Prose (30 page)

Then Uncle Neddy bought a model-T Ford. There were very few cars in the village then; the family who had driven the coach to the railroad station, four miles off, for years and years, had been the first to acquire one, and there were only two or three more. Uncle Neddy got his Ford somehow, and the younger daughter, fifteen or so, with long curls just like Mary Pickford's, drove it hell-for-leather, expertly. Perhaps she drove her father the fifteen miles to town, in no time, to buy rum—anyway, he got it, and when he didn't have it, there was another unbelievable overheard remark, that he drank
vanilla.

Meanwhile, the shop was changing. First, there were many more things for sale and less and less work seemed to be done at the old black-and-silver glinting workbench. There were many household effects that came readymade: can openers, meat grinders, mixing spoons, gray-mottled enamel “sets” of saucepans. There were more fishing rods and then gorgeous barbed fish lures, displayed on cardboard stands. The stoves were now all, or almost all, white enamel, and there were white enamel kitchen sinks, and faucets, and electric water pumps. The chewing tobacco with the little tin apple in the corner was still on sale, but next to it one day there were chocolate bars: Moirs and Cadbury's, with nuts, without nuts, or in little sections with a different cream in each. These were magnetic, of course, but they cost five cents, or ten cents, and Billy and I had rarely had more than a penny to buy anything in our lives. Uncle Neddy was as kind to us, to any children, as always. He would take a whole ten-cent bar, divide it into its little squares, and share it out. A punchboard appeared, two or three of them. For ten cents one could punch out a little rolled-up paper with a number on it and, with luck, the number would win a whole big box of chocolates or a tin of biscuits. It was still a fascinating place to go, but not nearly as fascinating as when Uncle Neddy had been making tin mugs and soldering.

Then I went away to live in the States and came back just for the summers. Perhaps two or three years went by, I'm not sure, but one summer a gasoline pump appeared in front of the shop. Cars stopped to be filled up; not very often, but there were more of them, although the road was still dirt and gravel, “crowned” in the middle. Billy and I competed with each other as to which one had seen the most and the biggest trucks. If a truck stopped for gasoline, we rushed to examine it: red or blue paint, decorated with white lines or gold lines, with arrowheads, what load it was carrying, and where it was going. Sometimes Uncle Neddy poured water into its radiator from one of his own watering cans while it stood steaming and trembling. Another summer, and the road had been covered with tar. The red house still had an unpainted wing, its “new” shingles already gray. Another summer the Governor General drove through and stopped to make a speech in front of Uncle Neddy's shop. Another little girl, not me, curtsied and presented a large bouquet of flowers to his wife, Lady Bing.

Although there are more, these are all the memories I want to keep on remembering—I couldn't forget them if I tried, probably—and remembering clearly, as if they had just happened or were still happening. My grandfather dies. My grandmother goes to live with a daughter in Quebec. I go away to school, then to college. I come back at longer and longer intervals to Uncle Neddy's village. Once I go fishing with him and he deplores my casting, but, as always, very gently. He grows older—older, thinner, bent, and more unshaven, the sooty bristles mixed with silver. His voice grows weaker, too, and higher pitched. He has stomach ulcers. He is operated on, but won't stop, can't stop drinking—or so I am told. It has taken the form of periodic bouts and an aunt tells me (I'm old enough to be confided in) that “Everyone knows” and that “It will kill him.” However, when he dies it is of something quite different.

The last time I saw him he was very weak and very bent. The eyes of the man who used to lean down to hug and kiss me were now on a level with mine. When I kissed him, the smell was only half the same: rum—he no longer chewed tobacco. I knew, and he said it, that he was “not long for this world.” Aunt Hat had aged, too. The red hair had faded to pink, but her jaw, her freckles, and her disposition were exactly the same. She no longer shooed me out of the house. Now she expressed her feelings by pretending not to see the presents from the States, clamping her jaw tight, and swatting at flies. Some days she refused to speak; others, she spoke—disparagingly, of whatever subject came up. The filling station was owned and manned by others.

*   *   *

I don't believe that Uncle Neddy ever went anywhere in his life except possibly two or three times as far as Boston after his daughters had moved there and married, and I'm not sure of that. And now he is here, on the other side of the Equator, with his little sister, looking like the good boy in an Horatio Alger story: poor, neat, healthy, polite, and by some lucky accident—preventing a banker from having his pocket picked, or catching a runaway horse—about to start out being a “success” in life, and perhaps taking his little sister along with him. He is overdressed for this climate and his cheeks are so pink he must be sweating in his velveteen suit.

I am going to hang them here side by side, above the antique (Brazilian antique) chest of drawers. In spite of the heat and dampness, they look calmly on and on, at the invisible Tropic of Capricorn, at the extravagant rain still blotting out the southern ocean. I must watch out for the mildew that inevitably forms on old canvases in the rainy season, and wipe them off often. It will be the gray or pale-green variety that appears overnight on dark surfaces, like breath on a mirror. Uncle Neddy will continue to exchange his direct, bright-hazel, child's looks, now, with those of strangers—dark-eyed Latins he never knew, who never would have understood him, whom he would have thought of, if he had ever thought of them at all, as “foreigners.” How late, Uncle Neddy, how late to have started on your travels!

1977

BRAZIL

Chapter 1

Recently in Rio de Janeiro one of those “human interest” dramas took place, the same small drama that takes place every so often in New York or London or Rome: a newborn baby was kidnaped from a maternity hospital. Her name was Maria da Conceição, or Mary of the Conception, but the newspapers immediately abbreviated this, Brazilian fashion, to Conceiçãozinha, or “Little Conception.”

