The More I Owe You Read online

  Two days in São Paulo with Miss Breen, then on to Rio, where Mary and Pearl would meet her at the train station. In the midst of a thousand strangers, those two would recognize her; each would take her arm. She needn’t worry that she’d have no anchor, that she’d lose her bearings, end up in a bar somewhere.

  And she would see Lota again.

  She and Miss Breen peered over the railing as the customs official climbed the ladder and came aboard, and then again as their luggage was lowered on ropes into the tender.

  Elizabeth felt a leap of excitement, followed by a wave of foreboding.

  Miss Breen took hold of her hand.

  2

  Paulo and Julinho returned with their arms full of grass, long yellow-green bundles that brushed the ground like sweeping horsetails. Lota showed the men how they were to load the rocks that she and Mary had chosen from the streambed into the back of the jeep. First a thick layer of grass, then the rocks placed upon it, like prehistoric eggs in a nest. Another bed of greenery, then more rocks. The grass was still green and aromatic from the rainy season. When they were girls, she and Marietta had tried to dry the grass and roll it in cigarette papers they’d stolen from their father and smoke it. They had rattled their bones from coughing. Her sister used to be so devilish, and now—such a bore! That’s what happened when you married a brute.

  You are very smart, Dona Lota, Julinho said as he watched her arrange the rocks in the grass. Look how you protect the car.

  Surprise! It’s not the car I’m protecting. Come here, coraçao.

  He was a youth, his brown neck so delicate it was like a girl’s. Lota chose a rock and showed him the ruff of lichen on its underside, the play of grays and soft greens. This is what I’m protecting.

  Julinho said nothing, simply turned to her with the look she’d seen so many times on the faces of men that she’d become inured to it. She ignored the look, his and others’, except on the occasions it triggered her rage. They might give her the look that said she was crazy, but afterwards they always did what she commanded. Just wait, she told the boy, you’ll see what a beautiful wall we will make.

  She sent the men to gather more grass while she and Mary carried the rocks they’d selected from the stream up the hill to the car. Mary was a strong worker. She could probably haul a sack of these rocks on her back, though she looked as though she were put together with little twigs and chicken bones you could snap with your finger.

  This is the last load for me, Lota, Mary said.

  What are you talking about? We’ve hardly begun.

  I have to go to Rio, remember? Don’t be obstinate. I know you haven’t forgotten that I’m meeting Elizabeth’s train.

  Oh yes, our American friend. But must you really leave now?

  In fact, Lota was excited by Elizabeth’s upcoming visit. Of all the people they’d met in New York, she was by far the most perceptive, the most brilliant. In a roomful of people talking, she would stay quiet for half an hour, then make one comment that cut through all the merde. But someone had hurt her terribly, that was plain to see. Why else did she act like a mouse scurrying along the wall? She needed to be cared for like a flower; then she would bloom. And what better place for a flower to bloom than here at Samambaia?

  Lota could still remember the moment she had first set eyes on Elizabeth, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She had gone there with Candido Portinari to meet her new friend Elodie, and the three of them—Lota de Macedo Soares, arm in arm with the preeminent Brazilian painter and the director of Moma’s circulating exhibitions—had strolled through the galleries, talking of how they might put together an exhibition of these paintings to send to Brazil. After a time, Lota noticed they were being followed at a discreet distance by a woman who pretended to look at the paintings but was actually eavesdropping on their conversation. The woman was small and very neat, her clothes put together with an excellent eye, everything of bom desenho. At last, Lota addressed her directly. She raised her voice and said, Would you like to come closer so that you can hear me better? The woman turned, and for an endless time they held one another’s stare. Her face was a perfect doll’s face, her eyes a pale northern blue. Lota smiled—she did not want to scare this little bird away, but she already had. In a fierce voice, the woman said, Oh, no thank you, and hurried off. In the way that fate worked, it was less than a week later when their friend Louise brought someone new to dinner, and Lota recognized her immediately, the woman of bom desenho.

