I made you something special, Elizabeth said as she unwrapped the meal. You can hardly find meat anymore—or rice or sugar either, for that matter—but my butcher friend saved me some. Then of course you never know if the taxi or bus drivers are going to be on strike, so I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to get here. Honestly, this country!
She watched while Lota ate. It is absolutely delicious, like everything you make.
Kylso called. We talked for a long time.
In the doorway, Lota’s assistant was trying to catch her attention. Lota waved her away. The mention of her adopted son instantly soured her mood. I suppose he tried to bring you over to his cause.
No, not exactly.
Did he tell you he has now hired a lawyer? He is making very extravagant demands. I took him from nothing! I gave him education, surgeries so he could walk, every opportunity. Is it my fault he is ruining his life with too many children he cannot afford? Now he is suing me because he wants my money? I see no choice but to cut ties.
A series of expressions fluttered across Elizabeth’s face: so many shades of sad! She spoke so softly Lota could hardly hear the words. Maybe he just wants a little of your attention.
Everyone wants my attention. I must answer to engineers who want four roads and students who want a restaurant on the waterfront and mothers who don’t want to imperil their children’s lives and admirers of Carmen Miranda who clamor for a memorial to that fruithead. It is enough to send me to the luna bin. But listen, Burle Marx showed me some preliminary plans of the gardens. How would you like to go to the Amazon with us to help collect some plants?
Nothing gave her as much pleasure as turning Cookie’s sadness to joy. You know I would love that, she said. You know I dream of going there again, and with you this time. Then she asked, Do you think we’ll be able to get away to Samambaia this weekend?
Of course. The weekends are sacred, just the two of us. I leave all this behind. I told you that.
Lota finished the meat pie. It was extraordinary. If only Elizabeth cared as much about her poetry as she did about her cooking. Still, since Lota had taken over the park’s development, she was not the only one who had been productive. Elizabeth had written at least six or seven poems in the last year, three times her normal output. It was probably a good thing that Lota had been so busy; maybe all along she’d simply been getting in Elizabeth’s way.
Though she wasn’t crazy about that poem with the man who turned into a fish. It didn’t make any sense.
Tell me of your morning, Cookie. Did you write?
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. This was a habit Lota still had not grown accustomed to. So much time might elapse between her question and Elizabeth’s reply that Lota could not help but jump in to offer one herself. Today she remained patient, however, gripping her knees and waiting for Elizabeth’s words.
I’ve been asked to write a book, Elizabeth said at last. One of those awful coffee-table books about exotic countries. They want to pay me ten thousand dollars.
Lota leapt to her feet, clasping Elizabeth to her and crying, Ten thousand dollars!
It’s more money than I’ve ever made writing anything in my whole life.
And it’s less than you deserve. But what is the book about?
Brazil, of course. The hilarious thing is that before they made the actual offer, they asked me if I’d ever been a communist. She laughed in a bitter way.
But what do you know about Brazil? You don’t even know Portuguese.
That’s not the point, Lota. I’ve certainly lived here long enough to know it’s a hysterical country constantly on the verge of collapse.
She stared at Lota, who could not help but smile. She liked it when Elizabeth was roused to emotion.
I thought I might buy a house in Ouro Preto with the money.
Buy a house in Ouro Preto? Ten years together, and Elizabeth was still a complete mystery. Why buy a house hundreds of miles away in a town she’d visited only once or twice? For now, she gave Cookie a squeeze and said, I must run. I have a meeting with Brigadier General Gomes, who promises he will finally get a contract so Affonso can be paid. He has worked without a salary for nearly a year. I will see you tonight by seven thirty. That’s wonderful news about the book. I’m very proud of you.
