“We will have the house to ourselves. The other day I opened the pantry door and found Maria and Paulo while the act was blazing, so I had to give the lovebirds some time off. Lovers must have the opportunity to consummate their passion. Carlos is coming to lunch tomorrow. I’m worried about him. His campaign against Vargas has left him exhausted.”
Elizabeth would have preferred for the two of them to be alone, but she knew it was important for Lota to feel they were resuming a normal life. You could forgive anything in the person who’d saved you from drowning.
The forest was lush and wild yet soothing to the eyes, a forest rendered by Rousseau. She found her studio precisely as she’d left it, her books open to the pages she’d marked, the daily list of Portuguese words and phrases from Helena’s diary she’d had difficulty translating still with a pencil upon it. Each evening she brought the list down to dinner and Lota went over her work, explaining the subtleties of the language. Really, the book was not her own—it was a collaboration.
Elizabeth sat at her desk, took up the pencil. She felt a strong desire to work. Perhaps it was the room itself. In Elizabeth’s first months at Samambaia, Lota had halted work on the house to build her a studio. Elizabeth loved the blue-gray rock with flecks of mica Lota had found on the mountain and used for the floor and fireplace; she loved her kerosene stove, the view of rustling bamboo from her window, the sound of the waterfall nearby. She loved them too much—she could not live without them. That was the lesson underneath the lesson.
Perhaps, too, it was Helena. Looking over the diary entries she had translated most recently, Elizabeth was struck again by the quality of the girl’s writing that had first enchanted her: a seemingly effortless honesty she not only admired but also felt she might learn from. Family squabbles, the care of livestock, descriptions of civic and domestic life—Helena invested them all with her modest struggle to balance the hopes and wishes she secretly held for herself with the desire to do what was right and dutiful to others. Helena had not turned to alcohol.
Elizabeth had spent so many years wandering in the fog, right along the edge of a precipice, at war with herself and with anyone who’d tried to come close. All that time, this was what she’d lacked: bamboo outside her studio window, a toucan on a breakfast tray, the occasional blast of dynamite, language lessons. How simple it could be to accept the ministrations of one person. The drinking, that was old—it was the ruins of Rome. Everything that had come before was old. Here, everything was new. She could make anything.
Elizabeth worked through the morning on a passage in which Helena and her cousin attended a midnight mass in the countryside. The cousin wrapped a rosary around her arm, only to discover some time later that what she’d believed to be her rosary was in fact a live garden snake.
“I HOPE YOU are feeling better, Elizabeth. We have all been concerned for your health.”
Carlos and Lota sat at the table on the terrace while Elizabeth lay in a chaise nearby, wrapped up in a shawl though the day was warm. “Yes, I’m greatly improved,” she said. “The asthma at last seems under control.” She wondered how much he knew or guessed, privacy being a porous border in this country. Elizabeth did not understand why, after all the time she’d spent in the man’s company, and in light of Lota’s nearly fanatical devotion to him, she still found Carlos so deeply annoying.
While he and Lota talked politics, she listened at a remove. The soporifics of the hospital still had her under their thrall. A hawk soared over the valley, with a small dark bird diving and fluttering around it. She loved it when the little bird chased the big bird.
Her companions’ words also darted about each other.
“. . . promiscuity with bandits . . . he is surrounded by thugs and criminals . . .”
“. . . but he is weakening . . . look at the demonstrations . . .”
Apparently, the newspaperman planned to run for congress in October, intent on making the leap from private to public office that he had been calculating for some time. In recent months, his daily attacks on Vargas, in print and on the radio, had increased his already considerable notoriety.
There was no doubt as to his intelligence or passionate conviction. Carlos was anything but corrupt, and had such an altogether different way—hopeful, almost naive—of imagining political change in a system that in so many aspects was cynical and rotten to the core. She had written enthusiastically to Cal that he was far and away the best man in Brazilian politics.Yet she could not forget his first words when they had finally seen him in his jail cell after his arrest last December. “Some see a setback,” Carlos had said. “I see an opportunity.” His belief in his own destiny came off him in waves. Elizabeth often found herself charmed, lured in, and then again she saw the opportunism and experienced an aversion as visceral as an allergy to cashew.
