Brazil on the Move

Travels with a Studebaker

I first landed off an airplane in Rio back in 1948 when I was on a South American tour to do some articles for Life. Bill and Connie White, who were then running the Life-Time bureau in that part of the world, let out that they were starting next morning to drive their Studebaker up into the hinterland of Minas Gerais (the state of “assorted mines”), which lies to the north of the mountain barrier that hems in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the great bay of Guanabara. I snatched at the opportunity to take a peep into the back country before getting tangled up with the capital city. Their faces certainly fell when I asked them if they would mind if I came along. They’d been planning a private expedition on their own. They mumbled a reluctant yes. As it turned out the trip was a success all around. None of us ever laughed so much in our lives.

The roads were rough. The hotels were worse. At a place named Conselheiro Lafaiete the only lodging we could find seemed to be built over a railroad roundhouse. Smoke and steam from the engines occasionally came up through the floor. In one room there was an open manhole that threatened to drop you into some black pit below. We’d barely got settled round a rickety table in the bare loft and were pouring ourselves out a drink when the electric lights went off. That meant every light in town. The streets were deep in mud. To find the local restaurant we had to grope our way along the walls in the dark.

The eating place turned out to be a sort of saloon lit by kerosene lamps. There was a rough noisy crowd, railroad section hands mostly. At that time, in spite of my Portuguese name, I was still trying to communicate with people in Spanish. In Conselheiro Lafaiete nobody understood a word, but they didn’t show the slightest surprise or annoyance at having three foreigners come crawling in out of the dark. They made us feel at home. The meal was mostly beans and rice and those not of the best, but the proprietor served up the dishes with a sort of flourish that made them seem better than they were. We got the feeling we were eating quite a blue ribbon dinner. We had a wonderful evening. By the time we made our way back to our uncertain couches in the self-styled hotel we felt we knew something about the people there and that they knew something about us. Don’t ask me how. We’d made friends.

It’s always been like this. I can’t help a sort of family feeling for the Brazilians. Perhaps the fact that I had a Portuguese grandfather helps account for it. When people ask me why I keep wanting to go to Brazil, part of the answer is that it’s because the country is so vast and so raw and sometimes so monstrously beautiful; but it’s mostly because I find it easy to get along with the people.

We turned off the road to see the baroque pilgrimage church at Congonhas do Campo. The shrines at Congonhas are full of the work of a very local sculptor known as Aleijadinho (the little cripple), who lived in the late eighteenth century. Working a soft soapstonelike rock, Aleijadinho developed an extreme form of baroque expressionism. In the carving of the Stations of the Cross along the steep steps that lead up to the main church, and in the saints and martyrs of its gravely balanced façade, he pushed sentimentality beyond bathos, into a realm of ecstasy reminiscent of El Greco’s painting. Joy, sadness, pain, always pain, come through with physical intensity. Some of the stone saints seem, as certain miracleworking images are supposed to do, to weep real tears.

The steps that led up to the church were thronged with countrypeople who had vowed the pilgrimage. Some climbed on their knees. Along the fringes sat beggars and old men and cowled women selling fruit and trinkets and little meat pies. The faces of the pilgrims seemed to me to wear the expressions that the little cripple had carved into his stone figures. The old beggars particularly had a look of being fresh from Aleijadinho’s chisel. These seemed deeply sentimental people. It was easy for them to give way to feeling sorry for themselves and for others. The twin faucets of sorrow and joy were right within reach. Their joy in their pilgrimage lay in the dolefulness of it.

At the foot of the steps the cobbled street was encumbered by market stalls and flanked by little bars and eating houses. A quiet jollity reigned. Men and women greeted friends and neighbors with broad smiles. Children, here as everywhere in Brazil very much indulged, scuttled about underfoot. In a smell of cane brandy and sizzling grease and charcoal fires and spoiled fruit crushed between the cobbles people were enjoying themselves. Flies zoomed joyously about. Burros and mules tied to the walls were being fed small swatches of hay. Radios blared out sambas. From inside a doorway came the sound of a guitar. In spite of a good deal of filth and ragged poverty, there was a sense of wellbeing, of a sort of wellintentioned innocence about the people of the back country. I don’t know how much the pilgrims looked at Aleijadinho’s sculptures, or what they thought of them if they did, but it was obvious that the little cripple was their man: it was their feelings he had carved so painfully into the stone.

Ouro Prêto the ancient capital of the province of Minas Gerais was quite different. There the colonial baroque took on a stately and imperial air. It was a city of long façades and irregularshaped squares with stony mountains at the end of every vista. Though sprung from a different goldrush and from a different culture, and artfully built of carved stone and stucco instead of being knocked together out of pine boards, Ouro Prêto had the mining town look as unmistakably as a place like Virginia City in our Sierras. Now it is a city of schools and museums. Students from the mining college give life to the streets. We found Niemeyer’s new hotel magnificently unfinished. Chill mountain airs romped through the corridors. The covers were scanty and the beds were of unforgettable hardness.

On the way back the Whites and I spent a cosy night in a nineteenth century sort of family hotel in a textile town called Juiz de Fora, which means something like “the law west of the Pecos”; and then returned over the rainy mountains of the coastal range to the cosmopolitan comforts of Copacabana. We had become fast friends. We couldn’t quite imagine why we had been having such a good time.

Sespe: An Alliance That Worked

My next expedition was to the Rio Doce.

When a British company built the Rio Doce Railroad to bring out the iron ore from the stripmine at Itabira in the high mountains of Minas Gerais, its construction vied as a mankiller with the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad in the far western reaches of Amazonas, which was said to have cost a life for every tie that was laid. Now the Special Public Health Service, organized with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, in the good neighbor days of World War II, had turned the valley into a health resort, so the story went. I arranged to go see.

It was a rough trip. Almost anywhere else in the world the trip might have seemed uncomfortably rough, but the good humor of my companions and the general tendency to take things as they came, turned it into a pleasant outing.

In those days no matter where you were going from Rio you arrived at Santos Dumont airport before dawn and stood around drinking coffee while the plane crews collected and prepared in their leisurely Brazilian way for the takeoff. Dr. Penido, who was at that time in charge of the Rio Doce Health Service, turned up just in time to insist on paying for my coffee. A complete stranger got ahead of me with a coin when I tried to buy a newspaper. Our first stop on the flight north was in a scorched meadow near a sunflattened little town with redtiled roofs under coconut palms. The passengers piled out on the runway to stretch their legs and clustered round an old man selling green coconuts with straws stuck in to drink the water from. By the time I’d fished some money out of my pocket to pay for my coconut, the steward had already settled for it. Muito obrigado. A little embarrassing, this Brazilian hospitality, but it does make a foreigner feel they are glad to have him there.

Vitória, the capital of the State of Espírito Santo and the shipping port for the Itabira ore, turned out to be on the flank of a rocky island. First thing we were all bunched up for a photograph on the terrace of a clubhouse built on the ruins of the fort which used to guard the harbor’s narrow mouth. More Public Health Service doctors and a couple of Americans who worked for the Rio Doce Railroad had met us at the airstrip. Now we were confronted with the salutations of the local newspaper editor and of a group of townspeople.

It was Sunday and the sun was bright and the bay was blue and the men wore shining white suits. Inside the clubhouse young people were dancing the samba. While his photographer was crouching and peering the newspaper editor pointed out to me some old prostrate cannon rusting on the ledge below the clubhouse terrace. In the seventeenth century, he said, the Dutch had tried to take Vitória and the defenders had stretched cables from this fort to the granite shore opposite and had sunk a Dutch man-of-war and saved the city for Brazil. It was in this war against the Dutch that Brazilian nationality first came into being. His chest puffed out and he strutted like a bantam as he turned to mug the camera.

The sun was hot and the breeze off the sea was cool. After the shutter clicked, we stood a moment looking out, over the dancing blue waves of the harbor hemmed in by hills, at the redtiled roofs of the brick and stucco town and the small freighters tied up to the wharves and the yellow bulk of the oredocks opposite. There were gulls. A few dark man-of-war birds skimmed overhead.

Was this the mouth of the Rio Doce? I asked. Good Lord no, the mouth of the Rio Doce was miles away to the north. Vitória was the port for the Rio Doce Railroad down from the mines which has to climb out of the valley over a mountain range to get to it. The Rio Doce emptied into a shallow delta and had no decent harbor at its mouth. Everybody began to explain at once that the historical impediment to development in southern and central Brazil had from colonial days been that you always had to climb a mountain range to get into the interior. The iron ore deposits up in the central part of Minas Gerais had been known and worked since the beginning of Brazil, but it was only now that large scale shipment was in sight. In the early days hostile Indians blocked the use of the waterlevel route up the Rio Doce into the mining country. Then it had been malaria … “But the main impediment is bureaucracy,” one of the engineers interrupted as we climbed into the car to go into town to lunch, “Brazilian bureaucracy.”

