The More I Owe You

by Michael Sledge

  Elizabeth learned a new phrase: tapons do oveido. Earplugs.

  THE COOK WAS not in the kitchen. In fact, ever since Maria had confessed to her love affair with the gardener, the two of them had rarely been in evidence. At the blasting site, a temporary armistice appeared to have been declared, but Elizabeth did not hear Lota sneak up behind her. Arms encircled her waist, and a nibble on her neck sent an electric tingle down her spine. “Good morning, Cookie,” Lota breathed into her ear.

  “Someone might see!” Yet she drew Lota’s arms around her and leaned into the embrace.

  “I hope they do. We will show them what love can be.”

  “Did I keep you awake last night? I was up five times at least.”

  “Sweet Cookie. The cortisone isn’t working?”

  “It works, but you know it makes me terribly anxious.” Beyond the patio, the yard looked like a quarry, rocks and tools strewn everywhere. “Are you finished with the dynamite?”

  “For now. I need the engineer’s opinion, but he can’t be here until the afternoon. That is very frustrating! It is a powerful feeling to shape the mountain.”

  “I wish you’d wear a hardhat with that bathrobe.”

  “Cookie.”

  “If you need me, I’ll be in the studio.”

  “Yes, go. Write your masterpieces.”

  JUNE AGAIN, AND breathing was impossible. In the middle of the night, Elizabeth became a mad scientist conducting experiments by lamplight, mixing quantities of inhalant, injections, and pills, introducing them into her own body like Dr. Jekyll to register their effects. Only the cortisone gave her any real relief. But cortisone was a fickle friend; it hadn’t taken long to show its sinister side. Not simply the insomnia and jitters—worse, it gave her a sense of imminent doom. The medicine made her fat, to boot. So she tried not to lean too hard on the cortisone, until a week of nights like this made it the only option. Struggling through another wheezing fit at 3:00 am, she could stand it no longer. She employed the full battery.

  Ah, blessed breath!

  The miracle was short-lived. Elizabeth could breathe, but her heart raced as though from a sudden fright. She thrashed about in bed, eliciting groans of protest from Lota. On previous restless nights, Elizabeth had moved to the other bedroom, but Lota abhorred waking up to discover herself alone. Elizabeth forced herself to lie still, her arms at her sides, calling to mind any number of serene images: the clouds coming in the window, washing Lota’s hair in the stream, her hands rubbing Lota’s scalp.

  It was no use. She left the bed. There was one thing she could do.

  The jumpiness and nerves weren’t caused by any real reason; they were merely a physical reaction to the medicine. Yet the feeling mimicked another state of mind that Elizabeth didn’t care for in the least. She had no interest in revisiting the anxious panic that had once been her constant.

  So she didn’t need the alcohol for any real reason, simply for a physical reason: to counter the effects of the cortisone. She needed to bring herself down, away from that old, treacherous feeling. So she was doing it for her own safety, surely not only a wise, but also a necessary, course of action. It was no more than one or two drinks, in the middle of the night, to take off the edge.

  It was enough for Lota, who had a sixth sense of people’s failings, to notice. The next morning she asked in an offhand manner, “So you are back to your old ways?” while her mouth made a twisted little smile. Then she passed out of the room, not waiting for a rebuttal, and it was her dismissiveness even more than the remark itself that cut Elizabeth so deeply.

  She caught up with Lota in the passageway of the partially constructed new wing. “That was unfair,” Elizabeth said.

  “You should not drink.You told me so yourself.You can’t control it. Do you want me to say nothing?”

  The hurt whipped into heat, and the words were spoken. “You have your own ugly habits, and I don’t go hounding you about them.”

  It was liberating to be a little cruel.

  Lota stormed into the yard where the men were working and blew up at the first unfortunates she encountered there. Then she returned to her room looking very pale and tired.

  Halfway up the path to her studio, Elizabeth stopped. She had to go back and apologize, to explain that she’d had the drinks out of desperation, to plead with Lota not to lose faith in her.

