tching and spasming, while I sat and watched the pro fighters go through their no-gi workouts.
I found an apartment in Ipanema and moved to be closer to the gym, within a ten-minute walk. I was paying six hundred dollars a month, which was still a gringo price, for two rooms and a tiny kitchen a block from Posto 10, on Ipanema beach, arguably the nicest beach in the city (although Posto 9 had better girls, it was too crowded on the weekends). Ipanema, in the cidade maravihlosa, is a truly beautiful place. Wide leafy streets, sunny and hazy and bright and hot, with European taste but a unique world. The sidewalks are all the same—cobblestone, pounded into a concrete sand and then set to harden—and everywhere there are huge gaping ruts and shattered piles of stones. It is lovely in a gecko, sun-dappled way, with patterns of different-colored stones and large fish shapes set into the boardwalk. Everything reeks of the sea and the beach and heat and the jungle.
The main street is luxury commercialism: Louis Vuitton outlets, jewelry, ridiculous high-end sporting gear, H. Stern precious gems, and giant pharmacies. There are stands on every corner where fresh fruit juice is available for a pittance; Brazil has about five fruits that you’ve never heard of, unique to its jungle. I asked friends about this or that fruit and got, “Oh, there’s no translation in English.” I ended up hooked on acai and morago, a kind of thick shake of a dark, richly textured fruit mixed with strawberry (morago). Acai is supposedly wonderful for you, twenty grams of protein and trans-fatty acids and vitamins. It is relatively new to Rio, from the north; Wallid Ismail brought it south with him. Eventually, like most people, I made the switch to acai and banana, as it’s a little less sweet.
The street kids seemed remarkably happy, smiling and playing, making up games all the time, remaining children. They juggled for the cars and slept in lazy packs like dumped luggage, strewn in haphazard piles on the pavement. How nice not to be one of them, I thought as I walked home with a thousand reals burning a hole in my pocket, as I had to pay the landlord in cash. Why not just hand it to some kids, hand the whole stinking wad to them, right then and there? Just do it. But I didn’t. I turned hurriedly and shook my head as they came babbling to me with soft, high voices. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the plaintiveness, the note of sadness, of hunger, of human commonality—Help me please…. I am you and you are me, so why should you get to have all the fun? Why do you get to eat?
It was the only thing that distracted me in this beautiful, golden jungle city on the lip of the blue blue sea. The street kids bothered me less and less the longer I stayed, until I didn’t even see them, like everyone else. I lived for the most part in Zona Sul, the magic place, the richest part of the country, a fantasy world.
I had hurt my shoulder much worse than I could have possibly imagined. The pain increased day by day, and I took a few days off and then tried to train when it felt better, and it invariably got worse and worse until it would be hanging off my side like a chunk of driftwood, throbbing and tingling by the end of a training session. It felt as if it were held on by my gi. I began to panic, thinking that I’d damaged the rotator cuff. I couldn’t have come all this way to get hurt.
First, I tried self-medication. I went wandering and got an injection of cortisone at a quiet little mom-and-pop pharmacy from a tiny old man with glasses who seemed to understand me perfectly. Cortisona. Eu achuego mi hombro. Sim, sim. Boom, he gave me the shot of cloudy liquid into the meat of the shoulder. It made no difference at all.
Most people would have been ecstatic to be on vacation here in Ipanema without being able to train, but I was miserable. I had nightmares—my dreams were filled with snakes—and would wake up at five and drink coffee and fret. I had already been down here for a month; I was missing valuable training time.
I would have done anything to be healthy, for a magic pill to heal my shoulder. I would look covetously at all the other guys, consumed with shoulder envy.
It wasn’t only that I couldn’t train; it affected everything about me, about how the friendships went. Fighters will talk very differently to someone who works out with them, to someone they’ve been sparring and struggling with. There is an instant intimacy; fighters are friends after they fight because they have tested and know each other. As males, their respective status is known. Without a chance to prove myself as at least a willing beginner, I was a perennial outsider, tolerated instead of welcomed.
