Above Copacabana Beach, in the coworking space, with its anaemic air-conditioning and the emerald Atlantic pulsing under sunlight past the window, expat bros dropped code in the heat. A dark-haired girl who spoke pinched English, and had tattoos of stick figures on her legs, sat in the corner.
Within an hour one of the guys, an American like me, made his move. “Maybe we can get caipirinhas sometime,” he said. “Are you on Instagram?”
From her phone, the girl pulled up her account and found the QR code that, at least online, doubles as a fingerprint, a miniature of one’s true self. She passed it to him and he scanned the code, mashing hard the keys on his own phone. The girl said not a word through these motions. Her shoulders stayed hunched and her eyes stayed wide, nervous to surrender even this fleeting form of connection to the man before her. The other guys in the room paid no attention.
If the itinerant tech Casanova hoped to sexualize his loneliness, I preferred to keep mine to myself. Travel for me remains a sacred act. It is impossible to share with those whom we’ll need the internet to help us remember.
*****
We’d all checked in to the Copacabana location of Selina, a kind of Marriott for the laptop-bearing traveller born since 1980. The global company urges you to “travel indefinitely,” per its official slogan and slick digital marketing. Here in Rio de Janeiro, the wifi password for the coworking space—in bro parlance, the “cowork”—was “GetShitDoneCopa.” If you wanted to get online, Selina made you type the hotel’s positivist attitude into your own devices. In this way the digital environment forced every guest to adopt its think-it-into-existence sensibility, its faddish buzzwords. The terms read like hashtags for a TED Talk by the sea.
Christmastime in a tropical place is disorienting if you’re from somewhere with a cold season. I’d come for the first two weeks of December. The Selina was my ostensible reason for coming to Brazil, and Rio in particular. I was pursuing a freelance reporting project on digital nomadism, with the hotel group as its case study.
Yet personally, and perhaps the truest reason of all, my motivations were different from the other guests. I had finalized a divorce about a year before. The intervening months might have been minutes, for all the emotional closure I had found. I craved time and space anywhere that would let me think. My hope was to arrive at some place of rest, even peace. A warm, exotic place might help me do it. I was definitely not after the sensory payoff of sex or fun or both. My sense of home, post-divorce, had ceased to exist: my wife and the spaces we shared were gone, dismantled by bitterness and lawyers. The lease on my apartment expired after twelve months of back-to-bachelorhood dinners for one. I felt daunted, if not fearful, about dating again. Seeking refuge in travel, I hit the road. I was working remotely anyway, as a communications consultant. I had nowhere else to be. Rio was a more attractive choice than many.
Outside the cowork, Rio’s residents—‘cariocas,’ to use the Brazilian term—marked the holiday against the blaze of a sub-equatorial sun. The Catholic church between Copa and its walkable sister beach, the equally famous Ipanema, had a nativity scene on the sidewalk, which beachgoers passed wearing bikinis and sarongs, or just bikinis. Men strode along in flip-flops and speedos, their cellphones stuffed into their jocks. Between the two beaches, on a postcard-perfect outcropping of chocolate rock called the Arpoador (“the harpooner”), people sunbathed, swam, and surfed the ripcurl stretching away from the point. Sweat, tattoos, and most of all, skin shone wherever you looked. Beauty was bloodsport on these beaches—really, all over Rio. Women showed off silicon breasts, silicon lips, and, behind the especially committed, the Brazilian Buttlift, pioneered right here. Besides the smell of salt, and the famous saline haze over Ipanema, the essence of sex hung everywhere. Sensuality beat down on you with every day’s five-am sunrise. In Rio, life wasn’t a beach: the beach was life itself.
Some of those willing to pay a premium for an ocean view—from the street, the apartments looked fantastic—had strung up Christmas lights from their balconies, reds and greens and whites twinkling like the light off the breakers. Brazil is a Catholic country, not counting its sixty-six million Protestant evangelicals, but you wouldn’t sense either form of piety from the looks (given, accepted) on the ground. You had to gaze up, to the horizon of brown sugarloaf peaks, from one of which the statue of Christ the Redeemer, several thousand feet above, stands in concrete and white soapstone, arms outstretched, pleading for a homecoming from all of us sinners below.
On the wall by Selina’s ten-bed dorm rooms—the budget alternative for the budget remote worker—a sign requested that guests not have sex in each other’s bunks. Other, more chaste backpackers had paid for quiet nights. All the same, Selina sold condoms in its lobby. Brand name: Prudence.
