by Ellen Levy
Senhor Pinheiro helped me open an account and countersigned my lease. Then I took a cab back to my hotel and paid my tab, and by week’s end I’d moved in.
In the weeks that followed, I often ran into Nelci and Isa in the street on my way to and from the beach or bus stops or shops. The threads of our lives seemed meant to tangle then and these chance encounters delighted me.
Isa would greet me with extravagant affection, briskly kissing me on both cheeks, singing my name as if it were a favorite melody, languorously, slightly mockingly. There was an unmistakable mix of admiration and contempt in her voice, as she transformed my name into her language—Elena. The emphasis always on the surprising second syllable, eh-lane-uh. With a smile that lingered like bright light.
I seemed slow and heavy by comparison, as I had that first day when I’d watched Isa dress in her brilliant plumage, and undress, trying on and discarding a series of wild blouses in chartreuse, neon orange, denim miniskirts, wide belts of lavender and black. Outrageous and improbable combinations, a postmodern Carmen Miranda mocking the tropical tropes she employed. Dressing herself as if she were some wild blossom, a bloom of the flamboyant trees in the Rua João Pondé, or some brightly colored bird.
* * *
1. In fact, the name’s mistaken—I realized twenty years later, when I returned to Bahia and that hotel, that the name, so vivid in my memory, was wrong (the hotel’s name is actually Bahia do Sol—Bay of the Sun). But since this is memoir, not documentary, it seems truer to record memory’s mistakes.
PART II
SALVADOR
Amazon Snapshot #4
Long before I saw the rain forest, its mist-draped banks, its canopy-like green clouds; long before I knew its distinctive scent—a smoky mix of tea and loam, mulch and bog and blossoms; before I stepped from a low dugout canoe onto its soft bank and felt the earth give beneath my feet like a body; before I ever saw an enormous, iridescent, blue Morpho butterfly glide by like a mobile jewel (broad as my open hand) over tea-brown water or woke to the eerie, haunting cries of red howler monkeys, their roars like a fierce wind raging down a canyon then dying back (or like powerful gusts over the American prairie as they must have sounded to my maternal grandmother when she homesteaded on the Dakota plains a century ago); long, long before I walked beneath the rain forest canopy dense with bromeliads, vines, strangling fig, kapok, mahogany, hundreds of varieties of trees, birds, insects and saw the luminous white bark of the manguba, its fruit raised above the river like red paper lanterns; long, long before I saw any of this, I loved the forest. I was moved by its measurement—the descriptions of its vastness and its peril.
Making a Life
Those first few weeks in Salvador, while I waited to go to the Amazon, I made a life for myself. I made plans with a lowercase p. But I always thought of myself as on my way elsewhere, destined for bigger things: the Amazon.
Waiting was nothing new for me. As a child, I’d often felt that I was in the wings preparing to make my entrance, that my real life was yet to begin. I remember vividly the horror I felt one afternoon in fourth grade as I stood in line with the other children in a hallway of my elementary school, waiting to be let out for recess. There in the waxed linoleum-tiled hallway, the light of midday distorted through the warped surface of the block glass wall that formed the hallway’s only window, I stood with the other kids—who like me were buckled into rain slickers of thick shiny plastic in red and yellow, our galoshes huge on our little feet—and thought with lucid horror, “I am a fully adult consciousness trapped in a tiny body.” I waited to grow into what I knew I already was but could not as yet be.
Like lonely kids everywhere, I felt growing up that I was destined for some remarkable end, future greatness compensation for a present lack. I felt I was meant for something important, though I didn’t know what that might be. At twenty-one, I thought at last I knew.
The Cabby
At Barbara’s suggestion I had bought furniture at a secondhand shop a few blocks away and had it delivered to me, so I had a mattress to sleep on, a guardaropa (an armoire), a small coffee table, and an end table (an oddity given that there was no couch for it to sit at the end of). In those days it didn’t occur to me to buy or build bookshelves. The few books I had I kept with my jewelry on a shelf of the armoire.
