The More I Owe You
Page 9
Now I have no ties, Lota said.
Song for the Rainy Season
[JULY 1952 - JANUARY 1958]
Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
rain-, rainbow-ridden,
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.
In a dim age
of water
the brook sings loud
from a rib cage
of giant fern; vapor
climbs up the thick growth
effortlessly, turns back,
holding them both,
house and rock,
in a private cloud.
11
ELIZABETH WROTE THROUGH the night. It was extremely cold. As the dark hours lengthened, she added sweaters one by one, finally pulling a heavy blanket over her shoulders. She’d cut the fingers off a pair of woolen gloves, like some waif out of Oliver Twist, and typed with bare, numb fingertips. From the darkness outdoors there came an intermittent clang, as if signaling the hour, a resonant, metallic note that sounded like a hammer upon an anvil. It was the mating call, Lota had said, of an enormous frog that lived in the stream. The frog was called the blacksmith.
Elizabeth continued to write even as the sky lightened and the household woke around her and Lota tiptoed past and the construction started up. An hour later, Lota passed by once more; without stopping she resettled the blanket that had slipped from Elizabeth’s shoulder. It amused her that Lota would not dream of interrupting, not even to say good morning or to ask how the work was progressing. In Lota’s view, artistic creation occurred through a mystical channeling of the gods and was not to be interfered with. This mad rush of typing was exactly what she would expect of a writer in the grip of inspiration. Lota would reject any suggestion by Elizabeth that the manner in which this piece had consumed her energies was so anomalous in her career that she hesitated to call it by the name of writing.
PRIVATELY, ELIZABETH DID not absolutely settle for some time the question of whether or not she was in Brazil to stay. It had taken nearly two months to recuperate from her clash with the cashew. Even though she was spoiled on her sickbed by Lota’s attention and by that of Lota’s kind friends, and even though by the time she left the bed Mary had moved to the apartment in Copacabana and Lota had begun building a writing studio for Elizabeth beside the waterfall, she still made a series of reservations on ships bound for Argentina, the next stop in her original itinerary, canceling each one as the departure date approached. Some perverse part of her desired to flee from a happiness that seemed to have sprung out of the ether.
The compulsion to continue south had finally abated. Elizabeth had instead conceived of a plan to return to NewYork in the company of her Brazilian friend. For Lota, the answer to any proposition of substance was an enthusiastic Yes!, and so they’d gone back to the States to spend the spring. A couple of months to show off Lota to her friends and to collect her things—that was how Elizabeth had thought of the trip. The city had never seemed so dazzling as when she and Lota revisited the shops, street corners, and galleries where they’d first encountered one another five years earlier, but it was in New York that she’d first begun to sense her own shift of reference, to feel that she was now a resident of there rather than of here. During the steamship passage back to Rio, the magic of crossing the equator had transported them from early summer directly into winter. Happily, as if throwing streamers from the ship’s deck, Elizabeth had renounced all attachment to the sequence of seasons she had previously considered inviolable, to languages, fruits, and geography. To her own resistance to Yes.
Arriving back in Samambaia, she’d been surprised by how frigid the nights in their mountain enclave had become. The chill clutched at one’s soul. She walked through the house stooped over from the weight of wool blankets, yet they did nothing to prevent her constant shivering. Lota’s house was still only a handful of rooms more or less open to the elements, welcome to all varieties of neighbor, human and animal. The floor of the house remained an unfinished cement slab punctuated with the footprints of cats, dogs, and the gardener’s children. No doubt there were monkeyprints as well. Around midnight, the floor was particularly refrigerating to the toes, socks or no.
Not long after their return, Elizabeth remarked to Lota that in Great Village a simple sheet-iron stove had heated the entirety of her grandmother’s modest house, even in the dead of winter. It had simply penetrated all the rooms with warmth, and hadn’t they such a thing here? Any intriguing architectural possibility Lota appropriated with fervor. She’d never seen a stove such as Elizabeth described in any of the old houses in Petropolis, nor for that matter in any house in Brazil, and so to the idea Lota formed of this old-fashioned, no-frills iron stove she attributed the allure of the modern.
They drove the next morning along the winding river road into Petropolis, to the workshop of a blacksmith called Rodrigo. The name was impossible for Elizabeth to pronounce; she could not get her tongue underneath the aspirated r’s. Hodhigo. Inside the ironworks, twenty or so men hammered away at hot, glowing metal. They threw open the doors of blast furnaces and were bathed in orange light. The heat and leaping flames, the tangy, molten smells, the screams of the buzz saws and the banging of the hammers, and the laboring, sweating, half-naked bodies—it was a vision of Hades.Yet it was an inviting Hades. In spite of the noise and the heat, it was a place where one might feel at peace. Lota shouted over the din to describe to Hodhigo the stove they wanted him to make.
A boy in partial shadow was hammering intently upon a piece of metal. Bang. Bang, bang. Clang. Elizabeth wondered what he might be forging: a horseshoe, an iron gate, a milking pail? The sound transported her to another time and place, one that was in memory’s shadow. The sound was also deeply familiar, anticipating by many years this visit and the song of the frog that lived in the stream; however, she could not pinpoint the how or why. A door in her mind cracked open, but she was unable to see into the room.
