Brazil’s perilous prosperity owes everything to São Paulo. And São Paulo owes everything to immigrants. In the last few decades most of these incomers have originated, not in Europe or Asia, but in Brazil itself, from the undeveloped north-east, a thousand miles away, where the soil is thin and drought and famine are a constant threat. Over half the present-day population of São Paulo comes from places like this. It’s as though fifty per cent of New Yorkers came from Mexico. For such nordestinos, as they are called, the city represents a dream of financial security. They find work there, but more often than not they do not find housing. So they are compelled to build what the statisticians call “precarious dwellings”—shacks and shanties.

All over and around the city—on wasteland, in small valleys, under freeways, along railway sidings—are the favelas, shanty towns, without sanitation, often without water (except when it rains and they are half washed away). Heliópolis, Paraisópolis, Radar, Azul, Nega Rose, Vietnã, Peri and thousand other mellifluously-named settlements. All Brazilian cities have such shanty towns, but Greater São Paulo has the most—more than two thousand, with over two million people living in them, ten per cent of the population. Though illegal, many of these settlements are well-established; some have existed for decades.

Living there is better than living nowhere. And nowhere is where another quarter of a million people in this city live. Many of these homeless ones are crianças abandonadas, abandoned and runaway children to be seen begging, sniffing glue and picking pockets in the city centre. Again, all Brazilian cities—most cities in South America—have such an outcast tribe, but São Paulo, as in everything else, has the most.

The moon shines brighter in Alagoas

Soon after I arrived I went to meet Manuel Francisco Espinola, seventy years old, originally from the poverty-stricken north-eastern state of Alagoas. A former metal worker, he lived in a three-room house of wood and corrugated iron in a long-established favela alongside the railway in the western part of the city, where he was president of the Residents’ Association. The favela had been established in 1911, Sr Manuel told me, when São Paulo was a tenth of the size it is today; there were seven thousand people living there now; over half of them were under fourteen. There was a one-room school for these four thousand children, and a pharmacy where a doctor came once a week.

Sr Manuel accompanied me and my journalist friend Moyra Ashford, long a resident of the city, and our young guide, Camilo Rocha, through the dirt alleys of the favela. Children were playing hopscotch in the shade. He showed us, first, the range of places of worship in the favela: the Catholic church, three chapels of rival fundamentalist sects, a temple of the African-derived religion Umbanda, and a Spiritist meeting room. I asked Sr Manuel which god he followed himself. He was an espiritista, he said. (Spiritism is an all-embracing belief system with a large following in Brazil, though in São Paulo only three per cent of the inhabitants are practitioners, according to the official statistics.) In politics, Sr Manuel was a Socialist, a supporter of Brazil’s Workers’ Party, which is strong in São Paulo, though it has not yet shown itself strong enough to unseat the right-wing machine politicians who run the city.

“You can see,” he told us, “there is hunger and misery here. It goes on, despite the promises the politicians make us. This is what capitalism does.”

He gestured at a small boy playing outside “I want my grandchild to have a better chance in life than me. But the burguesia fear us. They may need us to work in their houses and factories, but the rest of the time they pretend we don’t exist. Or they call us marginais—marginal people”

“And it’s true,” Sr Manuel continued, “there is a lot of violence these days. Look at me, though. I couldn’t rob a bank if you paid me.”

“Things get worse and worse for us here,” said Sr Manuel. “The moon is brighter back in Alagoas.”

I asked him if there was anything he really liked about the city.

“Ah,” he said, smiling a little. “What I like is the intercambio cultural—the cultural exchange. See—I am speaking to you here. It would never happen back in Alagoas. People don’t know anything about the world there.”

And what about work?

“It’s true, there is work here, that’s if you think it’s worth working for eight hundred cruzados a month.”

Eight hundred cruzados—about thirty dollars—was the monthly minimum wage in Brazil at the time. The figure has gone up since, but inflation has gone up faster. Even the middle classes must struggle to survive. But in Brazil os ricos, the people who really have money, are still making more of it. For them São Paulo is a boom town. Apartments in the most luxurious of those tall white towers, where the residents are protected by armed guards and videophones, can cost upwards of half a million dollars. In a few chic streets in the centre of the city you could be in a fashionable district of Paris or Rome. Intercambio cultural has a different meaning there.

