Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  —E você não fez nada? The first woman asked. Why didn’t you do something?—He could’ve had a knife, Jackie O said.

  She was right, of course. Money is not worth dying for. Still it was rough to lose my key, to be locked out of my only refuge.

  The first woman told me that I must go immediately to o centro. Have you been to the lower city, the city center?

  I shook my head no.

  Well, you must go there, she said, immediately. You must go to the police station and file a report. You can take a taxi.

  She rested a hand on my back. Do you have money? Do you need some? She offered me cab fare, and began to reach for her purse, but I remembered that I had my money in my shoe.

  —I have money, I said. Thanks. I told them that he got my key, passport, and ID, but no money.

  —He can sell the passport, the kind woman said. You’ll have to report it.

  I sat on the sand, the beach blurry now through my tears, the two women crouched beside me. My mouth tasted salty.

  —He could be dangerous, Jackie O observes. If he has your hotel key, he could come back for more. He knows where you’re staying, who you are.

  I did not want to hail a cab and spend money I could not afford in order to tell a cop in broken Portuguese that my passport was gone. I was tired, I was hot, I was exhausted, I was scared.

  —You have to go to the police, they said.

  So, tired, hot, exhausted, scared, I thanked them and I did.

  The Cop

  In 1984, the police station in Salvador was small and white and stucco, a single-story building in a forgotten section of the lower city, and the cop I spoke to did not seem optimistic about the chances of recovering my passport. Like the woman at the beach before him, he noted that there was a market for such things. Like the hotel clerk I’ll speak to later, he was incredulous that I would bring my passport and key to the beach.

  —Why did you have them with you? The cop asked.

  —I was trying to protect them, I said.

  He laughed.

  I did not tell him that I thought I was supposed to carry identification on me at all times, that I had read this somewhere, in some misguided guidebook.

  He told me that was nuts.

  —Leave those things in your hotel safe, he said. You should carry only a little money on you, just in case you are robbed.

  He told me to go to the American embassy and get a new passport. He gave me the address. He wished me luck.

  I told him I’d need it.

  The Ambassador

  In the cubicle-sized lobby of the American embassy in Salvador (red carpet, white walls, blue chairs)—in an affluent residential neighborhood, south of Barra—I explained to a clerk through a tiny bullet-proof window that I have lost my passport and need to get a new one.

  She explained that I could not get a passport today, it would take weeks. I could fill out an application here but they would have to send it on to Texas, where it would be processed by an office there, which would send it back here, at which time they would call me to let me know it was in. I could fill out an application here, but first, she said, You must bring the following items.

  She pushed a Xeroxed sheet of paper toward me through a hole at the bottom of the bullet-proof window. On it was a checklist of items required for a passport application—two recent black and white photos, a current valid ID, $45 cash or travelers checks or cashier’s check. She explained the fees to me, $45 for the reissuance, an extra $15 if I wanted to have it sent express mail.

  —But you cannot apply today, she said. She looked at the clock above me. You’re too late. We accept passport applications only until 2 o’clock each day. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.

  I asked if I might simply fill out the paperwork while I was there, to expedite the process, since it would take time, and since I had come a long way.

  —She asked if I have brought my photos.

  —What photos? I asked.

  —The photos you need for your passport application, she said. You cannot get a passport without photos or proper identification.

  —But my identification was stolen, I told her. That’s the problem. That’s why I am here. I was robbed.

  —You need identification, she told me, in order for us to issue a passport. Or how do we know you are who you say you are? And you need two photos, she said, closing the subject.

  I had no photos of myself and no idea where to get them. I had had a hell of a time simply getting here. I was near tears when I asked if I might speak to someone else, someone in the embassy itself, someone who might perhaps bend the rules, who had the power to bend them. The clerk said that everyone had gone for lunch; they wouldn’t be back for awhile.

  —You might as well come back tomorrow, she said.

  —May I wait? I asked.

  —You can do what you want, she said.

