Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

As we were leaving the Palace I realized that its more disappointing features had reminded me, in some way, of the house Niemeyer built for himself in 1954, on a hillside just outside Rio, and when I got back home I looked up what Henry Russell-Hitchcock had had to say about that in his book Latin American Architecture. Confirming my own amateur suspicions, I found this: “The pavillion contains only the main living areas and the kitchen. All other facilities are hidden away below the terrace with no relationship at all to the pavillion on top. Only, perhaps, its own designer and his family would find this an altogether comfortable residence…” Niemeyer’s house, of course, is not at all like the Palace of the Dawn in Brasília, having been designed “in response to the landscape” in an interlocking set of curves, “in a harmony between the boldly rounded outline of the hills and the sinuous curves of his plan.” Niemeyer’s response to the flat empty spaces of Brasília has been this transparent, gracefully supported, but essentially severe, box; but in both cases his solution of practical problems seems to have been the same: put them underneath, or underground, like a lazy housewife shoving household gear out of sight under a deceptively well-made bed.

Off to the south east of the Palace, a small white triangle in the distance, is the “Hermitage of Saint John Bosco” a faithful copy in white marble of an Indian teepee — American Indian, that is, with the open triangular doorway but with a cross on top in place of criss-crossed tent-poles. One of the booklets about Brasília explains the presence of this rather surprising chapel: “In the book Biographical Memories, Vol XVI pages 385 and 395, can be found the tale of Saint John Bosco’s prophecy. It tells there that Dom Bosco, on the thirtieth of August, 1883, had a dream-vision. We give the quotation in respect to Brasília.

“‘Between the fifteenth and twentieth parallels, in the place where a lake was formed, will be born a great civilization and this will happen in the third generation. Here will be the promised land.’

“We are in the third generation exactly. The great civilization under construction (and which is Brasília) is located between the fifteenth and the twentieth parallels. The lake will be formed by the streams Torto and Gama.

“Thus the prophetic dream of Dom Bosco will be fulfilled.”

Laura Huxley was familiar with the life of this Italian saint, the founder of the Silesian order (which does much work in Brasil), and was eager to start off on a walk to see the “hermitage.” However, it was pointed out that actually the chapel was about a mile away, and at that moment the light was beginning to change to a clear uniform pink, the beginning of the sudden sub-tropical sunset. As we left, a group of small soldiers, members of the Brasília Guarda Especial, marched solemnly past changing guard, pounding with their heavy boots; in their unstarched green uniforms, they always look like wilted string beans.

* * *

In the hotel lounge before starting out, Maya, the Polish girl, had run into another Polish former-refugee, Countess Tarnowska, who had invited us all to come to the Santos Dumont Hotel in the Free City for a drink before dinner. Some time before Countess Tarnowska had opened a movie house in Annapolis and shortly after the founding of Brasília she opened another one in the Free City. There were then three hundred people in the town and her cinema was in a wooden barn; now she has the largest building there, of corrugated iron, seating three hundred people, and there is even a rival movie house. She is young and handsome; in excellent English she told us blithely, “We love it here! Of course there are lots of fires. The bank next door burned down yesterday. We were frightened for the cinema a bit, but everything turned out all right. Too bad you missed the excitement!” Dressed in blue jeans, with a straw hat tightly bound down with a white scarf that swathed her neck, she and her beautiful dark-eyed daughter, also in jeans and khaki shirt, had resembled two heroines of an old western, a sepia western, since they were both covered with the usual dust.

We now drove towards the city, over the head of the bird, where the Esplanade of the Three Powers will be. At present it is a confusing, noisy scene of earthwork, trucks and bulldozers, with work going on day and night. Someone behind me was trying to explain the lay-out of the Esplanade. “You see, it’s a triangular rectangle,” he kept saying. The Englishman was trying to find the land acquired by his country for its future Embassy and when a vague area of the scrubby, termite-infested land was pointed out to him he said, “Oh! I’m so disappointed!” in such a crestfallen way that everyone laughed.

We passed the “superblocks” of apartments being built by the institutos; skeletons of steel and cement, it was hard to tell much about them except that they are very high and very close together, and again, with infinite space in all directions, it is hard to understand why they should be placed together at all, and with courtyards and area-ways not much larger than those in Rio — explicable because there actually is very little building space left, and real-estate values are higher than in New York.

The streets of Brasília have been planned to do away with traffic lights completely by means of over- and under-passes. Since the present capital is famous for the terrifying speed of its traffic, light-jumping, mad bus-drivers, and high accident rate, this is one innovation that has been welcomed by all.

* * *

It was growing dark when we reached the Free City, but it was not too dark to see it: almost that old, familiar, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer frontier town, but real, and greatly enlarged. The wide dirt streets are without sidewalks—“Imagine what it’s like when it rains!” we told each other — and the wooden houses, with peaked roofs and occasional false fronts, are set close together, all shapes, sizes, and colors. We passed the corrugated iron cinema, and a big red barn with IGREJA PRESBYTERIANA in white letters across the gable. The traffic is mostly trucks, of all makes and ages, and jeeps, jeeps, jeeps, American, English, and Brasilian-made, with a few old cars and even a few men on horseback, all churning up thick clouds of dust.

The Hotel Santos Dumont is a low building, indistinguishable from the rest except for its sign and a few metal porch chairs placed on a narrow strip of cement flush with the street. Once inside, however, we seemed to have been bodily transported to a new little boîte or espresso bar in Greenwich Village — new because all the colors were bright and fresh, almost the only fresh colors I saw in the whole of Brasília. It was a rectangular room about thirty feet long, with a varnished bamboo bar and two boys in mess jackets; the table cloths were scarlet, there were black “drugstore” chairs, and bright yellow and green frills around the windows. Music was playing; I looked and saw Villa Lobos, Stravinsky, and Bartók records lying on the victrola. All this had been lugged in six hundred miles or more by truck. The Santos Dumont was modestly doing its best to be chic and cheerful and I think all our hearts warmed towards it.

Tables were pushed together and Countess Tarnowska, now clean and polished in an India print dress and bandanna, called for whiskey sours. But our temperate little party, perhaps slightly over-awed by Huxley (he had spoken once or twice about the unnecessary drinking and smoking that go on in the United States), refused alcohol for the most part and drank orange juice, which was mysteriously available. Countess Tarnowska, the daughter, and a heavy, blond Polish gentleman who was staying at the hotel, too, had just returned from a three-weeks’ hunting trip, farther to the west, and she began telling us about it. They had had bad luck; they had been after onça, the Brasilian jaguar, but hadn’t found any, and instead they had shot a great many of what she referred to with flashing eyes as “stags.” It had been the daughter’s first hunting trip and, said her mother proudly, “She shot twelve alligators.” From hunting Tarnowska went on to speak of murderous propensities she had observed in Brasil in general and in Brasília in particular. “They like killing,” she assured Huxley, with beautiful vivacity, and told an anecdote about a recent gratuitous shooting. At my end of the table the Huxleys, Maya, the Englishman and myself all being rather strongly anti-shooting, man or beast (and my own experience of Brasilians being that they are the least bloodthirsty of peoples) the conversation began to fall a little flat, and Huxley, who had said almost nothing so far, shaded his eyes with his hand and seemed lost in meditation over his mysterious orange juice.