Beyond the Copacabana

It was a uniquely Brazilian scene. The government minister who had resigned from his post on Friday morning was sitting on the beach in Rio do Janeiro on Saturday afternoon, while a national television network interviewed him in his swimming trunks.

The first thing you learn about Brazil is that Brazilians speak Portuguese. One of the surest ways to offend a Brazilian is to assume his native language is Spanish.

The second thing you learn about Brazil is that Brazilians love their beach. The shores of Ipanema and Leblon, sparsely populated during the week, are jammed each weekend with government workers who jet in from Brasilia--the nation's capital--to escape the boredom of a city built from scratch in the isolated interior. Four-story apartment buildings and kids playing futebol line the quiet streets of these neighborhoods although the construction of a high-rise hotel occasionally pierces the calm. These districts have their weekly fruit-and-vegetable market on a sidestreet like the famous "Copacabana." But Copacabana has been honky-tonk and out-of-style ever since Fred and Ginger flew down to Rio 50 years ago.

Summertime in the United States is wintertime in Brazil, but that doesn't stop scantilly-clad women from lying on the sands or men from exercising at one of the gyms that dot the beach. Snow is almost unknown except in the southern-most reaches of the country. In Rio the August heat and humidity can wear you out after one errand downtown.

"All the young think about here is their namorado, their boyfriend or girlfriend, and nobody does any schoolwork," a middle-aged parent lamented to me. "Sao Paulo is bad," he added, referring to the South American financial and industrial capital further to the south of the country, "but Rio is the worst place to go to school. Everybody goes to the beach after classes."

School is taught in three shifts daily, both because of the shortage of competent teachers and the needs of students. Most middle-class children go to school in the morning or in the afternoon. The children of the lower classes, who work during the day in shops or factories, go to school at night. They don't have homework, though.

Sao Paulo, the largest city on the continent, has all the attributes of a cosmopolitan, lively urban sprawl. Crowds swamp the downtown area, some of which is closed off to traffic, throughout the day, giving the city a liveliness foreign to anywhere in the United States. One of the largest communities of Japanese outside of Japan lives in Sao Paulo, as do Syrians, Lebanese and Italians. The sweet smell of alcohol-powered automobiles now chokes the air along with the exhaust fumes of more conventionally constructed vehicles. The city's "red-light district" rests, like a leech, along the side of the Hilton Hotel.

I still clearly remember standing on the porch of my hotel room five years ago, seeing colorful shanty-towns spilling over the mountainsides a few hundred yards away from the luxury apartment buildings lining the seashore. Orphans slept and begged on the undulating, black-and-white mosaic sidewalks. Since then, though, the government has erected billboards advertising soft-drinks to hide the slums and has kept the kids off the pavement.

The foreign coexists with the Brazilian. My friends had both Guarana, a Brazilian soda made from an Amazonian fruit, and Coca-Cola in their refrigerators. We would go to a club to hear a singer from the state of Bahia--the "bulge" in the northeast of the country--chant rhythmic, Brazilian music and then drive along the beach, listening to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer on the radio. But there are the adaptations. I learned that the Portuguese word for razor blade, gilete, is also slang for "bisexual" (two sides of a razor blade, get it?)