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JD#56 RECIFE: VENICE WITHOUT GONDOLAS

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 - shuttling supplies to the island with necessities and bringing trash back 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.

steal water | 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 Brasil’s first large-scale bridge, completed by the Dutch in 1644 during their 24-year occupation, to the July 25th 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 £60,000 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 bathing in 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 far side 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" (Death and Life of Severino, 1954).