  But wasn’t it Lota who ought to apologize? Since Elizabeth had come to Brazil, her drinking had dwindled to nearly nothing. A glass of wine over dinner, every so often a bourbon. Maybe a handful of times she’d slipped further, hidden away with a bottle for a few hours, but Lota had always found her before any real damage had been done. And in a larger sense, she no longer craved drink as she had, nor did she experience, when she did pour herself one, the wave of absolute relief or even revelation that had once come over her with the first sip. Not just the need for it, but the pleasure as well, was virtually absent. Couldn’t Lota see this, instead of leaping to the worst assumptions? Personal transformation did not happen overnight simply because you willed it. Cal would understand, even if Lota didn’t.

  A brilliant little thing on the ground caught Elizabeth’s eye. Shiny, a beautiful shade of purple-red, it scuttled along like a miniature patent-leather shoe. Whenever she saw one of these tiny crabs that lived in the stream, she wondered how it had ended up here in the mountains, so far from its marine origins. As she admired him, the crab tilted back to brandish one large, lopsided claw. If Lota had been nearby, Elizabeth would have tugged on her sleeve and said, Look at this tough little customer.

  Instead she called to Julinho, who was working in the garden alongside the house. They stood side by side watching the crab, Julinho nodding his head and murmuring words too softly in Portuguese for Elizabeth to make them out. Once, she’d lived among the brightest minds of New York; now, these amiable, hardworking men—these Julinhos, Manuelzinhos, Paulos, and their families—made up the bulk of her human society. For days at a time, when Lota left for Rio on her various errands and forms of business, Elizabeth might see and speak to no one else. They worked for Lota, though were not officially her employees. Nor were they squatters, exactly. They’d lived on this land for generations, longer than Lota’s own family had, planting on the steep hillsides their haphazard gardens that yielded scant harvests. Lota made certain they had clothes and the attention of doctors, but they remained entrenched in poverty. Elizabeth had always been taken slightly aback by their smiles and readiness to help with whatever task lay at hand, yet there was still something wretched about the whole lot, especially all those children, brought into a world that did not want them.

  Crawling over the landscape, hard-shelled, tough customers from some faraway place—the men were like the tiny crabs. And not unlike her, either. In fact, all of them—she, the men, the shiny purple crabs—were bound in a loose confederacy under Lota’s protection.

  Julinho lifted up his shovel. Elizabeth quickly reached to stop him from smashing the crab. Instead he slid the blade beneath the hard, bright, scrabbling little legs and set the crab down beside the pool. He smiled shyly at Elizabeth and moved back to his work.

  In her studio, she set some water to boil and peeled a handful of bananas while Sammy made a noise like two gourds knocking together. He would eat as many bananas as she gave him, she was sure, right until he popped. He had no sense of pacing himself. As Sammy gorged himself, she looked over some recent letters from friends. The people who understood her well lived so far away that at times she wondered if they were products of her imagination. Some days she might write six or seven letters describing in each precisely the same events, simply in order to convince herself these friends still shared her life.

  She began to write about the incident with Julinho by the stream. I pointed out to him one of the beautiful little wine color and yellow crabs that live in it. In a burst of excitement, she continued, and wham went his shovel and that was the end of that crab. Sometimes one gets awfully tired of p
rimitive people, I must confess.

  She poured a second cup of tea; another banana disappeared down Sammy’s gullet. Looking over the lines, she thought what an odd thing she’d written to her friend. But why not? It wasn’t pure misrepresentation. Surely it, or something like it, had happened a thousand times since she’d taken up residence here. Brazilians were all primitives, incapable of judgment, and so wretchedly made, like the clothes and the furniture and the roads and just about everything else.

  SHE COULDN’T BREATHE. She took the medicine, and then she couldn’t sleep. It became Elizabeth’s habit to take a single drink, or two or three drinks, every night. This did not prevent her from working long hours on the translation of Helena’s diaries; in fact, it made it possible. Nor from rising early and bringing breakfast to Lota in bed, but Lota’s eyes would not meet hers, even with the comical distraction of Sammy on the breakfast tray. Her silence was more ominous than the grim expression. There was no atoning. Elizabeth felt as though she might shout, Yes! You’ve unmasked me! I’m not who you wished!

