Vasco Pereira; his wife, Margarida; his mother; and their children resided in the hulking consulate on Washington Avenue in Pacific Heights. His youngest child, Bernardo, was born in San Francisco in February 1959 shortly before Pereira met Alice. His two daughters, Vera and Cristina, attended a French-language Catholic school in Chinatown. For the entire family, but especially for the father, San Francisco was a revelation. Here, as his daughter Vera Futscher Pereira writes, Vasco and Margarida were “absorbed by a busy social life that never ceased to surprise them… meeting women who were more independent and daring than most European women.”10
Pereira had come to San Francisco in 1956 after assignments in Morocco and the Belgian Congo. Two years earlier, while overseeing his government’s building of a new consulate in Leopoldville, Pereira sent a letter to his superiors about independence movements in Central Africa, specifically in Congo and in the neighboring Portuguese province of Angola. He proposed that his government should change its policies and offered to travel and learn more about the situation. They transferred him to San Francisco instead.
As newlyweds in Portugal, a country whose authoritarian regime was officially neutral in World War II, the strikingly handsome Futscher Pereira had shared an interest in theater, art, and literature. She was a practicing Catholic, he an agnostic. She had a passionate interest and a master’s degree in literature, for which she’d written her thesis on Bloomsbury-era English novelist Rosamond Lehmann—an unusual choice for a devout young woman. After the war, the couple lived in Rome for two years, coincidentally overlapping Alice and Mark Linenthal’s briefer stay there. As Margarida Navarro, she wrote about Italy for Lisbon’s Diário Popular. One essay celebrates the poetic love and collaboration of Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
Unlike that famous English couple, Margarida and Vasco soon found themselves beginning a family. According to Vera Futscher Pereira, her mother’s happiness declined as her father’s prospects rose. Suffering with postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter in Rome, she returned to Lisbon. Vasco began a career with the Portuguese diplomatic service and was soon promoted to consul general in the Belgian Congo. Here Margarida gave birth to her second daughter, Vera, who grew up to be a translator, writer, and family archivist. The years in Leopoldville were happier for the young family. They entertained lavishly in the elegant new consulate with a staff of African servants.
By the time Alice met Vasco Pereira, his marriage had changed—or so he led Alice to believe. He and Margarida had both aged, certainly—she into a society matron and mother with domestic responsibilities, he into a charming middle-aged European man-about-town whose movements were assisted by Vice Consul Antonio Bettencourt.
Pereira dominated Alice’s life for more than two years. Afterward, her friend Eleanor Haas told her, “You were not yourself when you were with Vasco.”11 Her feelings for him pushed other people aside. In her apartment she waited for his fugitive phone calls and visits (he had a key) or for notes left at her door by Bettencourt. Sometimes—in deference to Bettencourt’s “delicacy”—she stayed away from her own front door in fear of encountering Vasco’s emissary. Nonetheless, the affair was no secret from Peter or from Alice’s close friends.
Judith Adams met Vasco more than once, never intentionally. “Once I came by about five one afternoon,” Judith recalled. “Alice came to the door, her face very flushed, and she said ‘I have guests.’ And that was Vasco. She had on earrings and a velvet robe in a claret color and her eyes were just huge. She looked gorgeous, but I thought, ‘Oh, my god, where is Peter?’ I hoped he was at Mark’s.”
No doubt Peter was with his father on that afternoon, but he holds other confusing memories from these years. “My room was not far from my mom’s. Only a narrow closet with doors at each end separated us. As a child I heard sounds that were scary to me. It sounded like hurting more than pleasure, and I was just sort of figuring it out.” His mother spent a lot of time on the telephone too, walking the long hall of their apartment with the receiver in one hand and the big old black phone in the other, the long twisty cord trailing behind her. “She’d shoot me a glance that meant, this is a boring person to talk to—but sometimes the problem was that I was there and she wasn’t talking freely.”