A city that works?

A while later I spoke to a British businessman from Liverpool, married to a Brazilian and settled in Brazil. His company is the leader in São Paulo’s booming real estate market.

“This is a place for real players,” he said. “You can win or lose in a big way. People make a lot of money.”

“But,” he added, “that doesn’t mean it’s a good place for long-term investment.”

Did he think it was a good place to live?

“Not any more. I keep a gun in the house. One of my wife’s family was killed by thieves.”

Yes, he agreed, there was great social injustice in São Paulo, and in Brazil as a whole. The fact was, if you had social justice you didn’t have cheap labour. And cheap labour, among other things, was what the economy of the country ran on. Without it, he said, there wouldn’t even be a minimum salary.

What, I wondered, did he still like about the city?

“The bits that work,” he said. “The telephones work. That makes business possible. The railways work, road transport works. Garbage collection works. So far … .”

It’s true: São Paulo works. It’s ugly, but it works. The city exudes the raw energy of money: Some people making a lot of it by hard graft, others by speculation and corruption; many more struggling to survive on almost nothing. And Paulistas certainly work. Theirs is a serious city, they are wont to tell you, unlike Rio.

Cariocas, in their turn, say that Paulistas work because they have nothing better to do. It’s meant as a joke. Though Rio may have a reputation as the pleasure centre of the country, it too, has a huge industrial zone, well away from the beach suburbs and the beautiful people. It’s just that Rio’s astounding natural setting distracts attention from the lives of labour and the squalor and deprivation there. Carnival irradiates Rio; there are beaches; and the weather is kinder. For the tourist, the comparison with São Paulo can only be to Rio’s detriment.

Take a look at São Paulo again: a vast central conglomeration of high rises, ringed with endless shanty towns, mouldering towers in a pool of deprivation, no green belt, only a rust belt. A city with a tide mark of poverty, incomprehensibly large, seriously polluted; miles and miles of freeways and throughways, tunnels and bridges, underpasses and overpasses, all jammed with cars and trucks and buses. Where Rio de Janeiro has mountains, Sao Paulo has more high-rises. Where Rio has beaches, São Paulo has more freeways. And where Rio has the sea, São Paulo has the River Tietê.

This once noble waterway was one of the routes followed by the bandeirantes, the sixteenth-century European pioneers who founded the city. Now the River Tietê is a noisome ditch, sluggish and grey, flanked by shrieking freeways and joyless amusement parks and moteis de alta rotatividade—the high-turnover lovers’ retreats found on the outskirts of Brazilian cities, where couples can hire rooms for a few hours of privacy. These motels have English names: My Flower, Pink, Big’s, Love, Las Vegas. It is hard to imagine a less romantic location, but any one of them might be paradise if you lived half a dozen to a room in a favela. If you live in a favela, though, you probably cannot afford a night at My Flower, or Big’s, or Pink.

Every few years a new plan is unveiled, designed to ease the traffic flow and create more room to breathe. There are at least three such plans gathering dust in the offices of the Prefeitura. But they never stop building roads—three hundred new roads a year. The Transport Department started a name bank but it ran out of names. So the street map shows a street called X. There’s a street called Rua Disneilandia, one called Rua Science Fiction and an entire district named Alphaville, after the metropolis of the future in Jean-Luc Godard’s film of that name, with streets named after characters from the movie. There are a hundred and twelve streets named after the Virgin Mary in São Paulo; there are streets named after Queen Elizabeth II of England, and Queen Victoria, and the Queen of the Night; there are a dozen Orchid Streets and several that bear the name of a Brazilian general called Haddock Lobo. There’s a street named after the former British prime minister, Clement Atlee. There are streets named after people that no one, not even a Paulistano, has ever heard of.

