Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  After a while, she offered me a cafezinho and I accepted. And when she came back with the hot sweet demitasse, she stood by the couch where I sat and said, with feeling, I am sorry. I like you, but my husband said that he needed the apartment.

  —I signed a lease, I said. Without cause, he has no right to evict me. I have nowhere else to go.

  I told her that I had plans to leave town in a week, that my family was about to arrive from the United States for a visit; I was going to fly with them to Rio and travel in the south. I had a ticket. I could not move. I wouldn’t.

  When she began to cry, I was dumbfounded.

  —I’m afraid he has a mistress, she said, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief from her pocket. She pulled out a chair from the lace-covered highly polished table and said that she was afraid that he wanted to install a mistress there. She rested her hand on the table like a discarded glove. She cried.

  —I don’t know what to do, she said.

  I comforted her as best I could, patting her back and making sympathetic sounds. I waited for one full hour, reassuring her that her husband loved her, which I hoped he did, then I got up to go. At the door, before I left, she told me that she’d talk to him.

  —It is not right for him to put you out, she said. You are a good girl, a good girl.

  I thanked her then and left.

  And because I was near the offices of A Tarde, because I was out this way and was agitated and had no friends and nowhere to go and no one I wanted to see and had something to prove, I went to see Pinheiro.

  I told myself that it was only polite to let him know what I was doing. I would stop by his office to let him know that I was back from the Amazon and would be heading south soon to tour for a few weeks. Say good-bye. But in truth, I wanted to show him. I wanted to show him that I knew now how to speak, how to dress, how to make my way around, that I was bem Bahiana now.

  When you are shown into Pinheiro’s office, he smiles hugely at you; he looks surprised (you are gratified to see this); he says, in fact, what a surprise it is, his eyebrows raised a little, admiringly, as he stands and leans across the desk to extend his hand to offer you a seat, which you take.

  When he sits again, he leans back in his chair, interested, it seems, in this new development, this twist. He comments admiringly on your clothes (indigo blue nylon shirt that drops in a loose cowl to show the tanned curve of your breasts, fashionably flared jeans that hug your belly like a corset—fastening with metal clasps—then flare at the hips like harem pants, huaraches), your speech, your tan.

  —Você e bem Bahiana, he smiles. You are—it’s true—very Bahian now.

  On the street, you are taken for Brazilian, you tell him, though people take you for a Paulista, like being taken for a New Yorker in the States. Sometimes they do not believe you are American at all; they make you say things in English to prove it, then they laugh.

  Pinheiro asks how you are. You ask how he is, then you tell him that you will be leaving soon to travel a bit with your family.

  —I just wanted to stop by and extend my thanks for all you’ve done, you say, standing to go. It has been an education.

  He stands and you shake on it, as if you’ve struck some deal.

  In the street, on my way to the bus stop, I bought a pack of Chiclets from a newspaper vendor just for the pleasure of buying something I did not need, and I decided, Fuck the bus, I’ll walk. I was not afraid to ride the bus anymore. I just needed air. No doubt, I wondered, as I often did then, how many calories this would burn: a walk from Rio Vermelho to Barra. Could I even get there from here, from the place I was to the place I wanted to be?

  I crossed the street and walked along the sidewalk until I came to a narrow pathway that descended to the right through a favela carved into the side of the hill. The path was a narrow precipitous walkway—built of chunks of discarded cement, pieces of board, and stones someone had dragged here—no wider than my shoulders; the path wended between walls of cardboard and wood and tin, boards lashed together with wire and rope, past rusty corrugated tin roofs. It was the most direct route, the fastest; if I’d tried to avoid this, walk around, I’d likely have gotten lost, spent hours on circuitous paved routes.

  I made my way down through this neighborhood that smelled of piss and sweat and shit and rotting things—there was no running water here—and partway down the path, it occurred to me that if someone were to come out from behind or in front of me now and pull a razor blade or a knife, I’d have nowhere to go, but no one did. I heard voices from somewhere in the clutter of makeshift houses, people maybe or a radio or TV, if someone had found a way to tap an electric line.