Brazilian bureaucracy, someone explained from the back seat, was a little special because of the horror of productive work of the literate Brazilian. One of the evils of the Portuguese heritage. No use fussing now about the historical causes but the fact remained that the sort of people who were brought up to become public servants had no practical knowledge of any of the processes of production. The old habit of wearing a long fingernail on the little finger had been the symbol of the educated class that had never done any physical work and never intended to do any. So the Brazilian bureaucrats’ notions of production were purely theoretical. This was true more or less of all Latin countries. In Brazil a certain social democracy did occasionally narrow the gulf between the illiterate barefoot producer and the man at the office desk, but it was wide all the same. In the States we suffered from bureaucracy too, but the man at the desk had maybe worked as a section hand on the railroad summers when he was in school, or at least he went home and stoked his own furnace and mowed his own lawn. In most of South America you came out of school belonging to a different race from the man who hoed your garden.

By that time we had arrived at the already shabby modern-style building where the Special Public Health Services, known to everybody as Sespe, had central offices for the Rio Doce region.

Going up in the elevator Dr. Penido explained sadly, in his low rather singsong tones, about the building. It had been built as a hospital. A modern hospital was very much needed in Vitória, but the money had run out and all that had come of it had been a small private clinic on the lower floor. The rest was rented out for offices. That was the sort of thing his service was determined to avoid. Sespe never entered into a project unless the funds were on hand not only to complete it but to maintain it.

Did I know the history of Sespe? I nodded.

I had spent some time in the main office in Rio where I had found the same low tones, the same frankness and modesty, talking to Dr. Candou, then its Brazilian chief, and Dr. Cambell, who represented the State Department’s Institute of Inter-American Affairs.

Although Brazil had a public health service back in the fifties of the last century, before the United States in fact, that service fell into bureaucratic lethargy, along with many other useful organizations set up by Pedro II’s imperial administration, under the republican spoils system. There was a revival under Oswaldo Cruz, the Brazilian Walter Reed; but the new generation of Brazilian public health doctors got their training during the worldwide battle of the Rockefeller Foundation against yellow fever, and in the war of extermination against the gambiae mosquito in the eastern bulge during the period of the Second World War. Before DDT they used arsenic and pyrethrum. These campaigns resulted in the only cases known to medical history of the complete eradication of a species. The Aedes mosquito which carried yellow fever was eliminated in Brazil, and the gambiae which carried pernicious malaria.

Then in 1942 in the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Major General George C. Dunham, the author of a famous textbook on public health, was sent down from Washington to help Latin America set up a health program. He had experience in the Philippines in inducing local governing bodies to come in on public health programs and was convinced that a health organization to be effective had to be based on the cooperation of the people themselves. That was the genesis of the Sespe idea. Most of the Brazilian staff obtained their practical education in the field under the Rockefeller organization and their theoretical training at public health centers in the States.

We were standing in the empty office looking at a map of the valley tacked up on the wall with glassheaded pins in various colors indicating the different services.

“To produce an island of public health in each place we work,” said Dr. Penido, “first we have to build privies for the people. You see we start from zero in this country. Then we give them pure water.”

Monty Montanare pricked up his ears at that. Monty was a lanky young American engineer with a long North Italian nose, a graduate of the Seabees in the Aleutians and on Guam. Building water systems was his business. “Don’t touch the water in Vitória” he admonished me gruffly. “Once we get in the valley you can drink all you want.”

Monty seemed to be executive director of the expedition. After a glance at his wrist watch he announced it was time to eat; he’d ordered the linecar for three. After a tremendous Brazilian luncheon, which started with salad and coldcuts, and proceeded through steak and rice and chicken and beans to culminate in roast pork smothered in fried eggs, Monty shepherded us into two automobiles and we were driven across the iron bridge to the railroad station on the mainland.

The linecar of course hadn’t arrived yet, though it was after three, so we roamed around looking at the old wood-burning locomotives with their funnelshaped stacks, like the locomotives in prints by Currier and Ives, that were shunting the cars in the freightyard, and at the great piles of wood along the tracks. I wondered how many manhours of work it took to cut all that wood up in the hills and to bring it down by oxcart or on the backs of burros or of men to the railroad.

At a church on the shore a ringing of bells had started. The steamboats at the docks across the harbor were blowing their whistles. Down the middle of the stream in the sparkling sunlight came a long string of launches and rowboats decorated with green and yellow streamers. From the shore came cheers and the popping of rockets. Foguetes are part of the Portuguese heritage. It was from China, probably, the early navigators brought home a taste for fireworks. Somewhere a brass band was playing. It was the procession of some saint being carried by water from one shrine to another. Before we had time to find out the name of the saint the line-car had backed in beside the platform.

It was a big green stationwagon sort of vehicle mounted on railroad trucks and driven by a diesel engine. We had to hurry to get off in order to meet the passenger train coming down the singletrack line at the proper siding. First we circled the conical mountain on the track the oretrains used. We stopped over the oredocks. Walter Runge, another American, who worked for the company that was repairing the line, stepped out and picked up a piece of heavy blue and red rock.

“Sixtyeight per cent,” he said. “Just about the richest iron ore in the world. The railroad’s still sketchy. It comes a long way, and it takes a long time, but it gets here. These ore-docks could have been better designed but the ships somehow get loaded. There were times when we wondered if they ever would.”

At the edge of the yards the bucktoothed mulatto driver had to stop the car suddenly to send his black assistant running back to the station to get his orders. The railroad was operated on the old English block system; only one piece of equipment allowed at a time in a block. At last the boy arrived panting with a green slip in his hand and we went off rattling and lurching over the newlaid rails, past bamboo fences and small thatched huts with mud floors and yards planted with scrawny papayas where a few skinny chickens pecked about and dirty children black and brown and grayish white, naked or dressed in rags that barely covered them, rolled and played in the thick dust.

One set of houses, freshly built for railroad workers, stood out along the track neat and white with scrubbed tiled floors.

Immediately the town fell away and we were crossing sunseared savannas that had once been planted in sugarcane and where occasionally the ruins of a stone and adobe fazenda crumbled under a bristling mat of vegetation. The abolition of slavery had made them uneconomical.

Scattered white and gray zebu cattle with big humps grazed on the plain. The railroad swept into bare rocky hills. The hills were scorched and smoldering because this was the season when they burned over the land to plant it when the rains began.

In the valleys there was an occasional ranch house with mud walls and tiled roofs set in a bunch of tattered banana trees. As the evening began to thicken in smoke and dusk the line wound in endless curves up a rocky valley. In the distance blue humped mountains rose from dark rock faces into fantastic cones against the sky.

Walter Runge was a hefty young man from New Jersey who had studied his engineering at Rutgers. He pointed out with a craftsman’s pride the work his outfit had done, straightening curves, eliminating grades, laying new rails, reballasting. He made you feel that this rickety singletrack line into the wilderness was an amusing and capricious toy to be coddled and petted and gradually babied out of its errors and vices.

Night came down on us suddenly. As the car came to a stop on a siding he pointed up into a barely visible tangle of matted trees. “We had a camp up there … All over here is swamps … The place is full of wonderful orchids … Before DDT we had to keep a double payroll because half the men were always down with malaria.”

“Any wild animals?”

“There might be some deer. They claim Espírito Santo is a great place for jaguars but I never saw one … Ticks and chiggers keep you so busy you don’t worry about other wild life.” He started scratching at the very thought of them.

We were waiting for an oretrain to come down. The night was dead silent. A few grasshoppers made a rasping noise in the trees. From away up the line we heard the whistle of the engine and the rattle of the trucks of the orecars coming round the curves.

The doctors were talking about jungle yellow fever that had been found to be carried by the Haemagogus mosquitoes that bred in the little pools of water in the forks of high forest trees. Now that the standard type had been eliminated, the jungle type was the next enemy to be vanquished. People called it the bridegroom’s disease because it was often contracted by young men who went out to clear themselves a piece of land when they married. The yellow fever inspectors kept track of it by watching for the bodies of the little animals that lived in the highest level of the rainforest. If they found a lot of dead monkeys it meant that there was yellow fever about.

The oretrain went slambanging past. After that the line was clear. We crossed the divide and went lurching and jangling through the night round long curves over singing rails until we roared with siren hooting into the main street of a place called Colatina.

There were creamcolored stucco housefronts and stores and cafés lit up theatrically by a string of electric lights.

The local doctors had come to meet us at the station. Abraços and felicidades. We walked to the hotel beside flatcars piled with immense logs of peroba wood. Now this hotel, Dr. Penido was explaining, was an example of how public health worked. I should have seen it a year ago. Now at least the kitchen was clean and the bedrooms and the dining room and bar. I’d be distressed by the toilet but he was working on that. Gradually. Gradually … Keeping a toilet clean was the result of years of education. In the Rio Doce Valley a privy was a monstrous novelty five years ago.

Next morning we were out early walking round the town. Rosy mist hung low over the broad sluggish puttycolored river. The bridge had been built for a railroad that never got completed; battered trucks were coming across it into town and occasionally a cart with whining wheels of solid planking drawn by a majestic pair of humped zebu oxen.

We walked down the cobbled street toward the Health Center. On the way Dr. Penido and Dr. Lavigne, the local chief of public health operations, proudly showed off the market. No rotting piles of garbage as in Rio. The stalls were clean. The vegetables looked freshwashed. The butchershop was screened and the marble tables had just been scrubbed. To be sure somebody had left open the little window in the screen through which the sales were made. Dr. Penido noted the fact philosophically. The next time it would be closed. “Education,” he said in a tone of infinite patience.

