PEARL K. BELL
39
through marriage, enormously rich. Neither Dona Alice, as vain as she
was stubborn, nor her husband (a former head of the Bank of Brazil),
nor their children gave a damn about the literary quality of the transla–
tion. They had naive and greedy fantasies of the money and fame the
book would bring them, though they had more than enough of the
former. And, adding
to
Elizabeth's problems, old Senhor Brant was ex–
tremely proud of his English, and insisted on going over every word of
Elizabeth's text and making "corrections." At one point, she reported,
"I had someone say 'Go home and sober up'
(curar se
-
'sober up' is
right) and he changed it to 'Go home and dispatch your drunkenness.' "
When she had finished a large chunk of the translation, Elizabeth
had a devil of a time finding a competent typist with good - or at least
good enough - English, and the one she finally obtained, from the
American Embassy, was barely adequate. And that wasn't aU: one day, as
Elizabeth was sorting the several carbon copies in her studio:
Tobias, the cat, wandered in - it's a rainy evening - all glistening with
rain and jumped up on my work bench to investigate everything as he
usually does. I wasn't paying attention, and then I heard a funny
trickling sound ... and when I yelled at him and dashed to investi–
gate I found he had made a small but deep puddle right between the
2nd and 3rd carbons of M V de M - all laid out beautifully in a row
... The corners are all wet and
stillk
....
What on earth shall I do.
. . . He has never, never done anything like that before - always the
perfect gentleman.
Eventually the smell of cat-piss evaporated, and Elizabeth forgave
Tobias, whom she dearly loved. He maneuvered his way into her poem
"Electrical Storm" - she never tired of writing about the melodramatic
mountain weather in Samambaia. When the storm in the poem struck,
Tobias "jumped in the window, got in bed - / silent, his eyes bleached
white, his fur on end." And as hail, "the biggest size of artificial pearls,"
pounded against the house, and the storm fused the wiring and knocked
out the telephone, "The cat stayed in the warm sheets."
The poem, one of the Brazilian group she included in
Questions oj
Travel
(1965), was probably written some time after Tobias made his dis–
graceful puddle. While she was working on the translation, Elizabeth
gave it all her energy and attention, and she began to realize, perhaps for
the first time in her life, how lucky she had been in her writing life.
Minha Vida,
she remarked in a letter when the translation was almost
finished, "has been good for me, to find out how most writers have to
do their work - maybe I'll appreciate my free time a little more after
