Brazil is a country where: sensuous women dance to pagan rhythms in remote villages, with model churches perched on their heads; races mix remarkably freely, but criminal violence is of Balkan proportions; the world's biggest statue of Jesus extends its concrete arms over a city where the poor are always with us, and Mary Magdalene's sisterhood does a roaring trade; spectacular economic progress fails to provide schools for millions of children; a country where deserts bloom, rainforests burn, and trees scatter flowers on dusty urban pavements.
Perhaps a fierce dance can tell us something about this huge, exuberant, heart-warming and heart-breaking land. The capoeira was brought to Brazil by the slaves who gave this former Portuguese colony the biggest black population in the world, outside Nigeria.
Capoeira has roots in an Angolan ritual, a dramatic and potentially lethal public contest between young males for the favours of pubescent girls. In contemporary Brazil, it has become a hybrid activity, cross-breeding the elegance of ballet with the edgy frisson of martial art.
The first time I saw it was in the cavernous skeleton of an unfinished 1960s hotel, about a month ago. The speculators who built it had run out of money, and the state of Rio de Janeiro took over the building as a "Community Centre for the Defence of Citizenship". The centre's panoramic views of Rio, where sumptuous villas alternate with bleak favelas (shanty towns), show with stark clarity how fragile a concept citizenship must be in this city.
Against a background of unpainted, prefabricated concrete, children and teenagers stand and sway in a three-quarter circle. They are black, white, (well, as white as any Brazilian ever gets to be) and every shade of coffee in between. Some of them have drums, some play a twanging one-stringed instrument that looks like Robin Hood's bow, with a gourd attached for resonance. Others clap two sticks together. All of them sing, a tireless, hypnotic chant always - I was told - made up of similar, risque lyrics.
Suddenly, two of them leap into the circle. Instantly, they are swooping and diving in and out of each other's spaces, toughened hands and hardened feet shaving necks, chests, groins, buttocks. In time to the music, the movement is at once terrifying and exhilarating. After several minutes, at some unseen signal, they merge back into the chorus, and another couple seamlessly take their place. Big and small, girl and boy, capoeira seems to permit infinitely various pairings, and size and gender do not seem to offer their usual physical advantages. This is amazing grace, in the flesh. No one, in the dozen fights I see, in three different towns, gets hurt.
Things are different on the street outside, of course, where violent death is a fact of life. That is why the Brazilian authorities and non-governmental organisations promote a host of social programmes, ranging from capoeira to literacy classes, from sexual education to surf-board painting skills. They are trying to offer the dirt-poor kids of the favelas an alternative to the ever-present route of narcotrafico.
It is an endeavour that requires not just commitment and imagination, but great faith. Drug-trafficking provides thousands of young Brazilians with their best chance of a decent income and a modicum of social status. And no self-respecting drug dealer on these mean streets feels fully dressed without a gun.
"Don't write about the violence" was a kind of mantra on the lips of some members of the expatriate Irish community in Rio who, quite naturally, want to encourage more contact, and more tourism, between our two countries. There were, I was told repeatedly, so many positive aspects to Brazilian life. As there are. I would rather write about toucans, waterfalls, botanic gardens, mangoes, about the charm, intelligence and wonderfully indiscreet sensuality of the Brazilian people. But to write about Brazil without mentioning the violence is like describing the Irish landscape without mentioning the rain.
To its credit, the Brazilian government makes no effort to hide this reality, even from journalists on official tours. "Take off your ring and your watch when you walk in Rio," a senior diplomat warned me. "My ring doesn't come off," I replied.
"It does when they cut off your finger," he said quietly. I took off my ring.
"You are now in one of the most violent countries in the world," the Secretary of State for Human Rights, a member of the cabinet, told a group of us in Brasilia. He also freely acknowledged that the state security forces had made a shocking contribution to this violence in the past, though he claimed that a vast re-education project for the police was changing all that.
Two days earlier, we had visited a favela in Rio where the police had shot 21 people in a single raid six years ago. "There were elements in the state which believed in implementing an illegal death penalty," one of our escorts told us. Other people said the police rarely acted against the drug gangs in the favelas at all - unless the gangs had not paid the police their protection money. One night I went to visit a Dutch journalist, who lives in a beautiful house on the edge of the rainforest, perched below the ubiquitous statue of Christ the Redeemer. Safe in the arms of Jesus, you might think. The road from my hotel to her home, in the bohemian bairro of Santa Teresa, snakes vertiginously up towards Corcovado mountain, past faded but gracious suburbs, studded with brightly-lit artists' bars. It all looks very tranquil and inviting. But the first taxi I stopped simply refused to risk the 10-minute journey from the city centre.
When I finally arrived, I told my colleague about the reluctant taxi driver. In response, she played me an audio tape of everyday life on those green and pleasant avenues. A couple of weeks previously, she had just got off a bus, when the police opened fire, apparently without warning. Someone on the bus may have fired back. Her attempt to record what was happening was constantly interrupted by the ugly stutter of sub-machine guns. When she finally crawled up to a policeman who seemed to be directing the operation, he calmly told her that "nothing is going on". It seems he was right. The episode, in which, miraculously, no one was injured, did not even register in the local or national media.