  I took a seat in a blue chair, and stared at the limp flag in the corner, the smiling face of an aging B-grade actor framed on the wall, our president. I was still in the chair twenty minutes later when a woman resembling Gertrude Stein—short-haired, with a square face and blocky build—came through the front door with a paper bag. She greeted the clerk, who buzzed her in.

  —Do you work here, Madame? I asked, in Portuguese.

  She looked at me.

  —Yes, she said, in English. May I help you?

  —I need a passport, mine has been stolen. Please, can you let me fill out the forms?

  —I told her she is too late, the clerk said.

  —I’m afraid that’s not my area, the woman said.

  —Please, I said. I must have looked desperate, near tears. I was.

  —One moment, she said. I’ll see what I can do.

  A buzzer sounded and Gertrude Stein pulled back the heavy metal door that separated this lobby from the embassy offices beyond. She disappeared behind the heavy fireproof door, beyond which I glimpsed stairs going up.

  I waited. After a few minutes the phone rang, and the clerk said, You may go up now, and buzzed me through the door.

  I ascended the staircase, and following the clerk’s directions found among the empty offices plump Gertrude Stein, seated in a leather chair behind an impressive mahogany desk, eating her lunch from a bag.

  I recall that she was eating yogurt, and that the walls were covered with photos of dance troupes and framed posters of traveling exhibitions. I remember the tasteful, soothing decor of a therapist’s office, and I remember being relieved and comfortable there. I took the seat she offered across the desk from her. Gertrude Stein, it turned out, was in charge of USIA in Salvador, the branch of the foreign service responsible for cultural and artistic exchanges; the booking agents, as it were, for embassies.

  She asked me what she could do for me and I told her.

  She was kind. She asked if I speak Portuguese and when I said that I understand better than I spoke, she spoke in a Portuguese so slow and simple that even I could understand. She assured me that it would be no problem to get a new passport, though it would take time. She would get me the forms I needed, told me where I could get photos, suggested I come tomorrow with these and it would be done right away, she’d see to it.

  Then she leaned back and asked me what I was doing here.

  I told her I was down from Yale and on my way to the Amazon.

  She told me there was another student here from Yale, a Fulbright scholar, and asked if I knew her.

  I told her that I didn’t.

  She leaned across the desk and told me that she liked me better.

  —The other girl is stuck up, she said. She doesn’t talk. She is very arrogant. But you, she said, talk. You don’t know the language well, but you try.

  I was grateful that she saw my failings as a strong suit and admitted that I’d been trying to find a language tutor. She told me that she could recommend one. She wrote the woman’s name and number on a square of paper and pushed it across the desk to me. She said she sho
uld be able to help. Then she wrote down another name and number, that of the girl from Yale.

  —You should call her, she said.

  I smiled and thanked her. I told her that I would call.

  Outside the embassy, the heat of the day had cooled and there was a breeze that smelled of salt water and tar. The sky was blue and beautiful and the palm fronds overhead were clattering like beaks striking, an obscurely exciting sound, a reminder that I was far from home, in the Tropics, and so because I had nothing better to do—and had time on my hands and no one waiting for me back at the hotel or anywhere really—I decided to walk to Barra; I figured it was a few miles from the embassy, a clear shot along the winding cobblestone promenade.

  It was a beautiful afternoon and the walk would do me good, I thought. I needed exercise after days in planes and cars and buses and the hotel. I could walk to the bus stop in Barra and ride on from there. Truth is I was afraid of getting on a bus, afraid it would take me somewhere I did not want to go. A five-mile walk seemed easier than asking directions in a foreign language.

  By the time I got to Barra, almost two hours later, the sun was setting and my calves were cramping and I was light-headed with hunger. I had not eaten since breakfast. I thought about stopping in the café I’d seen earlier, but I’d have to sit alone at a table; I thought about buying a candy bar from a magazine vendor in the port, but I was sick of candy, having eaten little else for days; then I saw the old Bahiana dressed in lace and seated by her pot of boiling oil and decide on that.

