Too Hot for Rubies

Up near the ceiling of Rio's gaudy old Municipal Theater, gay armadas of dangling colored disks swayed in a rising fog of tobacco smoke and perfumed ether. On the floor below, three dance bands, thousands of voices, brigades of clinking bottles and the hypnotic hop of feet endlessly sambaing built a solid wall of sound. In the midst of the jammed dancers, 24-year-old Gilda Lopes, clad in a Queen of Sheba wisp of gauze and sequins, shimmied deliriously on a table top, drinking in masculine ogles as a parched field drinks the spring rain. She lost not a beat as she explained her costume: "It's like the one Lollobrigida wore in the movie, except that Gina had a lot more pearls and a ruby in her navel. In Rio it's too hot for rubies."

For the men of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's four-day pre-Lenten carnival is wild enough. Surging through the city's streets, jamming its clubs, they sing, samba and spray passers-by with ether, in a pleasure-madness that only exhaustion can satiate. But for Brazil's women, the Rio carnival is a rare escape from the censorious control normally exercised by fathers, husbands and fiances. Peeling off some of their clothes and more of their inhibitions, perfectly respectable Brazilian wives and mothers become during the Rio carnival the houris of their innermost dreams.

Tough in a Toga. Long before last week's fun rolled around, Mrs. Terezinha Souza, 26-year-old secretary to the Industrial Social Service Board in Recife, 1,200 miles north of Rio, had begun to work on her harem-girl outfit. Last week, shimmying atop her table at the Municipal Theater, she let her husband--a small man in a large tuxedo--have it square in the face with a squirt of ether from a spray bomb. "I went to another party dressed as a Roman girl," she explained in a shout above the din, "but it's hard to do bumps in a toga." From another table top near by, a handsome young matron in a white Carmen Miranda outfit went right on wiggling her bare midriff as she confided that she had left her three children with her husband's parents. "Eight years I've been coming," she boasted, tossing off still another glass of whiskey. "Only once, when I was pregnant, did I think I'd have to miss it. Luckily, the baby waited until two weeks after carnival to be born."

Let-Go Libidos. "I'm not jealous when other men stop and stare," said one broad-minded husband last week, "so long as they just look and don't touch. This isn't a five and ten."

Not all the whoopee is without consequences; by carnival's end last week, Rio's firemen had been called out 50 times, some 6,995 people had reported into the city's hospitals for treatment of bruises and wounds, and another 2,350 had been hauled in by the cops whose charge books recorded 13 murders, three suicides, 477 fights and 87 assaults. After that came Lent. The church might not approve of all that went on, but there were earnest psychologists who argued that there were therapeutic dividends from thousands of repressions relaxed and frustrations banished.

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