Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  Years later, I will not be surprised when a professor of East Asian studies at NYU where Barbara is a professor will say of her, “She’s very exotic, isn’t she?” I’ll wonder if what seems exotic to this professor, who hails from Delhi, is Barbara’s extreme beauty.

  That day Barbara greeted me warmly, as if we were old friends. She placed her hand on my shoulder, standing on tiptoe, and kissed me on one cheek, then the other, then again: one, two, three times. When she smiled, her lips seemed to stretch all the way across her face.

  —Tudo bem? she asked. Her pronunciation was flawless.

  —Two-do-bone, I said.

  I flinched to hear myself. The words did not drift like smoke from my nose, as they were meant to, but fell off my tongue, heavy as marbles, Americanized.

  Barbara appeared not to notice, which struck me even then as a sort of regal discretion. As far back as high school, my friends and I had taken note of one another’s failings, measuring ourselves anxiously against those we knew and loved. Barbara seemed to prefer to imagine that I was as graceful as she.

  —Are you ready to go? she asked, as if I might have other plans, a busy social schedule.

  —Delighted to, I said, and I was.

  Barbara was what I had expected people at Yale would be like before I got there. I had expected the remarkable, the uncommon. I’d found something altogether else: a mix of the exuberantly ambitious, the high-IQ-endowed, heirs to food fortunes, grandchildren of presidents, celebrities’ progeny, movie stars, the wealthy and neurotic, the hard working and the merely very bright.

  I had expected more, though I couldn’t have said precisely what it was I’d hoped for or why I felt disappointed as I often did when I met people from Harvard or Princeton or Yale. As a child growing up in Minnesota in the 1970s, I had sometimes heard people on TV introduced as having received a degree from Oxford or Cambridge or the Ivy League, and I’d imagined that they were a different breed than we: smarter, better, the American elect. In the Midwest, where I grew up, these colleges did not have the same social import as in the East: they did not connote blue blood and great wealth or hint at an American aristocracy, but still we were impressed. I was. And more than impressed, I was hopeful that somewhere out there people were living up to my best expectations, even if in my clan we were not. I wanted them to be better; I needed them to be.

  Barbara and I walked up the street toward Barra, away from the city center, to a restaurant she liked, a place next door to the convent school I had passed the previous day. The sun was high and the sky white overhead and though we walked in the heat it did not seem oppressive now that I was in Barbara’s company. People watched Barbara as we passed and I felt, as I often would in the coming months whenever we were together, proud and contented, as if, for a moment, I was a part of her more beautiful world.

  As we walked, I asked Barbara, by way of making conversation, what college she was in at Yale, and learned that she had graduated the previous spring but would be returning to New Haven in the fall to enter the PhD program in comparative literature. She had been an English major as an undergrad, specializing in comp lit.

  At that time Yale was what some called “the Ellis Island of deconstruction” —the place where Continental scholars came to be deloused, or rather to be stripped of their politics, before their ideas entered the rest of the country. De Man was there, and Derrida, Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller, along with Geoffrey Hartman. I knew nothing about it, except the names, which, like Gauloises, signified cool.

  Barbara said she’d been in Salvador since September and would leave in June. I was relieved that she would be around for a while, and I relaxed a little knowing this. I asked her what she was studying here and she told me that she was writing about literatura de cordel, literally, line literature, little pamphlets of poetry hung out on cords in the street and sold for a penny. She was looking at the ways these lay poets translated history and protest into poetry, the way pop culture and political critique met in their work.

  I had taken only one college English course—a freshman seminar on Shakespeare that examined the major tragedies through a lens inflected by Jungian psychology and the professor’s own libidinous exigencies—and I had not thought that politics and art could meet in so colloquial a fashion.

  Art, like Culture, was forever capitalized in my mind in those days and always qualified by the adjective High. I believed that artists were a different breed of being and that people like me had politics because we could not aspire to create. Barbara’s project suggested another possibility.

  I told her that her project sounded marvelous, and I meant it.

