Prose

Chapter 1

Recently in Rio de Janeiro one of those “human interest” dramas took place, the same small drama that takes place every so often in New York or London or Rome: a newborn baby was kidnaped from a maternity hospital. Her name was Maria da Conceição, or Mary of the Conception, but the newspapers immediately abbreviated this, Brazilian fashion, to Conceiçãozinha, or “Little Conception.”

Conceiçãozinha made the headlines for a week, and while she did it is safe to say that the country’s current inflation, the soaring cost of living, the shifts of power in the government — perhaps even the soccer scores — took second place for most readers.

The hospital staff was questioned. A feebleminded woman wandering in the neighborhood was detained. The police poked into culverts and clumps of weeds and around the favelas, Rio’s notorious hillside slums. Somehow the kidnaping was kept from the baby’s mother, but the young government-worker father was photographed at his desk, in postures of despair. Then, after three days, Conceiçãozinha was found, safe and sound. One of the hospital nurses, who had lost a child of her own by miscarriage shortly before, had stolen her.

* * *

So far it all could have happened in New York, London, or Rome. But now the story becomes Brazilian. The white nurse’s mulatto lover, owner of a small grocery store, had promised her a house to live in if she had a child, and he had already given her the equivalent of fifty dollars for the baby’s layette. So the nurse — determined, she told reporters, “to have a decent place to live in” with “home atmosphere,” and also because she really wanted a baby — concealed her miscarriage and told her lover that the baby would be born on such and such a day. Until then she boarded Conceiçãozinha with her laundress, an old woman living in a favela shack. The nurse was arrested as she took them food. The baby was fat and well. The laundress, who could not read, knew nothing of the hubbub in the papers and protested her complete innocence. When the father was told the good news he sobbed and said, “This is the strongest emotion I have ever felt in my life.” He was photographed embracing the police. Conceiçãozinha was taken back to the hospital, where “the doctors were shouting and the nurses weeping.” Three or four hundred people had gathered outside. The swaddled baby was held up to a window, but the crowd screamed, “Show her little face!” So it was shown “to applause and cheers.”

The next day the drama continued on a lower plane but in even more Brazilian style. The two sets of in-laws quarrelled as to which one would have the honor of harboring the child and her real mother first. One grandmother denied that the chief of police had been asked to be Conceiçãozinha’s godfather, because “that is always a family affair.” And the poor father was faced with fulfilling his promessas. If the baby was found alive, he had promised (1) to pay for four Masses; (2) to stop smoking for a year; (3) to give two yard-high wax candles, as well as a life-size wax model of a baby, to the Church of Our Lady of the Penha; and (4) to climb the steps of the same church on his knees, carrying a lighted candle. This 18th-century church perches on top of a weirdly shaped penha, or rock, that sticks up out of the plain just north of the city. It is a favorite church for pilgrimages and for the fulfilling of promessas. The steps up to it number 365.

* * *

The story of Conceiçãozinha contains a surprising amount of information about Brazilian life, manners, and character. Much of it, of course, is what one might expect to find in any Latin American country. Brazilians love children. They are highly emotional and not ashamed of it. Family feeling is very strong. They are Roman Catholics, at least in outward behavior. They are franker than Anglo-Saxons about extramarital love, and they are tolerant of miscegenation. Also — as one would expect in a very poor and in many ways backward country — many people are illiterate; there are feebleminded people at large who in other countries might be in institutions; and hospitals may not always be run with streamlined efficiency. So far it is all fairly predictable.

But there is more to it than that. The story immediately brings to mind one of Brazil’s worst, and certainly most shocking, problems: that of infant mortality. Why all this sentimental, almost hysterical, concern over one small baby, when the infant mortality rate in Brazil is still one of the highest in the world? The details of Conceiçãozinha’s story are worth examining not only for the interesting light they throw on that contradictory thing, the Brazilian character, but also because the tragic, unresolved problem they present is almost a paradigm of a good many other Brazilian problems, big and small.

First there is the obvious devotion to children. As in other Latin countries, babies are everywhere. Everyone seems to know how to talk to infants or dandle them, and unself-consciously. It is said that two kinds of small business never fail in Brazil, infants’ wear shops and toy shops. The poorest workman will spend a disproportionate amount of his salary for a christening dress (or for milk if he happens to know it is vital to his child’s health). Parents love to dress up their offspring; the children’s costume balls are an important part of Carnival every year throughout the country.

In Catholic Brazil there is no divorce and no legalized birth control, and large families are the rule. Sometimes families run to twenty or more, and five or six children seems to be average. Brazil is a very young country; more than 52 per cent of the population is under nineteen years old. Early marriage is normal, and a baby within a year is taken for granted. Children are almost always wanted — the first three or four at least — and adored.

And yet the infant mortality rate stays appallingly high. In the poorest and most backward regions of the great northeast bulge and the Amazon basin, it is as high as 50 per cent during the first year of life, sometimes even higher. The cities of Recife and Rio, with their large favelas, are two of the worst offenders. During the three days when Conceiçãozinha was hidden in the washerwoman’s shack, and survived, it is a safe guess that more than sixty babies died in Rio.

* * *

Most of this tragic waste of life is due to malnutrition. But often the malnutrition is due not so much to actual lack of food as to ignorance, a vicious circle in which poverty creates ignorance which then creates more poverty. In Rio, for example, there are many worthy free clinics. But fine doctors have been known to resign after working in them for years; they can no longer endure seeing the same children brought in time after time, sicker, weaker, and finally dying because the parents are too ignorant, or too superstitious, to follow simple instructions.

The masses of poor people in the big cities, and the poor and not-so-poor of the “backlands,” love their children and kill them with kindness by the thousands. The wrong foods, spoiled foods, worm medicines, sleeping syrups — all exact a terrible toll on the “little angels,” in paper-covered, gilt-trimmed coffins, blue for boys and pink for girls.

Nevertheless, the population of Brazil is increasing rapidly. Life expectancy has gone up considerably in the last few decades. The indomitable and apparently increasing vitality of Brazil shines through the grimmest death toll statistics. It is like the banana tree that grows everywhere in the country. Cut it back to a stump above ground, and in a matter of hours it sends up a new shoot and starts unfolding new green leaves.

* * *

Indeed, the banana tree is a fairly good symbol for the country itself and for what has happened and is still happening to it. Brazil struck all the early explorers as a “natural paradise,” a “garden,” and at its best moments it still gives that impression — a garden neglected, abused, and still mostly uncultivated, but growing vigorously nevertheless. Great resources have been squandered, but even greater ones are still there, waiting. Barring some worldwide disaster, material prosperity seems bound to arrive. But it is the mismanagement and waste of both human and material wealth along the way that shocks the foreigner as well as the educated, sensitive Brazilian. To give only one example of this: because of inadequate roads, poor transportation, and lack of refrigeration, some 40 per cent of all food produced spoils before it reaches the big markets.

Exploding birth rate and infant mortality, great wealth and degrading poverty — these are the two big paradoxes. But along with them come many smaller ones repeating the pattern, overlapping and interacting: passionate and touching patriotism combined with constant self-criticism and denigration; luxury and idleness (or admiration of them) combined with bursts of energy; extravagance and pride, with sobriety and humility. The same contrasts even appear in Brazilian history, periods of waste and corruption alternating with periods of reform and housecleaning.

Brazil is very big and very diverse. Brazilians vary widely from one region to another. A man may be a “Carioca” (from Rio — the name probably comes from an Indian expression meaning “white man’s home”), a “Paulista” (from São Paulo), a “Mineiro” (from the State of Minas Gerais) or a “Bahiano” (from the State of Bahia), and he is proud of the peculiarities of his own region.

But not only does he vary geographically, he varies historically. Men from two, three or more eras of European history live simultaneously in Brazil today. The coastal cities, from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon River to Pôrto Alegre in the south, are filled with 20th-century men with 20th-century problems on their minds: getting on in the world and rising in it socially, how to pay for schools and doctors and clothes. Then in the surrounding countryside is a rural or semirural population who lead lives at least half a century behind the times, old-fashioned both agriculturally and socially. And for the people of the fishing villages, for those living on the banks of the great rivers, for cowboys and miners — all the backlands people — time seems to have stopped in the 17th century. Then, if one ventures even a little farther on, one enters the really timeless, prehistoric world of the Indians.

* * *

And yet there is one factor that unites Brazil more closely than some European countries which are only as big as a single Brazilian state: its language. Brazil is the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world. Its Portuguese differs from that spoken in Portugal at least as much as American English differs from English English. But throughout Brazil the language is amazingly uniform, and Brazilians have no difficulty understanding each other.

It is a rather heavy and solemn tongue, with some of its grammatical forms actually dating back to the Latin of the Roman Republic. The tendency in Brazil is to be careless about grammatical niceties, at least in speaking, and to lighten the language with constant diminutives (as Maria da Conceição became Conceiçãozinha). In fact the Portuguese regard Brazilian Portuguese as “effeminate”—charming when women speak it, but no language for men.

Not only the constant use of diminutives but also the forms of address help create an atmosphere of familiarity, of affection and intimacy. Brazilian nomenclature is almost as complicated as Russian and is often compared to it, but in general women are addressed by “Dona” followed by the Christian name or pet name, and men by “Doutor” if they have a university degree or, if they have not, by a softened form of Senhor, “Seu,” again followed by the Christian name.

* * *

Brazilians are very quick, both emotionally and physically. Like the heroes of Homer, men can show their emotions without disgrace. Their superb futebal (soccer football) players hug and kiss each other when they score goals, and weep dramatically when they fail to. Brazilians are also quick to show sympathy. One of the first and most useful words a foreigner picks up is coitado (poor thing!).

Part of the same emotionalism in social life is the custom of the abraço, or embrace. Brazilians shake hands a great deal, and men simultaneously embrace each other with their free arms. Women often embrace, too, and kiss rapidly on both cheeks: left! right! Under strong feeling the abraço becomes a real embrace.

A rich man will shake hands with and embrace a poor man and also give him money, try to find him a job, and pay his wife’s doctor bills, because they grew up on the same fazenda, or country estate, made their first communions together, and perhaps are even “brothers of creation,” a system of partial adoption that dates from slavery days. Servants are still often called criados, a term which originally meant they had been raised in the family. Even today one occasionally sees an elegant old lady out walking, leaning on the arm of a little dressed-up Negro girl, or taking tea or orangeade with her in a tearoom; the little girl is her “daughter of creation” whom she is bringing up.

In such relationships there is complete ease of manner on both sides. Sometimes Brazilians seem to confuse familiarity with democracy, although the attitude seems rather to be a holdover from slavery days, or feudalism, or even from the Roman Empire, when every rich man had his set of poor relations and parasites. Nevertheless, a sense of natural responsibility underlies the relationship and certainly contributes something toward the more difficult and somewhat broader conception of what democracy generally means today.

Home and family are very important in Brazil. But because there is no divorce, strange situations arise: second and third “marriages,” unrecognized legally but socially accepted, in which there are oddly mixed sets of children. These situations merely give the Brazilians a chance to exercise their unique talent for kindly tolerance. In fact, in the spirit of mollification the courts more than two decades ago ruled that henceforth no one could be legally termed illegitimate.

There is a story about Rio de Janeiro and its beloved, decrepit bondes or open trolley cars. A bonde was careening along, overcrowded as usual, with men hanging to the sides like a swarm of bees. It barely stopped for a tall, gangling man to get off; and as he jumped from the step he fell, landing in a humiliating heap. His fellow passengers laughed. He pulled himself together, got up, and with great dignity shouted after them: “Everyone descends from the bonde in the way he wants to.”

That is the perfect statement of the Brazilian belief in tolerance and forebearance: everyone should be allowed to descend from the bonde in his or her own way.

