Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

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One night on board a ship going down the muddy Amazon a young woman doctor was telling stories. She had been fifteen years with the S.E.S.P., the Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública, founded jointly by the United States and Brazil in 1942, and soon to be taken over completely by Brazil. She was twenty-three years old when she entered the S.E.S.P.; she had gone up to Santarém, then another hundred miles or so by launch, and landed with her instruments and a few books at a small village on the Rio Tapajós. The first night a group of wild, ragged men asked her to make out the death certificate of a fellow-villager whose body had just been found in the river: death by drowning. She asked to be left alone with the body and found that, although it had been in the water for some time, the man had died of a stab in the back. Quite alone, at night, knowing that the murderer or murderers must be in the threatening group of men, she had refused to sign the death warrant and ordered someone to go for the nearest police representative — half a day’s trip by motor boat, — she loved her work. She thought that the Indian Protection and the S.E.S.P. were the two best-run services in Brazil.

Small, fat, animated, dark, probably with Indian blood, she was a “modern” Brazilian woman. There are not many like this Amazonian doctor, but there are a few and the numbers are increasing.

Brazil is a man’s country. The double standard could scarcely be more so; little boys are spoilt, according to Anglo-Saxon notion; everything in the home revolves around the head of the house or the son of the family, often referred to simply as “the man.” The male, o macho, is the all-important, all-admired, principal. Women are: “the mother of my children,” “the bearer of my name,” and “religion is for Women.”

But nothing is that simple. Even if poor women trail behind the men, carrying the baby in their arms and the water-jug on their heads, even if the Women’s Pages of the papers are of an unbelievable vapidity, and even if men stay in one room at parties talking of politics & real estate and women stay in another babbling about servants and babies, things have changed a great deal since the first Portuguese carried off the Indian girls. In the old days women were scarce and were kept in harem-like seclusion, peering out at the city streets through muxarabis, or in the dark inner rooms of the old farm houses. For three hundred years they were rarely taught to read or write, and they were married off as young as twelve to neighbours, cousins, even to uncles. All the early travellers’ accounts speak of the timidity of Brazilian women and how rarely they were seen by male guests. They grew white and fat in the darkened rooms, rarely walking, swaying in hammocks, or sitting cross-legged on pillows, while their husbands, according to most accounts, made merry in the slave quarters. After several generations of that sort of life, often the men had not much enterprise, and the wife would, in reality, run the sugar- or coffee-plantation, sitting on her pillows, being fanned, sewing, but issuing a stream of orders all day long.

It is only in the last hundred years that women have been educated in Brazil, and now lower-class girls even more than boys are lucky if they get a year or two of school. Upper-class girls go to convent schools, some good, some bad. But one cannot help but feel that the nuns have too often encouraged complacency and snobbery, not noblesse oblige. In spite of general kindliness, too many upper-class women still treat their servants or social inferiors in the old 18th-century way and let their children grow up doing the same thing.

Since women were illiterate there were naturally no women writers. We can learn the woman’s side of 19th-century life from visitors like Maria Graham or the letters of the many foreign governesses. Some of the talent wasted can be guessed at. The Diary of “Helena Morley” (Alice Brant) is an authentic diary kept in Diamantina in the ’80s by a young girl, certainly a novelist manquée. Women are now prominent in Brazilian letters. Cecilia Meireles is one of Brazil’s best poets. Clarice Lispector is a short-story writer and novelist of considerable originality; and there are many others. The best known of all is Rachel de Queiroz, who at the age of eighteen wrote a short, brilliant novel about Ceará, The ’15, the year of a particularly dreadful drought. She came to Rio, wrote plays and novels, and for many years has had a page in O Cruzeiro, the biggest weekly, in which she is consistently and courageously on the right side of political and social causes. During the Vargas dictatorship, when many intellectuals were arrested or exiled, she spent six months in jail, incommunicado. In 1961 President Quadros invited her to be Minister of Education, and later an ambassador. Although she refused both positions, this was the first time in Brazil a woman had been so honored.

Women were admitted to universities in […]. There are now women in the government, congresswomen, lawyers, doctors, psychoanalysts, and engineers. The head of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, Carmen Portinho, is an engineer, and the graceful viaduct of Canoas near Rio is the work of another woman engineer, Bertha Leitchic. We have seen how active women are in the arts. The pianist Guiomar Novaes has long been world-famous.

Special credit should be given to hundreds of anonymous Brazilian normalistas, — the young girls who start out every year as school-teachers, often in remote villages, in one-roomed school-houses, under heart breaking conditions.

But marriage at seventeen or eighteen and the grim race of procreation are the lot of even the rich and educated. Women themselves are against introducing divorce. Security for herself and her children is the most important thing in life.

Although women got the vote in Brazil in 1934, they still do not have full legal rights. They usually think as their husbands do and accept their husbands’ infidelity as a matter of course. Some will even insist that they are happier than American women, — but that is usually after a visit to the United States, where they have seen how American women “do their own work,” take care of their own children, or support themselves, and appear rushed and harassed.

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Besides careers for women, another new development in Brazil is sports. Only thirty years ago, futebol (“soccer”) was a strictly amateur affair, played for fun by the upper-class. Now like baseball in the United States, it is a big business, with high salaries, the buying and selling of players, and popular national heroes. Every newspaper devotes at least a page to it everyday. In 1958 Brazil was soccer champion of the world. (It is interesting to note that each player on the European tour was alloted thirty pounds of black beans.) The players are all shades, from white to jet black, graceful, nervous and incredibly quick. For years they lacked team play or cooperation.

[Popular heroes—“The Black Diamond,” “Pelé,” story from Carolina Jesus here. In 1958 the basketball champions of the year. Maria Ester. Bruno Hermanny.]

In the country on Sundays, the population of every small village will be out watching the local futebol teams. The big pale-green fields will be edged with people in their Sunday best, carrying babies, carrying umbrellas against the sun. The Kibon (“Eskimo Pie”) man with his yellow wagon, a spun-sugar wagon (home-made, mounted on a bicycle); buzzards and delicate tissue paper kites hang overhead, and the players in their brilliantly striped jerseys and brief shorts are running, running.

It is also a common sight to see the local washerwoman’s line hung with the jerseys of one team, sweaters striped like wasps, a cheerful display, sometimes against the background of a city dump, with buzzards and paper kites hovering above.