52
PARTISAN REVIEW
mountaintop in Petropolis, friends more than lovers, happy in their
work, their cozy domesticity, their affection and respect for each other.
But it was not to be.
Though the park that Lota had envisioned and zealously brought
into being was a great personal triumph, the strain of coping with devi–
ous bureaucrats and temperamental engineers and landscape architects
took a fearful toll. Ground down by the unrelenting pressure, Lota be–
came
ill,
body and soul. The high-spirited and vibrantly cheerful woman
I remembered so fondly shrank into darkness. Suspicious and hostile, she
poisoned the snug world she had created for herself and Elizabeth with
uncontrollable and groundless accusations of betrayal and abandonment.
When Elizabeth could endure it no longer, she flew north late in
the summer of 1967 - it was rainy winter in Brazil - to stay with friends
in New York. She badly needed the time and the distance away from the
distrust and turmoil in Samambaia. Lota followed, though Elizabeth had
begged her not to, and in the friends' apartment she committed suicide.
Though Elizabeth did stay in the house in Ouro Preto for brief pe–
riods after1967, Brazil without Lota could never again be a haven and a
home . It was not only Lota's tragically vengeful act of desperation that
destroyed the life in which Elizabeth had flourished for fifteen years, but
her Brazilian friends turned against her as well, blaming her for Lota's
death.
In the early seventies she left the country for good. But it held her
imagination fast, with the insistent anchor of memory, in the Brazilian
poems - "Santarem" and "Pink Dog" - that she wrote in her final
decade, and in the disturbing elegy, "One Art," whose mock-jaunty re–
frain ("The art of losing isn't hard to master") ironically intensifies the
poem's bitter denial of continuity and hope.
Saudades,
Dona Elizabetchy.
Saudades,
Brazil.
Toni Greenberg
1925 - 1990
