After the Ball

Carnival in Rio is the wildest, the biggest, the craziest mass blast in the world. There are no other contenders, say the cariocas. New Orleans' Mardi Gras? That is for the tourists. The Riviera? Fine, if you like floats. Valencia? Nice fireworks and bullfights. Fasching? Mostly indoors--besides, those Germans get conscience stricken and go home at dawn.

Last week, for the 123rd year, it was carnival time in Rio, and for three howling days and four nights, all work stopped, except for the police and the hospital attendants. Everyone else--the rich and the poor, old and young--shucked street clothes and inhibitions and donned everything from jeweled and satin costumes at $5,000 to sequined bikinis, hand towels, burlap sacks and burnooses, and went out. Thousands of bottles of liquor, from Scotch to Brazil's own cachac,a, distilled from sugar cane, vanished down thousands of dance-parched throats. In the streets, in the hotels and public halls, they shimmied and shook to the 2,650 songs composed for carnival. They drifted in and out of the city's uncounted thousands of parties, drinking, dancing and making friends. What they did, they did with flair and zest--all restraint was tossed to the warm breeze that blew in over Guanabara Bay. At one blowout alone, 110 revellers needed first aid treatment for exhaustion and alcohol.

On Ash Wednesday, with Rio's streets almost deserted except for strings of colored lights, colored plastic pillars and a few exhausted stragglers, the highly vital statistics told only part of the story. Ambulance calls: 1,827. Street fights: 90. Arrests: 422. Complexes eased and frustrations forgotten: Quern sabe? What the statistics did not show was the thousands of times the police simply looked the other way, following an unwritten law governing the free spirits of carnival. "Americans have money," rasped one exhausted tourist when it was all over, "but Brazilians have soul."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.