Inside the courtyard we’d entered, I saw twenty or so children – several even younger than Valentina – all dancing to the strong rhythm of the drums. Ramon led us discreetly around the wall and into the shade that the building above us provided. He indicated the children.

‘They are preparing for Carnival. You know the favelas are where it all began?’ he whispered, offering me a warped plastic chair so that I could sit down and watch.

The tiny bodies of the children seemed to throb instinctively to the beat of the drums. I watched their rapt faces, many of them with their eyes closed, as they simply moved to the music.

‘They are learning something we call samba no pé. It was what saved me when I was a child,’ Ramon said quietly into my ear from behind me. ‘They are dancing for their lives.’

I wished later that I had taken some form of photographic record of the event, but maybe it could never have captured the ecstasy that I saw on the children’s faces. I knew what I was witnessing would be burned into my memory forever.

Eventually, Ramon indicated it was time to leave, and I stood up reluctantly. We waved goodbye to the children and walked away from them through the wooden door.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Floriano, again placing a protective arm around my shoulder.

‘Yes,’ I managed, my voice breaking with emotion. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

We left the favela and hailed a cab back into the city, my heart and senses still full of the sheer, joyous abandon of the children’s dancing.

‘Are you sure everything’s all right, Maia?’ Floriano asked as he reached over and took my hand solicitously.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Honestly, I’m fine.’

‘You liked watching the samba?’

‘I loved it.’

‘Good, because that’s exactly what we’re going to do later on tonight.’

I looked at him in horror. ‘Floriano, I can’t dance!’

‘Of course you can, Maia. Everybody can, especially cariocas. It’s in your blood. Now,’ he said, halting the cab at the square in Ipanema that was filled with market stalls, ‘we need to find you something suitable to wear. Oh, and a pair of samba shoes.’

I followed him like a lamb through the market as he went through racks of dresses and picked out the ones he deemed suitable for me to choose from.

‘I think the peach would suit your skin colour best,’ he said, proffering a figure-hugging wrap dress made of silky-soft material.

I frowned. It was exactly the kind of thing I would never pick out for myself, considering such styles far too revealing.

‘Come on, Maia, you promised me that you’d live a little today! You dress like my mother at the moment!’ he teased me.

‘Thanks,’ I said flatly, as he insisted on paying the few reais for the dress to the vendor.

‘Right, now for the shoes,’ he said as he took my hand once more and we weaved through the streets of Ipanema, alighting in front of a tiny shop that looked similar to a cobbler’s.