The Health Center had an air of quiet gaiety about it. It was an airy little building of gray stone and white stucco, designed I was told by Peter Pfister in the States, with a cool covered patio between the two rows of offices and consulting rooms, where people could wait out of the sun and in the breeze. At one end there was a playground for children. You could see that people enjoyed coming here. Varicolored children were scrambling around on swings and seesaws. People had brought their dogs.

In back was a sample vegetable garden with vigorous rows of lettuce, beets, dill, chicory, carrots, turnips, magnificent tomatoes. Dr. Penido explained that the people of the Rio Doce Valley had forgotten about growing vegetables. Beans and rice and occasionally a small gourd named chu-chú cooked with a strip of sundried beef constituted the daily diet, sprinkled plentifully with dry manioc flour so that you could make the mess into a ball with your fingers and shove it into your mouth. Now, in the town at least, the Public Health Service was cultivating a taste for vegetables among the people. If somebody proved that he could raise a garden he was given free seeds. Education.

The doctors tried to get the schoolchildren into health clubs so that they would interest their parents in sanitation and a wellbalanced diet. If they educated the children, the children would educate their parents. The trouble was that not all the children went to school and, of those who did, the great majority dropped out after the first three years.

In the offices they showed me their filing system. A simple and usable filing system was the crux of the problem. To produce an island of public health where there had been not the faintest notion of it before, you had to keep a record. That was the best thing the Americans had taught them, the Brazilian doctors agreed; a method of keeping a simple and adequate record without bureaucratic clogging. There were cards for every family in town showing its health record and the results of the visits of the district nurse. There were cards for individual patients. There were cards for every butchershop, bakery, bar, restaurant, hotel and boarding house, showing its sanitary record, recommendations made, improvements if any.

“Always,” said Dr. Penido in his quiet drawling voice, “we try to use persuasion … We try to get people to feel they want to improve things themselves. Then when they feel the benefit they become interested.”

As we walked out we passed a row of humble beatenlooking women waiting in line to get free boiled milk or made up formulas for their babies. Some of them had shoes but many of them hadn’t. Their skimpy dresses were none too clean.

“Five years ago,” said Dr. Penido in his low voice, smiling his sad disdainful smile, “they were drinking polluted water out of the river and depositing their excrement in the bushes … We can isolate the lepers. We can cure yaws with about ninety cruzeiros’ worth of penicillin, we can cure hookworm … DDT has malaria on the run. We can vaccinate for diphtheria and smallpox but to have really universal public health in this country we have to produce models that people will copy … sanitary islands.”

As he went out into the street a dark look came over his face, as if somebody had said something that had hurt his feelings. “Now we face tuberculosis,” he said solemnly. It seemed as if TB increased with civilization. When people lived in huts in the crannies of the mountains they didn’t have so much TB. “As we clean up other diseases TB seems to spread.”

Across the street from the Health Center was a very much larger building ornamented with a great deal of carved stone in pompous Manueline style.

“What is that building?” I asked.

Dr. Penido had walked on scowling up the street. Somebody else answered the question. That was the lying-in hospital built by the state of Espírito Santo some years ago. A fine building but the trouble was it never opened. Funds ran out … Another Brazilian project.

We walked back to the station down the main street between stucco walls that glowed in the failing sunlight. At one corner in front of a drygoods store stood a sallow man of middle age with the respectable paunch of a father of a family. All he wore was a fake Indian feather girdle and a feather headdress. He carried a bow and arrow in his hand. Now and then he emitted hoarse fake Indian noises and made wardance steps inside of the drygoods box he stood in. As we passed we noticed that he was barefooted and that the box was full of broken glass. It was some wily Syrian’s idea of how to advertise his cotton prints.

The Triumph of the Oldtime Privy

The valley was murky and hot that morning. Brush fires burned on the mountains on either side. Clearing land for new coffee plantations. The ranks of shrubby shinyleaved dark-green trees I’d been looking at in the hollows of the hills were coffee, the doctors said. In the lower part of the valley the planters were doing very well with cacao; up here it was all coffee. New plantings. Many of the trees were just about to come into bearing. In a few years the Rio Doce would be a great coffeeproducing region … if the world market didn’t glut with coffee. “Brazil is the land of the future,” one of them broke in bitterly.

The linecar jerked and jounced over the rails. At every station teams of zebu oxen, four, five, and six yokes pulling in line, were hauling up the logs of peroba wood from the water’s edge. They strained forward in slow unison in a swirl of red dust. Alongside ran barefoot men and boys the color of the dust steering the oxen with shouts and groans and the touch of their long slender wands.

The river wound broad and sullen under a glaze of heat between rocky islets. Now and then we waited on a siding for a long oretrain to grind heavily past.

We were out of the malaria belt. The chief enemy of man in this upper part of the valley was a clever little fluke known as a schistosoma that spent part of its lifecycle in a watersnail. From out of the watersnail came millions of microscopic wormlike creatures that joyfully sought out the feet of a man wading or the hands of a woman washing and made their way through the pores into the blood stream where they hatched out eggs and produced a highly disagreeable disease known as schistosomiasis. The preventive measure was oldfashioned privies. The way the schistosoma got back into the streams and ponds to infect the snails was through the human feces.

“In Aimorés we’ll show you the snails … On my way back from the States I stopped off in Venezuela where they are making progress in poisoning the snails. We are experimenting with that method, but meanwhile,” said Dr. Penido with his ironical smile, “the answer seems to be privies. Here I spent twelve years of my life studying medicine, in Brazil and in the United States” he exclaimed in a tone of mock deprecation, “and I spend my time building privies.”

In the freight yard at Aimorés we found the health service’s sleeping and laboratory car. The sleeper was in charge of a shrewdlooking brown steward named Joaquim. Joaquim had some sort of a rising on his chin which was swathed in an immense wad of bandages and adhesive tape like the false beard of a pharaoh. He served us lunch in the tiny dining section of the car. Dr. Penido announced, laughing his soft sarcastic laugh, that it was just as well the car was there because the Aimorés hotel had turned out so hopelessly unsanitary that he had induced the owner to pull it down entirely and start all over from scratch.

In spite of the loss of its hotel Aimorés was a busy little town full of dusty traffic and new building. House building offers few problems in these parts. A carpenter makes around twenty cents an hour. The valley is full of sawmills and every tiny hamlet has a brick kiln. Everybody complains of the expense and scarcity of cement but they have an abundance of cheap tile and brick. On every street we saw new brick houses going up with tiled roofs, and wellfinished woodwork and beautifully laid parquet floors. From the top of the hill we climbed to visit Monty’s waterworks, about half the roofs of the town straggling out over the valleyfloor beneath us looked new. Right at our feet were the new tiny shacks, some of brick and some of the common mud and wooden frame construction, of the workingpeople’s suburb which in Brazil is known as a favela.

This favela was the best we had seen on the trip. The houses were in row and each had a yard and a solidly built brick privy. “Look at all the privies,” Dr. Penido burst out waving his arms with humorous pride, “An orgy of privies.”

“This is such decent housing,” said Monty, “we shouldn’t call it a favela.”

The Favela: Symbol of the New Brazil?

The word favela as usual set off an argument. Everybody started talking at once.

Favela in Brazilian Portuguese means slum. A favela is a particular type of recent slum that takes its name from the hill near Rio where the first one appeared. The favela is the sign and symbol of the population explosion which has resulted from the success of just the sort of public health measures Dr. Penido and his associates were showing off with such pride.

With the growth of industry, and the caving in of the scanty rural economy, people came crowding out of the back country into cities and towns. In the back country they had lived a barefoot life as ungarnished in every aspect as the little huts with dirt floors they were born in and dwelt in and died in, but at least they had space about them and air to breathe. Except in very bad droughts the rural economy had furnished sufficient food. People lived according to certain standards of civilized rustic behavior. The landowner was feudal lord. Feudalism, when it works, is far from being the worst form of human organization.

In the cities the immigrants find no housing ready for them, so they pick themselves out a back lot and put themselves up a shack out of whatever materials are cheapest and handiest just the way they would back up in the hills. Individual initiative. They cook on charcoal. They can’t read and write so they don’t need much artificial light. The women and children fetch water in gasoline tins from the nearest pump that may be a mile away, just as they would have gone down to the river back home, and they deposit their excrement behind the fence and throw their garbage out on the path just as they always did. The shacks agglomerate into rattletrap settlements, like the Hoovervilles of depression times in the States.

In Rio — this was in 1948—there were said to be three hundred thousand people living in favelas. Today there are nearer a million. You come on favelas in the most unexpected places. In Copacabana a few minutes walk from the hotels and the splendid white apartment houses and the wellkept magnificent beaches you find a whole hillside of favelas overlooking the lake and the Jockey Club. In the center of Rio a few steps from the Avenida Rio Branco on the hill back of one of the most fashionable churches you come suddenly into a tropical jungletown.

