Ruy watched us. But we liked the church very much and said so. He looked greatly relieved. The church danced in the light. I climbed on a stone wall, the remains of another abandoned house, to get a photograph of the whole thing, if possible, but there was nothing high enough to take it all in. It started to rain. I got a picture, jumped down — a dozen people had gathered to watch me, all looking scandalized — tripped, and tore my petticoat, which fell down below my skirt. The rain poured.
The others were all inside the church. It was mostly blue and white — bare, cold, huge, echoing. Little children followed us and ran shouting up and down; Ruy’s little boy joined in. We went out on the second-story galleries, beneath the row of huge whitewashed pillars. You could see a pattern of tile roofs and mango trees through the rain tapestry, red-brown, down to the river, where the masts of ships and boats showed. A battered blue truck ground along below, and the driver came in, too — another friend of Ruy’s.
The sacristan, an old fisherman, appeared. There was little enough to be seen in the sacristry. He went to a cupboard, with the little children pressing close around him and me, crying, “Show her Father! Show her Father!” and he handed me — a bone. A skull. The children reached up for it. He patted the skull and said yes, that was Father So-and-So, a saint if ever there was one, a really holy man. Never went anywhere, thought of nothing but prayer, meditated and prayed seven hours a day. I thought he was speaking of some forgotten saint of the seventeenth century who had never been properly recognized. No, Father had died two years before. I kept trying to hand the skull back. He was too busy telling me about the final illness, his agonia, his death. It was the most wonderful thing in Vigia. The sacristan put the skull back in the corner of the bare cupboard. It was so dark in the sacristy we could scarcely see.
We went out. Huge thunderclouds rolled back and forth, the river was higher, the tide had turned. All the lights went on in the forsaken plaza, although it was not dark. The pearly, silent, huge church of Vigia had made us all feel somehow guilty at abandoning it once again. The town’s little white houses were turning mauve. In the high, high skies, shafts of long golden beams fell through the thunderclouds. Nature was providing all the baroque grandeur the place lacked. We started back to Belém, and it soon began to get really dark.
* * *
The car didn’t stop all the way home, except once on purpose for gasoline. The trip seemed to take forever and we all fell silent. The little boy fell sound asleep. There wasn’t even a light for miles, and never a car; we met two trucks and overtook two. Our eyes fastened on the slightest light or movement — an oil lamp, like an ancient Greek lamp, on a bicycle; a few people on foot carrying umbrellas.
Then lights. We were coming to Belém. Lights on the mud walls and their political posters and endless slogans, with all the N’s and S’s written backwards. Tall narrow doorways, the murky light of an oil lamp, warm, yellow and black. A man carrying a lantern — oh, he’s leading a cow and a calf. Goats. Look out, a zebu! We almost hit him, a high bony gray wall across the road. He lowered his horns sharply and snorted softly.
Suddenly we are in Belém. Huge black mango trees. Cars bumping over the cobblestones, bumpety-bump. How very, very bright this dim city can look! We ache in the dark. The church at Vigia, huge, white, alone on our consciences, has become a ghost story.
The hotel at last. It is almost nine o’clock. We invite Ruy in for a drink, at least. He comes, but will take only another cafezinho. The dingy café looks brilliant. The young literary men are there, with their rolled umbrellas, moving hands and black neckties, their hair slicked back. They all greet Ruy. Half asleep, we swallow the coffee and, behind our backs, Ruy pays for it.
1967
Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore
In the first edition of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems of 1951 there is a poem originally called “Efforts and Affection.” In my copy of this book, Marianne crossed out the “and” and wrote “of” above it. I liked this change very much, and so I am giving the title “Efforts of Affection” to the whole piece.
I first met Marianne Moore in the spring of 1934 when I was a senior at Vassar College, through Miss Fanny Borden, the college librarian. A school friend and the friend’s mother, both better read and more sophisticated in their literary tastes than I was, had told me about Marianne Moore’s poetry several years earlier. I had already read every poem of Miss Moore’s I could find, in back copies of The Dial, “little magazines,” and anthologies in the college library. I hadn’t known poetry could be like that; I took to it immediately, but although I knew there was a volume of hers called Observations, it was not in the library and I had never seen it.
Because Miss Borden seems like such an appropriate person to have introduced me to Marianne Moore, I want to say a little about her. She was the niece of the Fall River Lizzie Borden, and at college the rumor was that Lizzie Borden’s lurid career had had a permanently subduing effect on Miss Fanny Borden’s personality. She was extremely shy and reserved and spoke in such a soft voice it was hard to hear her at all. She was tall and thin; she always dressed in browns and grays, old-fashioned, muted, and distinguished-looking. She also rode a chainless bicycle. I remember watching her ride slowly up to the library, seated very high and straight on this curiosity, which somehow seemed more lady-like than a bicycle with a chain, and park it in the rack. (We didn’t padlock bicycles then.) Once, after she had gone inside, I examined the bicycle, which was indeed chainless, to see if I could figure out how it worked. I couldn’t. Contact with the librarian was rare; once in a long while, in search of a book, one would be sent into Miss Borden’s office, shadowy and cave-like, with books piled everywhere. She weighed down the papers on her desk with smooth, round stones, quite big stones, brought from the seashore, and once when my roommate admired one of these, Miss Borden said in her almost inaudible voice, “Do you like it? You may have it,” and handed it over, gray, round, and very heavy.
One day I was sent in to Miss Borden’s office about a book, I no longer remember what. We continued talking a little, and I finally got up my courage to ask her why there was no copy of Observations by that wonderful poet Marianne Moore in the Vassar library. She looked ever so gently taken aback and inquired, “Do you like Marianne Moore’s poems?” I said I certainly did, the few I’d been able to find. Miss Borden then said calmly, “I’ve known her since she was a little girl,” and followed that with the question that was possibly to influence the whole course of my life: “Would you like to meet her?” I was painfully — no, excruciatingly — shy and I had run away many times rather than face being introduced to adults of much less distinction than Marianne Moore, but I immediately said, “Yes.” Miss Borden said that she would write to Miss Moore, who lived in Brooklyn, and also that she would be glad to lend me her copy of Observations.