* * *
Alice wrote to Vasco often, mailing her billets-doux to him at the consulate with special delivery postage.12 “I am so filled—entirely—with love for you—this makes the world another color—I need new words,” she declared after an early assignation. His letters to her, often in French, which they used as their private language, are equally ecstatic. Alice has talked to Vasco about her parents, her marriage, Max Steele, and her writing ambitions. When she tries to write, she complains, she can think only of letters to him: “Once I wanted to say to you furiously—how can I be a great writer when I think of nothing but you? But now I am not furious. I will write, finally better because of you, because at least what I feel for you has greatness.”
Alice and Vasco participated together in the glorification of their love affair. That he was married, that they both had children, did not seem, in the early months, to be an impediment. In Adams’s story “Sintra,” the Portuguese lover Luiz warns Arden, “I think that you have fallen in love with my love for you.” Such was the case for Alice with Vasco. She was probably thinking of herself when she sketched this character in her notebook: “Not Mme. Bovary—no vanity involved, an impassioned need to be loved, & a generous wish for everyone to be warm & well-fed, well-loved.” On another day, writing to him on the gallery’s letterhead as she expects him to walk into the shop any minute, she asks, “Do you remember that very dangerous thing you said to me?—that if you were sure I would always love you you would give up everything?”
Madly in love, perhaps for the first time, Alice felt the irrationality and vulnerability of her position and noted in her journal, “The fine line between infantilism & greatness—I’m on the side of the lovers who say I can’t live without you, & mean it.”13 With a fervor that D. H. Lawrence would have applauded, Alice believed that sex with Vasco transformed her. “She told me,” Judith Adams remembered, “that she thought his penis had ‘imprinted’ her. I think that was the verb, meaning he owned her in a way.”
Judith Adams believes that Vasco was equally besotted with Alice, and other scraps of evidence confirm her impression. He requested and received an extension of his posting in San Francisco. One of Alice’s letters mentions that Vasco has spoken with Alice’s mentor, her parents’ old friend Ralph Bates in New York—the same Ralph Bates who had warned Alice in 1946 not to marry precipitously. Turning to Careless Love for clues, we find Pablo Valdespina promising Daisy that in their future together they will spend summers on the beaches of Portugal. Also in the novel, Pablo seeks an international banking position that will allow him to leave the diplomatic corps and live in Paris with Daisy. This dream of starting over in a new country tantalized both of them. Even Peter believed they would be moving to Paris.
* * *
Separation made both Vasco and Alice frantic. He sent long love letters. She cabled her love to him at the Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros when he went to Lisbon for a few weeks. On her coffee table she kept a book of black-and-white photographs of Portugal that fascinated Peter with its picture of the Capela dos Ossos chapel, mosaiced with the bones of five thousand corpses. She mentioned Portugal so often in letters to Max Steele that he queried from Mexico, “[Why] all this talk of Portugal when you haven’t even seen Cuernavaca?”
When Vasco was seriously ill late in 1959 with a kidney ailment and couldn’t call or visit her, Alice besieged him with worried letters. Perhaps he objected, prompting her to reply: “You were right that I’m terribly concentrated in my own troubled mind—and I hate that too—I’m sorry—really sorry…” Nonetheless, he wrote her from his sickbed and listened for her to drive by and “hoot” her car horn. Later Adams diagnosed her condition in Careless Love: “She was committed, a
ll the way, to melodrama and to pain. She had yet to find out that these emotions are not necessarily love, or that love is possible without them.”
During Vasco’s illness, Alice and Peter celebrated Christmas with her father, Dotsie, and her relatives in Santa Rosa. In Alice’s abbreviated report to Vasco, Nic Adams “shouted all night in Italian to [Dotsie’s son’s wife’s] relatives who couldn’t understand him,” while Peter was great because “he expects grandparents to be crazy & is never thrown by them.” Four years after her father’s remarriage she describes Dotsie as “a bitch lacking self-awareness.” It seems Alice had told her family about Vasco and they viewed him as her future spouse.
Peter met most of the men Alice dated but some were friendlier to him than others. He recalls, “One time a man was leaving and she ran to the door and yelled, ‘No, no, don’t go!’ I felt bad for her. My mother never called me ‘her little man’ or anything like that but I felt protective of her,” Peter reflected. “I think I am a good listener, and some of that must have come from this period. I’d tell her if I didn’t like somebody.”
