Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Some of the people in the diary are still alive, and the successors of those who are dead and gone seem to be cut very much from the same cloth. Little uniformed girls, with perhaps shorter skirts, carrying satchels of books, press their noses against the dining-room windows of the new hotel and are overcome by fits of giggling at seeing the foreigner eat her lunch — on their way to the school run by the Sisters of Charity, the same school that Helena ran away from. The boys still give them the same nicknames. (They call a freckled child of my acquaintance Flocos, “Flakes,” but that is a new word in Brazil and Helena was spared it.) Mota’s store, where she bought her boots, is now Mota’s Son’s store. There is still a garrison of soldiers, now outside the town; there is a seminary, and young priests walk in the streets and people talk to them through the latticed windows.

When the diary happened, Helena was tall and thin and freckled and always, always hungry. She worries about her height, her thinness, her freckles and her appetite. She is not a very good scholar and fails in her first year at Normal School. Her studies can always be interrupted by her brother, her many cousins, or even the lack of a candle. (The diary was mostly written by candlelight.) She is greedy; sometimes she is unfair to her long-suffering sister, Luizinha, but feels properly guilty afterwards, rationalize as she may. She is obviously something of a show-off and saucy to her teachers; but she is outspoken and good-natured and gay, and wherever she is her friends may be getting into mischief but they are having a good time; and she has many friends, old and young, black and white. She is willing to tell stories on herself, although sometimes she tries to ease her conscience, that has “a nail in it.” She thinks about clothes a great deal, but, under the circumstances — she has only two or three dresses and two pairs of boots — who wouldn’t?

She may grow tedious on the subject of stealing fruit, but it is, after all, the original sin, and remember St. Augustine on the subject of the pear tree. On the other hand, she seems to take the Anglo-Saxon sin of sins, “cheating,” rather lightly. If she is not always quite admirable, she is always completely herself; hypocrisy appears for a moment and then vanishes like the dew. Her method of composition seems influenced by the La Fontaine she hates to study; she winds up her stories with a neat moral that doesn’t apply too exactly; sometimes, for variety’s sake, she starts off with the moral instead. She has a sense of the right quotation, or detail, the gag-line, and where to stop. The characters are skilfully differentiated: the quiet, humorous father, the devout, doting, slightly foolish mother, the rigid Uncle Conrado. Occasionally she has “runs” on one subject; perhaps “papa” had admired a particular page and so she wrote a sequel to it or remembered a similar story.

In matters of religion, Helena seems to have been somewhat of an eighteenth-century rationalist. She steps easily in and out of superstition, reason, belief and disbelief, without much adolescent worrying. She would never for a moment doubt, one feels, that the church is “a good thing.” With all its holidays, processions, mast-raisings, and fireworks, its christenings, first communions and funerals, it is the fountain-head of the town’s social life. Her father remains in the background, smiling but tolerant, while her mother pleads with him to go to church and constantly prays for all the family. Like him, Helena is at first skeptical of a schoolmate who dies and acquires a reputation for working miracles; then she veers towards her mother’s party. Her religion, like her feeling for nature, is on the practical side.

She lives in a world of bitter poverty and isolation. A trip to the capital, Rio de Janeiro, where a few boys go to study, takes ten days: eight on mule-back to Sabará, and from there two days by very slow train to Rio. Supplies are brought to town by the drovers, on long lines of mules or horses. One of the greatest problems is what to do with the freed slaves who have stayed on. Reading this diary, one sometimes gets the impression that the greater part of the town, black and white, “rich” and poor, when it hasn’t found a diamond lately, gets along by making sweets and pastries, brooms and cigarettes and selling them to each other. Or the freed slaves are kept busy manufacturing them in the kitchen and peddling them in the streets, and the lady of the house collects the profits — or buys, in her parlor, the products of her kitchen.

Now that I can join in my friends’ exchanges of anecdotes from the book, and have seen Diamantina, I think that one of my own favorite entries is Helena’s soliloquy on November 5th, 1893, on the meaning of Time (her style improves in the later years):

“The rooster’s crow never gives the right time and nobody believes it. When a rooster crows at nine o’clock they say that a girl is running away from home to get married. I’m always hearing the rooster crow at nine o’clock, but it’s very rarely that a girl runs away from home.

“Once upon a time I used to believe that roosters told the time, because in Boa Vista when you ask a miner the time he looks at the sun and tells you. If you go and look at the clock, he’s right. So I used to think that the sun kept time during the day and the rooster at night. Now I realize that this was a mistake.…

“In Cavalhada only the men have watches. Those who live in the middle of the town don’t feel the lack of them because almost all the churches have clocks in their towers. But when papa isn’t home the mistakes we make about the hours are really funny.… The rooster is mama’s watch, which doesn’t run very well. It’s already fooled us several times.” She goes on to tell about “mama’s” waking her and Luizinha up to go to four o’clock Mass, because the rooster has already crowed twice. They drink their coffee and start out. “I kept looking at the moon and the stars and saying to mama, ‘This time the Senhora’s going to see whether the rooster can tell time or not.’ The street was deserted. The two of us walked holding onto mama’s arms. When we passed by the barracks the soldier on duty looked at mama and asked, ‘What’s the Senhora doing in the street with these little girls at this hour?’ Mama said, ‘We’re going to Mass at the Cathedral.’ The soldier said, ‘Mass at midnight? It isn’t Christmas eve. What’s this all about?’

“I was afraid of the soldier. Mama said, ‘Midnight? I thought it was four o’clock. Thank you very much for the information.’

“We went home and lay down in our clothes. But even so we missed Mass. When we got to church later Father Neves was already in the Hail Marys.”

I like to think of the two tall, thin little girls hanging onto their mother’s arms, the three figures stumbling up the steep streets of the rocky, lightless little town beneath the cold bright moon and stars; and I can hear the surprised young soldier’s voice, mama’s polite reply, and then three pairs of footsteps scuttling home again over the cobblestones.

Food

The staple diet of Brazil consists of dried black beans and rice, with whatever meat, beef or pork, salted or fresh, can be afforded or obtained. And black beans, instead of the “bread” of other countries, seem to be equated with life itself. An example of this: when the Brazilian football team went to play in the Olympic Games recently, thirty-three pounds of black beans were taken along for each man. And recently in Rio the court ordered a taxi-driver to pay alimony to his wife and children in the form of twenty-two pounds of rice and twenty-two pounds of black beans monthly.

They are boiled separately and seasoned with salt and pepper, garlic, and lard. The common vegetables, such as pumpkin, okra, couve (a kind of cabbage), are usually made into stews with small quantities of meat or chicken. As in other Catholic countries, salt codfish is a common dish. But black beans and rice form the basis of the main meal, the heavy lunch, usually served early, between eleven and half-past twelve. At the time of the diary lunch was even earlier, at half-past ten or eleven, and dinner was eaten at three or four o’clock. This explains why everyone is always ready to eat again in the evenings.