The More I Owe You

by Michael Sledge

  From a waterfall above, a stream cut through the green mountainside. The forest protects a rare and unusual creature, Apollonio said in his high voice. It has a soft body, with legs like a caterpillar’s. This creature is called a velvet worm.

  “What a beautiful name,” Elizabeth murmured, not sure if she’d even spoken aloud.

  Lota pinched her lightly on the bottom.

  With care, Apollonio said, we can overturn rocks at the edge of the stream to find one of these living fossils.

  Lota and Lilli bent to search for velvet worms in the stream, but Elizabeth stepped away from them and sat upon a fallen, rotting trunk. She watched Lota’s small, quick hands lift the rocks and debris at the water’s edge, then carefully set them back in place. Hands unafraid of labor, calloused and rough, yet capable, Elizabeth knew, of the most delicate caresses. Hands that had traveled over her body, giving pleasure. Hands Elizabeth had taken in her own and kissed, but only in private. To act with discretion meant that she and Lota could never publicly reveal any sort of intimacy. Lota was always trying to defy the rule—the stolen public kiss, the sneaked tenderness—but Elizabeth pulled back from these gestures; even when the charade became unbearable, she could not let herself want. Their public performance as dispassionate spinster companions sought to erase the private world of touching, explaining, loving, perhaps with too much success. Elizabeth could parse out love in dribs and drabs, no more. She had warned Lota, from the beginning. Even when the two of them returned to their room and were once again together, with no one else near, Elizabeth could not cross the great distance from her feelings.

  The light in the forest appeared aqueous, filtered by the green mist, as if Elizabeth were submerged beneath the sea. Sounds were muffled. The others at the streambed grew blurry. Elizabeth noticed a cloud of black particles descending into her vision, jumping and jiggling like atoms. She nearly called to Lota before she realized it was a phenomenon visible only to her. The particles hissed and crackled. It really was the most unreal sensation. Then she heard shouting.

  A poeta está desmaiando! The boy’s voice came from far away. The poetess is fainting!

  Three faces floated above her.

  The succulent green mat pressed softly against her back. Long shreds of moss hung from the tree branches, a tangled lace against the yellow sky. Elizabeth had no recollection of falling from the log, nor of being caught and laid upon the ground. She perceived Lota at her side, kneading her hand vigorously. Her lover did not care that the others witnessed her bending so close to Elizabeth that their lips nearly touched.

  Elizabeth sat up. Her mind was clearing, but the vertigo lingered. Lota helped her to sit again by the stream, where she offered Elizabeth a handful of bread on which she might nibble.

  “You gave me a scare, Cookie.”

  Staring into the flow of water, Elizabeth discovered the most marvelous optical illusion. If she kept her eyes for some moments on the rush of a waterfall, then turned to look upon the adjacent rock, the appearance of motion was transferred from liquid to solid. The stone itself flowed, it bloomed like a mineral flower, as if the rock had come alive.

  “Cookie, can you speak to me?”

  Elizabeth reached out to place her palm against Lota’s soft cheek. “Did you find any velvet worms?”

  “Oh, Cookie.”

  Lota leaned into the touch of Elizabeth’s hand. She could never decide if her lover’s constitution was truly as fragile as Elizabeth claimed. Sometimes she suspected Cookie would outlive them all, yet the possible loss of her was never far from Lota’s mind. She felt she’d tossed her heart into the middle of the highway. Craziness to leave it there, it was certain to be mashed at any moment, yet nothing in the world had made her feel more thrillingly alive. Not her house, not art, not even, she thought sadly, Mary. When Elizabeth had fainted, sliding from the log to the ground and then, almost gently, laying her head upon the green cover, Lota had felt herself approach the verge of extinction.

  Now Elizabeth cried out, Look at the waterfall, Lota! Then look at the rock. The rock actually moves!

  Lota was overcome with a strange feeling of pride. Cookie, she said, you are learning to love.

  Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. Lota reached for her hand.

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, Elizabeth said. Maybe it’s the altitude. It’s made my head go soft.