In Rio under the pressure of metropolitan life the favelas are even producing a culture of their own. Their religion is one of the many forms of West African voodoo that have taken root in American soil, known there as macumba. The artistic and social center is the samba school. The favelas are the spawning ground for Brazil’s abundant popular music. I was told of a wealthy songwriter who refused to move out of his favela. How could he? That’s where his music came from. If a foreigner turns up on a visit the inhabitants tend to cluster around to show off their favela’s best points. Some of the shacks are well built and prettily painted. The views are magnificent. Their owners take pride in their dwellings and fight like tigers to retain possession of them. The main trouble is the lack of water and light. There is no garbage disposal, no sewerage. The police don’t dare penetrate; but at that you are probably safer in a Rio favela than in Central park in New York or on a side street in Washington, D.C.

Remembering the smell of dried excrement that haunted the favelas of Rio I could understand the real enthusiasm under Dr. Penido’s kidding manner when he stood looking down with the air of a conqueror from the hill at Aimorés, and spoke of islands of public health. I got the feeling that there was more than sanitation at stake, there was the budding of a civilization.

The Rio Doce Valley was no health resort, at least not yet, but I was beginning to feel the excitement of combat, taking part, if only for a few days, in this battle for public health. The diseases had become as personal as people to these doctors. Tagging around with them in the humorous give and take of rough frontier travel, I had begun to feel as they felt, the hostility that lurked in forest pools and in the garbage thrown out back of the hut by a careless housewife, and to exult with them in every puff of vaporized DDT into a damp corner, or in every quinine injection or atabrin pill that was helping drive back the enemy beyond the blue hills that hemmed the valley.

While we wrangled over the sociology of the favelas, Monty was waiting with some impatience to show us his waterstation. The water was pumped up from the river by diesel pumps so that they wouldn’t depend on the light and power system which so often broke down. It passed through filters and chemical purifiers. Better water than many towns had in the States, Monty insisted proudly. Inside, the walls were fresh painted and the machinery looked well tended and the tiled floors were sparkling clean. “There’s capacity for twice the size of the town,” Monty insisted, “up to fifteen thousand people.”

A man was on his hands and knees mopping the tiles as we walked through. I looked at him twice because he was white-skinned and had tow hair. His face was lined and haggard and dirty. It’s a shock to a northerner in this Rio Doce Valley to find the blond offspring of German or Polish settlers living in the same ragged barefoot dirt as the darkerskinned inhabitants.

“You see,” Monty was explaining enthusiastically as he ushered us out on the terrace, “we’re all set except for pouring a little more concrete. Then only the cleaning up and landscaping left to do.”

I asked who the blond man was. He was not interested. “I dunno. He must be a German. I guess they just hire him for odd jobs.”

We stood a while on the terrace to look down into the valley. The sun was setting red into the murk behind a scraggly line of ravaged forest on the crest of a cutover hill. Touched with sultry copper glints the Rio Doce meandered with a distant hiss of broken water among rocks and scrubby islands. It looked a little like the Susquehanna below Harrisburg. An oddlooking black bird with brown markings like a butterfly was fluttering about a clump of cactus.

Down the path from the waterstation to the favela, naked except for a ragged pair of shorts, with a beaten droop to his shoulders, the blond man went stumbling wearily. He never turned his head to look at us. Holding onto his hand was a little towhaired boy three or four years old who was dressed in short pants and a little striped sweater, a sort of grimy replica of what a little boy of his age would be wearing in some distant northern home. Looking after them I was remembering what a geographer friend had told me in Rio: “Brazil is the greatest experiment in the settling of European man in the tropics, but that doesn’t mean it is always successful.”

Islands of Public Health

Above Aimorés next day the valley was narrower and dustier and drier. Fires burned more fiercely in the hills. A streaky ceiling of smoke and dust hung over the river. On steep eroding pastures, which were a network of dry cowpaths, big zebu cattle grazed in herds. Gangs were working on the line. Occasionally we had to stop while the section gang ahead lowered a new length of track into place. The settlements had a raw backwoods look.

At the little stations where the linecar had to wait for the oretrains coming down, there was a great deal going on. There were ferries on the river, flatboats, that traveled on a cable, ingeniously propelled by the force of the current. A shriek of mechanical saws came from the sawmills. Carts were bringing in cut firewood for the railroad or bags of charcoal to be shipped to the charcoalburning iron furnaces up the valley. At every siding the oxteams were churning the dust as they dragged the trunks of peroba trees up from the water’s edge. At a place called Conselheiro Pena three men were maneuvering the great logs up onto a platform with a team of eleven yokes of zebu oxen, and rolling them onto flatcars. Their only tool was the slender poles they used to handle the oxen.

At a place called Timiritinga, which, so the station master proudly explained, had just changed its name from Tarumirím, there was a long wait for the daily passenger train down from Valadares. Monty and I roamed through the ankledeep dust between the two rows of forlorn low houses of plastered adobe, looking at the pigs and the scattered garbage and the open square of sunscorched weeds that was laid out for the praça to be.

“You see,” Monty was saying dreamily, “this work can be expanded indefinitely. We are just in the shape now where we know how to do things … We’ve had five years to make our mistakes and to work up a system. We’ve got the blueprint and all we need to do now is expand it. At first it was all by guess and by God as they used to say in the Navy … When my contract expired I went back home and intended to stay but I got to thinking that this work was about as important as a man could find to do and I said to my wife could she stick it … with the baby and everything … and she said she guessed she could … so back we came. And now when we’re all rearing to go down here and Brazilian organizations are really interested in putting up money for more public health work, it looks as if the American end was petering out, as if there wasn’t much interest in Washington. The folks back home are forgetting about Brazil.”

We went into a little bar to get one of the tiny cups of strong black coffee that are sprinkled through every Brazilian day. An incredibly tattered young white woman with her hair in a ratsnest and her breasts blobbing out of her grimy dress brought us our coffee. There was a tobaccocolored man with a felt hat and a mustache sitting at the only other table. Right away he told us that Timiritinga had not only changed its name but it had just this day been created a city. Now there would be money to appropriate for public health.

We heard the siren blow from the linecar. That meant that the driver had his orders to proceed. Swallowing the scalding thimbleful of coffee we hurried over to the station. Our friend with the mustache followed us all the way to the linecar explaining how much the people of the new founded city of Timiritinga wanted Sespe to help them with their sanitation. “You see,” Monty nudged me excitedly as we settled back in our seats, “you see, it’s like that all over.”

The Lost Leader

My trip up the railroad ended at a raw new town named Governador Valadares. You could see the outlines of a future city plan scratched out in the red clay among the stumps and carcasses of the felled forest trees. Eight thousand people lived in a straggle of shanties among sawmills and brick kilns. The town lay on a bend of the Rio Doce opposite a great battlemented mountain with a smooth granite face that soared out of sight through the level layers of smoke and mist that roofed in the valley.

In the crowded freightyards beyond the station we found Joaquim waiting for us with his sleeper, which had come up on the passenger train. The car was still oven hot from the day’s sun, and airless because every space between the tracks was piled high with cut wood for the locomotives, but the narrow showerbath where a trickle of tepid water washed off the grimed red dust of the valley was a delight.

All the way up Dr. Penido had been promising us a good restaurant in Valadares so after everybody had bathed we straggled off along the broad main street already planted with trees, up past a new circular park at the intersection of the main streets still in the excavation stage, to a café presided over by a huge lightbrown man in a cook’s hat and apron whom the doctors explained had worked as a tailor until it had occurred to him that he’d rather be a cook. And a very good cook he turned out to be.

After a great deal of steak and rice washed down by Portuguese wine to the tune of that most ingratiating Brazilian toast: “As nossas boas qualidades que não são poucas [To our good qualities, which are not few]”—we sat a long time talking and smoking. The Brazilians were trying to explain to the Americans, still in a gentle friendly way, that they felt let down, after all the propaganda of the Good Neighbor policy and wartime cooperation, by the lack of interest the American people now showed in their problems.

“But you don’t want American capital. You want to develop your own oil industry and your own iron and steel.”

“O petróleo é nosso. That’s mostly propaganda,” said one of the doctors laughing.

“But everybody believes in it. The papers in Rio are full of it.”

“We don’t want American imperialism but we do want American interest and help, especially technical help … and dollars. We’d like more help for public health.”

“Perhaps what hurts us,” said Dr. Penido in his gentle ironical tone, “is a certain lack of comprehension … I feel it myself with Americans, not with all but with some even at this table.” It seemed to me he looked rather hard at Monty. Monty looked glum. “I was two years studying public health at Johns Hopkins … Baltimore is a very nice city. I had a very good time there, met many damn splendid guys, but I felt a certain lack of comprehension.”

He went on to talk in a dreamy voice about European culture. He had lived in Paris as a child. As he talked I could see him, short pants and bare knees, playing in the Parc Monceau. The loss of Paris was something no Brazilian could get over, the loss of that feeling of being linked to the evolving traditions of European civilization: the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the French, link by link, through the ages. The war had blacked out Europe and Brazilians missed that stimulus. The North Americans didn’t have it. It was hard to put your finger on it. It was something that made a man feel part of civilization. Perhaps that was why they were disappointed in the United States.

The town lights had gone out. Our immense host brought in an oil lamp and set it on the big Electrolux refrigerator behind the table.

