by Ellen Levy
I wanted to be a part of the team of researchers whose work and names I had come to know from reading journals. I wanted to be among the biologists and zoologists and economists who seemed to me then heroic in their efforts to halt the devastation of the vast tracts of forest and rivers and communities known as the Amazon. I was ambitious of saving part of the disappearing world.
But something had gone wrong. The fellowship office’s command of geography was sadly lacking and someone in the Foundation headquarters near Chicago had succeeded in sending me to Salvador, Bahia, a coastal tourist capital some 1,600 miles southeast of the rain forest I had come to study. I’d booked a hotel in Salvador and figured I’d spend maybe a week there, maybe less, getting my bearings, boning up on Portuguese, getting my money, before I arranged a transfer and headed north to the Amazon.
If you’d asked me that day who I was, I would have said that I was a student of economics with a specialization in twentieth-century Brazilian economic development. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be, I would have said an artist, a writer—in the museums my parents had taken us to as kids, I had seen Franz Marc’s Blue Horses and Calder’s whimsical mobiles, Hans Hoffman’s nearly edible colors and the haunting luminosity of Rothko’s squares, and they’d made me long for something, as if the paintings were speaking to me in a private language we understood; I sensed, as poet Patti Smith would later write, “that to be an artist was to see what others could not”; I wanted to see as clearly. But I knew better: that kind of thing was beyond people like me.
People Like Me—children of the burgeoning American middle class, born of working-class parents, who had themselves been born of immigrants who’d bet on education as the ticket up and out of wherever they were, ghettos or farms—were educated in public schools at a time when Shakespeare and calculus were still taught there, not yet thought too elite for the masses, when metal detectors were not yet a commonplace at the doors (when we did not yet see ourselves, or our young, as dangerous, suspect); we expected ourselves to go to college, to move up and move on. We expected to become lawyers, doctors, professors, psychologists, critics; we talked about and analyzed what other people made; we joined the Foreign Service and worked for the USIA, bringing artists in to tour foreign countries and building amity among nations; we gave papers and luncheons and joined the Rotary Club. We read books; we did not write them. We went to museums to see paintings; we did not paint them.
People Like Me believed it was important to know what was what (reading the newspaper was a moral issue, the New York Times was like high mass); we believed it was important to know what one was, to know one’s nature and to master it. To know what you could and could not do. To be realistic. To have perspective.
We took to heart that Delphic exhortation: know thyself. But for us the phrase was inflected by Calvinism, some vague strain of doubt in our election. Know Yourself for us meant know your limitations (I thought the two synonymous). Know them and accept. Know your nature and develop it.
Destino
It was full-blown summer when I arrived in Salvador and the city was ablaze with sunlight in the dead heat of a tropical January day. In the course of the flight from Minneapolis—at the forty-fifth parallel north—the plane had passed through the Tropic of Cancer, crossing the equator north of the Amazon, heading for the Tropic of Capricorn. Those twin imaginary lines—the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn—demarcate the torrid zone, better known as the tropics, a term that seems suggestive now, portentous, deriving as it does from the ancient Greek tropikos, “pertaining to a turn.” For the tropic effects a turn: as literary tropes turn words from their literal meaning to some other sense, as, heliotropic, plants turn toward the sun, turn towards that scalding light.
We had crossed into the country by night, had been awakened when we reached Belem, in order to fill out Customs cards, and had flown on in darkness. Waking, I looked out the window to my left and was moved to find a world softly lit. I still remember how the ground looked below me as dawn came on: the felty animal-hide brown of the countryside, which is known in Brazil as o interior—the interior—the camel-colored hills, sloping gently, as if muscles lay beneath them, recumbent, relaxed. To the east, a crack of yellow sun spread over the curved edge of the earth, sending out long bright beams of light; bands of yellow, orange, rose striated the sky at the horizon, which was blue-black with ocean.
As we approached Salvador, losing altitude, the rectangle of my window framed green, deeper than any I’d ever seen before. It was a green that seemed to suck in light, nearing black except where sunlight picked out trees. It was the dense tropical knotted green of forest canopy, clotted like clouds, quivering with palms as we approached the coastline and Salvador.
