PEARL K. BELL
51
scour the city for
all
the things they longed to take back. I had married
again in the previous year, and for the baby I was expecting in Decem–
ber, they brought elegant sets of infant clothing - one for a boy, one for
a
girl,
tiny pink dresses with elaborate smocking and beautifully tailored
blue trousers and jackets. When my son was born, I put away the pink
treasures, and have them still, waiting for a granddaughter - whose par–
ents will need an exceptionally good laundress to care for them.
When
Brazil
was published in March of the following year, Eliza–
beth, back in Samambaia and still licking her wounds, wrote a letter siz–
zling with rage and chagrin:
I hope you have not had time to read it, and never will have time...
We [Elizabeth and the editors] ended up with a horrid exchange of
letters - I lost my temper (if I'd done that the very first day maybe
things would have been better) and now I am horribly and idiotically
distressed by the book - absolutely everything seems wrong....
She was especially incensed by the photographs the editors had
chosen, or rather, by those they had left out: "not a single bird, beast or
flower - in Brazil!" Nor did the text have even "a
trace
of what I tried
to say." She was right: the book gave little sign of Elizabeth's literary
imagination, and as she summed up the whole sorry business in a letter:
"What they wanted to do - and have just about succeeded - was give
their own vague preconception of an imaginary Brazil. . . . Please
pretend I had nothing to do with it."
She got the nine thousand dollars Time-Life had agreed to pay,
more than she had ever earned in a single year (not counting grants and
fellowships and prizes), and Elizabeth and Lota were at last able to treat
themselves to a brief holiday in Italy. It was not the leisurely rediscovery
of Europe they had looked forward to, and endlessly postponed, but it
was better than nothing. And the money Elizabeth had so painfully
earned for a book she ended up detesting also made it possible for her,
several years later, to buy a neglected colonial house in the baroque city
of Ouro Preto. Built in the 1690s, the house was lovingly restored, at
great cost, under Elizabeth's guidance, and she named it Casa Mariana,
for Marianne Moore.
Over the years, reading and savoring Elizabeth's ebullient letters
from Brazil, I had no reason to doubt that the contentment and root–
edness that Lota had provided with such loving devotion would last for–
ever. I could see the two women growing old together on the
