Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  and I thought once of my wife,

  but I knew what I was doing.

  The riverman already practices as a pajé, a medicine man dispensing folk remedies to the sick, but he would like to be a truly great shaman, a sacaca. By the 1950s, as Elizabeth learned from Wagley’s book, no sacacas remained in villages along the Amazon. But elders recalled the famous mystics Joaquim Sacaca and Fortunato Pombo, whose supernatural powers enabled them to enter an enchanted kingdom beneath the river by means of “ports,” disappearing into a hollow tree trunk at the river’s edge or walking barefoot down a thorny log into the water. They returned hours later with fantastic tales of meetings with the river gods and underwater journeys along secret passageways to the mouth of the Amazon at Belém and back in the blink of an eye. “Why shouldn’t I be ambitious?” Elizabeth’s riverman asks.

  In Elizabeth’s poem, the riverman experiences such a journey, after being plied with cachaça, the strong Brazilian liquor distilled from sugarcane juice, and “green cheroots”—“my head couldn’t have been dizzier.” A “tall, beautiful serpent / in elegant white satin” appears, showering the riverman with compliments in an unfamiliar language that he must master as part of his training. This serpent is Luandinha, the most powerful of all, the goddess who bears him up and down the Amazon, “travelling fast as a wish.”

  The riverman will take more midnight journeys, whenever the dolphin calls, in search of knowledge, cures “for each of the diseases”: “it stands to reason / that everything we need / can be obtained from the river.” He resists his wife’s efforts to break the river gods’ spell, tossing out “behind her back” the “stinking teas” she brews for him when he returns in the morning, his skin yellow, his scalp muddy, his feet and hands cold. He will not give up his newfound secret freedom:

  You can peer down and down

  or dredge the river bottom

  but never, never catch me. . . .

  Elizabeth had not yet visited the world’s largest river when she wrote the poem, and she felt troubled that she had no firsthand experience of her subject. But Katharine White, filling in for Howard Moss on leave, loved “The Riverman,” considering it a “magical poem that casts a spell—one of your very best.” It had been three years since Elizabeth submitted a poem to the New Yorker, and “I can’t tell you how happy we are—all of us—to have it.” Elizabeth wrote back acknowledging the “long arid stretch” and promising “if not exactly an Amazon of verse, at least a small steady trickle.” Perhaps Katharine White’s compliments would work their own magic, as Luandinha’s had on the riverman. Elizabeth promised to dedicate the poem to her. And when, after reading “The Riverman” in the magazine, Cal called it “the best fairy story in verse I know,” Elizabeth was relieved. It was a “very powerful initiation poem,” he wrote again later of her “forsaken Merman.”

  Elizabeth never said why Lota disliked the poem. Could she have been troubled by Elizabeth’s identification with the riverman, who drank the intoxicating cachaça, tossed away his wife’s medicinal teas, and escaped at night to consort with a tall, shining goddess, turning his back on home? Was she envious of the door that “opened inward” for Elizabeth, her regular disappearances into an imaginative realm to pursue her ambitions, though Lota herself had constructed that portal, Elizabeth’s estudio? Or perhaps the answer was as simple as the one Lota gave each time she turned aside Elizabeth’s suggestions of travel to remote destinations in Brazil: she wasn’t interested. Any vacation that required slow boats or “roughing it” was out of the question for Lota, and she “refuses to have anything to do with anything Brazilian or ‘primitive,’” Elizabeth explained to Cal.

  Elizabeth pleaded now with May Swenson to fly to Brazil and make the journey down the Amazon she had been longing for since her arrival almost a decade before. But May already had plans to tour Italy and France with Pearl Schwartz on an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. Finally, in February 1960, two months before “The Riverman” appeared in print, but long after it had been set in type, Elizabeth boarded an Amazon River steamer with Lota’s friend Rosinha Leão, who’d promised the trip to her sixteen-year-old nephew. Still Lota refused to go along.

