Brazil on the Move

Boa Viajem, Recife, September 13, 1962

The name of the beach means “pleasant journey.” It brings up a picture of people riding out from the city in the old days to wave to their friends tacking out from the harbor entrance on sailing ships into the onshore breeze. I don’t find the hotel as pleasant as it seemed when I was there with my wife and daughter four years ago; rebuilt and modernized, it lacks the rustic air it had. Maybe it’s that my family has gone back to the States. There’s been an immense amount of building. The beach has taken on a standardized resort look.

The fishermen have been chased away. Watching their jangadas was one of the real pleasures of our stay in Recife four years ago.

The jangada is a boatshaped raft made of logs of various light woods. The fishermen push them out in the morning over the heavy surf. Using a lateentype sail they cruise far out into the ocean. They fish with casting nets and hook and line. They steer with a paddle and with moveable leeboards pushed down between the logs, like on the Kon-Tiki. They are awash most of the time. We never did get to go out on one but it was a constant pleasure to follow their skillful navigation, tacking back and forth into the wind; and then the return in the afternoon running before the wind through gaps in the black reef that gave its name to this capital city of the ancient sugar state of Pernambuco, and back through the surf onto the beach.

The fishermen stored their gear in neatly made shelters of plaited palmleaves, up under the endlessly swaying rustling coconut palms. The catches they brought ashore in their deep baskets seemed pathetically small. These waters are not rich in fish.

For bathing, the sea is as delicious as ever.

Drying off in the mild late sun in the salt breeze that was almost cool — the season here is early spring: I’ve seen peach-trees in bloom — I felt a sudden gush of a very Portuguese state of mind: saudades. The Pequeno Dictionário Brasileiro da Língua Portuguêsa describes saudades, rather lyrically I thought, as “the sad and suave remembrance of persons or things distant or gone.”

Four years ago we all enjoyed ourselves particularly on this beach. The surf was just right. The reef cuts the force of the waves.

There are landcrabs if you watch for them. They have a ghostly way of being gone before you see them, set high off the ground on spiderlegs like harness racers.

Gilberto Freyre was at his house in Apipucos. He played host for us for an entire day. It was like living a chapter of Casa Grande e Senzala. He look us out to lunch in the country at an ancient sugar plantation. The sugarmill wasn’t working any more, and the young couple who entertained us, pleasant as they were, were like young couples with artistic tastes you might meet anywhere in the world, but somehow Freyre managed to evoke the sugarmill and the people who’d lived there through the years. He made us feel its history and its folklore … in depth through the years.

It was a day of semitropical beauty you could hardly believe: blue sky sprinkled, as if with confetti, with little halcyon clouds tinted with lavender and primrose and faintest brick color. The cane was a very lightgreen; the mangoes the very darkest green etched in black. In the shimmering sunlight every tree was a different green. There were sheep, and a duck-pond and geese, and cattle in a distant pasture. Country people on scrubby little horses passed along a country lane. Their straw hats, their clothes had a distinctive air. Even their dogs had a Pernambuco look.

The lunch tasted incredibly good. We ate a great deal and drank a great deal. Afterwards Freyre produced a pair of guitar-players. They sang what is called a desafio, a challenge. One man makes up a couplet and sings it and the other caps it. In between they keep the guitar strings throbbing. The whole thing is extemporary. The couplets deal with everything from national politics to the private lives of people in the audience. Everybody is kidded. The guitarists kid each other. The audience applauds a successful crack. For the rest of the day wherever we went the guitarists went with us. They gave a great performance.

In the afternoon we drove through farms and plantations on our way back to Freyre’s house. We drank plenty and talked plenty. We were on the crest of the wave. We dined at the house of a Recife politician. Again the food was much too good. The desafio was going great guns. Afterwards our tireless friends went on to a nightclub, but we, pleading our daughter’s tender years, went back to the Hotel Boa Viajem and to the salty night breeze rustling through the palms and the sound of the surf … Saudades.

This time four years later, the weather’s threatening. The city of Recife has grown skyscrapers from every seam. It looks as if it had doubled in population. No place to park a car. The old town on the island has lost its quaint Dutch look. I miss old buildings I had remembered. If it weren’t that my friends the Ellebys put me up in their house made lively by their children, I’d be feeling depressed indeed.

Among the Americans I find a good deal of gloom. The Alliance for Progress seems stalled. Among the Department of Agriculture people to be sure there’s talk of a real breakthrough in rainforest agriculture. If it’s true it’s the most exciting news since chloroquin. So much to be done … if it weren’t for the Communists.

For the first time, in all my batting around Brazil, walking with a group of Americans at lunchtime into a restaurant, I see real hostility in the faces of the people at the other tables.

The people who for want of a better word we call intellectuals are subject to obsessions the world over. The anti-McCarthyism of the collegiate and bureaucratic classes in the States became an obsession. In Brazil anti-Americanism may be becoming the current obsession of the intellectuals.