  At that dinner, Elizabeth claimed to have no recollection of the incident at the museum. It will become a joke between them, a game, to admit or not to admit remembering that first encounter, the jolt it had sent through them both. When did you mark the beginning, the moment the wheels were set in motion? At the first meeting of eyes, the formal introduction with names? Or later, when the inevitability of something more could no longer be denied, when it had to be spoken aloud?

  After Mary left, Lota drove the jeep full of rocks up to the house. She arrived just in time. The workmen pouring the floor had begun marking square divisions in the setting concrete, and she had to scream, Leave it smooth, you clowns! This is not a sidewalk!

  Yes, Elizabeth would bring a breath of fresh air to their mountain. And more than that: the spark of her genius. Lota could hardly wait to show her all this, all that she had made.

  But still, how annoying to be interrupted!

  3

  HER HEAD FELL back against the taxi seat. Out the window, a parade of sights. Skyscrapers, a harbor circled by mountains, ships going back and forth, Christ atop a cliff in a swirl of clouds with his arms spread wide, speeding cars, men chasing after a soccer ball. A cobblestone street with sunlight beaming through the foliage of great big trees. “Here we are,” Mary said as the taxi slowed. Tall apartment buildings, and tree limbs laden with vines and flowers. It was like New York a bit, but with orchids growing on the telephone lines.

  In the apartment, they settled into chairs, and a maid set a tiny cup of coffee in Elizabeth’s hand. Her luggage was shuttled down a back hallway. Then the three ladies were making small talk, just as if she’d popped over for a neighborly visit. The typical back-and-forth rhythms: How was the ship, oh it was wonderful and dreadful; and how was the train, such impractical scenery!; and how was São Paulo, total chaos I must have gotten lost a thousand times. Mary, after all these years in Brazil, still sat as stiffly as if she possessed a steel rod for a spine. No doubt it would be a greater challenge to one’s expectations to have discovered otherwise. Lovely woman, though. And Pearl, one of her favorites from Yaddo, so pretty and impetuous, but really too young to be down here on her own, or practically on her own.

  Mary expressed surprise to have heard Elizabeth was coming by train; she’d been led to believe the route from São Paulo had been discontinued.

  “I did get the impression the service is erratic,” Elizabeth said. “My friend Miss Breen knew people in São Paulo who tracked down the information for me.” She’d loved traveling by train, the view of lush mounds of mountains with cows perched on their steep slopes. Elizabeth hadn’t slept a bit all night, she was utterly exhausted, and yet she felt truly awake and alert. A film of perspiration lay over all her skin, but it made her feel right at home, it was that Key West feeling. “This coffee is delicious,” she said.

  “Would you like another?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Mary spoke to the maid. Mary of all people, the proper Bostonian, speaking Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro! “You said you were lost in São Paulo?” Mary asked.

  “At least twenty times in two days. The city is a labyrinth.”

  “You were on foot?”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “That was brave,” Pearl said.

  Abruptly she stood. She couldn’t sit still a moment longer. She’d been sitting down for the last twelve or fourteen hours. She’d been sitting the last twenty days, perhaps that many years. Across the apartment a wall of glass beckoned, and El
izabeth moved toward it. From there she took in the wide blue planes of sea and sky, exactly as she had on the ship, and down below, a yellow stretch of beach. Behind her, Mary murmured polite questions to Pearl. How long have you been in Rio? Oh, really, not even a year? You seem so at home already. Then Mary was standing at Elizabeth’s side with her hand upon the window latch. The entire wall slid open, not a window after all but a door, and the sea breathed into Elizabeth’s face. The terrace offered an even more impressive view. To the left, a mountain, with another mountain peeking up over it—was that the Sugar Loaf?—and to the right, the great sweep of Copacabana. “This is magnificent,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t realize you were quite so in the clouds.”

  “If you like being in the clouds, wait until you see Samambaia.”

