Lost in Hotels (2 page)

CHAPTER 2
DAVID

R
IO’S AIRPORT IS named after the man who sang “The Girl From Ipanema.” The aging concrete relic squats on the horizon with spotlights that flood its crumbling facade in almost too much brightness among towering cranes that have been there for years, even though the place has virtually never changed.

A strange airport, built for greatness, is mostly relegated to commuter flights and the spare European and US carrier that manage a few flights a day. There are moments in my life that I crave this city, its visceral mulatto madness of all-night sex and women who will grab guys like me off the street and devour them on their mother’s porch. It’s the prettiest place your eyes will ever see, even from an airplane window—jagged mountains with shapes as if made by a Vincent van Gogh god.

The benefits of being in seat 2A include being one of the first to disembark this flying bus to speed-walk my way through ramps and roped corridors that ultimately lead to a brutish customs guard. He eyes my passport with crumbled brow under an infrared light and slowly scrolls through an antiquated commuter screen before staring me in the blues and waving me into his land.

As the rest of the plane catches up with me at baggage claim, I try to recognize some of the faces I lingered with before boarding the plane almost eleven hours ago. I am remarkably unable to remember a single person aside from my flight attendant who looks so much better in her full navy uniform and scarf walking the airport with a sexy familiarity that didn’t translate while she was stirring my martini or carrying off my dinner tray when I rang the red overhead button for her.

A Tumi bag later, I make my way into the airport’s central marketplace, namely the arrivals hall. It’s where a country truly begins for me—a place where the institutional airport retreats to be somewhere authentic, where coffee places don’t look like Starbucks and cafés don’t feel like a Pret a Manger.

Once upon a time in Brazil’s poorer past, a visitor would be inundated with pesky cab drivers and porters who would swindle you for as much as they could get before passing you off in a cab where the driver wouldn’t turn on the air conditioner and take side streets all the way to your dodgy Copacabana hotel. These days, the Brazilians are rich, their old but immaculate airport with a fleet of cleaning staff and maintenance professionals in crisp shirts and cheerful smiles—truly the new order of a BRIC world.

In fact, it’s almost impossible to find a cab at all, which is why the Fasano car is supposed to be here with a sign that read Mr. David Summers. Sometimes the drivers linger to the side or hover in the background, but as I study each sign and look deeper and deeper into the crowd, I see nothing.

Perhaps a strong coffee is in order, and so I meander to the coffee counter. The sounds of American accents slowly catch up with my speediness through customs and make their way into and through the airport.

“
Brigado, un café dople
?” I ask in my best Portuguese accent as the overdressed waitress straddles the register with her too-exposed shoulders and hair that has a stiff sheen that frames her sweaty smirks.

“A-mer-i-can-o?” she asks in a five-syllable sprawl that sounds like there’s a period behind every other letter.

“No,
eu sou britânico
.” I look away so as not to lead this hungry, overly flirty woman on for something more.

My gaze returns to the terminal and my lost driver, who is most likely on a cigarette break or tipping off a security guy so he can park at the gate and leave his car idling. Then, among the cab drivers in their best working suits and a cleaning staff in their utilitarian blue uniforms, there she is.

An embroidered white linen shirt suits her, complementing her porcelain complexion as she does everything not to look at me even as she walks in an almost-straight line toward me. All the noise and commotion of the airport seems to descend into silence as with each step she cuts the distance between us like a knife. I finesse her with my own stare, passing over her, and then returning in a direct gaze and yet, nothing.

She holds copies of
Vogue Italia
or some other voluminous magazines tightly under her arm and approaches within a few feet of me without so much as a glance of her iridescent green eyes in my direction. She comes so close that I can actually smell her, a citrusy scent with a hint of jasmine and a smugly robust spice that’s noticeable even above an air of coffee beans, fresh-squeezed oranges, and burned toast. As I move just far enough from the register to allow her space, she shoves her roller bag between us and greets the waitress with a neutral semi-smile without teeth or tensing of her eyes or a mere notice of my presence even though I am three feet from her lips.

