“What does Carlos actually stand for?” Elizabeth cried out. “He attacks everyone, but is he really trying to build anything constructive? There’s so much wonderful humanism and imagination in this country, and it’s just squandered, over and over. When I first got here, Kubitschek was running for president and you saw his campaign posters everywhere with the slogan in big red letters: Fifty Years in Five. He promised to single-handedly forge Brazil into a modern nation. So he built Brasilia and bankrupted the country, and now it’s even more ruined than when he started.”
“It’s a beautiful line, though. I can see it in a poem. ‘Fifty years in five.’”
“Yes, it’s beautiful and totally disastrous. As if you can maneuver change just because you’ve passed a resolution, that you can forgo the process of change, the slow, painful work of it. Change comes at its own pace, and almost always from a surprising quarter.”
“If it comes at all,” Cal said, and squeezed her close to him.
From the dock, they returned to Copacabana by taxi. Their driver kept one hand out the window, holding a cigarette, while he raced along the length of the aterro as if hell-bent on breaking the sound barrier. To one side lay Lota’s park, to the other Christ on his mountaintop. How could you look at either without feeling the lie of monuments? All the way, her fist lay balled up in Cal’s ice-cold grip. When they arrived at her apartment building, they stood together in the little square bathed in bright moonlight. From the beach came the thunder of waves. Someone had suspended a tarp among the trees in the square, and beneath it lay two or three sleeping bodies.
“I’ll call you first thing in the morning.” Elizabeth didn’t yet want to leave him, and she sensed he felt the same. “We can skip our swim and go directly to the doctor.”
“You have always been my girl.” Cal’s gaze was intent upon her face. But he wasn’t seeing. Again, the disregard. It wasn’t him, really; it was the madness’s disregard. She’d been the object of this look too many times to count. It was a look that preceded the most extraordinary statements spoken in the most rational tone, the look that drew you in until you no longer knew what was normal and what was mad.
“You’re so beautiful,” Cal said. “Like an actress.”
“No, Cal. I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Too beautiful to touch.”
She did not answer.
“I threw away my crazy pills,” he said.
“Oh, Cal, please tell me you didn’t!”
“Right after Lizzie left.”
“Then I don’t know what to say. I just give up.”
“I wanted to feel free, and I do. Not at all like a monster, did I say that I did? It’s like a wonderful bright fever.”
She no longer tried to keep the annoyance from her voice. “Then you’re in no shape to go to Buenos Aires.You must postpone your trip. I insist. At least until you see a doctor.”
“There’s no need.” He smiled lovingly as he backed away. Elizabeth had only to step forward and she might still have caught hold of his jacket.
“Wait, Cal. Where are you going?”
“Goodbye, darling poppet.”
Out of reflex, her arm went up, then fell slack at her side. Cal had already turned and was walking briskly along Avenida Atlântica. Elizabeth determined to go upstairs immediately and call his hotel—perhaps they could restrain him somehow until a doctor arrived. But she didn’t move. She watched Cal’s back disappear into the dark.
Five years will pass before Elizabeth sees him again, in New York. By then, all of this will have been forgotten. She will be utterly alone. She will depend on him more than ever, and Cal will not fail her.
ELIZABETH REMAINED on the terrace at Samambaia with a glass of wine, having read and reread Cal’s letter from the hospital in Connecticut. He was spending a lengthy recuperation there, and reported that he was doing as well as could be hoped. At least he was recovering, a little more each day. The letter contained his usual postbreakdown apology, but this one moved her even more than most. She’d come alone to the house for the weekend; Lota could not get away. It was evening. This was always the most difficult part of the day for Elizabeth; as the light drained completely from the sky, her spirit was at its weakest. Yet she was not terribly worried that her glass of wine would turn into something more destructive. Her motivation for taking a break from the Antabuse was quite the opposite. Elizabeth had taken in so much poison with Lota’s involvement in politics that she had no desire to take in more—that included both pills and gin.
From the forest emanated the calls of birds and monkeys. Here was paradise directly before her. She must remember this, not allow it to slip through her sights.
Later, having retired to bed and deep in the letters of Coleridge, something drew Elizabeth from the house and into the frigid dark, up to her studio. Earlier in the day she had gathered jacaranda seeds in her skirt and placed them on her desk, the dark wooden pods beginning to open like a dozen gaping mouths. Before she slept, she wanted to see what the housekeeper Beatriz had done with them. She found the jacaranda seeds scattered throughout the studio—one held the drafts of a poem in its jaw, another stood upright on the lip of her teacup. Several had been set along the edge of a paddle Elizabeth had brought home from her trip with Rosinha down the Amazon. The paddle was shaped like a lollipop, and carved into its flat plane was the Brazilian flag. A man in one of the dugouts that had constantly approached their riverboat had noticed her admiration for the paddle and had offered to sell it. She’d hesitated, but Rosinha had urged her on. But how will he get back to shore? Elizabeth had asked.
For months after the trip, she dreamed of the river constantly. Sometimes she was on the boat, and sometimes the dreams were more surreal, she swam beneath the water like the riverman in her poem, she spoke to the river’s denizens, the birds and snakes. She wanted desperately to go back and begged Lota to accompany her, but she could have predicted the response. I’d sooner drown than be trapped onboard a boat for that long.
