The intruder went. Now Teresa was clean, except for her hair, and she had to take her biggest risk yet. She washed her hair, unable to hear properly for that time, and was lucky enough to have her hair out of the basin, while she was standing leaning back to squeeze water out of it, when a woman came in, and stared, but did not say anything. She left. Teresa combed her wet hair. She knew that now, clean, in her new red dress, her tall white shoes, with her hair smooth and sleek she was as good as anybody, and she walked out of the hotel and sat down at a table in the sun, so that her hair would dry. It was late morning. She did not know how to judge the people there, tourists mostly, except for the girls whom she knew to be from the favelas, like herself. Like herself, they were all good-looking. With a nice dress and shoes and the price of a drink a pretty girl from one of the worst slums in the world could sit at a table outside a fine hotel and no one would say a word. A waiter might, though. The other customers might not know who they were, the waiting girls, but the waiters would have understood it all.

But when one came, she ordered an orange juice and sat there, by herself, a long time. She saw one of the girls go off with a man into the hotel. At last a man did come to sit at her table, and she had to be courageous. He was a tourist, and spoke ten words of Portuguese. He was a German. He asked how much, she told him a sum so enormous she waited for him to laugh at her: but this was a famous hotel, she knew that, and everyone here was well-dressed, and very well-fed. He said, yes, he agreed. Now she had a bad moment: was he going to ask her if she had a room? But no, he took her arm and they walked back through the town to a smaller hotel, where no one stopped him, with her, going to the lift. She was carrying with her, in the glossy bag of the dress shop, her old clothes, which did not smell nice. She managed to leave this bag in the lift, as they went out of it.

This man liked her, and asked her to come every day — he had a week here. This was a stroke of luck: she did not know yet how big a one it was. But perhaps it was not only luck. She was beautiful, she discovered, looking into the long mirror in the room. She was beautiful and she had an aptitude for sex. She did not mind him. He was not like the soldiers.

At the end of the week with the German she took her mother more money than she had ever done, at one time. But it was not all she had, and she was becoming obsessed with the danger she was in, carrying wads of money taped under her breasts. Banks were not for people like her. She did not even have an identity card yet, and knew that if the police caught her she would be in bad trouble. She stood in line for a day and got her card, a piece of paper saying she was Teresa Alves. She felt let down by this identity card, which did not match what she felt about herself. And the card did not solve her problem with the money. A certain shopkeeper would keep money for customers, for a price, but she did not trust him. Yet she had to, and did give him half of what she had.

She did not go to the tables outside that first hotel for a week, and when she did, she had bought another dress, a green one, and she had been to a real hairdresser for the first time in her life. She was by far the prettiest woman at those tables, and she got another customer at once, a Greek. Her career at that hotel went on well, for a couple of months. The family was being fed. Her nest egg was growing. And she was planning how to escape being a tart. She was less afraid than she had been, in the time of the soldiers, about disease, but she was nervous, although she had been to a doctor who told her she was all right — so far.

Being a whore was expensive. She knew that her profession was costing her, in clothes and expensive drinks and make-up and the hairdresser and paying a maid in the hotel to keep her good clothes safe for her, what her father had earned in years of his life of being a poor farmer.

Then she had another lucky break: she was lucky, she knew. One of her customers, an American working in the theatre, used her for information about local manners and mores, took her on trips to check out locations, asked her to translate simple things — by now she knew some English, not much, but enough to make it seem that she knew much more. And so she was becoming known in that world: television, film, theatre, and was offered work. And she gave up whoring, though she would earn less money being respectable. She went back to the favela every few days; she had a cheap room in Rio: at last she had a place to keep her money and her clothes. Her mother said to her with bitterness that soon she would take herself off, ungrateful daughter, and leave them all to starve. But Teresa could never do that, and her mother knew it. Both understood the mother was angry out of shame. Now Teresa told her that she had a good job, but her parents did not believe her, but pretended to, to save her face — and theirs, so they were not living off a tart's wages.

The family was better off than many in the favela. The father had built a little brick house with an iron roof, where the rain banged and thundered. There were two rooms and in them not six people, but three, mother, father, and a sickly little girl. The two boys, the one nearest to Teresa, fourteen, and the one down from him, twelve, had joined the gangs of boys that roamed the streets, stealing, taking what they could. If they did return home it was only to demand some money and they were off again. Sometimes Teresa saw a gang of street kids, looked out for her brothers and saw them rushing past, or idling with blank eyes, on the pavement edges. Drugs. They took them and they sold them. She scolded them, but knew she ought to be afraid of these cool, cruel street children who killed for the sake of a handful of reals. But she had helped bring them up, recently had fed them, and so she felt she had the right to scold. She gave them money. And then had to keep a lookout for the gangs, because it might not be only her brothers she could expect to come demanding money.

Two years ago Alex had employed her, when he was working on the play, and they had become lovers. She made a favour of it to begin with, did not want him to think she went with the job. But he would not have minded, or even noticed, much. He was fond of her, relied on her, and had no idea at all of the dirty roads she had travelled, at first literally, from her faraway dying village, and then, using her body to escape from poverty. He took things as they came, and in Rio there was lovely Teresa, and she was certainly not more than he deserved. He was used to the good things in life and he liked being liberal with his money. 'I have a mother,' she said. 'I give her money.' And he gave Teresa money, a good salary, more than he would have done if there had not been this mother.

When Teresa allowed herself to think about her situation she was attacked by panic. On her entirely depended her mother, her father, and the sickly child. She was scheming how to rescue her brothers. The trouble was, her room in the flat of a minor singer who let the room to keep herself eating was tiny, and she could not ask her brothers there. If she earned more, got a better place? — but she was not prepared to go back to prostitution. Responsibilities sat on her shoulders like heavy sacks she had to carry. She was seventeen, though she pretended to be twenty-two, just as she put on a show of knowing more English than she did. She often dreamed of her village, though it had been so poor and life so hard: at least she had been looked after. She yearned to have somebody between her and the dangers that surrounded her. It was her mother's strong arms she wanted, and she knew it.

And so there sat Teresa, her head on her hand, thinking of how as a child running about in the dust she had no idea that so soon she would have such a load on her, and Ben sat at the table with her, grieving, 'I want to go home.' And sometimes Teresa put her arms round him, 'Poor Ben,' and even, 'You're a good boy, Ben.' Even while she said this she reminded herself that this was a bearded man who, his passport said, was thirty-five, even if he had told her he was eighteen. People treated him as if he were younger than that, and he behaved like an obedient child, she thought. People behave as they're treated. She changed her manner towards him, asking him like an adult person to do little things for her, make her a sandwich, or coffee; she believed she saw a difference in him because of it.