There was the problem. The words did not match the feeling with which they were spoken.
Corruption is a cancer corroding the federal district, Carlos said, rapping his index finger against the tabletop. Lota was relieved that he was steering the conversation to more familiar ground. She was gearing up to join in when Elizabeth loudly exclaimed, Is that a little frog on the table?
She was pointing at one of the branches they’d gathered from the woods. A trick, Lota assumed, to retain the table’s attention. Then she shouted, Oh! and leapt to her feet. She reached one hand into her dress, shrieking and wiggling her torso as if suddenly compelled to dance a samba. Not half bad, for an American.
Cookie, what is it!
A frog has just leapt into my bosom!
Everyone roared with laughter, even Carlos. She was perfect. Lota’s saborosa Cookie was perfect.
LOTA WAS ARGUING with Sergio over the angle of the concrete ramp leading to the new wing when Leticia rang. Carlos has been arrested, she said. He was taken from the offices of Tribuna and is being held at the police headquarters. We’re gathering there to protest his arrest, and can you come?
But why . . . ? Lota was unable to form the rest of the question.
The list of corrupt policemen, Leticia said.
On the drive down the mountain, Lota battled unusual emotions: fear for Carlos and fear for herself if any injury came to Carlos. He was the only man who had ever truly seen her. He recognized the value of her ideas, he encouraged her passions, he requested her ear when refining his own thoughts and positions. Women were so easy to charm and bully that their good opinion didn’t register. Lota took it for granted. Men were different. Generally, she had to kick them in the balls before they might turn their heads to acknowledge her presence. But not Carlos. He had always given her respect.
Intent on these thoughts, she didn’t take in Elizabeth’s words. There was an odd shimmering in her gut that only after some moments did she recognize as panic. She carefully took her Cookie’s hand and asked her to repeat what she’d said.
I only remarked that Carlos is a clever man. First he provokes the authorities to arrest him, then he gains even more admirers for sticking to his principles and therefore gains greater notoriety and power, and at the same time he’ll sell a heck of a lot more newspapers. Elizabeth chuckled. Very clever.
Lota was speechless at Elizabeth’s ability to give offense. She withdrew her hand and returned to her thoughts for the remainder of the drive.
It was raining in Rio. When they arrived at the police headquarters on Rua da Relaçao, they were informed that Carlos’s presence had caused too great a disruption and that he’d been moved. She had to raise her voice quite loudly and prepare for the kick in the balls before they told her where they’d taken him: to the barracks of the military police, several blocks away. Lota had no patience to move the car; she ran to the second location without an umbrella, Elizabeth trailing, and arrived soaked to the skin. A gate barred their entrance. Lota shouted to be let in. She did not like gates blocking her way. As a child, before her family had been forced into exile, she had stood at the gates of the Belgian embassy holding a box of cigars for her father, who’d taken refuge there from Vargas’s thugs.
She banished these thoughts as a policeman now opened the gate and she rushed into the barracks. She was relieved by what she saw there. The magnitude of the response to Carlos’s arrest was far beyond what she might have hoped. Throngs filled the reception area and the halls of the barracks. Lota saw immediately that it would be impossible to reach Carlos. A line snaked from the rear quarters of the building into the reception area; she assumed these people were waiting to visit Carlos in his cell. Leading politicians from the União Democrática Nacional and other friendly parties were present in great number, but Lota also noticed at least as many getulistas and congressmen from parties opposed to Carlos. So cynical of them to appear here. Surprise! His cause had become fashionable. Look over there, at the ultimate proof: society-page ladies in Chanel suits who didn’t even know Carlos or have any idea what he stood for. Their primary interest was to hover in a group near the newspaper photographer like pale butterflies. In every doorway stood men in uniform, soldiers or policemen, who knew which? Lota could never distinguish between the two. This country was so rife with uniforms you couldn’t tell a garbageman from a general.
A man knocked against her, smelling strongly of cologne. No, not cologne, it was cachaça! On the other side of the room, he offered a glass to a woman. Someone turned up the volume of a radio playing sambas.
Are we to start dancing? Lota cried out in frustration. Do they think this is Carnaval?
