Part Two: The Young Man in the Bar
The second postcard from Brazil: a portrait of a generation.
“You must be lonely,” he called over to us. Ours were the first English voices he’d heard in a while, he explained, and he assumed we were starved of company. Actually, we have each other, so not really. After talking to him for a while it seemed to me that he was the lonely one.
But that is how you fall into conversation with a stranger in a bar in another country, talking about anything and everything, unguarded in that peculiar way that comes with someone you’ll likely never see again.
Before I introduce him properly, a word about how these conversations usually go. The first time I met a fellow author for coffee, she asked me, delicately and not a little nervously, where I stood on the environment, before confessing she didn’t have much time for anthropogenic climate change. And I’d been braced for her to be a hardcore vegan until I spotted the vast quantity of chorizo in her shopping bag.
We are two confident women, both perfectly capable of tolerating a dissenting opinion, and still we circled each other before holding forth. If you are right of centre you will recognise the ritual instantly. If you are on the left, probably not. You see, people on the left tend to assume they hold the moral high ground, so they go straight in with their opinions. While those of us to the right tread carefully until we are sure of our company because we know from bitter experience we risk being pilloried or despised by those on the left.
The young man performed no such ritual. He was firmly of the left, and so he went straight in.
