The More I Owe You

by Michael Sledge

  “You know, Elizabeth,” Mary said, without glancing up from her knitting, “I’ve been meaning to mention how strong your work has become. We do get the New Yorker here, even if it doesn’t arrive until months late. I always thought your writing very skilled, of course, but there was something slightly too darling about your earliest poems. You’ve grown tremendously.”

  “Thank you.” The book in her hand was momentarily in jeopardy of being flung into the fire. The sting of too darling nullified any compliment. “I was just telling Pearl that sometimes I think I’m only published there because for whatever reason, the boys’ club has finally decided to let one woman in.”

  “Balls to the boys!” Both women looked up to find Lota in the doorway. “You do not wait for an invitation to their club. You smash down the door!”

  “Has Carlos gone home already?” Mary asked.

  “He has.”

  “Did you finish plotting Vargas’s ouster?”

  Lota did not answer but stretched out upon the floor, rested her head on a pillow, and stared at the ceiling while smoking a cigarette. “The problem with this country,” she began, “or the problems . . .” Then she stopped and did not complete her thought.

  These evenings, after the guests had gone and the three of them remained, reading, knitting, discussing the day, were for Elizabeth the greatest luxury during her time at Samambaia. As the night deepened, what made itself evident was the balance Lota had managed to create here, a harmony between the world of action and the world of reflection.

  “Besides,” Lota said, sitting up abruptly, “you don’t need an invitation to the club. You’re famous.”

  “Lota, I’m not famous.”

  “Of course you are! Among your friends are Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. They are famous poets.”

  “One isn’t famous simply by association.”

  “Artists have a special status with Lota,” Mary said, “if you hadn’t realized that already. When we returned from New York, she was determined to create the sort of public arts programs in Rio that we’d seen in the States. There was really nothing like that here before, and now, thanks to Lota, there is.” Elizabeth had rarely seen the woman exhibit so much feeling. “Brazilians are extremely proud, but they know almost nothing about their own artists.”

  “In some ways,” Lota said, “we are a very backyard country.”

  Misuse of the English language had never charmed Elizabeth more.

  “Lota knows everyone,” Mary went on. “They were all dying to become involved in Lota’s plans, even the rich. People flock to you, don’t they?”

  “It is because I have a great deal to offer.”

  “Not too modest, our Lota.”

  “I only say it because it is true.”

  “She’s had no formal training,” Mary said, “yet she is a master of every subject. Though sometimes I think she is still trying to find her way.”

  “Read me another poem from your friend Lowell,” Lota demanded.

  Mary put away her knitting. “I’m off to bed. The two of you could read all night, I think.”

  “And all day, too!” answered Lota.

  MARY WONDERED HOW long Elizabeth planned to stay at Samambaia. The single instance she’d brought up the subject, Lota had lost her temper. True, as Lota had cuttingly remarked, Mary was not as natural, nor as generous, a host as Lota was, but nor did she desire to be. She greatly preferred the days and nights when they had no visitors. The sounds of the two women reading and laughing in the other room carried back to where Mary now lay in the dark; she knew that she would go to sleep alone and also wake alone. Since Elizabeth’s arrival, Lota had not once come to share her bed but had retired each night to her own room. And though Elizabeth had been their guest for only a few days, even the politest, least intrusive of visitors—which, Mary had to admit, Elizabeth was—became a distraction from the construction of the house.

  Oddly, Elizabeth’s arrival had also brought a flood of memories from the time they’d first come to know one another in New York. Not nostalgia, certainly—Samambaia was Mary’s home, she looked neither forward nor back—but recollected rooms and conversations and people that were tinged with fondness and something like longing. At the time, she’d already been living for several years in Brazil, having decided to stay after she retired from dancing, and then, of course, she’d met Lota. It was hardly the city of New York or the life she’d left there that had drawn her back from Rio. Near the end of the war, Mary could no longer resist the duty that called her home to serve in whatever manner she could. She stayed in New York for two years and joined the women’s voluntary services, working in a veterans’ hospital and occasionally at a children’s care center, tending the infants of women who’d taken over the factory jobs left vacant by men who’d joined up to fight. Lota thrived, of course. She turned the whole trip to the States into a grand adventure that, in her mind, had originally been her own idea. In no time, she was bringing her new friends to the apartment: musicians and painters and museum directors and shoeshine boys and whoever else crossed her path.

  That was how Mary first came to know Elizabeth. Louise Crane, an elegant woman whose company she enjoyed, brought Elizabeth to the apartment, and the four of them began spending time together. Louise, sophisticated and certain; Elizabeth, fidgety, uncomfortable in her skin, always making wisecracks instead of speaking from any true feeling. You never had a sense of who she really was. The rumor was that Louise had already left Elizabeth, or that Elizabeth had left Louise, but that was hardly evident in how they related to one another. Louise was still very attentive, and it was understandable why a kindhearted person would be. Elizabeth was like a bird that had flown into the house and was dashing itself against the windows. You rushed to save it, wanted to hold the delicate thing in your hands, even if you might wonder at the same time if it carried some sort of pestilence.