  “That’s your place in the mountains?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Mary’s intent presence seemed to expect further inquiry, but in the face of Elizabeth’s silence the other woman returned inside. It was extremely hot. An iron lid of cloud clamped down, steaming them alive. Below, hundreds of men were running around on the beach, kicking and lobbing balls back and forth, on the sand, over nets. How they were able to do so in such weather, Elizabeth couldn’t fathom.

  “I’d love to explore a bit,” she said when she rejoined her friends.

  “Yes,” Pearl said brightly, with a touch of desperation. “I can’t wait to show you around.”

  Mary reached for her purse. “I’ll be heading back to Samambaia, so I can’t join you. The apartment is yours while you’re here, of course. Lota will come down to Rio in a few days and fetch you back, as we discussed. If you call tomorrow, we’ll arrange the time.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that.”

  “Good, then. Pearl, a pleasure.”

  As soon as she’d gone, they both fell back in their chairs with relief. “What a dry stick!” Pearl said. “I thought I was going to slap her.”

  “She’s never been anything but gracious to me, but I always feel I have to hold my breath.” With Pearl, of course, who’d seen her at her absolute worst, it was the exact opposite.

  “You’d think Brazil would have loosened her up. God knows it’s loosened me, and I was loose already. You have to wonder why she even came.”

  “The story is, she met Lota on a ship, trumpets blared, and that was that.” In fact, that was as much detail as Elizabeth knew herself. It was too bad you couldn’t ask what had really happened, how the first conversation had gone, what had signaled what to whom, how they had known, so quickly, that Mary would move to Brazil. She added, “That was ten years ago. Now they live together quite openly, or so I hear.”

  Pearl picked up her coffee cup and looked into it, a sour expression on her pretty face. Perhaps, Elizabeth thought, she should have kept that last bit to herself.

  “Would you look at this apartment?” she said. “That’s an actual Calder hanging there. Lota knows him. You’ve got to meet Lota. She’s magnetic, unbelievably sharp and funny. She speaks multiple languages. It’s been five years since I spent any time with her in New York, but some people you remember with utter clarity.”

  “Shall we go out?”

  “Yes, of course. Are you able?” At the train station, when Elizabeth had expressed horror at Pearl’s swollen, bruised ankle, her friend had explained she’d only twisted it stepping off a curb. But you had to wonder. No one understood at all why she’d come down here to marry Victor Kraft. He was notorious.

  “It doesn’t feel as bad as it looks. The doctor said I should try to walk on it a little every day.”

  “Then we’ll walk. You can lean on me for a change.” She stood and held out her hand. “Maybe we could go someplace close by where I might find just a sip of something.”

  “Elizabeth!”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “It’s only noon.”

  “Really, don’t worry. I allow myself one a day, and then I’m not afraid of it. Like an inoculation.”

  ENORMOUS GREEN WAVES crashed on the beach, and swarms of people floated in the water or stood shin-deep in the surf. On the beautiful black-and-white mosaic sidewalk, people of all ages were strolling past and riding bicycles. Every few paces, a kiosk sold drinks and some sort of fried fish, and a number of people sat around these stands in plastic chairs, chatting and drinking beer or sipping from straws stuck into coconuts and wearing practically nothing, even the women. They had dark, thick hair and white teeth and skin a beautiful ochre or even darker, and all the colors of people appeared to intermix freely. In every group she passed, one or two were laughing. The men, in their tiny bathing suits and with their legs splayed out, really left very little to the imagination. Many of them had no shame about staring right at you. They were very curious about her and Pearl, watching them with their glittering black eyes, though not threateningly—more like cows you passed on a country lane. One man, in conversation with his friends, very baldly slipped his hand into his bathing trunks and rearranged himself.

  They turned from the beach into Copacabana, where a few blocks in they came upon a street market. The stalls were heaped with produce and fish and meats. It wasn’t as if Elizabeth were not a woman of the world; she’d been to the markets of tropical America, she recognized papaya and passion fruit and even the one that looked like a pangolin, the cherimoya, and mango, of course, which she couldn’t eat because she was allergic to the skin. But some things did astonish her—figs the size of apples, tiny glossy peppers on little plates, more varieties of fish than she’d ever seen, even when she’d lived in Florida, striped black and silver, vermilion, yellow. There was a grouper as big as a full-grown man, ten varieties of shrimp, piles of octopus, and great big spiny crabs on ice, slowly moving their legs.

