The Bikini Shop.

Rua dos Pinheiros. Glamorous like Slough.Some weeks ago my wife and I went into a shop selling beachware to look at some Havaianas. It wasn’t a trendy store on Ipanema or a boutique on Oscar Freire. No, it was a nondescript, slightly shabby shop on a typical São Paulo street – which is to say dirty, congested and ninety-five kilometres from the sea. 

Given the banality of the circumstances, it was strange, then, to walk inside and see six young women moving about in the shadows at the back of the shop in various states of undress, giggling with excitement. For a moment I thought I’d walked into my own imagination as a fifteen year old boy and had to look at my wife to check I hadn’t regressed into a state of juvenile fantasy. A single arched eyebrow told me that, no, I wasn’t hallucinating, and, yes, the way I behaved in the coming minutes would determine whether or not I woke up with a penis tomorrow.

We both attempted to concentrate on the Havaianas, but it wasn’t easy. One of the girls started pinging the elastic on another girl’s bikini bottom to test the fit. They both seemed to find this amusing, possibly enjoyable. Then a girl scampered into another girl’s stall and pulled the curtain closed behind her. Further delighted giggling ensued. My wife caught my eye, and her expression was one of pity. ‘Come on, darling,’ she said, leading me gently towards the door like I was an old man who’d forgotten where he lived, ‘let’s get you some fresh air.’

I suppose the point of the story is that a lot of nonsense gets talked about Brazil being a paradise of beaches, beer and beautiful girls in bikinis. No doubt some of this is willingly propagated by the Brazilian tourist industry, but the vast majority of it derives from a wholly fabricated American and European construction of Brazil which exists independently of reality and reveals far more about ‘us’ than it does about ‘them’.

And yet, as with all stereotypes, there are moments when the endless unfurling of coincidence happens to overlay the cliché perfectly and give the impression of truth. And when that happens –well, when that happens, I have to go outside for a while.