  She seemed pleased, and then she said, I’m glad you’re here.

  I was flattered and for a moment tongue-tied.

  —I’m glad you called, I said.

  Barbara watched the street ahead of us, and began to speak confidingly, as if she were speaking to someone she knew well, or as if she were talking to herself.

  She said she had been lonely in Bahia these last six months. It had been hard to make friends among Bahians. The women saw her as competition, and the men only wanted to have affairs. Even the woman at the embassy did not seem to like her; she was surprised when the woman called to tell her I was here. She was glad she had.

  I was flattered that she told me this, admitted to loneliness, and I felt I should confide in her too. It seemed to me then that confession was often the bond between young women, as competition typically was between young men.

  So I told her how unprepared I found myself, despite my prior study of the language, and I recounted my current dilemma: how the Foundation had sent me to the wrong part of the country, how Pinheiro had withheld my funds, how I needed to secure lodgings here before I could get my money and go north to the Amazon, how I had been robbed and gotten sick. I tried to sound game, unafraid as she seemed.

  —That’s terrible, Barbara said, with genuine sympathy, and it occurred to me, for the first time, that it was.

  —I guess so, I said.

  We stepped through the white-enameled ironwork gate that separated the restaurant from the sidewalk and took a seat at a round, white-enameled table, beneath a green-and-white-striped umbrella at the edge of the patio that served as the restaurant’s dining room. Sounds of traffic reached us from the street a few yards away as did the shouts of girls playing in the schoolyard next door. Barbara was a glamorous companion; with her, even simple things seemed uncommonly vivid, bright even now in memory. Barbara sat in the sun; I sat in the shade. She tipped her face toward the sunlight; after a moment, she turned to me and smiled, evidently pleased with everything.

  I was pleased too and I was feeling almost brave with Barbara there until a waiter came and gave us menus and I realized that I did not understand the words and felt again the slight panic that accompanied me everywhere like a stray dog. I scanned the prices, nervous about what I could afford. I had not brought much money, both to economize and to insure that I stuck to my perpetual diet.

  I scanned the words, looking for familiar elements: pão (bread), suco (juice), limonada (lemonade), queijo (cheese), café. I made up my mind to order a basket of bread and coffee, a pathetic idea of a meal but one I could both afford and pronounce.

  But when the waiter returned, Barbara graciously ordered for us both. (Do you mind? she asked, eyebrows raised, smiling, as if I were doing her the favor. Delighted, I said.) She ordered foods she thought I should try: aipim, fried yams, some sort of sausage, sucos.

  The food was wonderful—sweet yam strips cut thick and deep fried then sprinkled with salt, the yeasty tuber of aipim, slathered with butter, spicy sausage bursting from its skin—but I ate shyly, afraid of getting fat.

  Barbara, who was slender, delighted in each bite. Her lips were buttery and glistened in the sunlight. I knew very few women who ate like that then, with pleasure, and I admired her unembarrassed appetite. Most of the women I knew at school lived on cottage cheese and egg whites, miserable a
s martyrs, penitential, swallowing guilt with each bite. As if hunger were humiliating.

  As we ate, I asked Barbara about her apartment, where she lived, how she found her place, whether she could recommend neighborhoods. I was afraid our conversation might lag and relied on the bond of advice to carry us.

  She said she was living in Barra, on Avenida President Kennedy.

  I was relieved to know the name, the street, to be able to say that I had been by there (I didn’t mention that Barra was where I was robbed).

  I said I might try to find a place there as well, but she warned me against it.

  —Don’t, she said. Don’t live in Barra. It’s full of tourists. Only Americans and Europeans live there. If I had it to do again, she said, I’d live in a more interesting neighborhood. She mentioned Amaralina, Rio Vermelho—poorer, tougher, local neighborhoods—not, as Barra was, a colony of exiles.

