Fridays with Sylvia

Every Friday afternoon, B. and I read "The Bell Jar" at her house. To get there, I take the subway, and then the bus towards Moema, and then it´s a fifteen-minute walk up a quiet, leafy street. The trees are enormous and their leaves are viscous and dark green. Their oversized roots break the cement and colonize the sidewalk. When I ring the bell at the large brick house, the heavy front door opens with an automatic twitch; I am greeted by a big orange dog with silky hair and moist brown eyes. Then B. appears, barefoot, wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans, her long, glossy brown hair pulled back in a loose bun. She takes me into the dim living room, I ask for a glass of water, or a coke if I need caffeine, and we sit at the dining table.

B. is seventeen. She needs to keep up her English while she prepares for the vestibular, the exam every teen needs to take to get into university. In the preparatory course, the cursinho, she is made to read countless articles in English about current affairs and economics, and she has to write down dozens of vocabulary words, and work through pages and pages of multiple choice questions.

I want to find a way of motivating her, to help her find a taste, if not a passion, for English. She is exhausted by her endless studying, she doesn't exercise anymore, she barely has a social life. This strong, pretty girl, shut in her house as in a mausoleum, kept away from life. We talk about it. This whole hamster-in-a-wheel situation is only supposed to last for a few months, until she takes the exam, and gets into university, and starts her new life. Which will be all about studying again. But no matter, she says, university life is IT, that is the end point. These months of no-life, they are the means to an end. I decide not to tell her that once she is in college, she will feel like that it, too, is transitory, she will be working towards another end again. And so it will always be, endlessly. But I keep these musings to myself.

She has never heard of Sylvia Plath. I bring her my old, tattered copy of "The Bell Jar", with its brown-gold cover with a dark red rose. I read it for the first time when I was her age, and then read it again during my holidays at the beach in Venezuela this past December. The book spoke to me, more than ever, and I hope it will speak to her too.

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We started a few weeks ago. The reading is excruciatingly slow: we read out loud, taking turns. We stop and savour the images, describe a character, discuss American culture in the 50s. She only reads ten pages between my visits, but remembers the last reading together in detail. We go over the beginning again, trying to decipher something more in it.

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they eletrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

I start talking about the Rosenberg execution. I talk about the Cold War and McCarthyism and the electric chair, and later on I will try to help B. trace a parallel with the electric shocks that the main character, Esther, undergoes to "cure" her of her madness, an extreme medical procedure (short of a lobotomy) that is supposed to tame a young girl´s suffering. We follow a string of Esther´s associations with that summer in New York, and soon I have to explain to B. the word "cadaver", and then explain what it means that the cadaver´s head became something that was carried around on a string, like some "black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar."

These are strong, real, extreme images. They are scary ones, which have none of the saccharine lightness and frivolity of TV shows like OC and Gossip Girls. And I know pretty fast that this read will be a journey, that English has found a new way of creeping into B.´s life unawares, as a series of words that are not what they should be, but are a comparison or an image of something else, always.

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In the book, Esther, who is really Sylvia Plath, is spending the summer working at a women´s magazine (presumably Vogue) alongside eleven other girls. It is a special privilege for smart, overachieving girls, an opportunity to enter the glowing "real life" in New York City, and an opportunity for Esther to show off her writing, albeit in a rather conventional, mundane format.

The girls are lodged in a young ladies´ hotel called Amazon. B. has no idea what an amazon might be besides a river in Brazil. I tell her that an amazon is a woman who cuts off one of her breasts in order to shoot better. I´m not quite sure how and why I come up with this minimalist, graphic explanation of the word. B. is fascinated and horrified at the same time. We wonder whether amazons, who are supposedly more apt to shoot with an intrinsic part of themselves missing, use their bow and arrow to hunt or to play at war. I recall the jingoist feel to the word, and decide that amazons are really warriors.

I make B. summarize what we have read so far, I ask her to tell me what we know of Esther, to talk about how Esther feels in New York. We look for passages that will better express this, lines that anchor Esther´s emotions to the physical world.