  “What is that lewd thing?” She pointed to a pyramid of yellow-orange fruits the size of her fist. From the top of each one extruded a green flaccid phallus.

  “Cashews,” Pearl said. “Too sour for my taste. The green part is the nut, but you can also eat the fruit.”

  She steered Elizabeth to a derelict little bar that opened onto the street. A few elderly men sat on stools in front, intent on a sports match broadcast over the radio. Pearl spoke a few words of Portuguese to the man behind the counter, and he produced two glasses of clear liquid. Pearl slid one toward Elizabeth. “Here’s your inoculation,” she said. “You can’t have more than one, or you’ll become catatonic.”

  Elizabeth lifted the glass to her nose. Not at all an enticing liquor, she was pleased to discover. “What is it?”

  “Cachaça,” Pearl said. “The national pastime, after soccer.”

  The taste was harsh at first, then mellowed. “Pearl, I meant what I told you. I’m doing well.You saw me in terrible shape two years ago, and it got even worse. Last winter, I had to put myself in the hospital again. I wanted badly to stop drinking, but I couldn’t do it on my own.”

  “Yes, you wrote me all that.”

  “It was a wretched time—” Elizabeth broke off. There was a pressure in her eyes that was as close as she came to tears in the company of another person. “But I’m through it. I’ve gotten to the other side, I’m not sure how. I could feel it on the ship. I was even productive again. I’m sick of being a fake poet who never writes anything.”

  “I saw your last poem in the NewYorker. Elizabeth, it was very good.”

  The liquor gave her courage to ask what she’d been dying to know. “So tell me. How are you and Victor?”

  Pearl’s eyes flicked away, and she smiled. She was happy with Victor, that was apparent. Perhaps she’d hurt herself falling off a curb, after all. “He loves it here.”

  “And you?”

  “It’s very loud. I’m a bit at loose ends, to be honest. I haven’t managed to find any work in six months. But I have become quite a cook.”

  “I’d take cooking over writing any day. You’re brave, I think, getting married. I considered it myself once, but I couldn’t do it.”

 
; “Victor’s not the easiest man in the world. That’s no secret. But there’s something different about me since I’ve been with him. He can stretch my patience to the breaking point, and still I feel, in some deep part of myself, at peace.” She smiled again. “I can see by the look on your face that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, I’m not the one who has to live with him.”

  “So it’s true what I heard, that you’ve broken things off with Tom?”

  “Decisively. That’s one of the few sane things I’ve done lately. He’s been a true friend, but honestly, I think he’s unbalanced. But that’s not even the reason. I have no business being with anyone, I have so little to give. I just barely get by on my own. The people I try to love always end up extremely unsatisfied and angry.” She took another taste of cachaça. “They end up either wanting to kill me or killing themselves.”

  “That’s completely untrue! You’ve only driven one man to suicide.”

  Elizabeth laughed aloud, truly shocked. “You’re as horrible as I am. That must be why I like you so much.”

  Pearl left her there and hobbled across the street to the market. It was Elizabeth’s first opportunity since she’d left the Bowplate simply to be still, to watch and listen. At least a dozen men lounged under the trees nearby, several of them in bathing trunks, a few without shirts, eyeing the women going past. All of them were quite dark, Elizabeth noted, and two or three were very good-looking. The men at the bar commented to one another about the game on the radio, their Portuguese unlike any language she knew, with no similarity to Spanish or French, a production of somewhat comical sounds from the nose and back of the throat. Across the street at the market, adolescent boys sang out the names of their produce. In the shade, it wasn’t too hot, it was just right. The light was strong but was filtered through the leaves of the trees. Elizabeth felt as though she were looking at the world through a green lens.