In the months leading up to our departure, before flying off first off to a month or so of language study in Seville –and then on to our new home, jobs and lives in Paraguay, many things must have buoyed up the vision and expectation.
The adrenalin of preparation, a sense of vocation too, must have kept us afloat and focused. There were letters, literature, stories, visits from those who already lived on the continent. We attended an orientation conference for the organisation through which we were being employed; we even had a brief home visit from a language tutor –more of that in a moment. And we were of course particularly alert to all things latino, helping to form preparatory impressions of the culture and climate into which we would enter. I found myself quite arrested by the Jack Lemmon/ Sissy Spacek film ‘Missing’…and in my final days of full time teaching in 1980s Britain, for classes in literary response, I chose to read and discuss, with impressionable 15 year olds, James Watson’s ‘Talking in Whispers’about life in Chile under Pinochet.
Even musically. I found an LP, for instance, in a Bargoed charity shop, by ‘Los Paraguayos Reales’. When our language teacher Joanna came to stay for a couple of days she helped me to pick out (and understand) the lyrics for some good rousing campfire songs – ‘El Rancho Grande’ especially, and even ‘La Bamba’. (she also disabused me of the misconception that I was listening to ‘the real Paraguayans’ – “it means ‘the royal Paraguayans’ “she said). And then there was also Sting and his wonderful song about the wives of ‘los desaparecidos’ –and their profoundly eloquent silent dance of protest ‘Ellas danzan solas’. Listening to this reminded us that we were entering a continent struggling with human rights abuses on a massive scale. It was sobering, and yet, if I’m honest, a little blood-quickening also.
And then there was this James Taylor song which are often seemed to be on in the car, on a ‘Best Of James Taylor’ cassette that I must have acquired from somewhere or other. And yes, okay, it was about Brazil, and so yes, okay, the unfamiliar language on it was Portuguese and not the Spanish we were trying to learn. But the feeling of the song evoked something of the buzz of the continent we were about to enter, if that makes sense.
It’s odd, isn’t it, that this archetypal 1970s singer songwriter with his easy, relaxed, fairly affluent Martha’s Vineyard picking style crooning moderately introspective songs about love, loss and sunshine, should be so good at – and so interested in –evoking Latin rhythms and conjuring hot, sultry Latin atmospheres. He did it, relatively early on, with his song ‘Mexico’; and he has even done it, again, more recently on his 2015 album, on a track called ‘Snowtime’ where he describes hearing Latin music seeping from a club in snowy Toronto – and drawing him in. It’s a great, happy track.
So too, ‘Only A Dream In Rio’ which from start to finish excites. It certainly excited me back in 1989, in that time of preparation. It fed my anticipation, I think, hungry as I was for the otherness of the different culture – so that even the Portuguese lines felt like a spur to my eagerness. I loved all the accumulated ‘more than…’ lines, which somehow hinted indeed that the continent was more than the enumerated sum of its parts . ‘But it’s more than the shining eyes/ More than the steaming green/More than the hidden hills/More than the concrete Christ/ More than a distant land over a shining sea/More than a hungry child…’
Ah, that concrete Christ: Cristo Redentor, it’s phenomenal.
We hit Rio only as an overnight stop, sometime within the next five years, so, even though we didn’t get to visit Cristo Redentor itself, we bought, in the airport shops, wooden souvenirs of the famous and exciting Christ figure which looks over the city! The song’s engendered vision – the ‘ more than a dream..’ did not disappoint (ie the otherness and excitement of living in South America was entirely as stimulating and energising as the song had hinted at..) : and the song still gets to me in a big way. So yes, synthesise the above: we knew we were entering a continent where injustices and inequalities were even more raw and painful than in our own – they were, and I won’t minimize that. We were also about to be embraced by a culture which had a vibrancy which could not have been more of a contrast with British understatement and restraint. An adventure was about to begin…
Going for a Song 