“If it weren’t for my place here,” Carlos said, “just to come here to Samambaia and tend my roses, I think I’d go mad. Did you know that if you keep cutting roses back they will bloom continually almost all year? I notice you have none, Lota. You should have roses.”
“I prefer native plants. We’ve just planted the hillside with three hundred Brazilian trees—jabuticaba, pau brasil, and ipê.”
“Don’t forget monkey nuts,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes, and abriço de macaco.”
“Then you are a disciple of the landscape master Burle Marx?” said Carlos.
“Are you trying to insult me? Who do you think he learned it from?”
Carlos grew serious. “Your father paid me a visit last week. He said to send his regards.”
“His regards to whom?”
“To you, Lota.”
“How is he? I heard he’s looking terrible, very yellow in the face. He is in deep financial trouble, they say.”
“He’s been a good friend. He hates Vargas’s cronies as much as we do.”
“Yes, he always had enough hatred to go around for everyone.”
“Lota,” Elizabeth interrupted, “I received a note from Lilli today. Do you think we might go back to Ouro Preto soon? She’s opening an inn and has invited us to stay. I was reading Burton again in the hospital. He went there nearly a hundred years ago, and his observations still hold true. Funny how I knew it would captivate me even before I ever saw it.”
“Yes, it is stunning,” Carlos agreed.
“It has that effect on you, too?”
“In fact, I’ve never been.”
Then why did you say that? But Elizabeth held her tongue.
“You know what really could be made into something stunning?” Lota said. “The aterro. I could see it from Elizabeth’s room in the hospital. You know, Affonso Reidy has already begun his design of the art museum to be built there. When you become president, I want you to give the aterro to me. Let me make it into something we could all be proud of.”
“Lota, when I am president, I will name you as one of my ministers. Then you can take on any project you like.”
“I will be vice president, you mean.”
They both laughed, but they were not joking, neither one.
16
LOTA CRIED OUT during the night. Her body leapt and jerked in Elizabeth’s arms and then went slack. Elizabeth held on, urging her lover’s troubled soul toward calm. Lota began to wail, a low, terrified sound, and at last Elizabeth spoke her name. Then again, more forcefully. Lota came awake with a shout. A moment of disoriented terror, then she pressed her face into Elizabeth’s neck.
“I was having a terrible dream,” she said, in a voice eerily vacant of emotion.
“I know you were.”
“The same one, the one you don’t like to hear.”
“The swimming dream?”
“Yes.”
“It’s an awful dream, but that’s all it is. It’s not real.”
“It is real. I’ve had exactly the same dream ever since I was a child. It is telling me something. It’s telling me how I will die. And when I will die.”
“I’ve had nightmares of dying, too, Lota, in a fire. Repeated ones. But I don’t believe that’s the way it’s really going to happen. We’ve been through a lot these last weeks. We’re all worried about Carlos.”
“But Carlos isn’t in the dream,” Lota protested. “It’s about swimming in the sea.”
“Yes, I know—”
“The water is beautiful, very blue and clear. Maybe it is at Cabo Frio.”
Elizabeth could not bear to hear the nightmare recounted one more time; it always upset her terribly.Yet from the very first words, she was mesmerized.
“We are swimming together,” Lota continued. “That too has always been part of the dream, that I’m swimming with someone I love, the person I’ve loved most deeply. There’s so much to see, so many beautiful things. We’re below the surface, holding hands, looking at them together. We have no trouble breathing. It’s as though we can breathe the water. I dive deeper to see more, and when I finally try to come back up, something is holding me down. A tide or current or a hand. At first I am frightened. I struggle to swim back to you. I see you above, floating on the surface. I want to get back to you, to be with you. I begin to feel terrified of being alone and drowning. And then I stop struggling.”
