bahia.
The biggest such building on the road is a gallery, a museum, the ‘Museu de Arte da Bahia’. It is unclear what the building was originally used for, but clearly for something prestigious. Its huge doors, of thick tropical hardwood are carved with the heads of indigenous deities, poking their tongues out, a reminder, just to be clear, of a time before Salvador. When the doors are open two amiable security guards direct people inside and chat to the locals walking past. They stand like gatekeepers to the light, which floods past them, up a grand marble staircase into a cooler atrium inside. Another staircase with curved wooden bannisters reaches up to a second level, and on both levels rooms wide and tall run around the central space, some connected to each other, some not. At first encounter, at the top of the first flight of steps, two young attendants at a small table ask you to sign a visitors book. Most of the signatures are from the rest of Brazil, a few are ‘estrangeiros’, foreigners. A foreigner from Europe might be asked where he or she is from, and an intrigued ‘ah,’ and a ‘muito bem vindo,’ given in return.
The main exhibition is of works by the artist Carybé, Héctor Julio Páride Bernabó , an Argentinian who moved to Salvador in the middle of the 20th century, loved it so much he settled down and called it home. He was a painter, a muralist, a designer of stage sets, a writer and member inducted into the Ketu sect of the Candomblé religion, that blending of West African and Catholic spiritual practice that is particular to the coastal regions of Brazil. In 1950 he spent time down by the docks documenting with quick and prolific sketches the lives and livelihoods of the working people of the port of Salvador, before containerisation took it a little further around the bay. There are over one hundred drawings here, filling several rooms, upstairs and down, framed and grouped in themes to resonate with each other. Here are the sailors of ships and the rowers of ferries, the loaders and unloaders, the packers, carters and warehousemen, the fishermen and market stall holders, the hawkers and traders, the festival goers, to the goddess of the sea, the dancers and musicians, the spiritual and community leaders, the onlookers and stander-abouters. The sketches were conceived firstly in pencil and then later transformed in the studio into ink drawings, sixty years after slavery was abolished, and now another seventy five years later, the work still here, its people and personalities still very much alive in their modern day incarnation in the Centro area just up the road. Here are lines elegant and economical, with brush and ink running spontaneously and expressively over the pencil beneath. The lines describe exactly the character and essence of the person or persons in their moment. Here is character fused with caricature, with sentimentality, romanticism, social comment and insight, forming a description of place, its individuals and social groups.
And the windows, …the windows. When walking past the building at night, or on a Monday, all the windows and their wooden shutters are closed. All that is inside seems forgotten. But come Tuesday, the windows and their shutters are thrown open, the light and the air comes flooding in, illuminating and breathing life into the grand spaces. The noises of the city drift into the gallery, an ongoing soundtrack to the pictures of Carybé. Each window is large, three metres high, two metres wide, a living picture of the street, of the lush palm trees that surround the building or of the city skyscrapers receding into the distance. It is a picture that moves as you move towards it, the breeze, if there is one, the humidity, brushing your face, leaning or putting your hand through the space as if to shape the world outside. It is unusual in a gallery, unknown in northern Europe, where rain, wind and cold keep the windows closed, the temperature and light monitored and controlled for fear of degrading the pictures inside. Here the pictures, their subject, the building, its open windows, the noise of the city, seem to have become one. Visitors walk from room to room, noting the points of each drawing, pausing to soak up the atmosphere of the building, standing at the open windows to look out at the city from whence the work of Carybé came, all part of this happy set of coincidences.
Back outside, after a roundabout one hundred metres further on the road gently descends, past more apartment blocks, several churches, some shops and older houses down to the beaches of Barra. Here on the beach there is no shade, just sun and sand and sea. All shapes of people find some space for themselves, eat ice cream, drink fresh ‘agua do coco’, a beer or a caipirinha, wade or swim in the tranquil water of the bay, or venture into the waves the other side of the point. Middle aged bellies peer over the tops of middle aged shorts, next-to-nothing bikinis reveal next-to-everything curves and love-handles, younger arms and legs and muscles flex and pose, pert in the sunshine.
And at the end, at the very end of the promontory is the lighthouse of Barra, casting its light out into the ocean at night, warning ships of the entrance to the Bay of All Saints. It is an image printed on t-shirts and postcards, mugs and car-key medallions, a symbol of Salvador and its history for every tourist to take home. Beneath the lighthouse, amongst the stalls selling hats and sunglasses there are a couple selling precious stones. Young trendy guys with bandannas and dreadlocks and cheerful smiles sell clear pieces of quartz and amethyst, or even something a little rarer. Not many ‘reais’ for each perhaps, though the money will be precious enough to the stallholders trying to make a living. Worn around the neck or the wrist to catch the light, they will be precious too to those may buy them. For it is the light that passes through them that inspires. And there is plenty of that in Salvador.
