“Well, it’s no surprise why she’s gone half-mad,” Elizabeth said. “After Vargas’s suicide, we all are. And who knows where Carlos has gone. I don’t doubt for a minute he disappeared purely for theatrical effect. Honestly, does anyone in this country ever balk at the grand gesture?”
“I heard a radio broadcast today claiming it’s a trick,” Mary said. “They say there’s no proof Vargas is actually dead. No one’s seen his body. They say the getulistas will do anything to regain power.”
“No, he’s dead,” Elizabeth said with certainty. She’d heard the suicide note read over the radio too many times not to recognize the cold fury of someone bent on his own end.
I fought against the looting of Brazil. I fought against the looting of the people . . . I gave you my life. Now I offer you my death. Nothing remains. Serenely, I take my first step on the road to eternity and I leave life to enter history.
It reminded her of another example of the genre: Go to hell, Elizabeth . Both of them catchy in their own way.
“Suicide is a terrible thing,” she said. “So full of vindictiveness. But I suppose we might have expected it. This entire country is in a continual state of nervous collapse.”
“Yes, it’s become almost normal, the insanity.”
“Not to me, it’s not. It will never be normal.”
THE BEEHIVES HAD to be moved. That was obvious now. She should have seen it at the beginning. If you were in bed looking out the window, they blocked your line of sight entirely. She was very stupid to have placed them so close to the vegetable garden.
Lota rubbed her arms. She was so cold, she could not get warm. Her arms were numb. She had no feeling.
The architectural tours of Samambaia must stop at once. She was ashamed to have anyone see the house as it was now, even if they were only students.
Where had Elizabeth gone?
Privately, Lota had always known the house to have failed. On the day of the party celebrating the roof’s completion, they attempted to light the wood in the fireplace and the entire house immediately filled with smoke. The workers had bricked over the chimney to prevent rain from coming in. They were so ignorant, they’d never seen a chimney before! Half the doors and windows were still missing, the floor was unfinished, no better than bare rock. For months the fireplace had remained useless, but she didn’t have the energy to attempt a cosmetic correction for a problem that ran, she suspected, to the very core. One night, she and Elizabeth had built a fire on the concrete floor and roasted their dinner over it, like Neanderthals in a cave.
She’d dreamed of a house that showed its seams, turned inside out to reveal that the mode of its construction—the very thing most architecture sought to hide—could in itself be a thing of beauty. No secrets tucked behind walls, no conjuring of tricks, everything transparent. A house that showed you exactly how it was put together and at the same time took your breath away.
Instead, it had turned into a cave.
Women don’t own businesses! That’s what her mother had said, the only instance in which Lota could remember the woman raising her voice. Lota had wanted to own a dress shop, to participate in the modern world for the love of God instead of chitchatting with all the other women and embroidering handkerchiefs behind the scenes while the men smoked cigars in the drawing room and decided all their fates. So they’d fought, she and her mother, and Lota had moved out. Her father had lodged her at the Hotel Gloria, had also put up the money for the dress shop in Copacabana. He’d had money then, as well as the desire to pique his ex-wife whenever the opportunity arose. But once in a while, even at that time, he’d shown affection for Lota, had still wanted to please her now and again. At the Hotel Gloria, you were treated like royalty. At Samambaia, like a Neanderthal! Welcome!
She was not blind to her qualities. Single-handedly she’d brought an exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to Brazil, to this backyard country. But no one valued that here. In Brazil, materialistic, beautiful people sailed through life. Look at her sister. They had no original ideas. She had too many ideas, they took her in every direction. She had an eye, but everything she did was half-cocked. Nothing was finished just so. She ruined her own ideas. Her father had let her know he understood that about her from the first.
Now everyone would see that he’d been right all along, that she had no ability, that she was stupid as well as ugly.
Everyone would see she was a failure.
Except Elizabeth.
Where was her Elizabeth?
Elizabeth believed.
When at last the door opened and Elizabeth crept back into the room, Lota lifted the bedcovers to receive her. Elizabeth’s body radiated heat. Lota drew close to the warmth. She felt so cold.
I have to move the beehives, she whispered urgently.
Elizabeth was searching her face. There was no light in the room, but Elizabeth’s eyes gleamed like the sea beneath the moon. You don’t have to do anything right now but let me hold you, she said.
Lota nestled close into Elizabeth’s warmth. Elizabeth was a warm wave rushing over her. She revived her. She made her human again.
You bring me back, Elizabeth.
Back from where, my love?
From death.
17
ONCE THE PARTY had died down and most of the guests had gone, Elizabeth found herself surrounded by the young poets from New York. She was seated with her feet on a cushion while they stood before her like three valiants out of a fable come to seek her favor. One was tall and cool and barely registered emotion, the second was scared of his own shadow, and the last, skinny and exuberant, had come bounding up the stairs early in the evening and knelt before her, taking her hand to press his lips upon it and proceeding to kiss his way up her arm until, with a stricken laugh, she attempted to free herself. As undernourished as he appeared, he had a strong grip and wouldn’t let go. His name was Frank.
She amused herself thinking what Cal would have to say about all this. He would have the right take on this sort of thing.
