Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette
OK, where to start regarding yesterday’s shenanigans? Probably with Casa Nem.
As many of you know, Ana Paula da Silva, "Lupita Santos", Soraya Simões and I often work with a group of LGBTS activists loosely called "Casa Nem", who are rather more loosely led by Indianara "Indianare Alves Siqueira", a trans- substitute city councilwoman and leader of the NGO Transrevolução.
Casa Nem occupied a building in Lapa for several years, using it as a safe space and drop-in center for the local LGBTS and sex-working community in downtown Rio. They were cleared out of there, however, late last year. Since then, they've been occupying one abandoned building after another, hoping to create a squat that 'sticks' through a combination of brinksmanship, public pressure, clever lawyering and sheer courage.
Last week, as Nicola Mai can attest, they were kicked out of their most recent squat. So this week they went to another building on their list: a 112 year old apartment building in Copacabana that had a well preserved but abandoned penthouse apartment. Indianara and her krewe took it over and moved in.
So last night I was at home, painting a 3mm Seven Years War army and grading papers (as one does) while Ana Paula, ironically, was watching a Brazilian film about an urban occupation/squat. Ana gets a phone call from our lawyer pal, Vanessa Lima.
Vanessa is down at the Copa squat. The night before, some mysterious agent or agents had locked all the women INTO the building. Then, all day, strange-looking people were circulating in the neighborhood: people Vanessa and Indianara qualified as "looking very militia-like". Understandably, this freaked the women out. They are old hands when it comes to squatting and, in today's Brazil, it's a dice toss every time one does something like this. But generally it takes weeks to months before the sinister, mafia-looking dudes start showing up and making veiled threats. This time, it was happening almost immediately.
The women stayed indoors, called Vanessa and other lawyers for reinforcements and continued to expand their holdings. Most importantly, they opened up the attic above the penthouse... and they found what appeared to be the Forgotten Tomb of Tutankamen's Cheaper Brazilian Cousin.
The loft was full of... of... well, crap. Literally and figuratively. But the most eclectic and interesting crap you can imagine. Marble, bronze, and plaster busts of famous historical figures. What appeared to be a collection of shell whistles, a full alligator hide, a stuffed emperor penguin, bits of ivory, stone tools that looked like they could be neolithic in origin (or maybe Native American?... or maybe just replicas?), tons of pottery both broken and whole, decaying paintings in rotting frames. Oh, and some human skulls and a box or two of what seemed to be other human remains.
The ladies, to put it bluntly, shit a collective brick.
Given what had happened to them the night before, they (not unreasonably) felt that they had stumbled upon a stash of stolen museum goods. No one could make heads or tails of the collection, but it looked old and expensive. This, they felt, was the reason they had suddenly attracted so much unwanted attention from Copacabana's Shady Character Brigade.
So this is when Ana's phone rings with a call from Vanessa.
We get the story and are told to mobilize all the media we can and get them down to Copa, because it's getting dark and the women in the squat feared that the owners of what looked to be rare and precious stuff could come in under the cover of darkness and kill them.
I called my friend and mentor Antônio Carlos de Souza Lima, from the National Museum and asked him if he knew any museumologist who could go down to Copa and take a gander at the stuff. Antonio and I both agree that it is going to be hard to mobilize people on a Friday evening and that, probably, the squatters were vastly over-rating what they had found.
Then the pictures of the hoard start coming into Ana's phone. I shit a brick and forward them to Antonio. Antonio agrees that this looks like srs bzns. He puts me in touch with Dr. Mario Chagas, head of the National Historical Museum. Meanwhile, Ana is mobilizing the self-same Dr. Chagas via Soraya, who is his friend.
Dr. Chagas doesn't know me from Adam, but to his eternal credit, listens to my story and, when it is confirmed via Soraya, mobilizes the 19th Police District, the Federal Police, and the Federal Council of Museums.
Meanwhile, it's getting darker down at the squat and no one knows shit about what's been found or what may happen late at night. All we have are the photos Vanessa sent us. It looks serious, but who can tell?