  Her eyes shifted to look past Lota, and her expression changed in that lovely way she had. In Elizabeth’s face, Lota could see her as a little girl discovering a mystery of nature for the first time, a chrysalis, a bird’s blue egg in a nest. Lota turned to follow her gaze.

  Through a break in the trees, she could see far below into the valley that led back to Ouro Preto. A soft black band undulated through the hills, like a velvet worm.

  Elizabeth nearly whispered, Could that be the new road?

  BEFORE THEY LEFT Ouro Preto, Lilli presented Elizabeth with a gift. It was an object from her own home, a wooden altar eight inches high, painted red, with doors that opened like those of a miniature armoire. It was called an oratorio. Inside was a wonderful carving of a saint. “It’s from the eighteenth century,” Lilli said, “like the house you have fallen in love with. Travelers and pilgrims carried these on the road so they would always have a protector nearby. This one is from Diamantina, where Helena Morley lived.”

  “And who is the saint?”

  “Saint Barbara. She offers protection from sudden death, from thunderstorms and lightning, fires and explosives.”

  “Explosives! In that case, she can protect Lota, too.”

  THEY TOOK THE new highway out of town, the fresh asphalt sheathed in red mud rinsed from the mountains by the rain. Within the hour, the new road collided with the old, potholed one and disappeared. You really had to laugh.

  They stopped at a hotel en route, a modernist monstrosity outside Juiz de Fora that Lota had been curious to see. Sitting at the poolside bar, they struck up a conversation with a salesman in a bathing suit on his way to Belo Horizonte. Elizabeth sipped a caipirinha made with passion fruit, really the most delicious drink that seemed to have absolutely no alcoholic effect, and watched the salesman’s young daughter paddle around the pool inside a circular inflatable float. Before she was halfway through the first drink, she already wanted another; she could have had twenty in a row. Even with her eye on the girl, she remained attentive to the conversation, so familiar with the sounds and rhythms of the language that she didn’t quite register when she lost comprehension of the Portuguese. Like a dog, she kept her ears perked up, wagged her tail at tones that seemed to be aimed in her direction.

  The girl splashed about, talking and singing to herself, apparently happy to play alone.You didn’t know the difference, Elizabeth remembered; you didn’t register your own friendlessness or the fact that you’d never felt the touch of your mother’s hand, because your mind and imagination, the stories you’d read and the ones you made up, filled in the space that human contact might have occupied.

  She didn’t see exactly how the girl flipped over. Elizabeth had turned to sip her drink and to smile at the salesman, who she sensed was telling a joke, and when she turned back, two skinny brown legs were frantically scissoring upside down in the air, trapped by the float. The little legs were mesmerizing. She wanted to say something—truly, she tried to—but dogs could not easily form words.

  Flying from her seat, Lota knocked past the surprised salesman and dove into the pool fully clothed. She pulled the sobbing girl upright and held her close, calming her tears, repeating over and over, “It’s all right, my dove, you’re safe now, you’re safe.”

  Elizabeth traded looks with the salesman, who didn’t seem to have fully taken in the rapid sequence of events. She finished off her drink.

  At dinner in the hotel restaurant, Elizabeth thought to comment on the hotel’s architecture, how it was truly one of the most dreadful places ever conceived and executed, and that when they’d been shown
to their room through dark cement passageways smelling of mold, she had felt like an ant following trails dug out of the dirt or like a miner in tunnels about to collapse. But Lota’s silence and the hushed, deserted restaurant were oppressive, so Elizabeth said nothing. She felt sure Lota would interpret her criticism of the hotel, even if she agreed with it, as an attack on the country, and, to be honest, maybe it was an attack on the country, which just never ceased to confound her. Brazil had squandered such enormous wealth, with its pretensions to a grandeur that would never materialize or that could not be sustained longer than a historical instant. Just look at the imperial palaces of Petropolis or the grand opera house of Manaus in the middle of the Amazon jungle or Ouro Preto decaying beyond help. All of it fated to fall into decrepitude, just as all these monuments to modernism would no doubt also fall.