In São Paulo, at the lawschool at the old university, I tried to have it out with a group of law students. Personally they couldn’t have been more cordial, but their prejudice stuck out like a sore thumb. First they brought up, as everybody does, our discrimination against Negroes in the South, but they seemed to see the point when I explained that three or four southern states constituted a small part of the population of the United States and that even there an effort was being made. (I might have added that the average southern Negro gets a whole lot better break than a workingman in Brazil.) Why was it, one young man who had been to Los Angeles, insisted, that everybody born north of the Rio Grande considered himself better than anybody born south of it. I pointed out that it was a natural human failing to think of your own group as being tops. The paulistas were famous for that. They laughed. They really had me when they began to ask questions about American writers. They knew Faulkner and Hemingway and Salinger and Cummings. Their questions showed thought and information. I kept thinking: suppose I were talking to a group of students back home; they wouldn’t even know whether Brazilians wrote Spanish or Portuguese. Perhaps it’s our ignorance that galls them so.

It seemed strange to me that they never mentioned the Bay of Pigs. Politeness, maybe.

I may be wrong, maybe I haven’t talked to enough of them; but I don’t seem to find anti-American prejudice among working people. If they know Americans at all they like them, perhaps because we tend to be more openhanded towards working people than the Brazilians. Better wages. The complaint of the housewives is that Americans spoil their maids. The North American idea that people who do manual work should for that very reason get a little better than fair and equal treatment has made little progress in the southern continent. Of course a lot of Brazilian working people vote the pro-Communist and anti-American tickets. They have to vote the way the labor bosses tell them to. It’s a question of bread and butter. They repeat the Communist slogans without paying much attention to them. If they read, they do believe to a certain extent what they read in Ultima Hora, but they don’t seem to feel the hatred the journalists feel who write in it. The working people are too busy trying to get a square meal, a roof over their heads, a few clothes for the children, and the price of a soccer game Sunday.

Modern Communism, what in Brazil you might call the Fidel Castro mentality, is an obsession of the intellectuals. Politics is, after all, the ladder to success. In recent years university students here have given a great deal more time to politics than to study or technical training. Whether they were justified or not, student strikes have paralyzed higher education. Dedication to knowledge: scholarship is almost forgotten as a way of life. Many students, whether Communist or anti-Communist, throw all their energy into the political activities of the student organizations. Being a student has become a profession.

The anti-Communists mostly have to work gratis. The Communists get paid in various ways; traveling expenses to meetings, travel to Cuba or the Soviet Union, board and lodging during indoctrination courses. If they write articles they are sure to get them published. A writer who doesn’t offend the Communists finds his books get a good press. There are Communist claques in the publishing houses and in the newspapers. It’s much easier to swim with the tide than against it.

The last thing the young Brazilians who graduate from the university want to do is to engage in manual labor. We have a similar state of mind developing in the United States, but with us the old Protestant tradition of the nobility of work still has a certain strength. The career they look forward to is officeholding, and Communism looms ahead as the officeholder’s paradise. Even in opposition and illegality the Party offers careers to its adherents. The magic of the Marxist ideology turns careerism into altruism. The student leaders think of themselves as dedicated idealists.

The Communists are struggling against imperialism and exploitation: how can an idealist oppose them? The Communist imperialism and Communist exploitation they read about in the newspapers doesn’t impress them. The Berlin wall; they shrug it off. The development of the demagoguery of revolution in Mexico should have proved a corrective, but the lesson has been lost.

Of course the nationalists have a story, in Brazil as they did in Mexico. Though great sectors of industry are now wholly or partly in Brazilian hands, some foreign utilities are still owned abroad. Fear of nationalization has inhibited improvements or even decent maintenance. Investment is at a standstill. In Rio there are people who have been waiting twenty years for a telephone. In trying to protect their stockholders the foreign boards of directors have thrown the Brazilian consumer to the wolves. As a result both consumers and stockholders have lost out. The financial managers can’t seem to think of anything except how to get their companies bailed out by the American taxpayer when expropriation finally comes.

It is a sorry end to the history of American and European investment in South America, which produced so many engineering marvels in its day. It is a situation made to order for Communist propaganda.

With Goulart’s administration in charge of the federal government, Brazilian Communism seems to be entering its heyday. The tragic thing to me is that the Marxist theory has nothing to offer that can solve the country’s problems. The most pressing need is to grow enough food to feed the population. The world over, Marxism has failed to produce food. Brazil’s spreading frontier demands individual initiative. All Communism has to offer is increased power to a bureaucracy which has already proved its incompetence. With a government that can’t keep the employees from stealing the stamps off the letters in the postoffice, the rational thing you would think would be to call for less rather than more power for the politicians.

When you come to think of it, maybe the Communists and near Communists are no more powerful in Brazil than they are in the United States. There’s nothing in the history of Brazilian relations with the spreading Soviet power as disturbingly illogical as the behavior of various administrations in Washington. The Brazilian press suffers from none of the inhibitions against clear thinking that muddy the mental processes of the American liberals. The Rio and São Paulo newspapers are as vigorous and varied and scurrilous and satirical and generally rambunctious as the American newspapers used to be in their salad days before schools of journalism and the Newspaper Guild and the breakdown of competition. The best pens are in the anti-Communist camp. “How the hell,” I said to myself, “can we ask the Brazilians to follow our leadership when there isn’t any?”