“
Café com leite, por favor
?” she says with the most un-American of swift dialects and without a single missed syllable.

A stillness washes over me as I listen for more, so much so that the waitress interrupts in a yell of choppy English above their conversation, “Mister, here is your coffee!”

Here I am, revealed as the outsider. I take my coffee and retreat to a standing table near the edge of the café to watch. I watch for a sign of her slipping up that will negate her in my mind and explain her total ignorance of me, maybe pulling out a credit card as if she’s at Starbucks instead of the cash these types of places require. Her perfect posture and shiny bag make no mistakes, and I resign myself to calling the hotel to inquire about my car.

As I become involved in conversation with the hotel receptionist, I can feel a single stare fall on my neck. I quickly look and with a swift turn in response, she looks away, perhaps never looking at all, distracted by her coffee and conversation that lingers with the chatty waitress. Despite my attraction to rejection, this proves too much even for me, so I mentally say good-bye to her and that Fasano driver, wherever he might be.

I forget that you actually see more in the back of a taxi. The glass widows clear for viewing Rio’s elevated highways that wind around the motionless lagoons with their fabricated beaches by the airport and through two of the now tamed favelas that claw their way atop a hillside. Their poetically crumbling facades are enveloped in a geometric glaze of brick and mortar chaos, capped in satellite dishes and electric wires. There’s a long tunnel that you pass through that seems to divide the black-and-whiteness of suburban Rio from the Pantone city itself, a dark and mysterious strip of roadway that in its day was prone to well-publicized robberies, when traffic would be halted by drug lords and bandits targeting passing taxis and buses.

Today, the worst thing that can happen is that traffic might make you late for your dinner in Santa Teresa. It zips along with ethanol-guzzling SUVs and puttering motor scooters with shirtless guys and their girlfriends clinging to their shoulders with penned in colorful tattoos that draw the eye. Together we all emerge at the end of the tunnel that spills onto the famous Lagoa and its incongruent residential high-rises with their first three or so floors trimmed in chain-link balconies facing the holiday Christmas tree that lights up every December and then sits out the rest of the year along the shore. Along the lake, women saunter along the sidewalks in nothing more than a bikini and flip-flops, their chocolaty hair blowing behind to lure chiseled men in those wide-banded Speedos that try to catch up, even to just see her eyes.

Signs point in various directions that define the city, from Leblon to Copacabana. These were once the narrow parameters for tourists in the city that’s expanded and thrived under a stronger economy and better management of the police. My bosses insist it’s only a cycle, and despair and financial ruin will return to these lands. Rio has a long history of being savaged by us Westerners, who loot it for its minerals and fleshy innocence, only to leave it in ruins and then pick it up again in some sort of whirlwind romance.

Today it’s the international conglomerates and private equity companies, like the one I work for, that purge the country of its resources. And really, that’s what my job as their risk analyst is all about, finding the prettiest of financial novices who are like those virgins of old who have no idea their value as we write them a check and strip them of most of their business rights. Then we put them in a pretty dress, smear them in the finest make-up, and spritz them in the most intoxicating of fragrances before we parade them on the world’s financial markets where the highest bidder wins.

There it is, and it wows me even on the umpteenth time. That most beautiful shore of the Atlantic dotted in numbered lifeguard towers with a long boulevard and promenade of wavy geometric mosaic tiles that almost hypnotize you into this sexually charged trance that lasts every moment in Rio. The beaches are full, even on a Tuesday, a cavalcade of almost naked bodies running, biking, and rollerblading in all shapes of perfect, past the numerous identical kiosks that sell coconuts with a straw and the strongest rum drinks you’ll ever taste.

With a swift stop, the door swings open and a line of six or so men in suits and security uniforms line the cobblestone valet of the Fasano with its glassy-steel frontage framed in swags of white drapery and cool chrome signage.