From Rio, they’d flown over the River of Souls, the River of the Dead, the Xingu. In Manaus, she, Rosinha, and Rosinha’s nephew had boarded a riverboat packed with over five hundred passengers. The caboclos hung their hammocks on the lower deck or else slept on mats among their livestock and sacks of goods. Elizabeth shocked a fellow passenger in first class, who’d mistaken her for the wife of a rich plantation owner, by descending the stairs to visit them. A handful of pure Indians, handsome and plump, waved her over like gentle children. One wore beads and red and black paint on his body, and before her visit ended he made Elizabeth an offer of marriage.
Below Manaus, the Rio Negro was joined by another tributary, the Solimões. The two waters did not mix but flowed side by side for many miles, crystalline black on one side, café com leite on the other. For the next two weeks, they floated down the great river, making eighteen stops along the route to Belem: Itaquatiara, Urucurituba, Oriximiná—names out of prehistory. Some were towns and others were settlements discernible in the night only by candles or lanterns on a pier. The boat took on even more passengers and cargo, including game from the forest—a gutted deer, a muzzled live alligator, a fish eight feet long—and a number of sick people on their way to the hospital at the river’s mouth. There was a girl bitten by a snake, a feverish pregnant woman, and a dying man wrapped in a sheet with a nightcap on. The ill, like the cargo, were loaded into the hold.
With every breath, she wanted to speak Lota’s name.
At night they traveled side channels so narrow the forest swept at her cabin door, like hands scratching to get in and claim her. During daylight, her eyes were constantly upon the river. A hundred herons ornamented the branches of a dead tree, luminous white against a stormy blue-black sky. Elizabeth loved the river traffic, boats of all sizes scuttling back and forth, crowded with people and their daily commerce. The dugouts were propelled by the lollipop paddles, and their rears popped out of the water as though the front ends were overloaded. At eve
ry stop, the boats came out to meet them, laden with fruit, rocking chairs, chickens and turkeys with their legs bound, anything and everything on offer. One sold ironing boards, another shirts and trousers. She acquired a tin basin in which to wash Lota’s silver hair and the paddle from a father and son who’d sold out of their woven baskets and rubber balls. Without the paddle, they lay in the dugout upon their stomachs and pulled themselves back to the dock by hand.
Lota hates boats so much, she would have lost her mind on this trip, Elizabeth told her companions as she dealt another game of Hearts. But I think she would have loved it, too.
The town of Santarem had no pavement, just deep orange sand among the beautiful houses, and absolute silence. On the ground lay blossoms from Brazil nut trees, smelling divine. That town in particular Elizabeth hated to leave. It was ideal for a rest cure, and she discussed with Rosinha how they might return at the earliest possibility. But Elizabeth will not return to Santarem. She will dream of the Amazon for the rest of her life, she will write about it, but she will never go back, not with Rosihna, not with Lota, and not alone. When the boat’s bell rang, she left Santarem and boarded with the other passengers. In her hand she held tight to a souvenir, the hard mud nest of a wasp given her by a friendly pharmacist.
Even she had to admit the food onboard was inedible. After fifteen days on a diet of hard-boiled eggs and ready for a little variety, they reached Belem, near the river’s mouth. Along the riverbank, the houses balanced precariously over the water on stilts. The wharves were full of miserable houseboats, their names written on the hulls, Flotuante this and Flotuante that, though most of them were waterlogged, listing, barely afloat. Flotuante Maria, Flotuante Flor, and one that made her cry out to Rosinha, Look at that one! That one’s mine! Flotuante si Deus Quer. Still floating, as long as God wills it.
21
CURIOUS HOW ONE grew accustomed to living in a state of siege. The first time Elizabeth took notice of a shift was on the night she last saw Cal, when several men lay asleep on the ground beneath a tarp they’d unfurled in the little plaza beside the apartment building, but really it must have begun a while before that, in countless smaller ways, or even those sleeping men would have struck her as more remarkable. No one really seemed to notice or asked them to move in the following days. It crossed Elizabeth’s mind that perhaps they were owners of one of the kiosks across Avenida Atlântica or drunkards who’d rolled down the hill from the favela and were too soused to climb their way back up.
They were striking workers, it turned out, and they began to arrive in profusion. For some time, there were maybe twenty-five or thirty, men and women both, who sat all day under the tarps and slept there as well. They spliced into the electrical lines and watched television or made fruit juice in blenders. You had to be careful not to trip on the cords running over the pavement, but otherwise there was nothing overtly menacing about their presence. You got used to them. They didn’t bother anybody. Many simply lay on cots and read books. At night, during the blackouts, they talked softly by candlelight. Some strummed guitars while others sang. Elizabeth did not understand why they’d settled here; they did not display any signs protesting a specific injustice. Lota dismissed the entire issue with a wave of her hand. Meaningful conversation was reserved for one topic only. And that was the park.