  I crossed the street and asked the woman in the turban how much. I didn’t ask her what it was, because I wouldn’t understand the answer and I didn’t need to know. The smell was intoxicating. The scent of onion and cashews and cilantro and palm oil filled my nostrils and my mouth watered. She named her modest price and I paid it.

  I watched her scoop a hot bean ball from the pot, its surface crisp and orange from frying. She held it in a wax paper napkin. She asked me if I liked it spicy, and I said yes and watched her slit the bean ball’s white belly with a knife and spread on red palm oil laced with red pepper seeds. Over this, she spread a thick layer of cashew paste flecked with shrimp and spices, over which she sprinkled dried shrimp, their pink heads and eyes still attached, observing me, as I received the acarajé she handed up.

  This was my first taste of acarajé and vatapá, which I would later learn to make at a cooking school in the old section of town, foods that bear the traces still of their West African origins, as so much of Bahian culture does. Acarajé is a fried bean ball made of black-eyed-pea paste ground with garlic and spices then fried in palm oil, a staple of the cuisine for which Bahia is famous. Vatapá is a thick, salty, cashew paste blended of garlic, onions, dried shrimp, tomato, coriander, and palm oil. Both are supremely good. Eating them, the horizon going pink, I was happy, even hopeful, as I waited to catch the bus to my hotel.

  Around midnight, I woke with terrible cramps and struggled to make it to the bathroom, only to find, when I stopped shitting, that I was bleeding from my rectum. It will be months before I learn that you should not buy acarajé from the vendors in the street, that the water in which the beans are washed is often filthy, the same water in which clothes are washed and sewage dumped. And sometimes, in the bean paste, there is broken glass.

  The local man who will tell me this will not explain if the glass is accidental —simply a fact of life among the poor who make these foods at home and sell them in the street—or intentional, but I cannot help remembering that slaves used to grind glass into the food of those who forced them to labor, slowly killing those who were slowly killing them.

  Amazon Snapshot #3

  Of the few memories I have of childhood the most vivid are of wild places —forests, oceans, great lakes. These places inspired in me an excitement and delight that I rarely felt in the company of people. The natural world—even our domesticated suburban backyard with its beds of wild violets in a thin crescent of woods that curved around a duck-weed-green pond—held my attention as other children rarely could. Watching trout hover under the shadowed overhang of a river bank in Vermont, or stalking thumbnail toads by moonlight on a gravel road; observing moths and butterflies in a summer field or gathering milkweed pods and bittersweet from Minnesota woods in autumn—compelled me as people did not.

  The people I knew then, even those I loved, seemed a shade less real than landscapes. The passion the rain forest inspired in me was emotion I could not muster on my own behalf.

  What was so great about nature? Perhaps it was the act of observation itself. Sitting by a pond watching wood ducks cut through the green algae, or crouched over unfurling violets to study their purple veins, I was engaged in what poet Elizabeth Bishop once called, apropos of writing poetry, “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” I was delighted by the act of observation itself as much as by what was observed.

  The dense, moist, mineral scent of moss; the coarse sandpaper hide of an oak tree; the soft pliable too-slippery fabric of a maple leaf; the sharp-sweet musk of a pinecone—all this compelled me as later sex and art, music and literature and a good martini would. By contrast, people seemed to me then both too complicated and too simple. But the natural world—a walk through woods or watching crabs in a tidal pool—was like a book I couldn’t put down.

  Of the few memories I have from childhood are these: I remember foraging for acorns at the age of six with my father in our grassy yard, digging among the carpet of liver-colored oak leaves until we had filled a grocery bag with acorns, which my father and I proceeded to heap at the base of a tree for the resident squirrel, a rodentine version of meals on wheels; I remember fishing with my parents after we had dropped my older siblings off at summer camp, the sickening heave of the swells as I stood below deck praying with childish faith to Poseidon for a catch, which I subsequently got (the largest of the day); I remember next to nothing of Girl Scout camp save one sunset, which I glimpsed through spring-bare trees and watched in awe, saying, Beautiful, how beautiful, while my best friend, Sue Hoy, observed, Geez. It’s just a sunset. What’s the big deal? My first clear memory of shameful attachment.