There is the heat of summer, and Sylvia´s recurring descriptions of the New York concrete sidewalk. The sidewalk outside hotels and cabs and magazine events, the hot city sidewalk that is so new to Esther, the sidewalk that is always fuming, registering the encounter of heat and moistness and grey, hard matter. When it rains, Esther imagines it must be like the rain in Brazil, the way the fat rain drops hiss when they hit the ground. B. and I stop at this paragraph. I explain the onomatopeia of the hisssssss. And then, another image. This is a sidewalk from which vapors are always "writhing" (I tell B. that usually it is people that writhe, but I cannot go very far with this, as it occurs to me that it is usually lost souls that writhe, in hell).

We have only read three chapters, but we are already immersed in Sylvia's language, in her web of imagery. The book is still fresh in my mind, and the reencounter with its metaphors is all the more delectable when shared with someone else.

We read about Esther´s forray into the pine-pannelled bachelor pad of a dj who dresses like a cowboy, with a plaid shirt and cowboy boots and leather belt. B. laughs about Lenny. We read about Doreen, Esther´s beautiful yet cynical friend. We laugh when we read that Doreen´s breasts "had popped out of her dress and were swinging out like full brown melons as she circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder". B. laughs and laughs, and I am so glad that she is slowly hooking on to the book, that she is reacting to it the way that I did, last Christmas, and over sixteen years ago.

B. reads that Doreen is like an exotic white bird, and I make B. find the passage that describes Doreen´s hair as a big white puff of cotton candy. B. doesn´t know "cottoncandy", I have to tell her that cotton candy is that big sweet thing that is sold in Parque Ibirapuera, and she gets me immediately. I realize that as a child I never tasted cotton candy, I only saw it being sold at that park, and now Doreen´s hair in Sylvia Plath´s book is forever bound to a memory of something forbidden in my childhood, something that always remained an image rather than a taste.

We laugh some more when Esther is at a fancy luncheon where fingerbowls are used (I explain what a fingerbowl is), and Esther recalls her first encounter with a fingerbowl, how she drank the fragrant water inside the fingerbowl, with cherry blossoms and all, thinking it was a clear soup.

We talk about how deep Sylvia is, and yet how funny. "This is real", says B. Yes, she says that "this is real for a lot of people". She thinks it's much better, much more important than "Catcher in the Rye". She gets the language, she gets the experience.

We read that when Sylvia brings a linen napkin to her lips, her lipgloss leaves a stain that "blooms like a heart". I show her with my hands the movement of a flower opening, a flower blossoming. "She is always making comparisons between things", says B. "I mean, she is always using... what do you call it? ... metaphors about things. And then they always remind her of other things, of her past." I am really excited. B. has plunged. B. will be different after reading this. And I, too, am a little different after our Friday read.

I see the thread that images provide in the telling of a story, how they help connect disparate things. I think about how Sylvia is going to help me tell my story.

I go online and fish for quick study notes and interpretations of the book. I find this in "Sparknotes". Why is it that this passage speaks to me so much, why doesn't it feel outdated, why does it seem desperately relevant to my own life, here, now 2009 in Brazil?
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from Sparknotes:

"The Restricted Role of Women in 1950s America

Esther's sense of alienation from the world around her comes from the expectations placed upon her as a young woman living in 1950s America. Esther feels pulled between her desire to write and the pressure she feels to settle down and start a family. While Esther's intellectual talents earn her prizes, scholarships, and respect, many people assume that she most wants to become a wife and mother. The girls at her college mock her studiousness and only show her respect when she begins dating a handsome and well-liked boy. Her relationship with Buddy earns her mother's approval, and everyone expects Esther to marry him. Buddy assumes that Esther will drop her poetic ambitions as soon as she becomes a mother, and Esther also assumes that she cannot be both mother and poet.

Esther longs to have adventures that society denies her, particularly sexual adventures. She decides to reject Buddy for good when she realizes he represents a sexual double standard. He has an affair with a waitress while dating Esther, but expects Esther to remain a virgin until she marries him. Esther understands her first sexual experience as a crucial step toward independence and adulthood, but she seeks this experience not for her own pleasure but rather to relieve herself of her burdensome virginity. Esther feels anxiety about her future because she can see only mutually exclusive choices: virgin or whore, submissive married woman or successful but lonely career woman. She dreams of a larger life, but the stress even of dreaming such a thing worsens her madness."