The greatest tolerance is naturally extended to love, because in Brazil that is always the most important emotion. Love is the constant element in almost every news story, street scene, or familiar conversation. If lunch is an hour or so late because the cook has been dawdling with the pretty delivery boy, her mistress will scold her, even lose her temper (for Brazilian tempers are quick, too), but there will be sympathy underneath and the cook’s excuses will be frank, half humorous, possibly even indecent from the Anglo-Saxon point of view. “First things first” is the motto. Opposed to the constant preoccupation with love is the lack of sentimentality about marriage arrangements. There may be surface emotionalism, but there is Latin logic and matter-of-factness underneath.

A Brazilian woman shopping in New York was puzzled by the tag on a madras shirt she had bought for her husband: “Guaranteed to fade.” In a country as rich as the United States, why would anyone want to wear faded clothes? Why do the Americans like to wear faded blue jeans? Surely that is false romanticism and just one more example of the childishness of the Anglo-Saxon as compared to the more adult Latin? Values are realistic in Brazil. Outside of fashionable circles, the poor are thin and the rich are fat, and fat is a sign of beauty, as it has been since the ancients.

Brazilians are in many ways quick, but they can also be woefully slow. The same mistress who scolds her cook for flirting will complain about the meals always being late. Yet if anyone asks naively, “But why not have lunch at one o’clock every day?” she will reply, “Oh, well — this isn’t a factory.”

* * *

Among the first settlers in Brazil were the big “captains,” impoverished Portuguese noblemen and younger sons seeking quick fortunes, who were used to having feudal henchmen and slaves around them. They and the Portuguese of low rank who were also early on the scene soon established a tradition of having Indian and Negro slaves. One result is that to this day physical labor is looked down upon. Of all his inherited attitudes this one is the hardest for the Brazilian, free of so many other prejudices, to overcome. The upper-class Brazilian who visits the bustling North American continent cannot understand why there is so much eagerness for work. A rich boy mowing the lawn? More romanticism! A lifetime government job, white-collar work, or preferably no work at all, is the poor man’s dream. A shabby, sickly bill collector, who can barely support his wife and six children, but who proudly carries a brief case and wears two fountain pens in his pocket, will tremble with rage if his position in society is misunderstood: “I? — Everyone knows I have never worked with my hands in my life!”

* * *

But along with admiration for a life of ease and luxury goes a strange indifference to physical comfort. Even in cold weather — and it can get quite cold south of São Paulo or in the higher regions of the interior — there is no heating of any kind. People simply put on more clothes. In the small towns in June or July, the coldest months, one often sees a pleasant, old-fashioned Brazilian scene: the large family, grandparents, parents, babies, visiting godparents, and a few odd cousins and fiancés, wearing sweaters or perhaps bathrobes over their clothes, all sitting around the dining-room table under a hanging lamp. Everyone is doing exactly what he wants: reading the paper, playing cards or chess, or relentlessly arguing over the other people’s heads. Elsewhere, even the granfinos, the elegant, cosmopolitan-rich set of the upper-class, who have adopted the “English weekend” and spend it in Petrópolis or other resorts, present somewhat the same air of camping out in the winter. In freezing rooms, the ladies with mink coats over their slacks and rugs over their knees, the gentlemen wearing mufflers, they watch after-dinner movies, the latest chic diversion. Perhaps they will sip Scotch, again to be chic, but more likely cafezinhos, the boiling hot and very sweet little cups of coffee. The poor, meanwhile, drink the same cafezinhos, pile all their clothes on top of them and go to bed early.

Brazilians are a remarkably sober people. Two or three cafezinhos provide enough fuel for them to talk and argue on all night long. The late 19th-century sailor-author Captain Joshua Slocum (Sailing Alone Around the World) was, in his earlier days, in command of a ship on the South American coast. He speaks more than once of “my sober Brazilian sailors” who, unlike the sailors of other nationalities, always turned up again after a night in port — with no hang-overs.

Perhaps because Brazilians are usually as indifferent to cooking as they are to physical comfort, the staple diet is rice, dried meat, and black beans, cooked with a great deal of lard and garlic and served with a dish of manioc flour, to be sprinkled over the beans. However, there are many dishes of great refinement that use twenty or thirty ingredients, and wonderful desserts with even more wonderful names like Maiden’s Drool, Bride’s Pillow, and Blessed Mothers (small cakes).

* * *

The conversation in the caffeine-enlivened evenings will alternate between politics, real estate deals (a favorite pastime of all classes), and family reminiscences. Proud of their Latin logic, Brazilians are also a little proud of their reputation for “craziness.” Family traits are cherished; such and such a family will be famous for its bad temper or for its obstinacy or for its green eyes — because looks, too, are very important. A good family nose will be traced down right to the last-born infant. This preoccupation with good looks may come from the knowledge that many of the oldest families have some Negro blood. Since everyone also wants to be as claro, or white, as possible, this is another of those contradictions that seem to bother no one.

Criticizing the country, running down the government and talking about the “national stupidity” with fearful and apocryphal examples are also favorite pastimes. It is sometimes hard to tell whether the speakers are really angry or merely excited, tolerant or unaware of any need for tolerance, naive or extremely sophisticated. Brazilians are mercurial: recently during Carnival a Negro dancing along the sidewalk with his wife suddenly ran into his two mistresses. There was a small riot and some hair-pulling, but an hour later all four were observed gaily dancing the samba together and holding hands. When the wife was asked why she put up with it, she answered helplessly but rather proudly, “He talked me into it. He’s such a pretty talker!”

More taciturn peoples are likely to be suspicious of talkative ones and to think they are wasting their energy. One frequently meets among intellectuals a sort of Brazilian Hamlet-type, incapable of serious work or action, who seems to be covering up a deep anxiety with words, words, words, a pretended madness, a deliberately fanciful humor that is not frivolity although it resembles it. The earthy humor of the poor, the brutal cartoons in newspapers and magazines, the street boys who laugh at cripples or ugly women — this is directly in line with the humor of the Romans; but the humor of the intellectual is very different, wry, gentle, and a little wild.

They poke fun at their usually bloodless revolutions: “No one fought in that revolution — it was the rainy season.” Like the Portuguese form of bullfighting in which there is no killing, Brazilian revolutions or golpes (coups) sometimes seem to be little more than political and rhetorical maneuvering. A man’s speeches, his moral and physical courage, are admired, but actual violence is going too far. Duels are still fought in Argentina, but they are out of style in Brazil. Brazil has not fought a major war for almost a century. It has rarely wanted more land, already having more than it knows what to do with.

* * *

Jokes tell even more. There is an old favorite, perhaps not even Brazilian originally, about a man walking down the street with a friend. He is grossly insulted by a stranger, and says nothing. The friend tries to rouse his fighting instincts, “Didn’t you hear what he called you? Are you going to take that? Are you a man, or aren’t you?” The man replies, “Yes, I’m a man. But not fanatically.” This is the true Brazilian temper.

Chapter 2

At least as early as the 9th century a land called “Brasil” was already a legend in Europe. It was wherever bresilium came from, a wood obtained in trade with the Far East, much in demand for dyeing cloth red. (Perhaps all the red woolens the peasants wear in the paintings of Brueghel were dyed with “brasil” wood?) The Medici Atlas of 1351 shows an island labelled “Brazil,” and this imaginary island keeps re-appearing for several centuries, sometimes in one part of the world, sometimes in another, even after the present Brazil had been discovered. Columbus found the dye-wood tree in the West Indies, but in his eagerness for gold he simply ignored it. But the first ships sent back from the continent of South America were loaded with brasil-wood, and “Brazil,” or “Brasil,” became the common name for the new country. (The spelling varies and sometimes the number; it was also called “The Brazils.”)

In one of the parks of Rio de Janeiro stands a fine, flamboyant example of Latin-American park-sculpture, a much-bigger-than-life-size man dressed in a costume-pageant costume with wide sleeves, fringes, and skirts, and holding onto a ton or so of undulated bronze banner. One side of the huge pedestal says “1900” and the other “1500” and it was set up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral — according to some authorities. As the city has grown, this statue has been shunted from one place to another, and in somewhat the same way historians have shuffled the problem of whether Cabral really did discover Brazil or not. But most of them now agree that he did, in 1500, shortly after Easter. He was supposedly on his way to India in command of a fleet of thirteen tiny ships; if so, he was off his course by some […] thousand miles to the west. Since the best astronomers, navigators, and mathematicians of the day were all employed at the court of King Manoel I of Portugal, it scarcely seems as though Cabral’s extended side-trip could have been accidental. Probably the Portugese were really trying to get ahead of the Spaniards, who were very busy exploring the lands further north.

Two years after Columbus’s first voyage, Portugal and Spain, then in the full flush of their age of discoveries, had grandly divided all the non-Christian world, known and as yet unknown, between them. The Treaty of Tordesillas, sanctioned by the pope, gave all lands east of a line drawn 370 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands to Portugal, and all lands west of it to Spain. The exact positon of this line was always vague, and the rivalry between the two countries was so strong that even after the treaty they tried to conceal their various voyages and discoveries from each other. (And thus made things harder for the historians.) But Portugal believed, or pretended to believe, that Brazil was within her rightful territories.

On Cabral’s flagship there was a nobleman-merchant, Pero Vaz de Caminha, signed on as a scribe. The wonderfully vivid letter he wrote to King Manoel, describing Brazil and the Indians, or the little he saw of them, has been called “the first page of Brazilian history” and also, with equal justice, “the first page of Brazilian literature.” After a brief account of the voyage west, Caminha calmly announces: “On this day at the vesper hours we caught sight of land, that is first of a large mountain, very high and round, and of other lower lands to the south of it, and flatland with great groves of trees. To this high mountain the captain gave the name of Monte Passoal [“pertaining to Easter”], and to the land, Terra da Vera Cruz.”

The mountain, in the present State of Bahia, still bears the same name. The King changed Vera Cruz to Santa Cruz, the official name until the middle of the century, when, over ecclesiastical protests, it became Brazil. But on the first maps it is either “Brazil” or the “Land of Parrots.” Along with dye-wood, macaws were sent back to Europe, and their brilliant colors, large size, and loud shrieks obviously made a deep impression. (In 1531 a French ship took back three thousand leopard-skins, three hundred monkeys, and “six hundred parrots that already knew a few words of French.”) On a mapus mundi published the year after Cabral’s voyage the coastline of Brazil is not much more than a guess, but Caminha’s “groves of trees” are there, lined up as formally as in a Portugese garden, and under them sits a group of giant macaws, to give explorers some idea of what to expect.

Even if not very original in the 16th century, the first name of Vera Cruz must have seemed appropriate. Cabral was a Knight of the Order of Christ and the fleet’s sails and banners bore its red cross. The men landed to celebrate Easter Sunday with Mass, and set up a large cross. And for weeks they had all been watching the brilliant stars of the Southern Cross overhead; the fleet’s astronomer also wrote to the King, just about this useful constellation. Ever since, Brazil has felt itself to be uniquely “The Land of the Southern Cross.” It is on the flag; the nation’s highest award is the Order of the Southern Cross; the present unit of money, the cruzeiro, is named for it, — and so are thousands of bars, restaurants, bus-lines, business firms, and manufactures. And with the frequent Brazilian abruptness of transition between the spiritual and the material, the 1,000 cruzeiro note, the highest denomination of money, shows a portrait of Cabral on one side and an engraving of that first Easter Mass on the other.

(In exactly the same way, the biggest church in Rio de Janeiro, Our Lady of Candelaria, where all official religious services took place until the change of capital in 1960, sits in a square completely surrounded by the country’s richest banks, as if illustrating a thesis on the relations between Church, State, and High Finance. Or in the same way Brazilian conversation can veer from the eternal verities of Thomas Aquinas to the eternal real estate deals, and back again.)

* * *

Caminha was a good reporter; he describes the Indians’ looks and behaviour, their food and houses, the brand-new wild life. He grows almost lyrical, as all the early voyagers did, over these first few idyllic honeymoon days, — in the amazing century when countries and continents intermarried and new countries were conceived. In his unscientific way, he was also the first of a long line of naturalists and ethnologists, some of the world’s greatest, that has since been fascinated by South America and Brazil.

