Thursday 10 March 2016

Red Earth

Red earth. Banks of red earth rising up from each side of the road, veined with tree roots. The foundations of a a house dug in a terracotta plot, the pots and tiles there, ready for the making, in the ground. Everywhere the earth is a deep Moroccan red, or a rich salmon pink. There are burnt reds, and rust reds, and clumps of ochre-streaked reds or umber reds. When the rain comes, the water mixes with the earth to form sludgy rivers of red clay oozing down the narrow hillside lanes and farm tracks. The cars grind their way up and down the hills and valleys, forcing their way through, tyres coated in clay. Local caipiras – dressed not in rustic farmers’ clothes but in brash pink T-shirts and football shorts – sit on their porches and watch with curiosity as we weave our way through the countryside, looking for a house owned by the local village elder, Seu Geraldo. Most of the houses we pass are not plain terracotta, they have rendered walls painted anything but earth red. Aqua. Lemon. Lilac. Primrose. If they are red or pink, they are magenta or rose. Anything but terracotta. We are overtaken by a group of young people driving squat open-top buggies with enormous tyres – vehicles that would look at home on the lunar surface.




Seu Geraldo, do you know him? Heads are shaken. Things are different around here these days. People don’t stay put in the same farmhouse for generation after generation, like they used to. People move away. New people come. Eventually, a smiling woman in a flowery dress tells us where we’ve gone wrong. We need to go back, and drive up an almost hidden track, and there he’ll be. 

He’s very welcoming of these eight people who turn up unannounced at his gate, in two cars, inviting curiosity from the wire-fenced run of chickens, and a skittish ginger kitten. He invites us in to sit on the inbuilt stone bench that runs the length of his yellow house, facing the Serrinha dam and reservoir that is the distinctive geographical feature of the region. There it is, stretching across the valley, banked by the rich red earth that the hills are made of, with the lush green vegetation rising above, and a ridge of higher, indigo blue hills behind. Geraldo is bent and shaky and stands at his doorway with a worried look, facing in to the kitchen. We can tell that he’s thinking he should offer us coffee, but isn’t quite up to the task. Then, inspiration strikes: he finds a packet of mint-flavoured sweets on a worktop, and offers them to us instead. There are orange trees in the front garden, and we help ourselves; big, bitter oranges with yellow-green skins, peeled and quartered. He watches us, pleased to have offered some sort of hospitality without the need to do anything. 

Seu Geraldo used to work the land. He sits with his hands clasped in his lap, fingers curled and bent into a leathery brown ball. His right hand is more gnarled and work-worn than his left, with a damaged yellowing thumb. He describes the way he and his brother tilled the soil as boys. He copied his mother’s way, right hand forward, and his brother copied his father: different ways of holding the farm implements, so that side-by-side his brother and he were mirrors of each other. My left arm was ‘forgotten’ he says. He worked planting corn and beans. Not sugar cane, which is one of the main agricultural industries of Sao Paulo, nor coffee, the most common crop in these parts once upon a time – until demand for Brazilian coffee grew less. I remember an old joke someone in Rio once told me, years ago: Where do you go to get the best Brazilian coffee? Colombia. 

The history of the dam is the history of the work patterns in this region. Before the arrival of the dam, it was all farmland. Then, the dam was built and the valley flooded, taking away the farmers’ livelihoods. My land is under the water, says Seu Geraldo. He had two hectares, but the water board took the land under a compulsory purchase order when the dam was built. Bought for almost nothing, he says. He was left with just 100 square metres. A large garden rather than a farm. 

Some farmers became fishermen. Drought years reversed out the situation again. The past couple of years in Sao Paulo state have been very wet, mother nature making restoration for the dry years, and the lake made by the dam is brimming full and sparkling blue in the sunshine. Out of sight, there is apparently a marina, and the rich of the area use the lake for water-ski-ing. If you try to get to the water, it is almost impossible as most tracks end in private property, with the lakeside behind the generous gardens fenced off. In the drought years, when the lake had mostly dried out, a surreal beach of cracked earth materialised, an odd other-wordly terrain patterned like a giant turtleshell. Perhaps the shell of the very turtle that was the world’s genesis, according to Native American creation myth. 

