Each morning, she rose early and took her coffee beside the waterfall. The dry season had begun, and the creatures who inhabited the pool, the snails and toads and crabs, squeezed into crevices among the rocks, seeking moisture. It was the time of year when large pale-blue butterflies drifted along the meadows and the edge of the forest, flopping slowly before one’s eyes, and the Lent trees bloomed purple all over the mountains. Looking back down the hill, Elizabeth saw how the house had become nearly overgrown by jungle and vines after many months of neglect. It appeared abandoned, or else home to the sort of people who collected bales of newspapers and were overrun with cats. But when she returned inside, the sun was streaming through the leaves that grew over the windows, like green stained glass, and the light was perfectly beautiful.
Nearly two decades earlier, when Elizabeth had first come to Samambaia, the house had been a mere four rooms. She’d written in the little den, banging on an ancient typewriter whose letters had worn off the keys. This was where she returned to work now. She preferred to stay in the main house rather than disappear into her studio; she did not want to stray too far from Lota. On the sofa across the room, Lota lay sleeping with a blanket tucked around her, while the Calder mobile suspended above took a twist or turn every so often from a draft. It was warm for March, but Lota said she could not rid herself of a chill that went to her bones. She wore sweaters and blankets, and Elizabeth, in a slip, kept the fire roaring in the sheet-iron stove as she worked.
The day progressed. Elizabeth wrote about the toad. Lota whimpered in her sleep, and Elizabeth tiptoed to her side to pull the blanket back over her shoulders. The woolen blanket was moth-eaten, pin-pricked with holes. Lota’s recovery was a miracle—Elizabeth could not yet fathom it—but she wasn’t completely out of the woods. For no apparent reason, she still experienced crying jags or sudden fits of bad temper. In most ways, however, in the ways that mattered, she was Lota again.
Lota woke as Elizabeth stood over her, and her eyes darted about, filling with panic. She was often afraid when she first gained consciousness, as if she did not recognize where she lay.
“It’s all right,” Elizabeth said, sitting beside her. “I’m here.”
Lota’s gaze finally rested upon Elizabeth, and she grew calmer. “Have I slept long?”
“It’s nearly evening now. Here, take these.”
Obediently, Lota swallowed the two white pills Elizabeth held in her palm.
“Shall I make you some dinner? I can bring it to you here, on a tray.”
“With a toucan?” Lota said, smiling.
“No toucan, I’m afraid.”
“You miss your Sammy the toucan, don’t you? You loved him so much. Why don’t I get you another Sammy?”
Elizabeth slid her hand beneath the blanket and stroked Lota’s calf. “For now, I’d rather take care of you.”
“I was terrible to you about Seattle, Cookie.”
“Yes, you were. You were impossible.”
“I was jealous. All those letters from your students. You must have been a very good teacher for them to miss you so much. I knew you were happy there, so far away from me.”
“I wasn’t happy being away from you. But it’s true I wasn’t as unhappy as I’d been here before I left.”
“And you are over all your nonsenses, aren’t you?”
Elizabeth nodded, though it was easier to speak about one of her nonsenses than about the other. “When I’m away, the drinking is not so much of a problem. It’s only with the constant strain that I can’t control myself.”
“Then we must eliminate the strain. And we must trust each other more.”
“I feel very hopeful, Lota, as strange as that sounds. After all we’ve been through together, I feel as if we finally have no illusions left. We just have each other, as imperfect as we are, but also as well-meaning.”
Whoever could have told her that deep sorrow was inextricably bound to deep love? Was that what Mary had meant, that in the end you must submit, humbled, before love? In the clinic in Botafogo, her mind had filled with plans for escape. She’d catch the next flight to Seattle, or New York, or Key West, or Mexico. No, not Mexico—no more Latin countries ever again. Instead, she’d been given another chance to love, to love better, and she would not squander it. She would not leave Brazil—not this vine-enshrouded house, not the pool, not the snail, the toad, the crab. And not Lota, never Lota.