One morning early in my two-week stay, after happening by a crescendo of loud Selina sex from a (private) room on my way out, I walked to a newly discovered spot for breakfast. Drop Coffee was its real name, in the vein of not-quite-English expressions in non-English-speaking countries—like Pizza in Cone, the beachside kiosk, or Skunk, the women’s clothing store. (And that was just in Copa.) Drop Coffee sat on the corner of Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana and rua Djalma Ulrich. Like the cowork, it boasted a wide window to the carnival just beyond. I sat behind the glass with a cappuccino and a calorie bomb of a cinnamon roll. But I indulged my eyes most of all. Shoppers, surfers, homeless, hotties: the parade brought all kinds. I took notes in the green imitation-Moleskine I’d bought at home, my hand cramping from the rush to get it all on the page. This was Brazil for the first time, and Copa, too. So much of Brazilian culture, from samba and bossa nova music to the sensuality of its daily living, had drawn me here, to this country, this beach, this corner seat. If Rio was a pull, my divorce was a push: to stay active and to not bum around at home. Though exhausted, I did not want to quit living. And my reporting project on Selina was a pretext for the seeing, the smelling, the sweating through everything that Copa was and meant in the swirl of life around me. Observation was bliss.
I wanted to draw out the moment at Drop Coffee, to keep taking notes, to order another cuppa. But I had my own remote gig to attend to. It would give my writing hand a break. I wiped my mouth, paid, and made for the cowork.
*****
Saturday afternoon brought me to Copacabana Beach, where the sun battled a diffuse white-grey cloud cover. Still, people were tanning, relaxing, talking, texting, mostly with friends and sometimes by themselves, like me. I had little interest in socializing—I had friends at home, whom I loved, even if I left them all too often for trips like these. A shot of guilt ran through me when I remembered I still had to buy Christmas presents: for my brother in Maryland, for my sister out west.
I was reading George Orwell, who was describing, from his own times and for posterity, the moral differences that only sometimes separate man from beast. I’d bought a worn-out paperback edition of Animal Farm for three euros at a bric-à-bric store in Paris earlier that year. “It’s in English,” the vendor lady had warned me. I told her that’s just why I wanted it.
Hawkers and touts plied the beach, dressed in long sleeves against the sun, selling trinkets and food to cariocas and tourists. I tried to ignore one but he insisted, politely and long enough, until I realized he had some other message. He set down a little foot-high plastic table in the sand, then a bowl, then inside it a coconut, with the top chopped off and a straw sticking out of the hole.
The man pulled out an obliterated phone and tapped into a translation app: “This is from your lady friend. The one in blue. Facing you. In the big black sunglasses. A gift.” I nodded my dim understanding and the messenger disappeared.
Not wanting to seem over-eager, I took a slow pull from the straw. The water was sweet and cool, a reprieve from the white heat. I looked up and saw a woman—late twenties, brown hair, saddle hips and a blue bikini, small tattoos, small fake breasts. I made a lifting motion like a toast with my drink, palm underneath the curve of the shell. From behind black glasses she smiled a game-on smile right at me.
I walked over. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, with an accent, and a hint of a rolled r.
“Thank you for the coconut.”
Her name was Brunella. She split her time between Alicante, Spain, and Rio. Her friend, a texting, bored-looking blonde, didn’t bother with more than a hello. Brunella looked cute, a little wild, insecure. This didn’t seem like her first coconut.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“The Selina,” I said, pointing down the beach.
“I know that Selina. I’m staying on Copa, too. The other way. Not far.”
I nodded.
She asked, “Are you on Instagram?”
“No. It’s sort of… superficial.”
She nudged her friend. “He’s not on Instagram!”
I wanted to disengage. Orwell was more interesting. Safer. And the coconut was getting heavy.
“Maybe I’ll see you again?” she asked.
“I’ll be at the Selina,” I said. “Another week or so.”
I smiled as a proxy for a goodbye. “Thanks again for the coconut.”
“My pleasure,” she said.
I went back to my book, sipped my gift, and walked to my hotel. I hoped Brunella wouldn’t come around. And she didn’t.
