The More I Owe You

by Michael Sledge

At last the road opened up and Lota blasted out of Rio’s orbit. The wind whipped Elizabeth’s hair around her head like Medusa’s coils. Still, the highway allowed a respite from the constant gear changing and thigh touching, so she could finally shift her attention from the hand upon her knee to their route. On Rio’s outskirts, a settlement of ramshackle houses—if you could even call them houses, these shacks constructed out of cardboard and crates and other discarded materials cobbled together—went right up to the barricade of a petroleum plant, another hellish landscape of billowing gaseous clouds and sulfuric flames leaping out of tall pipes.

  “Not the most favorable view of a city,” Lota yelled, “its entrance or exit.”

  Elizabeth nodded. Odd, the things that prompted Lota to speak. Interesting, always, but impersonal.

  She turned slightly to study Lota’s profile. Even as she drove, Lota grinned, as if dominating the roadway were a source of intense satisfaction. The workman’s shirt she wore was rolled up on her forearms. She was a diminutive person, but there was heft to her, strength, and also an ease with that strength. You would not mistake her for a delicate woman, nor one whose habit it was to bend to another’s will. Now that she was on Lota’s home turf, Elizabeth was desirous to know more, to ask some of the personal questions that came to mind: Where had she grown up, where was her family now—and most of all, what was the real story between her and Mary?

  Mountains popped up from the plain, and they began winding steeply upward. Elizabeth had to keep turning in her seat to look at what they’d passed, the unbelievable variety of plants and trees—the mangos, bananas, and papaya, of course, those she’d expected, but also the thousand others she didn’t know the names of, so many of them in flower, flowers of every color and size, and great, glorious old trees bearded with exuberant mosses. Underneath them, little roadside stands sold drinks and rugs and purses fashioned out of scraps of brightly colored fabric.

  “Look at that,” Elizabeth cried. They had slowed enough on the sinuous road that conversation was at last possible. “They’re selling old rusted metalwork.”

  “They’ll sell anything,” Lota said. “Almost all of it’s trash.”

  Elizabeth had been about to say she found the birdcages charming.

  “But I like the bird jails. I bought a very old one for my house. I’m building a house. Did Mary tell you?”

  “Yes, she said you were completely obsessed.”

  “Absolutely! You must be obsessed, or else there’s no point. Do you know modernist architecture? Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer?”

  “Le Corbusier, I know. I remember now we spoke of him in New York. But I don’t know the other one. Is he German? My ignorance is vast.”

  “Niemeyer is a genius, but of course you Northerners know nothing about him because he is Brazilian and we’re just savages! To you, Brazil is coffee and bananas and cannibals and piranhas. Modernism may have started in Europe, but it is pure Brazil. Le Corbusier came here, he influenced our architects, but what they are making now is a uniquely Brazilian form of architecture. Elegant, sophisticated, organic, and slightly insane. It will show the world what Brazil really is.”

  “Is that what you are? I’m beginning to understand the insane part.”

  “It’s a modernist house I’m building,” Lota said proudly.

  “I gathered that.”

  “I hired a young architect. He’s very up-and-coming. However, to be honest, the best ideas for the design are my own. It is really like no other house that’s been built in this country. Four materials are used: concrete, stone, glass, and metal. All of them are visible. A modernist building does not hide how it’s constructed, it prefers to reveal itself to you, it blurs the boundary between inside and outside.”

  “I’ve known a few people like that,” Elizabeth remarked.

  The joke appeared to go right past Lota. Then, smiling, she said, “And those people can be very exciting. Just like my house.”

  The road climbed higher, up and up. Tendrils of mist began to encircle them, and soon they were driving through dense fog. In the car’s cocoon, Elizabeth could see little of their surroundings beyond the latticework of branches over their heads and the screen of thick foliage on either side of the road. She’d have to write a note to Miss Breen. I’ve come to the Green Mansions, just as we pictured them.