The Indians were friendly and docile, too docile for their own good, as was to be proved. Presents were exchanged, one of which was grimly prophetic: they gave the Portuguese head-dresses of their exquisite feather-work, and in return the Portuguese gave them one of the red woolen stocking caps worn by laborers. They attended the Easter Mass and mimicked the white men, kneeling, crossing themselves, and singing a hymn of their own. Afterwards, the Portuguese hung “tin crucifixes” that they had thriftily “saved from another voyage,” around their necks.

The Portuguese were mercifully lacking in the bloodthirsty missionary zeal of the Spaniards. However, perhaps because he felt it was expected of him, or had some dim inklings of Manifest Destiny, Caminha wrote: “Our Lord gave them fine bodies and good faces, as to good men, and He who brought us here I believe did not do so without purpose.” There is even a hint of envy, perhaps the earliest trace of the romantic, Noble-Savage, Indianismo that later colored the Brazilian imagination so strongly. The Indians were “clean and fat and beautiful,” and they appeared to be healthier and stronger than the Portuguese themselves. As for the women: “she was so well-built and so rounded and her lack of shame was so charming, that many women of our land seeing her attractions, would be ashamed that theirs were not like hers.” The Portuguese had always been romantically drawn to women of darker races; they had long taken Moorish wives and Negro concubines (there were already […] Negro slaves in Portugal). In Brazil it was only natural for them to become eager miscegenationists almost immediately.

Caminha concludes by saying that they had seen no gold, nor silver, nor any metal at all, but “the interior appears very large. Its waters are quite endless. So pleasing is it that if one cares to cultivate it, everything will grow.” Se plantando, dar. This phrase is now a familiar saying, but it has changed its meaning, from a promise to a reproach to someone who is neglecting obvious opportunities. Surely that simple reversal of meaning reveals a great deal about the long history of the undeveloped resources and possibilities of Brazil since the year 1500.

* * *

Cabral left behind two convicts, who were last seen bewailing their fate while the Indians tried to console them. The condemned men were supposed to learn the Indians’ language and to convert them to the True Faith. This was the usual Portuguese practice and no one knows how many hundreds of these wretched men were dropped along the coast. Most vanished forever, but here and there one survived and became a “great chief,” took many Indian wives and produced many children. The caboclo (half-Indian, half-Portuguese) daughters would be ready to marry the next generation of Portuguese adventurers that arrived, and in this way a solid foundation was laid for a mixed, and easily mixable, race. Early Brazilian history has several half-legendary convict-heroes. In fact, its personalities are an oddly assorted crew: condemned convicts, devout Jesuit missionaries (Loyola was just starting his great work), and Portuguese noblemen, usually younger sons, who became the capitães-mores, the “great captains.”

But no gold had been found; there were no cities to ransack such as the Spaniards had found on the western coasts of the continent, and for a quarter of a century more Brazil was left almost untouched.

* * *

Two things that everyone knows about Brazil are that it is the same size as the United States (now that Alaska is a state), and that the seasons there are the reverse of ours. It is big, stretching from north of the Equator to south of the Tropic of Capricorn, and west to the foothills of the Andes, an area of 3.3 million square miles. And while it is perfectly true that livestock (including dogs and cats) imported from northern countries have a hard time of it the first few years, and swelters through the Brazilian summers (January through March) in “winter” coats, — to say that the seasons are reversed is too strong. The Equator is not that much like the bottom frame of a mirror. Caminha thought the climate “equable,” and although he really didn’t know, he was more or less right.

Brazil is tropical and sub-tropical, with few extremes of temperature. The Amazon is roughly parallel to the Equator, yet, surpringly, the average temperature at Santarém, a third of the way up the river, is only seventy-eight degrees. In the cooler south, frosts occur only rarely as far north as São Paulo. If one can generalize at all about such a vast country, the average North American would be apt to say it is all just a little too hot. Never as hot as New York City in a prolonged heat wave, or as cold as a winter in Washington, D.C. — altogether a bit lacking in variety. On the other hand, the rainfall varies entirely too much, — over eighty inches a year in the Amazon basin, and in the northeast in some places it can scarcely be measured in inches at all. The State of Ceará is so dry and the sunshine so monotonous that when the sky is overcast the Cearenses greet each other hopefully with “What a beautiful day!”

The warm climate is still blamed by many historians, including Toynbee, and by the Brazilians themselves fairly continuously, for the country’s lack of development and almost everything else wrong with it. It is held responsible for the “laziness” they regard as the greatest national defect (although on occasion it can be considered as a virtue, too). According to the usual theory, man needs alternating seasons and the stimulation of cold weather to keep him energetic and “progressing” properly. But this may not be true at all. “Laziness” may well be due more to bad health, poor food, and boredom, than to climate. Man is the most adaptable of animals. As we learn more about tropical diseases, nutrition, and psychology, and if the lot of the poor Brazilian is ever improved so that he is healthier and has more to work for in life, the old-fashioned, moralistic idea of “laziness” may disappear for good — and the Brazilians have one less item burdening their consciences.

Most of the […] square miles are a vast, rolling plateau, with only one wave of mountain ranges that runs north and south, fairly close to the coast. The mountains are nowhere over 10,000 feet high, the highest near Rio de Janeiro. In the north they flatten out towards the Amazon, leaving more of the coastal plain for sugar-raising; in the south they flatten out into the Uruguay and Plata rivers, leaving plains for cattle-raising. But for most of the coast the line of mountains between the coastal plains and the higher, cooler interior has been the greatest of all hindrancess to the growth of Brazil. It forms a natural barrier that for four hundred years has kept all the cities and most of the population, as if encamped before a fortress, along the eastern edge of the country.

There is another big geographical handicap. There are great and navigable rivers, but they have never served to open up the country or help its economy to any great extent. Brazilians speak enviously of the Mississippi; if only they’d had a Mississippi things would be very different. It is probably true. Large freighters can go 2,300 miles up the Amazon, a river that makes the Mississippi look almost narrow, but that leads to no important cities or industrial centers. The second-largest river, the São Francisco, flows north, almost through the middle of the country. It, too, is navigable, but before it reaches the sea it is interrupted by the Falls of Paulo Affonso, and like the Amazon, it reaches no important cities, and serves for even less trade. Railroads have been built very slowly and for short stretches, serving one or two cities only. For centuries trade and communications were carried on entirely by coastal shipping, or mule trains over incredibly bad roads or trails. The air age is changing this state of affairs, and at the same time, or slightly later, trunk roads are at last beginning to connect the cities and towns from north to south, and from east to what few settlements there are in the west.

* * *

Brazil is still more than half-covered with forests. It contains, at a rough guess, more than fifty thousand vegetable species, and no one knows how many of these are potentially valuable to man. As well as all the fruits, native and early imported (like the banana), there are trees yielding: rubber, cacão, Brazil nuts, balsams, resins, fibres, cellulose, and tannin; and from the palm-trees alone, oils and waxes, as well as dates, coconuts, and palmito. There are many valuable and beautiful woods: teak, mahoganies, Jacarandas, satin-woods, and cedar — some woods so hard they can only be cut with special machinery.

As far as mineral resources go, the surface has barely been scratched. There is not much coal, and what there is is of poor quality — a fact that held back the railroads, and until recently, the growth of iron and steel industries. But — to quote from the staggering lists given in The New World Guides—there are: bauxite, bismuth, barium, asbestos, chromite, copper, gold, iron (15 million tons, approximately 25 per cent of the world supply), also “graphite, gypsum, kaolin, lead, limestone, manganese, marble, nickle, diamonds, zinc, radium, euxenite, mica, rock crystals, and tungsten.”

There is a national oil industry, Petrobras, getting under way, and the source of great dissension. But expert geologists, Brazilian and foreign, believe that there are probably no very large deposits of petroleum in Brazil.

But all this Ali Baba’s treasure was hidden from the 16th-century explorers, in the future as well as underground. They kept on risking ships and lives for what Lévi-Strauss calls “derisory” articles: pepper and other spices; & from Brazil only wood and curiosities: dye-wood, animals, birds, skins, and a few Indians, too.

* * *

Then things began to change. The trip around the Cape of Good Hope was no longer profitable; Portugal discovered that “for every grain of pepper she gave a drop of blood,” and there were rumors of gold in Brazil. Around 1530, Portuguese fleets began coming regularly to patrol the coast, and to fight off the French and the Dutch, who also had designs on Brazil. A royal agent arrived and serious colonization began. The first town to be laid out was São Vicente, now an apartment-house-lined suburb of the port of Santos; the second Olinda, far to the north, now a suburb of Recife. (O! Linda! that is “beautiful,” because of its white, palm-studded beaches.) The captaincies were granted, each about 150 miles along the coast and stretching inland indefintely until they met the equally indefinite lands of Spain. (Surely the biggest examples of “strip farming” on record.) São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, otherwise Bahia, became the capital, and it was in the region around Bahia that sugar was introduced and the plantation system first grew up. Negro slaves started arriving from Africa as early as 1535. As Lévi-Strauss says: “the world, gorged with gold, began to hunger after sugar; and sugar took a lot of slaves.” The Indians were too primitive; they knew only what now would be called an absolutely “permissive” life, in the shade of the forests; set to work, and in the sun, they simply died off.

In this first century, the French settled in and around what is now Rio, and were twice driven off. The second time the beginnings of the present city were laid out and given the name São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, in honor of the saint on whose day the victory was won, in the month of January — although the “river” was non-existent. These first Brazilian coastal towns often have the simplified names that sailors would have given them: River, Bay (Bahia), Reef (Recife, whose inhabitants still call it “The” Reef), Fortress (Fortaleza), etc.

* * *

The next 250 years repeat the usual history of colonial rule, or mis-rule, in the 17th and 18th centuries. It resembles the history of the American colonies under the English, translated to a tropical setting, and a Catholic, slave-holding society, thinly scattered along a much longer strip of coast. While deriving great wealth from Brazil, the Portuguese crown monopolized Brazilian trade completely, and did its best to prevent the development of any independent industries. There were unjust taxes and restrictions: the inevitable salt-tax, and high duties on all imported goods, and yet everything had to be imported from the mother-country since no manufactures were allowed except the simplest home industries. A particular grievance was textiles: except for the roughest stuffs, worn by the slaves, no cloth could be woven. No printing presses were allowed, so there were no journals or newspapers, and very few books. Gold was discovered, at last, but goldsmiths were forbidden to work it. Over and over we read of the smiths’ forges being destroyed, but the treasure still in the sacristies of the old Brazilian churches proves that this restriction must often have been evaded.

The Jesuits, who came in great numbers during the first hundred years, tried to protect the Indians from slavery in the captaincies, They gathered them into large societies, called “reductions,” each around a church, converted them, and taught them, — in other words, “civilised” them. Undoubtedly they did save thousands from slavery or slaughter, but the Indians died off, anyway, from small-pox, measles, and inanition, and their culture, primitive but unique, and their skills and arts died with them, or blended gradually into that of Portugese and African newcomers.

* * *

The first event that could be considered “national,” implying a sense of identity and a small amount of cooperation between the northern settlements, at least, was the final driving out of the Dutch. For twenty years they had controlled the northern coast, and at the same time they had conquered the Portugese African colony of Angola, since they, too, needed Negro slaves and in the 17th and 18th centuries eastern Africa and sugar-raising northern Brazil were complementary. The Dutch had taken over the port of Recife as their capital, re-named it Mauritzstad, for the governor, Count Mauritz of Nassau-Siegen, and built it up “in the fashion of Holland,” according to a city-plan, from 150 houses to about 2,000. Dutch forts can still be seen on the lower Amazon, and high, stepped, Dutch roofs in Recife. But they were finally driven out for good in 1654, a triumph for the Catholic Church and for Brazil. (Some of these Mauritzstad-ers eventually settled in New Amsterdam, i.e., New York City.)

