Wraith-like emergence from the shadows to their dispersal, perhaps less than a minute passed. That was time enough for blades and a gun to be thrust faceward, shirts torn, our bodies pushed to the ground like condemned men. The way they streamed off in random directions was more like a rabid band of hounds than a victorious army, but perhaps that was a smart plan to confuse pursuers. But during the attack I had never seen such wild aggression, heard such feral and manic hollering.
In Rio they call it an arrastão, a flash robbery—lesser known to outsiders but just as iconic to crime-weary locals as caipirinhas and samba.
We had felt so safe in the deepening dusk, playing football on the beach. Tristan lived here with his Brazilian wife, and I should have known from my own years living in Colombia and Peru how to recognise the danger signs. And sometimes the sign is just silence: heading back, the parkland between the beach and Glória metro seemed quieter and darker than usual. Where were the joggers? A minute later Tristan had lost his phone but I, airport-bound in an hour to catch a flight to João Pessoa where friends awaited in a beachside apartment, was stripped of passport, phone, two bags, laptop, and wallet. Photos of loved ones too, old immigration stamps—all gone.
The initial shock is numbing, just sheer unbelief. This cannot have happened! Not now, not now! The self-hatred, the what ifs, come much later. My larger pack had been discarded a little way off, contents strewn on the grass like entrails. How violated those everyday items looked, packed so carefully hours before. Still, most of my clothes were there, tent, washbag at least. “They didn’t take my binoculars,” I said in a tremulous voice (how quickly we clutch at straws). Perhaps this clutching is the psyche initiating recovery as soon as it can. But at the time, I was trembling too much to know or care.
Half an hour later the desultory police station visit had produced a link to an online report form and heads shaken in sympathy. I chose to ram mine against a wall outside, startling passers-by. At Tristan’s apartment in Botafogo, a volley of angry incomprehension from his wife greeted us. What the hell were we doing at the beach with all that stuff! It’s anger borne of concern, of what might have happened to us if we had resisted, but it hits hard. We defend our actions heatedly. My hotel was charging the same as a room for baggage storage! It wasn’t even properly dark! It was tense. We cancel our cards, the first administrative step in a kaleidoscope of document-ordering, blighted e-mail recovery attempts and bank exchanges.
Such administrative treats were yet to come though. That night, one of the worst I have ever known, was given over to despair and a dreadful, pit-in-the-stomach incomprehension, made worse by a dawning realisation: not only was my trip derailed, but I would now have to fall back on my friends’ hospitality, friends who were raising a child, who were struggling financially, and who I had only just lent money to myself. Waking the next morning on the sofa, knowing this was the first of many grim recollections, was worse than the robbery itself.
Because Pri and Tristan had a flurry of work to contend with, I was on daughter duty. Making pancakes for a child with a savant’s eye for breakfast foods, then cajoling her onto the school bus in a weird mix of simple English and Portuguese-syllabled Spanish, was a stressful but blessed relief from miserable reflection, the trust shown in me by her parents even more so. But in the time between Mimi leaving for school and her parents returning from work, I paced the apartment in an agony of fixation, the self-hatred smothering me.
Over the following days, punctuating this despair, came bizarre spurts of optimism: “Tristan, after another wire transfer from home I’ll take a bus up to João Pessoa!” It must be what being schizophrenic is like. These swinging highs and lows became the norm. Sometimes the fact I had lost only possessions shamed me into thinking I was making too much of this, sometimes I even privately blamed Tristan. At other times we laughed it off. There is nothing neatly linear or predictable in the process of re-assembling oneself after such an event. A cup of tea, a shaft of sunlight lifts you for a moment, and seconds later you wallow in abject misery. It’s confusing, and incredibly draining.
And then a genuine victory. A local watch vendor had found my passport on the road near the attack site! After beseeching a confused American for help, my passport was returned and I drank street beers with my saviour in the first moment of joy since the robbery. That the passport had already been cancelled didn’t matter so much as the fact the stamps were recovered, those inked mementoes of so many joyous trips. It was also a precious reminder that not everybody on the streets was an enemy. Not all strangers carried guns. Some even brought me my passport and lovely, cold Brahmas.
