PEARL K. BELL
33
out of the water like a giant's stony fingers, which the first Portugese
explorers had mistaken for a great river, the River ofJanuary.
When Elizabeth told me she was going to stay in Brazil, I was
puzzled and more than a little apprehensive. For the better part of a year
I had been living in Brazil with my then husband, and I longed to get
away from the suffocating heat, the bad food, the untamable ants parad–
ing incessantly through our kitchen, the ubiquitous lassitude and incom–
petence, the unsettling sense of a world falling apart.
I did not find Rio exotic, I could not lose myself in the seductive,
tattered beauty of the city, as some of my American friends were able to
do. During the four convulsive days of Carnival, the entire country goes
berserk, and the very air turns loud and wild. (The Brazilian addiction to
noise did not subside on Ash Wednesday, when radios and voices were
pitched, as always, at top volume. Even the animals in Brazil can't stand
quiet, like the parrot we boarded during a friend's absence. It was un–
nerved by the comparative silence of our apartment, and screamed
"Socorro! Socorro!") I soon found the unceasing racket unbearable -
the pounding beat of orgiastic delirium, the deafening day-long night–
long commotion, the samba-ing crowds in the streets - and fled to our
apartment in Ipanema, where I reached for the most northernly book I
could find - Harold Nicolson's
Some People
-
seeking relief in his cool
British prose from the wild clamor outside. I was clearly in the grip of
something Elizabeth described in a letter not long after she settled in her
new home: "I think I carry some awful notions from the North with
me, like a sledge loaded with weapons and pemmican. ... "
It
wasn't just my own disaffection with Brazil that made
Elizabeth's decision to live there seem risky. At times during my
occasional visits to Samambaia, Elizabeth appeared to me as fragile as one
of the soap-bubbles she had blown at Yaddo. She knew hardly anything
about this immense country, yet at the age of forty she was committing
herself to a foreignness more complex than even this experienced traveler
had ever known. Would she be able to find the asthma medicine she
couldn't live without? Learn Portuguese, a language that confounded
me? And wouldn't the modest income she had inherited from her
father's family be frighteningly inadequate against a rate of inflation that
galloped more wildly out of control every day?
For a while she did indeed prove allergic to every plant and tree in
that
lush and alien landscape, but eventually Dona Elizabetchy - as Lota's
servants pronounced her name - became far less vulnerable to many dan–
gers, within and without, and her life in Brazil turned out to be the
happiest time she had yet known. In "Arrival at Santos," one of the ear–
liest poems that drew upon her new sense of place, she mocked the
