Brazil [antikvár]

i. The Beach LACK is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look. 'On Copacabana, the most democratic, crowded, and dangerous of Rio de Janeiro's beaches, all colors merge into one joyous, sun-stunned flesh-color, coating the sand with a second, living skin. One day not long after Christmas Day years ago, when the military was in power in far-off Brasflia, the beach felt blinding, what with the noon glare, the teeming bodies, and the salt that Tristao brought back in his eyes from the breakers beyond the sandbar. So strongly did the December sun strike down that small circular rainbows had kept appearing in the spray of the breakers, out there beyond the bar, all about the boy's sparkling head, like spirits. Nevertheless, returning to the threadbare T-shirt that served him also for a towel, he spotted the pale girl in a pale two-piece bathing suit, standing erect back where the crowd thinned. Beyond her were the open spaces for volleyball and the sidewalk of the Avenida Atlantica, with its undulating tessellated stripes. 1