Читать книгу The Ambassador to Brazil - Peter Hornbostel - Страница 4

CHAPTER 1

It’s the rains of March

ending the summer;

It’s the promise of life

in your heart.

—Vinicius de Moraes & Antonio Carlos Jobim,

“Aguas de Março”

Anthony Theodore Carter, ambassador of the United States of America to the Federative Republic of Brazil, nude but for the towel around his waist, stood at the window watching the rain which had been falling on Rio de Janeiro for six days, so hard now that he could barely see the buildings across Siqueira Campos Street through the rain. Three stories down, the rain had turned the street into a brown torrent, which raced down, across Rua Barata Ribeiro and Avenida Copacabana, over Avenida Atlantica, and then across the beach to the sea, itself turned brown by the rain.

Rio in the rain is not so marvelous, he thought to himself. “Cidade Maravilhosa.” The Marvelous City. That was the name it was given by the Mangueira Samba School in the Carnaval parade a few years ago. It is marvelous, he thought, but not in the rain.

The first time he had seen Rio had been twenty years ago. It was summer, no rain, and Rio was full of light and life, and heat, and sex, and smells, not separately, but all mixed together under a blue tropical sky. His prop-driven Pan Am plane had emerged from the clouds, and he could see the green of the mountains, then the blue-gray of Guanabara Bay embracing the city. As the plane dropped lower, he could also see the slums—the shacks perched on poles above the sewage-dirty water along the edges of the bay. Ahead stood the peak of Corcovado with the famous statue of Christ, and the escarpment plunging down from the statue into the south zone of Rio where the elite lived, out of sight of the shanties along the bay. But all of it, even the shantytowns, looked colorful, even picturesque from the sky, although he knew they weren’t.

The plane landed and rolled over to the terminal, a large white building with a balcony one floor up that was full of people. A large sign announced the airport as Galeão. Two brawny airport employees, their sweaty black bodies gleaming in the sun, rolled a mobile staircase over to the door of the plane. He was first in the line to disembark, and when the doors opened and Rio de Janeiro hit him square in the face, his eyes squinted almost shut against the glare of the concrete apron and the white of the terminal. On the balcony of the terminal, a five-person family was shouting a samba, somewhat off-key, while the littlest boy banged out the rhythm on a makeshift tin drum. His two older brothers were holding a welcome home sign reading Bem vinda Mariazinha!, Welcome home little Maria. Dozens of other families crowded the balcony, craning their necks and shouting to the passengers streaming by them below, laden with shopping bags and boxes, on their way to customs.

But what he remembered most clearly was the air that swept into the plane, displacing the stale air of the fourteen-hour journey from Washington. It seemed to be at least 90 degrees and humid as a steam bath. And it smelled—well, it smelled like Rio de Janeiro. He had tried again and again to sort out the ingredients of that smell: Clearly it included jet fuel, human sweat, and jasmine, plus another flower he did not know. And there was the water of the bay at the end of the runway, a cool fresh breeze with a whiff of sewage, but only now and then. Coffee definitely. And bananas. And oranges, or was it pineapple? Cigarette smoke. They all blended together, like the colors of a rainbow.

He walked under the balcony into a terminal which looked like a movie set. The ceiling of the main hall, three stories high, was held up by a number of huge columns some four feet in diameter. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if Alec Guinness, dressed in a white suit, had popped out from behind one of them. People everywhere—their skins every shade of white, brown and black. And, of course, the hum of Portuguese, and radios, and taxis along the side of the terminal that was wide open to the street.

Although he was only a Class 3 Foreign Service officer back then, the embassy had sent a car and a secretary to meet him. The moment he got into the air-conditioned car, which seemed to be hermetically sealed against the world outside, the smells of Rio vanished, to be replaced by the acrid-sweet smell of American disinfectant. The young Foreign Service officer sent to meet him had remained in the cool of the car.

“Sorry about not getting out,” he said. “Too damn hot out there … and smelly. Did you have a good trip, sir?”

“Just fine,” he replied.

“You’ve been to Rio before?”

He was not interested in diplomat chitchat. “I think I’ll rest a bit,” he said. He leaned back and closed his eyes down to narrow slits; he hoped his escort could not see that they were still slightly open. “Wake me up when we get there,” he said.