  TOO MANY KISSES. That was the problem with Brazilians; they always wanted to cover your face with their lips. At least with Mary she could count on a good old-fashioned handshake.

  Their guests had come from São Paulo to see the house, Luiz and Roberto Cusi and Lota’s nearly deified friend Lina Bo Bardi, with old Mary also tagging along. Such a strange creature, Mary, a wraith haunting the house that should have been hers. Elizabeth supposed she should feel guilty, but if Mary hadn’t been so humorless, Lota never would have had to go searching for someone else. Elizabeth’s predecessor in Lota’s affections should count her lucky stars that Lota had set her up in the Rio apartment, where she might consider occupying more of her hours, instead of spooking about Samambaia.

  They’d hardly put down their bags before Lota ushered them on the grand tour. Elizabeth begged off to finish preparations for dinner.

  “What are you cooking for us, Cookie?” Lota offered her first smile in days.

  “Chicken pot pie.”

  “An American delicacy,” Roberto Cusi said. His eyes were kind and full of mischief.

  From the kitchen, Elizabeth was able to track the group as they moved through the house and outside along its perimeter. Lina’s exclamations meant that Lota would return in a brilliant humor. Though far from finished, the house had won an international prize in architecture last winter, and ever since they’d been subject to weekend busloads of architects and students arriving for unannounced tours. Of course, Lota would always puff herself up like a fighting cock for these visitors, while Elizabeth scrambled to prepare an impromptu lunch for thirty, only too aware of herself as a most unpleasant sort of person, utterly mean in spirit. Now, she sipped a glass of wine as she worked in the kitchen, and by the time the guests had returned from their tour and the meal was ready, she gratefully felt herself slipping back into her normal, more generous skin.

  Lina was broadcasting her pronouncements on the house as Elizabeth took a seat at the table. “The industrialization of the design is much more radical than you described, Lota, and yet framed by these elements and planes, the landscape is even more irresistible and seductive.”

  Lota hung on every word. Lina had recently received the commission to design the new museum of modern art in São Paulo. It was the kind of recognition Lota might have craved for herself; still, it was embarrassing to see her fawning over her friend.

  “But how is the aluminum roof in the rain?” Lina asked.

  “Fantastic!” Lota exclaimed. “The noise is tremendous.”

  “So you’ve come to Rio to teach a symposium?” Elizabeth asked politely.

  “A three-day workshop at the university,” Lina replied. “Lota set it up for me.”

  “Do you often teach?”

  “Lo adoro. The minds of young people, they are very hungry. They have not yet been corrupted. And all of them are open to me. Have you taught? If you haven’t, then you must.”

  “I’d rather eat glass.”

  Luiz, she noticed, smiled at his plate. She had adored both of the brothers ever since she’d met them the day she first arrived in Samambaia, at the lunch Lota had thrown in her honor.

  “No, you mustn’t be afraid,” Lina said, placing a hand on Elizabeth’s arm, “not of the students. Not of anything. Right, Lota?” The Italian woman was undoubtedly a fascinating creation, with that impressive self-confidence and long red hair and translucent skin and intelligence sharpened like an instrument of war. She’d been a member of the Italian resistance against fascism and was now on her way to being one of Brazil’s most prominent intellectuals. All the same, she appeared to find herself even more fascinating than she deserved to. Lota, at least, was not a narcissist.

  Roberto said, “Elizabeth, the potted pie is fabulous. But please tell me where do you get your clothes? You are so elegant, and we expect a poet to be a frump.”

  “But I am a frump.” Kittenishly, she pulled up one leg of her slacks to reveal a magenta sock.

  “Surprise!” said Roberto, throwing himself back in his chair.

  “Lota got them for me at a store that sells clothes to the clergy.”

  “And your hair,” he said, his eyes darting around her head, “it’s genius. It’s so . . . alive.”

  “Isso,” Luiz, who until now had remained silent, said softly.