Ana and I thus divide up our labor: she will sit at home and act as switchboard central, trying to mobilize media and coordinating people as the news of the find spreads slowly throughout the carioca museum community. I will put on my leather jacket and boots (it's "cold" in Rio right now) and head on down to the squat and try to get some first hand information as to what is going on.
When I get to Copacabana, I'm confronted with a blacked-out apartment building and a locked gate. The media has arrived, but is being kept at bay by two dead-serious punks on the ground floor. They let me in and I shout up seven floors through the courtyard to Indianara, who tells me to come up.
We walk up seven flights of pitch-black stairs, illuminated only by cellphones. The T.V. crew from Globo follows. I immediately start giggling, because this is EXACTLY what's NEVER supposed to happen in anthropology/archeology. It's like an over-the-top adventure movie, being directed and produced by John Waters, José Padilha, and Penelope Spheeris: Indianara Jones and the Temple of the Lost Punk Travesti Treasure of Copacabana, or some such thing.
The penthouse apartment is beautiful, but has obviously been abandoned for a hound's age. It has amazing stained glass windows everywhere. The bathroom is covered in black and green marble and art deco tiles. This is literally a ruin from the Roaring '20s or Great Depression (hello, Indiana Jones motif again). Indianara greets me with a hug and a kiss, resplendent in her dark sunglasses and rainbow-colored "today-we-go-a-occupyin'" sundress. Everybody starts chatting with me and letting me know what has been happening. Meanwhile, Ana's infosphere is catching up to me via cellphone.
Ana lets me know that the federal police are on their way and, indeed, they show up just after I do, led by Delegado Thales, the man who is investigating last year's destruction of Brazil's National Museum. Mario has confirmed with other museum heads that nothing corresponding to the stuff we see in the photos has gone missing from any of Rio's Museums. One of the squatters points out, however, that in the chaos of the Museum conflagration last year, it would have been easy for someone to go in and "rescue" material from the flames, only to hide it away for later resale in a forgotten apartment Copacabana.
So the police, media, and an anthropologist have shown up. The time has come to ascend the stairs into the attic and take a look-see at what has been found with our own eyes.
My first reaction to the attic is yet another camp throwback to 1920s Egyptology, most particularly Lord Carnavon and Howard Carter: "I see things! Things covered in pigeon shit!"
It's a debris field. A fractal mass covered in dust, grime, and a metric fuck-ton of the aforementioned bird feces. In the cellphone light, my eyes struggle to make sense of it all. I look down at the floor, trying to recompose my field of vision. There, at the tip of my left Doc Marten's, is what appears to be an ivory incisor taken from some big cat. Laid out to the right of that are a collection of shell and turtle-shaped pottery whistles -- the sort of thing one might buy in cheap souvenir stores in Mexico City or, alternatively, might be hundreds of years old.
I lift my head up. In front of me is an old cabinet. On top of it is a decaying box of what look to be disintegrating human femurs. Strewn next to them are a mass of pottery fragments. The Globo camera crew comes in and turns on their portable klieg lights. This makes things much brighter, but no more sensible. I look to the back of the loft. There are a bunch of bronze and marble bust. Or maybe they are made out plaster...? One of them is of Santos Dumont, at any rate: the Brazilian who invented the airplane back in 1906 while the Wright Brothers were still farting around with powered gliders.
It’s too much. The mind boggles. I take some snapshots. Then the police sergeant from the 19th Precinct, who is acting as den mother for this excursion into post-modern amateur urban archeology, says "OK, everyone who needs to has taken all the photos they can possibly want. Time to get out. This is a police investigation now".
We all troop back down to the squat. I, predictably, am babbling. Because of my training at the Museum, I have a solid base in the four fields of classic anthropology, but as a social anthropologist, all I can say is that this gives me enough knowledge to know how much I don’t know. One thing seems certain to me, however: the stuff in the attic has been there since Jesus was a cowboy. If any of it was originally stolen, that happened a long time ago. Decades, probably. It certainly isn’t likely that any of it came from the Museum, before, during, or after the fire.