One of the people Peter came to dislike was Vasco Pereira. The Portuguese consulate was near Peter’s school. Always a friendly child, he once knocked at the door of the impressive building when he was walking home with a friend. Alerted, Vasco appeared and gave the boys a handful of coins and shooed them off to buy candy.
* * *
Throughout 1960—as a new decade dawned in the United States with John Kennedy’s defeat of Richard Nixon in the presidential election—Alice kept Vasco Pereira at the center of her life. He switched from French to English in his letters, sometimes mentioning writing of hers that he’d read or been told about, including a novel about “Avery” and her father and Golden Gate suicides. Along with frequent love letters, Alice gave Vasco a list of American books he should read. At its head were novels by men she’d loved, Saul Bellow and Max Steele. Next came novels by Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, James Agee, John O’Hara, and William Styron, along with The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.14 Not only does this list tell us which writers then mattered to Adams, it also reveals how much she wished for Vasco to imagine her in the company of this ménage of contemporary writers.
Vasco found excuses to leave home for weekends with Alice in Carmel and Yosemite and they talked about their plans for the future. In the snapshots he saved, Alice’s hair is blond and she is thin as a model except for her voluptuous and now uplifted bosom. She brandishes a cigarette and looks like a parody of a free woman.
Expecting Vasco to divorce his wife and marry her, Alice sent his picture to Lucie Jessner, who offered that he looked “intelligent and alive and controlled—passionate.”IV Later Lucie notes that Alice expects to join Vasco when he becomes ambassador to Chile—“I can imagine you as ambassadresse [sic] of grand style.”15 In Adams’s story called “The Edge of the Water,” based on a weekend she and Vasco spent at the Mission Ranch Hotel in Carmel, the consul tells her, “Of all the women I have ever known, I feel most for you.” But the woman in that story also notices that her lover looks “entirely alien and enclosed.” Remembering the pictures of his daughters, “little girls with great dark eyes, like his,” she realizes that she is not part of his real life.16
Romantic weekends and high hopes were spanned by days of desperation. At least once Alice ended the relationship, explaining, “Always waiting for you & not being sure you could come I was so lonely.” Alice declared her devotion in extreme language. “If you were suddenly to tell me that you were free to go with me, how gladly I would go, anywhere,” Daisy tells her lover in Careless Love. But when Pablo replies, “this is the most marvelous thing of my life,” Daisy understands that it is terrible. “She had said that she would leave her whole life… he had said nothing of the sort. Wantonly she had yielded up all her power, and her sovereignty.”
The inevitable crushing of Alice’s hopes came early in 1961. Vasco could not fulfill the promise she wanted from him, that someday they would live together. In Careless Love the breakup occurs when Daisy realizes that she is pregnant by Pablo. His reaction to this news circles through false pride and ends in cowardly horror. He will not claim the child as his own, nor will he discuss the abortion to which he tacitly consents:
He took her hand. “You are so brave a woman. You are a true woman.”
In this unspecific, uncommitted way it was decided that Daisy was to have an abortion. Pablo had not had to say the word.
He left, after gulping coffee. “Of all days there is much business in my office.”
After considering melodramatic (but not uncommon) options—“to refuse to have the abortion (to have the child in Mexico), to blackmail him into marriage by telling a gossip columnist or the police. Or to die of dirty instruments”—Daisy talks to a doctor who connects her with an abortionist. In a remarkable section of Careless Love, Daisy’s father makes an unexpected appearance in San Francisco and flies to Tijuana with her for the procedure, which is accomplished by a kindly Mexican obstetrician and his nurse/wife. At one point the doctor mistakes Daisy’s father for the father of the child, and the mistake is hurriedly corrected in broken English and Spanish. It’s doubtful that Nic Adams—whose Spanish was fluent—accompanied Alice to Tijuana. But the novel’s daughter-father episode provides Daisy with something Adams craved: a loving father who accepts her as she is and sets aside his own ego in order to help her.
