Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

1974

… Thank God Carnival is over. I can’t say that it was very pleasant, because grandma beat me, something she never does.

It’s my fate that everyone who loves me makes my life miserable. The only people who have any authority over my cousins are their fathers. Oh! If only it were like that with me! My father is the person who annoys me least of all. If it hadn’t been for grandma’s and Aunt Madge’s interfering I’d have gone to the masquerade ball at the theatre. Since the age of seven I’ve dreamed of being twelve so that I could go to the ball. And now I’m almost thirteen and I’m beaten for not going!

Aunt Quequeta was the one who made me want to go to the ball, telling me about what they used to do in her day. A friend of hers put on a masquerade costume, disguised her voice, and flirted with her father all evening until he fell madly in love with her and the next day instead of coming in to lunch he kept walking around in the garden with his head hanging down, thinking of the masked woman. Another friend of hers let her husband go to the ball first and she went later, masked, flirted with him, and he fell madly in love with her, to such a degree that he kept sighing the whole evening.

My aunts still have the hoop skirts they used to wear. How I wish they still wore them! They don’t wear anything like that now, but I’d like to go like that even so.

It was my cousin Glorinha who gave me such a swelled head that I thought I could go. I asked mama and she said, “If your grandmother will let you I’ll let you.” I asked grandma, “Grandma, mama will let me go. Will you let me go to the ball with Glorinha?” she said, “I certainly will not!” I stamped my foot hard and I ran and threw myself on her bed, angry. She came in and took off her slipper and hit me twice, saying, “That’ll give you something to cry about!” I thrashed my legs around but I didn’t get up.

But it was worth it because today I got the material for a dress and a silver two milreis piece.

* * *

… Knowing that I and my sister have that failing of laughing at everything, how did papa have the courage to send a guest to our house the way he did? You can’t imagine what our life has been like with this man in the house! Papa has been in Parauna for a week. He went to see a mine that a Frenchman wants to buy and asked papa if he’d go to see if it’s worth it. There papa’s the guest of this man he sent us. But you wouldn’t believe it if I told you what his visit has been like.

We have a little Negro girl, Cesarina, very funny, who makes us laugh all the time at the things she says and does. On the day this man arrived something happened to us that couldn’t possibly happen in any other house; there were only two tallow candles in the house. When mama discovered it there weren’t any stores open. But these candles aren’t any good; they don’t last at all. One was used up before I’d even finished my lessons. Mama had the other one put in the guest room. In our house we only use kerosene in the kitchen and even the kitchen lamp was dry. When my candle came to an end I still had lessons to do, there was nothing else to do but send Cesarina to the guest room, to see if he’d gone to sleep. If he had, she was supposed to steal the candle without waking him up! She went and came back laughing so hard at finding the man still awake that she could only speak to us by making signs.

She held her hands up in the air and made spectacles with her fingers, meaning that the man had his eyes open. She made this sign and all the time she was having such a fit of the giggles that she couldn’t speak.

We are idiots about laughing. We began that night and even now we can’t look at our guest without a fit of giggling. We just have to see the man and then we remember Cesarina’s spectacles and simply burst. Mama, coitada, doesn’t know what excuse to give the man. She’s said everything except that she has two lunatics in the house.

And I think that these attacks of laughing that we’ve had are due to our having as a guest a man who’s never seen us before, and his being silent, without saying a word, in the house and at the table. Now mama’s forbidden us to come to the table, but even in the kitchen we shake with laughter to see the man and mama sitting there in silence! I don’t know what she’ll tell papa. He’s been here three days and it already seems like a week. I envy people who don’t have giggling spells the way I have.

At the saddest moments, sometimes, when we shouldn’t have had cheerful faces, we’ve laughed.…

When papa got back he asked mama if we had treated the guest in our house well, and said, “He and his family couldn’t have done more for me at their house; they almost overwhelmed me with attention. His daughters are homely and not very attractive. I thought he’d come back enchanted with my girls, but when he got back he was silent and didn’t say a thing. I couldn’t keep from asking him if he’d seen my daughters and he told me, ‘I never saw their faces; they laughed from the minute I got there until I left.’”

* * *

… Today we went to Jogo da Bola Street for lunch. There were two guests there, friends of the family. The man is called Anselmo Coelho. He’s good-looking and very nice, married to a terribly homely woman, who speaks through her nose, called Toninha. I asked my cousins why such a handsome man had married such an ugly woman, and they said that he was the widower of a very pretty wife, and, living in Itaipava, he met this teacher, and because she wouldn’t be any expense to him, he married her.

At the table I noticed how little feeling the man had for his wife, and I felt sorry for her, coitada! After lunch we stayed at the table and he got the conversation onto his first wife. He praised her brains, her beauty, and her sympathy so much that I kept looking at the poor creature and feeling sorry for her. He said, “But she was so jealous that she made me suffer. When I miss her I always try to remember how jealous she was. If I had to go out alone on business, before I got to the door she’d fall down in a faint.” He told all this and then added, “I even miss the faints.”

After a while he looked at his watch and said, “It’s time. I have to go.” He got up to go and that fool of a homely wife ran and held onto his arm, trying to imitate the other wife. He kept going out, saying, “Stop it, Toninha. Stop this nonsense!” And the woman kept clinging to his arm and he kept on going. We stayed at the table pretending not to notice in order not to embarrass him. Suddenly we heard a noise, the sound of a body falling on the doorstep. We all ran and there was the poor homely woman stretched out on the ground, with a horrible face, and her husband prodding her with his foot and saying, “Get up, fool! Stop acting! Get up! Don’t disgrace me!” He said this still prodding his wife with his foot, without leaning over. Naninha said, “ Coitada! She’s had an attack!” He said, “She wants to do what I said the other one did. But you can leave her here, it isn’t anything. She’ll get up in a little while.” And off he went.

We waited a little for her to open her eyes. When she didn’t open them, we carried her, two with her arms, two with her legs, almost dragging her, and put her on the bed and ran outside to laugh.

Aunt Agostinha said to us, “Now you see, while you’re girls, that men don’t care for silly women. He treats her well, but you see what she did today.”

* * *

… Today I’m tired because it’s one of the days when I have the most work. But shouldn’t I tell what happened to me yesterday, here in my dear diary? I imagine that today all Diamantina hasn’t any other subject of conversation: “Did you see Helena and Luizinha dancing all night long last night, with their aunt lying in her coffin?” I’m only sorry that they won’t say it to me personally, because I could explain. But what bad luck we have! Aunt Neném spent the whole month dying and then had to draw her last breath yesterday.