  They’d flown inland to Manaus, where the dark, lucent Rio Negro joined the turbid Amazon, its rushing waters “like weak café com leite.” Elizabeth telegraphed Lota news of her safe landing: “RIVER VERY BIG . . . MISS YOU VERY MUCH.” They would travel downstream—the current flowing faster than the boat, which hugged the shore—all the way to Belém, stopping at eighteen villages over five days to let on passengers bearing livestock to market: chickens, turkeys, alligators, and turtles, stowed in one of the ship’s two lifeboats filled with river water. The human population on board swelled from 250 to 700 passengers along the way. Most brought their own hammocks or slept on deck, while Elizabeth, Rosinha, and the teenage Manoel enjoyed relative comfort in cabins de luxo reserved for tourists at the bow.

  Yes, Elizabeth wrote to Cal afterward, there were dolphins in the Amazon, pods of them, gray ones and pink ones with gray spots. She’d brought along a beach ball and tossed it out to the dolphins—the females, larger than the males, could be readily identified—and watched them play. “Pink ones are lucky.” She’d gotten everything right in her poem.

  One evening at dusk near Santarém, at the halfway mark in their journey, where the Tapajós flowed into the Amazon and cows and zebus stared at the passing steamer from flat green meadows, Rosinha spotted an enormous dead tree with more than a hundred white herons roosting in its silver-gray limbs. The vision, “against a dark blue stormy sky,” was “unearthly”: “I have never seen a lovelier wild sight.”

  Landing at Gurupá on the Amazon, photograph by Elizabeth Bishop

  At home in her studio at Samambaia, Elizabeth would immediately start in on an “authentic, post-Amazon” poem. But more than that, she told Cal, “I want to go back to the Amazon. I dream dreams every night”—“I . . . am living to go back there again.”

  While on the river, Elizabeth had written letters to Lota on the typewriter she brought along for note taking, letters far longer than the journal entries she hoped to turn into a magazine article someday. She promised Lota she really would make money now. She missed Lota, wished she had come along. Elizabeth told her to go ahead and read “all” the mail that arrived while she was away. She worried about Lota’s driving, begged her to be careful. She hoped Lota would enjoy her “rest from me ”—the trip, with several plane rides and excursions in Manaus and Belém, kept Elizabeth away for nearly three weeks, their longest separation so far. Elizabeth’s traveling companion, Rosinha Leão, looked healthier than ever: “we think that the rough and rigorous life is what she’s needed all along.” Wouldn’t Lota like to accompany Elizabeth on a return trip, a twenty-five-day voyage up the Amazon from Manaus to Iquitos, over rapids and into Colombia and Ecuador, where the river narrows? Before boarding the steamer at Manaus, Elizabeth had examined the smaller ships that took the upriver route—“not too bad,” she reported—and she interviewed one of the captains. “We must go back”; it is “my dream.” She signed her letters “Love, love, love,” and “Love and devotion, Elizabeth.”

  She returned to Samambaia with a prized souvenir, one of the lollipop-shaped paddles she so admired, used by men and boys in the smallest boats on the river, the paddler perched in the bow, the stern “sticking up in the air—against all principles of aquadynamics” she’d learned as a teenager at sailing camp. This one was lacquered to a high sheen and painted with the Brazilian and American flags on either side. She’d bought it from a boatman who’d paddled close to the steamer, ferrying a wooden armchair he hoped to sell to one of the passengers. He’d been confused by Elizabeth’s bid for his paddle, but when she offered more than he’d expected for the chair, he handed it up to her, then shuttled back across the great river using his young son’s much smaller paddle. The brightly painted paddle found a place on the walls of Samambaia, along with the Kurt Schwitters
collage Elizabeth had given to Lota seven years before on her birthday in 1953, the second they’d celebrated together.

  “On the Amazon” was the authentic poem Elizabeth worked on after her return, but this one would join her ode to Sammy among the unfinished. Instead, in her new mood of elation, when “everything seems nearer the surface, or the possible, than usual,” as she wrote to Cal, Elizabeth pulled out some older drafts—“cleaning up the attic,” she called it. By June 1960 she was able to send Katharine White “Song for the Rainy Season,” a poem Elizabeth had begun six years earlier, she told May, not long after she’d given Lota the Schwitters. It was a love poem in syncopated “rumba rhythm,” put aside as “The Shampoo” shuttled from one editor to another, enduring repeated rejection.

