Maria didn’t know what ‘vibes’ were; where she came from, people needed to exchange words, phrases, questions and answers whenever they met. But Maílson – the name of the interpreter-cum-security officer – assured her that in Rio de Janeiro and the rest of the world, things were different.
‘He doesn’t need to understand, just make him feel at ease. He’s a widower with no children; he owns a nightclub and is looking for Brazilian women who want to work abroad. I said you weren’t the type, but he insisted, saying that he had fallen in love with you when he saw you coming out of the water. He thought your bikini was lovely too.’
He paused.
‘But, frankly, if you want to find a boyfriend here, you’ll have to get a different bikini; no one, apart from this Swiss guy, will go for it; it’s really old-fashioned.’
Maria pretended that she hadn’t heard. Maílson went on:
‘I don’t think he’s interested in just having a bit of a fling; he reckons you’ve got what it takes to become the main attraction at his club. Of course, he hasn’t seen you sing or dance, but you could learn all that, whereas beauty is something you’re born with. These Europeans are all the same; they come over here and imagine that all Brazilian women are really sensual and know how to samba. If he’s serious, I’d advise you to get a signed contract and have the signature verified at the Swiss consulate before leaving the country. I’ll be on the beach tomorrow, opposite the hotel, if you want to talk to me about anything.’
The Swiss man, all smiles, took her arm and indicated the taxi awaiting them.
‘If he has other intentions, and you have too, then the normal price is three hundred dollars a night. Don’t accept any less.’
Before she could say anything, she was on her way to the restaurant, with the man rehearsing the words he wanted to say. The conversation was very simple:
‘Work? Dollars? Brazilian star?’
Maria, meanwhile, was still thinking about what the interpreter-cum-security officer had said: three hundred dollars a night! That was a fortune! She didn’t need to suffer for love, she could play this man along just as she had her boss at the shop, get married, have children and give her parents a comfortable life. What did she have to lose? He was old and he might die before too long, and then she would be rich – these Swiss men obviously had too much money and not enough women back home.
They said little over the meal – just the usual exchange of smiles – and Maria gradually began to understand what Maílson had meant by ‘vibes’. The man showed her an album containing writing in a language that she did not know; photos of women in bikinis (doubtless better and more daring than the one she had worn that afternoon), newspaper cuttings, garish leaflets in which the only word she recognised was ‘Brazil’, wrongly spelled (hadn’t they taught him at school that it was written with an ‘s’?). She drank a lot, afraid that the man would proposition her (after all, even though she had never done this in her life before, no one could turn their nose up at three hundred dollars, and things always seem simpler with a bit of alcohol inside you, especially if you’re among strangers). But the man behaved like a perfect gentleman, even holding her chair for her when she sat down and got up. In the end, she said that she was tired and arranged to meet him on the beach the following day (pointing to her watch, showing him the time, making the movement of the waves with her hands and saying ‘a-ma-nhà’ – ‘tomorrow’ – very slowly).
He seemed pleased and looked at his own watch (possibly Swiss), and agreed on the time.
She did not go to sleep straight away. She dreamed that it was all a dream. Then she woke up and saw that it wasn’t: there was the dress draped over the chair in her modest room, the beautiful shoes and that rendezvous on the beach.
From Maria’s diary, on the day that she met the Swiss man:
Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say ‘yes’ to life?
I made my first mistake when I was eleven years old, when that boy asked me if I could lend him a pencil; since then, I’ve realised that sometimes you get no second chance and that it’s best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course it’s risky, but is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took forty-eight hours to bring me here having an accident? If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I’ve had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion – and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough to me already) finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.
And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine; it’s best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life.
The next day, together with Maílson, the interpreter-cum-security officer and now, according to him, her agent, she said that she would accept the Swiss man’s offer, as long as she had a document provided by the Swiss consulate. The foreigner, who seemed accustomed to such demands, said that this was something he wanted too, since, if she was to work in his country, she needed a piece of paper proving that no one there could do the job she was proposing to do – and this was not particularly difficult, given that Swiss women had no particular talent for the samba. Together they went to the city centre, and the security officer-cum-interpreter-cum-agent demanded a cash advance as soon as the contract was signed, thirty per cent of the five hundred dollars she received.
‘That’s a week’s payment in advance. One week, you understand? You’ll be earning five hundred dollars a week from now on, but with no deductions, because I only get a commission on the first payment.’
Up until then, travel and the idea of going far away had just been a dream, and dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice. That way, we avoid all the risks, frustrations and difficulties, and when we are old, we can always blame other people – preferably our parents, our spouses or our children – for our failure to realise our dreams.
Suddenly, there was the opportunity she had been so eagerly awaiting, but which she had hoped would never come! How could she possibly deal with the challenges and the dangers of a life she did not know? How could she leave behind everything she was used to? Why had the Virgin decided to go this far?
Maria consoled herself with the thought that she could change her mind at any moment; it was all just a silly game, something different to tell her friends about when she went back home. After all, she lived more than a thousand kilometres from there and she now had three hundred and fifty dollars in her purse, so if, tomorrow, she decided to pack her bags and run away, there was no way they would ever be able to track her down again.
In the afternoon following their visit to the consulate, she decided to go for a walk on her own by the sea, where she looked at the children, the volleyball players, the beggars, the drunks, the sellers of traditional Brazilian artifacts (made in China), the people jogging and exercising as a way of fending off old age, the foreign tourists, the mothers with their children, and the pensioners playing cards at the far end of the promenade. She had come to Rio de Janeiro, she had been to a five-star restaurant and to a consulate, she had met a foreigner, she had an agent, she had been given a present of a dress and a pair of shoes that no one, absolutely no one, back home could ever have afforded.
And now what?
She looked out to sea: her geography lessons told her that if she set off in a straight line, she would reach Africa, with