  What I had been told to fear was not what was dangerous, I realized: the real danger lies in feeling safe and in trying to be, in all we’ll sacrifice for the sake of safety and comfort; the danger is the lie we tell ourselves when we take for granted all we have, believing that things will turn out okay if we just go along and get along, that we are safe and can afford to ignore the consequences. We can’t afford it.

  When I got to the bottom of the narrow walkway, I was on a shady expensive street and though I didn’t know where I was, I kept walking; I turned in the direction that I felt was right, going on instinct now, on hunches, and began to make my way from here home.

  I didn’t realize then what seems obvious now: that the doorman must have told my landlord that Nel was turning tricks in the apartment. The landlady’s line about the mistress may have been a ruse. But why, then, was the landlady crying? She seemed sincere, her tears did. I wonder, was she crying because I was so dumb, so innocent of the score? Or perhaps my ignorance was painful because it reminded her of her own? Perhaps there really was a mistress. It’s remarkable how little I understood then of what was transpiring around me. It’s remarkable how little I know now, in fact, of what really happened then.

  In the end I was not evicted. Whether this was due to my landlady’s intervention or my own stubbornness I will never know, but my landlord relented.

  A few days before I was to leave for Rio to travel with my family, Nelci finally called and explained that the strange callers I’d been hearing from were her clients. She’d had to get a job in my absence, she said, to pay the rent, and this was the most lucrative she could find. She had left a few things at the apartment, which she promised to come by and get, but she never came.

  Pão de Açucar

  When my family arrived, I showed them around Salvador for two days before we flew to Rio. We planned to tour the sites then fly south to the Falls of Iguaçu at the southern tip of the country. My family were excited to play tourists. But all of it made me sad. Pão de Açucar—Sugar Loaf—Rio’s famous pinnacle, 396 meters tall, was just a hunk of rock after all, not sugar, not sweet, but hard.

  My mother and I were shopping in Rio one morning while my father and brother remained in the hotel, when I suggested that we catch a bus instead of hailing a cab; I was used to public transportation by then and cabs were a rip-off, too expensive. The previous night a cabbie had charged my father half again the fare posted on the meter and I’d had to argue with him in my most colorful Portuguese.

  As we started across the street to the bus stop, a motorcyclist ran a red just as my mother stepped off the curb, nearly clipping her. I stood in the street cursing a blue streak at the cyclist, fluent now in epithets.

  —Thank you, my mother said, disconcerted. Thank you, honey. I didn’t see him at all.

  —The fucker, I said, taking her arm as we crossed.

  Around the corner from our hotel, my mother and I stood in line on the sidewalk to enter at the back of a bus. The line was long: a man stood in front of me, my mother stood behind me, behind her were two other men, and then a woman. Two giant steps, with rubberized mats, led up into the bus, where a cashier would take our money and let us through a turnstile to take our seats.

  The guy in front of me got on first; then I stepped up onto the bus. My mother followed; I turned to see he
r standing on the second stair; behind her, on the first step, were two men. One small, one big. They were standing very close to my mother and for a moment something looked wrong, like a painting hung at a slant. I looked at the two men, and the smaller man gave me a sort of smile and held up the pen in his hand, tipping it to his brow, as if in salute; a manila envelope was clasped under his right arm, the way my mother’s purse was tucked under hers. He looked like a courier of some kind. But something did not look right.

  I told my mother to hold onto her purse, to hold it in front of her.

  —Don’t worry, she said. I have a good grip on it.

  —Hold it in front of you, Mom, I said.

  —It’s fine, Ellen, she says. Really, I’ve got a very tight hold on it.

  Indeed the purse looked thoroughly wedged under her arm. Still, I stared at the two guys pressed too close to my Mom. The small one smiling, holding his pen.

