Sketching from memory: 1978, a journey to Brazil. Hardly a journey to speak of: a junket, really, in the name of international cultural exchange; just took a plane at 9 p.m. (total mess at the airport: Varig overbooked the flight two to one; the result the usual railway-station panic; the staff lackadaisical and indifferent—you sense you are dealing with a state—the company is nationalized, and everyone is a state employee). The plane was crammed, babies screaming, the back of my seat would not budge; all night I stayed vertical, with sleeping pills piling up in the abdomen. Bearing in mind that I had flown in from England just forty-eight hours before. Stifling, musty, etc. On top of everything else, instead of nine hours, the flight took twelve, since we touched down first in Sao Paulo—pleading fog in Rio, but in fact half the passengers had tickets precisely for Sao Paulo.
From the airport to downtown the taxi is rushing along the right (?) bank of that famous January River, overgrown with cranes and ocean ships—freighters, tankers, etc. Here and there looms a gray bulk of the Brazilian Navy. (One morning I walk out of the hotel and see Alexander Vertinsky's couplet sailing into the harbor: "When we see the tall Brazilian cruiser, sailors'll tell us tales about a geyser.") So, on the left, there are ships and the harbor; on the right, every hundred or so meters, cocoa-shaded kids playing soccer.
Speaking of the latter, I must note that Brazil's triumphs in this particular sport are no longer surprising when you've seen the way people drive here. What is really puzzling, with this kind of dribbling traffic, is the growth of the country's population. A local driver is a cross between Pele and a kamikaze. Apart from that, the very first thing you spot is the prevalence of VW Bugs. It is virtually the only make available here. Now and then, of course, you may notice a Renault, a Peugeot, or a Ford, but they are clearly in the minority. The same goes for telephones—all of them are Siemens (and Schuckert). In a word, the Germans are in the saddle here, one way or another. (Was it Franz Beckenbauer who said, "Soccer is the most essential of all inessential things"?)
They lodge us at the Gloria Hotel, an old-fashioned, fourteen- floor affair with an extremely weird system of elevators requiring constant hopping from one to another. In the week I stayed at this place I got used to it as to some kind of womb—or the entrails of an octopus. In a certain sense, the hotel was much more absorbing than the world outside. Rio—at least the part I managed to see—is a very monotonous city, with all its riches and its poverty, both by accident
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and by design. The two- or three-kilometer strip between the ocean and the looming cliffs is entirely overgrown with utterly moronic—a la that idiot Le Corbusier—beehive "structures." As though the vista denies man imagination. Perhaps it does. The eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries are completely wiped out. Occasionally you can bump into the debris of the mercantile style of the turn of the century, with its surreal medley of arcades, balconies, winding stairs, turrets, gates, and whatnot. But this is rare, and of no relief. And equally rare and relief-free are the small three- or four-floor hotels in the back streets behind the concrete-cum-stucco giants, or in the narrow lanes climbing up the hills at a minimum seventy-five-degree angle, winding up into an evergreen forest, the real jungle. There, in these narrow streets, in little villas and cobbled-up tenements, dwells the local population, employed mainly by the tourist outfits: extremely poor, somewhat desperate, but on the whole not overly protesting. At night, at every ten meters or so, you are offered a fuck, and later the West German consul treated us to the observation that prostitutes in Rio do not take money—or at least do not expect to get any, and are surprised if a client offers to pay.
It felt as if his excellency was right. Still, no opportunity to prove this personally ever arose, since I was kept occupied, as they say, from morn till night by a leggy Nordic delegate—or was she just an observer?—whose hairdo as well as a rather humdrum style of surrender brought memories of the same latitude and of N. N., with the difference that the latter was neither rude nor vain (and that I was younger and better then, and had N. not introduced me to her breadwinner and their bilious ofl'spring, I could, who knows, have overcome this shortcoming and arrived at a less bitter end). On the third day of my stay in Rio—and the second day of the Nordic Games—we went to the beach at Copacabana, where, while I was getting sun, I was eased out offour hundred bucks as well as my favorite watch, which had been given to me by Liz Frank in Massachusetts six years before. The theft was staged splendidly, and as with everything here, nature was involved as well—this time in the guise of a light brown German shepherd loitering on the beach who, now and then, at his master's instigation, pulled at a traveler's pants. The traveler would not, of course, suspect a quadruped: a nice doggy jumping around, so what! The biped, in the meantime, voids your pockets, leaving you—very considerately—with a couple of cruzeiros for the bus trip back to the hotel. So potentially costly experiments were out of the question, whatever the German consul claimed while treating us to an impressive homebrew that glittered with all the colors of the rainbow. To be fair to him, though, he did usefully warn us against splashing in the ocean, citing both the extraordinary undertow and two members of the Hungarian mission only last week gobbled up by sharks in plain view of the city.
The beaches in Rio are indeed tremendous. When the plane starts to descend onto this continent, you have the impression that almost all the Brazilian coast is one uninterrupted beach, from the equator to Patagonia. From the top of Corcovado—the rock dominating the town and crowned with a twenty-meter-high statue of Christ (given to the city by none other than Mussolini)—one can see all three of them: Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon, and many others to the north and south of Rio, as well as the endless mountain chains at whose foothills are scattered the white concrete stalagmites of the city. On a clear day you feel that all your eye ever beheld before is but the measly, lackluster pickings ofan arrested imagination. The local vistas can teach human as well as divine fantasy a lesson or two; it's places like this that give geography its good name.
As I stayed here for a week only, what I am saying amounts, by definition, to no more than first impressions. This said, I can only add that Rio is a most abstract place. This is a city which, no matter how many years you spend there, won't generate many memories. For a native of Europe, Rio is biological neutrality incarnate. Not a single fa<;ade, not one little lane or gateway, evokes any associations. It is a city of this century: nothing colonial, or even Victorian, with the exception perhaps of the edifice hulking over the passenger pier, resembling simultaneously St. Isaac's Cathedral and Washington's Capitol. Thanks to this indistinct (octagons, cubes, boxes), impersonal character, thanks to the beaches, which in their scale and generosity almost offset the ocean itself, thanks to the intensity, density, diversity, and total unfamiliarity of the local vegetation, which neither corresponds to nor echoes any species a European is used to, Rio gives one a sense of a total flight from the known reality. Into pure geometry, or into pure elements. All that week I felt like a former Nazi or Arthur Rimbaud: everything is behind, and just a blinking green light ahead.
"It could even be," I would say to myself, "that all of European culture, with its cathedrals, its Gothic, its Baroque, its rococo, its volutes, scrolls, pilasters, acanthi, etc., is nothing but the ape's longing for its forever-lost forest." Isn't it indeed telling that culture as we know it flourished precisely around the Mediterranean, where vegetation begins to change and, as it were, stops abruptly at the sea as if poised to leap over to its true homeland? That, in other words, architecture begins precisely where nature gives up, and that this may be true of all art? That literature is a continuation of the jungle by other means?