Prose (27 page)

He tells me and anyone else interested—there are several men and boys in the shop, as usual, one already quite drunk at the far end drinking straight
cachaça
and another eating a small loaf of bread, all just staring and listening—about the awful fight last night. One man had a machete, another had a pocket knife, the third had a stick, and they were all drunk. He got them separated and closed his doors. “I hate fights, don't you?” he asks me. I say I do. “Someone might get killed,” he says. He wanted three policemen to come and hit them with their rubber truncheons—he demonstrates—and that would have put a stop to the fighting, but he had no telephone, as the men well knew. But he wasn't afraid of them, or only of the one with the machete. Yes, too much killing goes on, it is easy to kill someone. He ends his little sermon by saying, “It is stupid, it is great nonsense to kill a man. Imagine, the police would catch him, he'd spend a year in jail, and lose his job, and confound his life completely.” Everyone nods in agreement. The
cachaça
drinker, in a thick voice, asks for another. I take my purchases and leave the botequim.

Home again. No, the dishonest antique dealer hails me from his pale blue house hung with fake-antique lanterns and with a front yard full of old tables and cupboards. “Do you want an antique cupboard? I have three or four nice ones.” He comes running across the road, wagging his fat hands like a baby. He's obviously making money. Three years ago he was just a day laborer and knew nothing of antiques. Now he has customers all over the state and sends things to dealers in Rio and Saõ Paulo. “I want to show you a house. I want the senhora to see it because she has such
good taste.
” I stopped speaking to him for two years because of a dirty trick he played on me over the most beautiful statue of St. Sebastian I have ever seen. I've started speaking again; it's useless to try to make him understand ethics. His fat wife smiles and waves her hands at me like a baby too.

At home I find a flyer, thrown in the yard—an invitation from the Ouro Prêto Department of Tourism inviting the people of the town and visitors

to witness the monumental parade of the Carnival Clubs in Tooth-puller Square on the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th of the month of February. The following clubs will parade: Zé Pereira of the Lacaios [footmen], Conjunto Brito Filho, Clube Recreative XV de Novembere, Escola de Samba Morro de Sant'ana, Bloco Estrela Dalva, Zé Pereira Infantil, and Escola do Bairro do Padre Faria.

On the 10th there will be a great competition for the prize for the best of the Carnival of 1970, and the great parade of Allegorical Cars [floats].

About a mile above the city, up a winding steep dirt road, you reach a high plateau. On the way you pass two small chapels in the distance, Our Lady of the Safe Delivery and Santa Ana. Up through Burnt Hill, past steep fields full of ruins. After two hundred years, a few ruins have turned back into houses again: one very small one, just four standing walls with openings for a door and window, now has a roof of tarpaulin, weighted with stones. It is hard to see how anyone lives in it, but a few hens scratch around the door and there's some washing spread out over the tops of the nearest weeds.

The tiniest house of all, mud brick, wattles showing through, stands against a magnificent view, overlooking a drop of a thousand feet or so, one end of the house merging into a small and very old bus body. The windows and door of the bus are all faded green, with a black rounded roof. Whether the house is an extension of the bus, or the bus the “new wing” of the house, is a hideous little riddle against a majestic backdrop. But someone lives there! It is a magnificent sight to the east, seemingly all the way to the coast, miles and miles and miles of blue hills, the nearer ones topped by crazy spars of gray stone, and one tall cross slanting slightly to the north.

On the left you can see where a small mill stood and fell down. There used to be a strange old iron mill wheel there, but some time ago the boys who came to make a very arty movie of the town stole it. (The boys then lived below me; I smelled their pot every evening and one, the youngest, stayed home alone and sniffed ether, almost etherizing me, in the bedroom above his, every night.)

The fields are filled with wild flowers. At first you see only tall ones, all nameless, yellow and purple, fuzzy seed-heads, red pods, and white ones too. Then you realize the ground is carpeted with flowers, short, shorter ones, moss-height ones. I pick dozens of wild flowers, little bright orange-and-yellow ones on a dry fine little bush, brilliant like orchids; lovely tall single white-yellow ones, each on its own thin green stock; hanging magenta bells. Before you can get these home, they have shut up tight forever.