  Looking back now, it seems curious that of all the things Barbara might’ve warned me against, of all that would befall us in the year to come, that she should have warned me against comfort, bland, desacrilized comfort. But it occurs to me now that perhaps that was the only thing we had to fear—comfort and all we’d do for it, sacrifice, risk, in its pursuit.

  It was somewhere in this conversation about the various neighborhoods of Salvador that Barbara mentioned again the difficulty she had had making friends among Brazilians and how Bahian women mistook her for a threat and I said, what perhaps she had heard all too often, that she was beautiful. Or rather, I said that I could see why women might be threatened by her, and she looked offended and in order to clarify I blurted out that she was uncommonly beautiful after all, she must know that.

  She did not look pleased so much as interested in this assessment, as if she had not considered before that she was beautiful though surely she must have known it.

  Thinking the point of interest to her, I continued.

  —Have you ever thought of modeling? I asked.

  Barbara’s face went blank. She looked as if I’d suggested she turn tricks.

  —No, she placed the word on the table between us like a stone.

  —I mean, I said, thinking to clarify my point, would you consider it? You could certainly do it. You could make a lot of money, I imagine.

  —No.

  She seemed deeply offended by the idea, by the mere suggestion, and I wondered at the time if she misunderstood me, if she thought I was proposing that she pose nude. But hers was not that kind of beauty. She was not voluptuous, not the sort of woman you’d imagine naked on a bed—plush rump and full thighs, sloping belly and round breasts exposed. She was in possession of none of these. Her body was childlike, like that of a girl of twelve, almost breastless. Flexible, slender limbed, hers was an esthetically—not an erotically—compelling figure.

  Besides her arresting face, it was her legs that distinguished her, her uncommonly long legs. They gave her that slight imperfection that makes for real beauty, the peculiarity that in models makes us stare at photographs but which later confuses us on the street when we see them in person and think, He or she is prettier in pictures than in life. The imperfection, the flaw, is what distinguishes the truly beautiful; it, ironically, is what confers beauty on a being or thing.

  I did not understand how I had insulted her, I understood only that I had managed in the course of lunch to offend into monosyllables the only person I wanted to call my friend here, the first person I had met in years whom I liked.

  I pondered my mistake all the way back to my hotel. I pondered it as I walked Barbara to the bus stop, where she caught a bus downtown to buy line poetry. I pondered it as I walked home alone. But try as I might, I could not understand her outrage.

  It did not occur to me that Barbara was refusing to traffic in beauty, to commodify it, to sell out or name a price. I was studying economics and did not realize yet that one could do that, hold things above price, refuse to name or have one.

  The Exile

  When I got back to the gloom of my hotel room after our lunch in the sun, I pulled the scrap of paper from the pocket of my shorts and phoned the tutor recommended by the woman at the USIA.

  A woman answered with the customary Brazilian salutation, Pronto. I introduced myself or tried to in careful Portuguese but I was cut off by a flurry of British-accented English. Yes, she said, quite right to have recommended her, she’d be delighted to conduct tutorials but she didn’t come cheap. I should know that.

  She said that she’d charge me $20 an hour. I had never heard of anyone charging $20 an hour for anything legal, and I told her frankly that I didn’t have much cash, that after paying my hotel bill, which was mounting fast, I would have about $100, which I would need for food, for transport, for emergencies until the Rotarians saw fit to bestow on me my fellowship funds.

  I told her that receipt of my fellowship was contingent on my getting an apartment.

  She said that she could help me get one. She suggested that we meet at her apartment that afternoon and asked me if I had a car.

  I told her I didn’t, but that I could take a cab.

  —Don’t take a cab, she said. She had errands in town anyway; she could meet me in the lobby of the language school near my hotel. It was 2 o’clock. She could meet me at 4. For an hour. For twenty bucks.

  When I walked into the language school, she was waiting in one of the lobby chairs, flipping through a magazine. She did not stand when she saw me. We exchanged greetings and I sat down.

