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Recommended Reading
Before I came to São Paulo I did so with some trepidation and unease. This was heavily counterbalanced somewhat with my vivid cartoon-like imagination of Brazil as a whole - with the promise of paradisiacal beaches, the hedonism of carnival, beautiful women, a promised tropical land of sun and surf, lounging about in a hammock for days on end under coconut trees sipping caipirinhas, entertained by the indios in grass skirts with some light bossa nova in the background... Okay that's going too far, but you get the picture - yet the little research I'd done on São Paulo wasn't enticing to say the least.
On the BBC website, for example, I learned that São Paulo had 17 million inhabitants, 4 million automobiles and 10,000 miles of streets, making São Paulo one of the most congested cities in the world. For an asthmatic with a hatred for cars this wasn't a good start. And then there was the bombshell to really get the travel juices flowing and friends salivating in jealously and running to the travel agencies to book their flights to stay with me - It also has one of the worst crime rates in the world with 1500 murders in 2004, compared to New York‘s 671.
I wasn't to be put off though. I could handle it. (While living in the UK I'd lived in both Toxteth and Brixton - two trouble spots in Liverpool and London, that exploded in riots during the early eighties.) If I could live there I could live anywhere - except Dufar perhaps or downtown Iraq. But I wasn't helping myself either when I brought with me for the flight a book ominously entitled "A Death In Brazil" (actually a brilliant portrayal of modern Brazil - giving an overview of its history, politics, culture, cuisine - highlighting the country's spirit and contradictions.) It must have been just after taking off, waving goodbye to dear old Blighty, all dewy eyed and dreamy, that I came across the following paragraph:
"Rio is huge and lovely and terrifying. São Paulo is huger and more terrifying and not lovely at all (oh dear, what am I doing? Take me back, please. Now!)... São Paulo has more private helicopters than any other city in the world, more armored limousines, more armored ordinary cars, more armed security personnel and more desperate people than any other urban center on the face of the earth. (Shit!)"
As far as I could see and smell, within a few seconds of driving past the shit stinking Rio Tiete upon arriving in São Paulo, Peter Robb's assessment wasn't too far off the mark. It has to be said it is one hell of a not-lovely-in-the-way-that-eating-one's-own-excrement-is-not-lovely ugly city - apparently designed with anarchic and random abandon by some bankrupt mediocrity in a fit of vindictive hatred against his fellow human beings.
São Paulo is also very much a city under siege. Paranoid of thieves and burglars and bank robbers and murderers and bandits - security is everywhere. As rife, perhaps, of say paid up members of the PCC (many of whom undoubtedly work in the security industry - but that's another story). On the entrance of many streets and avenues, patrolling the roads are security guards - before you even arrive at an apartment or commercial building, and when you do there is even more security usually both in front of and behind the electrified fences, and then, if that wasn't enough, you are suddenly being hassled on the entryphone by the porteiro for your name, so then he can okay it with whoever it is you are visiting - and then, only then, are you allowed in, albeit steadily followed in through the lobby and into the lift and up to the floor by the watchful eye of a camera lens.
Not that I'm complaining after the recent wake up call that São Paulo is really, truly one of the worlds most trigger happy cities. The death toll after the four days of violent clashes between police and suspected gangsters had reached over 130 on the last count.
"We‘re at war with them, there will be more casualties, but we won‘t back down,"state military police chief Col. Elizeu Teixeira Borges said, reassuringly.
I can't argue. This city is at war with itself - in many ways the self-destructive button had already been pressed a long time ago; with unparalleled levels of violence, pollution, homelessness, the extreme inequalities between rich and poor, one must ask the question I have been asking myself recently over and over. The question any privileged westerner living here must surely have asked: Why the hell live here?
I mean, apart from having more opportunities and a lot of very good restaurants, but that's all by the by if you have enough money and luck to live anywhere else in the world you choose. Why the hell live here if you are not from here? Why not London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Buenos Aires? I challenge you reader, give me one good reason?