Seu Geraldo talks about his working days as a farmer, and about his family, but won’t be drawn on much else. No, he doesn’t know any songs. No, he doesn’t like to dance. Would we like to read the bible with him, he asks. That’s his main interest – he’s a Seventh Day Adventist and he likes to pray and read his bible. So far, I’ve resisted adopting Google translate’s offering of ‘redneck’ for the Brazilian-Portuguese word ‘caipira’ but perhaps it’s not so far wrong. 










There’s a touch of the redneck in some of the lyrics of the local caipira songs sung to us by another elderly gentleman we meet, the eponymous Cilinho of Bar Cilinho. Octacilio, to give him his full moniker. But only a touch… 

We drive past the ‘bar’ twice in our search for it. It’s a house with a corrugated iron roof and a big porch behind a wire fence, on which a big black dog lies tied with a metal chain to a stake, its food bowl tilted at a rakish angle. To the side of the house, a duck pond, with a cluster of mallards on the pond, and a straggling gaggle of honking geese walking the edge of the water. On a battered blue sofa on the porch, two young men in mis-matched sportswear sit drinking bottles of beer. Next to them, a pool table. Do you know where Bar Cilinho is, we shout from the car window. This is it, they say. We park up, they open the gate for us, and there’s Seu Cilinho himself, tucked away in the dark behind a pair of ancient fridge-counters, which are fencing him in so that we only see his head and shoulders. 

We feel we should give him some custom, but there’s not a great deal of choice: crates of Krill beer stacked up next to the fridges; forlorn looking packets of peanuts and ‘chips’ on the counter; a bunch of bananas on a shelf behind, next to a row of trophies and some faded Kodachrome photos of a long-dispersed football team, their youth preserved behind sheets of yellowing plastic. And cachaça: there is of course cachaça – Brazil’s sugar-cane spirit, which is used to make caipirinhas. Not that you’d get a caipirinha here: cachaca is drunk neat in the countryside. The famous Pinga is made in this region. We order a few glasses. Cilinho puts his cigarette in the side of his mouth, takes down an enormous great jar, and pours the clear white spirit into tumblers that are filled to the brim. There’s around 300ml in each glass.

Behind the bar is a cluster of stringed instruments – regular guitars, and a number of 10-stringed ‘violas’, versions of the Portuguese Viola de Braga, which is strummed and plucked like a guitar. Traditionally, viola players would team up with a guitarist to form a two-man band to play the bars and local dances. 

Cilinho takes down his favourite, a beautiful instrument with five mother-of-pearl inlays on the neck, which he shows off proudly, and takes no persuading at all to give us a tune. His body is slow, but his hands are fast. When he speaks, he mumbles, but when he sings, his voice is full of character, if a little shaky. He doesn’t consider himself a singer, but will do if need be. Don’t any of these girls sing, he asks, waving a hand casually at the females in our group. We join in (in my case, with a lot of la-la-la-ing). He pre-empts each offering with a description: This one is a happy / sad / funny song. The funny ones include one about catching birds by the roadside with an ‘arapuca’ (a type of net for hunting birds). Sometimes you catch women too, the song says, including the married ones. Sometimes you catch an old one, but you let her go. One day, the song goes, I came by to find a big black man caught in my net… There are also songs with rather less risqué lyrics: Galopeira is an old favourite in the region – although it is not so much about the caipira life, it is a more general ode to the joys of music and dance, with a lyric about going to Paraguay to seek out the capital Annuncion’s famous players. It features a chorus with the ‘eir’ of the Gal-op-eir-a held for as long as the singer can manage it. Which is not exceptionally long in Cilinho’s case – but as he says himself, it’s the playing not the singing that is his forte. It’s a pleasure to hear him play – and a pleasure to see the pride and respect afforded him by his compatriots in the bar. One man, dressed in canvas work trousers and cap, says almost nothing, just stands or sits close to Cilinho the whole time, like a protector, nodding approvingly. Another man sits smoking by the bar, also nodding his approval and joining in the choruses. Younger, Honda motorcycle driving customers come and go. Occasionally, someone else picks up a guitar and joins in. At the rear of the open-sided building, a man paints a wall, skudding his brush along the wall percussively, sometimes in time. The geese join in too, and a smaller black dog sitting on a second sofa wags its tail sleepily. 