*****
Back on Ipanema, from the rooftop bar of the Boteco Belmonte, when the December sun sets at five-something in the evening, and the “Two Brothers” mountains jut their twin cones into the horizon, the sunset is so beautiful that people actually clap at the end. These are not only the tourists: the applause is a local tradition, observed daily. I braved happy hour alone—always a recipe for loneliness, if you aren’t feeling lonely already. I shrugged off my introvert’s jitters and the curt reception from the waitstaff when I held up a pointer finger and said, “Just one.” (A single seating means small orders and low tips.) On the rooftop, revellers took photos of the view and selfies with their friends as the molten tangerine descended below the sea line. The people here—couples, families, party creatures—took in the power of the scene with gratitude. One family had brought their scrawny six-year-old, still in her ballet leotard. Between dance class and the sunset, there must have been no time to go home and change. She sipped from a straw, watching a kid’s show on a propped-up phone, ignoring the conversation between her parents about boring grown-up stuff.
Never in my life had a sunset moved me to smiles and laughter. But to these cariocas it was a cherished public secret. They gathered with the evening like it was a member of the family. When the sun had finally gone, and only a solar corona arched above the water, I settled the tab for my two caipirinhas, tipped a little extra, and walked down to dinner at another open-air restaurant, this time at ground level.
The Boa Praça, a mid-range place squeezed into a flatiron-like corner between two streets, offered Brazilian everything, including live samba music. Across the street stretched Ipanema Beach, where people strolled, swam, and socialized at all hours. Around a nearby table, four fifty-something Brazilian women were partying like college girls. My own table faced the water. The darkening strains of sunlight illuminated the face of a caramel-skinned Brazilian with hair dye the colour of claret. She sat with her friends, facing away from the large TVs blasting sports coverage. Her smile gifted the room with white shining teeth and laughter, over and over again. She looked even better than the sunset had.
I drank my beer and listened to a jangling, funk-heavy rendition of “Mas Que Nada” from the male-female duo on stage, the man’s guitar guiding their two voices. I stole joyful glances at the Brazilian redhead in the blueing light. I wouldn’t have cared if my food never came. When it did—a salty cured-meat dish called carne secha, with slaw and French fries—I promised myself I’d come back to Boa Praça.
Sometime after my second beer, I as was returning from the restroom, my waiter passed me a note scrawled on a cocktail napkin.
“Oi, você já vai? Queria te conhecer!” The note shouted. (“Hi, are you leaving? I wanted to meet you!”)
I looked around, wondering if this was Rio’s indoor version of sending a coconut. Just then one of the fifty-something party girls approached, eyes ablaze, moving in for a drunk-serious conversation.
I apologized that I spoke no Portuguese.
“Oh! OK! Hello what is your name?” she asked, before jettisoning what little other English she may have had.
I told her. Then I had to tell her twice more, slowly, above the samba and the TVs. I had to draw very close.
“Wee-lee-YAAAMM!!” she shouted in my ear, finally. She grabbed me by the forearms. Whatever she said next wouldn’t have made sense had I spoken Portuguese my entire life. She took me in a zealous, full-frontal embrace. I gave her a conciliatory peck on the cheek. Then I wriggled loose, gave a parting smile to her grinning friends, and walked out to the beach.
That was it, as far as my admirer was concerned. No extended conversation. No more juvenile note-passing. Certainly no ensuing sex. It was flattering, to a point, knowing I had been noticed, even desired, back in Boa Praça. I was eating alone, which made me approachable, in this promiscuous town. That much was on me. It didn’t matter that an encounter like that was about the last thing I was hoping to find. I would have preferred to keep listening to the samba, maybe go for one more beer. I might have tried to talk to the luminous, caramel-skinned girl I had seen earlier. Instead, one overture pre-empted another, and pushed me to end my night early. I walked back to Copacabana, alone with my minor disappointments, and the embarrassment after being hit on by a woman, if not quite old enough to be my mother, then definitely old enough to be some kind of crazy aunt. But why let it lead to shame or sadness? Some things are best left ignored, like loneliness during an unforgettable sunset.
I laughed, as I climbed the steps of the Selina, remembering the older woman and her excessive attentions. I’m still laughing about it now.
*****
One Rio afternoon, late into those two weeks, the beach and the book allured me in equal measure. Trading my usual place on Copacabana for a spell on Ipanema, I rented a beach chair and positioned it to take in the Two Brothers, the sun, and as many passersby as could fit inside my field of vision.
I pulled out my Orwell—the beat-up, Paris-bought edition of Animal Farm. It felt foolish, trying to people-watch and read at the same time, but I managed a half-dozen pages nonetheless. The book’s previous owner, clearly an English-as-a-foreign-language student, had left prodigious marginalia. The hand was in tiny, perfect, very French cursive:
“There was a need of paraffin oil, nails (clous), string (ficelle), dog biscuits… Later there would be a need for seeds (graines) and artificial manure (engrais), besides certain tools (outils)…”
Elsewhere the reader tackled full sentences:
“In January there came bitterly hard weather.” (En janvier il arriva un temps acharnement dur.)