Yet my Dutch friend wouldn't, at the moment, live anywhere else. It would be unforgiveably glib to attempt any sort of cost-benefit analysis of living in Rio, but even its poorest inhabitants would probably still tell you proudly, and grinning irrepressibly, that they endorse the national slogan that "God is a Brazilian". If death is always on the cards in this teeming city, life still plays the stronger suit.
Rio's 10 million people, of course, represent only a small proportion of Brazil's 160 millions. One of many, much more relaxed cities lies at the other end of the country, 3,000 km away on the north-east Atlantic coast, just a few degrees shy of the equator. Fortaleza promises to become one of the quality tourist resorts of the 21st century. It was selected by Conde Nast Traveler magazine as one of the places to spend millennium New Year's Eve. On the streets of Fortaleza, nobody advises you to take off your rings.
Go to the Dragao do Mar Cultural Centre, and you could be in Barcelona. A splendidly organised museum displays marvellous examples of the "naive" popular sculpture and intricate lacework for which the region is - or should become - famous. Another floor has a fine collection of modern art. A third is a walk-in, three-dimensional journey into the world of the vaquieros, the cowboys who attempted to tame Fortaleza's punishing hinterland.
Behind such fine tourist shopfronts and the endless miles of shimmering unspoilt beaches, however, something else is happening which may be more significant for Fortaleza's - and Brazil's - future.
Fortaleza is the capital of Ceara, which used to be one of the poorest of Brazil's 26 self-governing states. Its arid interior, part of the notorious Sertao ("Badlands"), provided a bare living for cattle ranchers - most of the time. In the 1870s, as many as two million people died of famine. As recently as the 1980s, some of the population, which has never grown again beyond three million, were reduced to eating rats.
Today, Ceara has the fastest-growing economy in the country. This is largely thanks to an innovative Programme for Sustainable Development, piloted by the state's very popular governor, Tasso Ribeiro Jereissati. He is one of the most influential politicians in Brazil, and a close associate of (and possible successor to) President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
He has his critics on the right, because he has broken the power of a corrupt local political oligarchy. He is not loved by the conventional left, because thousands of state jobs have been shed in pursuit of fiscal rectitude and public service reform. But Jereissati is no heartless Thatcherite. Environmental protection, public health care, and, above all, education for the poor, are core elements of his policy, along with the construction of a huge new port and an ambitious state irrigation plan to make the Sertao bloom.
On a whirlwind three-day tour of such projects, it was impossible to do more than guess at their overall impact on Ceara, let alone their implications for the other 157 million residents of Brazil. But almost everything we saw in this state seemed to be inspired by a heady, infectiously joyous cocktail of social commitment and radical innovation.
In the Cesar Cals general hospital, Project Kangaroo propagandises tirelessly for breast-feeding, even for very premature babies. The happy, relaxed faces of hundreds of young mothers, and their sated offspring, were convincing enough. So was the statistic, endorsed by UNICEF as an "example to the whole world", that infant mortality had been halved in four years.
IN a dusty market town in the Sertao, a sparkling technical college has transformed the middle of nowhere into a centre of learning. The school draws in hundreds of students from isolated farms in the empty hinterland. The hi-tech equipment is impressive, but so is the realism which places it alongside the technology of the 1950s in the workshops.
"Some of these kids will go to work for multinational factories," we are told by a teacher, "but most of them will return to their farms and villages, where the best they will have are a few conventional tools. They must learn to work with the old as well as the new".
A glistening silver helicopter lifts us back up over the Sertao, where a rare month of rains has unleashed a riot of fast-growing green shrubs, occasionally splashed with a burst of lilac bushes, in the semi-desert. The chopper takes us to the Castenhao dam site. This is the biggest irrigation project in Brazil, controversial in terms of its environmental and human cost. But in the Jaguaribe river basin, alternatively scorched by drought and devastated by floods, the argument for the dam has been won, 90 years after it was first proposed.
An engineer speaks as though he were building the pyramids, which, given the colossal scale of the walls which dwarf us as we talk, is understandable. He insists that every one of the 12,000 people who have to be re-housed now supports the dam. And that, far from damaging the ecosystem, it will enhance the survival chances of a dozen endangered species. Perhaps he will tell us next that the dead in the local cemetery have also voted to be relocated. Nevertheless, his commitment to "doing something new for this country" is patent, and impressive. The men who built the Shannon scheme must have talked like this.
Back in Fortaleza, we visit an ABC centre in a poor suburb. ABC, in Portuguese, stands for "Learn, Dance, Grow". In one yard, teenagers practise capoeira. In another, they play basketball. In one workshop, old women make bunting out of torn-up magazines. Next door, children learn computer skills. Across the yard, there's a basic literacy class. Other elderly women do exquisite embroidery work on hammocks, for export to European department stores.
The walls are covered in slogans for sexual education. "Live with pleasure and responsibility. Use a condom!" is the most popular, repeated eight times.
Outside the centre, self-styled anarchopunks have contributed graffiti with a hostile view of Brazil's upcoming quincentennial celebrations: "500 years of massacres, disrespect and destruction of free peoples and cultures." Simplistic, yes, but not entirely at odds with a history in which slavery, exploitation and genocide feature strongly.
Inside, the kids continue to practise capoeira, long after the official visiting party has passed on. Some of those "disrespected" cultures seem to have survived, and thrived, after all. And another slogan on the walls, quintessentially Brazilian in its sunny optimism, seems at least as appropriate to the next 500 years: Vida e fazer todo sonho brilhar - Life is to make every dream shine.