“There have been a series of disappointments,” one of the other doctors burst out. “After the victory we thought that America would assume a world leadership like the Europe our fathers remembered.”

“Without imperialism? How can you do it?”

There was a polite shrugging of shoulders.

“America seems so much weaker in victory,” sighed Dr. Penido. “But,” he banged his fist on the table and went on briskly, “the important thing is that we have produced a successful experiment in international cooperation … Sespe would not exist without the cooperation of both Americans and Brazilians. We have proved that it works. We have learned a method. Now we could go on to do great things, if just at this crucial moment in the United States you did not seem to lose interest.”

“We feel,” one of the others echoed, “a certain lack of comprehension.”

Dr. Penido yawned and rose to his feet. It was late. We groped our way through unlit streets and freightyards stacked with corded wood back to our sleeping car.

The Rockcrusher That Never Gets Out of Order

In the morning a small plane came down from the mine at Itabira to pick me up. Now I was going to see where all those orecars came from. As the pilot spiraled up from the airstrip at Valadares to vault the first range of razorbacked mountains I began to note the extent of the devastation of the country. As far as I could see into the murk fires made a red marbling on the cutover slopes. The mountains under us smoldered like burnt papers in a grate.

Pastures along the winding streams showed that fine network of cattlepaths that comes from overgrazing. Houses, usually solitary on a hillock in a valley, were scarce. Near a house you could usually make out the broad bunched leaves of a few banana trees and some tiny green squares of cultivated land. It was hard to imagine how such a sparse population could so ravage the hills. The railroad’s demands for firewood, the burning of charcoal to cook with, and its use in iron furnaces, had already gutted the forests for an enormous tract of country. The logging out of lumber for export did the rest. As we climbed again to clear a new set of granite escarpments the valleys below were drowned in smoke. The plane tore into speeding clouds that packed tight like cotton wool against the windows.

There was no ceiling at all over the airfield at the mine, so we had to turn back. When we landed at Valadares again the Brazilian business man who shared the seat with me shouted in my ear. “I was anxious,” he said, “until the pilot told me he was the father of eight. The father of eight just has to be careful.”

As we walked with throbbing ears across the field to the shelter, he added that he wondered whether as a foreigner I understood the significance of what I was seeing in the Vale do Rio Doce: “It is climbing a series of steps. First the valley was so unhealthy we could hardly keep up the railroad. The malaria service and public health make sanitary the valley so that we can improve the railroad … America helps Brazil up a step. In the State of Minas Gerais we have the richest iron deposit in the world but to get it out we had only picks and shovels. The American loan buys the machinery to work it … Another step …”

“But what about the campaign against American imperialism?”

“That,” he said, “is the labor of Communists.”

He put his arm around my shoulder and offered to buy my lunch. After lunch, which, since the public health doctors were still in Valadares, turned out to be a second farewell celebration, the father of eight did manage to land us on the wet hilltop airstrip at Itabira. The mountains all around were still draped in clouds. The drenched air made us shiver after the heat of the valley.

The quiet man in khaki who came out to meet us introduced himself as Gil Whitehead, American manager of the mine for the Rio Doce Company. “It’s too bad that you can’t see the peak of Caué,” he said and looked up at the murky ceiling just overhead. “I’d like you to see the magic mountain.”

While we waited for the clouds to lift we drove round the old town that climbed up steep red ridges to a suburb of neat new houses for the skilled workmen and to the big concrete hangar which could house the new machine shops. The valleys below were full of tattered mist. The weather had settled down to a cold drizzle. The hunks of wet ore shone as they thundered down the chutes into the orecars.

Gil Whitehead had a selfeffacing manner and a slow drawl. Now and then his smoldering sort of humor would let out a sudden flash. He explained how production had increased and how, with the improvement of the railroad, production would increase still more. For Brazil the iron ore, which was going to steel mills in the United States and Canada, where they used it instead of scrap, would mean essential dollars in the world market. And when the new rockcrushing machinery came production would really spurt.

“Meanwhile,” he said and pointed to a little brown man with a hammer trudging up the road in the rain, “we are using the only rockcrusher that, in these parts, never gets out of order.”

He glanced out of the window. The rain had stopped but the clouds hung lower than ever. “Let’s go on up anyway.” He drove me up the broad zigzag road that vanished into a ceiling of cloud. “You’ve heard them speak of metaling a road,” he said. “Well this road is sixty per cent pure iron.”

When we stepped out of the car the driven clouds snapped like wet toweling in our faces. He told me I was standing on top of two hundred and fifty million metric tons of hematite. The trouble was it was such a long way to Pittsburgh.

He pointed to a quarrylike face of rock. “Simplest operation in the world. All we have to do is blast it down. Since we started in 1944 we’ve taken twentythree meters off the top of the peak.” My eyes followed the sweep of his hand. Under the glistening rock face men were at work among the piles of ore with little sledgehammers, making small ones out of big ones.

Here and there they lit fires of sticks or broken boards for a little warmth. There were spindling white men and tall broadshouldered Negroes and small compact wiry men in all shades of coffee and copper and bronze. Some wore sandals and some were barefooted. Many had gunnysacks tied around them against the cold. A few had tattered cloaks or mud-caked ponchos. As they worked away their hammers rang on the dense ore.

That was my first sight of the Brazilian working man in the mass, of the longsuffering happygolucky nomadic hordes who spread over the vast extent of the country moving from plantation to mine to lumbermill or construction camp, illnourished, ridden with illness, enduring cold and heat and hunger, tightening their belts, and singing their sambas and breeding children and somehow getting the work done.

The Brazilian West

A few days later, five hundred miles to the west I saw the same people under happier conditions. This was at Ceres, a new agricultural settlement which the great roadbuilder Bernardo Sayão was opening up on the Rio das Almas in the western part of the State of Goiás.

Flying west through the bumpy air over the knotted snarl of the mountains of Minas Gerais there were mighty few towns to look down on and almost no roads. You saw below you a lioncolored landscape of burnedover slopes with green strips of cultivated land spreading up the river bottoms. Rarely a tiny house shone white as sugar in the slanting morning light. The hills were a tangle of wandering mule and cattle tracks. Men and animals had walked there for centuries.

This infinity of wandering tracks testified to the still nomadic life of the backlands. A man and his family would live in some cabin in the hills until the land they worked was worn out and then they would have to pull up stakes and walk, with their few possessions on their heads, for hundreds of miles to find some patch of virgin brush which they could burn over for a new plantation. They burned the larger trees for charcoal. The first few years the scorched forest loam gave them good crops, but the winds blew it off and the rains washed it away and the crops ate it up and after a while they had to move on again.

The copilot, a dapper young man from Rio who spoke very good English, came back into the cabin to explain that the state of Minas was one of the oldest settled sections of Brazil, a little stagnant now, but — he spread out his arms — with an immense future. Far to the north on the indigosmudged horizon, he pointed out the clouds that hid Caué, the iron mountain. I told him I had just come from there. “Before it was gold,” he shouted excitedly, putting his lips against my ear. “Now it is iron … The iron deposits stretch across the state of Minas in the shape of a gigantic dollar sign.”

He went back to his place when the plane began to lose altitude over Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. Spiraling down for a landing we had glimpses of the regular avenues lined with trees and the tall white buildings of the city which was started fifty years ago on a plan based on L’Enfant’s plan for Washington.

Nearer the airfield shone the angular constructions of glass and concrete designed by Niemeyer and some other pupils of Le Corbusier’s for a suburban development round the lake of Pampulha. Among these buildings at Pampulha are some of Niemeyer’s most original and imaginative works. It is odd that a professing Communist should have designed such a pretty church. Unfortunately the project, suffering the fate of so many projects in this land of magniloquent blueprints, received a setback from a most unexpected cause. The lake was discovered to be full of snails infested by the wicked little schistosoma. Until some way is found of killing the parasite or the snail, the development of Pampulha was said to be at a standstill.

After leaving Belo Horizonte we flew west for hours and hours. The few tiny settlements were out of sight of the airfields, which become more and more rudimentary as we advanced into the rolling country, interspersed by great plains, of the then new state of Goiás. After seven hours flight from Rio we were in Goiânia. This new capital of a new state was only fifteen years old. It consisted of an avenue of feathery trees to the governor’s palace, some public buildings and a few cross streets of rough stuccoed houses, a new hotel already falling to pieces, and some very nicely printed booklets of plans for the future.

The hotel was a collector’s item. This was a time in South America when the more cheerful travelers collected bad hotels as a sort of hobby. I kept thinking of Dr. Penido’s reflections about how much education it took to keep a toilet clean. One of the oddities of this particular bathroom was that the doorknob would come off in the hand of the unhappy guest, thereby trapping him in the malodorous precinct. Banging on the door brought no response. The procedure was to escape by climbing over the transom that led into the adjoining kitchen. Busy clouds of flies buzzed back and forth over that transom.

Though pigs still rooted in the muddy streets, Goiánia already boasted a school of music and an academy of letters. I sat in the hotel’s tiny bar, drinking excellent cold beer with a couple of congenial members of the Goiánia academy, while waiting for a suitable hour to call on the governor, who had hospitably offered to send me out to the federal agricultural colony the next day on one of his planes. They had brought along some magnificent booklets describing the plans for the new federal capital of Brazil which was to be established on a high plateau about a hundred miles to the north, a plateau that boasted, they told me, a delicious temperate climate, where wheat grows in abundance and where all the plants and animals of the temperate zone, including European man, would flourish.