Orwell might have lauded his or her do-it-yourself approach, which was so much like his own. Thus the spirits of three language-loving souls—Orwell’s, mine, and the mysterious Francophone’s—passed through the same, shabby text. As C.S. Lewis said: “We read to know that we are not alone.” Books had become a kind of flotation device for me, in that first, reeling year of post-divorce. And not only in Rio. I had read in Paris and at home, waiting out the dark hours of solitude in the care of imaginations better than mine. Both Orwell and Lewis had lost their first marriages prematurely: each of their wives passed away. I was fortunate, at least, that divorce is a lesser disaster than death. Divorce does not extinguish life or hope but transmutes them: to something different and probably diminished, but not final. People find new companions. People remarry. They heal. There is hope and life in that.
And I honestly didn’t feel lonely then, reading Orwell on Ipanema, the way I had felt the previous week-plus. The mountains glistened by the sea. The water’s haze shrouded the beach. The sun gloried above us—there was hardly hard weather here. Thousands of cariocas circulated. Together, we felt a common awe for the spectacle we were lucky enough to be living in.
*****
Yellow fever kept me from leaving Rio. Or at least, its vaccination did. Of this, I learned at the airport, I was supposed to have hard-copy proof for the journey home. My plan had been to see Panama City, where the Selina flagship operates. More reporting, more Latin travel. But I had not read my ticket’s very, very fine print explaining that yellow fever is a serious threat in the country. Panama is draconian toward unvaccinated travelers. The Brazilian terminal attendant spoke no English, and instead shouted in dumbed-down Spanish for gringos: “No vacuna, no Panamá!”
Wanting to avoid the hassle of a new, unfamiliar neighbourhood and hotel, I taxied back to the Selina on Copacabana. The guy at the counter, as surprised as I was at my return, made an appointment for me for a yellow fever vaccination. He told me it was free, even for tourists, as part of Rio’s public health offerings. My slot was early the following morning, a Saturday. The vaccination clinic was in a neighbourhood called Siqueira Campos. I wondered if it was safe.
Standing there while the receptionist made my new booking, a lobby television played Selina’s promotional video, a running ad for the company’s purported lifestyle. I had somehow ignored it, the two previous weeks. The marketing was hallucinatory: it looked like year-round Carnival. Young adults pranced, nymph-like, under moonlight, dreadlocks swaying in the light of a fire-juggler’s batons. People grooved, smiling, never wearing much, a sheen of sweat on their tattoos. “Travel indefinitely!” flashed the company motto. The segments filmed in the morning showed dawn yoga and açai breakfasts. The archetypal Selina guest had a free spirit and little responsibility. No one seemed to have any children. Even the fodder of addiction got a sustainable-lifestyle whitewash, like the “mindful drinking” sessions held twice a week. That was the #SelinaLife, rolling on the screens in its lobbies around the world, like one blissed-out Instagram video forever.
Yet in Copa’s lobby I had seen scores of single people sitting, scrolling through their phones, not buying condoms, completely alone. They want the road life and connections to home, at the same time. Selina’s marketing didn’t show the stressed-out digital workers, isolated with their laptops, grinding out work product late into the night. About Selina’s mindful drinking and so much else, I kept wondering: Can the hotel—any hotel—deliver all these promises? Could tech-skilled ramblers, always hanging out and moving on, develop human connections anywhere? The delay in Rio only deepened my doubts.
I rode up to my hotel room—the same one I’d had the past two weeks, still vacant in the thinning occupancy just before Christmas. Online I found a morning flight two days later and booked again. Having already taken the day off from work, and brightening to the idea of an extra weekend in Rio, I planned some holiday shopping for my family. And, later that day, a nap.
That evening, I hadn’t thought ahead about dinner, but a down-market Brazilian steakhouse near the Selina offered the quiet to suit my mood. Eating alone while travelling can be hard to avoid, and likewise the anxiety it brings. Still, I tried to normalize the evening, taking my time, chatting with the waiter. The man warned me not to leave my bag too close to the open streetside window. His squinty eyes made constant, nervous darts around the room.