* * *

After almost a century of rumors and occasional lucky finds, gold and silver and precious stones were at last discovered in quantity in what is now the State of Minas Gerais (General Mines). It was there that the first real expansion and development of the interior of Brazil took place, and almost entirely owing to the efforts of the famous bandeirantes. They came from around São Paulo, descendants of the Portuguese and the Indian girls, and they were energetic, cruel, and rapacious. They travelled in armed bands, “bandeiras,” along with their wives, children, cattle, and Indian slaves. They made long treks and savage raids, for gold and for more slaves, for trading — even attacking and destroying the Jesuit “reductions,” and carrying off their own blood-brothers into slavery. They penetrated far into the present States of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso (the still almost “far-west” city of Cuiabá was originally one of their trading posts), and the discovery of the more glamorous parts of Brazil’s mineral wealth was almost entirely due to them.

A small but brilliant constellation of mining towns grew up after the bandeirantes. “Mining town” suggests something quite different, however, from these miniature cities, — wealthy, isolated, small out-posts of 18th-century culture, and filled with late, beautiful examples of baroque architecture. Vila Rica (now Ouro Prêto, or “black gold,” named for a dark, reddish gold) was the capital, and there were many more: Mariana, São João del Rey, Morro Velho, Queluz, to name a few. Diamantina, now almost unknown outside Brazil, was famous all over Europe as the diamond center of the world, until the discovery of the Kimberley lodes in Africa in 1870. During the century of the mining boom, a million slaves are supposed to have gone into this region alone, and the wealth rivalled that of the bigger, older, sugar capital of Bahia in the north.

But it was in this group of small, flourishing city-towns that the most important event of the 18th century took place, an event that should be of particular interest to Americans. It was an abortive and tragic attempt at independence from Portugal, called by the odd name of the “Inconfidencia Mineira,” meaning, more or less, the Minas Conspiracy. The standards of culture and education in these towns were probably higher than in any other part of Brazil at the time, and besides miners — rather mine-owners — there were lawyers and army officers and teachers. A group of six of these young men were all poets and thought of themselves as a “school,” not only that, but in those barren highlands, glittering with ores, they thought of themselves as Arcadians, took pastoral pen-names, and actually wrote pastoral poems — and epics and satires as well. It seems as though artificiality could not go much further — however, there were real talents among them, and they also were interested in politics, and particularly the recent successful American War of Independence. They were joined by other intellectuals and army officers, and their leader was a young lieutenant, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier. He occasionally practised dentistry and so was known as “Toothpuller,” Tiradentes. He carried the American Declaration of Independence about with him in his pocket and liked to read it out loud. The group corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and finally one of them was sent to meet him in France, where he was minister plenipotentiary. Jefferson, on a trip for his health, met him cautiously in the Roman ampitheatre at Nîmes. Samuel Putnam, in his book about Brazilian literature, MARVELOUS JOURNEY, says: “this event, although most North Americans have never heard of it, has since become for Brazilians one of the strongest bonds between their democracy and our own.”

Asked his advice about how to foment a revolution and found a republic, Jefferson, apparently, as a diplomat, could promise nothing more than his moral support. The envoy who met him died on the way back to Brazil, but the conspiracy in Minas went ahead and grew over-bold. It was found out, and all the “Inconfidentes” were drastically punished. One committed suicide, most were sent into exile in Angola, and Tiradentes himself was brutally executed, being hung, drawn and quartered. His house was destroyed and the ground where it stood was sprinkled with salt, in the good old medieval way.

The little “School of Minas,” if it can really be called a school, was wiped out, and not only was the first Brazilian movement for independence destroyed but also the first real attempt at a literary movement in the country. The brave but impractical “Arcadian” poets of ’89 could not arouse their country or do battle like our hard-headed small farmers of ’76. But Tiradentes has remained the greatest national hero of Brazil; “Toothpuller Day” is a holiday; almost every town in Brazil has its Tiradentes square or street; and rebellion against Portugal had begun, although independence was not to come for thirty-three more years and then not in the form of a revolution at all.

Chapter 3

The history of South America in the 19th century resembles Shakespeare’s battle scenes: shouts and trumpets; small armies on-stage, small armies off-stage; Bolívar here, Bolívar there; bloodshed, death-scenes, and long pauses in the action for fine speeches. But Brazil differed from the rest of the continent in two ways. First, while all the other countries rebelled against Spanish rule and finally broke up, into nine republics, Brazil managed to remain politically united. It had its minor civil wars, and secessions, some lasting several years, but it always pulled itself together again. And second, it had no real revolution or war of independence. It was ruled by the House of Braganza right down until 1889, and it still has a Braganza Pretender to the throne, — rather, with typical tropical proliferation of species, it has two Pretenders, first cousins.

The long period of relative stability enjoyed by Brazil in the 19th century gave it great advantages: a strong feeling of national unity and almost a century of history in which it still takes pride. But the pride is tinged with saudades, nostalgia, sometimes even despair. Brazilians feel that the national honor, international reputation, foreign credit — even the size and prestige of their Navy — have never again stood so high.

Modern Brazilian history begins with Napoleon. Everyone knows that he created an Empire and crowned himself Emperor. But it is not so well known that as a sort of by-product of the Napoleonic Empire the Empire of Brazil was also created, and lasted much longer than Napoleon’s — sixty-seven years, to be exact. Not to be compared to the Roman Empire, to be sure, but remarkably long to have held out in the 19th century with revolutions crashing like thunderstorms in all the neighboring countries, and the forces of liberalism, equalitarianism, and republicanism growing stronger and more articulate all the time.

Many of the new countries of the West felt that the old monarchical system might still be the best way of stabilizing their governments. Argentina shopped around unsuccesfully for years for a suitable European prince, and the experiment was tried in Mexico and failed dismally, with Maximilian. Even the United States had its small movement to make Washington the founder of a dynasty. But in the paradoxical way things often seem to happen in Brazil, what brought the country eventual political independence from Portugal was the arrival of the Portuguese royal family.

* * *

In 1807 Napoleon was trying to force Portugal to join his blockade against England and the Napoleonic armies were closing in on Lisbon. Maria I, the Queen, had long been insane, and her son, Dom João, was Regent. Portugal had been almost a protectorate of England for a hundred years. Caught, as the historian C. H. Haring puts it, “between the military imperialism of Napoleon and the economic imperialism of Great Britain,” Dom João, never decisive at best, shilly-shallied. At the last possible moment he settled for Great Britain, and Britain decided for safety’s sake to move the whole royal family and court to Brazil.

It was one of the strangest hegiras in history. In a state of near panic, the mad Queen, Dom João, his estranged wife (who was a little mad, too), their children, and the entire Portuguese court, — some fifteen thousand people — were squeezed aboard forty-two or — three merchant vessels. Under British escort they took off for Brazil, the unknown, romantic colony where all their wealth — and all their sugar — came from. The voyage was a nightmare of storms, sea-sickness, short rations, and stinking water. The courtiers behaved so badly that a royal command was issued that “only nautical subjects” were to be discussed. Meanwhile, Pedro, the nine-year-old heir-apparent, discoursed learnedly with his tutors on the Aeneid (according to the tutors’ reports) and compared his father’s plight to that of Aeneas. However, as Octavio Tarquinio de Souza, the best Brazilian historian of the Empire period, says: “Dom João saved the dynasty, and took with him intact the greatest treasures of the kingdom, including art, jewels, and books [sixty thousand of them, the nucleus of the present National Library] to the lands where he would found a great empire.”

After fifty-two hideous days they reached Bahia, but it was not considered safe enough for them, so they went on to Rio. They were received with mad rejoicing. Only poor distracted Queen Maria, seeing Negros prancing around her sedan-chair, thought that she was in Hell and screamed that the devils were after her. Almost immediately Dom João issued his first Royal Letter, declaring the ports of Brazil open to “all friendly nations” (meaning England, mostly); he also won more popularity by allowing printing-presses, newspapers, goldsmiths, and many small industries to be set up. Brazil felt itself changed from a much-abused colony to an independent power, almost over-night.

Rio was a hot, squalid, waterfront city of about twenty thousand inhabitants, without sewage or water-supply. The royal family, oddly enough, settled down and began to like their new home and its easy-going ways. But the court in general hated everything and were hated in return by the Brazilians — a reaction that was to have serious political consequences. There were no carriages; the food was bad; they were afraid of the thunderstorms that bounced from peak to peak around the bay (the way they still do), afraid of the Negro slaves, afraid of the tropical diseases, — and it is true that they died off like flies during the first few years.

But the thirteen-year stay of the court changed Rio into a capital city and changed the state of affairs in much of Brazil. The administration of justice was somewhat improved; taxes lowered; the first bank founded; the naval academy and schools of medicine and surgery were established, as well as a library and the Botanical Gardens (still famous). The Regent was fond of music and the theatre. He brought an orchestra with him; he also became an addict of Negro music and entertainments. In 1815 Portugal was rid of the French, and in 1816 he invited a French Commission, architects, musicians, painters, and sculptors, to visit Brazil. He started a royal palace on the outskirts of the city. The mad Queen died, and the Regent became Dom João VI of Portugal and I of Brazil.

But by 1820 the liberal forces in Portugal made it necessary for Dom João to return, if he wanted to save his throne. Again he shilly-shallied, apparently partly because he could not face that ocean voyage a second time. But again under British auspices and promptings, he finally announced one constitution for Portugal, another one for Brazil, and sailed away. Before he left he wrote a letter to Dom Pedro, weeping as he wrote, in which he prophesied the secession of Brazil from Portugal and advised his son to take the crown for himself. He also cleaned out the treasury and took with him all the jewels he could collect, — and about three thousand Portuguese. This departure established a sort of precedent, unfortunately, for later abdications or “renunciations” (under the Republic), which are always discussed in terms of João I’s sad career. Not all of them have filled their pockets as liberally as he did, and they have left for very different reasons, but the peculiarly Brazilian institution of leaving-the-country-in-order-to-govern-it-better had been established.

* * *

Dom Pedro had been badly brought up; he had led the luxurious but slovenly life of the small upper-class of Brazilians of his day; he had been friends with slaves and stable boys, and a notorious womanizer from the age of thirteen or so. He is, nevertheless, a fascinating character: brilliant, in spite of his faulty education, energetic, spoiled, dissipated, neurotic — and suffering from occasional epileptic fits. [Maria Graham, the Scottish woman who stayed in Rio in the 1820s and was even tutor to Dom Pedro’s children for a brief period, has left a good account of his personality and the life of the court and city.] He was fundamentally kind-hearted (he was devoted to all his children and provided for them well, legitimate and illegitmate alike) and he wanted to be a good ruler, but the “court” still meant the hated Portuguese to many of the Brazilians. Dom Pedro still favored them, and things started to go badly for him almost immediately. Brazil wanted a king, but not too much of a king; and Dom Pedro was autocratic.

Orders started coming from Portugal; some of the hated taxes and restrictions were restored. While he was away in São Paulo an order came for him to return to Portugal immediately, to finish his education. It was handed to him as he sat on his horse on the banks of a little stream, the Ipiranga. Dom Pedro read it, waved his sabre in the air, and shouted “Independence or death!” This is the famous grito, or cry, of Ipiranga, and the day on which Dom Pedro gave it, September 7th, is the Brazilian 4th of July. The first lines of the Brazilian national anthem — even more complicated and difficult than “The Star-Spangled Banner”—describe this scene. The simple word grito is a by-word and has as many overtones for a Brazilian as, say, “cherry-tree” has for an American.