After the workers took over a radio station up the block and began their pirate broadcasts, the encampment grew rapidly. From the terrace, Elizabeth looked down upon the multicolored surface of the tarps, which overflowed from the small square and into the nearby streets like an outdoor market, blocking traffic. Pedestrians were forced to duck beneath the lines that fastened the tarps to street lamps and buildings. Manholes were pulled aside, and latrines fashioned out of wooden scraps and tin were positioned directly over the sewers. In order to protect their fellow unionists living in the street, the strikers erected barricades at the intersections, first using stones and branches, and later shiny corrugated-tin sheets and barbed wire. After sundown, an acrid smell carried into the apartment when they began to burn tires in front of the barricades, where two or three men with machetes kept watch through the night. A scorched mark remained on the pavement in the morning along with the tires’ radial wire rings.
Elizabeth began to use the freight elevator at the building’s back entrance, around the corner from the encampment, in order to avoid the men at the barricade who asked for her identification. Refuse to provide it, Lota told her. Barge right past them, like I do. They are afraid of me.
A bus was burned and remained blocking Gustavo Sampaio Street.
Beyond the tarps, the city functioned normally, and there Elizabeth found a taxi so that she might take lunch to Lota at her workplace; otherwise, she found that she did not leave the apartment for days at a time. On the way to the aterro, she often passed soldiers or tanks guarding positions near the government palaces and public squares. It was unclear who commanded them, since it might have been either the governor or the president, who distrusted and hated each other and so maintained their own loyal armed forces, and unclear also what, precisely, they protected, whether the liberty of the strikers to protest or the right of Rio’s citizens, amid the chaos, to conduct their daily lives without fear.
A worker in the port who did not support the strikes was ambushed and murdered in the middle of the day.
Elizabeth realized she had not seen a single policeman in more weeks than she could remember. Soldiers, yes, but no municipal police force. Of course there are no police, Lota said. Carlos has pulled them off duty. He cannot afford to provoke a confrontation with the striking workers, who have the sympathy of the president. And can you believe, she continued, only now growing heated, that those peabrains at SURSAN resist my ideas for the lighting of the park, even when the world’s greatest lighting expert has agreed to design the plan?
You could no longer travel out of Rio with any certainty, as the bus lines, train station, and airport might be shut down when you arrived. You could not reliably purchase beans, coffee, rice, or sugar.You could not buy meat unless you took your place in line at the butcher’s by 4:00 am.You could not withdraw your money from the bank.You could not walk along the beach after dark, or anywhere in the city where the streetlights no longer functioned, without risking your safety.
As the city fell further into anarchy, Carlos announced his candidacy for president, though there were still two years before the elections. If he wins, Lota said, and of course he will win, he wants me to be his minister of education. Elizabeth could not find words to respond, and she immediately left the Shack before Lota finished eating her lunch. In Cinelândia, there was an encampment ten times the size of that in Copacabana, with banners draped across the façades of the buildings and speeches being made continuously through a megaphone. She ducked into a movie theatre, expecting it to be empty at midday, but instead it was nearly full and she had difficulty finding a seat. Minutes after settling herself, Elizabeth began to cry uncontrollably. She understood now that the park was only the beginning of Lota’s public career; they would never return to Samambaia. The woman two seats over put a hand on Elizabeth’s arm and offered her a handkerchief.
On one occasion, the protest erupted. Elizabeth opened the door to the terrace early one morning, and there was an odd pungency in the air, not the smell of smoldering tires that she had grown used to but something else, acrid like burning plastic. Then her eyes began to sting and stream tears. A helicopter was circling low over the beach, and a great roar rose up from that direction, as from a soccer stadium after a goal. Hundreds or even thousands of people were blocking the tunnel that led from Copacabana to downtown. A figure in black was braced in the helicopter’s open door. He wore a hood and aimed a gun with a wide barrel at the multitude. A canister of billowing gas shot into the mass of protestors, who began to run in every direction like terrified chickens in a farmyard. One man holding his shirt to his face retrieved the tear-gas canister and pitched it ineffectually bac
k into the sky.
Elizabeth realized that for some time she had felt a flickering desire for violence to break, for the growing tension to explode and spill over, that she had been waiting and wanting it and dreading it, knowing the explosion would come, though not when or in what form.
22
YES, SHE WAS drinking again. They were living through difficult times, so her detractors would just have to cut her some slack. Generally she kept it under control. However, there did occur with some regularity the chain of causes and effects, including, but not limited to, sleepless nights, a lack of poetical production, and a harsh word or breakdown, or both simultaneously, on the part of Lota, that necessitated Elizabeth’s holing up in her room for a few hours, or days, drinking until there wasn’t a drop left in the vicinity, tearing out her hair in private anguish over what a horrible person she was, then pulling herself back together and carrying on.
The less fuss made over it, the better, and that was the only fortunate consequence of Lota’s being away so much. Often she missed the entire spectacle. She was usually in meetings until midnight, and once or twice a week she stayed the night with Carlos at Guanabara Palace or Brocoió Island. Park business, of course. Yet more and more, the discussions centered on how to counter the communist rise to power. Since the announcement of Carlos’s presidential candidacy, Lota had become more than a mere park director. She’d assumed her place in the inner circle.
The More I Owe You Page 23