Just before my dinner arrived, another waiter walked in through the front door, his arms cradling a urinal, its porcelain still wrapped in plastic, and made for the bathroom. Between the awkwardness of solo dining, and the odd, tense, gone-in-a-blink interests of the pokey restaurant, the odd moments won. Whatever frustrations travel had given me, travel had just as produced a distraction. Frustration didn’t stand a chance against the quirks of another, unexpected night in Rio.
*****
I rose at seven for my vaccination. I figured, after some light administrative responsibility—millennials call this “adulting”—that I’d use the day to see my favourite corners of the city once more. I also wanted to fight the feeling common to undesired, multi-day flight delays: the gnawing sense that you should be gone by now. I took the metro inland, away from the glamour of the beaches, to Siqueira Campos.
Under white surgical lights, I heard a series of instructions in Portuguese and English, and the sound of my own grunt when the needle sank in. I emerged from the clinic vaxxed and relieved, a printed certificate in hand. I retraced my steps to the metro station as far as a gritty café, where no-frills service delivered coffee and Brazilian chicken croquettes. I ordered one of each and sat by the window, a light rain pattering up speed outside, to enjoy time in a very precise location (this street, this view, this window seat). I would, in great likelihood, never find myself here again.
On the sidewalk passed very average cariocas. No one looked wealthy. More than a few looked poor. They bore sacks of groceries, gym bags, or nothing at all, hands open to whatever the day might bring them. In the apartment building opposite the café, a few residents, visible from their windows, prepared for the day. A young mother fried eggs for her children as they rubbed their eyes. A man in a second-story bathroom shaved his face carefully, carefully. The rain flowed hard. I drew out my breakfast, then stood, dropping a tip on the table, once the downpour lightened up.
At the metro station entrance, a man and a boy, both filthy, their heels cracked and calloused, snored on flat cardboard. A tree above seemed to have spared them a morning soak. They, too, were part of Rio, no less than the luxury dwellers on the city’s finest beaches. I wondered what these two made of the Christ statue, a mile away and a stratosphere above. I wondered when they had eaten last. Their most recent meal had almost certainly not been chicken croquettes. I hoped the city would fill their hands.
The metro dropped me off near Ipanema, for Christmas shopping in posh Leblon, the other end of the prosperity spectrum. Rio’s yuppies strolled in force, families and friends chatting under the pleasant turn in the weather. Well-bred dogs sniffed each other on Rua Visconde de Pirajà. On a corner, the Rio-Lisbon Café, with its ingenious mix of open-air dining and a takeaway bakery window, drew groups of attractive, insouciant brunch people. They did not get their shots for free at public clinics in Siqueira Campos. They belonged in Leblon—together. I felt a pang of loneliness then, the first of the day, and wished I had plans for lunch with family or a friend from home. The nearness of the holidays, and of my return, made me miss them even more.
*****
An evening sky yawned in striking clarity above us. An orange ball of sun hung in the distance, about twenty minutes from dormancy, as people gathered to sit and give it their total, worshiping attention. I had come back to the Arpoador, that butte of cocoa sediment which forms the point between Copacabana and Ipanema. Spectators gathered here every evening in every season. A block away, invisible from my seat on the concrete landing, the Catholic church marked the few remaining days till Christmas with a progressively more elaborate nativity. The sun darkened, the crowd thickened, and I felt at ease in the middle of the scene that nature, not Rio’s party-loving people, had called together. The Arpoador’s couples and groups of friends took pictures and video. Of each other, of themselves. Some of those shots would no doubt surface on Instagram, but this much—such a spectacle of beauty—wasn’t superficial at all.
Beyond Ipanema, the sun held its bottom half below the horizon. The applause began, then built. Shouts of appreciation went up: first just one, then a couple of others, then a burst of guttural applause, whistling, and shouts going off like popcorn. The sun, or the spots it left in our eyes, slipped the rest of the way below the sea line. The clapping faded slowly. People began to leave.
I had gotten a final look at Rio’s glory, which most of the world will never see. It came as my last dose of what makes the city so justifiably famous. That last night made the earlier solitude worthwhile, and then some. I walked up Copacabana, packed, and left in the morning.
On the plane, I remembered the bros in the cowork, the excesses of the digital-hippie culture at my Selina hotel. The stone Christ, with his ever-open arms, still stood above the city, still calling out to prodigals. I remembered the gift of a coconut—and the woman, a seeker like me, who had sent it over.
My time in Rio, and my loneliness, had run out. My divorce felt more distant now. Home, I decided on that rock, was something I would have to make for myself. I would build a new place, sheltering near the family and friends who had been waiting for me, and rest in it. Travel should never be indefinite.
