I remembered Dick romping in the women’s workroom, and Fortunata with the medallions of Jane Fonda and Bardot clipped to her nipples, Robert Redford’s face pressed to her pubis. Dick would look but not touch. Yet I was depressed and he was in ebullient form. A certain reserve now marked his attitude to me, as if I had failed an important test. I had always been reluctant to appear on television, a shyness that amused him and which he put down to an old-fashioned strain in my character. Clearly I was too bound to the mundane, to the contingent realities of a wife, children, and desire, to the fear of death and the anguish of space-time. Dick had side-stepped all these, accepting that the electronic image of himself was the real one, and that his off-screen self was an ambitious but modest actor who had successfully auditioned for a far more glamorous role. He might interview Carmen and Fortunata, but he would never break the spell by touching or needing them.

Watching as he enjoyed himself in the limousine, I guessed that he was the forerunner of an advanced kind of human being. If one day the world became a film festival, its inhabitants would all resemble Dick Sutherland. Television had made him impotent, but perhaps its real role, in evolutionary terms, was to depopulate an overcrowded planet. The camera lens was our way of disengaging from each other, distancing ourselves from each other’s emotions. Looking out from the limousine at the veering, overexuberant streets, it occurred to me that everyone in Rio was having, not a good time, but the image of a good time.

Except, unmistakably, at Señor Pereira’s party. The terrace and reception rooms of the duplex apartment seemed to rotate like a satellite nightclub in orbit over Rio, filled with lavish buffet tables, roulette wheels, and a light-show. Hundreds of guests danced to a maracas band, celebrating New Year’s Eve in the year 2000. Elderly bankers who seemed to be impersonating distinguished film extras, sleek Rio gangsters more handsome than any film star, and fashionable property tycoons looking like expensive call boys mingled with a lower echelon of film agents, journalists, and television executives who formed the proletariat of the super-rich.

Above the cocaine voices and firework display on the terrace, I shouted to the Dutchman: “This party must have been going on since last year’s festival. Rio film critics live in some style.”

“Pereira is much more than a film critic. He has a stake in a local TV station, all sorts of businesses, and even his own production company.”