As we set sail from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires for my annual 29th birthday party, February 11th, I will forever look at this sprawling, beautiful city in my mind's eye in twilight.
We had arrived on the good ship Azamara Journey for Carnavale, the celebration before Lent that makes every show in Vegas look like Amateur Night at the Silverado Ballroom on El Cajon Boulevard. The whole city is alive with music, and the Sambadromo quakes with parades of samba dancers and singers from nine at night until dawn the next morning – for days.
On each previous visit to Brazil, I had attempted to find Paulo Mamede, a favorite foreign exchange student from the Class of '61. I had flipped through phone books from Buzios to Curitiba, Sao Paolo to Uba Tuba. With only a day left to find him before we sailed, I emailed my classmate Diane Petteys Simpson, now a well-known artist who lives between England and France. She directed me to John Fry and Jim McCorquodale. Paulo had lived with Jim during his year at Crawford.
My old friend Anna Maria Tornaghi was going full speed ahead with her annual Carnavale Ball on the 8th, which we were about to miss. As we never connected at the Sambadromo during the frenzied performances, we were determined to samba off to 'breakfast' at about 3:00pm on the 5th.
With the dawn, I took a last look at my email, and there it was -- a message from Jim, with whom I hadn't spoken since our only date (I was enthralled; he was bored rigid) in 1960. I hadn't seen him for 47 years. Live, and in glittering black-and-white, was Paulo's phone number. Naturally, I figured he, too, had just arrived home from the revelry, and thought to call him and Anna Maria before either drifted off to the Land of Nod.
"I don't know if you remember, me…"
"Marcia!" he said in his well-remembered basso voice, "Of course I remember!"
We arranged to meet in Ipanema in front of the cultural center where busses stopped to disgorge throngs of thonged bikini bodies; gaudily-dressed Carnavale revelers; beachfront salesmen with everything from cans of fizzy guarana to boxes of colorful pareos; creative pickpockets; upper class lunch dates; parents with children; tourists with cameras; culture vultures; my friend, Richard Vos, and me.
Cariocas – the residents of Rio – are notorious for tardiness. And with the blocos (huge Carnavale block parties that can close streets and businesses for the week), I was amazed to see him at all. But there, ambling towards me along the wavy sidewalk that typifies this Rio beachfront, was a good looking, 'older' man with a shock of white hair and a smile like an entire piano keyboard: Paulo.
"Are you Marcia?" he asked as if I had changed at all in the intervening years.
The afternoon was like old home week crushed into moments. As we caught up, I phoned Anna Maria who agreed to meet us all in the bar of Phillipe Starck's hotel in Ipanema. Like Richard, Paulo had become a theatrical producer: he sold his Rio theatre last year. They compared notes and found that their lives in the theatre had run parallel courses that had almost intersected throughout their artistic histories. Paulo had lived abroad, traveled widely, but had always returned to Rio where he now lives in Leblon. His sights, however, were fixed on the emptiness of the northeast coast Brazil where tourists had not yet discovered the wide space between the road to reach it and the sea.
We drank caparinas (traditional Brazilian lighter fluid with lime, etc.) and capiroskas and talked San Diego until Anna Maria arrived: it was then I realized that these two had known each other years before I had met either of them, but had not seen one another (except across the footlights of a stage) for half-a-century. Theirs, of course, is another story, to be continued.
As our sailing hour approached, we walked back to the sunlit beach where Paulo's car was parked, and made plans to meet again -- someday, somewhere. Maybe in my little Manhattan garden. Perhaps on Brazil's secret, untouched northeast coast. We said our 'goodbyes' as if the three-o'clock bell had rung for the last time.
"You know, Anna Maria, I remember Paulo as the most beautiful boy…"
"He still is!" she retorted, before I could add "… and a more beautiful man."
Once again, I was reminded that each moment is a jewel more precious than anything you can buy. And that timing is Everything.