  In physical appearance, the two brothers could have been mistaken for twins, yet in character they were inversions of one another, Roberto outgoing and big-gestured, while Luiz turned a fierce beam silently inward, as plainly uncomfortable in his skin as Elizabeth was in hers, which she always found an endearing trait. Recently, the furniture they designed out of scraps and discarded materials—a sofa made of cardboard, a stool of a coiled garden hose—had been collected by museums, and every so often she saw their work featured in the newspaper. All of it was quite imaginative and outlandish and playful. Slightly insane, as Lota had asserted Brazil to be.

  The conversation circled and returned to the house.

  “It is unlike anything I’ve seen, Lota. A triumph.”

  “She has thought of nothing else for years,” said Mary.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Elizabeth corrected.

  “Well, yes, we cannot think of only one thing. We must strive for balance,” Lina said. “But personally, I think balance is overly prized.” Elizabeth found herself the object of Lina’s scrutiny, as if there were a crumb on her shirtfront or gristle between her teeth. “I am just like you,” Lina pronounced at last. “When I first came to Brazil, it was not in my mind to stay. Remember, Lota, we met at that exhibit at the ministry of health, well-meaning but terrible? My husband and I had come from Italy, after years of fascism and the war. Like you, Elizabeth, we found it so enticing we could not leave. That was ten years ago.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth laughed. “It entraps you.”

  “Everything is new here,” said Lina. “You can do anything, create anything. Like this house.You can redefine your own possibilities.When I design, even more than beauty, I search for freedom. The only limits are those you impose upon yourself. Do you find that to be true?”

  There it was, thank heavens, the internal shift back to being a human being, and just in time. “Yes, I do,” Elizabeth agreed. “Truly, I’ve not ever been so productive as I have here in Brazil. For a while now, I’ve been working on a translation of the diary of a Brazilian girl named Helena Morley. It’s called Minha Vida de Menina. An extremely charming book, but even more than that, I find it very moving.”

  “We read it in school,” Luiz said. “A wonderful story.”

  “Yes, it is,” Elizabeth said, with great warmth for the man—atypical for a Brazilian, so modest and quietly mannered.

  “But it is taking too long,” Lota said sharply. “Elizabeth does not work enough. She stays in bed very late.”

  “Brazil,” Lina went on, “is very inspirational. In Rome, everything is in ruins. It is all dead. Morto.
Estinto!”

  “But sadly,” Roberto said, “here we have no gladiators.”

  “We do not all work at the same speed,” Luiz said to Elizabeth, but it was too late. She’d already shifted back.

  “Yes, Lota,” Mary said. “Not everyone works all day and all night, like you. Some of us need sleep.” She smiled at Elizabeth, who felt she might begin to claw the flesh from her own arm.

  “But what is the point if you are not completely absorbed by the work?” said Lina.

  “Then you’d just be a big fake,” Elizabeth nearly shouted, and sucked in a viscous mouthful of wine. “Not like the two of you, of course. You’ve each built a tremendous house.”

  “You have seen my glass house?” asked Lina, showing her glistening teeth.

  “Only in photographs. Lota insisted I see them when I first arrived in Rio.” A sensation came over her, oddly physical, even a little vulgar, but really rather wonderful. Why on earth had she been wound up so tightly? Smash that goddamn crab! “They had a very naughty effect, I have to confess. Lota showed me the photographs of your house, and the next thing we knew, we were—”

  “Elizabeth!” Lota cried.

  She refilled her wine glass. “Let’s just say your house is as inspiring as Brazil. It makes you feel as though you could do anything.”

  Lota slammed her hand upon the tabletop. “Stop now!”

  Elizabeth looked into air.

  Roberto broke the silence. “Lina, perhaps I might have some copies of those photographs for my own use?”

  Mary added, “I always say the power of good architecture is underestimated.”

  “Bravo,” Lina said, holding up her glass.

  Lota reached toward Mary and squeezed her arm. It was too sickening.

  Luiz looked as though his insides had begun devouring themselves. If only she could speak to him, human to human, she might rescue them both. “Tell me, Luiz, how does one start designing chairs? I love what I’ve seen of your work. It’s like poetry.”