AS LOTA GAINED strength, she also regained the capacity for boredom. Elizabeth had never known another person who responded to boredom with such a personal and almost moral fury. In retrospect, she understood this had always been so. During the years they’d spent peacefully in Samambaia, before the park, Lota had lived in a state of ceaseless motion. All her waking hours had been devoted to working on the house, with hardly a moment for rest or contemplation, for a stillness of soul. Then, it had not occurred to Elizabeth that Lota’s energy might contain an element of desperation; instead she’d thought it enviable, passionate and creative, qualities she deeply admired. Once the house was completed, however, Lota had pursued a project of an even greater scale to avoid drowning in her own impatience.
“Merde!” Lota exclaimed.
Elizabeth looked up from the typewriter. Lota had thrown the pages she was reading to the floor. It was another letter from Carlos. He wrote nearly every day, trying to woo her back.
“Carlos is so full of bullcrap it makes me sick,” she cried. “He wants me to come work for him again. I think he honestly believes the two of us alone can overthrow the dictatorship. If I don’t work soon, I will truly go mad, but if I work for him, I will go madder sooner.” As she held Elizabeth’s gaze across the room, Lota’s anger softened. “Why did I not listen to you?” she said. “You were right all along. Carlos does not want to reach accord with anyone, he simply wants to fight. I miss him, but I do not miss all his merde. A cloud of merde follows him everywhere.”
“That’s true. But I have to believe that, like you, Lota, he is only fighting because he believes so deeply in his cause.”
Lota replied, “I am tired of fighting. I don’t have any fight left. Cookie, I’ve been thinking. Do you think you could make a very special lunch, if I asked you?”
“Of course. Anything you want.”
“I would like to invite my father to come. And my sister Marietta. When I feel a little bit stronger. It is time to make peace.”
LOTA WAS AGAIN able to drive, to read, to take walks with Elizabeth in the forest, to bully the gardener. She began to take charge of getting the house in order, and now there was much bustle and activity around Elizabeth as she wrote. Their idyll was broken only by one daily unpleasantness: Mary’s visits. Mary no longer entered the house freely at any time of day but arrived each afternoon at three o’clock, knocking on the door like a formal visitor, and strode past Elizabeth without a greeting. Elizabeth hardly remembered what vile things she’d said the day of their quarrel, she’d been so distraught and poisoned by self-loathing. But obviously Mary remembered every word, and she had not forgiven her. Now she spoke to Elizabeth no more than was necessary to maintain the bare minimum of civility.
Of course, this did not escape Lota. “What happened between you?” she demanded.
“Nothing, Lota.”
“It was more than nothing. Morsie does not easily take offense.”
“Well, she took offense from me.”
“Tell me why.” Her expression was wonderfully stern and Lota-like.
“We fought over you, if you must know.”
Lota took in the information, and a pleased look settled over her face. She let the matter drop.
FINALLY, THE BOREDOM was too great. Cleaning the house was not enough; it was work for a maid. One of the former members of Lota’s staff at the park had moved to the federal office of inflation control. He offered her a job, and she accepted.
“That sounds absolutely deadly,” Elizabeth said. Lota’s announcement had taken her by surprise, but it al
so made plain another fact equally difficult to accommodate: Samambaia would never again be their permanent home. “I am only worried that going back to work for the government will make you . . .” She searched for the word.
“Unhinged?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Something like that.”
“I promise you I won’t allow myself to become swallowed as I was before,” Lota said. “I will keep perspective. Besides, I will be a low-level bureaucrat, and who will care enough to fight me? But Elizabeth, you know I cannot be idle. That is the greater danger.”