  The Englishwoman was one of those people who seem to get stranded in a place—never making a home in their adopted land, never returning to the place from whence they came, neither adapting nor withdrawing, stranded between homelands, as if survivors of some cultural shipwreck. I was never entirely clear about how she landed here in Salvador though it seemed to have to do with a love affair gone awry, perhaps a husband who was no longer around. It was ludicrous to choose an Englishwoman to teach me Portuguese in Brazil, but I was comforted to have a native English speaker, someone who seemed as awkward and in exile as I.

  Her British accent was strong, her criticisms numerous. The Brazilians, she said, Bahians in particular, were late, unreliable, will rob you blind. Robar, she said. That’s a word you need to know. It means to rob. Never, she cautioned, take a taxi alone. You never know what they’ll do. She told me about a girl who had been killed some months before: a tourist who’d caught a cab and was found raped and dead on a remote beach north of town days later. They do not respect their women as the English do, she said. She was like something out of a book, it seemed to me then, though I was not a big reader and knew that characters in books did not charge you $20 an hour. And there she was in front of me, for $20 an hour.

  She spoke airily of how long she’d been here, mentioned ten years or a dozen; it didn’t seem a fresh wound whatever it was that had brought her to Salvador. She had the weary undone aspect I’d come to think of as vaguely fortyish, a certain helter-skelter cast that seemed to me to overtake women in their forties, a collapsed quality, as if they were giving in to some force within or without that they no longer had the energy to resist. She was buxom, very pale, with wispy blond hair. Like everyone here, she was short. I towered over her, huge and unnatural.

  At our first session, she translated want ads from A Tarde and equipped me with the proper questions to ask landlords, phrases that like a parrot I repeated, honking through my nose in an effort to emulate the nasal sing-song of the Bahian.

  Back at the hotel that night, I phoned several places—two boarding houses and several landlords—and arranged appointments for the next day and the one following. Then I lay back on my bed and wondered how I would get through the time that stretched ahead of me and how I would ever get to the Amazon, to the place I believed I belonged.

  O Interior

  I had been in Brazil for a week by the time I visited the boarding house in Barra, and by then I was desperate to find a place. My cash was running low, but I could no
t call Pinheiro to obtain my fellowship until I had a permanent address. I went looking for a home that sunny Monday; I found Nelci and Isa instead.

  The day before, I had toured several apartments with the Englishwoman, but I found none satisfactory. Following Barbara’s advice, I’d sought out places in interesting neighborhoods—Ribeira, Rio Vermelho. In Pelourinho, the baroque cobblestone heart of the old city, I’d answered an ad for a boarding house where rent was cheap and the location interesting, but when I’d arrived to tour the place, I discovered it was straight out of Dickens. A gaunt young woman led me down a grim and narrow corridor, past cracked door after wooden door. The warren of tiny rooms was dimly lit by bare jaundiced bulbs; the whole joint resembled a brothel more than a residence for young women, as I’d been led to believe on the phone. Probably, given the neighborhood, it was.

  By the time I got to Barra that morning, I was desperate to avoid another day skimming want ads, desperate to avoid seeing places I’d rather not ever have seen.

  West of the old city, Barra—in those days—was a fashionable, faintly seedy, beachside neighborhood. Favored by foreigners, it was home to all manner of flâneur—the rich, the poor, the would-be-artist, the tourist. It had a pretty mosaic promenade and wide boulevards that led away from the beach into hills. Its streets were lined by tall apartment houses, bright as salt licks, with ironwork gates enclosing private gardens.

  It was early Monday morning when I stepped off the bus in Barra. The sky was the thin blue of early summer, hard and bright as blown glass. I was nervous that morning, as tourists will be. I made my way away from the beach and into the green hills that ringed the bay, following the broad treelined Avenida Isabella.

  I passed two banks in the space of a block, each with a large chrome nameplate bolted to a marble facade. Flamboyant trees dotted the sidewalk, and as I walked I passed through the shadows they cast. Their branches brushed my cheeks. Their red flowers hung like streamers, seedpods dangling like razor strops.