Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

She then told a story of her movie house that illustrated the national character a bit better. The forty-five thousand citizens of the Free City mostly come from the interior, the “north” or the “south”—and it is hard to realize the weight of the vast unknown, or half-known, that these ordinary terms of direction can still carry in Brasil — simple, old-fashioned, country people, a type called condangos. One of the films shown recently had been “And God Created Woman.” The audience, many more men than women, had watched quietly, thinking heaven knows what, until the story reached the disrobing scene. Brigitte Bardot had undone one button when the movie suddenly stopped and the lights went up. The man in the projection booth, who had obviously watched it through before, said, “Will all the senhoras and senhoritas please leave, and wait outside.” And leave they did, without demur, and stood outside in the dusty street in a little crowd. The theatre was darkened and the men watched the love scene that followed. Again the film stopped, the lights went on, and the ladies were invited back in, to see the rest of the show coeducationally.

We asked what was playing that night, with some idea of going to see it. It was a travelling show of skits, singing and dancing, and Countess Tarnowska, who had watched a rehearsal, did not recommend it.

We left the hotel and took a walk down the main street. Almost every building has its own electric generator (using more precious gasoline every minute), so there is a background music of pulsing and chugging and the lights vary from building to building, yellow, blueish, or grayish, with here and there the deep yellow of kerosene lamps or the blue-white glare of gasoline pressure lanterns. We strolled along observing barber shops and pharmácias (both doing rush business), grocery stores, dry good stores, and shoe-shine and shoe-repair shops — boot, rather, since all the male population of Brasília wears high boots, usually of a variety with an accordion-like section of imitation ripples above the ankle. Boarding houses, dormitories and restaurants; banks and airline offices, given a spurious city-look with ripped wall-board and a potted palm. Some furniture stores with new furniture but most crammed with second-hand Brasilian Grand Rapids, always included the lean armoires of closetless countries. The Butcher Shop of the Good Jesus, the suspended meat an iridescent violet under the light of hissing gasoline lamps. (And where had it come from?) Then small glass-fronted shops, exactly like other such shops all over Brasil: shoddy shirts and blouses and pink and blue undergarments, plastic bags and belts, and hung up in front, rows of umbrellas, black for men and brightly colored for women — because in Brasil everyone, no matter how poor, with the possible exception of the Indians we were going to see, owns an umbrella. Also baby dresses, booties and bibs, and even christening robes in glistening little piles like marshmallow sauce, because also no matter how poor, Brasilians will spend money on finery for their babies. A popular song, sung in English, blared out from a shop selling radios and victrolas.

As we went along we bought packages of cigarettes, boxes of matches, and Salva Vidas, Life Savers, to take to the Indians the next day. Antônio Callado, more experienced with the Indians than the rest of us, went into a shop full of boots, felt hats, machetes and guns, and came back with fish-hooks and nylon fish lines. The radio at the Indian post we were going to had been broken for over a month and there was no way of letting them know we were coming, so he also laid in a supply of sausage in case their food supply should be low.

Several of us met in a narrow bar at right angles to the streets, painted a dark sea-green. In it, alluring as a mermaid in her cave, stood a plump, sulky, pretty young woman with bleached hair and a very décolleté black sweater. Two small, pink-cheeked children, a boy and a girl, obviously hers, on the counter, staring at the one customer, a man drinking beer. Laura Huxley decided to get a photograph of the children with her Polaroid Land camera, using the headlights of the Volkswagen bus for light, and they posed, shy and blinking. From time to time the girl’s husband stuck his head through a flowered curtain at the back of the bar, keeping his eye on us. The girl’s parents had been Lebanese immigrants; she spoke a little French. We asked her how she liked living in Brasília, or in the Free City, and she replied promptly: “ Je le déteste! — But my husband likes it all right.” They were from São Paulo and she missed the city; she was of a new, sophisticated city class, without the formal, old-fashioned manners of the condangos. When we left she stood languidly holding the drying photograph, almost forgetting to call “Thank you” after us. Brigitte Bardot would not have surprised her.

Then back the fifteen miles to the hotel (and distances seem even farther than they are, perhaps because there are so few landmarks), for a dinner that ended after eleven o’clock. News that Huxley was at the hotel had spread among the party-guests from São Paulo; before dinner the taller man from Itamarati had been taken for Huxley and another woman of the group for Mrs. Huxley, and both asked for autographs. When the mistakes were corrected, Huxley and Laura obligingly signed their names on dinner menus ( Bife Stroganoff ). Huxley didn’t mind not being recognized; at dinner he told a little story of another recent experience of mistaken identity. Before starting out for Brasil he had visited his dentist in Beverly Hills, and as he walked out of the elevator he met a woman about to get in. She looked up at him and stepped back in astonishment, then inquired, “Pardon me, but aren’t you Theda Bara’s husband?”

After midnight, kept awake by strains of dance-music from the hotel dining-room, where the President’s party was in progress, I lay in bed studying the illuminated green-blue aquarium of the Palace of the Dawn, off in the distance. It is a pity, I decided, that the kite-like pillars are not spot-lit at night. As it is, their effectiveness is lost after dark because they show up only as formless shadows on the lighted glass box. But undoubtedly they eventually will be.

* * *

The next day, Sunday, was the day for the Indians. At six-thirty we met outside the hotel in the damp, chilly dawn; the Volkswagen bus was supposed to be there, but, with the confusion probably incidental to founding a new city, it kept us waiting for almost an hour, and to keep warm we took brisk walks around the cement parking space. The stork-like Huxley legs went around it faster than anyone else’s without any effort, and watching those giant steps our clammy little group, laden down with books, baskets, and sun hats, murmured to each other in Portuguese that he looked “young for his age.” We were a rather highbrow set. On our way to see the most primitive people left in the world, except for the African pygmies, we had, among us: Martin Buber’s “The Eclipse of God,” Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and “Heaven and Hell,” in Portuguese, and “Grey Eminence” in English. Also being taken along to fill in the time on the trip were a thick French book titled simply “Plato” and a pocket edition of “The Mill on the Floss.”

Finally the bus arrived and we retraced the long red road to the airport. A few birds were singing, but not many, and the termites were hard at work in their unsightly red nests. Red ostrich plumes of dust rose here and there, trucks moving along with their loads of cement, girders, or fill, and the nagging sound of bull-dozers came from the direction of the Esplanade of the Three Powers.