Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

At eight we took off in a Brazilian Air Force DC-3. It was a pleasant plane, if one can use the word for a plane, new, bare of all the usual paddings and curtains, but with blue plush seats, the backs of which could be folded over. It was meant for twenty-four passengers, and although several unknown men had now joined the party there were still so many extra seats that we could turn down the backs of alternate ones and put our feet up, the way we used to do on trains as children.

The continent rolled out underneath us to the west, a full-scale, dun-colored, bas-relief map. Trees grow along the wrinkles; the smaller streams are opaque olive-green. Occasionally higher ground breaks out into crumbling, fortress-like rocks, possibly the formations, Callado told us, that had given rise to the legend of the lost city that Colonel Fawcett searched for; we were flying over Fawcett territory. After a while we saw one large blue river, the Araguaia, flowing north, as all the rivers do, to join the Amazon, over a thousand miles away. Callado, dressed today in khaki drill, went down the aisle giving us each an anti-malaria pill from an enormous bottle: “Mostly for the psychological effect,” he said, “although we may meet some malarial mosquitoes.” Until it grew warmer the Air Force men kept on their stylish reefers of gray-blue wool with long-peaked caps to match. They were friendly and hospitable and began feeding us immediately: sandwiches, then gumdrops and jelly beans, and then paper cups of sweet black coffee, at least three times, but this is de rigueur on any Brasilian plane, sometimes even on Brasilian buses. Later the plane filled with the smell of oranges as a helpful aviator sliced off the peels of a whole tray for us.

We dipped into our various books and swapped them across the aisle; we changed places to talk to each other, like a dance. The young interpreter ate a large chocolate bar and devoted herself to a magazine called Lady (pronounced “Lah-dee”). She handed it across to show Huxley. There was a full page photograph of him at a recent press conference in Rio, shading his eyes and looking very sad. His wife was indignant about the expression: “Oh, why do they always take him looking like that! He really doesn’t look like that at all!” I was bothered more by the huge caption: THE OLD HUXLEY SAYS — something about world peace. Although Huxley does not know Portuguese, he does know Spanish and I was afraid he might recognize the similar word for “old.” I had a brief argument with myself as to whether I should try to explain or not, then decided to hold my tongue. In this case I felt the word was meant affectionately, or “old” only in the sense of Huxley’s having been famous for many years. (For two weeks Huxley had been making a deep impression in Rio; the bookshops were filled with his books, in five languages, and he had received nothing but unqualified praise and consideration from the press.)

One of the men who had joined us was an exuberant type, who couldn’t sit still but kept prancing up and down the aisle with a leather gaucho hat tied under his chin. Another was old and tiny, large-eared and mournful-eyed. He, I discovered, was the man who had been supposed to meet me at the airport two days before; at that very moment, he confessed, he was supposed to be meeting a party arriving from Rio, but on the spur of the moment had decided to come along with us instead. He carried a clip-board with “Aldous Huxley” printed in capitals across the top sheet. He presented this and asked if Huxley would write a message on it — his impressions of Brasília, anything at all — for a collection of such messages from all visiting celebrities he was making, to be put in a future Brasília museum. Huxley took out his pen and set to work, and after tearing up two or three sheets of paper he produced a few phrases about the interesting experience of flying from the past (the colonial towns in Minas) to the future, the brand-new city of Brasília. Two days later this appeared in the Rio papers as a telegram Huxley had sent to President Kubitschek, giving a rather odd impression of the Huxley telegram style.

We were now flying more north than west and the scenery below had gradually changed. We flew over the River of the Dead, and then the River of the Souls. There were areas of what Callado called the “cauliflower forests.” From above, jungle trees do look like massed cauliflower, or even more, broccoli, although here not as thick nor as vivid a green as in the Amazon region. At last someone exclaimed “Look! An Indian village!” and sure enough, there in a clearing beside a muddy little river were five round roofs of palm thatch and two or three stick-like boats pulled up on the bank. Beyond them was an air-strip, an inch or two of faded red tape dropped into the jungle. It was the post of Xavantina, named for the Xavante Indians ( x is pronounced sh ), formerly fierce warriors, the Indians who are familiar from photographs posing on one leg, and wearing their hair in long bobs. However, we were going on farther, to the Uialapiti at Captain Vasconcelos Post, on a small tributary of the Xingu River.

Callado, who was responsible for this part of the Huxley tour, now began to have a slight attack of nerves. He began to tell us not to expect too much of the Indians we were about to see; after all, they are at a Post, they are a mixed lot, sometimes as many as five tribes will be visiting there together, and those who live there permanently are somewhat “uninteresting,” he put it, not like those who live completely isolated in their own villages. Some of them sometimes wear a shirt or a pair of trousers (but the only possible reason for wearing clothes that they can understand is that they keep off the mosquitoes), and one man had actually been taken on a trip to Rio, to see the Carnival.

At last another air strip appeared, and another clearing on another small river, this time with clear water and the thatched roofs were oval. We circled over buriti palms and one tall purple îpé in full flower, without a single leaf — one of the loveliest of Brasilian flowering trees. As we dropped down we could see Indians coming out of the houses and running along a rough road from the village to meet us, and when we stepped from the plane five or six men were already there and women with babies were bringing up the rear. They were very glad to see us, beaming with smiles, reaching eagerly for our hands, right or left, and squeezing them; two or three of the men said “Good-day, good-day” in Portuguese. More and more kept coming running, squeezing our hands or shaking them limply, smiling with delightfully open and cheerful expressions, showing square, widely spaced teeth.

The Uialapiti are short but well-built, the men almost plump, with smooth muscles, broad shoulders, and smooth broad chests. They are naked except for shell necklaces and strings of beads or shells around the hips; the women wear a symbolic cache sexe of palm leaf folded into a little rectangle about an inch and half long, secured by a fine string woven from the same palm. This almost invisible article of dress is important; sometimes they stop and turn their backs to adjust the string. Their hair is very thick and surprisingly fine and glossy; the women wear it long, with bangs; the men in inverted bowl haircuts. They have almost no hair on their bodies; the occasional hair is pulled out. Most of the men had locks of hair or the whole crown of the head smeared with a bright red, sticky paint they make from the urucum tree, the only dye, and color, they possess; some of them were powdered with it, ears, necks, or chests, hot red. Their skin is fine and soft, a deep dusky color. Some of the children, girls, had two parallel black lines drawn down the outside of their legs, and one young girl had a bright red forehead, suggestive of a bad headache. Both men and women carry the babies, and besides their own shell beads most of them wear strings of blue and white glass ones. A baby girl, about ten months old, looked fetching in nothing but six strands of big Woolworth pearls. They are sweet-smelling and clean (they go swimming several times a day) — excepting that the children had filthy, muddy faces. However, that didn’t stop the Air Force men from plucking the babies (including the pearl-clad one) from the parents’ arms and carrying them off. There was an agreeable Old-Home-Week atmosphere. Callado and the pilots knew most of the men; some of them spoke a little Portuguese, and a simple, repetitious conversation started that kept going without ceasing all during our visit. Huxley was introduced as a “great captain,” um grande capitão, and allowed himself to be admiringly handled.