There are waltzes, and jaunty polka-esque and maxixe-like tunes in 2/4. One sounds very much like a countryside paso doble. A few of us dance around the edges of the porch – Cilinho looks up approvingly, a faint and slightly flirtatious smile on his face. He’s dressed down in loose trousers and a wool cardigan, both in a nut-brown colour that is only slightly darker than his skin – but the silver necklace and matching bracelet, the neat little moustache, and the twinkle in his eye, all hint at another life as a dandy-ish ladies’ man. What we do know for sure about his former life is that he used to perform regularly and teach caipira-style guitar and Viola de Braga. We also presume, although not told specifically, that when he felt the need to retire, he opened up his house as a bar so that he could continue to play when it suited him.  

It’s hard to leave, but it’s way past lunchtime, and needs must. Time to settle the bill. He apologises for the cost – Pinga is expensive, 3 reals a ‘shot’, if we can use that word for such a generous measure. That’s around 60 pence. He wants to give us a discount, but we insist on paying the going rate. The two young men are back, now playing pool. Both black dogs, the big one and the small one, have fallen asleep. The geese are still honking at anything and everything. Cirilho is once again sat behind the bar in the dark alcove, cigarette in hand, guitars and violas back on the wall. The man with the paintbrush carries on regardless – when there’s work to be done, the work must be done.







Working hands still, but work of a different sort, can be found not far from Cirilho’s gaff, at the oleria (brick foundry) run by Ademir Gomes. Should you forget his name, just glance down at the metal templates that form and stamp the bricks – a wheel of words. B Gomes, B Gomes, B Gomes, B Gomes. Like his father and grandfather before him, and perhaps one of these is the 'B", Senhor Gomes – an ' A', Ademir, which is almost Adam, the world's first man, who was formed from clay – earns his living turning the red earth all around us into those familiar little oblongs that we use to build our houses. The machine that forms the bricks into shape – he turns it on for us, and it clunk-bangs into action, a perfect example of found Industrial Music – is backed up against a wall, open at the top, with a great mountain of earth banking up behind it. More and even more earth is thrown on top by the bulldozer. Once the bricks are formed, they are baked in one of the numerous ultra-hot ovens that are inside – yes – red brick buildings dotted around the site. Once cooled, they are stored in neat rows, forming a great field of walls in parallel lines, covered over with white or blue netting. Also breaking up the sea of red all around is the family house, which stands at the front entrance, painted a bright mint green. Other than that, almost everything else around us is brick red. The outhouses and ovens. The baked bricks waiting to be stacked. The storage huts. The mountain of earth awaiting processing. The ground. Ademir himself, whose brown skin and beige trousers are smeared in red clay. His dog Muttley, who is a light brick brown labrador, also mud splattered. When we first drive into the front entrance, it takes me a moment to distinguish the two figures from the brick house background – Ademir and his dog are well camouflaged, and it is only as he walks forward that the man of clay can be clearly seen. As he shows us around, it’s clear that this is a man with pride in his work. He talks us through different styles of brickmaking, showing examples acquired from other parts of the country, and from other parts of the world. It’s not an easy life – but it is skilled labour, and there is satisfaction to be had from doing the job well. 

As he’s been talking, the sky has clouded over, and now the heavens open. It rains, and rains, and rains. Torrential rain has been typical of these late summer days in Sao Paulo state – the heavy rains of this year and last very welcome after the previous drought years. The red earth paths around the site turn to sticky clay rivers. Walking through the paths, our feet become coated, looking as if henna-painted. Back in our cars and out on the roads, we have to swerve the avoid the potholes filled with surging, cloudy water, whilst also being careful not to get the tyres stuck in the clay.









Earth. Water. Clay. The story of clay – alumina – is the story of human civilisation. Or at least, depending how you define civilisation, the story of the shift from the hunter-gatherer, eating from their hands, to the story of the agriculturist, raising crops, and cooking and serving them in earthenware pots and vessels. When did people first discover that by baking clay you could create a ceramic material that didn’t dissolve when you put soup or water into it? It was at least 14,000 BC as shards of pottery from this date have been found in Japan. Clay tablets were the first known writing medium. Clay balls (to be fired from slings) one of the earliest examples of arms manufacture. Fired clay went on to become not only the vessels food was cooked in and eaten from, but also the source for the bricks that would build houses – permanent residencies hard to destroy. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down, said the wolf – but it got him nowhere with the brick house, he ended up sliding down the chimney straight into the cooking pot. Native American and South American Indians discovered that clay could be used to make pipes, for sharing tobacco or other substances. Clay can even be fashioned into a musical instrument, the ocarina. It is also a medicine – the parrots of Brazil discovered many years ago that clay (or ‘bole’ as it is sometimes called in Europe) can cure digestive problems, and humans followed their lead.