So they left the mountains and descended back into the deafening city. Lota had new clothes made and began to meet with her prospective employers. Three days a week, she had an appointment with Decio. It was now Elizabeth, alone in the Rio apartment, who was forced to confront idleness. The crisis appeared to have passed, and catastrophe narrowly escaped. If they were to take up their lives again, in which direction was she now to turn her own energies? The answer was close by. In fact, it had been percolating for years. At last it was time to tackle the project she’d wanted to devote herself to for as long as she could remember: the book of essays on Brazil. Not the airbrushed Time Life version full of naked happy savages and gleaming modernity, but her own version, one that encompassed the staggering loveliness and the terrible waste, the Brazilians’ capacity for saudade as well as the consuming delight they could take in any moment—the whole wrenching, beautiful mess of which she’d become a citizen.
Once her mind quickened again to the work, Elizabeth knew exactly where to begin. Another river trip, this time to the Rio São Francisco, Brazil’s second great waterway, which cut northward from Minas Gerais to Bahia. At the end of May, Lota accompanied her as far as Belo Horizonte, where Elizabeth boarded a bus with the other passengers who’d signed on for the river journey, fourteen intrepid souls who were all, curiously, rather obese.
After a long day’s drive, they arrived in the town of Pirapora, where the river became navigable, and boarded the sternwheeler. Elizabeth began to take notes at once. In Portuguese, the boat was called a gaviola, or birdcage, for the iron framework built around the paddles, and indeed there were also birdcages all along the lower deck, filled with canaries, ferocious little green birds that were set upon each other to fight for sport.
As they set off down the river, the paddles splashed softly, a lulling, hypnotic ppph . . . ppph . . . ppph. The landscape was arid, desolate, a thousand times less lush and beautiful than the Amazon, yet this was exactly what the doctor had ordered: drifting with the current, gazing into the sky or water, losing all sense of time and place and distance. Her mind was cleansed. The hours passed.
All day long, the crew fished from the sides of the boat and grilled what they caught for lunch. The paddle wheel turned. Ppph . . . ppph . . . ppph.
The clay of the riverbank was a yellow-brown, and the color had worked its way into the water, the hides of livestock, the paint on the houses, the skin of the people. As they passed the yellow river towns, the yellow women washed their yellow clothes and yellow plates and yellow children in the yellow water. They stared at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth stared back. A breeze blew from the shore, carrying with it the perfume of jasmine and, underneath the sweetness, the scent of feces and carrion. Each evening, she made notes in her calendar book while the captain blasted a scratchy recording of Lakmé. On the last day before they arrived in Bahia, Elizabeth was gazing downriver when a thought lightly traced across her mind, like a bright mote floating in the corner of her vision.
Today is the day my mother died.
Then the thought whisked away.
She holed up in a hotel room in Salvador, writing out the notes for her essay. She tried to wash her clothes in the sink, but the rinsewater retained the yellow color of the river even after two vigorous applications of Flocos LUX soap. When she was done with her notes, she called home. It was Mary who answered the phone.
The moment she heard Mary’s voice, Elizabeth already knew what news she was going to deliver, more or less.
“You must return to Rio immediately,” Mary said.
“What’s happened?” Her own voice was flat, disembodied.
“Lota’s father passed away suddenly, several days ago. I’m sorry to tell you that Lota has collapsed again.”
29
THE WHITE HEN had met its end in the middle of West Fourth Street, directly in front of Nicola’s market. The unfortunate fowl’s wings were flattened thin as paper, outstretched on the pavement as if in its final moments it had attempted to take flight.
“A pigeon, I’d understand,” Elizabeth said to her friends. She’d been standing on the sidewalk between the two men for some minutes, conjecturing about the chicken’s origin. “Or a sparrow. But what’s a chicken doing running across the road in Greenwich Village in the middle of the afternoon?”
“Obviously, she didn’t quite make it to the other side,” said Wheaton.
“Don’t you think it’s the strangest thing?”
“I’ve seen stranger in this neighborhood.”
“An inglorious end to an inglorious bird,” Harold pronounced sadly.
“I feel she should be memorialized somehow,” Elizabeth said.