Great Worm and Giant Onion

One day in São Paulo I found myself driving with Camilo Rocha down a huge elevated highway that cuts through the northern flank of the city, strangling the buildings in its way, hugging their sixth floor windows. The highway was one of the attempts to improve traffic flow in the city. Its name, Camilo told me, was Minhocão, the Great Worm. Minhocão twists and turns through the tower blocks till it meets the river and the ring road, leading the unwary driver—myself in this case—from there into an impossible tangle of freeways and flyovers, a wilderness of concrete and metal called Cebolão, the Giant Onion.

Minhocão, Cebolão. The giant worm, the giant onion. Why—I asked Camilo—why an onion?

“It has many layers,” he said. “And it goes round and round in circles. And it makes you cry.”

Ah! São Paulo. Those phrases could describe the entire city. We sat in my car, there on a slip road off the Cebolão. It had stalled and I was having difficulty restarting it. Cars and trucks and buses and motorbikes hissed by on either side. It was irksome, but at least I didn’t have to do this every day. I didn’t have to sit in a car with the rush hour traffic hooting at my tail. I didn’t have to live in the Giant Onion. So it didn’t really matter what I thought about it. What mattered was how Paulistanos managed to tolerate, even like, this big, cruel, ugly place, when it does not seem to offer them much more than a job and a football team to support.

The next day I left my car behind and took a taxi. The driver complained about the traffic.

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked him.

“What—me?’ he said. “Go and live in some aldeia—some village? Eu sou metropolitano, senhor.”

Metropolitan. Cosmopolitan. São Paulo certainly is that. This is why Paulistas such as the taxi-driver, or the Romanian princess I had met on the plane, are proud of it, believing it to be, with all its problems, the most glamorous and sophisticated city in South America. There are world-class universities here, innumerable art galleries and museums. There are fine restaurants; elegant and well-dressed people dine in them. I dined there also. (The bill for two was a month’s minimum wage.) The country has a free press—the liveliest and most serious outside Europe and America—and São Paulo is at the heart of it. There is a plenitude of information and entertainment, at least for those who can read, or who have access to television. There are five TV channels, twelve daily newspapers and half-a-dozen weeklies. The bancas de revista, street corner news stands, are a wondrous sight, festooned with newsprint and glossy magazines. The leading dailies—Folha de S. Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo—and weeklies like Veja, Isto E and Senhor, bear comparison with their counterparts in Europe or the United States. As in other fields, São Paulo has taken over from Rio as the national centre of the communications industry. In this respect it feels like the future.

The power of money to build and destroy

My friend Moyra and I had lunch with Mino Carta, an elegant man who was founding editor of both of Veja and of Senhor. Why this plenitude of culture and communications, I asked him.

“Money, Power,” he shrugged. “What else? São Paulo is Brazil. This is where the national tragedy is being played out. Rio is nice, but history is here, now.”

São Paulo is Brazil. History is now. This sense of contemporaneity, of centrality to the present, gives Paulistanos a kind of civic pride. In truth, though, few cities have destroyed their past so thoroughly. São Paulo was founded in 1554, but it might as well have been yesterday. There are hardly any old buildings left. Even now they are tearing down the last of the ornate nineteenth-century coffee barons’ mansions to build some new corporate headquarters on Avenida Paulista, Sao Paulo’s main financial strip.

Avenida Paulista runs dead straight and flat for several kilometres along a high ridge to the south-west of the old centre. But now Avenida Paulista, in all its futurity, is itself being challenged by a new development of office buildings and financial information centres near the river. The city eats itself, the result of what the Brazilian singer and composer Caetano Veloso—who is from Bahia, in the North-east—has described as “the power of money to build and then destroy.”

The money moves further south and west; the middle class moves that way too, to clusters of guarded towers on high ground—to Morumbi, or north to Alphaville, the Jean-Luc Godard suburb. It leaves the traditional centre of the city, the Triangulo, as  a confused zone that is part offices, part shopping-centre and part red-light district.

It’s so new that on Avenida Paulista, the most venerable monument is not a building, but a man. Pietro Maria Bardi is the founding director of São Paulo’s art museum (an immaculately modernist hunk of concrete that already looks antique). At 88 he is older than most of the buildings in the city. Bardi—Italian-born like Mino Carta—is doyen of the culturati of Sao Paulo, presiding over its one world-class museum and writing a fiercely opinionated column in one of the city’s weekly magazines. But he, too, described São Paulo to me as tragic, the ultimate example of the evils of underdevelopment, advanced in some respects, hopelessly backward in others.

