LeBron serves coffee as Rio bleeds.

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Even though I frequently visit my hometown to see my parents, in the years I’ve left Rio I’ve lost my accent, my tan has faded, and I’ve become an outsider to my hometown. That morning on vacation, I turned off my phone, accepted being a tourist, and joined the others on Enrique Dumont, a sandy beach on the border of Ipanema and Leblon.

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Time passed without any promise. There, the sound of the waves and the fellow sellers harmonized like a song, and Rio was at his calmest. I decided to beat the cold and pack up to finish camping and look at my phone. There was a message from my mother. From Copacabana, she alerted me to a large-scale operation in the Alemão and Peña complexes, creating early morning rush-hour conditions. Therefore, it would be inconvenient to take the subway or bus to return to Post 6.

Almost instinctively, I entered Shopping Revlon. It’s an air-conditioned sanctuary you’d find in any major city on earth, but convenient for going to the bathroom or grabbing a cup of coffee. I passed an employee at a large sporting goods store, and in between nervous looks as he checked the news on his cell phone, I began to hear words like “It happened close to home,” “Shooting,” and “Many people died.”

Meanwhile, passersby were quietly walking around in the hallways, carrying branded bags and checking out store windows. After a couple of coconut shakes at a bar in Ipanema, I continued walking, a little dazed, struggling to decipher the code and trying to separate rumor from tragedy, both physically and mentally on vacation.

Once I entered the bathroom, the cleaning staff’s gentle conversation drew me back into the real world. I was worried that my relatives wouldn’t answer the phone and how I would get home.

At the cafe, couples talked about their travels and children ordered brownies. At the same time, my espresso with a slice of pie took 20 minutes to arrive at the table. Employees were alert, chatting and exchanging information. There was fear, and death was on the horizon. At the same time, there was also ambient music and air conditioning.

I returned to the table, drank my coffee, and watched the movement come and go. During part of my childhood and adolescence, I studied in a Catholic private school a few meters away, but I always had the impression that among the unfamiliar faces I found an old classmate who had grown up in a natural way. At the same time, I feel further and further away from this world. Not just as a tourist, but as a foreigner in my own land.

The city seems specialized in maintaining this privilege while the world falls apart next door. Leblon Shopping Center and Peña’s Plaza San Lucas, where bodies were laid out the day after the brutal attack, are about 25 kilometers apart.

I understand Rio to be a place where worlds with little contact overlap: those who consume and those who serve, those who flee and those who pretend nothing is happening, those who truly believe that nothing is actually happening. Nihilism here overlooks the sea. And perhaps true nihilism is this calm coexistence with barbarism, this quiet belief that everything can continue as it is, even at the cost of the death of others. The city seems to be suspended between hedonism and hell, offering a place to grab a cup of coffee while bodies pile up.