São Paulo – what a city: rich in culture, dripping with cash, undermined by political corruption, marked by a rich/poor disparity which fuels desperation and a life-is-cheap criminal ethos. The idea for my novel Paradise City was born over a weekend in 2006. It was the lovechild of organised crime, the construction industry, and Cazuza.
Joe Thomas
The PCC gang runs São Paulo crime from prison. They want to watch the 2006 World Cup on large, flat, wide-screen TV sets. The PCC is like a corporation – none of the flip-flop/assault rifle shtick of the Rio gangs. They are very organised. And they generally get what they want.
So the PCC ask for large, flat, wide-screen TV sets. They pitch for more frequent conjugal visits. These requests are nixed. In response, the PCC tell the authorities they will: ‘cause some chaos.’
For three days, São Paulo experiences some righteous, PCC-brand chaos. Gangbangers attack the police. They hijack buses. They evacuate them. They set them on fire and leave them on major highways. There are rumours of raids on public buildings. Over a hundred and fifty people are killed – police, gangsters, and the inevitable bystanders: the stray bullets. The city goes into lockdown. The authorities throw in the towel. The PCC get their TVs and their conjugal visits.
The Chief of Police’s kid studies at the school where I work. The officers who had been shot at over the weekend are receiving danger money. Trauma and whatnot, the chief of police tells the headmaster. Thing is, hearing this, a number of officers have shot at their own police stations. The bullet holes can be used as proof they’ve been attacked. They too, the chief of police says, are claiming danger money.
The peculiarity of the crime, the brazenness of the requests and the response, and the implied police behaviour seemed distinctly Brazilian to me.
Paradise City opens with a favela and a stray bullet.
It can feel dangerous outside my condominium gates. As we drive past Paraisópolis, I clock the harried faces, the slouch of rubbish and mess, the half-naked children and the condensed, improvised houses.
From my balcony, I can see an impressive tower block. At night, only a couple of the apartments are lit up. My friend Mario laughs when I put it to him that they must be prohibitively expensive.
‘Expensive?’ he says. ‘Mate, they’re knocking them out, cut-price. There’s a swimming pool on every balcony. Thing is, they forgot to factor in the extra weight of the water. When they filled them all up, the supporting pillars cracked.’
Still, a few people pay over a million reais for one.
An epigraph to Paradise City is from a Cazuza song. He remains the poet of the disaffected. His work is discursive and profane, preaching inclusivity and tolerance. His lyrics find an echo in Paradise City:
Transformam o país inteiro num puteiro
Pois assim se ganha mais dinheiro
They turn a whole country into a whorehouse
Because that way it makes more money
Joe Thomas is a visiting lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Prior to this, he lived and taught in São Paulo for ten years. Paradise City is his first novel, published on February 9th. The second book in the series - Gringa - will be published by Arcadia in 2018.
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