At last her efforts bore fruit. Burton
was appointed to Santos, in Brazil, where Isabel might also go. They made their
farewell rounds and Isabel learnt Portuguese while she packed up. At Lisbon
three-inch cockroaches seethed about the floor of their room. Isabel was caught
off her guard, but Burton was brutal," I suppose you think you look very pretty,
standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures." Isabel’s
reaction was typical. She reflected that of course he was right; if she had to
live in a country full of such creatures, and worse, she had better pull herself
together. She got down and started lashing out with a slipper. In two hours she
had got a bag of ninety-seven.
On arrival in Brazil she found
that Portuguese fauna had been nothing. Now there were spiders, as big as crabs.
In the matter of tropical diseases it seems to have ranked with darkest Africa;
there were slaves, too, and in a society where men drank brandy for breakfast,
no one condemned the habit of chaining mad slave to the roof-top as a sort of
domestic pet, or clown. There was cholera too, and the less dramatic but
agonizing local boils, "so close you could not put a pin through
them."
The Emperor found the new Consul and his wife a great
addition to the country, and once again Burton’s wonderful conversation held his
audience spellbound. But chic Brazilians looked askance at Isabel wading
barefoot in the streams, bottling snakes, painting and doing up a ruined chapel,
or accompanying Richard on expeditions to the virgin interior. There were
gymnastics and cold baths, and Mass and market," helping Richard with
Literature" (his writing was always in capitals to her) and the wearisome pages
of Foreign Office reports she was always so loyal and dutiful in copying out for
him.
About now, a note of sadness creeps into Isabel’s letters
home. We sense an immense loneliness behind the courage with which she always
faced life. Richard was going through a particularly trying phase. The explorer
was dying hard, strangled in office tape. He would cut loose and disappear for
weeks at a time, returning as bitter and restless as when he left. It was she
who held everything together and kept up the facade, both with the Foreign
Office, who were constantly making the most awkward enquiries, and the local
society, who were equally curious. There were few diversions for her.
Richard preferred discussing metaphysics and astronomy with the Capuchin
monks to going to the local dances. She was learning now to be self-sufficient,
to manage, unobtrusively, the practical side of their lives, and to rough it,
both physically and emotionally. She had to combine the shadow-like devotion of
the Oriental woman with a fighting spirit seldom found in women, and certainly
not in most Victorian women. |
