Tall and tan and young and lovely,
The girl from Ipanema goes walking.
When she walks, it’s like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gently.
How can I tell her I love her?
Yes, I would give my heart gladly.
But each day when she walks to the sea,
She looks straight ahead, not at me.
This was how the girl from Ipanema looked at the sea back then, in 1963. And that’s how she keeps looking at the sea now, in 1982. She hasn’t aged. Sealed in her image, she drifts through the ocean of time. If she had continued to age, she’d probably be close to forty by now. Or maybe not. But at least she wouldn’t have her slim figure any more, and she wouldn’t be so tan. She might retain some of her old loveliness, but she’d have three children, and too much sun would damage her skin.
Inside my record, of course, she hasn’t grown any older. Wrapped in the velvet of Stan Getz’s tenor sax, she’s as cool as ever, the gently swaying girl from Ipanema. I put the record on the turntable, set the needle in the groove, and there she is.
How can I tell her I love her?
Yes, I would give my heart gladly.
The tune always brings back memories of the corridor in my high school – a dark, damp high-school corridor. Whenever you walked along the concrete floor, your footsteps would echo off the high ceiling. It had a few windows on the north side, but these were pressed against the mountain, which is why the corridor was always dark. And it was almost always silent. In my memory, at least.
I’m not exactly sure why ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ reminds me of the corridor in my high school. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. I wonder what kind of pebbles the 1963 girl from Ipanema threw into the well of my consciousness.
When I think of the corridor in my high school, I think of mixed salads: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, asparagus, onion rings and pink Thousand Island dressing. Not that there was a salad shop at the end of the corridor. No, there was just a door, and beyond the door a drab twenty-five-metre pool.
So why does that corridor in my old high school remind me of mixed salads? These two don’t have anything to do with each other, either. They just happened to come together, like an unlucky lady who finds herself sitting on a freshly painted bench.
Mixed salads remind me of a girl I sort of knew back then. Now, this connection is a logical one, because all this girl ever ate was salads.
‘How about that (munch munch) English assignment (munch munch)? Finished it yet?’
‘Not quite (munch munch). Still got to (munch munch) do some reading.’
I was pretty fond of salads myself, so whenever I was with her, we had these salad-filled conversations. She was a girl of strong convictions, one of which was that if you ate a well-balanced diet, with plenty of vegetables, everything would be all right. As long as everyone ate vegetables, the world would be a place of beauty and peace, filled to overflowing with love and good health. Kind of like The Strawberry Statement.
‘Long, long ago,’ wrote a certain philosopher, ‘there was a time when matter and memory were separated by a metaphysical abyss.’
The 1963/1982 girl from Ipanema continues to walk silently along the hot sands of a metaphysical beach. It’s a very long beach, lapped by gentle white waves. There’s no wind, nothing to be seen on the horizon. Just the smell of the sea. And the sun is burning hot.
Sprawled under a beach umbrella, I take a can of beer from the cooler and pull the tab. She’s still walking by, a primary-coloured bikini clinging to her tall, tanned body.
I give it a try: ‘Hi, how’s it goin’?’
‘Oh, hello,’ she says.
‘How ’bout a beer?’
She hesitates. But after all, she’s tired of walking, and she’s thirsty. ‘I’d like that,’ she says.
And together we drink beer beneath my beach umbrella.
‘By the way,’ I venture, ‘I’m sure we met in 1963. Same time. Same place.’
‘That must have been a long time ago,’ she says, cocking her head just a bit.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It was.’
She empties half the beer can in one gulp, then stares at the hole in the top. It’s just an ordinary can of beer with an ordinary hole, but the way she stares at the opening, it seems to take on a special significance – as if the entire world were going to slip inside.
‘Maybe we did meet – 1963, was it? Hmmm … 1963. Maybe we did meet.’
‘You haven’t aged at all.’
‘Of course not. I’m a metaphysical girl.’
I nod. ‘Back then, you didn’t know I existed. You looked at the ocean, never at me.’
‘Could be,’ she says. Then she smiles. A wonderful smile, but a little sad. ‘Maybe I did keep looking at the ocean. Maybe I didn’t see anything else.’
I open another beer for myself and offer her one. She just shakes her head. ‘I can’t drink so much beer,’ she says. ‘I have to keep walking and walking. But thanks.’
‘Don’t the soles of your feet get hot?’ I ask.
‘Not at all,’ she says. ‘They’re completely metaphysical. Want to see?’
‘Okay.’
She stretches a long, slim leg towards me and shows me the sole of her foot. She’s right: it’s a wonderfully metaphysical sole. I touch it with my finger. Not hot, not cold. There’s a faint sound of waves when my finger touches her sole. A metaphysical sound.
I close my eyes for a moment, and then I open them and slug down a whole can of cold beer. The sun hasn’t shifted at all. Time itself has stopped, as if it has been sucked into a mirror.
‘Whenever I think of you, I think of the corridor in my high school,’ I decide to tell her. ‘I wonder why.’
‘The human essence lies in complexity,’ she replies. ‘The objects of scientific investigation lie not in the object, you know, but in the subject contained within the human body.’
‘Yeah?’
‘In any case, you must live. Live! Live! Live! That’s all. The most important thing is to go on living. That’s all I can say. Really, that’s all. I’m just a girl with metaphysical soles.’
The 1963/1982 girl from Ipanema brushes the sand from her thighs and stands up. ‘Thank you for the beer.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Every once in a while – every long once in a while – I see her on the subway. I recognize her and she recognizes me. She always sends me a little ‘Thanks for the beer’ smile. We haven’t spoken since that day on the beach, but I can tell there is some sort of connection linking our hearts. I’m not sure just what the connection is. The link is probably in a strange place in a far-off world.
I try to imagine that link – a link in my consciousness spread out in silence across a dark hallway down which no one comes. When I think about it like this, all kinds of happenings, all kinds of things, begin to fill me with nostalgia, bit by bit. Somewhere in there, I’m sure, is the link joining me with myself. Some day, too, I’m sure, I’ll meet myself in a strange place in a far-off world. And if I have anything to say about it, I’d like that place to be a warm one. And if I’ve got a few cold beers there as well, who could ask for anything more? In that place, I am myself and myself is me. Subject is object and object is subject. All gaps gone. A perfect union. There must be a strange place like this somewhere in the world.
The 1963 1982 girl from Ipanema continues to walk along the hot beach. And she’ll continue to walk without resting until the last record wears out.