On one of our visits we were taken upstairs in Dona Alice’s own elevator, to a panelled library and shown various copies of the book, the original of the letter from Bernanos, and some old photographs. By then it had been settled that I was to do the translation and I had hoped they might have some photographs of Diamantina and the people in the diary. They did have a few, but in poor condition. One was of Dona Alice’s old home in the Old Cavalhada: plastered stone, two-storied, severe, with a double door opening onto a wide stoop. I said that I would like to get a copy of it for the book, but Dona Alice and Dona Sarita said Oh no, not that house, suggesting that I use a picture of Dona Alice’s present house on the Lagôa in Rio. I’m not sure that my arguments for using the old photographs of Diamantina ever quite convinced them.
Diamantina is in the state of Minas Gerais (General Mines) and mineiros, miners, as the people who come from there are called, have the reputation for being shrewd and thrifty. There is a saying that the mineiro eats out of an open drawer, ready to close it quickly if unexpected company shows up. Dona Alice’s hospitality belied this legend, but once when Lota de Macedo Soares went to see her she found Dona Alice seated in the upstairs hall darning linen, and was rather taken aback to be asked severely if she didn’t employ her time on such chores when she was at home.
The diaries, I found, had been cut short where they now end by Dr. Brant because the next year marks his own appearance in them, and his acceptance as a suitor. I feel it is a pity he so firmly omits every incident of their courtship. By the time she was seventeen, “Helena” had already received five proposals of marriage from “foreign” miners living in Diamantina. Her girl cousins and friends had been reduced to hinting to her that if she didn’t want any of her suitors perhaps she would let them have them. She had indeed become what she admits to yearning to be in her diary: “the leading girl of Diamantina.” In true Brazilian fashion she chose a Brazilian and a cousin and at eighteen married Dr. Augusto Mario, whose family had been prominent in Diamantina since the eighteenth century. I am sure she has never for a moment regretted turning down those other offers, and that this is one of those rare stories that combine worldly success and a happy ending.
One story she told us, not in the book, was about the first time she received a serious compliment from one of the rejected suitors and at last became convinced that she was pretty, really pretty. She said that she had sat up in bed studying her face, or what she could see of it by the light of a candle, in a broken piece of looking-glass, all night long.
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Dr. Brant has provided the following information about “Helena Morley’s” English background:
“The family name is really Dayrell. Dona Alice’s grandfather, Dr. John Dayrell, studied medicine in London. He married a Miss Alice Mortimer, the daughter of an Irish Protestant, Henry Mortimer, who was, or had been, a government official in Barbados, where he also had a sugar-cane plantation producing sugar and rum. His children were educated in London, and it was there that Alice Mortimer met and married Dr. John Dayrell.
“Dr. Dayrell left England between 1840 and 1850 to serve as physician to a gold mining concern at Morro Velho [Old Hill] belonging to the famous English São João del Rey Mining Company. A short while later there was a flood in the mine, and work came to a halt. The other officials went back to England, but Dr. Dayrell, who had a ‘weak chest,’ remained in Brazil and went to live in Diamantina, a town 5,000 feet high and famous for its fine climate.
“In Diamantina he established himself as a doctor, acquired a fazenda [farm or country-seat] near town, and practised medicine for about 40 years. He and his wife were the only Protestants in the town. He had eight children, two born in England and the rest in Diamantina.”
Richard Burton, in Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil (Tinsley Brothers, London, 1869), speaks of meeting Dr. Dayrell in 1867, and also Felisberto Dayrell, the real name of “Helena Morley’s” father, who was even then at work mining diamonds, as he is later, throughout the pages of his daughter’s diary.
Diamantina
Like most children, Helena Morley seems to have taken her surroundings and the scenery of the region where she lived very much for granted. There are few direct references to them in Minha Vida de Menina. She does speak of the streams where she and her sister and brothers take baths, or catch the most fish, of places where there are wildflowers and fruits, or where she can set her bird-traps. And she says a good many times that she likes “the country better than the city,” the “city” being, of course, the tiny provincial town of Diamantina. But whatever love of nature she has seems part utilitarian and part, the greater part, sheer joy at not being in school.
However, what impresses the occasional traveller who visits Diamantina these days first of all is its wild and extraordinary setting. Diamantina, the highest town in Brazil, is about 200 miles northeast of Belo Horizonte, the modern capital of Minas Gerais, a state bigger than Texas. At the time of the diary the railway had not yet been put through; now, sixty years later, trains still run but are already outmoded for passengers, and a once-a-day plane makes the trip from the capital in a little less than an hour.
I went there in May, when the worst of the rains are over but roads are supposedly not yet too dusty. After leaving Belo Horizonte the plane flies higher and higher, the land below grows rockier and rockier, wilder and more desolate; not a sign of life is to be seen. A high sea of waves and crests of steely gray rock, eroded and fragmented, appears; the rolling land between is covered with greenish grass, but barely covered. There are unexpected streams among the rocks; slender waterfalls fall into small black pools or the streams fan out glittering over beds of white sand. Never a village nor a house; only hundreds of the pock marks, or large pits, of old gold and diamond mines, showing red and white.
The plane comes down on a bare, slightly swelling field. There is nothing to be seen but a long red dust-cloud settling behind it, an open shed with names and comic heads splashed on it in black paint, and a wretched little house with a baby and a few hens against a ragged washing strung on a barbed-wire fence. But the air is crisp and delicious and the horizon is rimmed all around with clear-etched peaks of rock. The three or four passengers descend, immediately feeling that they are up and exclaiming about the change in temperature. There is no sign of Diamantina. The highest peak of rock, to the northeast, is the mountain of Itambé, sharp and deceptively near.
A lone taxi drives to town. A church tower suddenly appears between the brown-green waves of grass and the wilder, broken waves of gigantic rocks; then other church towers, and then almost the whole of the red-tiled cluster of roofs comes into sight at once. The town climbs one steep hill, extends sidewise over a lower one and down the other side. The highway enters from above along the line of the railway, passing under the striped arm of a police “barrier.”
There are sixteen churches, most of them diminutive, no more than chapels; the Cathedral is new and very ugly. The famous churches of the gold-mining town of Ouro Prêto are small, too, but with their baroque façades trimmed with green soapstone, their heavy curves and swirls and twin mustard-pot towers, they are opulent and sophisticated, while the little churches of Diamantina are shabby, silent, and wistful. For one thing, although they are built of stone, plastered and painted white, the window and door frames are of wood, in dark blues, reds, or greens, or combinations of all three colors. Ornamentation is skimpy or nonexistent, and belfries or clock-towers are square. The comparative poverty of the town is shown in the way, once the walls were up, the rest of the façade and the tower were simply constructed of boards and painted white to match the stone. Because of the steepness of the streets there is often a flight of stone steps at an angle across the front and off one side, and some churches are still fenced in by high old blue or red picket fences, giving them a diffident, countrified appearance.