Dom Pedro was proclaimed Emperor of an independent Brazil, but his reign lasted only nine years. He considered himself a liberal, and a very advanced one, and the constitution that he granted in 1824 lasted until the end of the Empire in Brazil. But there were constant revolts, foreign soldiers made trouble, regional differences and needs were not attended to, and his private life became too scandalous for even the tolerant Brazilians. His notorious mistress, Domitila, whom he created the Marqueza de Santos, meddled in state affairs, and he was blamed for the death of his first wife, Leopoldina, whom the people loved. After the death of his father he became heir to the throne of Portugal, but his younger brother was already there and trying to take power. Rebellion broke out all over Brazil; his personal army deserted him, and then he, too, left the country, to begin, in Europe, the “War of the Brothers.” Daumier left cartoons of them, two mean figures having a tug-of-war over a crown. This was the way things looked to Europeans, but Dom Pedro I had really been a much higher-minded ruler than that, greatly superior to his father, and honestly well-intentioned. Brazil has always proved hard to rule. And the ruler he now left behind was only five years old.

* * *

Except that he was equally energetic, Dom Pedro II was almost exactly the opposite of his mercurial, dissipated father. He had been carefully, even over-carefully, educated by a beloved governess and series of tutors and priests. He was serious, hard-working, cultivated, an amazing linguist; he wrote quite presentable poetry on all the important occasions of his life; and for forty-nine years he did his very best to govern his country. The nine years of his Regency were filled with bitter quarrels, and finally the two parties, Liberals and Conservatives, agreed that only the figure of the young Emperor could unify the troubled country. This was explained to Dom Pedro, aged fourteen, who replied in another famous historical phrase: Quero agora. “I want it now.” He was crowned when he was fifteen, wearing the ugly, diamond-studded crown now in the Petrópolis Museum, and over his green velvet robes a yellow cape made from the breasts of toucans, a symbol of the Indian heritage of his country.

Dom Pedro was not a genius; but he was a very different type to appear in the Braganza line, and in most things, much in advance of his countrymen. He was an imposing Emperor: six feet four inches tall, plus his habitual top-hat; with blue eyes inherited from his German mother and a large bushy beard that early turned snow-white. He himself felt that he was better fitted for an intellectual life than a political one, but he did his duty. He ruled under the constitution his father had granted the country in 1824: the government was monarchial, constitutional, and representative; the laws were made by two houses, Senate and House of Deputies; Catholicism was the state religion but religious freedom was guaranteed, as well as freedom of speech and of the press.

He selected his own council of state and his cabinet; his chief strength was his “moderating power,” under which he could dismiss almost anyone he wanted to, prorogue Parliament, and dissolve the Deputies if he thought the state of the country warranted it. These privileges, or some of them, had been added by the Ato Adicional of 1834, for the constitution had started out being over-optimistic about the political maturity of the country. According to his more liberal-minded ministers, he was apt to over-use his “moderating” power and change the government too often. According to Dom Pedro himself, he was the most republican man in Brazil and would have preferred to be president rather than Emperor (second to being an intellectual, of course). As he grew older he grew more patient, but also more liberal. He never took political revenge; he did appoint men for their good qualities, no matter what their loyalties were, and Brazil has never had men of such high calibre in public office since. However, he seriously underestimated — and given his background, how could he help it? — the growing commercial and business interests of his country (and of the 19th-century world), and he always favored the old land-owning aristocracy. Towards the end of his reign many liberals, who admired him personally, for political reasons came out against him as a “tyrant” and a representative of a decayed monarchy.

When he had ruled for more than thirty years he at last permitted himself to go abroad, to Europe, then to the United States, and then longer trips to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. He always travelled incognito, as “Dom Pedro de Alcantara,” and his democratic ways, gift for languages, good-humor, and boundless energy made him “the most popular crowned head in Europe.” He sought out literary leaders wherever he went, and talked to them in their own languages. Victor Hugo called him “a grandson of Marcus Aurelius.” He was fascinated by comparative religions (and thus shocked his more devout subjects) and always made a point of visiting synagogues and reading aloud in Hebrew.

In 1876 he paid a long visit to the United States, something he had long wanted to do, and the occasion of the Philadelphia Exhibition, celebrating one hundred years of American Independence, seemed like a good time. His one regret was never to have met Lincoln, whom he deeply admired (as do Brazilians to this day; “Lincoln” is a favorite name for boys), and he tried to meet Harriet Beecher Stowe. He had corresponded with the Boston Transcendentalists and the Abolitionists (his correspondence is staggering), and translated some of their writings. One was a poem by Whittier called “The Cry of a Lost Soul”—not an anti-slavery poem, as might be expected, but a poem about an Amazonian bird, and Dom Pedro sent the poet a case of these birds, stuffed (at least not alive, like the macaws of earlier centuries). But it has Abolitionist overtones, perhaps, and Dom Pedro may have felt it expressed his own hopes for freeing the slaves. The bird

“Lifts to the starry calm of heaven his eyes;

And lo! rebuking all earth’s ominous cries,

The Cross [Southern Cross, naturally] of pardon lights the tropic skies!”

Longfellow gave a historical dinner-party for the royal visitor, and Dom Pedro attempted to give a Brazilian abraço (“hug”) to the shy, Quaker Whittier, and at the end of the highly successful evening, succeeded. Longfellow called him a “modern Haroun-al-Raschid wandering about to see the great world as a simple traveller, not as a king. He is a hearty, genial, noble person, very liberal in his views.” He visited Yale, Harvard, and Vassar, among other educational institutions, and seems to have met almost everyone of importance in the country. One exhausted Brazilian protégé called him “a library on top of a locomotive.”

At the Philadelphia Exhibition he met Alexander Graham Bell and was one of the very first to order telephones; he had them installed in all his palaces in Brazil. He also took back several of the newly-invented sewing-machines to the ladies of his court. It was a triumphal tour of over ten thousand miles.

There is a photograph of the royal party taken on their visit to Niagara Falls. There is something sad, almost tragic about this little foreign-looking group, dominated by the towering old Emperor, all dressed in the ugly, conventional clothes of the period, paying the conventional visit to the conventional “sights” and having their picture taken — something suggestive of the state of Brazil at the time, and its faults and virtues. The illdigested but eagerly grasped-at foreign influences, the attempt to adapt the inappropriate (even to clothing), and the neglect or ignorance of resources at home. Dom Pedro was the “owner,” so to speak, of waterfalls three or four times greater and more magnificent than Niagara, but inaccessible, and with all his curiosity and travelling, he never laid eyes on them. (To this day, upper-class Brazilians are amazingly unfamiliar with their own country, even its geography.)

* * *

During Dom Pedro’s long reign Brazil’s material expansion really began. In 1850 a Commercial Code was issued that has remained in force, with additions, to this day. More banks were established and foreign capital, still mostly British, began to come in. The first railroad started off towards Petrópolis, the Emperor’s favorite place of residence, in 1854—only fifteen kilometres of it to begin with; and gas-lights were put in the streets of Rio. Other short railroads were built, but transportation was, and continues to be, one of the biggest problems of Brazil. Progress was slow partly because of Dom Pedro’s life-long preference for the landed aristocracy, who were usually conservative and indifferent to “progress” and looked down on the new class of merchants and bankers. The towns were still mostly inhabited by artisans and Portuguese merchants, and the aristocracy lived on their estates and much preferred to go to Paris, when they could. Dom Pedro created many titles, mostly Barons, but with one big exception, they were all landed proprietors who had grown rich on sugar or coffee — for by now coffee was the leading crop and Brazil was providing the world with it. The exception was the Baron de Mauá, later Visconde de Mauá, the J. P. Morgan of Brazil. Some of his many activities are reflected in his extraordinary coat of arms that shows a steamship, a locomotive and four lampposts (like the ones he had installed in Rio).

Visconde de Mauá was an associate of the Rothschilds and part-owner of banks in London, New York, Uruguay, and Argentina. He was the figure that marks the change from the purely agricultural economy of the plantation world to the world of modern, expanding capitalism.

However, when ennobled, he, too, took an Indian name, as did almost all the others; it was the period of Indianismo; it was also considered stylish to have an Indian (a chief, preferably) among one’s ancestors. The Counts of Itaboraí, Tamandaré, Barons Maracajú, Paranaguá—it is as if the United States had had Count Massachusetts or Baron Ohio.

There had been two foreign wars, the first undertaken to get rid of the brutal Rosas regime in Argentina, in 1851–52. The second was Brazil’s one real war — against Paraguay, — and it lasted five years, from 1865 to 1870, and is still regarded by Brazilians with aversion, almost shame. Its beginnings were complicated, having to do with Brazilian citizens in Paraguay, and it was urged on the nation by the always more war-like south. Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil were allies; Paraguay was completely ruined by the war, with one man left to every fifteen women in the population, and the war-debt incurred by Brazil hung over Dom Pedro for the rest of his rule. The war also ruined Visconde de Mauá, and one of the harshest criticisms heard of Dom Pedro is that he could have saved Mauá with a government loan, but didn’t.

* * *

The biggest problem of Dom Pedro’s reign, and probably of his life, as well, was slavery. So closely was it bound up with the Empire and the Emperor that the end of the Empire and the death of Dom Pedro both followed soon after the emancipation. He was against slavery; he felt it to be a shameful blot on his beautiful, beloved country (he had liberated all his inherited slaves as early as 1840). But he also thought that emancipation had to come gradually, in order not to upset the country’s economy, dependent almost entirely, in the early years of his reign, on slave-labor. As a result of a bargain of Dom Pedro I with the English, the slave trade was prohibited in 1831, but thousands of slaves continued to be smuggled into the country every year, and this was a constant source of trouble with the English, who searched Brazilian vessels at sea and on occasion even blockaded Brazilian ports or landed marines on Brazilian soil.

Steps towards complete emancipation were taken, usually agitated for by the Liberals and then actually taken when a Conservative government again came into power. The law of the Ventre Livre provided that all children of slaves born after 1871 were free, and all slaves still belonging to the crown or to the states were free. The next step, in 1887, was that all slaves were free upon reaching the age of sixty. São Paulo freed all slaves within the city, various states began freeing theirs, and the army began to refuse to pursue run-away slaves. The institution of slavery was obviously doomed, but the landed proprietors in general did nothing to provide for their futures without slave-labor. There had been sporadic attempts to encourage immigration. Germans and Swiss had settled north of Rio, and later many Italians came to work on the huge São Paulo coffee fazendas. But, as Haring says, it was hard to get workers to come to a country “where agricultural labor was equated with human slavery.”

In 1887 Dom Pedro again went to Europe, leaving Princess Isabel as Regent. He was sick, diabetic, and looked far older than his age. Isabel had always been an Abolitionist, and now, partly by her own wish and partly under pressure from the more liberal Abolitionists, she signed the emancipation proclamation, May 13th, 1888—another national holiday. Actually, out of about 4 million Negroes, only 700,000 still remained to be freed. There was a week of wild celebration. The Emperor lay very sick in Milan. When the news was brought to him he said it was the greatest happiness of his life, and wept, murmuring, “What great people! What great people!”

However, the rich planters had been ruined overnight, and 300 million dollars’ worth of property was wiped out. Naturally, many of the land-owners immediately turned against the monarchy and joined the growing republican movement. It was led by Benjamin Constant (de Botelho de Magalhães), who was inspired by the dry doctrines of Auguste Comte, for the Positivist movement had taken a strong hold on intellectual Brazilians. (One Positivist church still survives in Rio; and one of their slogans, “Order and Progress,” is on the green-and-gold flag, along with the stars of the Southern Cross.)

* * *

The end came very suddenly and was a complete surprise to most of the nation. Benjamin Constant engineered a small army revolt and involved two generals (one of whom had been for the Emperor), and on November 15th, 1889, the Republic was proclaimed. The Emperor left, on a dark and rainy night, with all his family, a few friends, and his doctor. He was offered a large pension, but impeccable and dignifed to the end, he refused it. His Empress died, probably of a broken heart, soon after, and he himself lived on, mostly in France, for two years philosophically studying, as always: Tupi, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He was never heard to say a bitter word against his political enemies.

