More Umbrellas

Texto de Nancy de Lustoza Barros e Hirsch na revista para a comunidade de expatriados de língua inglesa no Rio de Janeiro. Para ver a revista na íntegra, clique aqui.

Notable umbrellas that we can list include the 1883 painting by Renoir; Penguin’s deadly artifact always trying to harm Batman; Catherine Deneuve’s romantic one; the singing and dancing Gene Kelly’s and Mary Poppins’ magical contraption with the head of a parrot as the handle . Talking about this bird, we must not forget the famous one belonging to Zé Carioca, the parrot drawn by Walt Disney in 1942.  A lazy rogue but extremely “simpático”, he personifies one aspect of the people that live in Rio de Janeiro. It is not wise to simplify the whole character of a population, but there are indeed some persons that are the perfect embodiments of the prejudiced caricature, no doubt about it. Paulistas are hard workers, Baianos are lazy, Cariocas are rascals. If you write it down, putting these in a bag and randomly match persons to adjectives we may end with: Paulistas are lazy, Baianos are rascals, Cariocas are hard workers. True or false, every statement will apply in one or other occasion.

Have you ever heard the come visit us at home invitation that is “passa lá em casa”? Once a Paulista husband and wife recently arrived in Rio met a very friendly couple at the beach. By the end of the day it looked like they knew each others since childhood. The Cariocas had a house in the mountains and they would be happy to welcome the new acquaintances, how about next weekend? Come Saturday morning, bags all ready, a gift in hands, the Paulistas waited by the curb at the meeting point for their to-be hosts, who never came… It happens. There is a lady that has invited me twice already for her Angra dos Reis get-away, but never informed the address. No bother, though, I have no intention to partake anything, not even a minute, with her.

The Brazilian writer Martha Medeiros, originally from Rio Grande do Sul, a true “gaúcha”, says in her latest book “Um lugar na janela” that in her first trip to Rio de Janeiro she felt the taste of liberty and discomposure of the place. Whoa! Should us, Cariocas, feel offended by the word “descompostura”? Not really, because the author professes her undying love to the city all through the text. It is, however, a little bit unsettling, we would prefer the use of “informality” as a better definition… Fact: you will never catch a Paulista walking on the street with a towel robe heading to or from the swimming pool. The same applies to women with wet, just off the shower, hair. Nowadays, just because the jet-set world validated the Havaianas flip-flops, one may find Paulistas wearing them, otherwise, never in one’s life: unthinkable to put delicate white feet in rubber sandals that were at first sold in grocery stores!

An American friend lived in Rio when it was still the capital of the country, her father was attached to the U.S. embassy, and her mother would drive around with a pink fish tail convertible Cadillac.  Back to her native California, she never misses the opportunity when hearing Portuguese spoken near her. She says: “Hi, I am a Carioca, where are you from?” Carioca, botafoguense and salgueirense, what else could you expect for a happy and contended life?