Ambition (7 page)

‘If Bangkok is a bar girl and Paris is an expensive mistress, then Rio is an orgiast,’ Tobias Pope proclaimed from his mobile Olympus as it moved through the
clouds, as fluffy and yielding as a Fifties pin-up blonde, above the Atlantic Ocean.

By his side Susan Street slept, sulked and stared blankly at the pages of her Tama Janowitz novel. ‘Really?’ she said, in a voice which dripped boredom.

‘But certainly. Brazil is sometimes called the Thailand of Lat Am, but personally I’ve always found Thai women essentially joyless and resentful types behind that grateful facade. If
it wasn’t for the hard cash, they wouldn’t touch you with a six-foot dildo. The
carioca
girls, on the other hand . . . superb beasts. Glossy, healthy brutes. Pre-AIDS, that is.
They’re still as loose as ever, though. They’d do it for fun, if it came to that. Which, praise God and the dollar, it never will.’

Susan sighed and put her book away into her Etienne Augier briefcase. Every time she tried to read, Pope pinched an excruciatingly tiny and tender amount of flesh at the top of her inner thigh
which her mini-skirted grey wool Alalïa suit left achingly vulnerable. Her Bruce Oldfield tights were already laddered due to numerous digital rebukes. In the interest of her wardrobe, it
might be wise to converse with him.

‘If Rio is an orgiast, and Paris is a mistress, then what’s London?’ she asked patiently.

He turned and laughed into her face. He’d been hoping for this one, she could tell. ‘A whore. Down on its luck. Two-bit. A two-bit whore whose speciality is getting down on its knees
and sucking the dick of any rich American who crosses its path. That’s what your countrywomen are famous for, isn’t it? What did they say about English girls during the war? One
Yank—’

‘—and they’re off,’ Susan finished wearily. It was a revelation hearing Tobias Pope’s witticisms and wisdoms. Somehow she hadn’t excepted the head of one the
biggest communications empires in the world to have a marginally less sophisticated sense of humour than a stand-up comic in a North Country working-men’s club.

He chuckled happily at his joke. ‘Yes, yes. I’ve always thought it strange, you know, that only Italy should be shaped like a part of the human physiognomy. If there was any natural
justice in the world, the British land mass would be a Y-shaped pair of open legs and the tip of the United States would be thrusting into it. It would be appropriate, wouldn’t it?
Economically, militarily and sexually.’

‘Isn’t it a coincidence,’ Susan said sarcastically, ‘that the women of countries suddenly become so wildly attracted to rich Americans when their countries are being
screwed in every other way by the United States. This animal magnetism couldn’t have anything to do with a certain little thing called 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, these people are made of rag and bone.

‘The
favelas
,’ said Tobias Pope behind her. ‘No sanitation, power or water. They ring every big city here, living off the waste. A very
ecological
system. I
think of the
favelas
as a frame; their repulsiveness makes the beauty of Rio proper even more of dazzling.’

‘I don’t think Rio’s beautiful. All those skyscrapers and freeways and flyovers and armies of people scuttling along like survivalist ants. It’s like a corrupt
Legoland.’ She gestured towards the
favelas.
‘And now this—’

‘Put your sunglasses on,’ said Pope impatiently ‘It will help your vision and your conscience.’

‘It’s like heaven and hell in the same place. It’s
horrible
.’

He laughed patiently. ‘But Susan, you’re describing your own country, or any rich Western country. America is one thing for me, but it certainly doubles as hell for the poor. The
same with you and British. You just don’t have to look it in the face, that’s all. You sit in the West End drinking Piper and talking about socialism and you don’t have to look at
the East End or the North Country. At least they’re honest here. Go down to Copacabana or Flamengo for a swim carrying a camera or wearing jewellery and you’ll be lucky to come back
with your bikini. The poor get a good shot at the rich here.’

‘And vice versa.’ She gestured at the girls on the beach.

They talked about Two Nations at home; they didn’t know the half of it. Brazil was both Disneyland and Dante’s Inferno: the poor and the rich; the ugly and the beautiful; the sexual
invitation of the beach girls and the huge billboards which purported to warn against AIDS but, due to the beauty of the models and the carefree smiles which could have been pushing stockings or
lipstick, only served to act as further stimuli in this already over-heated city. The Brazilian people seemed a lot like the rain forests themselves: natural wonders mown down by what passed for
civilization but were really the most base urges of the First World: the pursuit of sex and money. If Rio was the Bangkok of Latin America it was only that the recklessness of the desperate was
always wilfully mistaken for sensuality by the people who sought to exploit it. To call the Brazilians hedonistic was like saying that American ghetto blacks were hedonistic because they took
drugs, caught AIDS and otherwise destroyed themselves. Brazil was a ghetto and, like most ghettos, it doubled as a playground for the rich. Physically and fiscally, Brazil was being screwed.