In spite of the soothing roar of the surf on Pleasant Journey beach, none of these reflections made for sound sleeping.

Natal, the Governor’s Guesthouse, September 14

Doug Elleby drove me up from Recife in a jeep. At breakfast the Recife newspapers were full of Brochado da Rocha’s resignation as Prime Minister. The unions, which are under the direct control of President Goulart’s Ministry of Labor, are threatening a general strike if the congress doesn’t speed measures for a return to “presidentialism.” That’s a pitch of labor demagogy we haven’t yet quite reached in the United States.

Leaving Recife the first thing that struck me was the road. Four years ago nobody would have dreamed of trying to drive from Recife to Natal, even in a jeep. We skirt Olinda on a firstrate wellgraded highway. A glimpse of the faded tiled roofs and the belfries of the ancient Dutch capital makes me wish I had time for one more look at the beautiful Portuguese tilework and the fine arches of the old convents there. North of Olinda we drive through a beautiful rolling green country. The dark sculptured mango trees give the country a landscaped look. The houses are stucco on adobe with red and yellow tile roofs. They seem comfortable. This is oniongrowing country and fairly prosperous.

After an hour the trees grow smaller. The only cultivation is in the valleys. Fewer fruit trees and more sugar cane. After we cross the state line from Pernambuco into Paraíba we drive through a region of thorny underbrush interspersed with small gnarled trees. The road is graded but it hasn’t been black-topped yet. Parts are under construction. Eroding streams have taken deep bites out of the new raised causeways across bottomlands. Occasionally a washout almost cuts the road in two. No road for night driving.

A little more than two hours from Recife we reach João Pessoa which is the capital of the small state of Paraíba. It’s a pleasant little yellowstucco city. The new quarters radiate along streets laid out like spokes of a wheel from a circular pond bordered with palms. The beach, studded with vast banyantrees, each tree a thicket by itself, opens in a halfmoon on a Nilegreen lagoon protected by a distant black reef where the surf spumes. Beyond the ocean is deepest indigo to the horizon. Jangadas skim back and forth in the fresh trade wind. Skinny sunblackened men wade with shrimpnets in the shallows. The waiter who serves us a beer under the trees points out that the impressivelooking promontory to the south of the lagoon is the easternmost point of Brazil, less than 35° west of Greenwich.

Leaving town down a cobbled hill we have a lovely view of a little port on the river, rusty small steamboats, ancient sailingships and a great stretch of salt marshes behind. We speed along the straight cement road which leads to Campina Grande, the most important town in Paraíba. It is too far out of our way; so we turn north on a dirt road so as to drive through Sapé.

Sapé is reputed to be one of the centers of Julião’s Ligas Camponêsas. Julião is a landowner from Pernambuco who at one time had pretentions towards literature. Under the influence of Communist activists he has organized peasant leagues which are said to receive arms and guerrilla warfare training through agents of Fidel Castro. Their program is for the tenants to take over the land by force. It is quiet this morning. We did see one man with a rifle; and walls and buildings occasionally decorated with the hammer and sickle, and with VIVA CASTRO in brightblue paint.

His illwishers tell the story on Julião that when the peasants took him at his word and started to occupy his own estate he called in the Army to protect it. Could be; but it seems a little too pat.

What, you ask yourself, would you do in their place?

It’s a hilly country with small patches of decent land, a little like the Piedmont region of North Carolina. We pass extensive plantations of pineapple, packingsheds with stacks of crates ready for shipment. Doug tells me that there’s an active pineapplegrowers’ cooperative in Sapé. They are trying to enlarge their export market to include the United States. Now their pineapples go to Europe or the Argentine.

Overpopulated. We pass through too many dusty little stone villages. The crumbling adobe huts have a company town look. People are poor all right. If I had to live there I’d feel rebellious too. But even driving through, it becomes fairly obvious that redistribution of the land won’t solve the problem. There’s not enough good land to go around. In North Carolina the solution was textile mills. Here it might be small industry. It might be resettlement on virgin lands to the west. Cutting the throats of the landlords isn’t going to help.

It’s so much easier to appeal to envy, hatred and malice than to work out rational solutions: therein lies the success of the Communist play for power.

The landlords in the Northeast are no bargain either. Many of them would rather die than give their tenants a break. The basic trouble is that there’s not enough to go around. I was told the story of a man in Pernambuco who personally beat up one of his tenants for planting banana trees round his hut. I suppose the landlord thought that if the tenant had a few bananas to eat he wouldn’t cut cane at the going rate. Still, if the politicians would only give them a chance the pineapplegrowers’ cooperative might well do more to raise the standard of living around Sapé than the peasant leagues.

We cross into Rio Grande do Norte. Now the land is really poor but there are less people on it. The long rolling hills are shaped a little like the great green hills of Normandy, but they are sandy and arid. Scraggly vegetation under a flaming sun. In the valleys we see traces of abandoned sugar plantations. Here and there the stump of a brick chimney rises among the ruins of an old refinery. Even where there’s still cultivation the cane has a starved look. There is a great deal of it. From one rise we look out into the shimmer of sunlight on enormous canefields, blue like the shimmer on a lake.