The development of Brazil has been blocked for three hundred years by the colonial mentality of a people trapped between the mountains and the sea, they said. The way to break loose was to move the center of the nation boldly up into the plateau. Their eyes shone and their chests expanded as they talked.

This must have been, I kept thinking, how our early enthusiasts for the North American West talked and glowed, sitting in some rickety tavern on the site of Washington City, when the subject turned to the Ohio or the great dimly discerned prairies west of the Mississippi.

Before modern sanitation and trucks and airplanes all this was a dream; but now, my hosts kept assuring me, it was possible. The federal capital was written into the constitution. It had to come true. By history and tradition and by its racial admixtures Brazil was the best adapted of all the nations of European stock to conquer the tropics. The first step towards achievement would be moving the federal capital.

When I asked whether there was any way of reaching this marvelous plateau, they said it would be difficult. You had to go by a small plane to a rather uncertain airstrip. From there it was eight hours horseback up to the site. If it rained, it would be hard to get back. Neither of them had ever been.

“But where does the Communist movement fit into all this enterprising talk? Haven’t you already got too much bureaucracy?”

The younger of my hosts spoke up.

“At eighteen I was a Communist, like everybody else. We have malaria and jungle fever and a million diseases, but our worst disease is poverty. Young intellectuals feel trammeled at every hand by poverty. We thought communism was a cure for poverty. It seemed to open new careers for young men of brains. Now I am twentyseven and I have discovered that communism is just another way of dominating the masses. Instead of curing poverty it makes poverty universal. We have got to find other alternatives … The Communists now do not make propaganda for communism. They make propaganda against … against North America … against the rich, against anybody who is successful. In Rio they tell the poor people living in the favelas: ‘We will throw out the landlords and you shall live in luxury in the hotels and the apartment houses in Copacabana.’ It is simple. It works. Many of our most intelligent men, particularly poets, artists, architects are subject to this illusion. They have not thought the thing through to the end.”

“It is up to you North Americans to give us an alternative,” said the older man. “During the war the speeches of the great Roosevelt gave us an ideal to fight for. Since he died the United States seems to be drifting. You seem suddenly old and reactionary. We read about the Marshall Plan for Europe, but when the Communists tell us it is imperialism we tend to believe them. All we see here is the scarcity of dollars.”

“We Brazilians,” the younger man burst out, “are a people of noble impulses. We hate war and militarism. We believe in progress. We are a people of grandiose illusions. That is why the Communist movement here is like your Mr. Wallace’s party in the States. It flourishes in the best society. Many fine people in all walks of life have allowed themselves to be deceived because no one has offered them a better plan.”

“Then,” said the older man, “there is envy in every human heart. You are rich and we are poor. The Communists play on the envy of the poor for the rich. The cure is a great movement of expansion that will furnish us with new illusions.”

He looked at his watch. His voice suddenly took on the plush tones of a master of protocol. “It is time to go. His Excellency will be expecting us to make a short call at the palace.”

Sayão’s Colônia

Next morning the governor’s airplane deposits my young literary friend, the local circuit judge, and me on an airstrip which they tell me is almost exactly in the center of Brazil. As the plane takes off again in a drive of dust we feel small and lonely under the enormous sky.

We are standing beside a new gravel road that stretches straight into the dusty distance in either direction. Behind us is the ragged airstrip and in front of us a line of great trees that hides the river, and all around a rolling country of high scrub vegetation shimmering in the heat.

The sun, already high, beats down on us hard as hail so we take cover under the porch of a long hut thatched with palm leaves. Inside we find a counter and some shelves of groceries and a pale sweatylooking heavyset man with a week’s growth of stubble on his chin. Immediately we are all drinking cafezinhos out of the inevitable tiny white cups.

First thing I ask, “Is Bernardo Sayão at the Colônia Agrícola?”

“He is,” says the pale man enthusiastically. Then he explains that we still have three leagues to go. We must be patient. They will have seen the plane and will send out for us from the colônia. Sayão always sends out for people, Sayão attends to everything.

The pale man turns out to be a Russian, from the Ukraine. He has lived twentyone years in Brazil. He made big money in São Paulo as a machinist, but when he heard about the colony and the road into the north he’d moved out here. He steps in back behind a bamboo partition and brings out a diving helmet. Gold, he says, rolling his bloodshot gray eyes; he dove in the rivers for gold. Was he making money at it? One eye crinkles up like a parrot’s and his face takes on that sly look of the peasant on the steppe. He doesn’t answer but he holds up his thumb and forefinger and rubs them together vigorously.

Before we know what has happened we are adrift in a tumultuous argument about the Soviet Union. The pale man insists that Russia behaves as she does because she is ringed by treacherous enemies. England and America have always been her enemies. My literary friend from Goiânia brings up the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The Brazilian judge, a small brown sparrowlike man with tortoiseshell glasses, perks up and asks if the Russians did right to partition Poland. In 1918 the imperialist nations fought Russia, the pale man shouts back, fingering his diving helmet in a threatening way as if about to use it for a weapon. We lean across the counter and roar at him.

Meanwhile an audience is gathering, an aged scarecrow with a face of stained leather puckered on one side by some sort of ulcer, a soiled barelegged boy with a cast in his eye, a dog, two hens and a rooster. A pig sticks his snout in through a rent in the bamboo wall. Two tiny yellowfaced children peek in beside him.

We are all sweating like horses. The pale man tears the shirt off his damp chest in an agony of conviction. It is all lies we are telling about the Soviet Union. Then he lays his thick forefinger along his nose and crinkles up his eye with that sly look again and says, “In all this there is a mystery … There is a very secret mystery. It is true that there is no liberty now but the secret of Russia is liberty in the future.”

“Look here,” the judge asks him, “if you are such an admirer of the Soviet Union how is it you’ve been spending all these years in Brazil looking for gold like a capitalist?”

Suddenly the pale man smiles all over his face. He slaps his wet chest. He has a friend in São Paulo, he drawls, who is a doctor and writes very brilliant articles against alcoholism. This doctor wrote a whole book against alcoholism but whenever his friends meet this doctor he is in a bar buying himself a drink. The pale man thrusts out his hand laughing. He shakes hands all around then he brings out another set of cafezinhos on the house.

The cloud of dust that has been coming towards us down the road turns out to contain a bus, a junglestained paleblue bus bulging with passengers and packages. The bus stops in front of the palmthatched hut. A few grimy passengers straggle out to have themselves a coffee. The bus is on its way to the colônia. We are fitted in among dogs and bundles and crates of fowls and the bus starts off grinding and lurching on its slow way through the shabby dryseason jungle. After a while we begin to pass clearings where huge stumps and the skeletons of felled trees still smolder from the burning over; then thatched shelters, a few half finished houses of brick. In front of the first tileroofed houses we see a wattled cage that someone explains is a wolf trap.

We drive downhill through a broad street of low houses which are mostly stores. A crazy bamboo shack has a sign, CAFÉ CERES. We pass a billiard parlor. We cross a green river on a floating bridge supported on clusters of oil drums lashed together. The Rio das Almas. Everybody points out a small white house on top of a grassy hill. That is where Sayão lives.

We are deposited in front of a set of new brick walls which are marked GRANDE HOTEL CERES. We pick our way past the bricklayers, stepping over planking heaped with fresh mortar, and find that the diningroom and a few small alcoves have been completed. The hotel is open for business. The landlady greets us and briskly straightens up a table for our lunch. She speaks English. She comes from the northern part of Bohemia, she says. Oh yes she’d been in the colônia a long time, almost a year.

The place to wash is outside in the yard, two enameled basins on a soapy board and a gasoline can full of water. The tall unshaven man who is washing his face with a great deal of snorting and sputtering turns out to be a Syrian merchant who sells textiles. Yes business is good, good, good. When we settle down to eat I ask the landlady where Sayão is to be found. She shakes her head. He is a hard man to put your finger on. Never stays in one place. She will send a boy over with a message.

“He is not here. Dr. Sayão has gone to Rio,” says a young lighthaired woman, nicely dressed as if for shopping in the city, who walks into the diningroom speaking dogmatic English. She sits down beside us. She comes from Vienna. She has an apartment in Rio. Her husband is a Hungarian. They are settling. If she likes it she will give up her apartment in Rio. If we want to learn about the colónia we must stay many days because it is very interesting. We must come to see her new house. Eventually Dr. Sayão will return.

The rosy young couple who walked in while we were talking turned out to be Swiss. He was an agronomist under contract to the Brazilian Government. Did they know anything about the whereabouts of Dr. Sayão? Oh no they didn’t know anything yet. They had just arrived. Dr. Sayão had fixed them up with a house. They had gotten married and had come to Brazil. They both had blue eyes and light curly hair, and fresh pink and white complexions. Their clothes looked crisp and clean. They walked out hand in hand looking into the jungle with shining eyes.

