Isabel was the real girl from Ipanema

The boardwalk of Ipanema Beach, contrary to appearances, does not follow in a straight line. It has a small recess at the height of the Tom Jobim statue, as you arrive at Arpoador. A rare combination of factors (wind, extremely dry tide, phase of the moon) means that, right in the stretch in front of this curve, stones that spend months and months under the sand come to the surface.

Also because of the small winding, at a certain time there is a patch of shade right there, between the rocks, creating a perfect environment for a post-dive break, without the need for chairs or tents. Few people know this. Isabel knew.

She knew everything about Ipanema and would go to that corner, sometimes with her children, with her grandchildren, sometimes alone. It was beautiful to see her there, in addition to being practically an ISO 9000 certificate of quality: if Isabel attended, it was because it was good.

She followed a certain ritual, which I followed from afar for some time. She walked at a fast pace always on the hard sand, close to the water. Officially, the reason was to exercise the knee that, as she once put it to me, was “a bit buggy”.

Then he took a dip, dried himself in the sun and put on a button-up shirt (white, most of the time), jean shorts and low-top sneakers, like Conga or Superga. When she saw her, I would scream: “Isabel!” She responded by waving goodbye and smiling.

I still didn’t know who I was: Just another fan, who took advantage of the geographic proximity to admire everything about that incredible woman. All the same. From the Indian print bikini to the charming way she tied her hair, passing through her lifestyle and the way she raised her children. People from this neighborhood -where she lived in three different addresses- had the privilege of accompanying all of this. I admit that, more than following, I paid attention because I was always enchanted by her.

And Isabel gave all the reasons for that. The activism of a lifetime (she was always on the right side), being a mother of four at the age of 27, the fight against the objectification of women in sports…. her making a naughty face with her little finger in her mouth, in the 1980s, when she was the muse of volleyball. What woman!

Being a journalist gives us the opportunity to meet our idols, and with Isabel my approach was via WhatsApp, in 2019. The magazine I worked for would throw a party at Astor’s late Rio branch, close to that curve where the stones appear in the sand . I was asked to invite “nice cariocas with the face of the city”. It was the definition of Isabel.

I sent a message, she got excited (“I love Astor”) and asked a question: “Can I go with my son Pedro?” Of course it could. She ended up taking her sister, costume designer Inês Salgado, and we didn’t speak that day. I left it to greet her until the end of the party, when the hall was less crowded, and when I saw it, where is it? He was already gone.

The next day, he texted. “The party was great! I stayed an hour, had a drink, had fun”. We regretted not having spoken, but she promised that soon, “we would meet in Rio or Ipanema”. She didn’t give another one. At another event, I don’t remember which one, perhaps a session at the Festival do Rio, I went to Isabel.

I told her that I also studied at Colégio Notre Dame, where she started playing volleyball, and that I spent my childhood in a village of houses (a rare thing in Ipanema) where she had lived. “Ipanema is great, isn’t it?”, she told me. I said “Hey!”, and after that we started talking from time to time.

Nothing too intimate. Basically agenda ideas, comments about Flamengo and outbursts about volleyball players who became Bolsonarists, denialists (“What a shame”). We haven’t spoken since 2021, when, at the height of the pandemic, she explained that she was slow to respond to a message because she had gotten sick. I thought: “What do you mean? Does Isabel get sick?”.

Today was the same thing. How did Isabel die? I thought she was the strongest woman in the world. “Immorrable”. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll no longer have her walking through the sands of the neighborhood she loved so much, that her bicycle will no longer be parked on a pole in Vieira Souto. Toughness. With all due respect to Helô Pinheiro, Isabel is the real girl from Ipanema.