Brazilians and Argentines

Hello everyone! I have a guest blogger sitting in for me this morning, a guy called Mark Something-or-other. Hope you enjoy his take on life in Búzios. (Why, he's lived here as long as I have!) 
Barbara


You don't have to listen to a lot of the jokes that Brazilians tell about their neighbors the Argentines to figure out what it is that ticks Brazil off about the Argentines so much. "What's the definition of ego? It's the little piece of Argentina that we all carry within us." "What's the world's best business deal? Buy an Argentine for his real value and sell him for what he thinks he's worth." And then, the jokes aside, there's that relentless Argentine needling about how (their) Maradona is greater than (our) Pelé, (their) Messi is greater than (our) Neymar.



No war is brewing between the two countries, and no local Donaldo dreams about putting a fence up at the border. Brazilians will often in fact generously refer to the Argentines, in their own language, as the hermanos—not that there aren't some undercurrents of irony there along with the fraternal feeling. But Argentines are, unquestionably, a thorn in the Brazilian side, and all the more so here in Búzios, where many Argentines are long-time residents (and continue, most of them, to speak with heavy accents), many young Argentines come for a season or two and work in restaurants (and continue, irritatingly, to greet their customers in Spanish, as if we were still in Recoleta) and thousands of Argentines pass through every year on brief sun-and-sand vacations and go about their admittedly completely intelligible gracias-ing when they could just as easily make the simple effort to express their thanks for this and that with an obrigado — and seduce.

Mario

In Búzios, the situation is particularly complicada, since, though the Brazilians don't like to acknowledge it, Búzios to a large extent has come to depend on a collaboration between Brazilians and Argentines. Our one movie theater, where the bill of fare is more likely to be an Iranian film festival contender than a Hollywood blockbuster, was founded, and for decades has been overseen by, the Argentine cinephile Mario Paz.

Sonia

Of our many restaurants, the one that most resembles an old-line European establishment, by name Cigalon, was created by, and continues to be lovingly fine-tuned by, the Argentine lawyer and foodie Sonia Persiani.

Amalia

Of our hundreds of pousadas, the one that has been noticed most in the international travel press, and most recommended to upscale travelers, is the Casas Brancas; Casas Brancas was created by the Argentine Amalia de la Maria and for many decades it was she who obsessively kept CB standards way up in the stratosphere.

Marcelo

Our great satiric newspaper, the Perú Molhado, was published and edited for many decades, with insouciant genius, by the Argentine photographer-writer Marcelo Lartigue.

Hugo

I have inevitably been thinking about the Argentine contribution to Búzios because Amalia of Casas Brancas died just a couple of weeks ago. She had been sick. She decided to go off to Croatia with her husband, José, also an Argentine, for a last fling. She flung. She expired there. In other days, there would have been pages and pages about her in Perú Molhado—biography, celebration, irreverent nonsense. But Marcelo, the careless genius of the Perú, himself died about a year ago. Underlying cause of death: too much high living. In Marcelo's absence, the Perú has gone to pot and, when Amalia died, the new management published a small picture and a graceless caption. Some day Barbara or I — one of us — should write a memoir of our dear, dear Búzios-residing Argentine friend Hugo Oks. It is painful for Barbara and me to think how many years it has been since Hugo passed on.
   
Mark and Barbara to Buenos Aires: Send reinforcements! Send reinforcements urgently! Please!

Marcelo Lartigue (1953 - 2014)

Marcelo Lartigue, owner, editor and one of the founders of Búzios’s 33-year-old weekly newspaper, the Perú Molhado, or Wet Turkey*, was quite possibly the single most important person in Búzios. Argentine by birth, he was the heart and soul of the irreverent, often scathing, sometimes vulgar and always polemic newspaper, analogous to France’s Le Canard Enchainé and Britain’s Punch. Whether you liked Marcelo or didn’t like Marcelo, found him humorous or just provocative, gentle or biting, there was no getting around it. Marcelo was a force and a personality. Hard to think of any city and newspaper that reflected each other better, and to the greater honor of both.

I never understood a word Marcelo said. Really, not one. Even after all his years in Brazil, his Portuguese came out as Spanish as — well, as Spanish as his Spanish. I’m not sure when or how we all first met, but as soon as he learned that Mark was a writer, you could see the light go off in his head. From that day on we would hear "Bocha" being shouted at us, whether from a car veering off the road in our direction or from the depths of some restaurant we’d be walking by. (Bocha was Marcelo’s nickname for Mark. Don’t ask.) Anyway, there was Marcelo, hoping to get Mark to write something — anything — for the paper. Well, Mark didn’t need courting. He happily complied. And although Mark always wrote in Portuguese, together we once did an entire English-language version of the Perú Molhado for distribution at a tourism event in Las Vegas.



(See http://issuu.com/operumolhado/docs/1109ingles for the whole issue.)

Marcelo died last week from two heart attacks suffered after undergoing a liver transplant. Not just any liver transplant, either. The story is much more compelling. In an attempt to save her father’s life, Marcelo’s 18-year-old daughter Eva donated a portion of her own liver the week before. I don’t know Eva well — maybe I met her all of two times? — but I admire her enormously. Hers was an act of great love and astounding courage.

Some years ago Marcelo came by the house to ask Mark and me to give him English lessons. For some reason or other he needed to be fluent in six weeks. It wasn’t easy turning him down, but we did. We tried to convince him that if he couldn’t learn Portuguese after 30-plus years in Brazil, he probably wouldn’t do that well after six weeks of English lessons, either! Marcelo noticed my artwork all around the house. We talked about it a bit, and I showed him my studio. After that day, whenever he had a chance, Marcelo would ask me for one of my abstracts. I never gave him one. Now I wish I had.

Mark begs the privilege of adding a word:
Over the years, I’ve worked with a good many of the world’s great editors and publishers — Harold Hayes of Esquire; Daniel Filipacchi, who owned half the magazines in France; Hefner. Marcelo had more energy and imagination than any of them, and for shameless exhibitionism he rivaled my late lamented friend Al Goldstein. Marcelo was the paper as much as the paper was Búzios. How our little city can survive this loss is beyond my comprehension. It will certainly never again have the same heretic charm.

*Actually, there's more to the name than meets the eye, because peru is also a slang term for penis. Typical Marcelo.