The Kindness of Women (29 page)

The carousel disappeared into the din and haze, instantly forgotten. Apart from Dick and the families of beggars, no one had paid any attention to the floats. Everything in Rio was dominated by the beach. This was no strip of basking sand on the Mediterranean model but a linear, open-air city in its own right, filled with thousands of sunbathers, kite and watch salesmen, ice-cream vendors and marauding beggar troupes, and a complete league of football teams playing on almost full-sized sand pitches. No one swam. The morose Atlantic breakers hurled themselves against the Richard Strauss crescendos, wave for wave, daring the film executives and festival organisers to match their epic reach.

As Dick and I had noticed soon after flying in from London, Rio happily embraced the film festival and at the same time completely ignored it. Everywhere the crowds jammed the movie theatres, and the hotel terraces were packed with television crews, starlets, and producers. Fleets of limousines and buses ferried the delegates from one lavish embassy party to another, while gangs of prostitutes and their pimps so packed the streets of Copacabana that they squeezed out any hope of finding a customer.

But the city absorbed all this, as if the illusory visions of the festival scarcely matched the vastly greater illusion of Rio itself, a city that reminded me of prewar Shanghai in so many ways, but a Shanghai of tiled sidewalks ruled by the most confident and beautiful women in the world. Watching the bored policemen whitewashing the windscreens of illegally parked cars, I could almost believe that they were protecting the drivers from a blinding glimpse of this extraordinary sex.

And above all this were the people of the favelas, the shanty towns crowding the dozens of large hills that rose from the streets of Rio. Where the poor and destitute of most cities occupied its nether regions, in Rio they lived up in the sky, coming down from the clouds to exhibit their undernourished and crippled children and pluck at the tourist sleeve. Had these impoverished people found the door to heaven open one morning, taken possession of its misty peaks, and discovered too late that they had been tricked by those with their feet on the firmer ground far below? “On you it looks great,” I heard a film executive remark to a beggar woman, carrying a bony child asleep on her dry breast, who dared to raise her withered arm to him outside the Copacabana Palace.

However, it was easy for Dick and me to buy off our consciences with a few conference cruzeiros, and perhaps equally naïve. The gangs of confident pickpockets and the cripples viciously defending their pitches against any rivals reminded me again of Shanghai, with its rich beggars protected by their bodyguards. Shanghai, too, had been a media city, perhaps the first of all, purpose-built by the West as a test-metropolis of the future. London in the 1960s had been the second, with the same confusions of image and reality, the same overheating.

In Rio fiction and reality still played their games. At a party given by the American Embassy we found ourselves in a reception line shaking hands with the crew of the Starship
Enterprise,
a group of grey-haired actors like venerable morticians. Famous faces surrounded us, older and unsuccessful impersonations of themselves. Struggling to make small talk to a producer's wife, I felt that I, too, was an impostor, masquerading as myself in an unconvincing way. I was grateful for the light-show and the amplified music that raised all conversation to an unintelligible shout.

Rescuing me, Dick pushed through the throng and seized my arm. “Jim—come and meet Fritz Lang…”

He plunged into the press of dinner jackets towards a group of some twenty guests gazing down at what seemed to be the scene of a small accident. An elderly man in an oversize tuxedo sat on a straight-backed chair turned sideways to the wall. He slumped in the chair like an abandoned ventriloquist's dummy, buffeted by the noise and music, the light-show dappling his grey hair a vivid blue and green. He looked infinitely weary, and I thought that he might have died among these garish film people. When I shook his hand and briefly told him how much I admired his films, there was a flicker of response. An ironic gleam flitted through one eye, as if the director of
Metropolis
had realised that the dystopia he had visualised had come true in a way he had least expected.

*   *   *

Lang's resigned humour came to mind as we finished our rum collins at the Copacabana Palace and set off for the congress hall where the festival of scientific and documentary films was being held, an adjunct to the main festival, which the organisers had decided to sponsor as a tribute to Kubrick's science-fiction epic. A crowd of film fans pressed around us when we climbed into a taxi, and Dick momentarily brightened until we realised that almost all of them were pickpockets, brothel touts, and voodoo pitchmen.