  Even then, Mary remembered, she and Elizabeth had not truly spoken to one another. Mary didn’t have much to do with literature, though out of duty she read Elizabeth’s poems when they appeared. In fact, the two women had almost nothing in common. They had always talked of daily things, just as they did now. Still, she was not incognizant of Elizabeth’s charm, of her wit and intelligence; she did shine, in her way.

  It was a different Elizabeth who’d come to visit them in Samambaia, one with more polish and a greater sense of her effect on others. At those dinners in New York, she’d never noticed Lota watching her, like a sparrow hawk eyeing a morsel, and now she did notice.

  During those years back in the States, Mary had given herself one private luxury, a dance class two or three evenings a week. While Lota was out with any one of a hundred new, brilliant acquaintances, Mary had gone to a studio near the hospital where she worked, and there she had pushed her body until it cried out. Sometimes she’d stayed in the studio alone, mastering the slow execution of movement, the extension of line. Her life as a performer had been long past by then. She hadn’t been on a stage in over five years, but her body remembered this discipline; it still wanted to be willed into this. Besides, she had always enjoyed the practice more than the performance.

  Mary would not deny that Elizabeth subjected herself to her own rigorous discipline; you could see it in the poetry. But Elizabeth, you could also see, enjoyed the performance at least as much as the practice.

  ELIZABETH KEPT HER eyes on Mary as she left the room, and then her glance fell to the floor. When she looked up, she found Lota watching her, as Elizabeth knew she would be. Boldly, she held the Brazilian woman’s gaze. This was what she’d looked forward to since waking, this stretch of time alone with Lota in the dead of night. Mary’s joke was accurate; they really could read and talk until dawn. The comfort and playfulness between them, the unguarded exploration of mind and imagination, and the enjoyment that was so obviously mutual seemed to rise out of a long familiarity and warmth. Only once in her memory—on first meeting Cal, when each had been instantly drawn to
the other—had Elizabeth been so aware of her great good fortune in having discovered a like soul. Yet she and Lota were not like souls, they were nothing at all alike.

  “I’m so envious of what you’re making here,” Elizabeth said. “You imagine something beautiful, and then you bring it physically into being. But you create something more than a physical place, more than just a house. Somehow it makes possible an interior change as well, an interior space comes alive . . . Oh, I don’t know how to explain what I mean.”

  “Yes, you do!” Lota said, immensely pleased. “We’ll make a modernist of you yet.”

  “I imagine only words. A handful of words, at that.”

  “But what words.”

  “Twenty poems in twenty years. Hardly an impressive output. Right now, I’m more excited about cooking.”

  Lota put a fingertip to the back of Elizabeth’s hand. Her eyes commanded Elizabeth to believe. “Poetry, too, is a kind of food. I know that I would starve without it, and I am not the only one.”

  “Sometimes I think I’d like to do what Mary is considering. To have a child. But I’d make a terrible mother.”

  “Nonsense,” Lota said, “you’d be magnificent.”

  “I have no idea of mothering.” She felt dangerously close to revealing too much, yet she revealed even more. “I never received it myself.”

  “You had no mother?” Lota said.

  Oh, everyone knows my mother went mad, she nearly said, to throw off Lota’s concern. But Lota demanded, and deserved, more than easy deflection.

  “My father died of a long illness when I was just a few months old. My mother never recovered from his death. That’s what they say, but she must have been unbalanced already. Who can really know for sure? I have so few memories of her. She was hospitalized off and on, then permanently when I was five. By that I mean she was institutionalized. I didn’t see her after that. She died right when I graduated from college, nearly the same week. Her name was Gertrude Boomer. Imagine—what a name. She was about the age I am now when she died. I lived for a time with my grandparents in Nova Scotia. They were poor, and wonderful. This place reminds me a bit of there, it’s funny. Then I lived with my father’s parents in Worcester. That’s a town in Massachusetts. They were rich but very cold. They had no concept of what to do with a child. And then I went to live with my aunt . . .” Elizabeth trailed off.

  “Coitada,” Lota murmured, putting her hand to Elizabeth’s face. “Well, my mother was also institutionalized, but the institution was the Church. They shut her away inside a confessional!” As they both laughed, Elizabeth could hardly bear the hand on the cheek, the compassion in Lota’s gaze. The tenderness pained her. Yet her heart moved toward it like a parched woman in the desert to water. Or was it the mirage of water?

  THE WEATHER ON the mountainside was extremely changeable. Ominous dark clouds drifted from beyond the black-rock mountain even as sunbeams struck the green expanse across the valley. Fireflies confused the dimming light for dusk. Fireflies an inch long, with lights like beacons. Butterflies as big as hummingbirds, hummingbirds as big as hawks. Caterpillars the size of snakes. A fluorescent green lizard with a red-hot tail. Her notebook and sketchpad lay in a bag at her feet. Every so often while sitting at the pool, Elizabeth was caught in a sudden cloudburst. The rain dripped upon her shelter of leaves, and when it began to drip lightly upon her as well, she did not seek protection indoors. It was only a matter of moving, after the clouds passed, to another rock in a patch of sun, where she would dry out in moments.

