I’ve always thought of Rio as a city in the sun: tropical beaches, a samba beat, excess. When I was last here, in 1971, I was with several other guys (including Nelson Schreter) on holiday to Buenos Aires and then back here for Carnival. We rented an apartment in Copacabana over a grocery store and arrived after dark on a Saturday night. The city was bright with neon possibilities. The other guys elected me to climb the stairs to the apartment and get the key. The landlady met me at the door but since she couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak Portuguese, we had to communicate in pigeon French, filling in the blanks with wild, near hysterical gesticulations. It was a funny introduction to a frantic, fun-filled week, complete with lazy days on Copacabana beach, cocktails on the Avenue Atlantica and nights dancing in the many bars we ultimately found. In one of them, I met Ernesto, a soccer star who took me to a Samba Ball, where we danced until two or three o’clock in the morning when the city turned off the water so Cariocas, hot from dancing, wouldn’t open the fire hydrants and drain the water supply. The planning for this had occurred the previous winter and so it wasn’t practical – or even possible – for me to bring along my new lover, David, whom I had met that summer on holiday in Provincetown. He languished alone (or so I thought) in Baltimore. When I returned home, he told me he didn’t want to be with me any longer and I helped him to find an apartment in the brownstone that is now a part of the Baltimore School for the Arts. I gave him some of my furniture and traded him my 1965 Chevrolet convertible for his record collection. The split was as they say, “...just one of those things…” and we quickly went our separate ways. In retrospect, I think he may have wanted to escape his old relationship in Boston as much as he had wanted to establish a new one with me. He had several more before he was one of the first to die of AIDS, in the early 1980’s. David de l’Etoile. David, “from the stars.” How sad. As you can see the rain today – soft but steady – is making me nostalgic.
I enjoyed my reunion with the Rio of my youth yesterday: Corcovado, Copacabana, Sugar Loaf. They all reminded me, happily, of that frantic time so many years ago and satisfied my poignant longing for nostalgia and my quest for the perfect photograph. I’m finished now with Rio and will only go ashore today if the rain stops before my tour is scheduled to depart. I have a good book and will find a solitary corner and read away.
I learned this morning that the woman who was airlifted off the ship two days ago was the tiny and aging sprite who at 84, kept her hair in pigtails interwoven with brightly colored ribbons. She had surgery here and is in critical but stable condition.
After being sick for most of the cruise, Donna is up and bright this morning. Perhaps it’s the prospect of going home that has cured her lethargy. I took her a book at breakfast and she’s decided, now that she’s leaving, that she likes me, saying I was bright, and sweet. The words she chose for her endorsement suit my melancholy mood.
Today I’m seeing the ship in a new mode: guests are leaving and new ones are arriving. The halls are filled with huge wheeled baskets of used laundry going out of the suites and moving tables filled with great plastic cartons of fruit and flowers going in. Lorraine is busy in her office dreaming up new entertainments for the next leg of the cruise and the dancers and singers are leaving us here, after being urged to clean up their cabins and their costume bins for the next entertainment group coming in. Ellie has booked a new cruise for 2010 even though the single supplement went from 10% to 40% (“I complained, but booked it anyway”). Fernando and Naraya have gone back to their dance studio on Rio but Sasha and Olena are staying on, to teach us, in their more studied Russian regimented style, new steps in slow waltz or swing. One guest is busy in the library working on her Christmas cards, envelopes on tables and chairs strewn all around her. Elsa is at the gangway, smiling her broad but practiced Barbie-doll smile and saying goodbye to guests not going on to accumulate more nights for that titanium nirvana in the sky. All seems right with the world. Stay tuned.
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