It was the flatness of Lota’s voice, even more than what she described, that caused tears to slip from Elizabeth’s eyes. “But why do you stop?”
“Because it’s finally all right. I don’t have to struggle anymore. I can see you there, and I know you love me, and the pain is finally gone.”
“Carlos is extremely resourceful,” Elizabeth said. “He’s already survived more than one assassination attempt. He has many friends who will protect him. He’ll let us know he’s safe as soon as he can.”
Lota did not take in a single word. Her incessant fingers continued to knead Elizabeth’s back. Lota, who had carried her through so many desperate times—she, too, could lose her way, plummet to terrified depths. So Elizabeth held her lover and stroked the back of her head and said nothing more.
On the first few occasions she’d seen Lota brought low, when the powerful Lota she knew and loved and depended upon turned weak, Elizabeth had recoiled. It was not merely surprise at Lota’s sudden helplessness. Elizabeth’s instinctive reaction was one of repulsion. The lost Lota became a mirror in which Elizabeth saw her own reflection, her own darkest, most twisted need. She could not tolerate what she saw when Lota became a mirror: a bereft, shivering girl in the wilderness, half-savage, half-starved. In her weakened state, Lota lost the power to soothe the desperation of that girl, so fearful and alone. And so at first Elizabeth had turned her back on Lota, as a matter of her own survival.
But after a time, Elizabeth had discovered that she did not have to turn away. She did not want to. The parched little heart inside her rib cage had grown large and compassionate enough to answer both Lota’s need and her own. She’d stumbled across a steadiness in herself, rather than a lack. When Lota could not be strong, and even when Elizabeth felt she might literally die without the protection Lota offered, compassion was the door. Compassion for Lota, and compassion for the girl.
Now she put her hand to Lota’s lovely, despairing face. Tenderness gave way to a pull of desire. “You are very beautiful,” she said, and bent to put her lips to Lota’s.
Lota pushed violently away. “Don’t lie to me!”
“I would never lie to you, my love.”
“I don’t like it when you say I’m beautiful. Don’t say that. I’m not beautiful.”
Elizabeth did not answer, and Lota again drew close. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
“I know, but it’s going to be all right.”
“You’re never scared.”
“That’s hardly true. But I’m not scared right now.”
Minutes passed. Elizabeth could feel Lota growing more agitated.
“You should go,” Lota said. “Please go.”
“I’m not going to leave you by yourself.”
“I’m not so nervous if I’m alone. I can’t stand it if you’re here right now.”
“Then only for a little while. I’ll be right outside.” She kissed Lota’s forehead. “Please try to sleep.”
THE LIVING ROOM was awash in silver moonlight. Beneath the bright moon lay a shimmering sea, its luminous waves brushing the shore. All of it so beautiful, so enchanting, yet Elizabeth had absorbed the horror of Lota’s dream and the ocean appeared to her sinister, threatening, perigous. Maybe she wouldn’t miss this apartment as much as she’d thought. They’d come to Rio to rent it out, after many months of hoping to avoid doing so, but they desperately needed the money. The strikes and devaluations had brought the country to the verge of financial ruin, and Lota was completely broke.
Near the waterline, Elizabeth noticed a lone, wavering light, a pulsing phosphorescence on the sand. A beached jellyfish, perhaps, or else a candle left in offering to the ocean goddess Yemanja, no doubt complete with chicken entrails and bloody feathers. She should probably go down and say a prayer of thanks to Yemanja herself; without the Antabuse, she’d be heading this instant to the liquor cabinet to make an offering to a different god.
Lota would pull through. Whenever she became submerged in these dark waters, from whatever cause, she always came back up quickly. But the events of recent weeks had them all half-deranged. It was because they’d come down to Rio to fix up the apartment and find a tenant that they’d found themselves with front-row seats to the absurd political circus at summer’s end. Seesawing from fright to jubilation to greater fright—it was no wonder Lota was having nightmares.