  The finished version was even more oblique than “The Shampoo,” but brimming unmistakably with Elizabeth’s passion for her new life with Lota in Brazil:

  Hidden, oh hidden

  in the high fog

  the house we live in,

  beneath the magnetic rock,

  rain-, rainbow-ridden,

  where blood-black

  bromelias, lichens,

  owls, and the lint

  of the waterfalls cling,

  familiar, unbidden.

  Five more ten-line stanzas follow, rhyming easily, irregularly, celebrating the giant fern; the singing brook; the owl that lands on the roof each night and stamps five times, proving “he can count”; the “fat frogs that, / shrilling for love, / clamber and mount.” At Samambaia with Lota she had rediscovered the pleasures of early-morning lovemaking in the tropics, first experienced at Key West: “House, open house / to the white dew / and the milk-white sunrise. . . .”

  Did Elizabeth resurrect and complete the poem now to show Lota her commitment to their life together, a necessarily hidden yet deliciously shared life? She would not leave their home behind like laundry drying on a riverbank. Yet was it possible to make such a promise—for Elizabeth, who had once recorded in her travel journal her belief that “love will unexpectedly appear over and over again”? For Lota, who had written in the shared letter to Gold and Fizdale, responding to news of a couple’s breakup after nine years, “I always thought a strange trait in the human nature—the desire for the permanent, when in realité we are always changing.”

  At its conclusion the poem allows for the possibility of such change, conveyed not in personal terms, but in meteorological ones, as in the final lines of the more explicit love poem she had once written to Marjorie Stevens, “It is marvellous to wake up together,” a draft of which Elizabeth had brought with her to Brazil:

  The world might change to something quite different,

  As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,

  Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

  Marjorie Stevens had died several months before Elizabeth’s Amazon trip, weakened by the tuberculosis that brought her to Key West. In “Song for a Rainy Season,” in stanzas added to finish the poem, Elizabeth imagines climatic catastrophe, a time “without water” in a “later era” when:

  the great rock will stare

  unmagnetized, bare,

  no longer wearing

  rainbows or rain,

  the forgiving air

  and the high fog gone;

  the owls will move on

  and the several

  waterfalls shrivel

  in the steady sun.

  Katharine White, still covering for Howard Moss, wrote within a month from Maine to say “we are delightedly buying ‘Song for a Rainy Season’. . . It is perfection, really.” She asked only that Elizabeth alter the title, or add a subtitle to convey the poem’s setting in Brazil. At this, Elizabeth balked. She’d already confided in Cal her concern—“one of my greatest worries”—that she might be pegged as a poet “who can only write about South America.” She answered Katharine White: “I don’t want to become a local color poet any more than I can help.” The poem, Elizabeth argued, wasn’t “specific”; it could refer to “any rainy season, any place that there was a big rock and a brook and a waterfall or two.” Mrs. White conceded the point.

  But Lota knew which house Elizabeth had in mind; she complained that the poem made Samambaia seem “too damp.” Lota had not agreed to Elizabeth’s proposed trip up the Amazon from Manaus, but she’d taken time off from real estate negotiations in late May 1960 for a brief vacation with Elizabeth in Ouro Prêto, the mountain town three hundred miles north of Rio to which Lota had bravely driven Elizabeth in 1953, changing a flat tire while passing drivers gawked. Now there was a direct highway, and inland travel was easier.

  Although Ouro Prêto boasted a Grande Hotel designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the couple stayed near the main square at a small inn, the Pouso do Chico Rey, owned and managed by Lota’s friend Lilli Correia de Araújo, the Danish widow of a prominent Brazilian artist, Pedro Correia de Araújo, who’d died in 1955. Elizabeth described Lilli to May Swenson as “twice as tall” and “even blonder” than May, who came from a family of blond, blue-eyed Swedes. The “Danish Viking” wore her hair like May’s too, in a blunt bowl cut. Children sometimes asked, “Is she a blonde Indian?”

