The Girl from Ipanema

An American traveler cruises to the Muse

Tall and tan and young and lovely and now 62 or 63 years old, depending on whom you ask, Heloisa Pinheiro -- the woman who inspired "The Girl From Ipanema" -- has never made a single centavo off the song.

I don't know about you, but when I heard that I was deeply troubled. Friends tried to tell me that Pinheiro wrote neither music nor lyrics for the bossa nova classic, that her sole contribution came in walking past the Rio de Janeiro bar frequented by a musician (Antonio Carlos Jobim) and lyricist (Vinicius de Moraes) in 1962, day after day, usually while picking up a pack of smokes for her mother or making her way to an obscure stretch of sand the world would soon come to know as Ipanema Beach. They'd noticed the girl and been moved to write a song, but in essence she was just an impressive pedestrian.

Yes, but a pedestrian with a walk like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gentle, and unpedestrian poetry like that doesn't just drop from the ether. She was their Muse. But is artistic immortality enough of a reward for a Muse? I'd say she deserved more.

People go places for all kinds of reasons. I like to spend my vacations seeking out unwitting cultural revolutionaries and finding out if they've made peace with obscurity -- it's a niche, I know. And so I was determined to sail to São Paulo (Pinheiro abandoned Rio years ago) and make the acquaintance of the now-Grandma from Ipanema.

Another thing I like to do on trips: Avoid other Americans -- whom I think we've all had just about enough of. Given such a penchant, a cruise ship might seem the wrong choice -- unless your destination is South America. Despite being one of the last places on Earth where the dollar isn't struggling, the continent is still overlooked by many an American cruiser.

I couldn't have been happier in December when Pinheiro's husband, Fernando, whom I'd e-mailed out of the blue, invited me to visit the São Paulo dress shop his wife runs called ... Girl From Ipanema. It would just be me, Grandma, hundreds of gorgeous, cruise-happy Brazilians and not a single American.

U.S. vs. them

The Costa Victoria, my ticket to Ipanema and beyond, specializes in trips that stop in Rio and smaller ports along the Emerald Coast. Costa Cruise Lines may be owned by Carnival now, but it still references its Italian roots, in the Victoria's case by naming decks after operas.

Which is how, on a gray, overcast day just before Christmas, I found myself making a quick pass through my Manon cabin before racing up six flights past Carmen and Tosca and Rigoletto, arriving at the pool on the Butterfly deck (think Madame). More than a thousand Brazilians had already bounded up the gangplank -- not a single American in the bunch -- and I didn't want to miss it when burger bar met bikini, when swarthy and skinny cariocas tried to samba their way through "I'm Your Boogie Man."

I mention "I'm Your Boogie Man" because later that evening the ship's house band, Melodia Brasil, did a remarkably good cover of it, and because I now realize I'd been somewhat naive about how easy it might be to escape America.

Hundreds of people packed the dance floor that first night, all of them chanting with perfect diction: "At first I was afraid/ I was petrified" and "It's like thunder and lightning/ the way you love me is frightening" and "You can tell by the way I use my walk/ I'm a woman's man: no time to talk." They certainly looked like Brazilians -- especially the women, who teetered on spike heels and favored the kind of dresses that go to the brink of vulgar and pull back at the last possible moment. Still, I have no doubt each of them could have gone five rounds on "The Singing Bee."