After we’d eaten the usual meal of rice and beans and meat we strolled around the village of Ceres. The highway cut through the bottom of a wide valley cleared halfway up the hillsides. In every direction among the treestumps straggled clumps of unfinished brick houses. Everywhere bricklayers were working, framing was going up. You caught glimpses against the sky of the bare brown backs of men setting the tiles on the roofs. That heap of bricks was going to be a moving picture theater; that one was going to be a bank. Here and there a little house already finished in white stucco with painted shutters stood out bright and neat. On all the hills around the great scraggly trees of the ruined jungle crowded rank on rank against the edges of the clearings.

We kept asking for Sayão. “He can’t be far,” people would smile and say.

Everybody was out that afternoon. The American Franciscans who had a little house beside the unfinished church were away on a mission. The young American who ran a brick kiln beside the highway in the middle of town had gone into Anápolis. The Americans who had set up the sawmill down by the river were off in São Paulo.

At Sayão’s office, in the barracks next to the machine shop that kept his roadbuilding machinery in order, we tried to get a skinny young engineer to explain some of the workings of the colony to us but he begged off saying that Sayão would explain it so much better when he came.

Where the devil was Dr. Sayão?

One man pointed north, another pointed south. Out on the road at work. How could one tell?

A stocky little man, with long blond eartabs combed down from under a pith helmet, drove up in a jeep while we were talking. He spoke with authority. Sayão was in Amaro Leite. That meant sour milk. It was a town, a sort of a town. In the north, far in the north. He would be back this afternoon, he announced. E certo. How far was Amaro Leite? The stocky man spread out his arms. Uma infinidade de leguas … An infinity of leagues.

While we waited the judge and I went walking along the river. “This I suppose will be the principal avenida,” he was saying as we stumbled past wandering trucks through the deep dust. “They shouldn’t cut down those trees. That should be the public garden right along the river.”

All at once he was seized with a fury of cityplanning. He pointed here and there among the charred stumps, indicating parks and public buildings. I began to see columns sprouting among the trees, monuments to national heroes, bronze generals on horseback. The little judge’s chest swelled.

We started across the floating bridge. The sun had set behind forested hills. In the hurried twilight of the tropics a slight coolness rose from the swift mustardgreen water.

“Soon there’ll be a new bridge,” said the judge proudly and pointed to the unfinished cement piers on the riverbank.

At the end of the bridge we met a very tall slender young man with fine sharpcut features and almost black skin. He wore the usual ragged workclothes. He grabbed the judge’s hand and smiled with all his broken teeth. The judge asked him how he was doing, was he married yet, were there any pretty girls in the colônia? The young man talked fast and smiled some more and grabbed the lobe of his left ear with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. That gesture meant O.K. He shook our hands again.

When we walked on the judge explained that this young fellow had been janitor at the courthouse in Goiãnia. He’d been starving to death there on eight hundred cruzeiros a month. Now he was making fortyfive a day laying bricks. “The man is happy.”

By the time we get back to the Grande Hotel Ceres it is so dark we have a hard time finding it. No word from Sayão. The dining room is jammed with men eating by the light of two lanterns and a candle. There are bearded men in hunting jackets who look like prospectors, there are salesmen and surveyors and engineers working on the road and the new bridge. Everybody is eating fast and talking fast. The dim light glints in eager eyes, on sweating cheekbones. When I grope my way out to the waterbucket to wash my face by the light of the lantern I see that the man ahead of me, a bullnecked character with a strawcolored beard, wears a large pearl earring in one ear. The night is already cool. From somewhere comes a smell of cape jessamine. Down in the dark valley an accordion is playing and a voice is singing a samba.

We are up at daylight standing around outside the office beside the repairshop in the valley with the construction foreman. There are bulldozers and road patrols. The place looks like a construction camp in the States. “No, he’s not back yet.”

“Yes he is,” says the young man from São Paulo. “He got in from Amaro Leite at half past one … He’ll be along any minute.”

“Isn’t it early?”

“He never gets tired. He sleeps while he drives.”

The man with the helmet and the yellow eartabs drives up in his jeep. “He’s back,” he says in an excited tone. “His stomach is a little upset … He has a slight fever.” The men crowd around the jeep with a look of concern on their faces. “But that is nothing … For Sayão that is nothing.”

The Man Himself

A battered sedan drives up. There’s a pretty girl on the front seat. The freshfaced man in khaki shirtsleeves behind the wheel seems hardly much older. As he steps to the ground we can see that he is a broadshouldered sixfooter. He shows even white teeth in a smile as he walks towards us. His step has a vigorous spring to it. He is older than he looked at a distance. There are thoughtful crowsfeet round his eyes. In fact the pretty girl is his daughter.

“Sayão, at your service,” he says.

He rubs his hand over his rough chin and mutters apologetically that the barber is looking for him. He ate some beans and manioc flour in Amaro Leite that didn’t set well. He isn’t quite up to scratch this morning. He’ll be all right. Let’s go. He waves us into the back seat of the sedan and introduces the pretty girl as his eldest. Her father ought not to be out, she starts to tell us in remarkably good English, but she long ago gave up trying to do anything with him. He is incorrigible.

Sayão is talking to his men. He addresses a few words directly to each man in a pleasant offhand leisurely tone. Now and then he taps a man on the arm or lets a hand slide along his shoulders. When he turns towards us to step into the driver’s seat we can see that he is a great deal older than he seemed at first glance. A man in his late forties. His eyes are a little bloodshot from the night driving yesterday. He swings the car around carelessly and drives down the highway. As he drives he leans back over the seat to tell us about the colônia.

Four years ago there was nothing. This was part of the federal government’s colonization plan. Colonization was not his specialty. He’s spent his life building roads. His pleasure has been in the fabrication of highways. It is the kind of outdoor life he likes.

“How many families have moved in already?” asks one of my companions.

“Around three thousand … This is cellular colonization, a lot of people crowding around a center …”

“The state land office says thirty thousand,” interrupts the judge.

“That includes settlers outside the colônia … What we need, I’m beginning to think, is strip colonization, that is, to build roads and settle the land on either side …” Sayão swerves the car off the gravel and up a hill and stops on a grassy knoll in front of another unfinished building of raw brick. “This is our sugar mill. While we are waiting for the rest of the machinery we are going to use the generators to give light and power.”

After looking through the mill we walk out among the hills of darkgreen corn sprouting vigorously out of the deep forest loam among the stumps and the charred trees so recently felled. “You see,” Sayão explains, kicking at a stump a good four feet across, “we are not quite ready to use farm machinery. Our machines are hoes and the muscles in men’s backs.”

“How does a man ever get started hacking down the jungle?”

“I’ll show you.” As keen as a small boy with his first erector set, driving with one hand on the wheel through the rutted trails, he points out to us the various stages of colonization. He handles the battered sedan carelessly, the way a man might handle a well trained horse.

“The first year is hard,” he explains. The newly arrived often camp out under a tree. Next they’ll put up a bamboo shelter thatched with palm.

In the Brazilian backcountry there’s a mutual aid system known as mutirão. You get together some food and cachaça and a guitar and invite the neighbors in. All the heaviest work is done that way. They’ll work like fiends all day and in the evening they have a party.

Felling the tough hardwoods of the jungle is a man’s work. Snakes are a peril. He tries to keep a stock of antitoxins sent up from São Paulo.

By the end of the year you are beginning to get enough food out of the crops of beans and rice and manioc you planted. Maybe you have something left over to sell, enough to buy shoes with. A couple of more years, if it’s a hardworking family with plenty of children to help, you’ll clear a little more land and sell the timber.

As he drives he points out little shacks in the clearings on either side of the valley. This man’s from Minas. This one from Pernambuco. He brakes the car suddenly and calls to a man and a woman working in a field. João and Maria. They approach the car bashfully, a sunbaked couple with lean Arabian profiles. Sayão tells us they walked a thousand miles from some droughtstricken patch of ground in Ceará, God knows how many months it took them, on foot with their possessions on their heads, working their way as they came. “How are crops?” he asks them.

Their teeth flash as they smile in unison. “Here the land is cool, Mister Doctor,” they chirrup. “We can grow rice without irrigation.”

Sayão laughs happily. “They’ll sell their rice at a profit,” he says as he drives on. “When they get a little cash they’ll buy bricks and build themselves a better house like that fellow over there.”

He points out a little white house with an arched veranda, beside a clump of huge trees. “Then they’ll clear more land and sell the timber to the sawmill and buy cattle … Coffee does magnificently here. We are planting Colombian type coffee for the American market. I want my settlers to plant coffee to tie them to the soil. A coffee plantation is a longterm investment … Brazilians are nomadic. They drift all over the continent. They’ll clear a piece of land and plant a couple of crops on it and move on. I want my people to stay put …”

We drive on through raw plantations of coffee and corn and rice in jagged forest clearings. We visit the hospital and a small unfinished school.

The four things he needs to get a colony going, Sayão is saying as we walk about, are: first, an allweather road; second, proper division of the land so that each man knows what is his; third, a hospital and public health service; and, fourth, schools for the children. “But what I enjoy most is the road.” He shows all his white teeth in a smile. “We are driving a road clear through the center of Brazil.” He motions us back into the sedan.