The first sign of Natal, the state capital, is a row of old U.S. radio masts left over from World War II sticking up from the top of a hill. Then there are military hangars, nicely painted airport buildings on a vast empty expanse of concrete landingstrips. We are driving on a hardtop road that is unmistakably American. To the right, bluffs jut into the misty blue ocean over great spuming purple rocks. The seabreeze is suddenly cool. The large seedylooking gray building is a hospital. Visiting Americans put up there, Doug Elleby says, by arrangement with the nuns, because the hotel is so horrible.

We stop off at the hotel in the center of town. An unappetizing dump. A few discouraged looking customers sit sweating in the lobby. Gin and tonic is available in the bar but no sandwiches. We’ve had no lunch. It’s three in the afternoon and we are ravenous. All we can get to eat is some dried up strips of Dutch cheese. No bread.

A gentleman from the state government appears to take me to the guesthouse. Brazilian friends in Rio have arranged for the governor to take me along on a tour of the state starting tomorrow. I say goodby to my American escorts.

Aluísio Alves, a man of thirtynine who is present governor of Rio Grande do Norte, is, so it has been explained to me, one of the young men with a passion for social service who represent a new breed of Brazilian politician. It is this new breed of politician that will give the Communists a hard time.

He was born in Angicos, a little hamlet in the longstaple cotton region in the center of the state. He studied in Natal and took his law degree at the University of Alagoas in Maceió, an ancient city on the coast a hundred or so miles south of Recife. At twentyone, while still a student, he was elected federal deputy, one of the youngest on record. In Rio he became national secretary of the Democratic Union and a friend of Carlos Lacerda’s. Along with Lacerda he was one of the founders of the Tribuna da Imprensa which he edited during Lacerda’s exile. Since then there have been political differences between the two, particularly since Alves was elected governor of his home state in 1960 with Social Democrat backing.

On the way to the guesthouse I got the notion that — although possibly for political reasons the Alves administration was keeping Americans at arm’s length — the American troops had left not too unpleasant memories behind them in Natal.

At the guesthouse I was ushered into a princely pink bedroom hung with mirrors and festooned with plush that looked out through shuttered windows on a garden on one side and an airy terrace on the other. In Brazil it’s always a feast or a famine. The shower in the bathroom not only worked, but the water was hot. A shower was a godsend after all that dust. We’d arrived with half the state of Paraíba caked on our necks. I lunched in solitary splendor at a great oval table set as if for a state banquet.

Afterwards I was driven to the seat of government which the present incumbent has renamed Palacio da Esperanza (the Palace of Hope). Governor Alves is a showman. From the beginning of his campaign for the governorship he has used the green flag of hope as a trademark.

A green flag fluttered over the building and the official cars parked outside had green flags. Aluísio Alves makes a great play for the young. The government palace was as full of teenagers as Washington, D.C. during the Easter vacation. The central stairway swarmed with boys and girls. They chattered in the anterooms. There were so many youthful committees packed into the governor’s office that you could hardly see his desk.

Aluísio Alves has, like so many Brazilians, the knack of looking younger than he is. He is a slender man with sunken cheeks. Except for his harassed air of a man in the middle of a political campaign he looks almost as youthful as the highschool kids all about him.

He has a brusque decisive manner. His Portuguese is so clear and sharp I can understand every word. In a flash he arranges an appointment with Bishop Sales whom I have asked to see. He tells off a young man from his secretariat to see that I get to the afternoon’s comicio. He himself is up to his neck in appointments. He explains that he is not up for election. He is campaigning for a favorable legislature. His term has three more years to run.

José Augusto who has been detailed as my guide is a student of law. Right in Natal he’s learned fluent English. He’s too young to have learned it from the Americans. He’s so younglooking I don’t like to ask his age. He has plans for the diplomatic service. Itamarití. No, his secretarial work doesn’t interfere with his studies. It is good practice. He’d like to go to the States, to perfect his English and to see. He almost got a fellowship but something went wrong. The man who was backing him died. He wishes it could be this year. Next year will be too late. He’ll be training for the foreign service. Already he has the suave diplomat’s manner, but under it you feel a somewhat steely personality. I’d bet that young man will go far.

The meeting was interesting. An enormous crowd packed a Y-shaped intersection of streets. Green bunting, signs, posters, campaign mottoes. Rockets sizzle up from the outskirts of the crowd to go bang overhead in the rosy sky of the swift twilight. Bats — or were they some kind of nighthawk? — flitter overhead. Night comes on fast.

The governor is giving account of his administration. He talks in front of a floodlit screen. When he needs to explain a point of finance he has the figures thrown on the screen from a slide. He’s explaining his budget to the public. He has a clear sharp way of putting things. While he does occasionally pull out the organ notes of the professional orator his story hangs together; the public servant accounting to his constituents.

