Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

At home I find a flyer, thrown in the yard — an invitation from the Ouro Prêto Department of Tourism inviting the people of the town and visitors

to witness the monumental parade of the Carnival Clubs in Tooth-puller Square on the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th of the month of February. The following clubs will parade: Zé Pereira of the Lacaios [footmen], Conjunto Brito Filho, Clube Recreative XV de Novembere, Escola de Samba Morro de Sant’ana, Bloco Estrela Dalva, Zé Pereira Infantil, and Escola do Bairro do Padre Faria.

On the 10th there will be a great competition for the prize for the best of the Carnival of 1970, and the great parade of Allegorical Cars [floats].

About a mile above the city, up a winding steep dirt road, you reach a high plateau. On the way you pass two small chapels in the distance, Our Lady of the Safe Delivery and Santa Ana. Up through Burnt Hill, past steep fields full of ruins. After two hundred years, a few ruins have turned back into houses again: one very small one, just four standing walls with openings for a door and window, now has a roof of tarpaulin, weighted with stones. It is hard to see how anyone lives in it, but a few hens scratch around the door and there’s some washing spread out over the tops of the nearest weeds.

The tiniest house of all, mud brick, wattles showing through, stands against a magnificent view, overlooking a drop of a thousand feet or so, one end of the house merging into a small and very old bus body. The windows and door of the bus are all faded green, with a black rounded roof. Whether the house is an extension of the bus, or the bus the “new wing” of the house, is a hideous little riddle against a majestic backdrop. But someone lives there! It is a magnificent sight to the east, seemingly all the way to the coast, miles and miles and miles of blue hills, the nearer ones topped by crazy spars of gray stone, and one tall cross slanting slightly to the north.

On the left you can see where a small mill stood and fell down. There used to be a strange old iron mill wheel there, but some time ago the boys who came to make a very arty movie of the town stole it. (The boys then lived below me; I smelled their pot every evening and one, the youngest, stayed home alone and sniffed ether, almost etherizing me, in the bedroom above his, every night.)

The fields are filled with wild flowers. At first you see only tall ones, all nameless, yellow and purple, fuzzy seed-heads, red pods, and white ones too. Then you realize the ground is carpeted with flowers, short, shorter ones, moss-height ones. I pick dozens of wild flowers, little bright orange-and-yellow ones on a dry fine little bush, brilliant like orchids; lovely tall single white-yellow ones, each on its own thin green stock; hanging magenta bells. Before you can get these home, they have shut up tight forever.

This is the field of the Waterfall of the Little Swallows, and this is where the stream disappears, like the sacred river Alph in Coleridge’s dream. It fans out over the red stone, narrows and rises in cold gray ridges, disappears underground, and then shows up again farther off, dashing downwards now through more beautiful rocks. It then takes off downwards for the Underworld. You can hang over the rocks and see it far below. It keeps descending, disappears into a cavern, and is never seen again. It talks as it goes, but the words are lost …

1970

It’s raining in Rio de Janeiro, raining, raining, raining. This morning the papers said it is the rainiest rainy season in seventy-six years. It is also hot and sticky. The sea — I’m writing in a penthouse apartment, eleven floors up, facing southeast over the sea — the sea is blurred with rain, almost hidden by the mixture of rain and fog, that rarity here. Just close enough inshore to be visible, an empty-looking freighter lunges heavily south. The mosaic sidewalks are streaming; the beach is dark, wet, beaten smooth; the tide line is marked by strands of dark seaweed, another rarity. And how it rains! It is seeping in under the french doors and around the window frames. Every so often a weak breeze seeps in, too, and with it a whiff of decay: something or other spoiled, fruit or meat. Or perhaps it’s a whiff of mildew from my own old books and old papers, even from the shirt I have on, since in this weather even clothes mildew quickly. If the rain keeps up much longer the radio will stop working again and the hi-fi will rust beyond repair. At flood tide the sea may cross the avenue and start rising slowly up the base of the apartment building, as it’s been known to do.

* * *

And Uncle Neddy, that is, my Uncle Edward, is here. Into this wildly foreign and, to him, exotic setting, Uncle Neddy has just come back, from the framer’s. He leans slightly, silently backwards against the damp-stained pale-yellow wall, looking quite cheerfully into the eyes of whoever happens to look at him — including the cat’s, who investigated him just now. Only of course it isn’t really Uncle Neddy, not as he was, or not as I knew him. This is “little Edward,” before he became an uncle, before he became a lover, husband, father or grandfather, a tinsmith, a drunkard, or a famous fly-fisherman — any of the various things he turned out to be.

Except for the fact that they give me asthma, I am very fond of molds and mildews. I love the dry-looking, gray-green dust, like bloom on fruit, to begin with, that suddenly appears here on the soles of shoes in the closet, on the backs of all the black books, or the darkest ones, in the bookcase. And I love the black shadow, like the finest soot, that suddenly shows up, slyly, on white bread, or white walls. The molds on food go wild in just a day or two, and in a hot, wet spell like this, a tiny jungle, green, chartreuse, and magenta, may start up in a corner of the bathroom. That gray-green bloom, or that shadow of fine soot, is just enough to serve as a hint of morbidity, attractive morbidity — although perhaps mortality is a better word. The gray-green suggests life, the sooty shadow — although living, too — death and dying. And now that Uncle Neddy has turned up again, the latter, the black, has suddenly become associated with him. Because, after all these years, I realize only now that he represented “the devil” for me, not a violent, active Devil, but a gentle black one, a devil of weakness, acquiescence tentatively black, like the sooty mildew. He died, or his final incarnation died, aged seventy-six, some years ago, and two or three years before that I saw him for the last time. I don’t know how he held out so long. He looked already quite dead then, dead and covered with shadow, like the mold, as if his years of life had finally determined to obscure him. (He had looked, too, then, like a dried-out wick, in the smoke-blackened chimney of an oil lamp.)

But here he is again now, young and clean, about twelve years old, with nothing between us but a glaze of old-fashioned varnishing. His widow, Aunt Hat, sent him to me, shipped him thousands of miles from Nova Scotia, along with one of his younger sisters, my mother, in one big crate. Why on earth did Aunt Hat send me the portrait of her late husband? My mother’s might have been expected, but Uncle Neddy’s came as a complete surprise; and now I can’t stop thinking about him. His married life was long-drawn-out and awful; that was common knowledge. Can his presence here be Aunt Hat’s revenge? Her last word in their fifty-odd-year battle? And an incredible last straw for him? Or is he here now because he was one of a pair and Aunt Hat was a fiend for order? Because she couldn’t bear to break up a set of anything? He looks perfectly calm, polite — quite a pleasant child, in fact — almost as if he were glad to be here, away from it all.