  Meanwhile, Lota continued her lecture on the subject of Brazil’s modernist architecture. No matter what she spoke of, you could not help but be impressed by the expansiveness of this woman’s mind. Lota was so passionate about the house she was creating that Elizabeth began to wonder at her failure of passion for her own work. Poetry, when she was young, had seemed to be an open gate into the most lush of landscapes, as lush as that through which they were traveling now; nothing else had compared to the excitement of discovering her growing powers or the reaches of her own imagination. Somehow, that had changed. Poetry had used her up. It had left her desiccated. She’d dedicated her entire adult life to the craft of writing, and yet even with the praise she’d received, the admiration of a number of people she herself had long admired, and the envy of a handful of others, it had given so little back, even less in times of real need. It was like indentured servitude—or no, like faith in some particularly dry, ascetic, self-castigating religious sect. The reward lay in the devotion itself. It did not relieve her of her thirst.

  “Do you read much poetry?” Elizabeth interrupted.

  “I read everything,” Lota said, as if affronted by the insinuation that she might not. “Manuel Bandeira, I love especially. Do you know him?”

  “I know the name but not the work, I’m afraid.”

  “He’s one of Brazil’s foremost poets. And a friend. Carlos Drummond de Andrade?”

  “Nor him.” Elizabeth added, “But I enjoy Camões.”

  “He is not Brazilian, he’s European! How can a poet such as yourself not have read the Brazilian masters of the Portuguese language?”

  “I suppose because I can’t read Portuguese.”

  Lota was quick to beam her beautiful smile. “Then I will introduce you to them.”

  It was unclear whether Lota meant to the work or to the poets themselves. They continued to gain elevation, Elizabeth could feel it in her ears. The mist, dissipating, transformed into a bright, luminous haze. The sun began to warm her skin. Then she saw that the fog had not simply evaporated but that they had risen above it and were now at such a great height they looked down upon the clouds. Jungled mountain peaks lay all around, the valleys below turned to rivers of pillowy white. A surfeit of feeling bloomed in Elizabeth’s chest, a moment of breathless pleasure.

  They still had a ways to go, Lota assured her. They were nearing the town of Petropolis. Samambaia was a bit beyond. Just then, they nearly collided with another automobile. A taxi pulled onto the road, and Lota had to brake quickly and swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid it. She screamed something at the taxi driver as she zoomed past, an epithet that Elizabeth, without knowing an ounce of Portuguese, understood to be exceedingly offensive, and immediately resumed her relaxed good nature. “We’ll go around the town so we can get to my house more quickly,” Lota said.

  Elizabeth saw that her thumbs had been digging into the base of the cake. Still shaken by the near accident, she said, “That was a fine how-do-you-do.”

  For another ten miles or so, Lota kept repeating the phrase and chuckling to herself. That’s a fine how do you do, she murmured, ha ha ha, as she flew along a terrifying stretch of road beside a river, Elizabeth clutching the car seat and still trying not to upend the cake in her lap. Gashes in the hillsides revealed the deep red earth, much of which had washed over the roadway, big splashes of red as though an animal had been obliterated by a truck. They turned into the hills, where eventually the road vanished altogether. They stopped at the bottom of an incline facing a nearly vertical mud track. “Sergio won’t drive up here,” Lota said, gunning the engine. “He has no balls.”

  Whoever Serg
io might have been, he struck Elizabeth as a man of sound mind. Lota didn’t hesitate. Bouncing among the ruts and potholes, she maneuvered the tiny car up the hill from one dry patch to the next like a little wren hopping up a tree trunk.

  At the top they reached solid, level ground, and there Lota parked in front of a cement wall. “Come,” she cried, leaping out. As Elizabeth struggled to stand from the low seat, Lota was already there to take the cake out of her hands and say, “Leave that for now and come.”