Brazilian comicios, particularly in this mad campaign of ’62, never end. José Augusto says it’s time to dine. Gradually the chauffeur manages to back his car out of the crowd.

A full moon has risen above the Atlantic. Natal rises from the sea in ranks of stucco cubes, theatrically lit by the streetlights against a background of high black headlands. It is really beautiful in the moonlight. We eat at the aviation officers club, on a terrace overlooking an inlet. The place has the look of having been built by the Americans twenty years back. We are absolutely alone there except for a solitary figure at the bar inside.

The waiter produces elegantly broiled slices of a large fish I don’t catch the name of. Lime and Bacardi. (Exiled from Cuba, Bacardi rum is now produced in Recife.) After the long drive and the dust and the crowded governor’s palace and the jampacked comicio the stillness is delicious, the emptiness, the moonlit water.

The figure at the bar turns out to be a local poet. He’s been at the bar a long time. He weaves down the terrace to greet us. He hovers around the table. Talking, gesticulating, expostulating, there seem to be three or four of him. I get the feeling the place is crowded. He shows an amazing knowledge of North American writing. He loves Sherwood Anderson: Poor White, Winesburg, Ohio …

Poor Sherwood, I’m thinking, so many years dead. How he would have enjoyed this scene. The unfamiliar inlet between mysterious hills in the moonlight. The empty terrace, the puzzled waiter; José Augusto, who’s a proper young man, explaining apologetically that the gentleman really is a very good poet … How Sherwood Anderson would have enjoyed the scene and the drunken poet praising him.

We had to tear ourselves away in a hurry. My appointment with Bishop Sales was at nine and it suddenly transpired that his episcopal residence was not in Natal, but in a fishing village called Ponta Negra, fourteen kilometers away. Our suggestion to the chauffeur that we mustn’t keep the bishop waiting, caused him to tear off at such speed through the complicated moonlit streets of Natal and along a narrow bumpy road that skirted a great moonwashed beach that I really thought he’d be the end of us. It was only when I explained to him that it was not extreme unction I was seeking from the bishop but an interview, that he saw the point and slowed down.

Bishop Sales has a dark eager aquiline countenance with just a touch of Savonarola. His spare frame has a vigorous athletic look under the black cassock. He sits on a small hard chair in his bare little office, talking with his legs crossed in a rather unecclesiastical manner.

His program to combat Communism, he says right away, is only one of a dozen programs in various parts of Brazil. It is not a program of religious propaganda, he insists. He wants to awaken a sense of human dignity and of the duties of citizenship in a democracy.

In furtherance of this general aim, he conducts courses in reading and writing: alphabetization, he calls it, over the radio.

He wants a Christian labor movement that will be independent of politicians and Communists and also of employer influences. He wants trade unions that will really stand up for the rights and dignity of labor.

Like Aluísio Alves his appeal is to the teenagers. Every week he invites a group of young people from interior towns and villages to spend three days at Ponta Negra for an indoctrination course. He furnishes them with small batterypowered radios to take home so that they can tune in on the lessons and lectures he broadcasts every day: alphabetization, hygiene, sanitation, simple information that people need in the back country. The young people tune in and explain the lessons to their parents.

He takes me into the next room, where a group of boys and girls, some of them so young they must still be in grade school, are peering at sentences written on a blackboard. Their faces shine when he addresses them. They are having fun, like boy or girl scouts in the States.

“See how they enjoy it,” he says eagerly when we go back to his office. He pours me a glass of coconut water.

“Communist propaganda succeeds,” he says, “because nobody has shown enough interest to talk to the people first. You see how they light up. They know I am interested in them.”

He went on to lament the fact that many great Brazilian capitalists were so shortsighted — out of a mistaken nationalism perhaps — as to back Communist agitators. He regretted too that the U. S. State Department wouldn’t subsidize any of the church programs for promoting the democratic faith. He needed all the help he could get. There was so much to be done.

The chauffeur drove us back to town at a snail’s pace when I told him I wanted to enjoy the sight of the beach and the rocky coast in the moonlight. The enormous bed at the government guesthouse couldn’t have been more comfortable. It had been a long day.

On the Road — September 15

José Augusto and I joined the governor’s caravan in the early morning at a flourishing sugar plantation near Ceará Mirim some miles inland from Natal. The refinery was working. Smoke rose from its tall yellowbrick chimney. A wonderful little toy locomotive with a funnelshaped stack was shunting in little cars full of cane. The sort of little locomotive you want to wrap up and take home.

Under the trees opposite, on a knoll that stood up out of a glaucous ocean of cane that stretched to the horizon, cars were stacked every which way against a big comfortable house.

We found the party at breakfast. The dining room looked like a Marriage at Cana by one of the more animated Venetians. A variety of people ate, talked, argued, gesticulated about a long table that groaned with dishes of fried eggs and plates of ham and patties of manioc flour, all stacked about a row of stately poundcakes down the middle. At one end the blond hostess was pouring out oceans of coffee and hot milk. At the other sat the large monsignor, his cassock enlivened by a little red piping, who was the candidate for Lieutenant-Governor. Maids rushed in and out with plates and cups. New arrivals greeted each other with abraços. Precinct workers slid in and out with messages.