  When I stepped up to the turnstile to pay our fares, the guy in front of me spilled his change as he pushed through the turnstile and coins rolled everywhere; the cashier bent to help him, and my mother craned forward to see what had happened, as did I, and then suddenly, like catching a scent in the air, I understood that this was a setup, and though I didn’t know how it worked, I knew what to do:

  —Mom, I said, loudly. Watch your purse.

  I grabbed my mother’s purse from out of her hands and pressed her ahead of me in line, wedging my body between her and the two men behind us—the guy with the pen and the big guy behind him—and said under my breath, like a curse, Não vai robar-la, You will not rob her. My mother took her purse back as I told the cashier that I would pay for the two of us and handed him a 500-cruzeiro note and we pushed through the turnstile and took our seats, my mother clasping her purse now tightly to her chest.

  —Make sure your wallet is there, I said, as we sat.

  —It’s fine, Ellen, she said, annoyed at my having seized her purse. Really. You needn’t have worried. I had a good grip on it. It’s sweet of you to be concerned but—

  —Please, I said. Is your wallet there?

  —It’s here, Ellen, she said, but she checked anyway, while the guy with the pen and the big guy took seats up the aisle from us. I stared at them hard.

  It was while she was unzipping her purse that my mother first noticed that the zipper’s teeth had been worked open from the back, unlaced perhaps an inch and a half. Open. The wallet was still inside, but the zipper had been torn apart.

  —Oh my God, she said. You were right, Ellen. Look.

  I looked over at the hole in her purse and then I stared at the men across the aisle. The small one stared back at me, unsmiling now, then looked away.

  —Thief, I said, quietly, in Portuguese, taking a chance by calling this what it was. But it felt good to call this by its rightful name.

  That night in my hotel room, which cost per night twice what I paid each month in rent, I stood in front of a mirror with the lights out so that I was illuminated only by the dim glow of the city below my window. I studied myself, my unfamiliar image, dressed in ridiculous colors—chartreuse sweater, sky blue jeans—a parrot’s bright plumage, trying to be something I was not, when I heard a knock on the door and went to join my family.

  At dinner, my mother told again the story of how I had saved her twice that day (from the motorcyclist and thieves): to hear her tell it, I was a hero.

  —Thank heavens you caught it, my mother said. I had all our money in that wallet. Traveler’s checks, all our cash. We would have lost everything.

  Only later, at dinner, would I piece together the scheme: how, after working open the teeth of the purse with the nose of the pen, the small man would remove the wallet while the tourist was distracted by the spilled change. Once he had the wallet, he’d drop it into the manila envelope under his arm, which the big guy behind him would take, stepping backwards off the bus into the crowd, while the small man with the pen paid his fare, took a seat, rode innocently on.

  If the theft were discovered once the tourist took her seat, it would be too late. There would be no one to blame, no wallet on board, no one to accuse. It would disappear. Without the culprit in sight.

  Amazon Snapshot #14

  There was a time when I wondered if my interest in the Amazon were sublimation of a sort, transference or translation to the forest of feelings I’d had for Paulinho.

  I think now perhaps it was—though not in the way I once imagined. It seems to me now that in loving that boy, I was trying to love the world, reaching for something larger than all of us, than any of it, him or me, reaching toward some sort of transcendence, which only years later I will understand.

  Nearly a decade after I leave the Amazon, I will drive with a lover through the mountains of northern New Mexico. Moved by the beauty of the sky, the sage, the mountains capped with snow, I will reach out and press her hand and say, I love you, and in that moment know that I am lying; that what I really mean is, I love all of this. And that to try to compress that larger love into a single figure is a distortion of sorts, a misapplication of what is best in our selves—our ability to love the world.

  The Greeks had many words for love—agape, eros, philos—but none to describe the ardor we feel for and in wilderness, even in tame nature, the exultation that attends something as simple as walking down a country lane, or listening (as I am now, here in the hills of Austerlitz, New York), to wind rustling in treetops, the calls of birds, watching the feathery heads of timothy grass bending to the breeze. These things marvelous and not of our making.