Lota’s last appointment of the day was with a journalist, whom she took to task for describing her in a previous article as a chain-smoking friend of poets and artists, a woman who wore men’s clothing to work. Gossip about the director was hardly constructive journalism and was a waste of space that might otherwise showcase the park itself. Instead of alienating the young reporter, however, she knew she could convert him. She took him on a tour of the aterro, and discovered that the construction of a pedestrian bridge had stalled because the supplier had failed to deliver the proper building materials. At that moment, Enaldo also appeared, and she ordered both the journalist of her father’s newspaper and the director of SURSAN to climb into a dump truck parked at the Shack. Lota had never before navigated a dump truck through Rio’s downtown at rush hour, but it was no great trick—the other cars knew to get out of her way. She drove directly to the supplier and demanded that it be filled with the correct materials at once.
When they returned from the adventure, Enaldo was in a very good humor. He stayed late into the evening, and they went over all the plans again in detail, how it would work with two roads instead of four. This area is a gift, Lota said, it is a beautiful poem written to the citizens of Rio. We are entrusted with it for only a short time, and then others will take our places. It is a great responsibility and we must do our best to live up to it.
In the end, she prevailed. Men always believed their ideas superior, until she made them bend, even when they didn’t realize they were bending.
LOTA DID NOT arrive home until after eleven. There was a light beneath Elizabeth’s closed door. Lota put her ear to the wood; she could hear the rustle of pages. She wouldn’t disturb Cookie’s work. There were still at least three calls she had to make that would keep her up again until long past midnight. And tomorrow, at sunrise, another difficult appointment would be waiting for her at the Shack.
19
Today Rio is no longer the capital of the country. The actual drive to move the seat of government to the interior began in 1956, but the idea of establishing a utopian capital had existed for more than a century. As a site for this dream city, the government decided on a bleak, almost barren plain eight hundred miles to the north of Rio de Janeiro.
The ultramodern city of Brasilia is a testament to progress and the future, yet the ironies are endless. It’s simpler to launch a rocket to the moon than to drive an automobile over the hundreds of miles of muddy roads to the new capital. In a city of monumental concrete and glass architecture, the only real human life exists in the workers’ town built of wooden shacks. The city conceived and designed by its makers to eliminate social inequality has so bankrupted the country that there is no money for the basic services of schools, medical care, and electrical power in any of the cities where people actually live.
At the time of the author’s visit, the presidential residence, called the Palace of the Dawn, and the Brasilia Palace Hotel were the only two buildings completed, while the skeletons of five blocks of apartment buildings, or super quadras, rose into the distance like pyramids on Mars, with its miles of blowing red dust. The dust covers everything in Brasilia, one’s clothes, the cars, and the few scrubby trees.
The first building to be completed in the master plan of this modernist city was the Brasilia Palace Hotel, which appears to float magically in the air. Entering the lobby, one’s attention is drawn to a wall made entirely of drinking glasses laid on their sides, with the sunlight passing through the glass bottoms. The effect is beautiful
The Palace of the Dawn is a masterpiece of lightness and grace, a great glass box with swooping white columns, looking as if it has just touched down on earth. Even the best of Niemeyer, howe
ver, is alive with contradiction. Inside the palace, the sun streams through the glass, a lovely effect, though one feels likely to perish from the heat. And outside, one views the empty plain of red dust, kept at bay on the other side of a barbed wire fence and guarded by two soldiers in tin helmets with tommy guns under their arms.
Modernism: a new façade for the same old barbarism!
20
FEATHERS, MOSS, sheaves of bark, an opossum’s skull. The forest’s detritus that Elizabeth scavenged on her walks through Samambaia she left in a loose collection on her desk. The new housekeeper, Beatriz, might store the charcoal in the refrigerator and leave a dozen cobwebs hanging in the corners of a room, but she had a poet’s eye. She and Elizabeth had stumbled into a daily conversation, using, in place of words, the vocabulary of nature. Each afternoon, Elizabeth would pose a question with the objects she had collected, and the next morning she would receive Beatriz’s reply. A handful of leaves, eaten away to lace skeletons, were arranged into a nest, in which lay the fragments of a speckled eggshell. Concentric circles of stones radiated outward from the four legs of a worktable. Twigs and seedpods with undulating edges were configured upon a flat stone like hieroglyphics on a tablet.