“Hey, mister, you want voodoo? Real good voodoo?”

“Mister, you want to watch a guy fuck a chicken?”

“Only ten years old, mister. Real clean girls.”

We shut the windows on a forest of arms. “Well, Dick,” I asked, “do you? It's not exactly your everyday BBC wildlife film.”

“Wait and see—you may be surprised, Jim. Even you.”

Offering Dick my moral support, I sat in on his lecture and the panel discussions which he chaired, fascinated as ever by the sight of him working his audience like a seasoned music-hall trouper. Yet his performance seemed oddly subdued, as if he were trying to shrug off the repertory of television mannerisms he had cultivated so carefully since the Cambridge days. Now and then, as he acknowledged the audience's laughter, he glanced at them in the same weary way that Fritz Lang had accepted my handshake. Rio was filled with old actor-managers trapped within their images of themselves.

Dick's laboratory at the Institute of Psychology was now little more than a public-relations bureau, and Cleo told me that he had secretly borrowed bench space in a colleague's lab so that he could return to original research. Sometimes he would sit there for an hour, in this shrine to his younger self, unable as yet to come up with an original project. Then he would return to his own laboratory and become the reluctant fugleman of popular psychology, feeding news of the latest breakthroughs to his coterie of TV producers. I admired Dick and regretted that I had always encouraged him to think of the media world as his true laboratory. Sometimes, when I asked him about his own research, he became almost testy.

Later, wandering around the wide corridors where the out-of-competition films were screened, I was surprised by the variety of documentary films being produced, only a fraction of which would ever reach the general public. Zoos, schools of dentistry, agricultural research stations, international hotel chains, hairdressing colleges, and a consortium of undertakers and embalmers all had active film units.

In the glowing half-light the shirt-sleeved delegates stood by the lines of monitor screens, watching studies of the nose-wheel housing of the Boeing 707, the stress fractures of ice-hockey players, the life cycle of the cane toad, the architecture of brothels. As I turned from a close-up of an exposed nasal septum to another about the curing of sable skins the two seemed to merge in my mind. Were all these films moving in their reductive way towards the same undifferentiated end? Drained of emotion and value judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.

The medical and psychological films showed the process most clearly at work. In the competition section of the festival I watched Dick introduce the afternoon's programme on the theme: “Aversion therapy—desensitisation in the perception of sexual imagery.” The three films described work in Sweden, Japan, and the United States with habitual sex offenders, in which these doomed and gloomy men were exposed to endless images of their notional victims—small children, vulnerable women, racial targets, and fellow sex offenders. Doses of emetic drugs, surges of electric current, noise, and other aversive conditioning supposedly turned the subjects against the objects of their desire.

As the succession of harrowing images passed by, I looked away from the cinema screen to the members of the audience. For the most part documentary filmmakers and professional psychologists, they gazed at the screen with the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of the men in the Soho porn theatres or the fans of certain kinds of apocalyptic science fiction. Whenever the criminal subjects winced with pain or vomited into their sick basins, ripples of appreciation would move across the audience at some particularly striking camera angle or expository close-up, as the Soho patrons might have applauded a telling crotch shot or elegant anal penetration.

Later, when we returned to our hotel on Copacabana Beach and our first frozen daiquiri of the evening, I said to Dick: “I need this. We should have gone to the voodoo. That was quite an afternoon.”

“Gruelling stuff?”

“I was watching the audience. The future may be like a film festival, but which one? Yours or the one at this end of the beach? They had the eyes of tourists at a death camp, the kind of tourists who keep going back.”

“We've shocked you, Jim—that was worth coming to Rio for.” Delighted to catch me out, Dick glanced at me slyly over his glass. The rivalry between us, which for reasons of his own he had always encouraged, had become more open in Rio. “It's interesting that scientific films unsettle you more than hard-core porn.”

“But pornography is really very chaste—it's the body's unerotic dream of itself. Your films come straight from the psychopathic ward. Imagine how you'd react if you found them in the film library of a sex criminal.”

