Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

On our first visit we were ushered into a large living-room, parlor, rather, with its silk and lace curtains closely drawn, luxuriously furnished: vases, bronzes, and clocks on small tables, rugs, a chandelier, chairs and sofas covered in gold-colored satin. This room is divided from the hall and another living-room opposite by a fence and gate-way of wrought iron, painted white. One of Dona Alice’s daughters, Dona Sarita, appeared and started talking to my friend. Although they had not met before, very shortly they were identifying and placing each other’s relatives, something that seems to happen in Brazil as quickly as it does in the south of the United States, when Dona Alice herself came in.

She is a large woman, very tall for a Brazilian, looking younger than seventy-six, her hair not yet entirely white, with a handsome, lively, high-cheekboned face lit up by two small but exceedingly bright and gay reddish-brown eyes. Her half-English blood shows, perhaps, in the unusual fairness of her skin, the fairness that made her liable to the freckles she used to complain of in her diary. She began talking, laughing and talking, immediately, and in no time at all we were telling each other stories and Dona Alice was leaning forward to pat our knees with the greatest ease and intimacy. (This warmth and ease in meeting strangers is a Brazilian characteristic especially charming to Nordic visitors.) At the first interview a great deal of the conversation was lost to me. However, I did gather that Dona Alice was proud of the book she had unwittingly written more than sixty years before, pleased at the thought of its being put into English, and still somewhat puzzled by its success in Brazil and the fact that George Bernanos, French people, and more recently, Americans, had seemed to like it, too. I could also recognize her re-telling of some of the anecdotes in the very words of the diary, or in more detail, and with a great deal of hilarity.

Presently Dr. Brant came home from the Bank of Brazil, a small, modest-appearing man of brilliant intelligence, who also looks much younger than his age. He is proud of his wife and it was he who had undertaken to put together all the old scraps and notebooks and prepare them for publication. He has been a lawyer, a journalist, and was five times elected to the National Congress; under the Vargas dictatorship he was exiled, and spent five years in France and England. He reads English; that day, I remember, he told me he was reading Boswell’s Journals. In answer to my question he said no, that Dona Alice had never written anything since her early diaries, nothing, that was, but “letters, letters, letters!”

I don’t believe we accepted the invitation to stay to dinner on this first call, but we did on our second, even though we had taken along two friends, admirers of the book, to meet Dona Alice. Dona Sarita, another daughter, a son-in-law, a grandson of sixteen or so, a nephew — the number of people at the long table seemed to be constantly expanding and contracting. Dona Alice, very much a matriarch, sat at the head, Dr. Augusto Mario beside her at her left. She told stories, ladled soup, told stories, carved, told stories and served the multiple Brazilian desserts, occasionally interrupting herself to scold the maid, or the nephew, who used up a whole cake of soap, or so she said, every time he took a bath, in a sort of head-tone of mock-rage that disturbed no one in the slightest.

On one of our visits we were taken upstairs in Dona Alice’s own elevator, to a panelled library and shown various copies of the book, the original of the letter from Bernanos, and some old photographs. By then it had been settled that I was to do the translation and I had hoped they might have some photographs of Diamantina and the people in the diary. They did have a few, but in poor condition. One was of Dona Alice’s old home in the Old Cavalhada: plastered stone, two-storied, severe, with a double door opening onto a wide stoop. I said that I would like to get a copy of it for the book, but Dona Alice and Dona Sarita said Oh no, not that house, suggesting that I use a picture of Dona Alice’s present house on the Lagôa in Rio. I’m not sure that my arguments for using the old photographs of Diamantina ever quite convinced them.

Diamantina is in the state of Minas Gerais (General Mines) and mineiros, miners, as the people who come from there are called, have the reputation for being shrewd and thrifty. There is a saying that the mineiro eats out of an open drawer, ready to close it quickly if unexpected company shows up. Dona Alice’s hospitality belied this legend, but once when Lota de Macedo Soares went to see her she found Dona Alice seated in the upstairs hall darning linen, and was rather taken aback to be asked severely if she didn’t employ her time on such chores when she was at home.

The diaries, I found, had been cut short where they now end by Dr. Brant because the next year marks his own appearance in them, and his acceptance as a suitor. I feel it is a pity he so firmly omits every incident of their courtship. By the time she was seventeen, “Helena” had already received five proposals of marriage from “foreign” miners living in Diamantina. Her girl cousins and friends had been reduced to hinting to her that if she didn’t want any of her suitors perhaps she would let them have them. She had indeed become what she admits to yearning to be in her diary: “the leading girl of Diamantina.” In true Brazilian fashion she chose a Brazilian and a cousin and at eighteen married Dr. Augusto Mario, whose family had been prominent in Diamantina since the eighteenth century. I am sure she has never for a moment regretted turning down those other offers, and that this is one of those rare stories that combine worldly success and a happy ending.

One story she told us, not in the book, was about the first time she received a serious compliment from one of the rejected suitors and at last became convinced that she was pretty, really pretty. She said that she had sat up in bed studying her face, or what she could see of it by the light of a candle, in a broken piece of looking-glass, all night long.

* * *

Dr. Brant has provided the following information about “Helena Morley’s” English background:

“The family name is really Dayrell. Dona Alice’s grandfather, Dr. John Dayrell, studied medicine in London. He married a Miss Alice Mortimer, the daughter of an Irish Protestant, Henry Mortimer, who was, or had been, a government official in Barbados, where he also had a sugar-cane plantation producing sugar and rum. His children were educated in London, and it was there that Alice Mortimer met and married Dr. John Dayrell.

“Dr. Dayrell left England between 1840 and 1850 to serve as physician to a gold mining concern at Morro Velho [Old Hill] belonging to the famous English São João del Rey Mining Company. A short while later there was a flood in the mine, and work came to a halt. The other officials went back to England, but Dr. Dayrell, who had a ‘weak chest,’ remained in Brazil and went to live in Diamantina, a town 5,000 feet high and famous for its fine climate.

“In Diamantina he established himself as a doctor, acquired a fazenda [farm or country-seat] near town, and practised medicine for about 40 years. He and his wife were the only Protestants in the town. He had eight children, two born in England and the rest in Diamantina.”

Richard Burton, in Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil (Tinsley Brothers, London, 1869), speaks of meeting Dr. Dayrell in 1867, and also Felisberto Dayrell, the real name of “Helena Morley’s” father, who was even then at work mining diamonds, as he is later, throughout the pages of his daughter’s diary.

Diamantina