Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Between the hotel block and the dining-room wing is a small space about as big as a tennis court and here grass had been planted and was being watered. Otherwise, in front and in back of the hotel, and for the half-mile tract between it and the presidential palace, the red dust blew unchecked. (A week or so after this, when President Gronchi of Italy visited Brasília, a thin layer of cement was poured over the area in front of the Palace.) Dust seeped into the hotel, tingeing the carpets and one’s clothing and the gray marble floor of the lounge was powdered with it. I watched a workman trying to clean this floor with an electric polishing machine. After producing a few big spirals edged with banks of red dust, he gave up the attempt.

This particular floor comes to an end in a free-form curve four feet higher than the floor of the dining-room, into which the lounge opens. Plants and cacti hide coyly beneath the overhang, invisible from the lounge. The one occasion on our trip when I saw Aldous Huxley openly irritated was when, just after he arrived the next day, he started walking down the lounge, against the light, and almost fell over this drop. He showed distinct signs of anger, for him, and remarked that the handrail had been in use for some thousands of years and it seemed “a shame to abandon such a useful invention.”

In front of the dining-room is the biggest swimming-pool I have ever seen: oval, lined with blue tiles, as yet waterless. The Presidential pool, at the far side of the Palace, is bigger than the standard Olympic pool, and this is a much bigger one than that. Permanent quarters for the hotel employees have not yet been built. Beyond the pool is a wooden paling, and inside it a collection of wooden shacks. Maids, bell boys, and chefs in their white hats, skirt the blue tile abyss and vanish into this shabby compound, and the dining-room looks out on it.

Concealed behind a curving black wall on the dining-room level are a bar and cocktail lounge, and also there was the source of some annoyance to the Huxley party — a loud, Brasilian equivalent of Muzak, which was turned on for two hours at lunch and dinner. The food was not bad, considering that all supplies have to be brought by truck or by plane from at least as far away as Annapolis; there were almost no vegetables, but always airlifted pineapples or papayas to provide us with vitamins, as well as the mushy Delicious apple, as ubiquitous here as in the United States.

That Friday night two far-off couples and I dined all alone in the big dining-room, the canned music struck up with the canned consommé, and the extra waiters looked on. After dinner two younger couples appeared in the lounge, with a baby in a basket and another small child to each couple. One mother in plaid slacks ran races with her little boy; the other joggled her baby’s basket with her foot and read a detective story.

* * *

This peaceful family life, without the fathers, went on all the next morning. Around noon, when I was expecting my own party to arrive, several cars drove up rapidly from the direction of the airport and at least forty fashionably dressed men and women poured noisily down the steps into the subterranean lobby. They had come by special plane from São Paulo to attend a banquet and a ball that President Kubitschek was giving for them at the hotel that evening. The almost deserted, oddly domestic lounge suddenly swarmed with bejeweled women in sack dresses and men in pin-stripe suits. Parties like this, I was told, take place every week-end; in an air-age version of the hospitable old Brasilian custom of “showing the house to the visitors,” Kubitschek invites groups from Rio, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and other cities. Once, even, a whole convent of young girls came by special plane to look things over at the President’s invitation. Tales of these week-end parties, of course, only increase the indignation of those opposed to Brasília on economic grounds — besides the expenses of entertainment, they say, just that much more gasoline is being used, in addition to the thousands of gallons burnt up by the trucks and planes bringing in building materials.

Five or ten minutes later the Huxleys and their party did arrive: very quiet, carrying books and cameras, and, slightly travel-worn, but looking alert and curious compared to the giddier set still swarming around the room-clerks. Laura Huxley and Maya Osser, the Polish-Brasilian architect, are old friends of mine, and I knew most of the others slightly or had met them.

Huxley is, of course, tall, pale, and thin, but he undoubtedly looks even taller, paler, and thinner than usual in Brasil, where most men, at least by Anglo-Saxon standards, are short and dark. Also, while the Brasilians were thinking of the season still as “winter” and in spite of the temperature were wearing dark suits and ties, Huxley always wore beige or light gray suits, or a white sports jacket, and he favored an extremely long, pale, satin necktie with Persian horsemen on it. His long hair, combed straight back, is a uniform gray-brown, his features large but well-modelled; he has beautiful teeth. Laura Huxley is about twenty years younger than her husband, small, trim, and blonde, with a rather large head and enormous gray-green eyes set far apart, in a remarkable Campigli-like style of Italian good looks. She is polite and friendly and animated, in French, Italian, or English, as the need arises. She shares Huxley’s passionate interest in medicines, mescalin, and subliminal advertising, but on a more personal and practical level; in fact she adores to doctor people and occasionally handed out her various special pills to one or the other of us. With Huxley, it is hard to tell how much he is seeing, and since he usually talks very little, what he is thinking. By long self-discipline an original cool, English detachment seems to have been overlaid with an Oriental, or simply mystical, non-attachment. There is a slight cast to his bad eye, and this characteristic, which I always find oddly attractive, in Huxley’s case adds even more to his veiled and other-worldly gaze. When examining something close to, a photograph or a painting, he sometimes takes out a small horn-rimmed magnifying glass, or, for distant objects, a miniature telescope, and he often sits resting his good eye by cupping his hand over it. He is unfailingly patient, never seems to tire (whenever anyone grew apprehensive about this his wife assured us that he never does tire), and smiling sweetly, displays occasional mild outbursts of interest. But he gives the impression of being inwardly absorbed in a meditation of his own, far removed from the possibly frivolous scenes of man’s efforts that the Brasilian and Department of Foreign Affairs was proffering, and we all, to degrees that varied with our temperaments, behaved with him slightly like nervous hostesses.

After lunch and a two hours’ rest we were taken off on a brief tour of the sights of Brasília, starting with the Palace of the Dawn. Kubitschek, meanwhile, had arrived for the party by his private Viscount. He sent over the old Lincoln convertible he keeps in Brasília, for the guests of honor. The Callados went with them; the rest of us climbed into the cream-colored Microbus and tagged along behind. Around the Palace is a barbed-wire fence and at the gate are a sentry box and two soldiers in tin helmets with tommy-guns under their arms. The Presidential car swept through the open gate but the sentries, not having been notified about the other car, refused to let us in and shut the gate under the bus’s nose. The driver tried to explain but the young soldier said “No, no!” firmly and finally rather crossly, hugging his gun. The young Englishman hopped down from the bus and exclaimed “This is outrageous!” in the traditional English manner. Then someone drove back to the hotel, brought back the password, or at least permission for us to enter, and we were admitted after all, to catch up with the others.