For a destination often sold to tourists as a sun-and-sand beach town, Recife boasts a pretty rich collection of verse by native sons extolling the virtues of (and sometimes finding faults with) its rivers and bridges.
“Rios, Pontes e Overdrives” (Rivers, Bridges and Overdrives) was the signature song of the late manguebeat kingpin Chico Science and his roots-rock fusion band Nação Zumbi a decade ago. In a song simply called “A Ponte” (The Bridge) which he co-wrote with Lula Queiroga, singer/songwriter Lenine gives new meaning to concrete poetry: “The bridge isn’t made of concrete; it isn’t made of iron/It isn’t cement/The bridge is where my thoughts lead.” The repertoire of the veteran roots band Quinteto Violado includes a tune named after one of the city’s rivers: “It drowns the days of the calendar/Shipwrecks men in their salaries/Runs full through empty hands/The Capibaribe River.”
Most famously, João Cabral de Melo Neto’s sends his poor migrant hero from the rural scrublands along the Capibaribe and into Recife in his classic narrative poem Life and Death of Severino, published in 1954.
Capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, Recife stands where the Capibaribe meets the Beberibe River just in time for the two to flow hand-in-hand into the sea. The historic center is literally an island unto itself, and it is one of three that comprise the downtown area. Some 39 bridges crisscross a city that has been referred to as a tropical Venice.
Yet many visitors barely notice the riverside Recife. There are certainly no gondolas. Many tourists find lodgings on the hillside in Recife’s historic twin city Olinda. In the state capital itself all of the better hotels are located in the beachside Boa Viagem district – conveniently close to the airport and the main shopping mall, but with not a navigable stream in sight.
So when I discovered that Recife offered its version of the riverboat rides I’d taken along the Seine in Paris and the Thames in London, I jumped at the chance to learn about Recife’s “waterside.” I took the night tour, thus transforming Recife into my own City of Lights for an evening.
Like everything in Recife, symbolically, at least, the tour really begins at Marco Zero (zero mark – the point from which distances to elsewhere are measured). Recife means “reef,” and the shoreline is indeed skirted by natural barriers. Across from Marco Zero a dike was built atop the reef to provide extra protection for the old port area.
Atop the dike stands a starkly phallic sculpture. The author is yet another poetic native son, Francisco Brennand. His edifice soars to the height of 60 feet. But the artful tower itself is a relative anti-climax. The good part is “the making of.” The sculpture sparked one of Recife’s spiciest political scandals. Town officials could hardly have expected anything less when they granted a commission to an internationally-known homeboy famous for erotic sculptures. But when Brennand turned in his design, it was nixed. And yet nobody would own up to being the joy-killing prude. A local journalist revealed the culprit to be the mayor’s wife. To defend the first lady’s honor, the mayor invaded the paper’s newsroom and threatened the reporter at gunpoint. Soon it all blew over. City Hall had changed its mind. “The mayor has balls; the city will have its erection,” quipped Tobias Hecht in his “ethnographic novel” After Life.
Following Brennand’s mark, we passed relatively uneventfully by the old port (the construction of the new port, several miles south, is blamed by many for forcing sharks to surge northward in search of a new habitat along Recife’s fashionable beaches, but that’s another story). Here we could see only a couple of ships at dock. One was preparing for its 335-mile return trip to Fernando de Noronha, Pernambuco’s highly regulated nature reserve cum ecotourism attraction in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; the boat shuttle supplies the island with necessities and brings back all trash to the mainland. Another vessel had been abandoned decades ago by some Soviet bloc shipper that hadn’t been able to pay its port fees. Talk about a living museum.
Our little catamaran moved upstream on the Capibaribe though what may today seem like the back alleys of Recife. Yet for most of the city’s history, the river served as its collective front yard. Indeed, to a large extent, you can tell Recife’s history along the banks of the Capibaribe – from the construction of Brazil’s first large-scale bridge, completed by the Dutch in 1644 during their 24-year occupation, to the July 25, 2006 reinaguration of the restored Paulo Guerra Bridge sans the 17 lamps that were imported from Belgium but stolen before the reopening. (This is nothing new, apparently. Some R$250,000 worth of lamps had earlier gone missing from the Mauríco de Nassau Bridge, and on the 6 de Março Bridge somebody managed to carry away 1,200 meters of cable.)
We pass by the Rua da Aurora (Sunrise Street), which received its name by virtue of facing directly east and thus getting the early morning sun. From a distance, the colonial high-rises, some recently renovated or at least painted, remain impressive. But by this time of night the streets are most likely inhabited by the seedy characters of Hecht’s hybrid book – partially based on the narrative of an urchin turned prostitute who made that very street her own.
So close, yet so far. Soon we’re looking at another bizarre sculpture - hard to decipher at first, but it is indeed a crab. Our crab stands in homage to Chico Science, who died just on the farside of 30 in an automobile accident. Nearby is a school that provided the childhood education for an unholy trinity of disparate writers: Clarice Lispector, Ariano Suassuna and João Cabral de Melo Neto.
Soon it will be time to turn around and head home. Who better to leave at the helm than Cabral de Melo Neto himself?
River slow in the marshlands,
I travel even more slowly,
now that my waters
weigh me down with so much mud
I now move so slowly,
because I carry something heavy;
I carry with me the islands
that I picked up along the way
More information about boat trips in Recife
Catamaran Tours
Pernambucan State Tourism Agency
Recife Municipal Tourism Agency
Order Books about Recife Mentioned in this Article
After Life: An Ethnographic Novel by Tobias Hecht from Amazon.com.
Life and Death of Severino (in Portuguese) by João Cabral de Melo Neto from Livraria Cultura.
