Noise Noise Noise Noise Muito Noise

Taste & Decency Free Zone 

It’s become a weekly ritual. So much so that life without it seems unimaginable. * Every Friday around half 5-ish, Flavio parks his music cart on the corner two blocks away. He puts stones behind the wheels to counter the effects of gravity and vibration. Then he turns the dial to

ROCK.

This is my cue to go grocery shopping. The opening riff to Thunderstruck gets me mentally prepared for finding ways of purchasing a cucumber without having to give my CPF number to a check out girl who is incapable of closing her mouth. By the time I get to the local supermercado Flavio has changed the mood to something more in tune with vegetable selection. Whistling along to The Winds of Change while deliberating over which rectangular tomato (by EU standards) to buy is oddly comforting. Perhaps it makes me empathise with the lack of fruity variety in the pre-1989 Eastern Bloc. There’s a thesis in there somewhere… But then I think NO! They have foot long bananas here. I shouldn’t complain.

This is the only pleasure I get from noise in Recife.

Having sold some Yes CDs Flavio moves off to another corner somewhere else thinking

Slippery When Wet on the corner of Rua Capitao Zizinho, yes, easy money, works every week.

By the time I get home the vigilantes are power-whistling on their bikes to frighten away potential thieves. When the last coconut has been squeezed into the fridge they’ve succeeded. Then the beeping starts.

Brazilians reach for the horn so regularly that it is considered an extension of the body. A recently parked Brazilian has similar feelings of loss to someone who has had a limb amputated. As any amputee knows, the cold (below 25°) accentuates the feeling of loss. ** It takes a good hour for drivers to cease jerking their hands to where the steering wheel should be. This can cause problems, especially in restaurants or in church. ***

The gentleman's response

For around two hours every day, people beep to alert their porteiros to open the garage doors. Porteiros are trained to recognize the beep of every vehicle on their watch. My building has 96 apartments. You can see their frontal lobes pulse if you care for that sort of thing. 

While being an affront to taste and decency, this instance of beepage has a purpose; most instances fall into the category of cuntery. The months between February and May are the worst. Why? The Pernambuco State Championship. There are three football teams in Recife that have a chance of winning the tournament, Sport, Nautico and Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz supporters generally don’t live by the beach (or have cars) and Nautico supporters seem to be well rounded humans (the odd bus burning aside) in comparison to the beep-whores that support Sport.

When Sport win, which they regularly do, their supporters start beeping until they run out of noise. It goes like this

EHHHHHH EH EHHHHHHHH, EH EHH EHH EHH-EHH EHHHHHH.

It is like a skangers thought process. Other drivers reciprocate. Grown men race onto their balconies and scream incomprehensible grunts hours after Sport have won and wait for other imbeciles that they don’t know to abandon their family dinners and respond, irrespective of company. How does one combat such things? Eggs. I abide by the laws and go about my business. I buy a dozen eggs a week and boil about two. The rest are reserved for the only option available to curmudgeons. **** An unboiled egg lobbed from 20 metres up packs a satisfactory dent on the rare occasions you get the trajectory right – hasty lift journey and small talk with porteiro=alibi.

Though I must add that that all noise during World Cups and Carnavals are to be encouraged, as are arguments involving the Brazilian tactic of speaking rapidly, incoherently and deviating exhaustively from the subject matter in an          authoritatively loud manner. Which constitutes a win, regardless of any facts.

However, these are all minor infringements against Brazilian society in comparison to the culture of the Salao de Festa party. They usually start around lunchtime. The smell of beef wafts up. You think

Man I’d love some of that, smells divine! 

Cross hairs aligned. Tell me when Cap'n

Then the music starts. At first you don’t mind so much, thinking, like a simpleton, that it’ll stop soon. Five hours later, having suffered the worst offensive against ears since the opening barrages of the Battle of the Somme, you crack. Shell-shocked you stumble to the fridge for your eggs, imagine the whistle of one of the vigilantes and attack even though you know it’s futile. So you leave the building for a walk, bulling and listening to angry revenge music. But no matter where your feet go to you can’t escape. 

You wander to the beach looking for the calm solace of the shark infested waves. You sit down and breathe and order a rum & coconut but before said beverage arrives a solitary plump middle-aged middle-manager with kids from an accountancy firm arrives and opens his boot. He sets the speakers in his boot to

EXPLODE

 He takes off his top. You mentally vomit, down your drink and ruminate about what Reginald Perrin did.

This scenario replicates itself for km².  Though in Recife numbers make as much sense as Jedward so you rephrase that as km⁸   and no one would be any the wiser.

Brazil's only anti-horn sign

So what can you do? Well, you can either be ‘with us or against us’ which is a fudge in itself. There is no point in being against. It gets you nowhere – unless you discount the immense personal satisfaction of temporarily disrupting a graduation ceremony in the school next to your apartment by distributing yolk without discrimination. *****

So you go home defeated****** and plug in all available electrical appliances into your many orifices and hope that sleep takes you before an unexpected power surge.

* The only similar feeling I know is of demonstrating the magic of an electric kettle to an unsuspecting local and witnessing scenes similar to the guy who cast the triangular wheel to the dustbin of history.

** Any porter will tell you tales of finding lads in the parking lot sitting in their cars and beeping at 3am. Comfort beeping.

*** Such behaviour is regularly misconstrued as possession. Thankfully most churches have a modified Bat-phone under the alter to calm the flock. Once the pastor reaches for the phone a hush settles. Sprinkler systems have been abandoned as a response to the frequency of benches (resin-coated wood with inbuilt compasses set to ‘zoos’ complete with animal checklists) being sized up and fashioned into arks.

Last Thursday rumours spread like wildfire that the city reservoirs had burst. Schools closed. Business stopped. Roads didn’t work. Tack whoppers with horses and carts were advised not to travel in convoys of four so as not to add to the panic. Trees close to churches have axe marks. It was a false alarm. But those in the know know it’s a sign. One of many.

**** Empirical research shows that stress is alleviated by lobbing eggs at cunts beeping in cars.

***** Successfully negotiating the four holes of a T-shirt on two consecutive days can warrant a ceremony where all extended relatives are invited is not unusual.

****** But if you listen to this song all is OK!