After a month of training off and on, I realized I had to go to a doctor, and I went to see Zé Mario’s and Rodrigo’s doctor and got an MRI for about $150. I had inflammation and edema, little balls of white fluid building up in the tissue, but fortunately no muscular or bone damage. The doctor told me that maybe in fifteen days I could resume training. He was sadly, egregiously wrong: Four months later it was still screwed up, and a doctor stateside would decide that I had an umbral tear to part of the rotator cuff.
As I waited in vain for my shoulder to heal, I continued to go to Top Team every day to sit and watch for two or three hours, trying to educate my eyes, trying to understand what was happening. Slowly, I managed to make the internal adjustment that I wasn’t going to be able to train for a while, if at all; but it was bitterly disappointing. Such an opportunity lost, one that would never come again. However, I had to find the positive side; that is an aspect of jiu-jitsu. Look at Helio, one of the founders; he was considered too small and weak, so he was forced to turn from power to technique and became one of the major champions of the art.
Jean Jacques Machado is a famous black belt in jiu-jitsu who has a birth defect; one of his hands is badly deformed, so he can’t make the gi grips like the other black belts. Despite this, he became one of the greatest technical grapplers of all time. He was forced to use his hand as a hook and grab not the cloth so much as the body and limbs of his opponent; as a result, in the no-gi, he was way ahead of everyone else. It turned out to be an advantage. There is a Brazilian word, malandro, that conveys something of the essence of a crook but also of someone who turns a disadvantage, a potential setback, into an advantage. Maybe I could do the same, learn by being forced to watch and study. So I watched every day, until my eyes glazed over.
It’s been said that the main obstacle to jiu-jitsu ever becoming an Olympic sport is that it is impossible to watch without at least some experience. To the uninitiated, it is a total mystery. Even after a little familiarity, I knew I was not seeing half of what was happening. I was failing to appreciate the skill and cleverness on display. The strength of boxing and muay Thai is that even the unschooled eye can appreciate the fights to some degree. You could say that at any pro boxing match there are maybe ten people in the whole stadium who really understand what is going on, but everyone in there can appreciate a war. With ground fighting, with or without the gi, that isn’t the case. To the uninformed observer it looks strange, slow, and, as a friend put it, “oddly intimate.”
One day I took an afternoon off from watching Top Team to meet with a famous capoeirista on the edge of Lagoa, in a park. Spring was ending in Brazil, and the clouds hung low over the bowl of mountains, muddy and threatening. Capoeira is the only martial art native to Brazil, and, although I don’t trust it as a strictly fighting art, it provides terrific strength and agility training, and the good practitioners are strong and graceful. The mestre I met with was Jo?o José da Silva; probably in his late forties or early fifties, he is known as Jo?o do Pulo, the Jump Man. He was an aging, slight black man with a handsome, clear-eyed face and a neat mustache. His hair was still dark and curly, and he generated goodwill and warmth. He was born in Bahia, but came to Rio with his parents, who were small farmers, when he was eleven years old and began to play capoeira.
He fought vale tudo when he was sixteen, or at least fought other capoeiristas, and became famous for entering it so young. He laughed and said that he had been knocked out a few times and gone home with his face covered in blood.
We hunkered in the rain in the park in some dingy concrete pavilions that smelled vaguely of piss, and out of the corner of my eye I watched the lightning crown and wreathe the mountains around the city and the slow spread of water across the concrete floor. There was supposed to be a session that afternoon, and maybe thirty students would show up if the weather was good. However, rain depresses the Cariocas, and they probably wouldn’t come, at least not in numbers.
The legend goes that capoeira was developed by slaves, who hid it from their masters by turning it into a dance whenever a white man drew near, and there are antecedents in Angolan foot fighting. Capoeiragem was a very violent street game in Rio at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the police tried to c