10 December 2006

I walked all the way from Leme to Leblon and kept seeing the same people to the point of absolute disgust. Why do these people live like this? I looked at their bodies that had become little projects—like those of art or of charity or something else—to the souls that inhabited them. Just before the anticipated point of complete abandonment of any association with them, because I had not come to this place to be with slaves to vanity, I saw her. A thin woman in a white strapless dress characterized by a tightness so severe that it clinged to her body like a giant cylindrical fiber-thin albino leech and whose attachment to her body rivaled that of a single coating of paint, except with no blisters or air bubbles. Her face and chest—which was quite entirely visible to all—appeared in stark contrast to her clothed body as their respective skin regions were so loose that they seemed to have been simply traipsed across the underlying structures of bone. The coloring was that of a heterogeneous bronze painted on by Serat, tiny dots of pigment drawn out irregularly from years of over-exposure to intense Brazilian sun. She must have been beyond eighty years of age, and she reminded me that all of this self-sculpting and attempted beautification converged on a road of decay. The last thing anyone needs is to be ridiculed by the people entertained by them, so I tried to stop my internalized rampage of judgment and instead focus on the scenery, which turned out to be a ruined Portuguese fortress undergoing a literal decay of its own.

Things with Enrique aren’t going so well. Today he took me on a walk along Copacabana, full of insightful commentary and all. He told me about the cancer-like growth of favelas. Enrique remembers when it was little more than a lump acting as a slight irritation to the observer. Not only had it become malignant, metastasis had surely and evidently occurred, and it would only be a matter of time before the entire Rio proper was consumed by the tumor.