The ladies tell me that they found a library full of books on histology, piled on the floor of the apartment when they moved in. Slowly, we begin to form a collective picture of what seems to have happened here. A rich old eccentric surgeon dies, leaving no clear heirs. The family either didn’t know or didn’t care about what is in the attic of their penthouse and, in the ensuing battles over his will, the stuff was just left there to rot. I reflect how sadly ironic it would be if the owner of this stuff was a homosexual, more or less cut off from his or her family and leaving no children: a rich old outcast whose legacy is rediscovered by today’s pennyless trans-, prostitute, and gutterpunk outcasts. Maybe that’s what has happened here, but there’s no way of telling at this point.
One of the legal support personnel receives a phone call. It’s Dr. Nadine. She has Alexander Kellner, the director of the National Museum and a paleontologist, on the phone. Alexander lives a few blocks away and Nadine wants to know if she should send him down to take a look at the find. I respond that I can’t make heads nor tails of it and that, yes, it would be a good idea to have someone higher up on the academic/scientific food chain take a long, hard look at it.
Dr. Kellner quickly makes an appearance while I update Drs. Chagas and Lima via Whatsapp. Kellner and the federal agents go up into the loft and back down again. They converse quietly for a half hour or so and the loft is finally blocked off as a police investigation site. Dr. Kellner seems only slightly less befuddled than I. We agree that some of the stuff looks quite valuable, indeed, much of it is probably trash, and that probably none of it is stolen. The eccentric collector hypothesis looks stronger and stronger.
We all troop down the stairs again and leave the building. Before heading home to Santa Teresa, I buy the punk “nightwatchmen” a carton of smokes and 12 liters of spring water. On Monday, specialists from IPHAN, Brazil’s national patrimony institute, will begin sifting through the wreckage to see if there’s anything of value in it.
That’s it. That’s the story. Except for two things.
First of all, I am telling it in first person and that makes it sound like I was a major protagonist in the events, which I was not. Vanessa Lima, Ana Paula da Silva, Soraya Simões, and Mario Chagas were the people coordinating everything and everybody. I was just the scientific flunky designated to go down there and make an initial assessment, mainly because the Casa Nem people know Ana and I and Ana was already in her jammies when Vanessa called.
The second and most important thing is this: the people who discovered this and phoned it in to the proper authorities are a motley band of trans-travesti-punk-queer-street people-activists who have been wandering Rio, gypsy-like, looking for a new home for months now. They are exactly the type of people who our new President would say deserve to die or be imprisoned -- supposedly “scum” and “bandits”. They know that their lives aren’t worth two wet farts in windstorm and that if they are murdered – or simply are beaten and left to die – no one will investigate their deaths. Their leader, Indianara, was a substitute city council woman for the martyred Marielle Franco. “Indy” gets death threats on a daily basis and was on Bolsonaro’s wall of “people who need to be killed” back when our now-president was a state representative, 10 months ago.
In other words, these are people who literally do not have a pot to piss in and who had everything to lose and plenty to gain by keeping their mouths shut. They could’ve mined the ruin for whatever was saleable and walked away with at least several thousand dollars of survival money.
Instead, they did the right thing: they called the museum authorities and lawyers, then called the police, and reported what they found. They gave testimony to the cops. Indianara went off to the precinct house with Vanessa and officers who, in other circumstances, would probably happily arrest her or worse. She spent the night there filling out forms and answering questions. Meanwhile, Casa Nem’s squatters are functioning as on-site guardians for whatever the Forgotten Tomb of Tutankamen's Cheaper Brazilian Cousin might reveal to experts.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to the people of Casa Nem on behalf of Brazil’s scientific community. Once again, the whores, fags, trannies and other “people who deserve to die” have shown themselves to be ethically heads and shoulders above the “gente du bem” who currently govern us.
But that tends to happen when you walk around in high heels.
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