A month earlier, I had written to Senor Pinheiro, my Rotary contact in Salvador, to let him know the date of my arrival, my flight number and time, hoping he might offer to have someone meet me. But I had not heard back—mail was slow, sometimes lost, and he might well have considered it an imposition, I thought—and so as we touched down, I was prepared to hail a cab. I had a Fodor’s guide in my backpack, and had all but memorized the tiny map of Salvador, which showed Avenida Sete de Setembro where my hotel was.
The word for destination and destiny are one and the same in Portuguese: destino.
I arrived at my destino overdressed and unable to speak the language. I was in no hurry to disembark, so I lingered in my seat, as others filed past. When the aisle was mostly clear, I stood and reached up to haul down my backpack from the plane’s overhead compartment. A few other passengers straggled into the aisles. I ran my hand down the front of my ankle-length khaki cotton skirt, trying to press out with my palm the wrinkles that had settled there during the flight. A portly balding man behind me told me, in plain English, that I’d be too hot dressed like that; this was not the United States.
I had aimed for fashionable and failed. I wore a lightweight, tangerine-orange cotton sweater with three-quarter length sleeves, a thin cotton T-shirt, a khaki skirt made of cotton light as leaves, and that tell-tale sign of the American traveler: tennis shoes.
The sweater I wore was by a French designer, the only designer clothing I owned, and I’d bought it especially for the trip; the skirt, by an American designer, I’d borrowed from my mother. I took off the sweater, tied its sleeves around my throat so the sweater dangled like a shawl down my back, in a fashion that had not been fashionable for years, a sort of preppy, tennis-pro casual I had disdained when it had been popular years before when I was in high school. I smiled at the man who smiled at me in amusement.
We filed to the front of the plane and walked down a metal stairway to the tarmac. The hand railing too hot to hold. The heat was palpable through the rubber soles of my white tennis shoes as I stepped onto the runway. I pushed through the oppressive heat as if it were some liquid substance, some medium other than air, stunning as a vacuum, sucking the breath out of me. It seemed too hot to breathe.
I felt light-headed as I scanned the bank of bodies waiting beneath the cement canopy of the single-story building that served as airport terminal here. Palm fronds waved hysterically from the edges of the tarmac. I still hoped that Senor Pinheiro would show, but even if he did, I had no photo, no way to know it was he; I had not the least idea who he was or what he looked like or if he’d got my letter at all and if he had whether he would meet me. I squinted at signs, at faces, at the limp hands dangling at people’s sides, at those who squealed and ran out to embrace some friend or family member. I looked for signs bearing my name. Saw none did.
I filed through the waiting crowd into the open, single-story concrete structure, where I would gather my luggage, pass through customs, and hail a cab. After I found my bags—this was not difficult, they were flame orange, matched my sorry sweater—I heaved my suitcases onto a table as a uniformed guard directed me to, and opened them. I looked around nervously as another guard went through my bags. I saw people waving, nodding, but no one waved to me.
My bags done, rebuckled, I hauled them down from the table and started across the marble lobby to the front door, which was really just a missing section of wall through which I could see the white haze of daylight in the parking lot beyond. Then a handsome, well-dressed man in a white suit waved to me. He raised his right hand like he was taking a pledge, dropped it—a desultory (do I imagine it?) disappointed wave.
At the time, I was impressed that Pinheiro could pick me out of the crowd. But I realize now that I couldn’t have been hard to miss in my ankle-length khaki skirt, my sensible unfashionable white tennis shoes, my carefully curled hair gone flat. Besides, he had a picture of me in the file.
He greeted me with a smile and a flurry of Portuguese I could not understand. I let loose a flurry of my own corrupted grade-school French, resorting in a pinch to any language foreign.
—Je m’appelle, I began, and faltered, then, worse yet, butchering his native tongue, I announced, hand extended with crude American formality, Estou Ellen, which would translate, had I bothered to think it through, as, I am (temporarily) Ellen.