‘Charming animals, aren’t they?’ said Pope at her shoulder, tracing her gaze to the beach. They stood at the window in the Avenida Atlantica joined by a kind of understanding.
They could both comprehend the massive unfairness of the fact that this beautiful and lively people were condemned to strutting their stuff for their supper in a city that was little more than a
brothel. The only difference was that he approved of the arrangement and she didn’t.

The only difference! How her priorities were changing already! She drew back and looked at him.

He recoiled and laughed almost tenderly at the expression on her face. ‘Oh, Susan! You’re
so
English! Look at your face! The Roman haughtiness of the nose, the Norman
disdain of the eyes, the Teutonic disapproval of the mouth, the Viking iciness of the bearing – perfect English girl!’ He sighed. ‘You’ll never understand how to go about
having fun, you Euros, will you? You’ll never understand that the only way not to feel the world’s pain is to go at it like a pig at a trough. Otherwise you’re lost. Look at that
beautiful mess out there. Wallow in it.
Enjoy
the craziness of it. Or it will be your downfall. You won’t sleep at night and you won’t be happy. Believe me, I know what
I’m talking about.’

‘What do you know?’ she said sulkily.

‘I know, young lady, believe me.’ He opened his mouth, then closed it, then blurted, ‘I was a Communist at your age!’

Her head shot round.

He was relaxed again. He laughed. ‘I’m not lying. Whatever I may do to you, Susan, I’ll never lie to you. There’s no point.’

She sat on the bed. ‘What happened?’

He shrugged. ‘I told you. Nothing dramatic. It just didn’t make me happy so I got rid of it.’

‘You make it sound like an abortion.’

‘Of a sort.’ Pope drained his Virgin Mary. ‘Anyway, I can’t sit here talking politics and pipe dreams all day, I’ve got a meeting at the Banco de Brasil. If you can
be dressed in ten minutes, you can get a lift uptown in my car. Longer than ten minutes, though, and you can find your own way. Never forget, my dear; I am not here for your convenience – you
are here for
mine
.’

She walked up the Avenida Presidente Vargas and cased the clothes-shop windows. There were lots of copies of Chanel and Vuitton, lots of acrylic and plastic, lots of bad seams and leather as
over-tanned as the forty-year-olds on Copacabana beach. Rio seemed to specialize in what were politely known as ‘fun clothes’ and ‘sports clothes’; only somewhere along the
line fun and sports had become euphemisms for cheap and nasty. Even the familiar merchandise at Benetton and Fiorucci looked strange as though concocted by some cack-handed Martian with only a
vague and grainy approximation on some distant TV screen to work from.

Still she bought, almost reflexively: I shop therefore I am. A tiger’s-eye necklace at Sidi, silver earrings with green citrine centres at Prata Moderna and a gold ring set with a
beautiful black tourmaline that screamed ‘BULGARI!’ but actually came from Balulac. A couple of pieces of basic black and white at the mercilessly monochrome Tutto Bianco, a backless
and beaded red cocktail dress from Cenario & Figurino, a shiny black bikini from Cantao and a dark green leather envelope briefcase from Victor Hugo, and she was done.

The people in the street looked easily as harassed as any other big-city lunch-hour shoppers, and she considered how silly it was that if a country had exceptionally clement weather its
inhabitants were automatically described as ‘vibrant’, ‘vivid’ and ‘vivacious’. Looking at the faces on the humid streets of uptown Rio, she could have shown any
travelogue maker that living in a glorified sauna made you feel anything
but.

In fact, if you took away the sun and substituted rain, Brazil wouldn’t really be anything worth writing home about, she thought. With its flamboyant poverty and jerry-built skyscrapers,
it was quite like Tower Hamlets with suntans. Not that she’d ever
been
to Tower Hamlets. She had never found poverty, either domestic or exotic, vicariously thrilling. It was too
close for comfort.

Her disappointment mingled with and was finally swamped by her relief. Pope had slept in a different suite last night – not even adjoining; he said that would look ‘tacky’
– and read the business press all through breakfast. At four in the morning the phone had rung and she had waded thigh-high through sleep to answer it, fearful that it was the call to his
room.

‘Hello?’

‘Still up at this hour? Can’t sleep? Why not try masturbating?’ Pope had suggested jovially before slamming his receiver down. It had taken her one and a half hours to get back
to sleep. Otherwise he had behaved with the decorum of a duenna.

Glimpsing the window displays, feeling vaguely fractious and fretful, Susan Street suddenly became aware that she was being followed. In the same way that one can be in the same room as a
sleeping person and know suddenly that they are awake although they don’t move so much as an eyelash, she suddenly knew that she was being followed, halfway between a
sapataria
and a
supermercado.
A minute later she turned into a dark boutique and cannoned into a rail of cotton print dresses.