Lota gazed up at the Prophet Isaiah. “Look at his face,” she said. “As if he thinks he’s the last Coca-Cola in the desert. Men haven’t changed in a thousand years! The sculpture is genius, but still I want to knee him between the legs.”
“Lota, you don’t ever change.”
White teeth flashed in the darkness. Hands took hold of Elizabeth’s waist. “Thank you, dear Cookie. I take it you mean I am true to myself.”
“That’s certainly undeniable,” Elizabeth said with a laugh. But that had not been her precise meaning.
IN THE VALLEY below, amid green, a sea of red-tiled roofs. Churches stood like high fortresses upon outcroppings of stone. On the outskirts of town, they were stopped by a length of rope held across the road by ragged girls in ragged dresses. Their pretty faces were nut-brown, and each offered two or three bags of cassava bread and cakes.
Lota honked the horn. Elizabeth put out a hand to stop her, but the girls had already let the barricade drop and run off on the tips of their toes like dainty, timid deer. The cord, Elizabeth saw, was not a rope at all, but long lengths of grass they’d entwined and laced with flowers. The girls huddled under a tree and stared at the American woman in the sports car.
“Oh, please, let’s buy a cake.”
Elizabeth waved to them to come close and laid coins in one delicate open hand. “Obrigado,” she said, taking the bread, and all the girls giggled.
“Obrigada,” corrected Lota with a smile. “O is for men.”
Light eyes bore upon dark. Elizabeth could not turn away from the children. She felt a sharp, essential lack; it was like hunger or lust, a physical need to possess one of these girls, to keep her and hold her, bring one into her lap and enfold her there, rest her chin upon the perfect child’s head, breathe in the aroma of her tangled hair. To protect her and love her.
“They’re so beautiful.”
“And you, too, are the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen.”
Lota moved on slowly, as if not to frighten the girls. Elizabeth bit into the cassava cake, tough as shoe leather but perfectly sweet.
A pothole on the edge of town finally dislodged the muffler completely. It dragged along the last bit of cobblestone road, scraping and shooting sparks, the loud rumble of the engine drawing the attention of the townspeople they passed. A group of men followed them into the hotel’s parking lot, where they surrounded the car.
“This is a Jaguar?” one of them asked.
“Yes, of course,” Lota replied, leaping out as though preparing to defend the automobile with fisticuffs if necessary.
“Congratulations. You are the second of this type ever to come to Ouro Preto.”
“You don’t mean the first?”
“The first arrived last year. Unfortunately, it ruptured its gasoline tank on the road coming in.”
THEY STAYED AT the new Niemeyer building, the Hotel Grande. Everyone agreed that building modernist architecture in a three-hundred-year-old colonial city was pure hubris; at the same time, it was delightful. Their two-level suite had a sitting room below with a private terrace, and they climbed a chic wooden spiral staircase to the bedroom above. “It’s so elegant,” Elizabeth said as they prepared for bed, after spending the evening with the car mechanic. “I feel as though I should descend in an evening gown, with long white gloves up to my elbows.”
“No,” Lota cried, “you should be descending nude!”
Then Lota herself slid down the banister in her nightgown.
THE RAGGED NYMPHS had opened the gates to a dream of Brazil. The terrace of their hotel room had a panoramic view of the town amid tropical greenery, with a backdrop of high, rugged sierra. Three centuries earlier, they had mined gold and built this opulent city, though, according to Lota, the buildings had now decayed virtually beyond repair. She had gone to see her friend Lilli, a preservationist, while Elizabeth had begged to remain at the hotel and work. She could not pass up the opportunity to write down her impressions of Ouro Preto under the guise of a young girl named Helena.
For over a year, she’d turned her back on poetry to work on a translation project. One of the Brazilian books that Lota had insisted Elizabeth read was the diary of Helena Morley, who’d grown up in this area of Minas Gerais half a century earlier. Elizabeth had been instantly charmed by the writing and by Helena herself, whose girlhood in the mountain town of Diamantina bore countless similarities to Elizabeth’s own in Great Village. Again and again, Helena proved herself resourceful, pragmatic, unsentimental. She did not take it too greatly to heart when she was misunderstood or neglected, yet she felt things deeply. Reading the diary, Elizabeth had developed a protectiveness for the girl so passionate it verged on love, though the real Helena was no longer a girl at all but a rich matron living in Rio. She’d left her humble origins and married a wealthy banker. In spite of Elizabeth’s recalcitrant Portuguese, her working life was now devoted entirely to translating the diary into English. Each morning, with her dictionary in hand, she labored over the passages, discussing with Lota at lunch how she might infuse the woodenly translated phrases with life. Over the last year, her wish to visit Ouro Preto had sharpened into a desire to draw closer to Helena, to look at Brazil through Helena’s eyes.
She worked past lunch. Then she began to wonder what was keeping Lota. It was the mystery of the new road that finally drew her out of the room. The hotel lobby was a long glass box bathed in diffuse light, with no more than a few pieces of spare furniture set here and there, apparently more for visual effect than for the traveler’s comfort. Far down at the other end of the vacant space stood the reception desk, a bank of white stone.