“Is it really true,” Frank asked for perhaps the third time, “that you didn’t know you’d won?”
Such a curious thing, these not quite men, not quite poets, hanging on her words, unbelievably fresh and slightly desperate. “Somehow time moves differently in Brazil than it does here,” she said. “I’d got it in my head that the prize had already been awarded. Then one morning the phone rang, and a reporter was screaming over the static that I’d won the Pulitzer. I thought it was one of Lota’s friends playing a joke.”
The cool one tensed his jaw and winced, as if he’d bitten upon aluminum foil. “Even there they care about a poetry prize.”
“Yes, they care about it, and that’s not a bad thing. In Brazil, poets actually have value. That night, we had reporters and film crews for the newsreels coming to the house in the pouring rain. They had us all pose on the couch like bumps on a log, Lota and me, our friend Mary, and the cook’s baby girl—my little goddaughter. Then Lota entertained the journalists by flipping the lights off and on, because we had just gotten electricity after years of living by oil lamps.”
“You lived without electricity?”
“Right in the middle of the jungle, with the monkeys and the snakes.”
If they required a myth, she’d give them a myth. She’d hold that boulder over her head and put on a show. She’d done it before. The shy one didn’t make a peep. She wanted to take him onto her lap and feed him a bottle of milk.
Elizabeth began to worry the poets would want to talk about poetry, so she made her excuses. At the other end of the swimming pool, the water’s unsettled surface cast undulating light and shadow across Lota, who sat with their hosts Bobby and Arthur. She was still wearing a bib that covered her front with the stars and stripes. Joining them, Elizabeth let her head rest on Lota’s shoulder. She felt depleted but happy. The day had been one long parade of interesting people, heaps of lobsters and clams and corn on the cob, then a little Fo
urth of July concert by Bobby and Arthur, culminating in an explosion of fireworks over the water, false stars of red, white, and blue.
Here it all was: America.
“It is good for Elizabeth to be appreciated,” Lota said. “It is good for her to be the spectacle.”
“Please don’t say it will encourage me to write more.”
“It’s like watching three butterflies hovering over a lily,” Bobby said.
“I feel more like a mushroom than I do a lily.”
“Maybe it will help her to write more,” Lota said. “She doesn’t produce as much as she should.”
Elizabeth appealed to Bobby. “Lota doesn’t understand me in the least.”
“That’s what love is, didn’t you know?” he said. “A whole world of not understanding.”
Originally friends of Lota and Mary’s, the two men had embraced Elizabeth without reservation; their generosity of spirit touched her immensely. A virtuoso piano duo, Bobby and Arthur performed all over the world and were equally brilliant in the domestic arts. Their dinner parties were infamous. Bobby was soft, pliable and eager, really a very tender man. Arthur was more refined, yet his perfect manners disguised a wit sharp enough to draw blood. Beneath his silky voice lay a rasp, like butter spread upon toast. They were as different in temperament, yet as complementary, as were she and Lota.
“Tell me,” Elizabeth asked, “are only homosexual men writing poetry in America these days?”
“No, dear, only homosexual men are invited to our parties.”
“Brazilians are so different. As crazy as they are, they have a modesty of sorts. They don’t go parading their predilictions about.”
“Not like us.”
“But they don’t hide them, either. That’s the interesting thing. They’re just . . . exactly who they are.” Elizabeth took Lota’s hand and caressed her own cheek with it. “When will you come visit? I could ask the cultural attaché to invite you to Rio for a concert. Lota, don’t you think they’d like to meet Luiz and Roberto?”
“Is that the pair who’s replaced us in your affections?”
“They’re not a pair. Though I suppose you tend to think of them as a pair, when in fact they’re brothers.”
“How extremely freethinking! In that case, Bobby and I will certainly arrange a visit to Brazil.”
Across the pool, the New York poets were engaged in an animated conversation. It pleased Elizabeth that they appeared to be such good friends, touching, laughing, lighting one another’s cigarettes. Every so often, all three turned at once to look at her. “The cool one makes me nervous,” she said, staring back. “He just stands there and says nothing, and his eyes seem to judge you.”
“He respects you enormously,” Bobby said. “He told me so.”
“I like the shy one best. He acts the way I feel most of the time—just paralyzed with indecision.”
“Arthur likes the shy one best, too.”
“Shush,” Arthur said.
“I like the enthusiastic one,” Lota said. “He is only thirty, but they say he has already written a thousand poems. He works at the Museum of Modern Art.”
“He reminds me of one of those starving dogs in Rio that follow you down the street, hoping for a piece of your sandwich,” Elizabeth said. “The shy one really is painfully shy, isn’t he?”
“Poor Jimmy had a nervous breakdown a few years ago,” Bobby said. “He began having a long conversation with the Virgin Mary, who told him the world was coming to an end. He might still be having it. We’re not sure. You poets are very delicate—I finally understand that. But Arthur helped him through those dark days, didn’t you?”
“Not the time, my sweet.”