Why I thought to forgo a dining table and chairs of any kind is harder to explain. I suppose I thought it vaguely Japanese to seat my guests on a mattress on the floor, a Zen minimalism that was gaining currency in America in the 1980s (like Hellenized Rome, we absorbed postwar what we had conquered). More likely I simply thought comfort not worth spending money on. I wanted a life of the mind; the body could make do with less: what did I need with a kitchen table, a couch, a lamp, or chairs?
By the end of that first day, however, it became clear to me that in order to eat I’d have to buy a fridge, a stove, and the tiny tank of gas called a bujão. The British tutor—whom I continued to pay for advice, though it had long ago become apparent that she could not teach me Portuguese (she was neither a native speaker nor a skilled teacher, and I was a lousy student)—recommended that I go to the hypermercado, a massive grocery and home furnishings store in an outlying neighborhood, to buy a fridge and stove. The bujão I could have delivered by the gas company, whose name she gave me.
The tutor had already warned me against taking cabs. But given the distance and the number of bus transfers involved and that it would be broad daylight, it seemed—we both agreed—safe enough.
The trip from Barra to the hypermercado was a long one and the cabby’s silence as we drove seemed ominous, so I chatted, practicing my Portuguese. I was trying to be engaging, trying to ward off harm in the only way that I knew then—by being pleasing, a nice girl with my mother’s good Midwestern manners. (I’d have fared better had I relied on the bracing and abrasive honesty of my father’s New York clan.) I asked if he was from here. If he’d driven a cab for long. I admired Salvador’s beauty then we lapsed into another awkward silence while the meter ticked and I worried whether I’d have enough to pay the fare.
His was not an intimate cab as cabs sometimes will be: there were no saints medals, no ribbons from the Igreja do Bonfim, no photos of family or a girlfriend or pets, no plastic flowers, no dice.
There was only the Playboy bunny emblem—a white rabbit head in a bowtie, against a black background—hanging from the rearview mirror. Thinking perhaps to show I was not intimidated by such sexist paraphernalia, thinking perhaps to make conversation to keep the ride friendly and therefore safe, or perhaps simply not thinking at all, I leaned forward and admired the bunny ears.
I said they were nice or great or something equally insincere. For the first time the cabby took an interest in my comments. He volunteered that he lived not far from here, naming a beachside area on the outskirts of the city of which I’d heard nice things and said so. He said we could go by there, if I wanted to see it, it was on the way, and I understood (or misunderstood) that he needed to pick something up at home, so when he asked if I wanted to stop by his place on our way to the hypermercado, I said Fine, thinking how strange it was that Barbara had complained of having a hard time meeting Bahians. They seemed to me a very friendly bunch.
About ten minutes later the cabby turned onto a gravel drive that led into an open garage, above which a small, wooden bungalow stood. Boxy and new, it seemed to be on stilts, rising over the garage as if for protection against a rising tide.
To the right and left of us was sand, and in the distance the edge of blue water. There were only a few other structures around, a few isolated houses like this one, and the gravel drive and the asphalt we’d turned off. I waited in the backseat for the cabby to run in and retrieve whatever we’d come for.
He turned around, leaning his arm on the seat between us. Do you want to come in? he asked.
I was, in fact, curious to know how people lived here, so I said, Sure, but just for a minute.
I had, afte
r all, errands to run.
At the front of the garage, by the grill of the car, was a door, which the cabby opened to allow me to pass through. Inside, a steep set of carpeted stairs led up to an apartment above. I mounted the stairs through the narrow hallway—uneasy but not wanting to be, not wanting to imagine myself vulnerable, as if by ignoring danger, I might not be in any.
In front of a second door at the top, I stopped. The cabby squeezed past me and opened this door, and I walked casually past him and into a dimly lit room, which contained, like my own apartment, only one significant piece of furniture: other than the rust-colored shag carpet on the floor, the curtains drawn against the midday sun, the only bit of furnishing evident or memorable lay to my right—an enormous bed, above which, glued to the ceiling, were dozens of one-foot-square, mirrored tiles.
