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‘Roberto isn’t in,’ said the man in the Yamaha t-shirt, and my face instantly crumpled into a sad frown. Roberto Jorge was my last hope. He was the man who was supposed to smilingly hand the keys of a Fazer 250 over to me. And now, he wasn’t even in his office. I asked if he would be coming in, but my Portuguese was about as good as my cheesecake – it fell flat and tasted acrid. He looked blankly at me, as a sort of ‘You’re still here?’
Obviously, I wasn’t making much of an impression. Worse still, I was running late. I was supposed to meet Per Gabell, the genial Swede who runs Volvo do Brasil in fifteen minutes (an unbreakable appointment, since he was my host in South America), and it would take me fifteen minutes to get to the hotel for that.
Shoot. This was looking very ugly indeed. Finally, in a moment of unnatural clarity, I asked the Yamaha man if I could at least shoot some pics of the Fazer while I waited for Roberto. He batted not an eyelid and wheeled a bike onto the pavement. He warned me not to put it on the road itself, since the bike had no papers. Which is one of the two reasons for the slightly repetitive pictures that accompany this article. The other is that I am a poor photographer, especially when jumpy and nervous.
As the lens zoomed into various parts of the bike, I had a moment to reflect at just how arbitrary the chain of events leading to the Fazer really was. I was returning from Volvo’s Curitiba factory the previous day, when I spotted the Harley-Davidson Curitiba outlet, not two blocks from my hotel. I walked back to it minutes later, and met Fernando Buffara, who without a moment’s hesitation put an English-speaking chap next to me, and proceeded to give me a detailed tour of the place. God bless you Fernando. Then I asked the chap (ungrateful jackass that I am, I can’t even remember his name) about any friends of his who had a Yamaha Fazer 250. ‘Oh, that’s a badass, man. My friend has one, it’s awesome. And it’s even f***in’ fuel injected, dude!’ He made two calls, calling both the mates by their (apparently) F-word laden monikers and asked about the bike. Finally, he wrote down Roberto’s contact and address and said, ‘Go at eight-thirty, he’ll have a bike for you.’ Awesome. Then he sprang the monkey on my back. ‘Be careful, four of my friends have had their faces filled with guns in that area... and pockets emptied... going to school.’ Great, thank God I’m carrying Srini’s camera and not mine...
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