This is the field of the Waterfall of the Little Swallows, and this is where the stream disappears, like the sacred river Alph in Coleridge's dream. It fans out over the red stone, narrows and rises in cold gray ridges, disappears underground, and then shows up again farther off, dashing downwards now through more beautiful rocks. It then takes off downwards for the Underworld. You can hang over the rocks and see it far below. It keeps descending, disappears into a cavern, and is never seen again. It talks as it goes, but the words are lost …

1970

Memories of Uncle Neddy

It's raining in Rio de Janeiro, raining, raining, raining. This morning the papers said it is the rainiest rainy season in seventy-six years. It is also hot and sticky. The sea—I'm writing in a penthouse apartment, eleven floors up, facing southeast over the sea—the sea is blurred with rain, almost hidden by the mixture of rain and fog, that rarity here. Just close enough inshore to be visible, an empty-looking freighter lunges heavily south. The mosaic sidewalks are streaming; the beach is dark, wet, beaten smooth; the tide line is marked by strands of dark seaweed, another rarity. And how it rains! It is seeping in under the french doors and around the window frames. Every so often a weak breeze seeps in, too, and with it a whiff of decay: something or other spoiled, fruit or meat. Or perhaps it's a whiff of mildew from my own old books and old papers, even from the shirt I have on, since in this weather even clothes mildew quickly. If the rain keeps up much longer the radio will stop working again and the hi-fi will rust beyond repair. At flood tide the sea may cross the avenue and start rising slowly up the base of the apartment building, as it's been known to do.

*   *   *

And Uncle Neddy, that is, my Uncle Edward, is
here.
Into this wildly foreign and, to him, exotic setting, Uncle Neddy has just come back, from the framer's. He leans slightly, silently backwards against the damp-stained pale-yellow wall, looking quite cheerfully into the eyes of whoever happens to look at him—including the cat's, who investigated him just now. Only of course it isn't really Uncle Neddy, not as he was, or not as I knew him. This is “little Edward,” before he became an uncle, before he became a lover, husband, father or grandfather, a tinsmith, a drunkard, or a famous fly-fisherman—any of the various things he turned out to be.

Except for the fact that they give me asthma, I am very fond of molds and mildews. I love the dry-looking, gray-green dust, like bloom on fruit, to begin with, that suddenly appears here on the soles of shoes in the closet, on the backs of all the black books, or the darkest ones, in the bookcase. And I love the black shadow, like the finest soot, that suddenly shows up, slyly, on white bread, or white walls. The molds on food go wild in just a day or two, and in a hot, wet spell like this, a tiny jungle, green, chartreuse, and magenta, may start up in a corner of the bathroom. That gray-green bloom, or that shadow of fine soot, is just enough to serve as a hint of morbidity, attractive morbidity—although perhaps mortality is a better word. The gray-green suggests life, the sooty shadow—although living, too—death and dying. And now that Uncle Neddy has turned up again, the latter, the black, has suddenly become associated with him. Because, after all these years, I realize only now that he represented “the devil” for me, not a violent, active Devil, but a gentle black one, a devil of weakness, acquiescence tentatively black, like the sooty mildew. He died, or his final incarnation died, aged seventy-six, some years ago, and two or three years before that I saw him for the last time. I don't know how he held out so long. He looked already quite dead then, dead and covered with shadow, like the mold, as if his years of life had finally determined to obscure him. (He had looked, too, then, like a dried-out wick, in the smoke-blackened chimney of an oil lamp.)

But here he is again now, young and clean, about twelve years old, with nothing between us but a glaze of old-fashioned varnishing. His widow, Aunt Hat, sent him to me, shipped him thousands of miles from Nova Scotia, along with one of his younger sisters, my mother, in one big crate. Why on earth did Aunt Hat send me the portrait of her late husband? My mother's might have been expected, but Uncle Neddy's came as a complete surprise; and now I can't stop thinking about him. His married life was long-drawn-out and awful; that was common knowledge. Can his presence here be Aunt Hat's revenge? Her last word in their fifty-odd-year battle? And an incredible last straw for him? Or is he here now because he was one of a pair and Aunt Hat was a fiend for order? Because she couldn't bear to break up a set of anything? He looks perfectly calm, polite—quite a pleasant child, in fact—almost as if he were glad to be here, away from it all.