Conceiçãozinha made the headlines for a week, and while she did it is safe to say that the country's current inflation, the soaring cost of living, the shifts of power in the government—perhaps even the soccer scores—took second place for most readers.

The hospital staff was questioned. A feebleminded woman wandering in the neighborhood was detained. The police poked into culverts and clumps of weeds and around the
favelas,
Rio's notorious hillside slums. Somehow the kidnaping was kept from the baby's mother, but the young government-worker father was photographed at his desk, in postures of despair. Then, after three days, Conceiçãozinha was found, safe and sound. One of the hospital nurses, who had lost a child of her own by miscarriage shortly before, had stolen her.

*   *   *

So far it all could have happened in New York, London, or Rome. But now the story becomes Brazilian. The white nurse's mulatto lover, owner of a small grocery store, had promised her a house to live in if she had a child, and he had already given her the equivalent of fifty dollars for the baby's layette. So the nurse—determined, she told reporters, “to have a decent place to live in” with “home atmosphere,” and also because she really wanted a baby—concealed her miscarriage and told her lover that the baby would be born on such and such a day. Until then she boarded Conceiçãozinha with her laundress, an old woman living in a
favela
shack. The nurse was arrested as she took them food. The baby was fat and well. The laundress, who could not read, knew nothing of the hubbub in the papers and protested her complete innocence. When the father was told the good news he sobbed and said, “This is the strongest emotion I have ever felt in my life.” He was photographed embracing the police. Conceiçãozinha was taken back to the hospital, where “the doctors were shouting and the nurses weeping.” Three or four hundred people had gathered outside. The swaddled baby was held up to a window, but the crowd screamed, “Show her little face!” So it was shown “to applause and cheers.”

The next day the drama continued on a lower plane but in even more Brazilian style. The two sets of in-laws quarrelled as to which one would have the honor of harboring the child and her real mother first. One grandmother denied that the chief of police had been asked to be Conceiçãozinha's godfather, because “that is always a
family
affair.” And the poor father was faced with fulfilling his
promessas.
If the baby was found alive, he had promised (1) to pay for four Masses; (2) to stop smoking for a year; (3) to give two yard-high wax candles, as well as a life-size wax model of a baby, to the Church of Our Lady of the Penha; and (4) to climb the steps of the same church on his knees, carrying a lighted candle. This 18th-century church perches on top of a weirdly shaped
penha,
or rock, that sticks up out of the plain just north of the city. It is a favorite church for pilgrimages and for the fulfilling of
promessas.
The steps up to it number 365.

*   *   *

The story of Conceiçãozinha contains a surprising amount of information about Brazilian life, manners, and character. Much of it, of course, is what one might expect to find in any Latin American country. Brazilians love children. They are highly emotional and not ashamed of it. Family feeling is very strong. They are Roman Catholics, at least in outward behavior. They are franker than Anglo-Saxons about extramarital love, and they are tolerant of miscegenation. Also—as one would expect in a very poor and in many ways backward country—many people are illiterate; there are feebleminded people at large who in other countries might be in institutions; and hospitals may not always be run with streamlined efficiency. So far it is all fairly predictable.

But there is more to it than that. The story immediately brings to mind one of Brazil's worst, and certainly most shocking, problems: that of infant mortality. Why all this sentimental, almost hysterical, concern over one small baby, when the infant mortality rate in Brazil is still one of the highest in the world? The details of Conceiçãozinha's story are worth examining not only for the interesting light they throw on that contradictory thing, the Brazilian character, but also because the tragic, unresolved problem they present is almost a paradigm of a good many other Brazilian problems, big and small.

First there is the obvious devotion to children. As in other Latin countries, babies are everywhere. Everyone seems to know how to talk to infants or dandle them, and unself-consciously. It is said that two kinds of small business never fail in Brazil, infants' wear shops and toy shops. The poorest workman will spend a disproportionate amount of his salary for a christening dress (or for milk if he happens to know it is vital to his child's health). Parents love to dress up their offspring; the children's costume balls are an important part of Carnival every year throughout the country.

In Catholic Brazil there is no divorce and no legalized birth control, and large families are the rule. Sometimes families run to twenty or more, and five or six children seems to be average. Brazil is a very young country; more than 52 per cent of the population is under nineteen years old. Early marriage is normal, and a baby within a year is taken for granted. Children are almost always wanted—the first three or four at least—and adored.

And yet the infant mortality rate stays appallingly high. In the poorest and most backward regions of the great northeast bulge and the Amazon basin, it is as high as 50 per cent during the first year of life, sometimes even higher. The cities of Recife and Rio, with their large
favelas,
are two of the worst offenders. During the three days when Conceiçãozinha was hidden in the washerwoman's shack, and survived, it is a safe guess that more than sixty babies died in Rio.

*   *   *

Most of this tragic waste of life is due to malnutrition. But often the malnutrition is due not so much to actual lack of food as to ignorance, a vicious circle in which poverty creates ignorance which then creates more poverty. In Rio, for example, there are many worthy free clinics. But fine doctors have been known to resign after working in them for years; they can no longer endure seeing the same children brought in time after time, sicker, weaker, and finally dying because the parents are too ignorant, or too superstitious, to follow simple instructions.

The masses of poor people in the big cities, and the poor and not-so-poor of the “backlands,” love their children and kill them with kindness by the thousands. The wrong foods, spoiled foods, worm medicines, sleeping syrups—all exact a terrible toll on the “little angels,” in paper-covered, gilt-trimmed coffins, blue for boys and pink for girls.