  Not a soul crossed their path as they strolled back through the hotel grounds. As if her silence had harbored no ill feelings, Lota took Elizabeth’s hand and drew her beneath an arbor, kissing her neck. Then she said pleasantly, “What do you think of the outdoor lighting here? Should we do something like this at Samambaia?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth answered, “if we want our house to look like a concentration camp.”

  “Well, I like it.”

  The path took them past the poolside bar, now closed. Lota stopped and said, “I’ll stay and have a smoke.”

  “All right.”

  “Would you like to keep me company?”

  “I think I’ll go on up to the room.” A look of confusion passed over Lota’s face. Elizabeth herself did not understand why she had to flee, why the moment had become painful.

  “Please stay,” Lota said softly. “I want you to stay with me.”

  “All right, then.”

  In the shadows of the untended bar, Lota smoked while Elizabeth wished for the trip to end. She wanted to be home again in Samambaia. Lota stubbed out her cigarette and, instead of suggesting they head back to their room, began to undress, leaving her clothes where they fell. She entered the pool with hardly a splash and swam its entire length beneath the surface, her stout, strong figure gracefully moving through the dark water.

  Before Lota surfaced, Elizabeth hurried to the pool. She sat upon the steps and slipped her bare feet into the cool water. Lota came up for air beside her, unsurprised to find Elizabeth there, and folded her arms upon the pool’s edge. Her shoulders were plump, ripe for a bite. She smiled up at Elizabeth. With her hair slicked back from her proud forehead, she looked like a boy extremely pleased with himself.

  “This hotel makes me feel like a canary asphyxiating in a mine,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, bad modernism is terrible. It hurts the soul.”

  “It is the precise opposite of everything wonderful about your house, the lightness and glass, the luminousness.”

  “Our house, Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, our house. Our house is like a translucent balloon that could float above the earth. I love that house.”

  Lota regarded her seriously, then kissed Elizabeth’s foot. “I am very happy you love it.”

  Lota was so natural in the water; she was so natural in air. But Elizabeth thought it could as easily have been her instead of Lota who’d jumped in earlier that day to save the girl, righted the skinny scissoring legs, held the girl to her breast. There was so much need for protection in the world, and so little supply. Was it unthinkable that she might provide some small bit of it? Then a horrible thought returned to her. All you give is scraps.

  “I want a child,” Elizabeth said.

  Lota hooked her arm around Elizabeth’s leg. “I have raised a child already. But if that is what you want, then you will have it. I have no doubt you will be a wonderful mother.”

  LOTA DROVE WITH one hand nestled in Elizabeth’s lap, like a cat curled up for a nap. As dusk approached, the landscape was a blue-green blur, punctuated every now and then by a bright spot of color, pink house or yellow bird. On a curve, Lota went shooting past a truck with the words Materiais Perigosas painted in fanciful script on the back. “It’s certainly”—the word that came to Elizabeth’s mind was neither English nor Portuguese—“a perigous existence in Brazil.”

  “Sim,” Lota agreed. “Há muito perigo aqui.”

  Elizabeth propped the oratorio on the dash. “Good thing we have Saint Barbara to keep us safe.”

  She will be looking at Saint Barbara when she dies, in Boston, twelve years after Lota’s death, following a period of ill health. In spite of Saint Barbara’s alleged protection against lightning and other varieties of sudden death, it will happen suddenly. It is the sort of irony both she and Lota would have relished, to die beneath the gaze of Saint Barbara of an aneurism, a lightning bolt to the brain.

  IN THE LAST kilometers before home, they hurtled through a dark void. A storm had passed through earlier in the day, so in addition to dodging mud-filled potholes Lota had to contend with branches and other debris littering the roadway, illuminated at the last moment by the car’s headlights. At last, they turned onto their own road. In a fit of impatience, Lota went speeding up the hill in the pitch black.

  “How on earth can you see anything?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I don’t need to see. I’ve done this a thousand times.”

  An enormous thump brought them to a stop. Lota put the car in reverse, then forward.

  “We’re stuck in the mud,” she finally said.

  Elizabeth laughed in a burst, delirious with fatigue and the joke of being unable to travel the last quarter mile. “The mighty Lota is stuck.”

