Brazil: Night of Glory

Some of the world’s most spectacular slums smudge the green mountainsides above Rio’s crescent beaches, mosaic sidewalks and balconied hotels. Cariocas call them favelas, and there are 251 such slums in Rio with a population of 900,000. All year long the favelas are the city’s blight; cops venture through some of them in cautious pairs by day, clear out altogether at night. But one night a year—the second night of pre-Lenten Carnival—the poverty-ridden, hungry world of shacks brings Rio a matchless show of gaudy costumes, music, dancing and gaiety unrestrained.

Satins & Silks. This week the night of glory rolls around again. And up on the hillsides, no one is better prepared than the 12,000 glory-minded people in the Salgueiro favela on the city’s industrial north side. Salgueiro’s samba club started planning early. Those who could read pored over history books at the national library to find a theme; sewing machines whirred through billows of satins and silks, artisans hammered away on floats, musicians thrummed their drums, and thousands of lively feet ran through dance routines over and over again.

Salgueiro’s theme this year is the tale of Dom João Fernandes de Oliveira, a Portuguese nobleman who arrived in Brazil in 1761 with a royal deed to Brazil’s richest diamond mine, Tijuco, in the landlocked interior state of Minas Gerais. To Dom João’s castle, Brazil’s most aristocratic mothers brought their loveliest daughters. But Dom João spurned them all for a Negro slave girl named Chica da Silva. Dom João fell madly in love, bought Chica and installed her as head of his household.

Whatever Chica wanted, Chica got. Her husband built her a palace with gilded rooms, turrets and landscaped gardens. At parties, she made her entrance down a marble staircase while small boys scattered flowers in her path. When she wanted to go sailing, Dom João built a sea-sized private lake, ordered a sailing ship from Portugal and had it hauled from Rio to Tijuco by horse and slave.

Salute & Make Way. As the citizens of Salgueiro worked it out for this week’s show, the story of Chica starts with six dancers dressed as colonial gentlemen, prancing down the street bearing a banner: “The Académicos of Salgueiro salute the people and the press and ask to make way to present the 1963 Carnival with their theme, Chica da Silva.” Then come 20 men carrying gold-headed canes, wearing silk suits, suede shoes and derby hats. Behind them appear six groups of dancers, twirling, singing and high-stepping in gold buckles, white knee stockings and wigs. The first flag bearer, an exotically dressed mulatto girl, follows with a male partner who sambas in circles and does backbends as the girl gyrates around him, always keeping Salgueiro’s red-and-white colors high.

Chica da Silva herself is next, in $2,500 worth of red-and-white silk petticoats topped with a skirt embroidered with white feathers, lace, seed pearls and semiprecious stones. She wears a 3-ft. white wig, à la Marie Antoinette, and her satin train is 12 ft. long. The floats roll by—a replica of Chica’s sailing ship, a group of miners pouring money and gems into Dom João’s open hands—plus a second flag-bearer team, more dancers, and the percussion band. Around the whole 2,300-member group is a thick hemp rope carried by costumed men who keep the cheering sidewalk crowds at bay.

Salgueiro’s extravaganza costs something like $140,000, more than a month’s wages contributed by each member of the samba club. The money comes from savings, from stickups, from the world’s oldest profession, from pay-as-you-guzzle drinking parties. But everyone contributes, and everyone wants to dance. Says Salgueiro’s Carnival Director Joaquim Casemiro, known to his fellows as “Droopy Drawers”: “I direct them only with a whistle. I don’t need a gun or a knife. I’ve never had to shoot anyone yet in Salgueiro to get them to dance.”