“Okay, now we see. Fifty dollars.”

“That’s a lot.”

“For two. As long as you like. Afterwards we go to Señor Pereira’s party in Ipanema.”

“Fine by you, Dick?” He already had his arm around Fortunata while I searched for my wallet. He was romping playfully with her, as he did with my daughters.

Carmen stuffed the notes into her purse and opened the door onto a crowded room. Three middle-aged women and a small child were working at a trestle table, surrounded by piles of plastic sacks. They were producing cheap mementoes for the film festival, stitching cardboard-backed photographs of film stars into gilt papier-mâché frames, assembling festival kites from ready-made components which they snatched from the sacks. Hundreds of belt buckles with movie motifs, 2001 lapel badges, and other geegaws lay in open cardboard boxes on the shabby sofa, lined up in rows by the methodical child. Bags of spare components filled the small kitchen and were piled around the lavatory in the bathroom.

“Wait a minute…” I turned to Dick. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

“No.” Carmen tugged my arm with surprising force. She pointed to the bedroom of the apartment. “We go in—it’s just for us.”

A woman with a stapling machine glanced at us without interest and drove a staple through the forehead of Elvis Presley. As Carmen unlocked the door I assumed that she and Fortunata rented the room during the day. Beyond the double bed, unwashed windows looked out onto the rear balconies of a vast apartment block, more low-rent housing in this city where the poor were pushed away into the sky. Every balcony was crammed with bird cages and cardboard cartons, washing lines and abandoned furniture.

“Okay—nice time now.”

Carmen tried to close the door, but Dick and I were staring uneasily at the room. The rumpled sheets were stained with sweat and lipstick, the pillows covered with a blue glaze of mascara and vaginal jelly. Underwear hung across the pine dressing table, and on the floor beside the bed were a dozen paper tissues, each crushed around a smear of phlegm. Impassively surveying this scene was a small cine-camera on a tripod. Nearby, boxes of Kodak film were stacked on the wall unit.