MARANHAO

Well, we flew from Brasilia to São Luis de Maranhão… It is the capital of the state of Maranhão, founded by the French (1612) and quickly taken (back) by the Portuguese. It is famed for the old colonial centre, where the cobbled streets are lined with houses decorated with blue Portuguese tiles, and has been declared a Unesco world heritage site. However it is badly in need of a facelift and there are dark rumours that money provided by Unesco never reached the right places. In the build-up to carnival the bands are practicing and some of the streets are already decorated. Various museums and culture centres show carnival costumes, and also those associated with a festival which occurs in June, Bumba-meu-boi, associated with a local legend in which a pregnant girl persuades her husband to cut out the tongue of the local landowner’s best bull to satisfy her craving. He gets caught, but a miracle restores the bull and it all ends happily... In the evening we went out to eat in the street. The little square where the nearest bars were boasted two sources of music – a rather tired blond guitarist at one end and a very noisy Brazilian at the other. We picked a table half way between the two, outside the Yellow Parrot. A sleepy girl took our order of beer and soup – the beer arrived quickly, Magda’s favourite sweet stout called Malzbier. The musicians played on, the noisy one being joined by three friends – an Argentinean, and Italian and a Colombian (sorry if it sounds like a prep-school joke!), who started on a Round Latin America musical tour. After 20 minutes we enquired after the soup and were assured that it was coming. At that point a shoe-shine boy materialised out of the dark, he spotted that I was wearing leather shoes, and I was captured. He had a curious high voice and chatted merrily away as he polished my shoes, not to a major general’s inspection shine but quite decently! When he had finished and gone, and still no soup, we paid for the beers and went down the street to a kiosk selling “tapioca” – not the nursery pudding we all remember but mandioca (cassava) root ground to a coarse flour which is fried to form a sort of slightly rubbery pancake. This is folded in half and one of a variety of fillings ladled in (ours was seafood, and very good too) and eaten out of a napkin. Fast-forward four days to Friday, the first night of Carnival, when we returned from an excursion, and the scene had changed! The tables were all full and the girl from the Yellow Parrot was awake and looking rather flurried. The end of the square opens diagonally to another open space where a stage had been set up. The open area in front of it had become the showplace for the masque bands. As each formed up and moved into the space, its music group took possession of the stage and played the band’s song – or series of songs, as each band had about 15 minutes to show off its costumes. In reality the musicians were there not much more than to provide background music. The main sound was the batucada (drumming routine) of the band itself, which resounded furiously between the high walls. The costumes were pretty much what one might expect, lots of feathers and bright colours, although one band was in black and white and silver. This visual spectacle was complemented by the curious fauna among the crowd. Moving among the spectators were the free-lance masqueraders, mainly clowns wearing the traditional baggy harlequin suit and varying masks – ghoulish, pretty or amusing. We did not see much “clowning” – they were just there for the fun of dressing up. Blond-dyed hair was very popular (not to the exclusion of other colours).