  My parents were avid travelers even before my father became—in his fifties—a financial success and we went from collecting Green Stamps to going abroad. My mother was a talented photographer and returned home from these trips with dozens of rolls of film of the places they’d been. But her photos contained few shots of them or us. My mother’s photographs are almost entirely of unpeopled landscapes. Lava flows in Hawaii. Elephants on the Serengeti. Zebra herds in Ngorongoro crater. Dik dik.

  For a long time I thought that we’d failed her somehow or failed to hold her attention as Aztec temples and tropical blossoms could. Now I think my mother and I shared a common sense of proportion—or its lack: we did not see our lives as worthy of being preserved on film. Her photos reveal my psychology as well; they seem to say what for years I too believed: We will pass, but this, this magnificent world endures.

  On the cusp of adulthood, I’d begun to realize that the natural world I loved might not after all endure.

  Che

  Just before noon, the front desk rang my room to tell me that there was a woman waiting for me in the lobby, and when I went down, I saw a slender willowy figure standing in the shadows. As I approached, I noted that her hair was cut blunt above her shoulders, that her frame was lithe and delicate, and that though not tall—perhaps five feet five—she had uncommonly long legs. This was Barbara, the Fulbright from Yale, whom the woman at the embassy had phoned on my behalf; Barbara had in turn phoned my hotel earlier that day to say, It can be difficult to settle in; would you like to meet for lunch?

  Even from across the room, her uncommon grace was evident. She stood with her hands folded over her abdomen, hips slightly forward, her shoulders back, like a piece of patient sculpture, wingless Victory. I’d learn later that this is a pose she struck often, but even then its artificiality would not diminis
h its charm, as artifice does not damage art.

  When I reached Barbara, I saw she was wearing a denim miniskirt and a T-shirt featuring the face of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary. (I did not know at the time that Che was big business in Latin America. Tchotchkes featuring Che were everywhere, on every sort of trinket—beer cans, T-shirts, key chains; in the 1990s, Swatch will even come out with a Che watch, on which the Cuban government will corner the market. I did not know at the time that politics, especially revolutionary politics, could be a marketable commodity.) But I understood that for Barbara politics could be an accessory, a fashion statement, a lark, and I admired this, that she was apparently above the earnest debate of poli sci majors and aspiring economists like me.

  It’s hard to say precisely what impressed me so about Barbara, though certainly physical beauty played its part. She was easily the most beautiful person—male or female—I had ever met.

  She had the heart-shaped face of a young Vivian Leigh, a broad brow, long thick graceful eyebrows arched over moss-green eyes, a delicate slightly pointed nose, an intelligent and ironical gaze. Her hair was the color of gold coral, a brown that hinted at gold, bobbed just below her jaw and parted on the right to fall an even length. Her skin was the color of polished maple, golden, poreless. Her neck was slender, perhaps a little too long. She had an almost childlike body, small breasted, smooth bellied.

  But it was more than her beauty that arrested me. She seemed at ease, at home in the world, as no one I had ever met before did. She appeared perhaps a little bored but kind, observant, quick. What impressed me most was a certain quality of detachment that I perceived immediately, even at that first meeting, even across a room. Barbara seemed not to take anything personally; she seemed above personal concerns, and that seemed heroic to me then, marvelous.

  Probably I fell in love with her on sight, though I’d not have known to call it that, not then.

  Beauty, like great happiness, is hard to describe. Everything one says on the subject sounds like a cliché. And perhaps this is because beauty, like great happiness, is an experience more than a thing, a momentary immersion in radiance, or a momentary self-transcendence, a moment of recognition that lingers between the beautiful and its admirer.