Outside, the geese in the courtyard kept up an uneasy hissing, ducks quacked from a pool, children romped, drivers raced the motors of their cars. Bem-ti-vís piped in the trees overhead.

Eventually the governor emerged from a conference in a back room. People were loaded into cars, handbags were stowed away. Aluísio Alves, a green handkerchief in his hand, took his place in the first car and we were off across the countryside. In the first village there was a new school and a new well to be inaugurated. The children had green scarves and danced up and down chanting: “Aluísio, Aluísio.” The teachers and authorities stood beaming in the sun. On the edge of the crowd boys set off rockets.

And so on, village by village, new schools, water systems, public privies, speeches, singing school children, green bunting that lashed about in the seabreeze, until, at a palm-thatched fisherman’s hamlet near Cape São Roque we changed to jeeps for a run along the coast.

Cruising in a jeep over the white beaches and the tawny dunes was terrific. It was almost like being on skis. We skimmed round the edges of dunes, past endless variations of surf on shining sand, on rocky ledges; and blue sea and green shallows and japanesy little villages under coconut palms with canoes and jangadas ranked on the beach in front of them.

This coast north of Natal is very beautiful but dreadfully poor. Fish are scarce. The only reliable income comes from crawfish which abound under the reefs and ledges. Only now with new roads opening up is it profitable to market them. Schemes are in the works to set up refrigerating equipment so as to ship out the lobstertails for which the demand in the world market seems endless.

At each village the governor visits the school. There’s a little parade through the sandy streets with the local authorities and precinct workers, and a speech, songs, cheers, flower-petals scattered like confetti over the governor’s head, rockets and cherry bombs. The governor tells of his unsuccessful efforts to get equipment from the federal government for schools and clinics, for road building, for water systems. (Actually he’s working with the Alliance for Progress but he doesn’t make a point of it.) He points to the new public privy or the deep well or the school he’s built or repaired. Some schools have gone without even having the walls cleaned since the administration of Washingtón Luíz more than thirty years ago. He tells how much there is to do. He makes a touching personal appeal. “If you are satisfied vote for the men who will help me; if not, vote against me.”

We turned inland at a place on a clear palmfringed river called Rio do Fôgo. In a patch of richer appearing country with little plantations of papaya and manioc and banana we ate lunch at a long table in the breezeway of a wellkept schoolhouse in the midst of a great crowd of bystanders. The children and old men and women watched every mouthful. The staple here seems to be tapioca instead of rice. All along this coast they bring you green coconut water to drink, a delight because the sun is hot and the dust parching.

During the afternoon, having changed back to the cars that had come through back roads to meet us we drove through some of the most depressing inland country I had ever seen. Agave grown for fiber was the main crop. Often there was no other vegetation. The plantations were indicated by rows of dreary hovels with fiber in heaps beside them. Men, women, and children had a drab and dusty look.

We reach a real jumping off place, in the midst of a vast sunsmitten plain. Two straggles of dilapidated shacks form a sort of crossroads — only there isn’t any real road — with a tin windmill to pump water at the intersection. The windmill has broken down. The broken parts are mournfully brought out for the governor’s inspection.

The landowner looks almost as badly off as his tenants. “I wouldn’t live here,” he says with some bitterness, “except that it’s the only land God saw fit to give me.”

It was dark by the time we reached Touros. Touros was a goodsized fishing town on the beach. The people seemed full of beans. A band played. Floodlights lit the speakers’ platform set up in the square across from a recent monument attractively contrived out of aluminum sheets to simulate a jangada. The firmament resounded with the explosion of rockets and, fortunately at some distance, behind the church, somebody set off bombs so loud they must have been sticks of dynamite.

Aluísio Alves was at his best. He told us about his last visit to Touros in the course of an unsuccessful campaign and how he got there late and the people waited all night to hear him, and how their friendliness had cheered him. He told of the three years of work that still lay ahead of him in his battle against disease and illiteracy. Eighty per cent couldn’t read or write. Ninetyeight per cent suffered from schistosomiasis. Of every two children born, one child died in infancy. “People of Touros, with your help we shall change all this — our campaign is the campaign of hope.” And the green pennants waved.

The governor and his party were to be put up in a small house perched on a sand dune. Half the population of Touros had gotten there ahead to receive us. In fact they had eaten up most of the dinner laid out on a variety of tables set end to end. About all that was left was a little spaghetti, still cold in the can. There was one chair for the governor, but no more.

The porches were full of boys and girls who had come from interior towns to the speaking. The problem was where people would sleep. There were no beds and few cots and hammocks. As the large monsignor and I were the oldest, we were assigned to the privacy of a tiny leanto which housed tools back of the house. A cot was found for me and an effort was made to swing a hammock above it for the monsignor. Alas, we were both large men. There was no way of fitting us into the space. The monsignor handsomely retired and I was left alone. God knows where he slept. It was just as well I was out in the leanto because the racket in the house was indescribable. Everybody in town wanted to speak to the governor.

