I had only just closed my eyes and started immediately to dream, when a banging at the door blasted me wide awake. From the ruckus in the hall I knew it was my friends, and opened the door to find Schoeller, Freddo, and Doc, who lifted me in a great bear hug. “There he is, in the cheapest goddamned room he could find,” Doc said, peeking around the room. “We are glad you came, but why are you so mean to yourself? You live once. Everything is available to you. Why not take it?”
“I flew right,” I said.
Doc had arrived in college after a stint in the Navy, where he was stationed in the Pacific doing intelligence. He had spent two years after that living with a tribe in Micronesia, until it was time for him to either take a wife or come back to the West and try to unify his experiences. After all of that he took school with a grain of salt, working hard enough to get into medical school, but not so hard that there was ever a Friday he did not skip classes to play golf. “Come on, let’s get this man to the beach,” he said to the others, after looking me over. “He needs a sun cure.”
They had been drinking since breakfast, and before I could change for the beach someone pushed a caipirinha into my hand. I went to get my swim trunks and bathing towel, and we headed down to Leblon.
It was nearly winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but still warm enough for the beaches to be packed, the tourists to be sunburned, and the homeless people to sleep out on the sidewalk. As we passed I gave a real to a mother begging with her child hitched against her hip, who was immediately harassed by the security guard from a nearby business, informing her she was begging too close to the entrance of a nearby mall. The way he spoke to her reminded me we were at the southern terminus of the old slave belt, whose northern edge was the Mason-Dixon line.
“You should let those people be,” Doc said to the guard: “Beggars are holy. They trust the universe to provide all they may need.”
“Maybe, but they’re bad for business,” Schoeller said.
The city was in the midst of a financial boom, and the air along the grand boulevard at the front of the hotel was charged with the thrill of new money vying against the anxiety of the old.
All of it melted at the shore into the democracy of the sea, along with my own worries. It was my first time in Rio, and the country felt like the New World in miniature, so much so that by noon, as we lunched at a beachfront café, I felt perfectly at ease with what to expect.
We retired for a siesta after lunch, and did not go out again until evening, when we had a lavish dinner atop Santa Teresa. After eating we piled into taxis, and Doc gave the driver an address across town. We drove out through the hills surrounding the city, past the outskirts of a ghetto, which looked like every other ghetto — kids too old for their age, premature sicknesses, somewhere to buy liquor, somewhere to play fútbol, a dancehall, no visible means of egress. I felt my earlier sense of division return, and began to watch everything from a remove, trying to decipher the society around me, until we eventually reached an industrial district, where we rolled two levels down a garage ramp, before stopping at a security gate.
Schoeller spoke into the camera at the gate, and the metal barrier receded into the ground, opening onto another ramp, which took us down a third level, where we were greeted by a doorman at a lavish, well-guarded marble entranceway, with a discreet sign above the door that said unironically, Cielo.
The manager came to the entrance to welcome us, and escorted us into a sumptuous room with a walk-in humidor and wine cellar stocked with mature wines and aged cigars. In the room next to it was a chef grilling aged Argentinean steak, and in a larger room, girls in every corner, each more beautiful than the last. The room was furnished with antiques modeled after the Topkapi Palace, with rare Persian carpets and Ottoman artifacts. Only the girls were young. Tall girls, short girls, thin girls, buxom girls. Sweet girls, ruthless girls, desperate girls, good girls who had lost all trace of innocence, cynical girls whose experience of it had ended before their childhoods. Black, white, Asian, indigenous, mestizo, octoroon, quadroon, cafuzo, castas, they only have names for in the local language, and others they just invented with the last people to get off the boat and had not named yet. Whatever you wanted, whatever your unvoiced fantasy, whatever moved through you, dancing together in groups, laughing and winking, as we toured that palace of vice.
“Bunga bunga,” Freddo said.
“Technically,” Doc corrected, “bunga bunga requires the presence of water.”
“Please,” Schoeller begged, “don’t be a fucking pedant tonight.”
“I can’t believe you are having your bachelor party here,” Freddo said. “You’re getting married.”
“And when I get married I will be married,” Schoeller answered. “I am not yet.”
“Do you mean you will give up places like this once you are married?” Doc pressed.
“No.”
“He’s not marrying for love. Should he also give up pleasure?”
“What are you marrying for then?”
“Because we share the same values, and are devoted to the same way of life.”
“That makes it okay?”
“Once I’m married, it will mean something different to come to places like this, is all I mean.” He was marked by resignation as he looked around.
“I don’t care that he’s lying to his wife,” Freddo protested. “I care that he’s flaunting it, and making all of us complicit in his lying.”
“Please shut up, Freddo.”
“I can’t be here,” Freddo protested.
“Why not?” Doc demanded. “You are not forced to do anything. What are you afraid of?”
“It is because you see bodies. I see the poor girls I grew up with. I see my sister. My mother.”
“That is just a real cry for help.”
As much as I disliked agreeing with Freddo I shared his qualms, but for different reasons. Brothels were the nexus of everything I objected to. Besides commoditization of the body, the other interests colliding there were equally nefarious: human trafficking, drugs, violence, and a global network of corruption that flowed back into the legitimate economy. It was in fact one of the points where the legitimate and illegitimate markets mingled, and otherwise upstanding citizens aided all that civil society must necessarily abhor.
I did not say anything, but took it all in as we toured the rooms, more curious than anything else. I had never been inside one before. But the girls were beautiful, in so many different ways, as though someone had assembled a working definition of female beauty until, as we rounded a corner to the penultimate room, it was impossible to know where to focus your attention. There a forty-foot-high waterfall cascaded down from the ceiling, and a group of sirens frolicked in a pool beneath it.
“There,” Schoeller said, clapping his hands toward the water, as Doc fished in the interior pockets of his jacket and started passing around pills, “is the bunga, baby.”
“What’s this?” Schoeller asked, taking one of the pills Doc had passed.
“Molly.”
“The others?”
“China. Bolivia. Adderall. Sugarcubes. Valium. Methadone. Morphine.”
I knew then it had been a bad idea to come, but simply declined everything, until Schoeller lit a long, thin-stemmed pipe and passed it my way.
“What kind of hash is this?” I asked, exhaling a beautifully exotic taste in a plume of violet smoke.
“The opium kind,” he answered.
My muscles relaxed, and soon turned liquid, as the room began to swim pleasantly around me; I found a divan to relax on, while the others fanned out through the club, each in search of his respective desire. The last I remember of any of them that night was watching Doc leave around midnight with a coven of flame-haired she-devils. To do what, I could scarcely imagine.