Elizabeth’s bewildered expression only irritated Lota more.
Carlos will be freed by the end of the day, Elizabeth said softly. This is all for show, Lota. A power play. That’s my guess.
Yes, but you know nothing, Lota snapped.
Who was in charge here? She would demand an explanation of the charges on which Carlos was being held. She would insist upon his release. When she spotted Odilon Braga, leader of the UDN, Lota felt a great burden lift from her. Odilon was Carlos’s greatest friend in Congress and he was no fool; she was not, after all, alone among do-nothings. Lota moved quickly toward him, pushing through the crowd.
The sight of the man beside Odilon brought her to an abrupt stop.
Lota looked to every corner. She looked where she might hide. All her anger had abandoned her; now she was weak, afraid. Why had Elizabeth left her alone! Jose Eduardo must not see her. Yet she felt it was inevitable, as if she were standing in the center of a room that had suddenly cleared. Everyone else seemed to have moved to the perimeter. The helpless feeling made her furious, yet the fury did not make her strong. Only later, when she thought of the things she might have done or said, could she tap into that strength. Right now, she was a child again.
He’d seen her. He’d nodded and was sliding across the floor in her direction. He moved as though he believed himself a waltzer. On his arm, of course, was the usual woman at least forty years his junior, so beautiful it was a joke. This one wore a blue dress that cupped her breasts like two hands and left her slender brown shoulders bare. The kind of dress they called a tomara que caia—let’s hope it falls.
Where had Elizabeth gone?
A phenomenon occurred during earthquakes, she’d read somewhere: liquefaction. Under excessive force, rock melted.
She couldn’t move. There was no escape.
Over there, she saw now, Elizabeth was laughing with Manuel Bandeira. How like her! When Lota had first introduced them, she’d had to make plain that Manuel was the poet in Brazil before Elizabeth had taken any real interest. It wasn’t enough that Manuel was a gentleman, elegant and mannered in the old style.
As Lota approached, Elizabeth’s tone of address to Manuel struck her as overly familiar, verging on disrespectful. Manuel, she was saying, if you asked a poet in New York what you just asked me, you would be completely shunned. No one wants you to know how their work is going. They’re too afraid you’ll jinx it. But I’m happy to report that I’ve been working very hard. Or at least I was. I wrote some new pieces and actually sold them. I feel close to finishing a book of poems that’s been lying fallow for four or five years. I’ve even begun a translation. Lately, though, I just want to lie in a hammock and watch the birds fly by.
You must indulge that impulse, Manuel said. My best ideas often come to me in a hammock.
Elizabeth ceased laughing when Lota gripped her arm.
You shouldn’t have left me alone, Lota said in a low voice. He’s following me.
What on earth? Elizabeth said. Then her gaze shifted past Lota, and Lota knew that Jose Eduardo was upon them.
If I could show him my house, Lota thought, I would not feel this way. I would not be reduced. He would know what I am capable of.
But he will never step inside my house as long as I live.
Good day, Manuel. Good day,
Carlota.
Lota held herself erect. She would stand eight feet tall not five. Good day, Jose Eduardo, she said. She smiled, or rather, her face felt numb; she could not tell what it was doing. If only Carlos were not in danger. That was why she’d become incapacitated. Lota nodded to the girl on his arm, who, she noticed, had a big dark mole behind her ear, like a button.
Manuel pardoned himself.
Jose Eduardo took Elizabeth’s hand and kissed it. It is an honor to meet you, Miss Bishop. His English, so crisp and fake. How irresistible he believed himself to be. Elizabeth fell for it, of course. Look at her pleasure. She thought she was being recognized by an admirer of her work. There were further inconsequential words before Jose Eduardo took his leave of them.
Who is that charming little man? Elizabeth asked, and then she fully took in Lota’s face. Lota, dear, what is it?
Lota shrugged. He is no one.
No one?
He is my father.
That little man there?
Lota nodded.
Each weekend, when she’d come home to Petropolis from the convent school in Rio, he was at the train station to meet her. The most distinguished of papas in his dark suit and hat. How she’d scandalized the nuns—even as a child! She saved up the stories to tell him; he threw back his head and laughed as he held her hand. He was so tall, he cast his shadow over her. She skipped ahead through the streets, always running back to him.
