The nightlife of Manaus, Brazil.
Saturday night and it was party time outside the Manguieras bar, cockroaches from near and far had congregated in an erratic, scuttling dance formation around the warm stench of the drain to soak up the vibes and the bounty of decaying matter on offer. Grinning senior citizens strutted carefree to the four-piece band, the singer enthusiastically demonstrating an equally carefree attitude to harmony; the musicians expressing one of those Brazilian styles that demands only a minimal concern for what their fellow band mates are playing, whilst never quite straying into complete incompatibility.
Under the mango trees
Ladies exuding a louche confidence lurked across the road, clearly dressed, or rather nearer undressed in readiness for their later performance at the Dame do Noche bar only a few booty swinging steps up the road. Ruddy faced, older men, overdue a shave, musing over ice cold beers, considered their options for the night.
One of the many enterprising street sellers, on failing to convince us of the appeal of his shoddy, hand-made jewelery, moved on to express the virtues of his side business of hookers and coke. We politely decline.
In the middle of the road two sturdy men steady the alcohol stagger of a generously proportioned lady as she bellows with beery dissatisfaction. Under their feet lie decades of beer caps, impregnated into the asphalt by tropical heat, heavy feet and cruising cars .
Looming down from the big screen, two sinewy girls do their utmost to pummel each other into a pulp in a cage fight, finesse abandoned in favour of spitting aggression.
A rugged military police 4×4 cruises past, a few eyes glance briefly at its blind, tinted windows. No need to stop, all is well. Under the mango trees of Manaus I was truly beginning to feel at home in Brazil.
Coldy holders for icy beers are obligatory in Brazilian bars
Surrounded by the vast Amazon rainforest, 1400km from the coast and effectively isolated in terms of road connections to the rest of the country, the city of 2 million is a seething anomaly in the heart of the sea of green that maps northern Brazil. The wild west, frontier days of Manaus, funded by rubber plantations may have been submerged in recent decades by the relentless expansion brought about by the free trade zone, attracting foreign investment from far and wide, but a little of its spirit still thrives in its red light district.
I had stumbled obliviously into the district earlier on in the week on a late afternoon stroll, its true nature initially obscured by the dictates of Brazilian ladies fashion. It is considered perfectly acceptable for young and indeed not so young women to distract a gentleman’s eye with cut down shorts only marginally larger than a respectable pair of knickers, revealing entirely unnecessary expanses of sleek, brown thigh. Often this can be complimented by displays of ample cleavage, so ample in fact as to consist of more cleavage than anything else. Please do not for one moment imagine that I am trying to suggest in any way that Brazilian women attire themselves as ladies of the night, merely that my powers of perception were somewhat dulled by the distracting nature of the fashions. Once my observational failure became apparent it became a relatively easy task to differentiate the ladies who were employed in particular branches of the night-time entertainment industry.
For all the many attractions Brazilian womanhood has to offer, the streets of Manaus have provided employment opportunities for enterprising Venezuelan women affected by the economic woes of their own country that lies at the end of Route 174 leading north from the city. Should I have been considering taking advantage of the services on offer this would have meant being able to conduct negotiations in my modest Spanish rather than my largely hopeless Portuguese. Admittedly fluency in the language rarely plays a vital role such negotiations but I had decided on this occasion that a, “no gracias” or a “nao obrigado” would suffice for those offers of forging intimate relationships with Latin America that came my way under the mango trees of Manaus.
