Rain-puddled, barely navigable cobblestone streets, totally empty, and a hundred impossibly cute little buildings with brightly-painted shutters. A mock-up of colonial old-town Paraty, but still wonderful, reeking of ozone from the storm, everything drenched, the cobblestones heaving and whimsical, arranged like something out of Seuss or Escher. Then the shop full of bottles, floor-to-ceiling, many of them untouched for how long? Are they even full? There is no ladder to reach them, no one is buying them. So many bright labels and antic brands and unpronounceable towns, but an indifference too, dozens consigned to the top shelf to gather dust and take up space.
So we buy the cachaca of the place, the one called Paratiana because it is from Paraty. It comes in a 700ml bottle (not 750) and the glass is the kind used in all great hot-weather developing world things, heavy and brittle. I buy two bottles, one breaks on the way home, the other makes it all the way to Raleigh, and then lasts through moves and redecorations (and the innumerable raids on the cabinet [actually a closet now] to which many better bottles have succumbed) to make it all the way to now.
We tasted a number of rums that evening, and there were others more delicious, but this had a purity and authenticity that many lacked. It was not the best or most or least or any other superlative, it was itself. It did not clamor to be described, it was quiet, pleasant, easy. Like the faux-colonial building I bought it in, it is likely a product of factories and machines, and the great enthusiasts of cachaca would pillory me for holding it up as an example of anything. But I like it. It is a memory of something insignificant and beautiful, imputed romance, and the humid peace of rural coastal Brazil.
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