Elizabeth clasped Lota’s hand, draping her rain jacket over the indiscretion as she held on. For some moments, she said nothing. The room full of people rotated around them; they looked only at one another. Lota had grown used to their life in Samambaia, just the two of them. Perhaps she had already begun to take it for granted.
She told Elizabeth she wanted to leave. She wanted to go home.
That was when Carlos’s voice spoke beside her. The accusers have become the victims, he said, while the victims are becoming the accomplices of criminals.
Everyone fell quiet. The words came from the radio nearby. An interviewer from the radio station must have been with him, broadcasting Carlos live from his cell. The sound of his voice was enough. She knew he was safe. The fight had not gone out of him.
I have been jailed for the crime of defending the interests of the people of the Federal District, Carlos continued defiantly. However, I feel honored to be held under the fascist laws of the Estado Novo.
13
The road to Ouro Preto was a joke. Before they’d gone fifty kilometers, they already had a flat. With a cigarette dangling from her lip, Lota crouched at the roadside spinning the tire iron, while trucks came sputtering up the mountain pass and playfully tooted their horns. Investigating, Elizabeth found that Lota’s wraparound skirt had fallen open, treating the truck drivers to a view of her glorious white Victorian bloomers. She shielded Lota with her coat until the new tire was in place, then on they went through the mountains.
They’d planned to drive the jeep, but two days before their trip Lota had run into the wife of the director of the Patrimonio Artistico, who claimed she had just been to Ouro Preto and had traveled over the most marvelous new road, simply skimmed along for miles, so they’d loaded up the Jaguar instead. The old cow had obviously lied through her false teeth. Three hours out of Petropolis the new road had still failed to materialize and Lota erupted in colorful language every time they hit a pothole, though the horrendous condition of the pavement by no means slowed her speed. Descending out of the mountains, she flew past warnings of curvas perigosas and grazing livestock and signs that indicated they were in peril of having boulders fall on their heads, until one of the donkeys munching grass along the shoulder ambled nonchalantly onto the asphalt and stood directly in their path. Lota hit the brakes and the car began to slide, a cliff face to their right, a precipice to their left, the donkey fore. That a vehicle was approaching at high velocity did not appear to enter the animal’s consciousness until the last moment, when Elizabeth could see, at extremely close range, its eyeballs rolling back in terror. The car came to rest within inches of the donkey’s rump. Only then did it lunge back to the safety of the grass.
“Why do you have to drive like a maniac?” Elizabeth cried. “We could have been killed.”
“Look, my dove, what a beautiful valley.”
Elizabeth’s heart was still galloping as Lota took her hand and kissed it passionately. Sideways in the road, the car faced a vista of low hills. The light on the patchwork of cornfields below, she had to agree, was especially gorgeous. But she looked at the hand Lota held as though it were not a part of her.
THE ROAD DID not improve. Elizabeth began to imagine a new highway that was not entirely a figment of the imagination of the wife of the director of the PA. Perhaps she and Lota had simply missed the turn, and right now all sorts of people were flying along a beautiful, oil-black ribbon that had no potholes nor donkeys nor, as they encountered next, soldiers holding automatic weapons.
Children playing dress-up—they were simply too young to have machine guns slung over their shoulders—stood in the center of the road, checking vehicles. One of them motioned Lota to pull to the side of the highway. The fact that Lota did precisely as he said and got out of the car without backtalking or muttering any of her standard oaths alarmed Elizabeth even more than the guns.
On the roadside near the checkpoint, a line of stalls sold goods to travelers fortunate enough not to be terrorized by the armed forces. Weary-looking women cooked over open fires, and a man sat patiently beside a pile of blackening papayas with a bugle in his lap. At one untended stall, a line of cloth dolls hung from strings, as though swinging from the gallows. In theory, these images should be used in the service of poetry, or so Elizabeth had heard herself say in any number of non-life-threatening settings. Poetry should be so present and constant to the poet that it intrudes upon all other thoughts and experiences. One’s art should act as the prism through which all of life might be thoughtfully observed.