The governor went off to a dance given in his honor. He had addressed the crowd about two dozen times during the day. He had just finished a fulldress oration. He had driven eight or ten hours through the heat and the dust. He is a rather slight man. He must be made of iron.

Mossoró, September 16: the Long Long Sunday

A heavy shower of rain on the roof woke me at about four-thirty. When the rain stopped rockets started hissing up all around the house and exploding in the sky overhead. They have the loudest rockets in Touros I’ve ever heard. I mucked around in the yard behind the kitchen, awash with thin mud from the rain, in search of the washbasin. There was only one. Shaved among the awakening teenagers on the porch looking out on the long slow green spuming waves advancing towards the beach below the house out of a pearly ocean in the morning twilight.

Met our hosts. In the hubbub last night I didn’t have a chance to sort them out. The reddish-haired stocky man must be the paterfamilias. There are various sons, one a young man on crutches. The two elderly women stoking up a small charcoal brazier in the kitchen must be the maids. Nobody seems to be disturbed by the house having been turned last night into something like the New York subway at rush hour. We have to admit that the accommodations are plain.

Sitting on packing boxes at the table the large monsignor and I are regaled with a breakfast of eggs, toasted cheese, black coffee, and bread. Couldn’t be better.

Then we take an early morning stroll around the town in the governor’s train. Touros looks more modest by day than it did in the light of the floodlights. Squarish blocks of stucco houses. Sand in the streets. These strolls around town accompanied by the local authorities are part of the program at each place we stop. Anybody who feels like it comes up to speak to the governor. He listens to them all, old and young, rich and poor. He listens with a serious air, with an occasional wry smile. If it’s a matter of some detail a secretary steps up to take notes. Aluísio Alves is a man of few words except when he is delivering a speech.

The mayor of Touros wants us to visit the school but it’s Sunday and no one can find the key. At last an intelligent-looking old woman arrives breathless. Everybody helps her as the big key is hard to turn and the doubledoors stick. She must be over seventy but I think she’s the schoolteacher.

By the time we have toured the schoolrooms the cars have lined up outside. Governor Alves gets into the seat next the chauffeur with his green handkerchief fluttering and we are off. It is a long drive, over a decent gravel road that shows signs of fresh repairs, to what I’m told is the world’s largest agave plantation. The company has an English name. There is an endless row of company houses — all alike, bleak, unshaded, of cracked stucco — but the fact that they are houses is a cause for admiration. There are long warehouses, piles of sisal drying (this is not hennequen but an agave that produces a very similar fiber), and an airstrip.

Two small planes, one the governor’s Cessna, are waiting for us. Those who can’t fit into the planes will follow by road. When we take off we can really appreciate the immensity of the plantation. A checkerboard of the spinyleaved agaves spreads in every direction over the rolling hills. We fly inland.

At São Miguel the country is even hillier. The people waiting for us at the airstrip are welldressed. Everything looks more prosperous. Abraços, felicidades. Great enthusiasm. This is the township where Aluísio Alves was born. Local boy makes good. Every face beams with a personal pride in him. We are driven into town. The greeting throng follows in a truck, a few of them on sleek caramelcolored ponies.

This is the longstaple cotton region. Perennial cotton was introduced by British companies some forty years ago. The country looks like Arizona with rosy desert mesas and flowerlike formations of gray rock. The air is dry. There is a crispness to the breeze although the sun is plumb overhead.

At São Miguel we sit at a table with a clean cloth and eat a second — or is it a third? — breakfast. When someone speaks of more milk, the girl who is waiting on us smilingly brings in a large pitcher of milk from the electric refrigerator in the back room. On the coast where we were nobody would have dreamed of milk. That pitcher of milk is more eloquent than a dozen speeches. After the sight of such poverty it is a real pleasure to be among prosperous people again.

After São Miguel we were driven over to another prosperous looking town, Pedro Pedrosa. Milk on sale in the market, and eggs, and decentlooking meat. Few flies. While Governor Alves was addressing the crowd a young man in riding boots invited me in perfect English to have a drink with him. He professed great admiration for Governor Alves. He had been several times to the States. He was the soninlaw of the man who owned a large part of the local cotton business. He was full of the possibilities of developing this region into one of the great longstaple cotton producers of the world. He wanted American capital. He’d spoken to a Rockefeller. “For God’s sake,” he said, “go home and tell the people in Washington to eliminate Castro … It is Castro that is the roadblock against progress in the Northeast.”

The air was bumpy to Martins, an ancient little city perched on a green cultivated ridge high above the arid hills. Martins is the highest populated area in the state. At two thousand feet the altitude gives it a climate of its own. We found the sun roasting, but the wind cool. There were flowering trees and cobbled squares flanked by the long barred windows and tall green blinds of colonial buildings.

A dam was to be inaugurated. The cavalcade of cars plunged through the clinging dust to the edge of a lake in the valley below. It was long after noon. The speakers were grouped on a ranch wagon under the full lash of the sun. The governor spoke. The visitors spoke. The candidates spoke. The local authorities spoke. From the broiling crowd came questions and enthusiastic responses. At last after a couple of hours we were driven back into town to the cool airy corridors of the maternity hospital.

