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"Man," one friend said, "you are going to clean up. Have you seen pictures from Carnaval?" "Well," said another, "just be thankful you don't have a girlfriend." "Dude," said a third with a faraway look in his eyes. "Brazil, man. Brazil." This went on for about two weeks. I would tell people where I was going, and the reaction was always the same. Always, "Man, I can't wait to hear those stories," or "Damn, you're going to have an amazing time," or, simply, "Dude." It's understandable; Brazil occupies a peculiar place in the American imagination — a sort of sexual Eden of beaches, all-night dancing, and beautiful, hot-blooded, willing people. The fact that it's a fairly conservative, very Catholic country doesn't jibe with that image, and is therefore generally forgotten. By the time I got on the plane, all the expectations were making me very nervous. I'd like to say that I'm not susceptible to peer pressure, that I wouldn't turn a month-long, possibly revelatory backpacking trip through Brazil into a quest for foreign hook-ups. I'd like to say that I'm above treating an entire nation's women as a collection of sex objects. I'd like to say. Two weeks into my trip, I remained un-laid. Brazilian girls — especially in Rio — were very free about making out, but that was basically it. More than one frustrated foreigner told me (word-for-word, making me think that this was some kind of expat aphorism) that "kissing's like shaking hands here. But more than that — forget it."
Also guilty. Every time I found myself talking to an attractive girl, flirting in my crappy Portuguese, touching her arm or back, I was struck by the paranoid certainty that to her, I was just another gringo looking for ass. More than once, I had to fight the urge to step back, raise my hands defensively over my head, and say, "Despite the fact that I am foreign, and am somewhat interested in getting into your pants, I am not objectifying you. I respect you as a human being, who happens to be female and Brazilian." Only my limited Portuguese vocabulary, and the sneaking suspicion that this was not actually true, kept me from doing that. I passed my days in a miasma of desire and guilt. I began to despair. Then I met Ana. The first thing Ana ever said to me was, "Your glasses remind me of Sartre." It was about 12:30 a.m., New Year's Day, and we were standing knee-deep in seawater by the beach in Barra, one of Salvador's suburbs. She leaned in a little too close to say this. She was wearing a simple, white cotton dress, no bra. When she bent towards me to shout over the music, I saw her nipples, a rich coffee against the dark skin of her tiny breasts. She was staying in the same hostel I was, although we'd never talked before. She was a tiny girl, five-foot-nothing and delicate, with thin, birdlike features. She sat like a bird too, perched on the edge of her seat, her legs crossed, her arms flapping animatedly whenever she got excited. She had a very vaginal tattoo drawn in henna on the back of her hand. I pointed at it and said, "You know, that's kind of dirty." Her brown cheeks colored slightly. "That's not what it looks like." I smiled. "Neh?" She shook her head. "No. I can be a little bit pornographic, but that's not what it looks like." Maybe in Portuguese that made more sense. But, as I discovered, she liked to talk, and I could more or less follow what she said. And, if she wasn't beautiful, she was at least. . . I don't know. Brazilian. I mentally slapped myself for thinking it.
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