Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

When I went to meet the mayor in the baroque city hall, half the people there wore flip-flops. Rio is a casual place. But casual is not frumpy. While most cultures have created fashion and then found models to show it off, Brazil produced models and then started making fashion to clothe them in. “Our models come out of the favelas with this amazing natural elegance,” said Sergio Mattos, who owns one of Rio’s biggest modeling agencies. “They need to look good with their clothes on. But for Rio’s beach culture, they have to look good with their clothes off. We have the world’s only fashion industry without eating disorders.” Brazilians have a keen sense of beautiful bodies, and almost no sense of unbeautiful bodies. The great-looking people wear skimpy swimsuits (including some called fio dental: dental floss), but people who are old and fat wear equally tiny suits without self-consciousness. Brazil is singularly devoted to the aesthetics of sensuality. One young woman I met in a favela confided that she spent a third of her income on hair-care products. “My hair is the only beautiful thing I own,” she said, “and I am going to parlay it into the rest of my life.”

Italo Moriconi said that when he was growing up in Rio, every intellectual’s identity was as a Brazilian, but that increasingly people hold an international identity and a strong local identity, founded in pride about Rio de Janeiro and its transformation. The city’s street life has been reborn now that the streets are relatively safe, and whole neighborhoods are given over to the fun between dusk and dawn. The center of nightlife is the glamorously seedy downtown historic district of Lapa. As at the beach, the streets teem with rich and poor alike, though some of the nightclubs are expensive. In the small hours, music pours out of every other door; the caliber of decor and the quality of musicianship are unrelated, so you have to pause and listen before choosing where to go. Many of the venues seem both historical and transient, as though they were built to be temporary but survived into permanence. I decided one night to check out what appeared to be a tiny chapel, its walls crowded with devotional images, only to find that it was a bar, presided over by a middle-aged transgender woman who had moved to Rio from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais. She offered us a liqueur from her home state, redolent of cinnamon, and told us howlingly funny tales about figuring out her gender identity on a farm in the jungle. It’s not only the sun that’s warm at this latitude; friendship happens fast in Rio, and you continually find yourself in intimate conversation with people you’ve just met. They, in turn, eagerly introduce you to their friends—some of whom they’ve just met themselves—and after a few nights, you are juggling invitations to parties, dinners, rainforests.

One such new friend invited us to an early-evening samba party. People often gather to play music informally; anyone can bring an instrument and join in. Ours was in a downtown area where it attracted both businessmen on their way home from the office and favela residents on their way to clean those offices. Musically and socially, improvisation was the style. The musicians stopped only once, to announce that the smell of marijuana might bring in the police. Two ample women from Bahia were frying acarajé, delicious fritters of seafood and black-eyed peas, and the local bar was serving caipirinhas in plastic cups. Rio is not Rio without a sound track; music salts all the other senses.

Vik Muniz has made a career out of examining these ironies. The film Waste Land shows how he befriended garbage-pickers who lived on what they could find in a vast dump outside Rio, and eventually made them partners in his art. “You meet somebody in New York, and they say, ‘What’s your name?’ ” he said. “And the second question is ‘What do you do?’ In Rio, you get, ‘What’s your name? What do you like to do?’ ” Several people I met quoted Antônio Carlos (Tom) Jobim, the musician who wrote “The Girl from Ipanema,” who once explained, “Living in New York is great, but it’s shit; living in Rio is shit, but it’s great.”