There the ladies’ auxiliary, so much like the ladies who would serve a meal for the benefit of a church or the PTA in any North American rural community, served a magnificent lunch (for the benefit of the hospital) — roast beef, chicken with rice, venison, an assortment of rolled meats and meat balls variously seasoned and sprinkled with farinha—washed down by pitcher after pitcher of coconut water and a special soft beverage flavored with guava. The guava filled the room with a sort of strawberry fragrance.

From Martins the flight was smooth through horizontal sunlight to Mossoró. Mossoró is the second city in the state. The drive in from the airport is a nightmare of noise. Three or four cars abreast, trucks and jeeps move in a slow roaring traffic jam into town. Every horn and claxon is sounding two notes from the governor’s campaign song: “Aluísio, Aluísio.”

This comicio is dedicated to the meninos, the children of the city. The motorcade stalls on a street leading into the square. A parade has become entangled with the traffic jam. There are ranks of girls and boys in costume, marching bands, drum majorettes.

In front of the reviewing stand in the square two floats are stranded. On one is seated a young lady dressed like the Statue of Liberty. She’s already tired of holding up her torch. On the other, a plump youth stripped to the shorts is bound to a plaster pillar by newlooking aluminum chains to represent servitude. Although it’s obviously been a long day he’s still holding up his manacled hands with right good will.

Seeing that I look rather parched after listening to so many speeches in so much sun a thin man with a gray mustache from city hall leads me into the corner bar for a beer. The bar is full of hardbitten characters, obviously not meninos, who are taking advantage of the festivities to get thoroughly tanked up. We are latched onto by the inevitable grubby drunk who thinks he can speak English. He worked for the American submarine base during the war. He loves Americans.

The governor’s chauffeur, a thicknecked man who has the look that bodyguards have the world over — Lacerda would have called him “a sort of Gregório”—comes to fetch us. The speeches are about to start. He tactfully disentangles us from the drunk who loves Americans.

Indeed the children of Mossoró have turned out. Babes in arms, toddlers in their gauzy best. All the pretty girls. Boys and men perch like starlings in the trees of the jampacked square.

The afternoon is absolutely airless. The stand is crowded tight. Every menino who wants to is encouraged to climb up on it. It is hard to pay attention to the speakers on account of the squirming and the wriggling and the squeezing and the shuffling of the little ones working their way between the legs of the assembled politicos. Each one wants to get near the governor.

The boards of the stand creak. I’m wondering if they’ll bear the weight.

Beside me a gentleman in a white suit for whom no time has been found on the program is angrily jumping up and down as he argues with some official. The stand sways and groans. I’m expecting the scantlings to give way any minute.

The speeches go on and on. Every local politico has his say. A gentleman named Duarte Filho is running for prefeito. Evidently the campaign is violent in Mossoró because the denunciations of the opposition become more and more extreme as twilight falls. There are too many adults among the children in the square. Toughlooking waterfront characters like the men in the bar. I’m worried about what would happen to all the little children if the meeting should end in a brawl.

While I’m trying to catch what the speakers are shouting a skinny grayhaired man, shoved up against my midriff by the crowd on the stand, pours into my ear a story you could hear only in Brazil. He too worked at the American submarine base. He too likes Americans. He knows a cave where there are crystals that shine bright as the headlights of a car. He has samples at his home. If they aren’t diamonds they are something just as valuable. He wants me to tell him the name of an American engineer. Brazilian engineers don’t have the education to exploit such a treasure or else they will try to steal it all for themselves. Can’t I find him an American engineer to prospect the cave? Diamonds as big as your fist shine with their own light in the darkness.

The square grows dark. The closepacked crowd is getting hotter and hotter. On the stand we sweat rivers. Speeches are becoming more and more violent. Men in the crowd have a threatening look. A dangerous tension seems to be building up. Suddenly a samba band begins to play.

I’ve been noticing one small band that officials have been trying to keep quiet, behind the speakers’ stand, shushing and pushing back the dark boys with instruments. The minute the governor stops talking they won’t be shushed any longer. Their drums throb. The sound of sambas rises from every street that leads into the square.

In three minutes half the people are dancing. The oratory fades away. No more traffic jam. The floats are moving. The meeting turns into a sort of carnival parade with samba schools dancing ahead of the floats, each behind its own banner. TOO YOUNG TO VOTE, reads one. Songs take the place of speeches. Children, teenagers, old men and women, everybody is dancing.

No more tension. A cool breeze seems to sweep through the streets. The young kids are marvelous. In front of Duarte Filho’s house it is like a ballet. I’ve never seen such really beautiful dancing as fills the streets of Mossoró for hours, far into the night.

The governor and his party have gone on to another comicio. Don’t they ever get tired? I can still hear the piping and throbbing of distant sambas drifting in through the window of the pleasant old tropical hotel — there’s a shower, and a clean bed and the trade wind through the louvers, and even a reading light — what more could you want? — as I drift off to sleep.