Behind me, the cabby closed the door. I could hear him cross the carpet toward me. I braced as if before a blow and said, You have the wrong idea. I said this firmly but casually, as if I weren’t afraid, merely annoyed, the way I’d heard my mother speak to telemarketers who called during dinner: polite but dismissive.
The cabby did not say a thing.
It occurred to me that the door he had just closed behind us might well be locked, and that, even if that door did open, the one below might not. I might run down those stairs I’d just come up and find myself trapped at the bottom of a stairwell. Locked in.
It occurred to me that if I went for the sliding glass doors in front of me and ran out onto the little veranda I’d seen from below, I’d have to jump from twenty feet in the air onto hard sand, gravel, concrete.
It occurred to me that the laconic cabbie might get mean, might get violent, might be armed or nuts.
It occurred to me that no one knew where I was, not even me.
So I spoke dismissively, authoritative intonation my only hope, trying to talk my way out of this mess I had talked my way into.
—Não quero fazer isto, viu? I said. I don’t want to do this. Quero ir. I want to go.I moved toward the door, as I spoke, moving slowly, casually. But when I passed the cabbie, my skin ached with the knowledge that he could, at any moment, stop me. I reached the door, grasped the knob; it turned in my hand. I opened it.
—I want to go, I said again, sensing that he was not following. He stood by the curtains looking out into the heat of the day.
—Tudo bem, he said, without looking at me. Fine. He didn’t seem particularly disappointed.
The cabby charged me for the detour to his house and I paid it, thinking I’d shown him by giving him a smaller-than-usual tip. The stove I bought at the hypermercado was bright red, like a child’s fire engine, small and square, like a toy a kid would buy to play with, if a kid were playing with fire.
Avenida John F. Kennedy
Not long after I moved into my apartment, Barbara invited me to lunch at hers. (Evidently the offense I’d imagined I’d given hadn’t offended her, or perhaps she was as lonely as I.) It was hard not to notice the difference between our two places. Though they were just a few blocks apart, Barbara’s had character and charm; her apartment was in an older building on Avenida President Kennedy.
The apartment was pale blue, with parquet floors and a set of multipaned windows looking out onto tree tops. It was soothing to enter, cool after the walk through the hot, bright streets. On entering her apartment, you passed through a short hall that led to a square living room, separated from the kitchen by a counter; from the living room, a door opened onto the bedroom and from there another led to the bath. There was a blue enameled table at the far end of the living room beneath a window, and two poems she’d written taped to the windowpanes. There was a hammock, a bookshelf, and several carved figures; a woodcut and a mandolin hung on the walls. Wonderful books: Levi-Strauss’ Tristes tropiques, poetry by Fernando Pessoa, Elizabeth Bishop. It gave the impression of casual harmony. I’d never known a poet before and I came to think of this intentionality as a poet’s—her belongings arranged as carefully as words on a page.
She noticed me admiring the mandolin and told me that she’d bought it that morning at a praça in the center of town. I held my hands behind my back, admiring the delicate inlay of its surface while Barbara went to fry aipim and sausages for our lunch. When I went to use the toilet, I saw a delicate macramé bikini hung up to dry on the shower curtain rod.
Her apartment was splendid. Everything about it was. The full-sized bed. The pale blue light. The poems on the window panes. The sausage, the buttery aipim. Her books. Everything about her fascinated me. Like a dress pattern I wanted to copy, I studied her to know how I too might live a more beautiful, vivid life.
• • •
By contrast, the architect of the building I lived in aimed for and achieved the bland and sanitized neutrality of a shopping mall; the place had all the charm of a mid-level hotel chain. At the time, I found its lack of particularity comforting. I mistook the generic then, thought bland sameness a kind of common ground.
The building was of poured concrete, with four apartments on each of its five floors. Its ground floor was taken up with a glass-enclosed lobby, where the doorman sat, and a parking garage; an elevator and cement stairwell led up to each floor.
