As Dick and I had noticed soon after flying in from London, Rio happily embraced the film festival and at the same time completely ignored it. Everywhere the crowds jammed the movie theatres, and the hotel terraces were packed with television crews, starlets, and producers. Fleets of limousines and buses ferried the delegates from one lavish embassy party to another, while gangs of prostitutes and their pimps so packed the streets of Copacabana that they squeezed out any hope of finding a customer.

But the city absorbed all this, as if the illusory visions of the festival scarcely matched the vastly greater illusion of Rio itself, a city that reminded me of prewar Shanghai in so many ways, but a Shanghai of tiled sidewalks ruled by the most confident and beautiful women in the world. Watching the bored policemen whitewashing the windscreens of illegally parked cars, I could almost believe that they were protecting the drivers from a blinding glimpse of this extraordinary sex.

And above all this were the people of the favelas, the shanty towns crowding the dozens of large hills that rose from the streets of Rio. Where the poor and destitute of most cities occupied its nether regions, in Rio they lived up in the sky, coming down from the clouds to exhibit their undernourished and crippled children and pluck at the tourist sleeve. Had these impoverished people found the door to heaven open one morning, taken possession of its misty peaks, and discovered too late that they had been tricked by those with their feet on the firmer ground far below? “On you it looks great,” I heard a film executive remark to a beggar woman, carrying a bony child asleep on her dry breast, who dared to raise her withered arm to him outside the Copacabana Palace.

However, it was easy for Dick and me to buy off our consciences with a few conference cruzeiros, and perhaps equally naïve. The gangs of confident pickpockets and the cripples viciously defending their pitches against any rivals reminded me again of Shanghai, with its rich beggars protected by their bodyguards. Shanghai, too, had been a media city, perhaps the first of all, purpose-built by the West as a test-metropolis of the future. London in the 1960s had been the second, with the same confusions of image and reality, the same overheating.

In Rio fiction and reality still played their games. At a party given by the American Embassy we found ourselves in a reception line shaking hands with the crew of the Starship Enterprise, a group of grey-haired actors like venerable morticians. Famous faces surrounded us, older and unsuccessful impersonations of themselves. Struggling to make small talk to a producer’s wife, I felt that I, too, was an impostor, masquerading as myself in an unconvincing way. I was grateful for the light-show and the amplified music that raised all conversation to an unintelligible shout.