  SO HERE WAS the famous house. Introduced by a concrete plane that nearly bruised your nose. Lota entered through a hole in the wall, and Elizabeth followed her host through a number of long concrete rooms, one communicating with the next. When they stopped, they’d made a loop back to where they’d begun. As promised, the boundary between inside and outside was blurred beyond recognition. There appeared to be no inside at all. The house was open to the sky, and at present it had no external walls, just great gaping holes to the out-of-doors. Thin steel trusses, almost delicate, were being fitted over their heads and would soon, Lota said, support a roof made of aluminum sheets; the trusses called to mind the latticework of tree branches Elizabeth had just seen on the mountain road. Here and there labored dark little men in beaten-up straw hats. One carried stones in a wheelbarrow, a second chipped them with a chisel and mortared them into a wall fifteen feet high. Several more lifted the trusses onto fittings set into the concrete.

  “My house is the first in Brazil to incorporate this style of roof,” Lota said. “The workers think I’m mad. They’ve never seen anything like it before. Of course they haven’t—it’s revolutionary. If I’m not watching them every minute, they build things their own way, as many times as I tell them otherwise. Then they become furious when I have to yell at them to tear down what they’ve done and start over. We spend the whole day screaming at each other.”

  She laughed as she reported this, as though the process of altercation and deconstruction were another aspect of the work she heartily enjoyed. As if to prove her point, Lota approached the foreman, and within moments her voice began to rise while a knot of men looked blankly at the ground and shook their heads. At one particularly strident point, the men’s voices objected in a chorus. Lota immediately cut them off.

  Elizabeth backed away from the argument and stepped outside through one of the enormous holes in the wall. The house was odd, it took some getting used to. She sympathized with the workmen; it was like nothing she’d ever seen before, either. At once solid and light, serious and cheerful, like Lota herself. She squinted her eyes and imagined what Lota had described—a house sheathed in glass, a glass jewel box on the mountainside, inviting nature in from every side—and she glimpsed just how immensely beautiful it would be. From the concrete slab where Elizabeth stood, the view was only the most recent in a series of breathtaking sights. A lush green valley spread before her, forested mountains rising on the other side. Behind the house, a sheer face of black granite shot vertically upward for at least a thousand feet, like something out of Edgar Rice Bur-roughs. You half expected a pterodactyl to glide across the face of the cliff. Long streaks ran down the black rock, like the tracks of gigantic snails, while clouds cascaded over the lip, creating a waterfall of mist that was constantly evaporating and regenerating. The sun was hot on her skin and head, but before she began to feel she’d had too much, a cloudlet passed over and cooled the air to ease any discomfort. Lota was building a house in paradise.

  The argument grew more heated. Elizabeth turned to watch, the men gesticulating while Lota imperiously held her ground. Just as Elizabeth feared they might come to physical blows, they all began laughing and embracing each other. Lota joined Elizabeth outside.

  “They are wonderful,” Lota told her, “but they’re like children. They’d sit here all day scratching themselves if I didn’t give them a little push.”

  “Why is that? If you watch any Brazilian man for five minutes, you’ll see him scratching and adjusting himself. It’s as if they’re constantly arranging flowers in a vase.”

  “Those aren’t flowers,” Lota cried. “Those are the jewels of Brazil! If they didn’t keep grabbing their balls, they’d forget they were men. That’s the problem with this country: The men have to keep reminding themselves they are men, and the women are even worse. They have no balls, either!”

  Elizabeth couldn’t help laughing, though she was scandalized to hear a woman speak so coarsely. Lota continued to look directly into her eyes, without shyness or embarrassment, like the men who’d watched her from the kiosks at the beach. Only two hours had passed since she’d whisked Elizabeth away from Rio, yet several times already, at different pauses and shifts in the conversation, Elizabeth had found herself thinking, I’m going a step deeper. There was a different timbre to their interaction here than in New York. Lota was playful, perhaps even a bit suggestive, but her hostess gave no sign that they were conspiring in anything secretive or untoward. Elizabeth had to suppose that was merely the Brazilian way. There was really nothing more going on here than an interesting, attractive, and high-spirited woman showing an American friend her new house.

  “Right where we’re standing is one of my favorite places,” Lota said. “A patio nearly as many square meters as the house itself. Can you see how the inside, the world of domestic life, what you might call our ordered world, will reach out to greet the natural world, the exuberant world we have no control over?”

  “Like a big mouth with its tongue sticking out.”

