BackOur man in Ipanema
A storm followed by bright sunshine refreshes the city's icons: a beach, a statue, a classic song
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The rain that lashed Rio de Janeiro that evening was spectacular. The wind along the Copacabana beach was so strong that it pushed me along the road, scurrying me onward towards my hotel. Across the road hats flew off men’s heads and whizzed past at great speed through the air, stopping only when they hit cars or trees.
Women returning from the beach had given up on keeping themselves covered in their flimsy, diaphanous sarong-like pieces of cloth. The cloth kept trying to pull itself free, struggling against the tight knot that fought to hold it together. The wind frequently swept these sarongs above the women’s heads and over their faces, and exposed their bronzed bodies which they had no hesitation revealing only moments ago when they were on the beach, but which suddenly made them scramble for cover in their self-consciousness now that they were on the streets.
But this was Rio, and nobody was going to bother them. Dogs howled, birds disappeared, and lightning struck with a brightness that for a moment made it look like it was still afternoon. About 10 seconds later the cloudburst followed, explosive, unceasing, and unrelenting.
The next morning I found that the previous night’s tandava nritya of the elements had also struck Christ the Redeemer, the gigantic statue that stands atop a hill overlooking the breathtaking bay of Rio. With his arms spread sideways, Jesus at once looks as if he is blessing the city, or as if he is a master conductor asking his orchestra to change its tempo, or an umpire signalling a wide ball. The lightning had found its mark; it had made off with a part of Christ’s finger. The statue looked helpless, and the town’s mayor promised that the finger would be repaired.
I went to Sugarloaf mountain instead—pau de azucar, as they refer to it here—the peak across the valley from Christ, from where I was told I’d be able to see not only the city, but also Christ himself. We made our way to the top in a cable car, with a rest stop in between that was designed for the convenience of the engineers who built the cable car, but now is accessible to everyone. Beyond, we continued upwards, to the top. The temperature was 40 degrees Celsius. The sun was bright, the light harsh.
I ate some cashew nuts as I walked to a quiet part of the peak. Below, I saw hundreds of sailing boats shaking gently in the breeze. The bay shone like a sheet of shimmering gold, as sunlight rested on the water. To my right I saw the most wonderful cloud formation—like a still frame of a cyclone—moving slowly towards Christ. The cloud looked as if someone had moulded it, and it seemed to expand gradually. White at the edges, it had a greyish body, and it looked menacing—not the harbinger of rain, but of an end.
The cloud’s movement was determined; it began to devour the outer fringes of the sun’s piercing rays. The sun with its rays pouring outwards looked like an exploded egg. The sky was ablaze. The cloud, like an overworked fire fighter, tried to smother the sunlight. The silhouette of Christ stood stark and alone in the distance across the horizon. The sky was now a magnificent mess of yellow, amber and white streaks with the occasional red, even as that large cloud settled above Christ smugly.
The next day I went to meet my friend Simone at Ipanema beach. From my hotel in Copacabana it was a long walk, with the sun blinding and the sea roaring, its waves turning into foam and looking pristine white at the crest. I reached the restaurant where we were to meet, and she recommended moqueca, a stew made of seafood with tomatoes, onions, pepper, and garlic.
The waiter, a young man from Argentina, told me I should be careful, since it was spicy.
“He is an Indian, he can take spices, so don’t worry," Simone told him.
“Ah, then let me bring you some malagueta pepper," referring to the diabolic little red chilli pepper which I had tried a couple days earlier—back then, the intensity of its aftermath was akin to a religious experience.
As the sun descended, that old tune that sent so many hearts aflutter half a century ago played in my mind—The Girl from Ipanema. Helô Pinheiro was a teenager in 1962, and she would walk by the bar Veloso, sometimes dropping in to buy cigarettes for her mother, and Vinicius de Moraes and Antônio Carlos Jobim penned the bossa nova song. Moraes described her once as “a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone—it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow".
I stared at the sea; I saw dozens of young people frolicking in the sun, waiting for it to set, when they would applaud another ebb and flow of time. And at that moment, regardless of age, every woman out there became the girl from Ipanema.
Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.
Also Read | Salil’s previous Lounge columns
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