Three weeks earlier, Carlos had been shot outside his apartment building after speaking at a rally in Tijuca. His wounds were not mortal; in fact, they verged on ludicrous—he’d been shot in the foot. But the air force officer serving as his bodyguard had been killed. Visiting Carlos in the hospital, Elizabeth and Lota had discovered him in a state of near ecstasy, though unfortunately not from any morphine; he believed he’d finally been handed the golden opportunity to topple Vargas. After the shooting he’d become absolutely rabid; you could hardly talk to him anymore. He began pursuing Vargas’s impeachment through the highest channels of government, and denounced him more viciously than ever. Each night, Elizabeth, Lota, and Mary took their dinners beside the radio, listening to Carlos’s venomous broadcast. It was there that Elizabeth found an unlikely ally in Mary, who privately agreed with her on the subject of Carlos.
Listen to him, Lota remarked. He’s so passionate, vehement, and still so charming, so humorous. He is a great journalist, but an even greater orator.
To Elizabeth, Mary raised one eyebrow.
The official inquiry into the plot to kill Carlos brought him a larger audience than he’d ever had. Even as the hearings began to implicate a ring of Vargas’s closest associates, including his own son and the head of the presidential guard, Elizabeth felt increasing distaste for the inflammatory rhetoric Carlos used as a means to realize his ambitions. The country’s terrible economic straits had already drained Vargas of so much power that he’d become paralyzed; in his own words, with the new allegations swirling around him, he was drowning in a sea of mud. But Carlos did not desist. He excited a mob outside Catete Palace, where Vargas had barricaded himself with the war minister and several generals. That night, Carlos called Lota very late, shouting over the line, We’ve won, we’ve won! Vargas has resigned! The thirty-year dictatorship has ended!
It was close to four in the morning, but the news spread quickly. The phone kept ringing, and neighbors and friends appeared at the door, some i
n their nightclothes and stocking caps, with bottles of champagne in hand. There must have been fifteen or twenty people in the apartment drinking and dancing when a call came with the second announcement, which stunned them into silence.
The president had submitted his resignation, then locked himself in his office and put a revolver to his heart.
The friends hurried home through the false calm of dawn. Lota made repeated calls to Carlos and Leticia’s apartment but was unable to get through. From the terrace, Elizabeth watched the streets below begin to fill. At noon, a mob went marching up Avenida Atlântica, past the old lady walking her Lhasa apso and the men playing soccer in the sand and the beachgoers drinking beer at the kiosks in their bathing trunks. The same people who had gathered twenty-four hours earlier to demand Vargas’s resignation now attacked the offices of Carlos’s newspaper, shouting, Death to Lacerda!
Carlos went underground. They had received no word from him in days.
“IS LOTA ALL RIGHT? I heard her calling out.”
Mary stood in the corridor, an apparition in a white nightgown. Elizabeth was grateful to have the company.
“She was having another nightmare.”
“Should I check on her?”
“She insists on being alone.”
“Was it the one about the automobile accident?”
“No, the drowning dream.”
Mary took a seat. “That’s a bad one.”
Elizabeth could not help but notice that the two of them occupied the same chairs as they had on the morning she’d first walked into this room three years earlier, her life held in cupped hands like the shards of a shattered teacup. Same chairs, while all else had changed. Once the apartment was rented, Mary would return with them to Samambaia, where Lota had recently given her some land just down the hill. They would all live in Lota’s house while Mary built her own. It was hard not to be amused by the turns and ironies life presented: the three of them playing musical houses, musical hearts. More than once when she’d thought back to the early day she and Mary had gone to Correia, it had crossed Elizabeth’s mind that Mary had been attempting, in her indirect way, to warn her or even prepare her for the difficulties of life with Lota. It might have been Elizabeth, and not only herself, Mary had been trying to protect. She’d been uncharitable to Mary in the past, in her mind.
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