—Desculpe, I said. Não falo portugues muito bem, explaining the obvious—that I did not speak the language well.
—Claro, he said dryly—clearly—and he lifted my suitcase from my hand.
Pinheiro checked his watch, plainly nonplused. He wore a white linen suit, a sky-blue shirt; his thick black hair waved back from his temples and brow; he had a tanned, shapely, clean-shaven face. He was handsome, fortyish, younger than I’d expected, younger I would learn than the other Rotarians, whose generosity had brought me here. He was an editor at one of the region’s oldest and respected newspapers, A Tarde. A busy man. He was not a cabbie, and resented being drafted into the role; that seems clear now, though it wasn’t then. I see now he had no time for girls who had not mastered his language.
He had the bored, distracted air of handsome men, who do not need to show an interest in women, especially unbeautiful ones. He did not hide his irritation, nor try to. My unfashionably long skirt was rumpled like an old Kleenex. My brightly colored sweater—meant to be attractive, au courant—succeeded only in attracting contempt.
—You’ll be too hot in that, he said, as we redistributed my bags between us.
So I’ve been told, I wanted to say. But I could not; language failed me. Or perhaps I failed it: I remembered little of the Portuguese I’d studied in college the year before or during a brief, two-month summer stay in southern Brazil after high school.
Instead, I untied the sweater from my neck and stuffed it in my backpack, and then proceeded to further insult my host by reaching out to carry my second suitcase, which he took and painfully lugged toward the parking lot; I trailed him in silence.
The thin white T-shirt I wore had a round collar, not a V-neck: there was a schoolgirlish modesty to my dress that I had chosen strategically, after deliberation, aiming to impress the Rotarians as reliable, as one who would not take their money and run. I had aimed to impress my hosts as wholesome, as my mother proposed I should, but I could see that I’d impressed Pinheiro as merely unfashionable and therefore irrelevant.
I knew in that moment for the first time that I was unbeautiful and that beauty was a kind of currency here.
It came as something of a shock, his dismissal of me. In the United States I could get away with being attractive, that catch-all phrase for the compelling but unbeautiful. Tall, lanky, with large brown eyes, I’d been told I was a beautiful child, and I had always been well liked in high school, attending every prom; in college, I usually had some boy interested in dating me or some professor proposing we go to bed. I was attractive enough in the bland manner of my mother’s English forbears—lantern jawed, with a broad forehead and a face open as the American plains—I had learned early on to make up in wit and aggressive intelligence, in invention and charm, what I lacked in T and A.
My sister Susan was the family beauty—older than me by three years, shorter by four inches, she was five five, slender, olive skinned, marvelously busty from the age of twelve, when not so marvelously grown men began to whisper obscenities to her when the family filed through the bleachers at baseball games, in movie theaters, restaurants. By the age of sixteen, she’d taken to wearing widow’s black, dresses fashioned in the forties and pumps; she shellacked her lips bright rebellious red, tired of being ashamed and tormented for her figure, tired of being cast in the role of siren, she played the part; she wore her hair long to the middle of her back, in curls like our Russian grandmother’s.
My sister got catcalls. I got asked to the prom. I was the sort of girl you married. The sort of girl who was conscious always that her boyfriends were more beautiful than she. It became one of the many bonds my mother and I shared: our handsomeness, our lack of feminine charms. It was one of the many painful wounds that bound us, my mom and me, scar tissue being the materia prima of family.
As Pinheiro and I emerged into the parking lot, the brightness was blinding. I was conscious of the blue sky overhead, the oily sweat on my face and dampness staining my T-shirt beneath my arms. I held my arms tight to my sides, hoping Pinheiro would not notice. It seemed to take forever to reach his white convertible, where Pinheiro in silence opened the trunk, hefted my bag into it, slammed it, unlocked my door.
As he started the engine, I looked at the intense greenery that edged the parking lot, surrounded the airport, against which the grill of the car was stopped—a forest of bamboo and hibiscus and the delicate papery pink and purple beaks of bougainvillea.
