BRAZIL: Life in the Garbage Room

Carolina Maria de Jesus, a tall Negro woman with three illegitimate children, each by a different man, lived in a teeming favela (slum) in São Paulo. At dawn she queued up for water at a public spigot, an empty oil can on her head. To buy bread and rice, she scavenged scrap paper, selling it to a junkman and getting as much as 30¢ “on good days.” But Carolina’s nights, in recent years, were quite untainted by the brawling and raw sex that surrounded her. By kerosene lamp in her 4-ft. by 12-ft. shack, she wrote down the vivid details of slum life, filling 26 notebooks gleaned from trash piles. To her neighbors, this seemed putting on airs. While Carolina was out tramping streets, one slattern would regularly empty her chamber pot into Carolina’s window.

One day 2½ years ago, when a playground was being inaugurated, favela adults chased children off the new teetertotters and seesawed up and down themselves. “This is the kind of animal I have to live with,” Carolina whispered bitterly to a friend. “I’ll put them in my diary so they will not be forgotten.” Audálio Dantas, a reporter for Folhas de São Paulo, who was covering the inauguration, overheard, asked: “What diary?”

Last week Carolina’s diaries, compiled by Reporter Dantas into a 182-page book called Quarto de Despejo (Garbage Room), her epithet for the favela, broke over Brazil as its biggest literary bombshell. The first 10,000 copies were sold in a week—a record. Rolling off presses were 20,000 more, ‘and a 50,000-copy* third edition is planned. Carolina appeared on TV. Earning $60 a day in royalties, she no longer hunts streets for paper.

Fetid Mysteries. To middle-class residents of Rio and São Paulo, the fetid favelas are cities apart, mysteriously alive but best not entered. In her book, Carolina tells them what life there is like. She recalls that for her daughter Vera Eunice’s birthday, she dug a pair of shoes out of the garbage. “I washed them and gave them to her.” Of the death of a two month-old boy in the favela, Carolina notes: “If he had lived he would have gone hungry.” She says, “How horrible it is to see your children eat and then ask, ‘Is there more?’ ”

To Carolina, President Juscelino Ku-bitschek is a “wise man living in a golden cage.” She warns, “Be careful, wise man. We of the favelas are the cats. And we are hungry.” One time a favela woman knocked on a rich woman’s door, Carolina recalls. “The senhora of the house told her to wait. Soon she returned with a wrapped package.” The beggar woman carried the bundle back to her hovel and eagerly opened it. Inside were two dead rats.

Unashamed at her own unwed state (she lost seven jobs as a maid because she “used to slip out of the house at night and make love”), Carolina is scornful of men. “Today is Father’s Day,” she wrote. “What a ridiculous day!”

“You Black Whore!” Upon the success of her book Carolina moved out of the favela. Ordering a truck, she loaded up her children, table, two cots, mattresses, bookshelf and six cooking pots. Neighbors surrounded the truck. A man yelled, “You think you are high-class now, you black whore! You write about us and make lots of money, and then leave without sharing it.” A drunken woman hurled a rock that gashed one of Carolina’s two sons. Rocks struck Daughter Vera Eunice. As curses and the hail of stones grew, Carolina pounded on the hood, leaped aboard, and the driver roared through the mob. The favela-dwellers gave chase, brandishing clubs and rotten vegetables until the truck neared a police station. Then they fell away, and headed home.

* These 80,000 copies equalled the 80,000 copies of U.S. bestseller Lolita printed in its first month two years ago.