The question came from a woman sitting across the table from me. She was leaning forward, emphasizing what I couldn’t take my teenage eyes off. She wore a bikini and a pareo and had just come in from the beach. Her hair was dark and wet, uncurling as it dried in the early heat of the day. Her eyes were black, the shade of any cliche you want to imagine. Her skin, the colour of the coffee getting cold in front of me.

The table was on a little shelf of a verandah, at the entrance to the small hotel I was staying at on my first visit to Rio de Janeiro. I was a few days early for the big day, for the Noite do Carnaval, when all the samba schools paraded down what later became known as the Sambodromo and was then just an avenue in the…