The editors of Time had turned their backs on the natural poetry of this country; they’d wanted a book about Brazil with nary a bird, beast, or flower. It was beyond them to understand all the manners in which Brasilia was a complete disaster, but the modern city had been exactly what they wanted to emphasize—an exhibit of the new, the shiny, the engineered. All these months later, it still made her temperature rise. Writing that idiotic book had been the most scathing experience of her professional life. She’d hoped to make something beautiful, or at least with heart; then her relationship with the editors had deteriorated into an exchange of irate letters, and hardly a word of what she’d written remained in the final text. The published book was simply propaganda. What they knew about Brazil would have fit on the head of a pin, yet the gall, the arrogance, the condescension!
Ever since, the entire task of writing had soured. In six months, Elizabeth hadn’t managed a single decent thing of her own. She was stuck writing bad poetry about her pet toucan.
Uncle Sam, I killed you.
Poor Sammy, I didn’t mean to. I cried and cried.
It was all my fault.
You were so funny, Sam. Most comical of all in death.
Twenty drafts at least, and she’d never got beyond You’re dead. I killed you. The End.
Elizabeth abandoned her work and descended the hill to the house. Certainly she knew better than to disturb Lota, but some things couldn’t be helped. Lota was at her desk, peering through eyeglasses on the tip of her nose and surrounded by countless papers—sketches, accounting sheets, memoranda. The report she was studying so furiously was marked red with the ink of her notations. Elizabeth remained in the doorway and did not speak.
“Is there something you want from me?” Lota said, without looking up.
One of her own unfortunate habits, Elizabeth had noted, was that the fouler Lota’s mood, the more she pressed for Lota’s attention. “Why don’t we do something fun today?” she chirped. “Let’s have a picnic by the waterfall.”
“Elizabeth, I beg of you. I can’t leave the house on any whimsical outings. I must go over these hydraulic studies by Monday. I’ve brought an expert all the way from Lisbon to advise us on creating the beach.”
“I know, I know. And the dredge has come all the way from the Panama Canal. You certainly can’t disappoint the dredge.”
“I cannot go on a picnic.”
She should have gone, of course, gone anywhere—to collect some sticks and snakeskins, or take her watercolors to the pool, or work on her dreadful poem about Sammy—but instead Elizabeth entered the lion’s den and took a seat. “Sammy’s empty cage looks so forlorn behind the house. I miss that guy.”
“Then you should not have poisoned him.”
“I was thinking maybe we could—”
“No. We are taking a vacation from toucans for the time being.”
“Why are you being so horrid to me? It’s not my fault you’re overworked.”
“I should not be here, Elizabeth!” Lota erupted. “I am very uneasy in Samambaia when there are a thousand things in Rio that demand my attention. You have no idea what pressures I’m under. I let you convince me to come here because I know you want to, but I have a lot on my mind, a lot that I am responsible for.”
Yes, here she was in Samambaia, they’d come for the weekend at her insistence, but she was no more than a visitor, a tourist in her own home. The house that Lota had built was so gorgeous Elizabeth could wander through its rooms and stare and sigh as though she were in love. Every architectural detail was in dialogue with nature—the windows that invited light from every angle, the stone walls covered in lichen, the wild animals that passed through these rooms with as much freedom as its human inhabitants. How could she have understood they were to leave this home, which had taken her half a lifetime to find, so soon? Ten years had passed too quickly. Maybe Elizabeth’s happiness had drugged her into a sort of trance; she hadn’t received the news flash that everything necessarily changes, even enchantment. Enchantment most of all. Happiness was a state with no tension; that must be why it floated past like the clouds spilling over the mountaintop. The mystery was that Lota, too, had been happy, but for those days she had no nostalgia whatsoever. Once the house had been completed, she hardly seemed to acknowledge it. Nowadays, it was the park, the park, and nothing but the park.