  “Or else,” Lota said, “like a hand extended.” As she spoke, she made the gesture. Her hand, palm up, reached toward Elizabeth.

  Stepping back, Elizabeth peered over the edge of the patio. Below lay rubble, rocks, metal scraps. “Are you camping out here? I don’t see any furniture. You don’t even have a roof.”

  “We’ve rented a friend’s house down the hill until we can move in. But that will be soon. It’s a tradition to have a party when you raise the roof, and I’m planning this party in two weeks’ time. You’ll be here to celebrate with us.”

  More a command than an invitation. Elizabeth failed to break from Lota’s gaze.

  “Mary’s down there now,” Lota went on. “We’re having a lunch today for some friends. My sister will also come. She’s a terrible bitch, but she will be polite to you, it’s only me she hates. Of course, all of them are eager to meet you.”

  “All of them?” It was absurd, her instantaneous panic, but truly she found it difficult to breathe among such a group of strangers and their expectations of her. At the same time, she was angry that Lota had so quickly snatched away this brief moment of peace.

  “You’re the guest of honor. I promised to bring them a famous American poet.”

  “Yes, why don’t you go out hunting and shoot one?”

  Lota held Elizabeth’s eyes with her kind look. “Instead, I think I’ll call one from the trees.” Gently, she took Elizabeth’s arm. “But never mind that now, Elizabeth. Let me show you the rest.”

  They left the construction site behind. There is the vegetable garden, Lota said, there is the donkey, there is the gardener who once bit the donkey. And here, pass under this bough, let’s enter the forest, let me show you all its new and strange pleasures.

  Elizabeth watched Lota’s solid back as she followed. Climbing the hillside through the trees, Lota pointed out what Elizabeth, even with her trained eye, might otherwise have passed: a lichen that looked like a crater on the moon, an armadillo’s burrow, a nearly microscopic bloom. They came upon a stream and followed it back down the slope as it carved out a series of small pools. Lota stopped at an especially lovely one. A waterfall cascaded down, and moss and ferns grew among the rocks. For a while, they sat on a boulder by the water, side by side, in silence. Before today, Elizabeth had never seen Lota outside of the city. Lota had been fixed in her mind as an urban creature, her dynamism necessarily linked to the city’s own electricity. The museums, the parties, the galleries, amid the ci
ty’s great architecture—that was where Lota shone brightly. But here, among these trees and rocks and butterflies, with the city’s cacophony a million miles away, Lota was obviously every bit as much at home, if not even more so. She sat as still and quiet, as much in repose, as the stones in the stream.

  “I’m going to enlarge this pool,” Lota said. “I want to make a bathing place here. It will be a secret place.”

  “There’s no end to your plans.”

  “That’s true. I have many plans.”

  “They’re all perfectly beautiful. Everything you’ve shown me is beautiful.”

  “There is even more to show you, Elizabeth.”

  The noises of construction had faded behind those of the stream and waterfall, the wind, a bird chuckling in the brush. Some minnows nibbled at the debris speckling the pool’s surface. The branches hanging low over the pool were covered with bromeliads throwing out scarlet spikes, and all along one branch bloomed small yellow orchids with brown spots; they looked just like a leopard’s coat.

  “My friend Pearl and I went to the orchid house in the botanical garden,” Elizabeth said. “Do you know it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It’s funny how they present orchids in a public display, as if they were some overly fussy, Victorian sort of flower, don’t you think? Look at those. It’s a tough plant, living on the nourishment it derives from nothing more than air. It hardly even has roots. And the leaves, they’re almost like a succulent’s, something that lives in the desert, without water. Then it produces such an exquisite bloom.”

  An odd, tight emotion, nearly like anger, strained Elizabeth’s voice. Lota was watching her. Before Elizabeth turned away, she thought she may have recognized something of Miss Breen in Lota’s eyes, the gentle assurance that Lota could see past her mask and didn’t disapprove of what was revealed there, that it wasn’t detestable.

  “Should we go back?” Elizabeth said, suddenly worried the moment might turn malignant somehow.