Years later, when Alice and a good friend compared notes on their reproductive histories, they discovered that they both remembered the same kind Mexican.17 Also years later while in Seattle, Alice noted “Vasco—abortion” among her memories of that city. Whether she went to Seattle or Tijuana, it is almost certain that Alice aborted a child during the final days of their affair. Before he left San Francisco, Vasco wrote Alice notes promising checks for $1,200 and $800. Her letters (which he saved) begging him for the money he’s promised show that she waited six weeks for the second check.18
* * *
Alice’s breakup with Vasco left a searing pain that she felt for years afterward. Beyond the loss, she felt humiliated. Alice had told her father that Vasco was “the strongest & most honorable man [she] had known” and hated to say she’d been wrong. “I must give up this fantasy of love & protection from anyone,” she wrote in her notebook. Lucie Jessner, agreeing with an interpretation Alice had offered, wrote back, “I am sad. You are so right, that for Latin people marriage and love are something quite separate. And in a way, marriage more often than not is the beginning of the end for love—but females just won’t believe it.” Ruth Gebhart, an illustrator who’d worked at the Joseph Magnin store with Judith Adams and lived near Alice, stopped by often during this mourning period. “We’d drink and talk—she was wonderful to talk to. We were very close friends then and we confided in each other. She told me Vasco had a stray forelock.”19
Portugal was in the headlines as Alice’s affair with Vasco ended. Henrique Galvão, an activist against the dictatorship of António Salazar in Portugal, hijacked a Portuguese ship with the intention of setting up an opposition government in Angola and declaring the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. The action, which began a twelve-year war for independence in the former colonies, put Pereira in a specious position. Alice watched him on television as he defended the colonialist, right-wing (many said fascist) Portuguese Estado Novo regime against Galvão’s charges. “I didn’t like what you said,” she wrote him afterward, “but I suppose you didn’t either. What a bad job for you to have… You look older. It isn’t good to be a diplomat, not for you.”
After that Pereira finally wrote her a letter explaining the reasons he could not marry her: “We would have been happy… but always as two desperate human beings who know that in some way they have stolen everything they have.” She responded, “If you had written that letter a year—or more—ago, I would have grieved terribly, but also I would have admi
red your strength & courage, your decision. You would have remained for me a responsible man who knew himself & who was whole—”20
* * *
Three weeks later, Vasco Pereira and his family left San Francisco. In the newspaper Alice saw photographs of the large farewell party held for him and Margarida at the Fairmont Hotel. “I can’t imagine your marriage or life now,” Alice told him in a final letter, suggesting—as Careless Love does—that Vasco had broached the subject of leaving his marriage and learned that neither his wife nor his mother would countenance the idea. “ ‘I told my wife, and she said that I could never again see the children,’ ” Pablo tells Daisy. “ ‘She made such a scene—it was horrible.’ He drew out the ‘r’s’—‘horrrrrrrible.’ ”
The Pereiras’ marriage was virtually over. For three years after their departure from San Francisco, Margarida suffered from depression that hospitalized her or confined her to her room. When her vitality returned, she published two collections of her poems, but mental illness and medications had weakened her. In the final lines of her 1974 book, Bens Adquiridos, she addresses poet and anthropologist Ruy Cinatti, who was her close friend, to say that she will die with a sorrow and a mute secret (“E que morro com pena e um segredo mudo”).
Pereira was assigned to embassies in Karachi, Madrid, Malawi, and Bonn; his wife stayed in Lisbon with their children and her parents. In Pakistan he began a ten-year relationship with Graziela Lima Leitão that his children accepted. After the so-called Carnation Revolution that overthrew the Estado Novo regime in 1974, Pereira played a prominent role as ambassador to Brazil, where many Portuguese businesspeople fled. He formed a new relationship with a Brazilian beauty named Maria Lúcia Pedroza (“Malu”). He went on to serve as Portuguese ambassador to the United Nations, president of the United Nations Security Council, and Portugal’s ambassador to the United States. In 1980, Judith Adams came across a photograph in Architectural Digest magazine of Vasco and Malu Pereira in their New York apartment. “What struck me,” she said, was how much his second wife resembled Alice when her hair was dark. I never mentioned it to Alice.”21 But of course Alice knew of Pereira’s later career. In her story “Sintra,” she describes “the marvellous confidence” of her former lover’s stride and “that singular, energetic motion of his body, its course through the world, without her.”
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