  “We’ll walk the rest of the way,” Lota said, unamused.

  They left their luggage and Saint Barbara and began trudging blindly up the steep hill. Elizabeth was so exhausted that even with her eyes on the ground she repeatedly stumbled and slipped in the puddles. Half a dozen times she nearly toppled over. Lota held her arm to steady her, but Elizabeth kept slipping from her grip. Her foot sunk into the mud, and her shoe was vacuumed off. Before she could regain her balance, Elizabeth took a dive toward the earth. She landed flat on her back in the slop and began to laugh uncontrollably, wave upon wave of feeling.

  Lota stood against the stars, a dark outline with an arm outstretched.

  “You look just like one of the Prophets.”

  “Can I help you get up, Cookie?”

  Elizabeth grasped Lota’s offered hand and pulled with all her strength. Shrieking like a girl, Lota tumbled upon her. “You are in big trouble now,” she cried, laughing. “I am going to kick your behind.”

  Love crossed a new latitude. There was a notable change.

  Lota lay quietly with her head on Elizabeth’s breast.

  “You’ve helped me feel happier than I’ve ever been in my life, Lota. It is very hard for me to believe in happiness. I resist it. I’ve spent so much time just trying to survive.”

  “And now you thrive.”

  Elizabeth held her close and kissed Lota’s throat, and for a time they both looked up at the stars, as humankind had for millennia. In that moment, Elizabeth was unable to see through the eyes of the Prophets; she could not perceive portents, or warnings, or any promise of the end. For two thousand years, every age of man had believed itself to be the last, the most corrupt and exhausted, the final creaking era before the whole dangerous, precarious enterprise of human existence must collapse under its own imperfect design. And yet it hadn’t proven to be so. Here they were, still trudging through the mud. But hardly alone. Perhaps friendlessness affected one’s powers of divination.

  Elizabeth helped Lota to her feet. They walked hand in hand up the hill toward their house, which lit up the dark like a glass lamp held in a giant’s fist.

  14

  This place is wonderful, she wrote to Pearl, who’d returned to New York. I only hope you don’t have to get to be forty-two before you feel so at home.

  She did not know what she’d done to deserve this happiness.

  Since sunrise, El
izabeth had remained in bed with several of her favorite Englishmen: Dickens, Darwin, and Sir Richard Burton. Morning fog filled the valley below the house, like a big bowl of cream. Another sky of absolute blue and the entire sweep of mountainside gone rose-red from the flowering matto. One little black bird hopped up and down on a twig, a bouncing ball of a bird. Among the bedclothes lay a number of literary quarterlies that had finally found their way from the States, tied with twine into a batch, most arriving months after their publication date. Something of her own appeared in one of them. The poem had been written so long ago that Elizabeth felt as if she were reading a message in a bottle. Thrown into the sea by a cast-away who’d been marooned for a very long time.

  And then Friday came.

  A cloud flowed over the great rock peak, and mist floated in through her open window. As it cleared, Elizabeth spotted Lota near the new wing. Dressed in her bathrobe and slippers, she was shoving dynamite into a fissure in the mountainside.

  The new addition to the house flew from the main body like a gesticulating arm and was cantilevered off an enormous boulder. Lota had begun to supervise the dynamiting after the first fellow miscalculated a blast and showered them all with granite, rocks small and large raining down on their lunch, like a tea party in Pompeii.

  Lota retreated at a sprint, with her fingers to her ears. The explosion caused Elizabeth’s bed to tremble.

  Two years now, living in a construction zone. The racket from dawn until dusk, the ceaseless banging and pounding and scraping and blasting and shouting—early on, it had nearly driven Elizabeth off the deep end. One day, they’d tested a new doorbell. Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong until the noise was inside her head. Why have a doorbell when there was no door! Another time, when Elizabeth’s exasperation had gotten the best of her, Lota had led her outdoors and described the new wing, how it would become their private enclave, apart from the rest. “I’m not building this house just for myself, Elizabeth. I don’t think you always understand that, but you will.”