They walked around the corner to Perry Street. Approaching their houses, which stood facing one another on the same block, she felt the too-familiar anxiety of imminent separation. An extreme reaction to the circumstance, she knew that, but hardly any more extreme than any day out of the last five years. Throughout the summer, she’d passed her afternoons in Harold and Wheaton’s garden, reading or writing letters while Harold pruned. They were dear friends who became dearer by the day. She didn’t need talk or entertainment, just human company close by. It was impossible to be alone anymore. She’d lost the knack.
“I’m going to have to start wearing earrings dangling down to my bosom,” Elizabeth said as they passed two young women in sheer cotton blouses with no bras, “and a guitar strapped to my back, if I’m going to fit in here. Lota won’t even recognize me.” Her nerves, she noticed, were breaking down the filter between what her eyes encountered and what her mouth found necessary to speak aloud. “Look,” she said, as they arrived at the men’s house, “here I am again, following you to your front door, as if I lived here too.”
“But you do live here too,” Harold said, drawing her up the steps.
They settled in the garden. Wheaton went inside to turn on the hifi. Elizabeth’s logorrhea continued. “That Nicotiana looks very good here. It really works in this sooty soil. I’m so glad you took my advice. And doesn’t it smell divine? I love how it smells in the evening. But oh my, that bamboo isn’t exactly thriving, is it?”
Wheaton returned, and with a touch of urgency she asked, “Would you say it’s five o’clock yet?”
“The usual?” Wheaton rose from the chair he’d just taken.
“Yes, please. A gin and tonic is the perfect drink for these sticky New York summers, don’t you think?”
“What time does Lota come in?” Harold asked. He was never one for rambling along conversational side roads. He used his words sparely, and always directed them at the heart of the matter. It might be painful, but his bass voice was so soothing, his dark, deep-set eyes so calming, she didn’t mind.
“Her flight arrives tomorrow afternoon,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sure she’ll be worn out after the trip, but maybe over the weekend you two would like to come for dinner? I want to make something special to celebrate.”
“We’d love to,” Harold said. His smile was beneficent, deeply kind; she wanted to kneel and kiss his hand.
SHE’D LEFT BRAZIL two months ago, with hardly twenty-four hours’ notice. New York, in summer, she found abandoned by literate society. All her friends had gone elsewhere, to the Hamptons probably, or distributed themselves to the poles. Cal was in Maine. No doubt it was for the best, as she couldn’t tolerate any company but Harold and Wheaton’s across the street. Besides, she was still havi
ng headaches and dizziness from the concussion she’d received her last night in Rio. The only one still hanging around the city was Mary McCarthy, who kept calling to suggest lunch. What nerve! How she’d treated Lota in that nasty, vulgar book of hers was unforgivable. Elizabeth had been forced to pretend she hadn’t read it.
In June, when she’d rushed home after the river trip, Elizabeth had entered the apartment to find shades pulled across every window. She’d never before seen it darkened in this way, with the world shut out. “She says the light hurts her eyes,” Mary informed her, standing in the shadows like a ghoul. In the back room, Lota lay on the bed. A profound, or perhaps a drugged, stillness had taken hold of her body. Her breathing was hoarse, regular. Elizabeth sat beside the bed and leaned forward, pressing her palms to her eyes.
“Are you crying, Cookie? You shouldn’t cry.”
Lota had turned toward her, but in the darkness Elizabeth could not make out her face. It was her voice that was so chilling, all the emotion drained out of it but with an observing distance, as if mildly puzzled by its own lack of feeling.
“I thought you were asleep,” Elizabeth said.
Lota did not answer. After a long while, she said, “My father always told me you could not trust Americans. They speak the right words, but they do not believe them. I don’t know why I am always surprised when I see the truth in what he said.”
“Lota, please. I’ve been so worried about you. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when your father died. Has it been awful?”
“My father was old. It was only a matter of time. It is a pity, though, we did not have that lunch I asked you to make.”
The More I Owe You Page 31