As we turned onto a service road flanked by trees, I tried to explain to Pinheiro that I could understand Portuguese, I simply did not speak the language well. I fumbled an attempt at the subjunctive, gave up, and lapsed into the startled, perpetual present tense.
—Entendo Portuguese, I said. Mas não falo bem. I understand, but I don’t speak well.
—Claro, Pinheiro said again. Clearly. But this time, he smiled. Tá bem, he said. It’s fine.
As we merged onto the main road, a wide two-lane open road that ran along the coast past sandy beaches and the open Atlantic, toward the center of town, Pinheiro grew expansive.
He might’ve been shouting because of the wind that blew through our hair or because he thought volume would aid my understanding. But I understood him perfectly.
Pinheiro spoke lightly of our prospects. As he drove me along the beach, the white sand and blue Atlantic on our left so different, in their sensual entreaty, from their northern counterparts along the Connecticut coast from which I’d come, he apologized for having arrived late at the airport. He’d had a meeting or a deadline at the paper; I was never clear which. Work, though, had delayed him. He had to get back, but he gave me a tour as we drove.
He pointed out things that only later would take on meaning for me, names I heard but did not register or note since these places, these names were as yet innocent of personal memory. Abayaté, Itapoa, Barra. He pointed to a piece of land in the bay and shouted, Ilha.
—Ilha, I repeated, to show I understood.
—Ilha de Itaparica.
—Itaparica, I shouted, like a deranged parrot, nodding.
Sunlight glinted off the hood of the car. As the city came into view, Pinheiro pointed out the divided city ahead of us, half of which sat atop a cliff, the other half of which lay at sea level on the beach below. He told me that when the Portuguese had first arrived here in the sixteenth century, they had built this city, the oldest of Brazilian capital cities, on the cliff top as defense against attack by Dutch ships. Now, he said, the city center had spread to the shore below, defense against attack irrelevant.
—When they drop the atomic bomb, he said, smiling, it will not matter where you are.
Praia do Sol
There is no beach at the Praia do Sol hotel, so don’t arrive expecting one, as I did. The name’s deceptive, as first impressions often are.1 The Sunny Beach hotel—where I stayed my first week in Brazil, trying to get my bearing
s, trying to figure out what I was doing here 1,600 miles from the Amazon I’d come to study, 5,200 miles from home—has none. Located halfway between Barra and the city center on the main thoroughfare, Avenida Sete de Setembro, the Praia do Sol is fronted by asphalt, concrete, tar. There is not a beach in sight. Palm and flamboyant trees are entombed in the sidewalk from which they are pulled from time to time, when their roots threaten to break through the cement.
Pinheiro did not approve my choice of hotel. When he asked me approaching the city where I wanted to be dropped, I fished a scrap of paper from the tourist guide I’d brought, where I’d turned down the corner of a page, and told him the Praia do Sol.
He frowned, watching the road. It’s very expensive, he said.
I wanted to say that I didn’t plan on staying long, that it was mid-price actually, neither the most nor the least expensive, that I wanted this small comfort, this modest luxury; it was safer than a student hostel after all, but I couldn’t say a thing.
Instead I watched Pinheiro’s face, then I watched the road.
He pulled up in front of the hotel, which was small, three-story, white-painted cement, on the main thoroughfare a few miles from the city’s center, a nameless urban neighborhood of the sort that crowd the edges of cities and towns, neighborhoods that have no neighbors, no long-term tenants, just short-lease apartment buildings and ill-funded clinics and schools, mid-price tourist hotels and shops selling inessentials, overpriced restaurants catering to those just passing through.
There was no beach in sight. Pinheiro parked. He retrieved my suitcases then he walked me in. I thanked him as he let me pass first through the door, which was held open by a uniformed doorman. I needed Pinheiro. I could not afford to dislike him, that luxury. He had my money after all.
Pinheiro spoke to the hotel clerk behind the black registration desk on my behalf. Then he turned to me and said that I should phone him at his office as soon as I had arranged for an apartment. He would meet me at the nearest bank to sign over my bolsa—my fellowship money—then.