Anderson
The second tale that I have decided to publish was recounted to me by a close friend of mine, Claudio Silva, or as those lucky enough to be his friends know him as, Anderson. Twenty-six years of age, Anderson was one of the first people I met upon my arrival. He is a classic example of a young, hard-working man from the favela. Despite living in one of Rocinha’s most notorious areas, nicknamed the “Faixa da Gaza” (Gaza strip) by the locals, he manages to hold down a full-time job in Rio’s most glamorous neighbourhood, composes and teaches music on both the organ and the piano and speaks near fluent English. Not the life you imagined a twenty- something to have, living amidst some of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous Anderson will be helping me throughout the project, brimming as he is with stories of Rocinha, and this first memoir of his focuses on the life of his grandmother, Manoely Silva. The story provides an illustration of the huge changes that have taken place in Rocinha over the years. Though not a translation, I will tell the story from his perspective, in hopes of opening up a window into the life of his granny. Thanks again to Ben Sadek, Anderson, Will Jones and my aunt for the help and advice. Please visit the blog to see more stories like this one
My Grandmother: Manoely Silva Lopes
The story of my magnificent grandmother starts, not in Rocinha, but in the equally famous favela of Cantagalo. The community is a poignant reminder of the astonishing proximity of wealth and poverty in my wonderful city. It is hidden in plain sight, climbing chaotically up the hillside behind the famous streets of Copacabana. My granny, christened Manoely Silva Lopes, was born in the year 1947, long before the much-loved film, “Era Uma Vez,” (Once Upon a Time) brought fame to the morro (hill). Her mother, a true Carioca, (native of Rio) was a seamstress. Soon after her eighth birthday, the family decided to swap the steep slope of Cantagalo for the sprawling valley where Rocinha lies, flanked by the sizeable sentries of the Morro de Dois Irmãos (Two Brothers Hill) and the Pedra da Gavea (Rock of Gavea). It was 1955 and the relatively young favela of Rocinha had begun to slowly advance up the mountainsides. They were far from the only ones that made the decision to uproot. Masses of Brazilians from the North East of the country were embarking upon the long journey south in search of work, their minds lost in visions of the big city. By granny’s accounts though, Rocinha was still light years away from becoming the concrete jungle that I have come to know.
“Only a few shacks scattered the patch of land on which mother had chosen to build our house,” granny explained to me.
At that time the dense forest, which surged skywards from every inch of untouched land, was very much the dominant force in the vast valley. This would all change dramatically over the years to come, but in spite of all the difficulties that my grandmother faced, she never shuts up about the Rocinha of times long lost.
Although pockets of people were starting to inhabit the morro, the majority had arrived penniless and with few prospects of work, destined — at least in the beginning — to spend the initial months locked in a basic struggle for food and shelter. Each day, my grandmother’s uncles set off in the early hours of the morning, laden with fishing rods, tackle and bait. She watched their silhouettes disappearing over the gloomy horizon, as she began her daily duties, gathering all that she could lay her hands on in the way of sustenance for her younger brothers and sisters. Before the age of ten she was beating a path through the heavy forest in search of juicy mangoes, gigantic jaca (jackfruit) and dry fire wood to be used for the preparation of the day’s catch. In the beginning, my great grandmother was often out of work. Transport links between their new home of Rocinha and the neighbourhoods where she had her old customers were minimal, and the family was forced to live off whatever food they could come by. Any money they earned was invested in improving the ramshackle shelter in which they lived. Granny often told of how, late in the day, the construction workers who grafted daily in the city would arrive home, carrying with them all manner of surprises that were then used to bolster their dwellings. Nowadays, colourful brick houses in all shapes and sizes scale the sides of the mountains, but back in the 50s the residents inhabited wooden dwellings or, ever- increasingly, makeshift homes put together with an array of recycled construction materials. The community was a resourceful one and brick by brick its members developed it together.
As the sixties sprang into life their luck began to turn. My great grandmother was receiving more work with each passing day whilst granny’s uncles succeeded in making a living as fishermen, albeit a humble one. Everything went towards improving the family home. Granny always said that not a day went by without one addition or another: a brick here or a window there, aside from the never-ending arrival of relatives.
“It seemed as if half the migrant workers of Ceará had come to stay,” she once told me.
Before long there were fourteen people squeezed into the house and, being one of the eldest in the family, granny was soon put to work with the needle. She learned the tricks of the trade by watching her mother’s leathery hands dance over the fabrics, and was soon helping to put a dent in the pile of garments for any given day. This however, was just a fraction of her daily duties. In a house full of hungry mouths, granny was forever relied upon to provide for her younger siblings. Up at the first sign of the dawn, she would prepare food for them before setting out in search of the priceless wonders hanging from the trees that shade Rio’s lush landscape. Long days at her mother’s side followed; needle and thread in hand, brow furrowed, as the sun first soared above then sunk below the horizon. Only as night set in did her uncles return with their haul. On a good day, granny and her mother would rustle up a feast for the several, empty stomachs that awaited filling, but there were also nights when everybody was forced to go without. Time ticked by as my grandmother passed through her teens, her days following this relentlessly tiring pattern. Yet it was never with indignation nor resentment that she described her youth, growing up in the raw reality of Rocinha.
