Fervor and effervescence
The life you make for yourself is familiar, small and comfortable, but when it starts to become overwhelming, pointed, and narrow, you have to look for a change. You have to throw out the old one and make a new one with orange sunsets, wide laughter and vertigo in your heart. Elizabeth Bishop left her dull and sterile comfort zone and set sail in search of new lands where she could plant renewed emotions, ones that would restore meaning to her stagnant life. She planned a cruise that would take her to different ports and what she didn't know was that she would spend more than ten years on the first one.
Rio de Janeiro is a vibrant and hot city. The rhythm of the carioca blood echoes in the streets and in its people. Nature sneaks through the windows of daily life with drums and whistles and invades everything. Bishop disembarked from the ship that brought her from New York on November 30, 1951, meticulously dressed in a pleated skirt and silk shirt of nineteenth-century inspiration, with her white skin unfriendly to the sun and her English manners well assumed from the cradle. Not only did she feel the humid heat of the tropics on her face the moment she stepped on dry land, but also the clash of two universes that she would never have conceived on the same planet.
The toasted skins glistening with sweat, the warm greetings and the moist language worked a morbid discomfort in her, making her wish as strongly to return to her cabin as to enter that tumult of dancing bodies.
That same city is the one that welcomes me today, as I arrive as a tourist ready to solve a familiar puzzle. I lean my forehead against the window of the car that takes me downtown and try to see her, sad, white and ancient, immersing herself in that sensual, insolent and colorful land. I can't stop a smile from tugging at my lips. Elizabeth Bishop was looking for a more exciting life and she didn't know it would enter so quickly through her transparent, thirsty skin. She didn't know she was so permeable.
I walk through the door of what will be my room for a few days and approach the window. A sweet woman's voice comes up from the street. She sings an old song I once heard in the living room of my grandparents' house in Barcelona. Her again, my grandmother leading the way, leaving bread crumbs and giving me shelter. I know that 67 years ago she was here, letting the city work its welcome just as it does now with me.
I feel it breathe. The arteries of its streets carry the nutrients of culture, which with its fervor and effervescence make it unique and unrepeatable. Who knows, maybe a moment or an idea is hidden in its streets that will change my life as it has changed theirs.