“Bom dia,” Elizabeth said as she approached.
Two officious, good-looking young people regarded her, one young man and one young woman. Aside from sex, they were nearly identical in most other respects: black, glossy hair, black-framed glasses, dark jackets, crisp white shirts. The young man busied himself with some papers. The young woman replied, “Boa tarde.”
“A estrada nova . . .” Elizabeth began, before abandoning the language altogether. “I heard there is a new road to Ouro Preto, coming in from the south, and I wonder if you know anything about it.”
The young woman nodded. “Yes, of course. There is a new road. We are preparing to celebrate the official opening. That is why the entire hotel is booked.”
Elizabeth took in the vast, silent lobby, untread by a single soul. “Booked?”
“For the delegation. The governor of Minas Gerais and thirty others who have come for the ceremony.”
“But the hotel is entirely empty!”
“They have yet to arrive, obviously.”
“When do you expect them?”
The young woman conferred with her colleague in murmured Portuguese. Elizabeth noticed that she wore a shiny name tag of apparently recent vintage, on which there appeared no name. She turned back to Elizabeth and pronounced, “Soon.”
“Well, if there is a new road, would you happen to know where it enters town?”
A pleasant, receptive blankness spread over the young woman’s face, as though Elizabeth were still speaking or had yet to pose her question. The only obvious thing was that the girl was completely deluded and didn’t have any idea at all if there was a new road or a ceremony or a delegation arriving or not.
“The wife of the director of the Patrimonio Artistico said she’d traveled on the road herself just last week,” Elizabeth suggested helpfully.
“No, that lady came by train.”
“She did? How can you be sure?”
“She requested a car from the hotel to meet her at the station.” The nameless girl turned again to the young man for another private conference. “Paolo was at the Office of the Prefecture this morning. He says they are preparing the invitations to the road’s inauguration. Perhaps you might check there for more information?”
Emerging from the hotel, Elizabeth nearly collided with a mule clomping by with enormous bunches of
greenery on his back, led by a boy with a stick. Still wet from the morning’s rain shower, the cobblestone streets of Ouro Preto glistened in the sunlight. Grand white colonial buildings with portals and windows painted all sorts of bright colors lined the roads, which curved and ascended so that she was continually pulled along to discover what was just out of sight ahead. Elizabeth attempted to follow the directions she’d been provided to the prefect’s office, but one hill was too steep and treacherously slick, and she had to make a detour—and then, no matter, she’d find the office eventually. The pleasure of Lota’s guiding hand upon her back was absent, but she had forgotten the luxury of wandering lost.
Topaz and amber jewelry lay upon tables set outside shop doorways so low even she would have to duck to enter. Elizabeth passed by, lingered at one or two, while dark heads emerged in a line up the block to gawk at her. A shopgirl rushed into the street, not to hawk the merchandise but to stare, as though Elizabeth had sprung to life from the pages of National Geographic, and then disappeared inside. Helena Morley’s reaction to an American woman passing through her town with an umbrella and a purse would no doubt have been considerably more polite. Elizabeth was confident that Helena would have approached the foreigner and offered assistance. She imagined the two of them, arms linked, chatting warmly on their way, discovering all sorts of shared interests.
At the center of town, Elizabeth came upon a large square, where a statue commemorated a national hero named Tirandentes, the tooth puller. A dentist who’d become a revolutionary, Lota had told her, and who’d been executed here in Ouro Preto after attempting to liberate Brazil from Portuguese dominion. Helena would have learned about him in school, in a one-room schoolhouse like the one Elizabeth had attended in Nova Scotia. At the edge of the square, she found a seat, tucked her skirt beneath her, held her purse in her lap.
A tree above cast its shade upon her; from within its low, protective branches she observed the world as if through the bars of a wooden cage. She felt unperturbed, happy. The colonial buildings in beautiful shades, the light upon the wet cobblestones, all the people moving past—she might simply sit on this bench watching them forever and never grow bored.
Her gaze was drawn to a group of children huddled near the base of Tirandentes’ statue. She realized they had followed her from the street of topaz shops and now were staring at her, growing bolder in their laughter and taunts to one another to approach, as though Elizabeth might bewitch them. She wished she could draw them near, give them sweets or pat their heads, but when she waved for them to come close, the urchins scattered instantly.
Ouro Preto had been Elizabeth’s first idea of Brazil—long before her ship had docked in South America, before it had even crossed the equator, this was the place she had imagined most vividly. Many years from now, it will be the last place in Brazil she leaves. She will buy a house here, she will repeatedly seek refuge in Ouro Preto, and this is where, after Lota’s death, she will make her last stand. She will try to remain a citizen of the country where she will have lived for seventeen years. But Brazil will not have been hers—it will have been merely on loan—and in the end she will leave for good and return to the States.