SINCE SHE’D ARRIVED in the States, Elizabeth’s clock had been completely off. They’d stepped onto American soil the last day of March; here it was July, and she still bolted awake before five. Lota lay comatose with the white sheets twisted around her caramel legs. Elizabeth slipped out into the morning, where pale yellow light had begun to seep above the ocean. The beach at Southampton was as wide and white as Copacabana’s, but not a single soul was kicking a soccer ball. All that good sand going to waste. After yesterday’s party, with everyone treating her as though she’d gone to Hollywood and come back a star, she appreciated the stillness, just the soft light and the dawn waves and the shorebirds with scissoring legs.
Five years away; it had passed so quickly. She’d been excited to return to the States, only to find herself taken aback by the whole bloated enterprise. As much pleasure as Elizabeth took in seeing all her old friends, in their uniquely open American spirit, and in speaking her native tongue to an audience that caught her references and tones, the banter and the martinis and the glamorous crowds had all begun to feel like hardly more than a glittering surface. There was no real texture here.
She and Lota lived on an isolated mountaintop, yet nearly every morning some grizzled little man pushed his cart up the extremely steep, rutted hill to deliver water or canisters of gas, or to pick up the trash or sharpen the knives and hatchets. Each made a different sound to identify himself: The gasman rattled a chain, the trashman honked a horn that mimicked a cow, the knife sharpener blew an extremely shrill police whistle that could wake the dead. Then Elizabeth would go running out into the road to catch him. At first she’d wondered, How on earth can a country even function like this? And now—well, she couldn’t imagine living without it. Cal had once told her that on rare occasions he entered a heightened state in which all experience felt as though it were being filtered through poetry, that it had actually become poetry. That was Brazil.
The day Elizabeth learned of the Pulitzer, Lota had gone to the market and she’d spent the morning in her studio, working on a poem that for months she’d been unable to break the back of. That was what she termed the moment when all the juggling and back-and-forth of words and form fell miraculously into place. Though the poem might still be rough, at last she understood how to push the work to the final stage.
Last night another big one fell, she’d written. It splattered like an egg of fire / against the cliff behind the house.
Every June on Saint John’s Day, the villagers who lived near Samambaia released fire balloons into the evening sky, contraptions of sticks and colored paper and kerosene. From the terrace, she and Lota watched the softly glowing balloons ascend into the night. Some of them were caught by mountain drafts and whisked upward, and every so often, one was dashed against the rocks and burst into flame, terrifying the animals there, the owls and rabbits and, once, an armadillo she saw scurrying away from the conflagration. As beautiful as the balloons were, she didn’t understand how the villagers managed to avoid burning down the whole mountainside. She’d been working with the fire balloons as the poem’s central image, draft after draft, and though most of the important pieces were on the page, the whole contraption had yet to become airborne. This particular morning was not a bad workday, nor did she break the poem’s back. Then it was time to put writing aside and attend to the needs of the household.
In a bright yellow flannel suit with matching socks, the cook’s daughter Maria Elizabeth was crawling around on the kitchen floor unattended. Elizabeth picked up her namesake and lightly nipped her two fat cheeks. The child, called Bettchy, was more or less her goddaughter, except that Elizabeth was a non-Catholic heretic and therefore could not officially be named her godmother. Not quite two, Bettchy was so cheerful that her own father had asked if something was wrong with her, as if only an idiot child might find cause to smile so much. Elizabeth balanced the child on her hip as she began preparations for lunch, while the plump starfish hands grasped at everything. Elizabeth saw that Bettchy’s mother Maria was out on the terrace, painting. Their cook had turned into quite an impressive primitivist—her paintings on tin sheets and cardboard and plywood scraps, of saints, mostly, and flowers and churches, and sometimes all three in one frame, leaned against walls throughout the house—but in the fever of artistic
creation, the woman had basically abandoned her domestic duties, as well as her maternal ones. Elizabeth had taken over the cooking and most of the mothering. These days she hardly needed her own child when there were so many extras crawling around. Now that Helena was done, Elizabeth’s next translation project would most definitely be Dr. Spock. Maria didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with a child. All day long it was no, no, no, and a double slap on the hand or the behind.
When Elizabeth answered the telephone, the connection was so full of hisses and crackles she didn’t register at first that the other party was speaking in English.
“Please, is this Miss Bishop?”
“Yes?” she shouted. “Hello?” Bettchy wriggled insistently until Elizabeth let her out of her arms.
“I’m calling from O Globo,” bellowed the caller, a youth by his voice. “Can you tell me your reaction to the Pulitzer Prize?”
“My reaction? Bettchy, vem cá! Well, I think it’s a fine prize.”
There was a silence; perhaps the connection had been lost. “Dona Elizabeechy,” the reporter shrieked, “do you know you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize?”
Outside, afternoon clouds were gathering over the mountains. The waterfall was gushing. They’d have another night of terrific storms. “Well, thank you for calling,” she said.
“Don’t you hear me?” he shouted. “O Premio Pulitzer! You’ve won!”
For some moments, she could not think of a proper or polite response. “Are you sure there’s not some mistake?”
“It is no mistake. You have won the prize. Would you like to share your thoughts?”
“Well, then,” she said, “thank you very much for calling.”
The More I Owe You Page 17