He had come to Brazil just after the war, he told me, in the days when, he said, you didn’t go to the cinema without a tie. He soon left Rio for São Paulo (“It wasn’t the capital, but the capital was there”). He had always preferred it to Rio.

“But now,” he said, “I no longer love the city.”

I seemed to be asking a lot of people this simple question: did they really like living in Sao Paulo? And most of them were hard put to answer yes. The next person I asked, though, really did seem to like it. Surprisingly, perhaps, she was a police chief.

Brazil is a country where a man can still kill his wife and get away with it on grounds of her infidelity. In the rural areas where many Paulistanos come from, if not in the city itself, such macho principles still operate. A year ago in São Paulo Chief Inspector Rosmary Correa established the world’s first women’s police station, the Delegacia da Mulher, a popular success that has spawned similar institutions in a dozen Brazilian cities. Two hundred women a day pass through the striking gothic building in which the Delegacia is situated—weeping women with babes in arms, clutching tattered identity cards, with stories of children hurled on the floor by drunken husbands, possessions thrown on the street, lockouts and rapes. Moyra and I went to see her there.

“1986 was a good year for women in Brazil,” Rosmary Correa told us. “We have a new democracy; the politicians suddenly discovered that women are 51 per cent of the electorate. That’s what made the Delegacia da Mulher possible.”

I asked her what she herself liked and hated about São Paulo.

“You can see what I hate,” she said. “It’s right here in front of us—this exploitation, this cruelty. What I like about it is privacy. You can be anyone you like here, nobody knows you.”

It was a striking reply for someone in her line of work, especially one who had recently become a celebrity and seemed to be enjoying it. Weren’t anonymity and loneliness among the problems of big cities?

“You are a European,” she explained, “and you take the right to privacy for granted. But if you live in a small town in Brazil you can be a prisoner.

“Of a marriage, for instance?” I asked.

“For instance.”

It was something I hadn’t taken into account. Not, perhaps, enough to redeem the city, but something to be said in its favour.

The next day, a Saturday, I had another conversation lined up, on the other side of town, with a traffic scientist, one of the specialists called in to try and sort out the problems caused by the endlessly growing influx of vehicles into the city.

I was late, of course. I had left my car behind after my experience in the Big Onion, so I had a choice between metro, bus and taxi. It is a choice Paulistanos face every day. A serious choice: on average they spend four hours a day getting to work and back. The São Paulo metro is new, quiet, clean and safe, the opposite of its New York counterpart. Unfortunately it hardly goes any distance, and the traffic scientist was beyond its reach.

Buses are plentiful: articulated buses, double-length, linked by concertinas, sometimes half-a-dozen of them, nose-to-tail, and often stationary in the traffic. Camilo, my young guide, who had accompanied me on a number of trips across the city, was keen on these new, bendy buses. I was not so sure. Once you are inside one, you have to fight your way to the back to get off. It’s like the digestive system of a centipede. If you are lucky you will arrive at the exit before the bus gets to your destination. (That’s if you’ve got on the right bus: the municipal authorities encourage discussion among passengers by providing no indication, apart from an obscure colour-code, of where buses stop or go on to.)

So I went by taxi again. Brazilian taxis have their attendant risks. You are probably safer inside one than outside, but you have to look out for illegal butane gas-driven gipsy cabs, with gas tanks in the trunk. These are indistinguishable from the genuine article—until they explode.

The traffic scientist was not fazed by my delay. He was used to all this. Things were worse than usual, he explained, because a recent government price freeze had made fuel cheaper. Actually, he said, the traffic movement in São Paulo was very efficient, considering the road space and the number of vehicles. There wasn’t any way it could be improved short of knocking down buildings. No technology could make it move faster. At least, he said, when the roads were jammed it brought the accident rate down. (But not far enough. There are five hundred traffic accidents a day in São Paulo. The death rate is five times that of Los Angeles, ten times that of Tokyo-Osaka.)