Not long after her seventeenth birthday, my grandmother was to mature in a way for which not even her most trying of childhoods had prepared her. It was the summer of 1964 and like so many young girls in the favela granny met a boy. Seventeen is a terribly young age at which to bear a child but teenage pregnancy is nothing out of the ordinary in Rocinha. The morros of Rio de Janeiro were void of contraception but full of intimate, sociable people that lived and interacted with each other very closely. Out of such circumstances came my father, without whom I would not be here today, telling you this tale. My grandmother, after so many years of caring for her siblings, had a son of her own. She raised him with her mother’s help, in the same home where she herself had grown up. Whilst the Brazilian military oversaw a slew of dictatorial regimes that spanned the 1960s and 70s, granny watched my father grow in a Rocinha that was transforming like never before.
The shanty settlement was becoming unrecognizable from the quiet community where my grandmother had been raised. Rio was developing at a remarkable rate; heavy investment in civil construction brought a new, far larger influx of public sector workers to Rio’s doorstep. Where better to settle than the marvelous morro of Rocinha, which lay in the midst of some of the city’s biggest projects. The hillside was now heaving with Baianos, Cearenses, Paraibanos and former members of every state in between. The life and soul of the favela burst out of the valley in an explosion of cultural expression.
“We were always getting together as a family. We would find an excuse to throw a party for any occasion, anything that gave us a reason to sambar (dance the samba) into the early hours of the morning.” My granny told me one night.
As well as the late-night parties, life was a never ending cycle of churrascos (barbecues) with innumerable family members and narrowly avoided accidents with children, intent on imitating Pele in the archaic alleyways.
“I wouldn’t have changed a thing,” she always says.
However, as Brazil’s new democracy rose from the ashes of the 1970s, my granny may have wished she could alter one, key dynamic of the ever-evolving favela. Though one totalitarian regime finally fell in the beautiful nation of Brazil, another smaller — yet equally threatening — organisation, was rearing its ugly head. Comando Vermelho (The Red Command), a gang that was the brainchild of a common crook and a far- left political prisoner, had its own visions of controlling certain sections of the population, and where better to begin than in the forgotten favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
“It was a different time.” My granny told me, a slight crinkle in her brow. “Despite the respect, trust and relative safety that existed within the community, our children were now becoming exposed to a world that we didn’t want them to see.”
My father was nearing adulthood when Comando Vermelho arrived on the scene, infesting the community with arms and the drug trade, but the glamour and the relative riches that this ‘career’ offered never caught his attention. The same however, was not true for many other teenage boys who grew up in the favela without the guidance they so desperately needed. Over the years, granny watched as the lost boys of Rocinha slipped into this cruel crevice of society. Once in, there were usually only two, torturous ways out. Thankfully, my grandmother had raised a son with a good head on his shoulders, and it was love, not drugs, that eventually intoxicated him.
My grandmother was into her forties as the decade neared its end but it was only now that she would have to face the toughest period in her already challenging lifetime. My father had long since moved out and married my mother. They lived together in a small home elsewhere in Rocinha, whilst granny continued to house nigh on half of the favela in the home she called her own. By this time, Comando Vermelho had taken complete control of Rocinha. The gang ruled ruthlessly and any person that stepped out of line was punished in accordance with thelei do trafico (law of the traffic). On a wild night in 1988 however, a force far more powerful wrought havoc with the lives of my relatives. Six months previously, my father had been fired from his job. With no prospects of work and his relationship with my mother tearing apart at the seams he returned to his mother’s house, in what was rapidly becoming the wildest winter that Cariocas had ever seen. Crime levels in the marvelous city had risen exponentially, while the opposite was true of employment numbers. Granny became another victim of the complicated circumstances into which the city had fallen and found herself without work for the first time in her many years of adulthood. It was during these difficult months that she awoke one night to the sound of an almighty crash. A storm was raging, the likes of which had never been seen on the sunny shores of Rio de Janeiro. Jumping out of bed, my grandmother could only watch as the howling wind wrenched the roof from off the house that she had spent her life constructing. The men of the house rushed several screaming children to safety as rain battered down through the gaping hole above, soaking Manoely to her very skin. She tore herself away from the sight of such destruction and hurried to shelter in a nearby neighbor’s home while the elements continued to roar outside. Only as the first glimmer of the morning sun appeared did the storm finally relent, bringing an end to the longest of nights. The damage was significant but paled in comparison to stories that they heard the following morning. The people of Rocinha had paid for the inaction of the Brazilian government that left them to live in such haphazard housing, where the weak earth simply could not endure such saturation. Friends and acquaintances’ entire houses had fallen away from the hillside, leaving the fruits of so much labour strewn across the valley. Yet, in the midst of all the madness, the community showed its astounding courage, pulling together against the chaos. Rocinha had been growing at a rate of knots over the previous three decades and was no longer the meager collection of farms and shacks that it had once been. The plucky population of Rocinha rebuilt its homes in a fraction of the time of which it had taken for their predecessors to be constructed. They were no longer made of wood or corrugated iron, but with bricks and mortar — in an attempt to safeguard against such a catastrophe ever happening again. My grandmother, side by side with my still unemployed father, began to reconstruct the home, not only repairing the extensive damage but also renovating other parts of the house. No state help arrived, but the sense of community and muitrão (self-help culture) was more than a match for the storm of ‘88.