Clay is one of the oldest building materials on Earth. Fired bricks have been used to build houses in China and other parts of Asia since around 5000 BC; sun-dried bricks are even older, going back to around 7500 BC, according to archaeological finds in the River Tigris area of what is now Iraq. Nowadays, bricks and blocks for constructing buildings can be made from many other materials – yet clay-based brick remains the most common building material across the world. According to Wikipedia: ‘Between one-half and two-thirds of the world's population, in traditional societies as well as developed countries, still live or work in a building made with clay as an essential part of its load-bearing structure.’ In hilly clay-soiled regions like inland Sao Paulo, the manufacture of bricks and terracotta tiles – sourced from the very earth that its people walk on – is intrinsically linked to the economy of the region. The Caipira life might be changing, and new ways of living and working emerging, but the brickmaker and the farmer still live and work side-by-side, entertained by the music-maker.








Bringing all these elements together is the Fazenda de Serrinha. Once (like some many old farms in the state of Sao Paulo) this beautiful terrain was a coffee plantation. The story of the coffee farms is also Brazil’s history of slavery and immigration. When the slaves that worked the coffee and sugar cane plantations were emancipated by law in 1850, many farmers in the region refused to employ them, setting them free with no prospects – so a large number of the Afro-Brazilian former slave population of the country’s south east set off for the newly-burgeoning cities, creating the enormous favelas that still ring Sao Paulo and Rio. In their place, the land owners encouraged the immigration of desperately poor Europeans (often Italians) to work the land. From 1877 to 1903, almost two million immigrants arrived from Europe and the Far East. An Immigrant's Hostel (Hospedaria dos Imigrantes) was built in 1886 in São Paulo, setting up speedy admittance and recording routines for the throngs of immigrants arriving by ship – people of more than 70 different nationalities were recorded. Hence, the Sao Paulo region now has a very large number of residents who are of Italian, German, Eastern European, or Japanese heritage – amongst many others.  

The Fazenda de Serrinha (Serrinha Farm) has only operated under this name for just under a hundred years, having previously comprised a number of smaller fazendas or ‘sitios’ as they are called. Benedicto Moreira, Paulista politician and abolitionist, bought several neighbouring ‘sitios’ to create one large coffee plantation – a grand 113 hectares. It thrived for a while, but in the mid-twentieth century, the immense plantation suffered various crises, and eventually closed. For a while, there was an oleria (brickmakers) on-site. Now, it has been taken over as an artists’ centre, with residential accommodation, a sculpture trail in the landscape, and an annual arts festival that attracts artists from all over the Sao Paulo state and beyond. 








Yet the land tells its own stories, and all this land was previously, and all it ever will be, is written on its body. There are the occasional coffee plants growing wild, here and there. In the wooded parts, you can find eucalyptus, which the land owners planted when the coffee failed – although no doubt often regretting it, as eucalyptus is now viewed almost as a weed in Brazil, as it spreads so rapidly, killing all in its path. If you’re keen-eyed you can spot the monkeys high up in the tall trees. A cacophony of birdsong erupts day and night. The maritacas (a type of parrot) are the loudest, outshouting everyone else. At night, there is the sound – the loud sound – of frogs and toads in the lake and the streams. By day, the long grasses hum and click with the sound of crickets. There are big clumps of bamboo, used by the artists-in-residence in the studios to build sculptures that will be in, and of, the environment. By night, everything fades into shades of back and grey, other than the sky, which becomes a riot of white light, the Milky Way spreading across the heavens – so so many tiny bursts of light. Oh, and the fireflies – the vaga-lume – darting about in the bushes.

The ground here in the Fazenda is the same red earth to be found all around the area. Here and there along the paths are small chips of old bricks laid into the ground, perhaps remnants from the former onsite oleria. As the rain takes hold, the earth turns to clay, coating our feet once again. Artist or artisan, farm-worker or labourer, musician or bricklayer: we are all children of Eve, walking the world. We arrive, we stay, we go – leaving nothing but our footprints in the earth.