I lived on an upper floor. Down the hall from me lived Luisa; across the hall was Zé; next door were two, young, beefy guys, affluent drunks whose names I never knew, though one of them would come to my door late one night, waking me out of sleep with his insistent knocking, blind drunk and amorous, swearing that he loved me, begging me to let him in. We didn’t exchange more than half a dozen words that year, save for that single declaration of love.
Nelci
My first weeks in Bahia, Nel and Isa made a habit of coming by in the afternoons to gossip and chat. They’d sit on the mattress that served as a couch and I’d brew us coffee or make them sucos by cutting open the hard purple husks of maracujá—passion fruit—and straining the juice and pulp through a sieve into a glass over ice, a glass I’d later fill with water and sugar to make the tart floral drink, a cross between pineapple juice and lemonade.
I suspected that Isa did not approve of my apartment, though she never said this directly. I suspected, after their first visit, that she mocked my lack of furnishings, the odd collection of mismatched things—a mattress, a coffee table, a guardaropa, no chairs.
So I was relieved when Nel came alone one day.
She arrived with a magazine tucked beneath her arm, Veja, Brazil’s equivalent of Newsweek. She sat on the mattress, and I sat across from her on the floor, cross-legged, and listened to her talk about politics, about her hopes for her future. I was flattered that she wanted to talk to me, flattered to be someone’s confidant. She was studying economics and hoped to be a professor, maybe enter politics someday.
She talked about the books she was reading and about the exams she was taking—to be a bank clerk, an office worker. She was tremendously bright, a voracious reader (she was always carrying a book or magazine), and proud of her intelligence. She scored impressively high on these exams, but positions were not open. Not long before, she’d accepted a job as a jewelry store clerk. But it hadn’t worked out after the boss had wanted to sleep with her. Sex—it was plain to us both—was the real hard currency.
When I asked if she ever thought about returning home to the interior—the Bahian countryside—she shrugged it off. She was vague about her reasons.
Though we never said it, we both knew that she could find a patron here, some wealthy man to keep her as Isa was seeking, but Nel disdained dependency. She wanted to leave the boarding house; she wanted a place of her own. She wanted her independence, to make something of herself, to develop her potential.
Amazon Snapshot #5
The word for “development” in Portuguese is desenvolvimento, a telling term. From envolver (to involve, to envelop, to cover, to comprehend), and the prefix des-, implying its opposite: it means, literally, to uncover, to uninvolve, to un-include, to unc
omprehend. In our quest to make good, we rarely think of this other possibility, this correlate—what we are un-making.
The reasons for “developing” the Amazon have been various—political, geopolitical, economic. (From the eighteenth-century attempt to deport U.S. slaves to the Amazon, to Henry Ford’s twentieth-century rubber plantation, Fordlandia, to the folly of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, which continues today, the history of development has been a long and peculiar one.) There was money to be made in mining, logging, even through significant tax breaks to distant landlords who could claim to be “improving” the land by clear-cutting and stocking a cow or two. And there was the myth of the Amazon, the appeal of vast tracts of unclaimed land to which the disenfranchised poor could flock in search of a better life. It promised release from the pressure of rural migration to the cities and the ever-expanding ranks of the favelados.
Most of all, perhaps, there was money on loan from foreign banks eager to help Brazil “develop.” The extravagantly costly construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway was instrumental in launching Brazil into its devastating cycle of debt to First World banks. The highway opened veins into the forest, and people followed. But the roads led nowhere. Asphalt ended on the edges of cliffs. Still, the highway had its uses: it was arguably a distraction from Brazilian political repression in the seventies. The War on the Jungle—presented as a war on ignorance and backwardness—was partly a cover for the war on the citizenry.
The reasons for wanting to save the forest are perhaps suspect as well. We cared, of course, for the forest and its creatures. But there was also a career to be made in the field, documenting the devastation. There were grants to be had. Papers to be published. My own grant, I imagine, was modest by comparison with the salaries of the internationally known researchers at the National Institute of Amazonian Research. One could win an international reputation documenting this loss our government and banks had helped effect.