“So…? Take a set of surgical instruments—innocent in an operating theatre, but in Myra Hindley's handbag? You're seeing them out of context.”

“Nothing is seen in context anymore. Switch on your TV set, Dick, and you find a murdered prime minister, a child eating a candy bar, Marilyn lifting her skirt—what sort of scenario is the mind quietly stitching together?”

“It might be interesting to know. Tell me.”

“One of Cleo's fashion magazines showed some models prancing about in front of a blowup from the Zapruder film—the Kennedy assassination as a fashion accessory?”

“Of course. In the future everyone will need to be a film critic to make sense of anything.”

“Not a psychologist?” His remark surprised me. “Surely, you…?”

“No, I think the psychologist has had his day…”

Dick stared coolly across the crowded terrace of the Luxor, at the relaxing delegates and the photographers waiting by the lobby in hope of a passing celebrity. Despite his success that afternoon he seemed dissatisfied, as if he accepted that the epoch of popular television, in whose secure playground he had thrived, would soon be replaced by a harsher and more open world, an ever-changing media landscape in which fame was as transitory as a mayfly. Like an astronaut unable to tether himself to the moon's surface, he longed for a stronger gravity. The need for attention had sent him bounding ever higher through the airless dust of celebrity, and there was nothing now to pull him down. He often asked me about the children's school results, glad to hear of their success and clearly envying me my family ties. He had never married, and his women friends moved through his life like game-show panellists, cheerful, optimistic, and unremembered. Even their fascination with Dick was never enough.

*   *   *

“Dr. Sutherland—we saw your interview. Without doubt, the most handsome psychologist in Rio…”

An avuncular voice hailed Dick across the terrace. Señor Marcial Pereira, a leading film critic on a Rio newspaper, approached our table, accompanied by two of Copacabana's ambling beauties. He recognised Dick from the interview he had given the previous evening on a local TV station. He joined us at our table with his companions, who surveyed us with the eyes of empresses. Like all the women in Rio, they were filled with such character, elegance, and hot beauty that only some inexplicable oversight had prevented them from achieving Hollywood careers.

“We have a party tonight, in my apartment at Ipanema,” Pereira told us. “A festival car will collect you at ten. Each day we must relax a little more. I leave you with my actress friends—Carmen and Fortunata. They are most anxious to meet visiting Englishmen.”

When he had gone the women settled themselves at our table, eyes conferring as they swiftly surveyed the crowded terrace. Both wore the same loose silk frocks that revealed their thighs and shoulders. They were scarcely older than my daughters, with an equal command of the space around them. Carmen's dark hair sprang from a sharply sloping profile that was part Portuguese and part Indian. Her forehead was perpetually creased, as if she were fretting over some misplaced clue to the world. Her friend, Fortunata, a passive, heavy-breasted blonde, was waiting for the signal to leave, but Dick, excited by the heady body scent of the two women, was already ordering drinks and practising his pidgin English.

“You live in Rio? Here?”

“On the beach? No.” Carmen was ticking off Dick's television smile, his gold medallion and credit cards. “São Paulo. We come for the festival.”

“Like us. We come from London—in England.”

“London, oh … Carmen and I go to London.” Fortunata stared down some Carnaby Street vista inside her head, at the end of which stood the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She spoke wistfully, as if unsure whether Carmen would agree.

“Rio is much better,” Dick assured her. “Many beautiful women. Like you two.”

“Yes … many women in Rio.” Carmen sounded like a commodities dealer in a slow market. “You prefer beautiful women?”

“Of course. Especially in Rio.”

“You're an actress?” I asked. “Have you made any films?”

“Yes. I act in films. With Fortunata.”

She spoke matter-of-factly. I assumed that we were with two São Paulo prostitutes visiting Rio on a speculative trawl. I waited for Dick to realise that there was only one way to impress them. Carmen was strumming at the tabletop with one hand, while the other flicked at her shoulder strap. She was exposing her breast to me, at the same time letting the hem of her silk dress ride up her thigh.