Swirling

This week from Cuba to Chile half a hemisphere is practicing new songs, trying on costumes and catching up on sleep.

Gangs of boys in the back streets of Buenos Aires are cracking their muscles with acrobatic stunts for the big parade.

Indians in the Bolivian Andes are laying in stores of fireworks. Chilean belles are worrying about their ball dresses. For in Latin America, as in all Catholic countries, the days before Lent are carnival time.

Star attraction of the season is the carnaval at Rio de Janeiro, which is some thing special even among the gay celebra tions of Latin America: a swirling four-day-and-four-night bender of lights, noise, tinsel and music that makes New Orleans' Mardi Gras look like a meeting of the Modern Language Association.

Bulging Rio's hotels, together with hundreds of Argentines, thousands of upcountry Brazilians, are about 700 Norteamericanos (including Coca-Cola's James Aloysius Farley), more than carnaval has ever drawn before. For this Rio can thank Nelson Rockefeller in his mouth-filling capacity of Coordinator of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics. Coordinator Rockefeller has worked hard to sell the South and Central American carnivals to the U. S. (see cut), hopes for several times 700 U. S. visitors next year.

Most exacting job in the Rio carnaval belongs to a reporter on the paper A Noite who looks like a Latin edition of Oliver Hardy. For four days each year Senhor San Francisco Cardozo Menezes is carnaval's gaudy, giddy King Momo. In those four days he is on the go from mid-morning to 5 a.m., out in the streets and at balls, drinking champagne by the Jeroboam, singing sambas and shedding some 20 of his 210 pounds.

To strangers the spirit of the carnaval seems like drunkenness, actually it is an elation that has little to do with alcohol. It is carried on the thumping rhythm of the samba, the marchas, and the belligerent batuque, a transplanted African war dance. To these tunes, some lovingly composed and rehearsed beforehand, some made up white hot as the musicians parade, the whole city, rich and poor, moves out into the streets.

Focus of carnaval is swank, tree-lined Avenida Rio Branco. There on Sunday thousands of automobiles (mostly sub-jalopy seven-passenger touring cars) brimming with people in costume drive along in the "Corso" singing, pelting each other with confetti. Monday the "Ranches" take over the town, small clubs of marchers who skimp for months for their costumes, compete heatedly in dancing, playing, singing. Tuesday night winds up with a contest of mammoth floodlit floats. Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is a half-holiday conceded to the slack-jawed weariness of the city.

Banned from this year's carnaval are the sambas with satiric verses that might offend touchy European countries. But one of this year's sambas describes Italians fleeing through the desert, praying to Allah for water. But there is still more than enough fun for the Cariocas and their guests--dancing in the streets, wearing gay costumes, jamming aboard the open streetcars, making up new and scurrilous samba verses and above all enjoying four unfettered days in a formal country and an uneasy world.

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