The last time I visited Brazil I arrived on a Ladeco flight from Santiago clutching a copy of Chile’s best newspaper, El Mercurio, wherein I was much impressed by an exclusive from the ever-erudite pen of Thomas Molnar. His article dealt with the architectural rape of modern cities, of which Pei’s monstrosity in front of the Louvre is one example, and it applied closely to South America, alongside the more publicized pillaging of that continent’s natural life.

Everywhere one travels there today the eye is depressed by the sudden urbanization, the eradication of history via hideous high-rise buildings of an anonymity more relevant to insects than human beings. One after another the old colonial centers are being squeezed out in the interests of soulless small apartments, geared to the couchpotato life of washing machines and TV. In some of these cities (Brasilia, Sao Paulo, La Paz, Caracas, even Salvador-Bahia, Brazil’s former capital) the pedestrian is an anachronism. It is not merely unpleasant, but dangerous, to amble about. Quito and (to a degree) Asuncion may have retained some of the dignity of their past in the face of this industrialization, and Buenos Aires is still a city you can stroll in, with pedestrian malls like the famous Florida, but Lima and Rio are swamped with appallingly impoverished sectors, some still without light and water, all crying out to city fathers for translation into high-rise horrors. Rio, whose glorious setting redeems its tourist facade, actually offers sight-seeing tours of its shantytown slums (favelas): To its honor, Quito is alone in sequestering its old town, grouped with glorious baroque churches about its Independence Square, well to one side of its modern city with busy shopping centers, or centros commerciales.

A little more than halfway up the Atlantic coast from Rio to Recife, Bahia’s hotels are jammed with tourist groups. A small relic of the old town, with its colonial churches and convents, one made into a graceful hotel, is walkable, but almost anywhere you want to go involves a (cheap, honest, polite) taxi ride, and up here Brazilians don’t speak Spanish. The Sao Paulo church is a glory of gilt baroque, while the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Bonfim hangs from the ceiling of its atrium the limbs and heads (some embellished with bloody wounds) of the miraculously cured. As the same sculptor seems to have been responsible for these it is like being in some grisly orthopedic operation room. But the faith is there.

Tasteful folkloric handicrafts are not, despite the hype of brochures and tour books. The Modelo market by the piers has floors of wood carvings and “peasanty” offerings in the style of a rather crummy South American Woolworth’s. This prompts the thought that tasteful indigenous artifacts arise in those regions—Mexico, Peru, to some extent Ecuador—where Indian art has poured into and borrowed from and even enriched the Catholic; though Brazil has its celebrated Amazon Indians, they do not seem to have found any vital channel into high art.

For tourism, least of all group tourism, does not enhance aesthetic confidence, and seaside Brazil is first and foremost a resort today. Nobody wears anything much. Informality is such that I twice found myself chauffered by girl taxi-drivers in short-shorts. Along the kilometers of beaches of Rio and Bahia the string bikini puts what Shakespeare termed “the afternoon of the body” on display. Satin-sheened rolls of sulcal skin roast on the poolside spits while, as for their jeans, the local teens must triple-sew them at the seams, unless they put them on with a spray-gun.

The currency continues to collapse. The attempt to match the new cruzado with the dollar, obliging you to cancel three zeroes on each note, does not seem to have worked. The customary dollar panic was on when I last arrived, shingles held up in the airport advertising advantageous change rates for anyone possessing greenbacks, while my hotel, the Meridien, had a rate for anyone paying in dollar bills that was nearly half what would have been listed on a credit card check. I cashed $100 on arriving, to find it worth $60 the next morning, and $20 a few days later. I left with a handful of bills which I simply tore up and put in the garbage back in New York.

But perhaps the acme of local contempt for their own currency came when I watched some of the magnificent capoeira dancing outside the Modelo market one Saturday noon. This is a truly remarkable mixture of acrobatic kung-fu and break-dancing, said to have come down from the African slaves who were denied any martial arts or arms and who substituted the capoeira to keep their overseers quiet. Today these dancers always attract crowds and invariably pass around the hat at intervals. I contributed what I thought I had translated as an appropriate cruzado bill, only to have the dancer decline it.

Finally, South America stands badly in need of an open-eyed guidebook. In the last listing of best hotels in the world, in Investors Chronicle, there was not a single hotel in the whole of South America within the first fifty (Bangkok’s Oriental invariably wins, thanks to its army of servants). Fodor and Myra Waldo are either hopelessly out-of-date (not always their fault on the peripatetic restaurant scene), or ludicrously sentimental: of Bahia the latter writes, “As the dark-skinned men load heavy goods, the cheerful Negresses sell anything and everything, happy voices are raised, often in song . . . ” Fodor specializes in comments so generalized they are undatable since they could apply anywhere. There is the South American Handbook (to which I confess to having contributed details). It is certainly the most comprehensive, so long as you have a microscope handy with which to read the print, but it is leveled at the British (who can’t get to the Argentine anyway) and apparently more directly at the indigent British backpacker. A typical entry might go something like this: “The five-day bus ride to Santa Inertia (bring your own seat) costs 72 cents. At Los Pueblos you can rent a room with kitchen facilities at Mrs. Lopez’ over the abattoir for $1.50 a night (bring your own mattress and mosquito repellent).” The continent needs its Michelin.