How could the traffic scientist stand living in a place like this?

“Oh I like it,” he said. “I like the night life. Sometimes the roads clear then. The last place I was in was Lagos. It’s much worse there.”

There had been a sharp increase recently in the use of executive helicopters, he told me. Yes, he wished he had one.

Darkness was falling as we came to the close of our conversation. I set off back to the centre. It was Saturday night and I had one more evening in São Paulo. By night the city seems to improve. Perhaps it is because you can’t see so much of it. The moon gleamed like a nail paring through the neon. On the way to my evening rendezvous with Moyra I passed the up-market bars in Jardins, one of São Paulo’s smart neighbourhoods, where rich kids chatter and cruise, the crescendo of chic where Rua Oscar Freire meets Haddock Lobo, the bright-lit pharmacies, the all-night bancas and the flower stalls outside the cemeteries. I studied the strange polychrome street art that had recently appeared in Jardins and surrounding areas on walls and telegraph poles: arcane symbols in swirls of colour, reverberating shapes that seemed as though they might be a clue to the meaning of the cidade desvairada, the hallucinated city.

I passed through the boca de luxo, the mouth of luxury, the red light district where travestís—transgendered sex workers—negotiate with their ambiguous clientele. The bancas there offered pornography in five languages. Night-club barkers plied their trade. One pressed a card into my hand. It read “Golden Bells Night Club Come! The Girl’s For You” in English and in Portuguese. On the other side it said the  same thing in Japanese: we were close by Liberdade, the Japanese section of downtown São Paulo, where there are Taoist temples and the street signs read from top to bottom.

Finally I arrived at my rendezvous with Moyra, in an outlying area of the city called Brás, where many migrants from northeastern Brazil have settled. It was a forró, a dance place where nordestinos go to hear the music of the land they left. In a huge old ballroom under a mirrored globe that no longer moved, an indefatigable squeezebox player with a two-piece band rolled out the frenetic music of the northeast, the inimitable forró, to a dance floor packed with couples, some sedate and elderly, some youthful and agile, some moving in a fluid embrace, some glued from neck-to-ankle. (Forró is fast music, with some of the sound and feel of zydeco, the accordion music of Louisiana.)

For men the cost of entrance was the equivalent of fifty US cents. For women it was free. It went on till the early hours. Afterwards, as we slid through the raucous dancers fanning out into the dawn streets of Brás I asked a young woman there the same question I had been asking all day, all week in fact.

What do you like about São Paulo? I asked her. What do you hate about it?

She was staring anxiously after her boyfriend, who was talking to someone else, and turned round for a moment to answer me.

“I like my boyfriend,” she said, laughing. “I hate the roads. And most of all I hate the pavements”—she removed one of her shoes—“They ruin your heels.”

Then, with her shoe in her hand, she started to run along the broken pavement, after her errant boyfriend.

This was where the night ended. After the forró there was nowhere to go but home. As the traffic scientist had said, the roads in São Paulo clear, just briefly, in the early morning hours. Moyra and I picked up a copy of the Sunday Folha de S. Paulo—it’s as bulky as the New York Times—and waited for the sun to burn a hole in the haze.

Dawn over the Great Stain, the Giant Onion. Huge and filled with life. Crowded and polluted, poverty-stricken and violent—the city wraps you up and envelops you. Thanks to the country’s hybrid vigour, its national joie de vivre, no Brazilian city can be mean. And as the sunlight caught the high towers, São Paulo was momentarily, beautiful.

The good feeling we had, though, as dawn was breaking, was not because of the architecture. The city is redeemed by its inhabitants, by the Paulistanos themselves—their physical generosity and grace, their warmth and charm, their perilous dwellings, their intercambio cultural, and the brave lives they contrive to live in this harsh environment. Policewomen, princesses, journalists, museum directors, spiritists, street artists, nordestinos, taxi-drivers, favela-dwellers, dance-hall revellers—all of them. And a young woman with broken heels on her shoes—and an as-yet unbroken heart. ★