* * *

In many ways Dom Pedro failed to accomplish much. The country was still almost empty, almost illiterate, and divided between the very rich and the miserably poor. In spite of his respect for education there were still no universities and the enrollments in schools of higher education were very small and the teaching inferior. His personal example of dignity, probity, and self-sacrifice could influence very few — given the conditions of the country, how could it? — but the calibre of the statesmen in the first years of the Republic was still much higher than it was to be ever since. However, Brazil had changed from an 18th-century, monarchial, slave-holding, primitive agricultural country to a republic, growing prosperous from its coffee trade, with equal rights, aware of the outside world (which was also more aware of it). Dom Pedro had achieved a very small part of his dreams for Brazil — but if there had been more monarchs like him, history would certainly make more edifying reading.

Chapter 4. The Three Capitals

Bahia, or Salvador, was the first capital of Brazil, appropriately enough since it was in the State of Bahia that the country had its beginnings. Cabral first landed on the coast there, and Caminha’s first letter describes it. The year after Cabral’s voyage another was made, with Amerigo Vespucci as navigator. This time the “bay,” Bahia, was discovered, and the name São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Saint Saviour of the Bay of All Saints) given to it. In the following year, Vespucci led the first expedition into the interior of the country, starting from Bahia. In 1534 the first captaincy was established, a small group of thatched huts inside a stockade. This was very soon attacked and destroyed by Indians, who also ate some of the unhappy adventurers.

The first Governor-General of Brazil, Tomé de Souza, arrived in 1549, with four hundred soldiers and six hundred convicts, and orders from the King to establish a “large and strong settlement,” to serve as capital of the new country. He brought with him a map of the new city, complete with walls and bastions, churches and public buildings. According to the Portuguese tradition, it was to be built on the heights overlooking the sea, more like a fort than a town, for the sake of defense. According to the stories, the Governer-General helped in the construction with his own hands. Besides the 1,000 men, the first inhabitants were principally “pacified” Indians, and the huge family and following of the most famous of the legendary convict-chiefs, “Caramuru,” who had been in Brazil since 1510, and who had married an Indian princess, the beautious “Paraguaçu.”

The town grew so quickly that it overflowed the walls and descended to the beaches, dividing into the “higher” and “lower” towns, as it still is today. Cable-cars and elevators now connect the two towns; the chief elevator, that has become almost a symbol of Bahia, is the Lacerda, 234 feet high, — first built in 1875.

Bahianas are extremely proud of their city; they call it “the good place.” The Cariocas, referring to the large numbers of Bahianas who come south to Rio every year, add to this ironically, “Yes … Bahia’s the good place — it there, and me here!”

For travellers approaching by sea, it is usually their first Brazilian city, and the huge port, with its picturesque water-front life, heat, pungent smells, and large Negro population, makes a first and permanent impression as being “typically Brazilian.” With its ancient forts on the ocean, its magnificent baroque architecture (supposedly three hundred churches), crowds of all colors, frequent religious processions, surviving folk-costumes, street vendors, open-air markets and restaurants, displays of folk-art — it is more what one expects Brazil to be like than any other city. Protected by the viceroys, and fabulously rich during the period of the sugar boom, it was also the biggest port of entrance for the Negro slaves, from Guinea, Mozambique, and Angola. Although from many African nations, at all levels of culture, many of these Negroes were Mohammedans, and well-educated; some are even supposed to have taught their owners how to read and write. They were skilled in iron-working, cattle-raising, — and cooking. They brought with them many arts, handcrafts, music; the cultivation of the banana and the palm.

The fact that the capital was transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1763 is one of the reasons why Bahia has preserved its colonial character more than other old Brazilian cities. When it ceased to be the capital, although always remaining important until São Paulo took over, as the coffee capital, its building on a large scale more or less stopped. So that by the time “progress” or the modern building movement hit Bahia, its old buildings were regarded as sacred; they were protected by centuries of traditions, and spared destruction. In Rio or São Paulo, with their uninterrupted growth, there wasn’t time for the colonial buildings to grow to honored old age. Every decade saw new construction, buildings torn down, and streets and avenues put through, — the ugly price of progress. Today, although Bahia continues to grow and build and modernise, the old city remains almost unchanged and dominates the newer sections.

Instead of being a relic, carefully preserved (or peacefully preserved as much as possible) by the Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico, like Ouro Prêto, Bahia is still a living city. Its folk-art and folk-traditions are not just survivals but are still being kept up and constantly adapted to the present.

There are six major churches and six convents, all architectural monuments …

Bahia’s cooking is particularly famous, using dende palm oil, ginger, little dried shrimps, coconut milk, and dozens of exotic ingredients. The costume of the Bahianas, the mulatto women, is reminscent of that of Martinique, of French Empire styles. It consists of a full, printed skirt, a loose white chemise (usually homespun cotton), trimmed with handmade lace, a turban, earrings, necklaces, and the balangandã, a collection of large-size magic charms, fruits, crosses, etc., worn, tinkling and clanging, at the waist. In the old days the balangandãs were sometimes made of gold, and the wealth of the slave’s owner was shown by the jewelry she wore. Bahianas, with their portable food-stands and little charcoal braziers, are familiar figures in São Paulo and Rio as well as in Bahia. They sell sweet, heavy cakes of manioc or tapioca, mysterious sweets wrapped in corn husks, broiled corn on the cob, and other specialties of the north. Their costume is considered as “typically Brazilian” (although it really isn’t), and in beauty contests or costume balls, whenever a Brazilian wants to appear “in character” she dresses à la Bahiana.

Bahia has a constant succession of festas and pilgrimages. Famous all over Brazil is the festa of the Senhor do Bonfim (Lord of the Good Death), the patron of the city, the Salvador or Saviour Himself. The little 18th-century church is the object of a great pilgrimage every year, just after Epiphany. Not only the Negro population or the poor people trek to the Bonfim; statesmen, politicians, generals, millionaires, all can be seen regularly in the processions, carrying lighted candles in their hands. (The other great objects of pilgrimages annually are the Basilica of Nazareth in Belém, and the biggest of all, the Sanctuary of Our Lady Aparecida in São Paulo — Nossa Senhora Aparecida being the patron saint of Brazil.)

With its large Negro and colored population, Bahia is also the center of candomblé and macumba (voodoo, or vo-dung, religions) that highly-developed, intensely emotional mixture of African cults and Catholicism. From Bahia come the great “Babylons” or “Holy fathers,” of these cults, leaders of their “churches” in Recife or Rio.

In Bahia, too, is practised the art of the capoeira, a form of combined wrestling and jujitsu, using the feet, lightning quick, graceful, — another importation from Africa.

Rio has its unsurpassed natural beauty, Recife its Flemish traditons, and São Paulo stands for progress, — but Bahia is above all the romantic city.

* * *

Bahia was built at the King’s command, to be a capital, but the origins of Rio de Janeiro were more like those of Boston, say, a century later. It was established around 1555 on the Bay of Guanabara by a group of French Calvinists, without as much as a by-your-leave to the Portuguese. The colony called itself, ambitiously, “Antarctic France”; their leader was Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (Villegaignon Island still marks the place of settlement) and they dreamed of establishing in the New World a “Utopia” according to Thomas More.

To expel the French, who were allied with the Indians, the Governor-General of Bahia sent his nephew, Estácio de Sá, to the south. In the battle that gave the Portuguese victory over the French, Estácio, “a boy of gentle presence,” was killed by an arrow in the face, but he became the lay-patron of the city he had founded on “Dog Face Hill,” at the foot of the Sugar Loaf. For reasons of defense, the town moved across the bay to the Morro do Castelo (Fortress Hill), and it was there that the old colonial city grew up. Although still outlined by the oldest of Rio’s churches, the Charity hospital, the Arsenal, etc. — the morro, or hill, itself was removed during the first Centenary of Independence, 1922—one of those amazing land-moving and scene-shifting operations that are so characteristic of the city and so surprising to visitors. “What has happened to Rio?” the Brazilian Carioca who has been away for two or three years always asks sadly — one who had been away for twelve years had to buy the latest map of the city before he could find his way around in his home town again.

The topography of Rio is fantastically beautiful, but sadly unsuited to any geometric mathematical-minded city-planning. The city has spread out and penetrated like the fingers of a hand between the towering peaks of granite and the steep hills, which were left uninhabited until the fairly recent (about twenty years or so) growth of the notorious favelas, or slums. Although poor people had always lived on the morros it is only during the last twenty years or so that they have become covered with shacks, mostly inhabited by immigrants from the north and northeast. It is estimated that one million of Rio’s three million inhabitants now live in these slums, creating the worst of the city’s many problems. Although life in the favelas would seem to offer nothing at all, except superior views and breezes, to the poor who come to them, nevertheless — as soon as a housing project removes a thousand or so people to better quarters, the same number stream into the city and fill up the old ones. Such are the attractions of city-life, even at its worst, as compared with the same poverty, plus boredom and isolation, of life in small towns in the interior. In the city there are the lights, there is radio and television (it is surprising how many aerials for both appear above these shacks), the futebol, the lotteries, the constant excitement and a sense of participation, even if on the lowest level, in the life of a great city, to offset the misery, the standing in line for water, & the frequent visits of the police.

Rio is a city of surprises. Right at the end of its Fifth Avenue, Avenida do Barão de Rio Branco, looms up a gigantic ocean liner. A dead-end street turns into an endless flight of steep steps. Since because of its peculiar physiognomy there is, or was usually, only one way to get to any one place, tunnels have been put through in all directions, or deep cuts right through the granite mountains. Upper-class dwellers in upper floors of apartment houses often look straight into favelas only a few yards away and are awakened by roosters crowing, at the level of the 10th floor, or babies not their own crying. One story, told as true, illustrates the intimacy of this chaotic mixture. A couple returning to their 8th-floor apartment at night heard a terrific bumping and crashing going on inside and thought “Burglars!” But when the door was opened a panic-stricken horse was found inside. So close are the protrusions of rock and earth to the buildings that he had managed to fall from his minute pasture on one straight onto their terrace — and it is perfectly possible.

Between the exuberant outcroppings of rocks and mountains on one hand, and the marshes and mangrove-swamps on the other, Rio developed as a huge city, but an isolated one, and its problems of transportation have always been very difficult. There is one highway leading from it into the interior; the main streets and avenues either wind between the mountains or are built on filled-in land along the bay. Almost all the old squares and plazas were originally lagoons or mangrove-swamps. The city could not expand along the coast because the marshes were uninhabitable because of the malarial mosquito. Now, however, modern sanitation has changed all this and enormous suburbs have spread out over the former swamps.

When the Portuguese court arrived in 1808, the capital was still only a dirty colonial village. The new arrivals quickly solved the housing-problem in a summary way: the King’s quarter-masters requisitioned all the best houses for the members of the court. A bailiff merely painted on the door the letters P and R (Prince Royal). The Cariocas translated the letters in their own way as Ponha-se na Rua—“Get out in the street,”—and that was that.

The city made rapid progress under the Empire, but the biggest period of growth came after the consolidation of the Republic. In the euphoric days before the First World War it took on its present appearance. The mayors of that period destroyed many ancient alley-ways and streets (and unfortunately along with them many priceless fountains and old buildings), flattened out hills, filled in stretches of the bay, and opened up the avenues. They built the long line of quais and handsome warehouses where the black stevedores work in their ragged shorts and straw hats. The Copacabana section grew from almost deserted beaches to be the overpopulated, apartment-house crowded “south zone.” The cable cars to the top of the Sugar Loaf date from this period, as does the little funicular railway that ascends the Corcovado (hunchback) mountain. The 100-foot-tall figure of Christ the Redeemer was placed on top of Corcovado in 1931.