It was during the following year, as the final touches were put to the new house, that I was born. Shortly after the events of that stormy night, my mother revealed to my father that she was pregnant. With the house all but completed, my father returned to work, understanding the all-new importance that a steady job now had. My mother on the other hand, continued to live in her own father’s house, hiding the truth that would inevitably announce itself some months later. My grandfather had once warned her in no uncertain terms that if she was to become pregnant again she would be banished from the house. It was with both a heavy heart and head that she went to sleep each night, wondering if the following morning would be the day that her father finally realised. My granny was well aware of the situation that was simmering away and urged my father to reconcile with my mother, but he is a stubborn man. He believed the tatters of their relationship to be torn beyond repair. Instead, he picked up extra shifts, dedicating himself to his work in an attempt to prepare financially for my birth, all the while neglecting the fragility of the matter at hand. It was therefore no sudden surprise for my grandmother when, just weeks before I was expected, my mother disappeared.
“I had told him again and again that something like this could happen, but did your father listen?” Granny informed me when I was a teenager.
Hide nor hair was seen of my mother during the following weeks, and it was not until a month later that the panic was eased. It was not my mother who appeared on the doorstep that scorching summer’s morning though, but an old friend of my grandmother. The conversation was brief; my father was out of the door the moment he had heard where I was, taking off up the street in nothing but his shorts. Granny stayed long enough to learn of how my mother, broken both physically and mentally, had given me up to an equally unstable woman that lived in Dioneia, a clutter of houses that teetered at the top of one of Rocinha’s sharpest slopes. My mother had since fled again and was nowhere to be seen. Granny set off in hot pursuit of my father, concerned by the rage in which he had left the house.
“I had never seen your father so full of fury and purpose in all my days.” she said.
She arrived to find him engaged in a blazing row with a deranged woman.
“The two of them were screaming at the top of their voices. He was roaring at her, saying that although he would never strike a woman, he would break and shatter every item in the house until she told him where his son was!” Granny recounted.
It was at this moment that my grandmother, who was a quite fearsome woman at times, stepped in.
“I had seen enough nonsense, and giving her an almighty whack I let her know that I was not impeded by the same restrictions as my son,” granny told me with fire in her eyes.
The terrified woman soon backed down. She glanced conspicuously at the door to the next room, which was pulled to, and did not try and stop Manoely as she strode towards the place where I lay still, miraculously, sound asleep. My grandmother carried me home that day, naked as the day I was born, and it was this very act that would become so symbolic of my childhood. Although my mother ghosted in and out of my life until I was eight years old, when she disappeared forever, it was my grandmother who truly raised me. Whilst my father was there in the beginning, it was my grandmother who clothed and fed me. When, before my tenth birthday, he had remarried, it was she that continued to encourage and educate me. She once told me, ‘the only source of pride which a man should have is that of being remembered as humble’. I live by this mantra each and every day. Various people disappeared from my life during my childhood, people who are so often seen as essential in the upbringing of a child. My granny however, never deserted me — not even for a moment. Returning from a hard day’s work one evening during the perilous 1990s, she was hit by a stray bullet, fired during a mugging gone wrong. She was rushed to the hospital and, lucky to be alive, remained there for many weeks. Her recovery was slow and arduous. When fired, the bullet lodged itself in her spine and remains there to this very day, yet she has never once allowed it to prevent her from providing all she possibly can for me. On the contrary, it has served as one more source of inspiration, from which I can take strength and belief — one of the countless lessons that I have learned — from the woman who has made me all that I am today. She has taught me to sweat and struggle for all that I want, and more importantly, for the people I love. This is something I will continue to do for the rest of my life, in order to give back just an ounce of what she has built for me.
