financial necessity, could it?’
‘As in your case, you mean?’ Tobias Pope sipped his J&B thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I do see your point. It must be torment trying to struggle by on fifty-five thousand pounds
sterling per annum plus expenses. No wonder you’re a whore.’
She thought about asking the stewardess for some earplugs on the pretence of trying to sleep.
‘Yes, a remarkable country, Brazil. A country of paradoxes. The people are a unique racial inter-marriage of African, Indian and European, but the stratification of their society is still
savage. Which is as it should be. Dark-skinned on the coastal north of Rio, light-skinned to the south.’
‘South Africa-on-Sea,’ she muttered.
‘Speak up, young woman, don’t mumble. Yes, in the seventy years up to 1950 Brazil took in four and a half million Europeans, and something like fifty thousand a year since
then.’ His upper lip winced in mild distaste. ‘The Japs have moved in recently, unfortunately. There’s a fair number of them in coffee. Some mornings in the business quarter you
feel like an extra in
Bridge Over The River Kwai.
’
She had to smile. Just like Joe Blow in the street, Tobias Pope had a deep and violent dislike of the Japanese. She had asked him why at the airport that evening, as he stared with disapproval
at the camera-clacking hordes of Japanese tourists taking a photographs of the planes, the people, even litter bins. ‘Because the women are ugly and the men are clever. That’s not how
the yellow races should be. Or any race but the Americans, come to that.’
‘Brazil, as I’m sure you know by now, thanks to the ecology gangsters who run our TV channels, has the largest virgin rain forest in the world which contains one third of the
world’s trees and covers an area larger than Europe. But in the last sixty years, praise God, a quarter has been destroyed and another four per cent goes every year. It’s a terrible
thing, conservation – it makes cowards out of the people. The rain forest is being pulled down with no thought for anything but a fast buck. Which is just as it should be. A brave and
optimistic people. Riddled with AIDS, naturally. You can buy a woman for the price of a pina colada. It has been a biggest gap between rich and poor of any country in the world. That fact alone is
proof the United States is not what is used to be. Yes, it’s a wonderful country. Healthy.’
Susan took a deep breath. Here was where laying out the financial pages of the
Best
came in useful. ‘So healthy that if it declared itself bankrupt, the world banking system would
probably collapse? So healthy that it owes one hundred billion dollars and can’t even pay back the interest?’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, Susan.’ He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. ‘Especially if you read it in one of mine.’
From the window of her hotel suite on the Avenida Atlantica, she could see the pure white beaches of Rio, resembling a
smorgasbord
of spilled cocaine, and the banquet
of tanned flesh barely tethered by the briefest of tangas that used it as a catwalk, hoping to exchange almost criminal beauty for legal tender. These girls were not professionals, though, just
beautiful and poor in the wrong place and hoping for a man who was as kind as he was rich. The robust earthiness of their beauty robbed even this situation of its exploitative sordidness and,
despite herself, she smiled as the soundtrack to a travel advert floated through her head – ‘Brasil’, ‘Rio’, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’.
She turned her head idly to the right, and gasped.
Less than two hundred yards from her window, level with her eyes, was a man-made mountain of trash. On it, children, dogs and rats competed on equal terms for the pickings. Around its base stood
flimsy wooden shacks and around these stood weary women looking helplessly and hopelessly at the children. Rag and bone, she thought dazedly,
‘As in your case, you mean?’ Tobias Pope sipped his J&B thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I do see your point. It must be torment trying to struggle by on fifty-five thousand pounds
sterling per annum plus expenses. No wonder you’re a whore.’
She thought about asking the stewardess for some earplugs on the pretence of trying to sleep.
‘Yes, a remarkable country, Brazil. A country of paradoxes. The people are a unique racial inter-marriage of African, Indian and European, but the stratification of their society is still
savage. Which is as it should be. Dark-skinned on the coastal north of Rio, light-skinned to the south.’
‘South Africa-on-Sea,’ she muttered.
‘Speak up, young woman, don’t mumble. Yes, in the seventy years up to 1950 Brazil took in four and a half million Europeans, and something like fifty thousand a year since
then.’ His upper lip winced in mild distaste. ‘The Japs have moved in recently, unfortunately. There’s a fair number of them in coffee. Some mornings in the business quarter you
feel like an extra in
Bridge Over The River Kwai.
’
She had to smile. Just like Joe Blow in the street, Tobias Pope had a deep and violent dislike of the Japanese. She had asked him why at the airport that evening, as he stared with disapproval
at the camera-clacking hordes of Japanese tourists taking a photographs of the planes, the people, even litter bins. ‘Because the women are ugly and the men are clever. That’s not how
the yellow races should be. Or any race but the Americans, come to that.’
‘Brazil, as I’m sure you know by now, thanks to the ecology gangsters who run our TV channels, has the largest virgin rain forest in the world which contains one third of the
world’s trees and covers an area larger than Europe. But in the last sixty years, praise God, a quarter has been destroyed and another four per cent goes every year. It’s a terrible
thing, conservation – it makes cowards out of the people. The rain forest is being pulled down with no thought for anything but a fast buck. Which is just as it should be. A brave and
optimistic people. Riddled with AIDS, naturally. You can buy a woman for the price of a pina colada. It has been a biggest gap between rich and poor of any country in the world. That fact alone is
proof the United States is not what is used to be. Yes, it’s a wonderful country. Healthy.’
Susan took a deep breath. Here was where laying out the financial pages of the
Best
came in useful. ‘So healthy that if it declared itself bankrupt, the world banking system would
probably collapse? So healthy that it owes one hundred billion dollars and can’t even pay back the interest?’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, Susan.’ He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. ‘Especially if you read it in one of mine.’
From the window of her hotel suite on the Avenida Atlantica, she could see the pure white beaches of Rio, resembling a
smorgasbord
of spilled cocaine, and the banquet
of tanned flesh barely tethered by the briefest of tangas that used it as a catwalk, hoping to exchange almost criminal beauty for legal tender. These girls were not professionals, though, just
beautiful and poor in the wrong place and hoping for a man who was as kind as he was rich. The robust earthiness of their beauty robbed even this situation of its exploitative sordidness and,
despite herself, she smiled as the soundtrack to a travel advert floated through her head – ‘Brasil’, ‘Rio’, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’.
She turned her head idly to the right, and gasped.
Less than two hundred yards from her window, level with her eyes, was a man-made mountain of trash. On it, children, dogs and rats competed on equal terms for the pickings. Around its base stood
flimsy wooden shacks and around these stood weary women looking helplessly and hopelessly at the children. Rag and bone, she thought dazedly,
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