Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

We had met Ruy just two days before. That morning I asked M. to let me know when the mystic moment arrived and she’d shift gears from addressing him as “Dr. Ruy” to “you.” This use of the você or second person is always a delicate problem and I wanted to see how M., who has the nicest Brazilian manners, would solve it. Since Ruy was a poet and therefore could be considered sensitive, and since we found him very sympathetic, I felt it would be happening very soon.

Outside Belém we crossed a dead-looking railroad yard with old red freight cars scattered about in it, the end of the line. We passed under a fretwork arch, decorated with a long and faded banner and with cut bamboos turned sere brown. It had been set up to celebrate the opening of the new highway to Brasília. Just beyond it, the paved road stopped for good. However, the very thought of this new road to the capital had cheered up all of Belém considerably. Even the resigned Ruy spoke about the future optimistically.

Vigia was about a hundred kilometers away. We went off toward it on another narrower road to the left that went up and down, up and down, in low wavy hills, mostly through bushes. Because of the two daily rains (it was the rainy season), there was little dust. Slowly, slowly we rose and fell over the gravel. The silent mechanista was like a mother teaching the car to walk. But after a while it stopped.

He got out and lifted the hood. M. talked gaily of this and that. After fifteen minutes or so, the car started again: up a slight grade; down faster; up. The day was getting hot. The car was getting hot. But still it seemed as if we had just left Belém. We passed fields of pepper, big leafy pillars. It is grown on poles, like string beans, and is called Pimenta da Rainha, Queen’s Pepper, because it originally belonged to the crown. They say that the whole history of Portugal since the fourteenth century is the history of pepper. It had recently become a big crop in the north. Ruy complained about it, saying it was already overplanted, the way any successful crop always is in Brazil, and the price was dropping. On the left, where an unseen stream ran, were occasional plantations of jute, a bright and tender green.

More pepper. A mud-and-wattle house or two. An oxcart: mild, lovely zebus with high humps and long hanging ears, blue-gray, a well-matched team. Skinny horses scrambled off into the bushes, or stood pat while we edged around them. A dismal mud-and-wattle church, half-painted bright blue: IGREJA BATISTA. Then a little bridge with half the planks missing. The mechanista got out and squatted to study it from the far side, before taking us over.

Fine and blue, the morning rain arrived. The gravel darkened and spurted away slowly on either side. We plowed dreamily along. Ruy was talking about T. S. Eliot. He read English, some, but spoke not a word. I tried a story about Ezra Pound. It was very well received but, I felt, not understood. I undertook some more literary anecdotes. Smiling politely, Ruy waited for every joke until the faithful M. had helped me put them into Portuguese. Often they proved to be untranslatable. The car stopped.

This time the mechanista took much longer. M. talked ever more gaily. Suddenly the rain came down hard, great white lashings. The bushes crouched and the gravel danced. M. nudged me, whispered “Now,” and in her next sentence to Ruy used a noticeable você; the mystic moment was past. The mechanista got back in, his clothes several shades darker with wet, and said we would stop at the next village for repairs.

* * *

The rains stopped and the sun came out. Certain varieties of glazed tropical leaves reflected the light like nickel, or white enamel, but as the car passed they returned to their actual gray-green. It was confusing, and trying to the eyes. Palm trees, more pepper and jute, more bushes. Here and there a great jungle tree had been left standing, and black specks were busy high around the tops; each tree held a whole community of birds. At least two hundred feet high, a Brazil nut tree blossomed; one could tell only by a smell like that of a thousand lilacs.

Three teams of zebus, loaded with jute. A small shower, like an after-thought right through the sunshine. We were driving north-northeast, skirting the great bay of Marajó, but we might as well have been in the middle of Africa or the Yucatan. (It looked a bit like the Yucatan.) More wretched little houses, with pigs, and naked children shining from the rain. The “village” was a crossroads, with a combined drink-shop and grocery store, a botequim, beside a spreading flamboyant tree. It took a moment to realize the car had really stopped; we stopped talking, and got out.

The store had been raided, sacked. Oh, that was its normal state. It was quite large, no color inside or cloud-color perhaps, with holes in the floor, holes in the walls, holes in the roof. A barrel of kerosene stood in a dark stain. There were a coil of blue cotton rope, a few mattock heads, and a bundle of yellow-white handles, fresh cut from hard ipé wood. Lined up on the shelves were many, many bottles of cachaça, all alike: Esperança, Hope, Hope, Hope. There was a counter where you could drink, if you wanted. A bunch of red-striped lamp wicks hung beside a bunch of rusty frying pans. A glass case offered brown toffees leaking through their papers, and old, old, old sweet buns. Some very large ants were making hay there while the sun shone. Our eyes negotiated the advertisements for Orange Crush and Guaraná on the cloud-colored walls, and we had seen everything. That was all.

The shopkeeper had gone off with our mechanista, so Ruy helped us to warm Orange Crush and over our protests put the money for it on the counter. “No cheese?” he inquired, poking about in back, as if he were in the habit of eating quantities of cheese with an Orange Crush every morning. He asked if we’d like a toffee, and urged us to take another crooshy. Then he said, “Let’s go see the manioc factory.”

This was right behind the botequim. It was an open-air affair of three thatched roofs on posts, one a round toadstool. A dozen women and girls sat on the ground, ripping the black skins off the long roots with knives. We were the funniest things they had seen in years. They tried not to laugh in our faces, but we “slayed” them. M. talked to them, but this did not increase their self-control. Zebus stood looking on, chewing their cuds. A motor, with belts slanting up under the thatch, chugged away, grinding up the raw manioc. The place smelled of zebu, gasoline, and people. Everyone talked, but it was murky and peaceful.

The greatest attraction was the revolving metal floor, a big disk, for drying out the flour. It was heated underneath by a charcoal fire and the area was partly railed off, like a small rink, so one could lean over and watch. The coarse white flour went slowly round and round, pushed back and forth in drifts by two men with long wooden hoes. The flour got whiter and whiter, but they were careful not to let it brown. In the north, people usually eat it white; in the south, they prefer it roasted to a pale tan.

We almost forgot we were on our way to Vigia. Then the mechanista collected us; in we got, out again, in again, and finally off. The motor now sounded languid and half sick but uncomplaining, like the poet himself.

* * *

Another ten kilometers and we came to a small house on the left, set among fruit and banana trees growing directly from the bare, swept earth. A wash was strung on the barbed-wire fence. Several skinny dogs appeared and a very fat young woman came out, carrying a baby, with two little boys tagging along behind. We all shook hands, even the baby boys. Her husband, a friend of Ruy’s, was away but she invited us in—“for lunch,” said the poor woman. We quickly explained we had brought our lunch with us. Ruy did the honors. “Ah! the water here is a delicia, isn’t it, Dona Sebastiana? It’s the best water, the only water, from here to Vigia. People come for miles to get water here. Wait till you try it.”