  ELIZABETH AND MARy drove to the far side of the black rock, to a town called Correia. Correia had none of the grandness of Petropolis, Mary explained, since the mountains had protected it from becoming part of the imperial court established in Petropolis a hundred years earlier. “Petropolis is a town of the rich,” she said. “It always has been, and it still is. I prefer simpler places.” They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  As they wound through the mountains, Elizabeth thought of the party Lota had thrown the previous day to celebrate the installation of the roof. The workmen had all got very drunk on beer, or choppe, as they called it, and tried to hoist Lota on their shoulders. “Viva Dona Lota!” they’d shouted. “Viva la choppe!” And then, so inebriated they had lost their balance, they’d nearly bashed her head on a rock. Lota had stepped out of their collapsing arms as regally as a queen from a palanquin, gracing the earth with her delicate foot. The afternoon had brought thunderstorms, and as they stood beneath the new roof, admiring the sound of the downpour on the aluminum panels, water had begun to gush down an interior wall. Within minutes, Lota had leapt into the jeep and was speeding down the mountain to Rio for an emergency consult with Sergio. Thinking of Lota now, Elizabeth turned to the car window, hiding her smile from Mary.

  She also concealed her disappointment when they reached Correia, which was not exactly dreary but neither was it the charming, unspoiled colonial town she’d imagined. Mary parked in the central square, where the low buildings were a patchwork of new and old materials, plastic upon plaster, and Elizabeth followed her into the church. The painted walls were dingy, nearly blackened by eons of candle smoke. Two people sat in the pews, an old woman in the back and a young one near the front, their mumbled prayers magnified by the emptiness. So quickly that Elizabeth thought she was brushing something off her blouse, Mary crossed herself and dipped in a gesture of genuflection. Something about this made Elizabeth leave the church; she did not know whether to laugh or cry. She honestly wished she liked the other woman more. Mary was surprising, but there was no playfulness to her.

  When Mary joined her outside, they strolled around the perimeter of the square. Elizabeth thought, I will not speak until spoken to. Lota would have had all sorts of witty things to say about this land of the lost, or else would have known half the people and greeted them by name. A few blocks out from the square, Elizabeth could see the town fading into countryside. She amused herself for a good quarter of an hour with the idea of hanging a left at the next crossing and marching directly into the hills. Then Mary took a seat outside a peculiar little grocery store and ordered coffee for them both.

  A birdcage hung from a rope tied to the patio’s overhang, in which a dove sat placidly on a stick. Elizabeth sipped the hot coffee. At first glance, the square appeared devoid of activity, but as she continued to observe, the citizenry began to emerge from hiding. A mother holding a baby passed across the square, where she met two girls with jugs balanced upon their heads. A boy exited one storefront carrying a chicken by its feet; he entered another, then came sprinting out, chickenless. A laborer wheeled along a metal cylinder of gas, wearing a straw hat painted green. Stumbling past their table came a toddler with two gold hoops in her ear. She nearly lost her balance and then regained it just as both women’s arms went out to catch her fall. Some paces behind came the father, hands behind his back, giving them a smile of golden teeth. Across the square, two young men worked beneath the hood of a car, while managing to keep an eye on the girls filling their water jugs at the fountain. The memory of Great Village rushed upon Elizabeth. On afternoons that had seemed to have no end, she’d sat on the front porch with her grandmother while the townsfolk passed before them. Every person had a story; all the stories interconnected. It struck Elizabeth that her want of drink had never served as more than a distraction from another, more piercing want.

  “What a lovely place,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mary replied. “It is.”

  “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  Shyly, she met Mary’s glance. It was impossible to infer the other woman’s emotion. It was as if Mary wanted nothing, as if she were entirely contained, entirely poised.

  “I always wondered how you could make your home here,” Elizabeth said softly, “how you were able to leave the U.S. utterly behind. Now I’m beginning to understand.”

  “Brazil can be maddening. It can be extremely difficult to feel comfortable here. For us, I me
an, for Northerners. And for all the reasons you’d expect. The poverty is heartbreaking, the inefficiency, the corruption. Sometimes, at their worst, Brazilians seem like parodies of themselves. But the North . . .” Mary shook her head. “It gets harder and harder to imagine ever living there again.”

  Elizabeth became aware of a noise at her back that had been going on for some minutes, a fluttering of wings. She wanted to investigate, but the delicate beginnings of an accord with Mary made her hesitant to move. The waiter who’d served them was talking with the shopkeeper next door. He laughed, spat a big glob onto the ground, and rubbed his crotch. The two women again glanced at one another and smiled.

  Once more, she was distracted by the noise, and this time Elizabeth turned. Outside the birdcage, a dove was batting itself against the bars. She thought at first that the dove had gotten loose and was trying to return to its perch. Then she saw that it was a second bird altogether, a wild dove attempting to reach the tame one inside.

  “Besides,” Mary said, “Lota’s very convincing. She wants me here, and she knows how to get her way.”