From the covered porch of the ironworks, Elizabeth turned to gaze upon the street. She left Samambaia infrequently to come into Petropolis, but she always found it enjoyable when she did. For instance, the names of the stores on this block alone: Ladyman, Very Person, Mister Rats. What on earth did they all sell? Her mind, often too lively for its own good and rarely at ease with itself, now looked upon the world and found nothing that did not gratify.
Voices began to rise at her back, and when she turned to look, Rodrigo was shaking his head. Lota’s voice grew louder. He might have been explaining that the design Lota wanted was impossible. Or perhaps not. Elizabeth had learned that what often sounded like the tones and mounting passions of an argument could as easily be a forceful account of one’s liver problems. By now, though, she had certainly learned to identify annoyance on Lota’s face. It was time to intervene.
“He swears the stove won’t work,” Lota said when Elizabeth took her arm.
“I know that it will. The principle of the thing is extremely simple. Tell him that.”
Lota made a sharp-tongued comment to Rodrigo that Elizabeth suspected was not an exact translation of her words. Lota’s hand upon her back guided her out of the ironworks.
THE NIGHTS WERE cold, but the days were hot and bright. By late morning, the sweaters were shed. After lunch, as she liked to do, Elizabeth took a brisk walk up the mountain. In no time she was very much in the wilds. The sky was a vertiginous blue, the forest a thousand brilliant greens, the vertical mountain black, like a great ship’s hull cleaving the earth. Showy birds darted here and there, or rose up in a flock. No one she had asked seemed to know any of their names, not even Lota. They simply lived happily among them. As she ascended the hillside, the sounds of Rodrigo’s workshop came back to her and Elizabeth’s memory began to loosen and uncoil.
“Make me a ring!” she cried, and he bent a red-hot nail into a circle.
The memory of Nate came to Elizabeth so piercingly that she felt she could close her eyes and observe his workshop as clearly as if she were sitting on that table now. A deep-russet horse with green crust around his mouth stood patiently while Nate shoed him. He shifted his weight and exhaled in a burst. He was so much larger than she was, but not at all frightening. He didn’t make sudden noises or erratic movements. Nate was like that, too—predictable.
When Elizabeth looked back down the mountainside, the view of the Brazilian landscape seemed to have a screen laid upon it of a different, remembered view. From the Chisholms’ pasture, you looked beyond the elms of Great Village to the long, green marshes and the sea. As the tide receded, the wet mud reflected the sky. The colors were more muted than here in Brazil but they were beautiful nonetheless: the soft, gauzy blue of the atmosphere, the lavender mud at dusk, the pale-ochre moths that fluttered everywhere over the grass.
It had been years since she’d recalled Great Village with such feeling. In the days after the visit to Rodrigo’s workshop, these visitations of memory began to intrude with more and more frequency upon the current moment, as if the bank separating the past and present had begun to erode. A street on the outskirts of Petropolis shimmered into the lane leading out of Great Village on which Elizabeth had driven Nelly to pasture. One of the men who worked for Lota, named Manuelzinho, rode past on his bicycle wearing a painted straw hat, and instead she saw Dr. Gillespie, the minister who’d always worn a straw sailor hat he’d painted black, pedaling along. Dr. Gillespie had been kind to her, though for some reason her grandmother had found him lacking as an interpreter of God’s word.
One day, Elizabeth encountered Dona Fernandes down the road from Lota’s house. The elderly lady’s mind had recently begun to fade, and Elizabeth found her trembling with confusion, unable to remember where she’d come from or what her destination had been. As Elizabeth escorted Dona Fernandes home, the image of Miss McNeil returned vividly to mind. Nearly forty years earlier, she’d come upon a stricken Miss McNeil in the lane, turning this way and that. I can’t find my way home, she called out to Elizabeth. Where am I? Thinking it was a game, Elizabeth shouted, You’re in Timbuktu! and, laughing, ran on. When she told her grandmother later how funny Miss McNeil had been, Gammie became furious with her.
Elizabeth was not certain why all roads suddenly led back to Great Village or why she was being assailed by these memories, but she did not resist them. The sound of the ironworks was a key to a lock, opening a door to reveal something else to her, something important. It was leading her to another sound, she realized; when it came to her what that second sound was, she thought, Of course. She remembered it too well, though it had occurred on only one occasion. At the time, she had run away from it, to the safety of Nate’s.
There were two sounds, and they were linked.
RODRIGO SENT WORD that the stove was finished. He greeted Elizabeth and Lota with an enormous smile and his arms held wide, as though he might pull both women to his barrel chest. With a flourish he proudly presented his product, and Elizabeth had to clap a hand over her mouth to prevent herself from laughing. The stove was ludicrously unworkable. Too small by half, with a door the size of a mouse hole. Inside, the grate was positioned nearly against the top, leaving room for little more than a handful of twigs.
“What is this piece of merde?” Lota shouted. “Any idiot can see it’s useless.”
