34
PARTISAN REVIEW
exorbitant expectations with which she had begun the journey to South
America, but in a way they did all come true: "Oh, tourist / is this how
this country is going to answer you / and your immodest demands for a
different world, / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of
both at last. . . ." No longer a tourist, her "immodest" demands
were
met. For Lota - shrewd and generous and wise, full of strong and irre–
pressible opinions about everything - had realized that what Elizabeth
needed, for her health and her sanity and her writing, was not all those
lonely weeks on a freighter, or the fragmenting jangle and clang of New
York, but the affectionate protection of a home, a sense of belonging,
the orderly consolations of habit and dailiness, the will to stay put. They
became lovers, even if Lota more often acted the mother to Elizabeth
the child.
I returned to New York a few months after Elizabeth settled down
in Samambaia, feeling no
saudades
for Brazil.
(Saudades
has no English
equivalent; the word mingles feelings of homesickness, nostalgia, longing
for a cherished place, for the friends we miss, and so on.) It was then that
our friendship came to rely, over the huge distance of seven thousand
miles, on the many letters we exchanged regularly for more than ten
years. Happy as she was in Brazil, Elizabeth still needed to maintain her
ties with her own country, and she depended greatly on letters in answer
to her own, from Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, and
many others.
I eagerly looked forward to the arrival every few months (and
sometimes more often) of her wonderfully casual and funny letters, so
unlike her coolly laconic poems. They arrived in flimsy airmail envelopes,
with a striped border of green and yellow (the national colors of Brazil)
- several pieces of cheap airmail stationery ("so thin," Elizabeth once
wrote, "it wrinkles like sheets") almost completely covered with single–
spaced typing and dozens of afterthoughts in her maddening scrawl.
A letter from Elizabeth was a free-associating potpourri of domestic
details, literary gossip and judgment, politics, landscape, lamentation,
weather, and joy - the joy she felt at no longer being alone, of living
contentedly in a house alive with noisy, succouring normality. Nor was
her life on the mountain as isolated and unchanging as I had feared it
might be. Lota, ever gregarious, had a horde of friends who came to
visit, bringing their eccentricities with them, like the "zoo lady" who
borrowed Lota's jeep one day to transport a load of parrots. Elizabeth
was enraptured, and described it
all
in her next letter:
She had to ship off dozens somewhere or other - so picked
all
those
who use the filthiest language to get rid of them... . She also has a