“Are you checking in, sir?” asks a young valet lingering in the doorway in a white shirt and pants far too woolen for this humid February day.

“Welcome back to the Fasano, Mr. Summers,” says a suited man, interrupting him from the reception with an apologetic undertone that translates even in his broken English.

“We are so sorry about the car. There was an issue with the driver, and he missed you by ten minutes. Please accept our sincerest apologies. We’ve upgraded you in hopes that you can forgive.”

Sadly, an upgrade at the Fasano usually just means a higher floor.

The luggage flies out of the taxi in a melody of formal Fasano footwork and through a separate entrance from the guests. The taxi driver approaches for his tip, and a few more of the footmen hold the glassy hotel gates open for another visit.

This hotel was supposed to be an Argentine property by Alan Faena, a fashion-guy-turned-hotelier from Buenos Aires who fell on hard times after the opening of his Faena Hotel+Universe, after Argentina’s ultimate devaluation. He was partnered with designer Philippe Starck, who stayed on the project once it was sold to Sao Paulo’s Fasano family, a three-generation group of Italian restaurateurs who made this their second hotel property, and really their best to date.

The dark lounge, with its futuristic leather chairs and Sérgio Rodrigues sofas, is separated from the lobby by a succession of white drapes that billow with every opening of the glass doors. The front desk is a step back to Rio in late 1950s, but filled with the young and rich in designer linen and complicated straw hats that make the grand trek to this place, which is like the architectural incarnation of sex itself. Silk-screens with folkloric scenes of the Amazon hang from antique glass behind the reception carved of a single fifty-foot piece of timber.

The staff, in their matching vintage khaki uniforms, appears as if cast for a movie, most having been here every year since I started visiting. The same woman, Isabella, tells me the latest restaurant opening, while the chap named Marcello, who looks like a thug version of Antonio Banderas, stands next to the door and assures guests are actually guests and that no call girls or hookers or escorts make it to the rooftop pool, even to the point of his own embarrassment.

The elevator lingers a little too long on the lobby level as a rush of guests make their way in and push me to the back. Fedoras are everywhere in these parts of Rio as the door stutters open again to let in that inevitable sixth guest. There it is again, the spicy citrus scent of the American woman who shunned me in the airport. Now she simply turns her back to everyone, including me, without a “hello” or an “excuse me” as the door shimmies to a close.

Her scent makes immediate friends, even if all remain silent and pretend they’re actually alone instead of crushed together in a six-by-six stainless steel box built by construction workers constrained by a tight budget and an almost too-timely contractor. And there on that second floor, which offers either a loud room facing the beach or a dark room facing the rear of an unattractive apartment block with strings of dirty laundry and too-chatty housekeepers, the American leaves me yet again without a glance or an acknowledgment or even a look of the eyes.

The fifth floor is where you want to be at the Fasano. It faces the ocean and is the perfect distance above the beach crowds to still be able to see who has the hot body, but not so close that honking buses or 2:00 a.m. crowds leaving the basement bar wakes you up. The Fasanos were an unlikely pairing for Philippe Starck, the infamous designer of gilded seven-foot wingbacks and acrylic ghost chairs, who suddenly found himself working for a family more familiar with old-school deco styling than slutty baroque. The result was a success, even if the personal relationship was not; a hotel that mixes rich Old World style with abstract artwork and Rio glamour that I always look forward to visiting.

The rooms are the perfect beach crash pad. A head-on silhouette of the Cagarras Islands frames a two-person balcony with teak deck; Eames chairs and mirrored walls make it hard for nosy neighbors to see inside. A king bed like you’ve never seen straddles the center of the room, with black-and-white images of lifeguards on some sort of massive diving pier in a Brazilian beach Neverland that makes for good daydreaming from a cushy leather chair I’m sure the Fasanos had to plead for Starck to accept.