After Lota, and after Brazil, she will love other people and other places, but it will be a different species of love, so different she will wonder if the feeling can be called by the same word. The greatest surprise will be to discover that her lover’s abrupt end does not also bring about the death of love, that after two years of numbness, then grief and anger in equal measure, again there is love. Love, simply. As naturally as if Lota were still alive to receive it. But that is precisely what Lota will have taught her—that to give love is its own reward, that to give love is in itself perhaps the most profound variety of liberation, that the more she gives, the more she inhabits herself and is alive to the world around her. To discover that capability after so much pinched, mean subsistence will be the gift of Elizabeth’s lifetime.
Her last apartment will overlook Boston Harbor, and it will hold many beloved possessions from her years in Brazil: a mirror with a sea-shell frame, a paddle carved with the Brazilian flag, a wasps’ nest made of mud, an antique birdcage, an oratorio of Saint Barbara. In those last years, she will reach a kind of peace, not completely free of drinking or painful shyness, but those she will allow to wash over her, and then she will reemerge. It will be to her Boston apartment that all her books and papers will finally be shipped, after packing up her Ouro Preto house. She will unpack them, lingering over the termite-eaten Oxford dictionary, the few notes and letters from Lota that survived Mary’s purge of fire, even a handful of papers Elizabeth saved from high school and college. On one, she will read the professor’s comments and laugh, accidentally calling Lota’s name to come look at what he said.
Your argument suffers, Miss Bishop, from your insistence, against the evidence, that there is no opposition between passion and virtue.
AT THE DOOR to the Office of the Prefecture, Elizabeth heard gales of laughter. Three women were writing out by hand the invitations to the opening ceremony for the new road. So much attention devoted to the beautiful ivory cards, to the elegant script; however, the ceremony’s time and place had been left blank.
“There is no date on these invitations,” Elizabeth attempted to say in Portuguese. The words tumbled too quickly out of her mouth to be certain of their precise meaning. “How will anyone know when to come?”
The women nodded their heads, smiling. “You speak Portuguese very well,” one said. The other two kissed her cheek and insisted Elizabeth take a seat and share their lunch.
LOTA’S FRIEND LILLI had short dark hair and a square sturdy face, and she spoke perfect English with a slight trace of her native Denmark. She’d been married to a Brazilian painter, and, though she was the town’s only foreigner, she’d taken it upon herself after her husband’s death to mobilize interest in preserving the decaying colonial buildings. Elizabeth had felt certain she would like Lilli immensely, yet as the Scandinavian woman gave them a tour of her ramshackle old house, the rooms full of paintings and beautiful, old, odd things on shelves and in cabinets, her tight unsmiling mouth and hard blue eyes made conversation impossible. The house reminded Elizabeth of a provincial museum where she might find Indian bones unearthed from someone’s backyard or her own uncle’s artwork or a two-headed chicken. From a front room, Elizabeth spied on a group of women who’d gathered in the street below, gossiping and laughing at a fountain. A child emerged from the skirts of one, and his mother cupped water in her hands and held them to his mouth. Across the road lay a derelict house, the tile roof sagging and full of holes. From its window, Elizabeth saw, one would have a daily view of the activity around the fountain. The house was in ruins, truly unsalvageable, and instantly she wanted to possess it.
She gathered courage and broke the silence. “Do you know who owns that house?”
“Why do you ask?” Lilli’s eyes looked as though they could scratch glass.
“It’s beautiful.”
Lilli made no answer then, nor later in the day, as she walked beside Elizabeth on a mountain trail, did she offer a single word. It had been Lilli’s idea to come to the cloud forest above Ouro Preto, yet she seemed to take no joy in it.
Lota strode ahead with their guide, a boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. His name was Apollonio and he spoke in a grave, high register. Lota walked with a hand upon the boy’s back, as if he were her ward rather than a hired guide. It was Lota’s easy tendency, her instinct and her gift, to pull anyone she perceived as vulnerable or needing protection into her orbit—the gentleness always a surprise in someone so quick to ignite. But also so necessary. The country was full of children like this one: the shoeshine boys and five-year-old jugglers and fire-breathers at street intersections, and those beautiful ragged nymphs with their cassava cakes. It was just a crime.
Lilli spoke at last. “The house that captivated you, it takes a special eye to see its beauty
. I do know something about its history. It was built during the early eighteenth century. I might arrange for you to see it, if you’d like.”
“I would love that.” Elizabeth smiled at Lilli, but the woman did not return the warmth; she kept her gaze forward. There was something about the stolidness of her neck and chin, the erectness of her spine, that caused Elizabeth to recall the women of Great Village.
Ahead, Apollonio lifted a branch revealing a trail that led down the steep hillside. Elizabeth passed beneath his arm and entered a forest more mysterious than any she had ever seen.
Remain in a single line, the boy said behind her, so we do not disturb the nature.
Mist drifted through the trees and turned the light yellow-green. The ground was a thick, soft mat of green covered with tiny red flowers. Tree trunks were furred with dense, vibrant moss and leafy lichens, while curtains of more moss hung from the branches, brushing Elizabeth’s head like witches’ hands. The landscape was primeval, too otherworldly to fully apprehend. The four of them walked in a hush.
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