The car drove through what looked like a light industrial zone, which also contained a surprising number of motels with names like Love Nest, King and Queen, Pussy Cat, and one called Aspen, with a large billboard showing a bundled up person heading downhill on what the artist must have thought skis looked like. Why so many motels, he mused, and why out here?

After half an hour, the factories, warehouses, and motels gave way to apartment houses and small shops, until the road emerged onto the shore of Guanabara Bay. Now they were speeding along a road skirting the bay, in front of the old elegant apartment houses that looked out onto it. In the background towered Sugarloaf, the huge gray-brown rock formation with a red cable car running up it, which appeared in every picture book he had ever seen about Brazil.

The car ducked through a pair of short tunnels and then out onto Avenida Atlantica and the beach. The beach was wide—perhaps fifty meters of white sand between the Avenue and the blue of the sea. Closer to the ocean, he could see the sun worshippers, some sitting under umbrellas, others stretched out on the sand, still others standing around and talking or playing volleyball. They stopped for a traffic light. In front of the car, dozens of beautiful tanned bodies—mostly young girls in their teens—walked across the avenue on their way to or from the beach. One, a lovely brown-skinned girl in a scanty bikini, looked into the car and smiled.

Carter’s escort officer nudged him. “We’re at your hotel,” he said. The hotel was a large white structure, dripping with Victorian ornamentation, facing the sea. A bronze plaque by the side of the front door read “Hotel Copacabana Palace 1886.” A dark-skinned liveried doorman opened the door to the car. “Welcome to Rio, sir.” he said with a perfect English accent. “Did you have a good flight … ?”

From the sidewalk behind the car, a beggar with no legs, on a plywood platform with rollers, scooted over to the car. The doorman shooed him away.

That was twenty years ago. In the meantime, he had been posted to Cairo, Portugal, Kenya, Ecuador, and one tour in Washington on the Brazil Desk. The “Desk” was not just a desk, but about twenty of them crowded into two large offices on the third floor at State, manned by thirty or more young Foreign Service officers who thought they were making the foreign policy of the United States. They reported to the head of the Brazil Desk, who reported to the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, who reported to the secretary of state, who reported to the president of the United States. Carter had become an expert at shuffling incoming cables to the right officer within the State Department, and correcting the spelling and syntax of outgoing cables before they were sent. After two years of bureaucratic labor at the Desk, the department had finally rewarded him with the title of United States ambassador to Brazil. Priscilla and he had celebrated with dinner at Rive Gauche. It was the best restaurant in Georgetown. Priscilla was ecstatic. “Oh Tony,” she said, “it’s going to be such fun!”

It had not been such fun for her, Carter mused. It wasn’t really fair. It was all so different now.

Behind him, from the dark of the apartment, he heard the sheets of the bed rustling.

“You’re up,” Marina said.

He nodded.

“Is it still raining?”

“Sure,” he said, “it’s going to rain forever.”

“Well, then, come back to bed.”

“I can’t. I have to go to the embassy. It’s my job to be there. There’s going to be a coup—a revolution—and it’s going to happen soon. I have to go.”

She got up from the bed and walked over to where he stood by the window. She was tall, slim, with soft light brown Brazilian skin, full, perfectly shaped breasts with dark brown nipples, long straight black hair, and incredible gray-green eyes. She brought her nude body up against his and with one hand fiddled with the towel around his waist.

“Whose revolution is it?” she asked. “Is it your revolution?”

“No,” he said.

“Well then, there’s no hurry about going, is there?” she said. She fiddled a little more and the towel slid to the floor. She looked down at him approvingly. “Oh come on,” she said.

It was hopeless to argue.

Outside, in the rain, a black 1949 Plymouth sedan was slowly weaving its way down the brown torrent that used to be Siqueira Campos street, around the empty banana boxes, destroyed furniture, old tires, and other detritus washed down from the slum on the hill by the rain. The car slowed, then stopped in front of the building. The driver, a swarthy bald Brazilian with a brownish-gray complexion, opened his window, pulled out a pair of binoculars, and scanned the face of the building. There was a window open on the third floor, but no one was there. The driver cursed softly. Then he took out a camera with a long lens and, although the American ambassador was not to be seen, he snapped a photo of the open window and drove on, disappearing into the rain. The ambassador was out of sight in the back of the room, otherwise engaged.