She and Lota stared tensely at one another until a bright flash of crimson outside the window caught Elizabeth’s eye; it was that little drab bird with the brilliant red breast. She hardly ever saw him, and here he was, perched sideways on a stalk of bamboo, showing off his one impressive color. Lota had told her that on the rare occasion this shy bird offered a glimpse of his red breast, that day you would receive a pleasant surprise.
“Lota, look!”
Lota turned to the window, and then, glory to God, she broke into a laugh. When her eyes again rested upon Elizabeth, they had grown kind again. Lota rose from her work and knelt before Elizabeth, laying her head in Elizabeth’s lap. Her jet-black hair had silvered over the years—it was so elegant, so handsome. “Please forgive me,” Lota said. “I need you now very much. Please don’t leave me, don’t go away from me.”
Elizabeth put a hand to Lota’s cheek. “I don’t know anymore whether you’re heroic or completely out to lunch.”
CAL, AT LAST, in Brazil.
They sat together on a cliff face, watching seabirds wheel and dive into the sea. From their perch, the jagged rocks fell at least a hundred feet into the surf, which boiled and seethed below. He’d arrived a week earlier, bringing Elizabeth a wonderful present—a pair of binoculars—and now she kept them pressed to her face, studying how the birds folded their wings and plummeted into the rough water. They hit so near the rocks they risked being dashed against them, then took flight as they were still gulping down the silvery beakful of their catch. Then they dove again.
“I never should have accepted the assignment,” Elizabeth said, passing Cal the binoculars. “I knew from the beginning I couldn’t write the kind of propaganda Life World Library wanted to publish about Brazil, but I just kept beating my head against the wall. Promise you’ll never let me write again for motives of profit.”
“I promise you,” Cal said.
“But how else are we to survive? My last royalty check for Helena was $4.90.”
“I’ve considered taking a job at the local five-and-dime. It’s about all I’m qualified for.”
Sameness of mind was restorative. Elizabeth had forgotten. She did not spend hours wondering what Cal’s thoughts might be or trying to second-guess what he needed from her or upon what system of logic he operated; she already understood.Yet ever since she’d met his plane and helped Cal and his family settle into their suite at the Copacabana Palac
e, Elizabeth had been studying him, examining his face as though that might tell her the truth of his state of mind. In the five years since she’d seen him last, on the disastrous visit to Maine, he’d had another handful of breakdowns. Each time he’d managed to pull himself back together, but who knew how; it seemed a superhuman effort. His wife Lizzie was a saint, that was sure, but Cal’s sufferings broke Elizabeth’s heart.
Still, he seemed well. What had first struck her as jet lag from the long flight appeared to be his steady state: rather calm and subdued, though not at all melancholy. She’d seen none of the swings or effusions of his sickness.
“It’s nice to be alone with you finally, Cal.”
He set down the binoculars and reached across her shoulders, drawing Elizabeth close. She looked at his big warm hand upon her bare arm. “I’m doing wonderfully, just to let you know. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m thriving. And I’m writing up a storm.”
“You just got here!”
“You never told me how inspiring Rio was.”
“I suppose it can be.” Elizabeth still focused on her arm, where the skin, spotted and slack, wrinkled up in the crook of her elbow. The length of the limb looked like the skinny, jointed leg of a crab. Cal was so hale and vigorous. How had she become a scrawny crab?
“Would you like to see Rio by helicopter?” she asked. “You swoop up and down over all the mountains, and it’s absolutely terrifying. Lota can arrange it.”
“I would love that!”
“I’m sure she’ll want to take you to her park, too. Though there’s hardly anything to show. She’s been working on it for two years, and all she does is have fruitless meetings with lazy bureaucrats, then come home with mysterious aches and dizzy spells.”
The More I Owe You Page 21