Soon we have left the settlement behind and are charging north up the straight gravel road through the shaggy jungle. Sayão keeps turning back to talk to us as if he knew the road so well he didn’t have to look at it. Sometimes he takes both hands off the wheel to make a gesture. The car plunges and swerves but he yanks it back without looking … “Here’s where we get our gravel. The soil isn’t so good. You can tell by the smaller size of the trees. Grazing land to be, but it’s full of gravel … we get all we need for the road.” Whenever he speaks of the road his voice takes on an affectionate tone as if he were speaking of one of his children.

“What do you do,” the judge is asking, “when you get settlers who don’t work?”

“When they don’t want to work they leave. The others don’t like to see idle people around. I’ve never had to use the police yet … or any kind of force. We argue with them, we give them friendly advice. But they have to work to eat. We are not running a home for incompetents. They soon catch the spirit of the thing. They see other people building houses, buying clothes, making money. Our people are natural colonizers.”

We drive north for an hour at top speed. Blue mesas begin to rise up in the distance. Beyond the Rio São Patricio, Sayão turns into a construction camp. “Now, Papa, you can’t go too far,” the pretty daughter is insisting. “You have that government commission flying in this afternoon.” He gives her the look of a small boy called in from a ballgame. “All right,” he says, “but at least I can show them on the map.”

The construction camp has an uptodate thrifty look. The living quarters are on trailers. The repairshop looks neat and businesslike. New lathes and Manley presses. Plenty of tools. The portable generators are humming. Everything is screened, there is electric light, a twoway radio.

In part of a shack fitted up as an office Sayão strides up to a map on the wall. He points with his forefinger to the mouths of the Amazon. “The object is to open up communications with Pará, our northern port will be the city of Belém. From São Paulo to Belém we have around twentyfour hundred kilometers to go. There are roads from São Paulo to Anápolis. On the new road from Anápolis we’ve come three hundred and forty.”

He turns from the map to look us in the face with his hard level gaze. “Eventually we must have a road clear through to Belém. While we are waiting we’ll carry the trucks by water on the Rio Tocantins. We are planning to use American landing barges, war surplus … we are negotiating for them in the States.”

When he slams the car into the gravel again, Sayão hesitates at the turn as if he had half a mind to drive north anyway. “Now, Papa,” says the pretty daughter. Obediently he points the car back the way we came. He twists his head around from the driver’s seat and gives his guests a rueful smile. “You come back in a couple of years,” he says, “and I’ll drive you clear to Belém.”

Bernardo Sayão had the greatest quality of leadership of any man I ever met. Building roads was his hobby and his obsession. According to his sisters even when he was small he showed a passion for outdoor life. He was born in Rio about the turn of the century of a welltodo family. He was raised in an atmosphere of achievement. His father went to work for the Central Railroad of Brazil when still a schoolboy and ended up as a director of the line. “A simple and straight career,” Sayão said of his father one day with a proud smile. “He never lost his taste for the back country and neither did I.”

Sayão’s people lived on a sizable patch of hillside in the beautifully forested region of Tijuca that overlooks Rio and the bay and the great ocean beaches that stretch south from Copacabana. As soon as young Bernardo could walk he started roaming about the property with a sack of toys on his back looking for campsites. He’d play hooky from school to climb the conical basalt peaks that abound in the mountain ranges behind Rio. He was a firstrate soccerplayer and pulled a famous oar as an occasional member of the Botofogo Club rowing crews.

After graduating from the agricultural college at Piracicaba in the state of São Paulo he took a job under the Ministry of Agriculture. He married. His first wife died young, leaving him with two little girls to bring up. Already the Ministry of Agriculture was making plans, mostly on paper, for agricultural colonies to form centers of settlement for the back country people whose habit of life the officials in Rio considered distressingly nomadic. Sayão took them at their word. He worked to resettle the nomads, but his idea was that agricultural colonies would do no good without roads to bring their products to market.

Sayão became obsessed with the need for good roads to open up the hinterland. He went to work with such vim that he got in wrong with the agricultural bureaucrats who warmed chairs in Rio offices. His struggle with governmental red tape turned out to be as strenuous as his struggle to clear rights of way through the forest.

When Getúlio Vargas took over the national government in 1930 he too had ideas about colonizing the West. Friends told him of the candor and drive of the young athlete from Rio. The President sent word he wanted to see him.

Sayão’s brotherinlaw, who arranged the details of the appointment, used to tell a story on him. Never much of a dresser, Bernardo had only one white suit. Since it was soiled he washed it himself, but he didn’t have an iron to press it with. The suit was so rumpled that his brotherinlaw had to stop on the way to the presidential palace to buy Bernardo a new suit at a readymade clothing store. Vargas, already headed for the dictatorship, knew a good man when he saw one. He started Sayão on the work of setting up experimental farms. He encouraged his interest in western Goiás.

About the time of the Second World War, when Sayão married again, the first question he asked his betrothed was, would she mind living out in the bush? It was Vargas who arranged his appointment to manage a projected agricultural colony in the red soil region among the tributaries of the Rio Tocantins.

His daughters still tell of the caravan of fortyeight trucks and jeeps which Sayão led on the great trek across country to the Rio das Almas. When the expedition reached the river, there was of course no bridge. The lands assigned for settlement lay on the other side. Sayão threw off his clothes and swam across. The current was so swift that an associate who tried to follow him was drowned.

Sayão’s first job was to bridge the river. He used gasoline drums lashed together and covered by a rough board roadway. For years he carried on a vendetta with the government bureau that was trying to get these gasoline drums back to the oil companies that claimed ownership. Sayão said he could not give up his drums until he had finished a proper concrete bridge across the river. At the same time he pushed through a road to the railhead at Anápolis. This road opened up an immense region of fertile country. By the time it was finished and hardsurfaced Anápolis had doubled in size and Ceres was a city of forty thousand people.

Sayão fought the Rio bureaucracy at every step. The ministry kept demanding explanations and sending out investigating committees to plague him. They couldn’t understand a man who worked for the sport of it with no thought of accumulating a fortune for himself and his family. His instructions were to build a set of agricultural buildings and barns for a model cattle farm. Instead he’d built a road and bridged a river. He wanted houses for his settlers, not offices for officials. The idea of sitting in an office made him sick. He lived in his car the way the oldtime pioneers lived on horseback.

Not too long after my visit to Sayão back in 1948 he became so irked by bureaucratic obstructions and frustrations that he threw up his job with the government. He went to work on a farm in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The farm had a stone quarry. He got out the rock himself and trucked it in person to his customers. In his spare time, just for his own satisfaction, he paved the local roads.

His name was legendary in western Goiás. In 1953 a delegation sought him out, at a location near Belo Horizonte where he was building a road, to beg him to run for lieutenant governor. When it was explained to him that the lieutenant governor was in charge of the state road program he consented to run. He was elected by an enthusiastic majority.

He immediately went to work on the highway that linked the state capital at Goiânia with the milling and cheesemaking center at Anápolis. He improved communications through to São Paulo. All the while he dreamed of the road to Belém.

When Juscelino Kubitschek’s administration inaugurated the project to build a national capital a hundred miles to the northeast of Goiânia, in the enormous tract of tableland that had been long since set aside for a federal district to replace the region around Rio, he remembered the great roadbuilder. Sayão was appointed one of the working directors of Novacap, the government corporation entrusted with the work of construction. He would not take the post until his old friend, Israél Pinheiro, who as president of Novacap was in charge of the operation, promised that he would never be expected to set foot in an office.

As director of Novacap, Sayão for the first time had sufficient funds and proper assistants. Hardsurface roads had to be completed to Belo Horizonte to the east and to Anápolis and Goiânia to the south; but the project into which he put his heart and soul was the nine hundred and fifty mile road, stretching due north through barely explored territory, that was to open up passage from central Brazil to the seaports and mining regions in the mouths of the Amazon.

When I was being shown around the construction work in Brasília in the summer of 1958 I tried in every way to catch up with Sayão. He was off in the bush, we were told. One of his chauffeurs drove us around, in a car, he explained with awe in his voice, that Dr. Sayão often rode in. He pointed out the plain frame house where Sayão lived, a place where he had once eaten a meal, a chair he had sat in. When he learned that I had spent several days in Dr. Sayão’s company several years before he treated my wife and me with almost embarrassing respect. Some of the mana of the great roadbuilder had rubbed off on us.

In January 1959, a few days before the bulldozers working up from the south were to meet the bulldozers coming down from Belém to open the final link in the preliminary trail of the Belém road, Sayão was killed by a falling tree. He was directing the clearing of the dense rainforest near Imperatriz on the Rio Tocatins in the State of Maranhão. He had sat down for a moment at a rough table to check something on his map when the tree fell on him and crushed his skull. He died very soon.

The candongos, as they call the roadworkers and construction workers, revered him as a father. He was a saint who worked miracles. His death was the end of the world. One of his jeep drivers, Benedito Segundo, fell dead when he heard the news.

Bernardo Sayão and Benedito Segundo were the first men buried in the new cemetery at Brasília. The whole city was in mourning. People walked along the streets crying. Particularly the huts of the candongos were hung with crepe. The candongos begged that Dr. Sayão be buried standing up, with his face to the north, so that he could look forever up the great highway he had planned.