Lota’s conversation with the soldier on the side of the highway did not, fortunately, appear to be turning into an argument. On the contrary, Lota suddenly pulled the soldier into an embrace. She was shaking her head with amusement as she returned to the driver’s seat.
“He wanted money, of course,” she said once they were on their way. “He told me the car was in violation because the muffler had come loose and was making an unpermitted noise.”
“It’s only loose because of this absurd road!”
“I told him I was taking a famous American poet to meet the United States ambassador in Ouro Preto, and that we should not be delayed.”
“He believed that?”
“He lied, so why should I not? Then I asked him what his mother would think if she knew he was harassing ladies on the road who’d done nothing wrong. He backed down. They all do.”
“Well, he’s hardly more than a child.”
“He said that it gets so hot standing in the sun all day that if we don’t want to be stopped again, we should hold out a cold drink as we approach the soldiers in the road. That’s all it takes. A cold drink. I gave him a little money anyway. They make nothing, these poor boys.”
IT WAS CLOSE to sunset when they reached Congonhas, where they were to stop for the night. The muffler’s rattle resounded through the town’s narrow streets as Lota began shouting out like a madwoman to the people on the sidewalk. “The Prophets! The Prophets!” she yelled, while without surprise the locals waved them onward. One old woman sweeping her front porch warned that the way ahead was perigoso, and directly, the road slanted nearly vertical, as if to launch them toward the planets.
At the crest of the hill stood a church.
In the dying light, the hilltop was utterly still. A samba on the radio drifted up from the town below. Dogs barked distantly, back and forth. “I wanted to surprise you,” Lota said, and gazed at Elizabeth adoringly. Her love was offered so freely, and with such ease, that at times it pained Elizabeth as much as it p
leased her.
She and Lota left the car and drew near the church. Upon the steps and parapets stood ten or twelve figures made of stone. The sculptures towered above them, their silhouettes against the deepening blue of the night. A bit spooky, really, if magnificent.
“So these are the Prophets,” Elizabeth said.
“Your friend Manuel Bandeira describes them as a poem in stone. They were made over two hundred years ago by a sculptor called Aleijadinho, the little cripple. He was a leper and a mulatto. His mother was a slave. If he had not been a genius, he would have been an outcast. By the time he sculpted these Prophets, his hands had become useless from the leprosy. He worked with chisels strapped to his forearms.”
“Is there anything you don’t know about?” Elizabeth asked.
“I know a little about everything,” Lota replied, uncharacteristically rueful, “but not much about anything.” She moved up the steps.
Hacking away at stone with chisels strapped to one’s useless hands—it was not an entirely unfamiliar feeling. Even so, Aleijadinho had rendered the Prophets with an exquisite touch. Some of the figures pointed toward heaven or outward to an imminent danger, while others cast their eyes upon the ground. And though the men’s robes were of Old Testament times, their expressions were so precise, and so feeling, that no modern person could fail to recognize them. A prophet would necessarily stand alone, friendless. No one would have wanted to hear the messages these fanatics delivered: that the human race was a disappointment to its creator, that the earth, so freshly wrought, was already close to exhaustion. It was not wrath or moral outrage or the certainty of God’s judgment that clouded these men’s faces; it was profound loneliness.
As night fell, the Prophets turned to dense black outlines against a sweep of stars. Brazil often made Elizabeth feel that she’d traveled backward in time; it was no great stretch to transport herself back to her Nova Scotia childhood, or even to a colonial era, when all the daily social formalities, the little rattling coffee cups that made their appearance at every call upon a neighbor or business, and the pageantry of religious and secular festivities appeared hardly to recognize the modern world. The Prophets catapulted Elizabeth even further back. In the beginnings of human history, all tribes regardless of continent had felt themselves dwarfed by powerful forces they could never counter or understand, by extremes of weather, phenomena of earth and sea. You saw it in the literature, from Homer on. Life in Great Village had not been so different, really. You endured, and you found fellowship in the endurance; you did not hope or wish to gratify personal pleasure. Lota, of course, refused to submit to forces greater than her own, or even to acknowledge them. Perhaps, Elizabeth thought, she herself was in a way more Brazilian than Lota would ever be.
The More I Owe You Page 11