  Rapture originally referred to seizure by force, especially sexual seizure, a meaning now grown obsolete (and one I find hard to reconcile with my own experience). Later it became synonymous with transport, with the carrying of a person to another place or sphere of existence, and it is perhaps through this latter definition that its theological significance took hold. To be raptured—an adjective dating from the last quarter of the seventeenth century—is a theological term that refers to religious ecstasy as a result of one’s faith.

  I was rapturous in my study of the Amazon at college, as I had been in amateur horticulture as a child. Mine was the monk’s and the missionary’s impulse merged: a passion to learn, married to an ambition to save. It didn’t occur to me then that missionaries were often part of the martial retinue, they arrived with or followed on the heels of the conquistadors who brought with them priests and seed gatherers.

  Perhaps the Germans have a word for the fervent passion for wild places, the longing that wide open spaces can inspire, the thrill we feel in wilderness, on remote lakes where the only sound you hear are bird calls and wind in leaves and a paddle pushing through water, or in red rock canyons whose walls recall hundreds of millions of years of change, the poignancy of waves breaking, the magnificent indifference of a blue whale or a flock of wild parakeets or an African elephant, the urgent profound passion to save all these from destruction, a passion that is close kin I imagine to the Enlightenment’s love of justice, ideas, liberty, and learning.

  Perhaps we’ve not needed words for this sort of ardor—our love of the natural world—until recently, until we became estranged from it.

  We treat such ardor as anomalous, a little ridiculous, certainly odd (“tree huggers,” we say; “nature boy”). “Nature is in bad taste,” essayist Emily Fox Gordon said, at age nine, to amuse her urbane mom. My friend Suzi liked to say that her idea of nature was a potted plant. We seem to say with our dismissive declarations, We are no mere mammals. But the fact is we are.

  E. O. Wilson has coined the term biophilia to speak of our feeling for the natural world, but it seems to me far too clinical a term. I crave a phrase more capacious, meet, to describe the heartbreak I feel sometimes on hearing something as ordinary as a cardinal’s call, or seeing a coyote dart across a field, or the golden newt I saw today making his way (seemingly swimming) across a gravel road, compelled by atavistic dictates, or when I walk a country lane among
eighty-foot trees or past an unmown field lush with clover, daisies, Indian paintbrush, lupine, black-eyed Susans, and a dozen kinds of grass, or feel in the dirt beneath my feet the pounding hoofbeats of hundreds of zebras as they race across the plains of Ngorogoro crater or witness at dawn 20,000 snow geese rise into the air over the Bosque del Apache like a single living thing, a river of white wings.

  The wonder this world is. I want a word for that.

  Saudades

  If this were a novel, there’d be an epiphany round about now, a moment when I recognized the error of my ways, realized that calculation alone cannot save us, a moment when I woke up and made a change, a choice. But change in life is often slower than that; like destruction, it often happens gradually.

  It’s true that I often thought of Barbara’s claim that she never did anything she didn’t want to do and that I puzzled over this like a koan, aspiring to live by that same code, to act from desire not fear. But I recall no epiphany in Salvador (though such a moment would come later, sudden as luck, life-changing). There was no neat progression or straight line or course like those I’d run with Paulinho years before.

  But there was this: in time, loss piled on loss until absence became at last a kind of presence in my life, inescapable, and I had to turn and stand my ground. The emptiness I’d fled all my life became a sort of presence; it grew in me like saudades.

  Every language has its untranslatable words; in Portuguese, it’s saudades. Saudades is the pride of Brazilians. “Homesick” is a crude and inapt translation; the word—like the feeling—is more capacious than that. Saudades is closer kin to longing, but it is a kind of supreme longing, longing raised to the level of a calling—to an epic, an heroic, an operatic scale. (Orpheus, one might assume, was motivated by saudades when he went to Hades for Eurydice.) Tenho saudades de você, distant friends write to one another and to family. Tenho saudades. Saudades is an almost existential longing, and it is a measure of one’s capacity to love, to maintain ardor in the face of absence.