What will become of Rio now that the capital has been changed to Brasília? Opinions vary. The pessimists prophecy poverty and decay; at best Rio will turn into an immense Ouro Prêto, living on the memories of the past. At the other extreme, the optimists believe that the city, rid of the excess population it has attracted as the capital of the country, will actually improve. Without the thousands of government workers, bureaucrats, and people from the “provinces,” they say that Rio will begin to function better than it does at present. Its position as the best-loved of Brazilian cities, the cultural capital of the country, the natural gaiety of the Cariocas, Carnival, the beaches — all its charms and advantages remain unchanged in spite of dire financial straits, lack of water, and all the rest of it. Rio gives no signs of realizing that it is no longer the capital. Although the capital has been in Brasília for almost two years, the greater part of the government remains still in Rio, and it is far easier to find a Deputado, or a Judge of the Supreme Court, in Rio than in his official place of residence.

* * *

Today, Brasília is looked on with great disfavour by many people, and not without some very good reasons. However, long before President Kubitschek began the construction of the new capital, the change from Rio to the Central Plateau had been a Brazilian dream, a sort of exodus for the land of Canaan, promised since colonial days, that would solve all the country’s problems as if by magic. A capital in the interior would be a romantic repetition of the marches of the bandeirantes through the wildernesses, bringing civilization to the remotest areas and even as far as the western frontier. It was the myth of the city of gold, with the possibilites of providing wealth and opportunity for all.

José Bonifácio, the adviser to Pedro I (patriarch of independence), also dreamed of this capital in the hinterland; he may even be responsible for the name of “Brasília.” In the middle of the 19th century, the Brazilian historian Varnhagen argued for a capital which would be at the meeting point of the principal drainage systems of Brazil — from the Amazon, the Paraná, and the São Francisco Rivers — more or less the actual location of Brasília. And the first constitution under the Republic, influenced by the Positivists, included the marking out of a quadrilateral in the geographical heart of Brazil, where the future Federal District was to be situated. After the Vargas dictatorship ended in 1945, the new constitution insisted on a new capital in Goiás, and ordered a commission to prepare for the change. Every political candidate looking for popularity, every opportunistic journalist, spoke against the “crabs” who wanted to cling to the coastal regions and ignore the fertile interior. “The march to the west” had always been a Brazilian national aspiration.

So that when the Kubitschek government wanted to distinguish its term in office with some sensational and never-to-be-forgotten public work, the idea of turning the old dream of Brasília into a reality immediately ocurred to them. Kubitschek, optimistic, energetic, and ebullient, refused to see any difficulties, or, later, to recognize the serious economic crisis and the spiral of inflation the country was entering. There was a great deal of opposition to it, and still is.

But it got built, even at the cost of over a billion dollars and the destruction of the national budget, at the expense of everything else. It also became a symbol to the Brazilian people and such a strong one that even politicians opposed to it (as the next candidate, Quadros, was known to be) did not dare speak of abandoning the whole project and returning the government to Rio. The government was installed on the 21st of April, 1960, and the government functionaries were all required to move there — or at least as many of them as there were buildings enough ready for. It has been hard to get a quorum in the Senate; the course of justice has become slowed almost to a standstill. The controversy still rages. It is only fair, of course, to try to distinguish between the really tragic drawbacks of the move, and those that are merely temporary discomforts, such as attended the building of Washington, D.C.

Even events leading up to the renunciation of Jânio Quadros as president have been blamed on Brasília.

* * *

In Rio, the Cariocas (and all Brazilians are potential Cariocas) conceal their jealousy, if they feel any, and laugh at the tribulations of Brasília. The fact is that no one is really yet accustomed to the idea of the new capital. The government that is there feels itself more like a “government in exile” than anything else. Rio continues to be the heart and soul of the country. São Paulo only recently overtook it in economic power and in population, and in Rio they still keep saying that good “Paulistas” when they die, come to Rio.

Chapter 5. Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral

While Brazil remains in many ways an agricultural country — agriculture produces almost 30 per cent of the national income and employs more than half of the working population — revenue from industry is beginning to overtake that from agriculture. In 1960 Brazil produced more than 134,000 vehicles with parts made almost entirely within the country. Steel production is increasing, and Brazil is now turning out more than 2 million net tons a year, compared with 350,000 net tons in the immediate postwar period. Even appliances are beginning to be produced in volume.

Remarkable as this achievement is, it does not necessarily mean that Brazil will soon become an industrial colossus. The country has ample resources — its hydroelectric potential alone is the world’s greatest: 80 million kilowatts. But Brazilians, it is said, “collect the fruit without planting the tree.” They have a national penchant for skimming off quick profits instead of laying the foundation for solid future earnings. The economic history of Brazil could almost be told in its long succession of spectacular booms. Brazil’s economy was dominated by sugar, gold, and coffee in succession, with brief interludes devoted to other products. But the country is today trying to diversify, rather than depend on single crops or industries.

One of Brazil’s earliest occupations was cattle raising, and it was necessarily an imported one. The Portuguese discoverers had been surprised to find that the Indians had no domestic animals, or at least no useful domestic animals. The Indians had only dogs, monkeys, and birds.

One of the first, and very difficult, undertakings of the Portuguese was to bring to Brazil all the domesticated animals they were accustomed to at home. In the middle of the 16th century cattle were brought to Bahia from Portugal and the Cape Verde Islands. They were the forebears of the cattle of the plains of the northeast.

Cattle were introduced in the south as early as 1532. The settlers who followed the bandeirantes took with them cows, horses, pigs, and goats. Later they drove the descendants of these animals through the one natural passage which penetrates the coastal mountain range and into the open stretch west of São Paulo. Horses and cows were allowed to range freely. As in the early days in the west of the United States, rustling and the roundup of wild herds — for the most part strays from the Jesuit villages — were important aspects of the life and legend of the region.

* * *

Although from the beginning sugar was the principal product in the northeast, cattle were a stimulus to colonization and the opening of new lands. In search of pastures for their herds, cattlemen pushed deep into the northeastern interior. Cattle raising changed from a simple adjunct of the great plantations to an independent activity. From it came the so-called “leather culture” that developed in this whole vast region of Brazil during the first centuries of the country’s history. The horse, upon which cattle raising depended, today inseparable from the gaucho of the Brazilian pampas and the vaqueiro of the northeast, became acclimated throughout the country. Today Brazil has more than 8 million horses.

In the northeast most of the cattle are descendants of the original herds. They are small and give little milk, but are tough and resistant. Over the years, the government and progressive cattle raisers have improved the stock throughout the country by crossing it with the zebu, or Brahman, introduced from India. This animal is well-adapted to the harsh northern conditions of heat, drought, and meager pasturage, and it thrives where the finest European stock dies off or quickly sickens and degenerates. Zebus, with their high shoulder humps, high-domed skulls, and long, drooping ears, have become common in most of Brazil, adding an exotic yet somehow not incongruous note to the landscape.

* * *

At the turn of the 20th century, zebus were imported into the huge section of fine cattleland in Minas Gerais called the “Minas Triangle,” which is now the center of the cattle industry. They became acclimated so successfully that zebu-owning became a passion with cattle raisers; prices soared, zebu buying and selling became a form of gambling, and there was wild speculation. In the 1920s the fever reached such a pitch that a single good bull brought as much as $7,500, compared to an average price of $250 for bulls of European breed.

Outside the beef-raising Triangle, the cattle of Minas Gerais are dairy cattle, and their products, including the white Minas cheese (no longer seen on every table at least once a day), are sold everywhere. Beef cattle need huge tracts of land, and with the rapid and progressive industrialization of the central-southern part of the country the cattle are being shifted to the wilder regions of Goiás and the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, which offer favorable conditions and are also near the biggest consumer of beef, the State of São Paulo.

In Pará, especially on the island of Marajó, the Indian water buffalo has been introduced and seems completely at home. The wilderness and abundant rivers and swamps of the huge island provide the kind of semi-aquatic life this semidomesticated beast prefers, while ordinary cattle, even the zebu, do not thrive there.

* * *

In a country with few refrigerators, the industry of making charque, a dried, salted meat which does not spoil easily and which is usually cooked with the staple black beans and rice, is very important. The industry started in the northeast and was taken by immigrants to Rio Grande do Sul. Although outranked in total number of cattle by Minas Gerais, this state now raises the country’s finest beef and is a center of the meat-packing industry. With 72.8 million head, Brazil is second only to the U.S. in number of beef cattle, but not in beef production, primarily because of poor disease control, inadequate transport and refrigeration facilities, and antiquated methods.

The largest herds of sheep — Brazil has some 22 million head — are also in Rio Grande do Sul, and crude wool is beginning to rank as an important export. With cotton, a major export for years, these herds also provide some material for the textile industry, which has grown enormously in the last decade.

The country’s immense coastline and teeming rivers should make fishing and processing fish much more important industries than they are. But commercial exploitation has just begun, and fish still represent one of the greatest undeveloped resources of the country. In the States of Pará and Amazonas there is, for example, the pirarucu, the “fresh-water codfish,” weighing up to five hundred pounds.

The commercial catch in the Amazon runs to only 90,000 tons a year, largely because fishing techniques used in the river are still primitive, as are those of many of the coastal fishermen. The beautiful, traditional jangadas of the northeast are merely rafts made of balsa trunks lashed together. They have one sail, and every object aboard must be tied fast to the deck. The fishermen venture on the high seas aboard the jangadas, but the hauls of fish they bring back are usually so small that it has been said that the real place for the picturesque jangada is the folklore museum.

Some modernization has been taking place in the fishing industry. Several Japanese firms have formed motorized fleets in the south, specializing in tuna and whale. A whale-processing plant has been built at Cabo Frio, a coast town east of Rio. Whales are abundant, and whale meat is being urged on a somewhat reluctant public in the coastal markets as the cheapest form of meat. Lobster fishing has also been increasing, chiefly in Pernambuco and Ceará. Canning factories are being built along the coast.

* * *

Coffee has been subject to as many ups and downs as any other Brazilian resource, but it has certainly not been troubled by underexploitation. For many years it has been Brazil’s best-known product; coffee has been the greatest item of export and the biggest source of income. Brazil produced almost 4 billion pounds in 1960. It supplied the world with nearly half its coffee, earning the country 56 per cent of its total foreign-trade income.

Brazilian coffee had modest origins. Early in the 18th century, a Brazilian stole shoots from French Guiana, where the French had started coffee plantations. The trees were first cultivated in the State of Pará. Later, seeds and shoots were distributed throughout the country. Cultivation remained small-scale until the 19th century, when coffee had its first great phase in Rio de Janeiro and Minas. The cultivation of coffee in these states, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, depended directly on slave labor, and coffee profits made the fortunes of the Rio de Janeiro barons. With the abolition of slavery in 1888 the barons went bankrupt.

São Paulo did not have as much slave labor and was far-sighted enough to encourage immigration. In the crucial years before and after abolition, immigrants — principally from Portugal and Italy — came in great numbers. In addition to this labor supply, São Paulo had its marvelous terra roxa (“purple earth”), which according to the Paulistas, God created especially for the raising of coffee. Also coffee, which already had been named “the vampire,” since within a few years it exhausted the soil, had declined in the State of Rio. In the year of abolition, for example, the States of Rio and Minas produced twice as much coffee as São Paulo; ten years later São Paulo was producing much more than both states together. Nevertheless, even with improved methods of cultivation, the terra roxa of São Paulo in turn began to be exhausted. Coffee continued its march to the south and to the west; in the late 1920s tracts of the precious dark red soil were found in the wild country of northwestern Paraná. Like a green army, the coffee trees of the planters triumphantly took over, pushing back the virgin forest and driving the wild animals farther into the interior. In the shade of the coffee trees new towns were born. A typical example is Londrina, a modern and prosperous city located where only a few decades ago stood the untouched forest. At present the coffee trees are penetrating into the State of Mato Grosso.

