Chasing Bohemia Read Online Free Page B

only real exception to the crush of beach condominiums was the Copacabana Palace Hotel, a creamy pavlova of white stucco, even though its pool was now overlooked by a dirty glass high-rise.
    I always had the impression that Copacabana was an extraordinarily glamorous place sometime around the fifties. Perhaps it was all the Carmen Miranda films that my mother used to play, or the Peter Allen song, but I had an image of cool tropical mansions by the water, swaying palm trees, and decadent women with lush red lips being pursued by wealthy wayward counts. Like most of the world’s famous beaches, Copacabana was once just a stretch of sleepy seaside houses joined together by empty sandy roads. It only really became famous in 1923 when the Copacabana Palace Hotel was built, and every Hollywood starlet and her director flew down to grace her creamy terraces. Copacabana opened for business, and Brazil’s wealthiest have been crushing into the four-mile strip of land between the sea and the lake behind it ever since. Now it is said that if all the people of Copacabana came down out of their condominiums there wouldn’t be enough room for them on the streets.
    There seemed to be only one building left from the old era on Avenida Atlantica. A flag flapping in the front yard indicated that it was now the Austrian embassy. Next door was the Syndicate of Chopp, a beer house whose sign competed loudly with two evangelist churches on the second floor: the International Church of God’s Grace and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
    I crossed over the six-lane highway behind two middle-aged tourists in badly cut swimsuits, their pale, glutinous cellulite shaking at each step, and stopped to look out at the sea. Waves were crashing wildly on the shore, sending up plumes of sea spray onto rows of empty deckchairs. The sand had a dull, oily sheen, and a suspicious brown scum clung hardily to the surface of the water. There were no Amazonian queens in feathers, no muscle men on the jungle gym blowing me kisses, and certainly no Carmen Miranda. A city of tourist clichés without the actual tourist clichés was hardly going to be any fun. It was August, after all. It was the middle of winter for Rio de Janeiro. The sky was a blanked-out winter white, and the tops of the palm trees shook in the winter breeze. There was even a chill in the air.
    I watched as the pair of cellulite-ridden tourists finally reached the line of tents and candy-striped deckchairs arranged along the seashore, then went to sit down at one of the kiosks dotting the black-and-white mosaic pavement. The battered plastic chairs were chained to small hooks on the ground, and as I tried to imagine a person who would be desperate enough to steal one, the bar owner came up behind me. ‘You look your bag, lady,’ he said, and pointed in the direction of some homeless kids sleeping under a palm tree. I shrugged, ordered a Coke and, as if on cue, two of them got up and came begging for money. They were black as midnight and dressed in thin, stained shorts that hugged their wiry frames. One had matted hair and yellow eyes, and both had running noses. I bought them an oldish-looking pastry instead, and their faces registered neither disappointment nor pleasure — just sheer indifference. They disappeared, only to be replaced instantaneously by another equally miserable pair of barefoot children who scampered away when the bar owner threatened something grave. ‘Leettel fiefs!’ the bar owner said angrily to me, and for a moment, I entertained the image of them whipping the bar owner as he pulled a human plough across the dirty sand, an image that dissolved as a passing policeman launched out to belt one with his open hand.
    I paid for my Coke and continued up the avenue, passing the sleeping bodies of black homeless people, undisturbed by the roar of the morning traffic and the tap of stilettos. Those who had awoken were sitting on rough