Agent at customs

An account of my arrival in Rio de Janeiro, written during the year following my mission (1971) as a creative writing assignment for one of my English classes at Brigham Young University. The story is not intended to convey any disrespect for that wonderful, vast realm I came to love as much as my own homeland.

I wasn't really ready for my first day in Rio de Janeiro, and it wasn't exactly ready for me. Between the two of us there was a considerable mix up.

The truth is that it had been snowing at Kennedy International on the eve of our journey, and this meant I had come to this land of sun lugging an overcoat filled with the extra weight of books and film. When you have no use for an overcoat, except as a piece of luggage, to haul it all over creation seems strangely like a bit of stupidity. Rio, on its part, was having trouble too. It couldn't find an agreeable temperature or a decent humidity. Our mutual discomfort established some minor rapport between us, and I realized that Rio de Janeiro and I actually both needed the same thing—a nice cool day.

The flight to Rio starts with the pilot's trilingual welcome. It is a long, uneventful journey, with gracious hospitality and lots of food, with two major meals on top of one another, dinner and breakfast. It offers time to stare at the darkness, later at clouds, water, and jungle; to chat in broken foreign tongues with fellow passengers; to sleep between the meals that are obviously from the kitchens of foreign chefs.

Suddenly you see the first intimation of the future, of Rio—the city of fun and sun—and there is the runway and the banners waving from the airport complex and the brave hope of a glimpsed destination. Except for the overcoat, handbag, camera case, books, and box of home-baked cookies that all had to be carried off the plane, I might have been walking into a fantasy world, for I felt that perhaps here would be the exotic land all men dream of, the vast jungles, the natives in their festive dress, awaiting carnival. A closer inspection, however, by the end of the walk to the customs area, revealed that it was merely a giant greenhouse—the same old hot humidity we had been warned of, with no immediate jungles, and the natives in rather drab attire.

The airport is filled with people—mixed, assorted people, with tourists hailing from every continent, and in the air the sound of incessant chatter. There are benches all along for the waiting and the waited, and though Rio's failure to cope with the indoor heat had dampened my enthusiasm and wilted my courage, the idea of getting through customs beckoned me on.

It was not particularly surprising, somehow, when at last, after so many months of anticipation and after so much arduous study and preparation, when at last I arrived, overcoat in hand, at the very threshold of my mission, when I finally presented myself there at the customs section, face to face with the man at the desk behind a little mountain of declaration forms, expectant, ready to enter at last where I had never been before, Rio de Janeiro—it was not, somehow, particularly surprising to find the man was not going to let us in his country.

That's the way it is with Brazil. Even after the Revolution of '64 had made it the country of the future, there is still an exasperating, archaic incompetence.

The elders with me were not surprised either, but they seemed apprehensive. We all did.

"Can we get through?" someone asked timidly.

"No, sir," said the agent. "Not without the luggage you've declared."

We were not encouraged. "But what if it's in New York still?" we replied, realizing that our luggage had not made our quick flight change at Kennedy International.

"Too bad," he replied. "Wait here a few moments."

I clocked the wait. It was 43 minutes. Not bad for one not expecting to get in at all.

Much depends, when you pause at the brink of entry, on the attitude with which you happen to be met by the man with the stamp, the agent at customs, and scrutinized in his omniscient way for some of the slowest moments that tick by in this lazy land. If you arrive just as night has faded into dawn, and without any advance warning about being barred from an entrance into the country, the experience is something that sticks with you.

I was lucky. Rio de Janeiro, when it first burst upon my expectant sight, was as thrilling as a Christmas present, and for a moment or two I didn't catch on that the unwrapping would be so difficult. If I hadn't been with seven other greenies, I would have felt lonelier than perhaps even this situation merited.

"Come back tomorrow," he said, with the stiff authority that an office had given him, "to pick up your luggage, for now we can do nothing for you."

I don't know how long it normally takes there. Twenty minutes, half an hour maybe. But when we returned on the next morning, to begin the whole mess all over, it took six and a half hours.