This boost meant ten days after the robbery we sat together in Tristan’s living room, writing the names of emergency numbers on a piece of paper, counting out the ninety or so dollars I had in cash, contemplating a 2,407 km solo, phone-less odyssey northwards. I was determined not to return to England, tail between my legs. On the map, it looked an insane proposition, like something second-rate celebrities are asked to do for reality TV. The fiery resolve my decision had kindled flickered as shaky hands set an alarm for 6:00am.
What the hell was I doing re-entering the void? This apartment had seen my lowest ebb, but it had become at first a shelter and then a kind of home, where Tristan had proved his worth tenfold as a friend, where I had gotten to know his wonderful wife and step-daughter, and Christ the Redeemer gazed down from his mount, reminding us there were far worse ordeals a man could go through. All this hobbit-like comfort was being exchanged for the chaos of the open road.
The journey was exhausting, but mercifully non-violent. A Danish backpacker inveigled me into a pitstop in Salvador, but that city was full of leering faces and dark recesses—trauma is such a powerful shaper of perception, tainting beautiful things, making the mundane monstrous.
But there were moments no memory of pain could tarnish. Waking on a bus at sunrise I saw a fog worthy of a London winter, but it hung over a vast, pink-suffused landscape of huge desert trees and spiny candelabra plants. The humid jungles of the south had disappeared in the night—this was the semi-mythical sertão: arid flatlands which have drawn poets, bandits, folk singers and evangelical desperadoes for three hundred years. It wasn’t like waking in another world, it was another world.
24 hours later, I and my disjointed sense of place reached the low-rise, almost Californian city of João Pessoa, too exhausted to feel a sense of victory. In true male fashion my friends greeted me with mocking laughter, and I joined them. And if this was a second-rate movie then here the tale would end, with three friends clinking beer glasses on a beach. But on my first morning, a virulent throat infection consigned me to either the sofa or the sea, where I wallowed (literally this time) in water so warm it failed to revitalise. In comic fashion I recovered on the last night of the rental. I had been in the city for 19 days.
And so back to Rio for me. But stopping again in Salvador, the place had a different energy, matching my own new-found health with its sun-blessed vitality, its bars pulsing to African rhythms I recognised from childhood days in Malawi. There was glorious reggae too, replacing the bossa nova I’ve tried and failed to love, and this musical tonic was more effective than any antibiotics.
Tristan’s apartment was reached after a 4,814km round trip. A new debit card awaited me, and a mind-bendingly expensive emergency, single-use passport ordered. England beckoned at last.
Then an entirely unavoidable and moronic error on the part of the British Consulate necessitated the purchase of a replacement passport for the replacement passport, as well as a hasty flight re-booking. There was even a tragi-comic moment when I was temporarily the owner of three passports: one in my possession but void, a replacement held up in transit to a Rio hotel, and another awaiting collection in São Paulo.
I flatly refused to log into my bank account during all this. I could not face that ghastly spectacle yet.
*
Days later the ordered loveliness of England slid past the train, and something unexpected happened. It was the return of a familiar sensation—the enigma of homecoming I call it. This is the simultaneous pull of the place just left, and the equal pull of the place one is headed towards. It is a lovely, bittersweet feeling familiar to most of us I think, often involving a contest between two, often contrasting, cultures. But it goes deeper than merely missing a place and looking forward to another. It teaches us how deeply travel enriches us, and intensifies our love for familiar home comforts which might become dreary if we didn’t leave them behind from time to time.
And I felt the pull of Brazil on that train, I really did. I felt it because what had first seemed a pathetic attempt to salvage meaning from retaining my binoculars was, I now realise, a streak of instinctive optimism I never knew I possessed. So although on the train images of fruit-laden groves edging tropical shores played in my mind, more than on any previous trip, it was people I thought of. Family of course, and tried and tested friendships which had proven their worth. But I thought of a watch seller by an underpass near Glória beach too. “I am crying for you, Robert,” he had written by text when he made contact and heard what had happened. But he didn’t need to now. All was well. His noble gesture had contributed to that. Fernando represents the majority. The petty villains of the world will remain as they are—minor figures in a world still mostly populated by decent people.
My confidence, ego and bank account have recovered (at different speeds unfortunately), salvaged passport safe in a box of keepsakes under my bed. My new one (technically number 4 for the year) has taken me to Albania, Greece, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Indian Himalayas since the robbery, now a year ago. It will take me to Brazil again I’m sure, but it, along with my bags, will remain firmly secure in a hotel lobby if ever I decide on a pre-flight stroll.
faroverthewater. 
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