  Lilli Correia de Araújo

  On departure, Elizabeth signed the hotel register with a rhyming quatrain, her first gift to Lilli:

  Let Shakespeare & Milton

  Stay at a Hilton—I shall stay

  At Chico Rei—

  The thermometer stood at 100 degrees in Rio. There was no water for its two million residents, and still Elizabeth and Lota remained in the city in March 1961, relying on four quarts of spring water they’d brought from Samambaia to brush their teeth, and sea water, carried up from the beach by the apartment building’s janitor, to flush the toilet. For dinner and baths they would visit a friend with a well. “It rains and rains,” Elizabeth wrote to May Swenson; there was no water shortage. But Rio’s public utilities were in a shambles. There had been blackouts, stalling apartment elevators all over the city in the evenings—you could hear the angry howls. And now no running water. A state of emergency was declared, but “what good does that do?” Elizabeth wondered.

  When the two women had met again in Brazil in the early 1950s—Lota astonished to find that Elizabeth’s hair had gone gray since they’d last seen each other four years earlier in New York, Elizabeth dazzled by the twin streaks of silver in Lota’s dark mane—Lota announced that she had “retired” from “society” and had no interest in Rio. In the intervening years, Elizabeth and Lota visited the city only at Carnival time or for dress fittings and dentist appointments; nearing fifty, both women had recurrent need for extractions and fillings, between which their dentists (they preferred different ones) plied them with sweet cafezinhos. Lota used her Rio apartment so rarely that she rented it out to boost her income.

  But even as the city’s aging infrastructure was taxed to the breaking point, a building boom was on. Elizabeth would soon be disturbed by the sounds of a demolition crew tearing down a rare colonial-era villa at the end of her street to make way for more high-rise apartments. Lota had been called to Rio to spearhead the most ambitious project of all, a new city park on several miles of waterfront landfill, vacant now except for Affonso Reidy’s angular concrete-and-glass Museum of Modern Art anchoring the northernmost edge of the fill. Lota’s friend Carlos Lacerda, the newly elected governor of the state of Guanabara, which included Rio, had been watching Lota closely on his weekends in Petrópolis, where he’d built a summer home on land purchased from her, and marveling, along with Elizabeth, at Lota’s gift for design and skill at managing her crew of “mens.” Nothing fazed Lota, and he could count on her loyalty. Lota had been the one to counsel him on the ways in which the massive public works initiative could revitalize the city after the federal government’s move inland from Rio to Brasília, and ensure Lacerda’s legacy as governor—perhaps even propel him to the presidency. Improbable as it seemed, the job was hers.


  As Elizabeth wrote in separate letters to Cal, May, and Marianne Moore, the year had begun with two transforming events. First was the arrival of Mary Morse’s three-month-old “darling baby,” Monica, by means of an off-the-books adoption several years in the planning; mother and daughter took up residence at Samambaia until Mary’s house down the road could be completed. Imagine “three old maids, hovering over this new infant,” Elizabeth wrote to May, admitting her preference for newborns and children under age three. The little girl was “cunning,” easy to soothe, and best of all, she “wakes up laughing.” Lota and Elizabeth had gone to examine the baby first, knowing Mary would fall in love instantly with any child, and agreed with the doctor’s report: Monica was “healthy as a young horse.”

  But soon Elizabeth and Lota were traveling to Rio each week so that Lota could spend the “useful days,” as Brazilians termed Monday through Friday, supervising development of the aterro, the landfill. The second of the year’s “big excitements” was Lota’s appointment as “Chief Coordinatress,” and it was “just the kind of job I’ve always dreamed of for her,” Elizabeth wrote to May, work such as she might have done years ago in another, less “macho” or “backyards” country, as Lota said in her endearingly scrambled English. As always for Elizabeth, Lota—whether changing a tire on the roadside, firing her .22 to kill a snake, or dancing a samba—was “wonderful in action.” In April 1961, Elizabeth had watched Lota keep a roomful of engineers, all men, laughing while winning them over to her plans for public beaches, playgrounds, cafés, dance floors, and a two-lane road set back from the shore instead of a four-lane whizway at the water’s edge. To have Lota “doing something at last, using her brains and helping poor dirty dying Rio at the same time,” was more wonderful still.