(The frames these ancestor-children arrived in were a foot wide, painted and repainted with glittery, gritty gilt paint. They were meant to hang against dark wallpaper in a hair-cloth-and-mahogany northern parlor and brighten it up. I have taken the liberty of changing them to narrow, carefully dulled, gold ones, “modern.” Now the portraits are reduced to the scale suitable for hanging in apartments.)

Uncle Neddy stands on an imaginary dark red carpet, against a dun-colored wall. His right arm rests on the back of a small chair. This chair is a holy wonder; it must have been the painter's “property” chair—at least I never saw anything like it in my grandmother's house. It consists of two hard-looking maroon-colored pads, both hung with thick, foot-long, maroon fringes; the lower one makes the seat, the upper one, floating in the airless air, and on which Uncle Neddy's arm rests, the back. Uncle Neddy wears a black suit, velveteen, I think; the jacket has pockets and is gathered to a yoke. He has a narrow white collar and white cuffs and a double black bow of what appears to be grosgrain ribbon is tied under the jacket collar. Perhaps his face is more oblivious than calm. Its not actually belonging to the suit or the chair gives it an extraneous look. It could almost have drifted in from another place, or another year, and settled into the painting. Plump (he was never in the slightest plump, that I can remember), his hair parted neatly on the left, his cheeks as pink as a girl's, or a doll's. He looks rather more like his sisters than like Uncle Neddy—the later versions of him, certainly. His tight trousers come to just below the knee and I can make out three ornamental buttons on each side. His weight rests on the left leg; his right leg is crossed in front of it and the toe of his right boot barely touches the other boot and the red carpet. The boots are very small, buttoned. In spite of his peaceful expression, they probably hurt him. I remember his telling me about the copper-toed boots he wore as a child, but these have no copper toes and must be his “good” boots. His body looks neatly stuffed. His eyes are a bright hazel and in the left one—right, to me—the painter has carefully placed a highlight of dry white paint, like a crumb. He never looked so clean and glossy, so peaceful and godly, so presentable, again—or certainly not as I remember him.

But of course he did have a streak of godliness somewhere, or else of a hypocrisy so common then, so unrecognized, that it fooled everyone including himself. How often did my grandmother tell me that as a small boy my Uncle Neddy had read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, straight through three times? Even as a child, I never quite believed this, but she was so utterly convinced that perhaps it really was true. It was the thing for children to do. Little Edward had also been a great text-memorizer and hymn-singer, and this much I did believe because when I knew him he often quoted texts, and not the well-known ones that everybody quoted, either; and he sang in the church choir. He also said grace before meals. Rather, he read grace. His memory for texts apparently didn't go that far. He had a little black book, printed in black on yellowish paper, with “artistic” red initial letters at the top and middle of each page, that gave two graces for every day in the year. This he held just under the edge of the table, and with his head down read the grace for that day and meal to his family, in a small, muffled voice. The little book was so worn with use that the pages were loose. Occasionally a few would fall out onto the floor and have to be retrieved when grace was over, while my little cousin Billy (Uncle Neddy's youngest child, a year or two younger than I was) and I, if I happened to be present, rolled our eyes at each other and giggled. My grandparents rather disapproved of their son for using a book. After all, my grandfather thriftily said the same grace every time, year in, year out, at all our regular meals. “Oh Lord,” it began, “we have reasons to thank Thee”—but this sounded like “raisins,” to me. (But then, at this time I also confused “as we forgive our debtors” with “taters,” a word I'd heard used humorously for “potatoes.”) However, if we had company to dinner or “tea,” my grandfather was perfectly capable of producing a longer, more grateful one, or even making up one of his own to suit the occasion.

Until age or drink had spoiled it, Uncle Neddy had a very nice baritone voice, and Sundays when he was well enough to go to church he appeared in the back row of the choir. On those days he wore a navy blue suit and a hard collar, a dark blue satin tie with a red stripe, and a stickpin with a small, dead diamond in it, much like the white highlight in his left eye that I am contemplating right now.