Before Rodrigo could respond, Lota launched into a tirade volubly dissecting the ironworker’s craftsmanship, with some pointed asides on his further failings as a man. She was truly indignant, and yet it appeared to Elizabeth that it was also something of a game to her, or, rather, that the stove was merely an excuse to exhale her rage, not the cause of it. Rodrigo’s face reddened as he attempted to interrupt, but Lota did not allow him the opportunity. Elizabeth took a pencil from her purse and began to sketch on a scrap of paper. She could picture her grandmother’s stove as clearly as if she were sitting on the floor before it, warming her toes and drinking a cup of cider.
“In my opinion,” Rodrigo finally shouted over Lota, “what you want can’t work.”
“I don’t give a monkey’s crap about your opinion. You should have done what I told you.”
Rodrigo’s men laughed, and Rodrigo turned to them. “Leave it to a woman to come up with this idea. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Of course you haven’t!” Lota screamed. “You are a peasant who pisses on his own feet.”
The huge man and the diminutive woman continued to shout at one another while Elizabeth drew. The front view had the door open to reveal the interior and placement of the grate; the back view showed the connection to the exhaust pipe. The men in the workshop had stopped their work to watch the shouting match, obviously amused by the spectacle of Rodrigo’s public demeaning by a woman half his size.
When Elizabeth was done with the sketch, she raised her own voice. “Stop yelling and translate.”
Rodrigo was huffing like a bull, his eyes wild and fierce as he turned them to Elizabeth’s drawing. “I grew up in Canada,” she said, and when he showed no recognition of the place, she added, “It is very cold there, with ice and snow. This is the stove in my grandparents’ house. It kept us warm all winter long. This is what we’d like you to make. I’ve marked the dimensions.”
He studied the paper as Lota translated. “This kept you warm?” Rodrigo asked incredulously. “You are sure?”
“Yes, absolutely. I swear upon my mother’s grave.”
This call upon the sanctity of her dead mother’s resting place at last conquered the blacksmith’s resistance. Rodrigo shot a dark glance at Lota before he turned to the nearest assistant and, shaking the sketch in his hand, thundered at him to get it right this time.
“Maybe the second try will be charmed,” Lota said.
“A gentle touch can work wonders.”
“You must have your stove. I have to keep my poet warm.” Lota kicked the misbegotten stove with her boot. “You’d think they’d never felt cold in their lives. Brazilians have absolutely no sense of their own comfort.”
“Does that include you?”
“Of course not,” Lota said, smiling. “I have an exquisite sense of my own comfort.”
THE NIGHTS GREW even colder. Elizabeth woke two or three times with the sensation that a great fist was squeezing her lungs in its grip. She sat up, for some minutes in suspense. If the tightness bloomed into a coughing fit, she left the bed so as not to disturb Lota and moved into the little den, where one day, she hoped, her grandmother’s stove would be radiating lovely heat.
“You can’t sleep?” Lota stood in the doorway in her red long underwear. She looked just like a stout fireplug.
Elizabeth shook her head, slipping air in through her mouth and struggling to suppress the inevitable cough.
Lota’s hand lay upon her back. “I think you must have a little bird trapped in your rib cage. I can hear him whistling.”
She took Elizabeth’s hand and led her outside. In the bracing darkness, Lota lay on a chaise and pulled Elizabeth against her breast, wrapped her in red arms.
“Look at the stars, my heart. You could never see so many stars in New York. It is a different sky completely.”
“Yes, it is,” Elizabeth breathed. The stars made a cre
amy texture across the night above.
“Doesn’t it look as though they are pressing down to earth? So many of them. Can you feel them brushing your hair?”
Yes, she felt the soft caresses on her hair, on her face. The streak of white in Lota’s own hair was like a comet’s tail. Elizabeth loved to wash it in a basin by the stream. They lay on the chaise until she fell asleep in Lota’s arms.
BRAZIL WAS KIND to the soul but punishing to the body. It was hardly a mystery why the asthma had become relentless. The humidity and cold, the upwards of ten thousand flowering plants simultaneously releasing their pollen into the air, the jungle of molds and mildews in beautiful shades of gray-green, black, chartreuse, and magenta that seemed to sprout overnight on decaying fruit and the walls and even your own clothes you’d folded upon a chair the previous day—any of these alone would be enough to induce respiratory red alert. Bundled in blankets, Elizabeth guided herself through one wheezing breath and then another, fighting the sliver of panic that could often be worse than the physical constriction of her lungs.
She was quite fond of molds, however, even if they were a hazard. Such subtle, intricate forms.
The attacks eventually subsided, but the constant deprivation of sleep made of her days a dreamy stupefaction. It was perhaps for this reason she’d become susceptible to the rush of memories of Nova Scotia; they were more nearly like visions from the unconscious than recollections. Her old reliables, adrenaline and norisodrine sulphate, provided momentary relief at best. In fact, the inhalant only caused her lungs to feel on fire. At the advice of her doctor in New York, Elizabeth agreed to try an experimental drug called cortisone, though its effects, both salutary and ill, were not fully understood. The cortisone worked like a miracle. After just a few days, Elizabeth could breathe. Once again, she could freely indulge in her fondness for molds. But she still couldn’t sleep. The new drug sent her flying.