* * *

As the mainstay of the Brazilian economy, coffee has suffered various crises, during which the entire national life has been threatened. The appearance of Africa among the coffee producers created one of the most serious of these crises in the 1950s. Although still the coffee leader of the world, Brazil has had to face previously unknown competition, and the competition is constantly becoming more acute. Brazil cannot today sell all its coffee; in 1960 it had an accumulated stockpile of more than 5 billion pounds.

Repeated crises in the coffee market are having the effect of arousing the country to the necessity of agricultural diversification; Brazil is attempting to expand exports of other products like sugar, tobacco, and fruit. The coffee problem has also stimulated the growth of industrialization, chiefly in São Paulo, Brazil’s most prosperous state. It had undergone a tremendous boom since World War II. There was no heavy-machinery industry before the war; today there are more than forty-five major plants in São Paulo. In 1959 alone, the state manufactured more than 15,000 machine tools. It produces 53 per cent of the country’s paper, 54 per cent of its textiles, and 58 per cent of its chemicals, and it is a major bulwark of the foreign market, exporting more than 1.6 million tons of manufactured goods a year. With the nearby State of Guanabara, São Paulo contributes almost half of Brazil’s domestic income.

At the center of this industrial complex lies the city of São Paulo itself. Only 80 years ago, it was a quiet town of 25,000 people. Today it covers 535 square miles and, with a population of 4.8 million, is the eighth largest metropolis in the world. Its traffic problem is even worse than that of New York, and it has a bustling, cosmopolitan atmosphere.

* * *

Unlike the prosperous south, the states of the northeast remain almost wholly agricultural. There sugar, which had its earlier heyday of monoculture before being dethroned by coffee, is still the basis of the economy — although cotton and cacâo are grown in large quantities. Sugar developed even as Brazil itself developed; it could almost be said that the first Portuguese arrived with shoots of sugar cane under their arms. The rich northeastern sugar plantations of Pernambuco and Bahia were major factors in luring the Dutch to invade in the 17th century. Most of the profitable sugar growing is now done in the south, but in Pernambuco, Alagoas, and Paraíba, the cane fields still stretch to the horizon. Great refineries, which are beginning to take the place of the primitive old ones, are improving the product. But the methods of cultivation are extremely primitive, almost semifeudal; and the sugar workers are among the poorest and most long-suffering of Brazilian peoples. There is today a strong movement among enlightened Brazilians for reform of the agrarian situation throughout the northeast. It is indeed a highly explosive area, ripe for Communist exploitation.

One product of the sugar cane is aguardente, generally called cachaça or pinga. A clear, fiery, powerful drink made since colonial times, it is known as “the brandy of the poor.” Cachaça is now being exported. There is no Brazilian product surrounded by so much folklore as cachaça; a whole cycle of songs celebrates it. The names by which it is called, mostly affectionate nicknames—“the grandmother,” “the little blonde,” “the thread of gold”—show the esteem in which cachaça is regarded. When a man takes a drink at the nearest corner bar, he always spits out a little of the first mouthful onto the floor, as an offering to whichever saint he believes to be the donor of the liquor.

* * *

Rubber, too, once played a major economic role. The source of great but brief wealth, Amazon rubber suffered a blow in 1910 when the plantations in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies began to outproduce and undersell it in the world market. The towns that had flourished in the valley of the Amazon were rapidly transformed into dead or dying communities. The city of Manaus, situated near the meeting point of the Amazon and the Rio Negro, was the rubber capital of the world until the collapse of the market. Rich and luxurious, with a huge opera house, it imported troops of singers and dancers. Large ships made it a regular port of call. To the east of Manaus, Henry Ford established experimental plantations, Fordlândia and Belterra, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but, finding the project unprofitable, abandoned it. Today owned by the government, the project still produces a small amount of rubber.

During World War II, when Japan seized the plantations of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, there was a brief resuscitation in Amazonian rubber. But Brazil today imports some $40 million worth of Asian rubber each year. The Amazon, deprived of the market for its principal wealth, has also been attempting diversification in recent years. The area now produces substantial quantities of Brazil nuts, jute, lumber, sugar cane, and vegetable oils as well as manganese.

* * *

Like other Brazilian resources, lumber has had its brief fling, but it, too, has yet to reach its potential. In the Amazon basin alone, there are at least 5 trillion cubic feet of timber, and there are vast forests of prime woods in the south. One of the most attractive features of the national landscape is commonest in the States of Paraná and Santa Catarina — the groves of araucarias, the Brazilian pine tree. They are very tall trees with straight trunks and arched, bare branches terminating in characteristic cup-shaped bunches of needles. Besides being beautiful, the araucaria is extremely useful; its wood constitutes the principal wealth of the region in which it grows. So sought after was this wood that the government was forced to pass a law in 1942 prohibiting excessive cutting and providing for replanting.

With more than 600 known varieties, Brazil has more palm trees than any other country in the world. They are rich sources of fiber, oils, and fuel. From the leaves of the carnauba, an elegant, tall palm that flourishes only in northeast Brazil, comes a sticky deposit rather like beeswax which, when gathered, powdered, and melted by a difficult and primitive process, produces the famous carnauba wax. It was used in the manufacture of phonograph records, polishes, and varnishes. The carnauba is one of the principal economic supports of the States of Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão, and the people of the dry sertão say that is the compensation given them by God for the scourge of drought — since when there is rain the palm produces no wax.

Tobacco is raised in most of Brazil, and has been for centuries an important trade merchandise for the slave dealers. It had developed into an industry in Bahia, whose cigars are famous and good enough to be compared with those of Cuba. Bahia cigarettes are also widely distributed, but the greatest number of cigarette factories is in the State of Rio Grande do Sul.

The European grape, introduced by Italian immigrants, grows very well in Rio Grande do Sul. The wine industry has developed rapidly and today Brazilians are proud of some of their wines, champagnes, and cognacs. In 1960 nearly 8 million gallons were exported to France. Also important to Rio Grande do Sul is wheat, although far from enough is produced to make Brazil self-sufficient. The country usually manages to produce enough corn, beans, and rice for domestic consumption.

Only recently has there been much interest in making use of Brazilian fruit for exportation or canning. Oranges are now exported on a large scale. Bananas, of which Brazil is the world’s largest grower, are principally grown in São Paulo. The cashew fruit of the northeast provides the valuable cashew nut, and the fruit is processed in the form of syrups and pastes. And then there is the guava. Guava paste, accompanied by cheese, is a standard dessert all over Latin America.

* * *

Brazil’s greatest mineral resource is iron. There are practically inexhaustible veins in the country, located mainly in the State of Minas. It is estimated that there are 65 billion tons of iron ore in Brazil, 35 per cent of the world’s total reserve. The lack of high-quality coking coal has until recently prevented the development of steel mills commensurate in number with the quantity of ore. However, the coal of Santa Catarina, although of an inferior quality, has been energetically exploited, and the result has been the great steel mills of Volta Redonda, whose construction began in 1942 with U.S. aid. Brazil’s iron and steel industry is now the largest industry in Latin America, and exploitation of the ore has barely begun.

The same is true of other mineral reserves. There are deposits of just about every known mineral, including precious and semiprecious stones, scattered throughout the country, some in vast quantities. Only with denser population in these areas and more specialized techniques will Brazil be able to profit from these hidden riches. In Espírito Santo and other areas the government is at present exploring layers of monazite sands rich in radioactive ores.

* * *

A matter of considerable controversy in Brazil is the extent of petroleum reserves. Some geologists have suggested that the vast sedimentary basins of the Amazon and Paraná, encompassing nearly 2 million square miles, contain extensive reserves. But so far only traces of oil have been found. Due to a fear of foreign exploitation, oil exploration and heavy oil production were restricted in 1953 to a single government monopoly, Petrobrás. Despite valiant wildcatting at a cost of some $50 million a year, Brazil produces only some 30 per cent of its own crude requirements, most of it from the wells in Bahia. And even if there are extensive reserves in the upper Amazon valley, geologists believe that they lie under rock and would present difficult and expensive problems. Transport would not be a problem, because of the nearness of the navigable Amazon. Throughout most of the country, however, transport is one of the basic problems which Brazil must solve before it can begin real exploitation of its truly magnificent resources. Today, Brazil has nearly 24,000 miles of railroads, but most of them are short-haul, east-west lines which penetrate inland only a short distance from the coast. Many of them are of different gauges, and there are few north-south connections in any event. The highway network still under construction will of course help to solve this problem.

Chapter 6. Unself-conscious Arts

The Brazilian of the interior owns almost nothing and has little cash income. He is not a “consumer”; he still makes most of the things he wears and uses. He lives close to the life of the Indian and the primitive African. These are some of the reasons why, once away from the coastal cities, the arts and handcrafts flourish in Brazil as they haven’t in the United States since colonial days. Since the man of the interior also has no entertainment (or hadn’t until the radio, now man’s alter ego in Brazil as everywhere else), he still makes his own: songs; ballads; dances; ancient, sometimes very elaborate, folk-plays and rituals; according to the seasons and the saints’ days. He weaves wool and cotton home-spun, plaits straw and wicker, makes pottery, carves. The richness and variety of these native arts owes much to the fact that they, too, like the people, are racially mixed. Portugese and Moorish, African and Indian, — and now in southern Brazil sometimes German, Italian, and Japanese, as well.

A curious fact about Brazilian folk-pottery is that, although familiar to the Portuguese for centuries, the potter’s wheel is not used. This is supposed to be because the present-day potters in Brazil learned their art from the Indians rather than from Portuguese tradition. Even without the wheel, the Indians for a thousand years or so have made — and are making — bowls and urns, sometimes of enormous size: huge pots for fermenting liquor, or funerary urns big enough to hold the body of an adult, sitting in foetal position. These pots are built up by the “rope” method, long thin ropes of clay superimposed, round and round, until the required height and shape are reached, then the ridges smoothed down. The backlands potters (women, as with the Indians) make pots of great elegance in this primitive way, decorate them with black, white, and earth colors, and polish them with the rinds of fruit.

Besides dishes & jugs for practical purposes made by women, men sometimes make clay figures, an art derived from Africa. Sometimes colored and glazed, sometimes clay-color, these little statues or whole groups of them depict all the types and activities of their society: the “cowboys,” soldiers, priests, hunters, a wedding, a funeral, a jaguar-hunt, a team of oxen, etc. Women potters occasionally make figures, and at Ipu, in Ceará, they are known for their miniature pots and pans, dishes and furniture and animals — toys for children, sometimes surprisingly like the toys the Greek and Roman potters made for children and that survive in the museums. From Bahia State come sitting-hens, turkeys, snakes, whole trees full of birds — brightly colored and gay. Pots for the baby copy exactly in clay the usual enamel model, those glazed inside costing a few pennies more than the unglazed ones.

Another art has developed in the zones the sociologists call the “leather-culture” (pastoral): a great variety of articles made from calf-skin. The most esteemed, however, are those of deer-skin — and deer are plentiful in the scrub-forests of the northeast. The cowboy’s leather costume is made to protect him from the thorns and sharp-edged leaves of the caatinga, the scrub-forest, and its varieties of low-growing cacti and thorny trees. It is like medieval armor, made in leather: leggings, serving the same purpose as an American cowboy’s “chaps,” but tight-fitting and extending over the top of the foot, like spats; an apron, a “chest-protector,” and over all the leather “doublet,” with long sleeves meeting the leather gloves or mitts. On his head the cowboy wears a leather hat, with a strap under the chin. All these garments are fancifully decorated: embroidered, inlaid in different colored leather, stamped. Their saddles are equally objects of art, and their long, quilted capes, and decorated whips with fine lashes (made from bulls’ pizzles).

Besides the art of pottery, the women of the north and northeast have inherited the art of working in straw from their Indian grandmothers: mats, bags, baskets, hats. In one part of Ceará they make straw hats similar to the “Panamas” of Panama and Chile in their softness and fineness. Baskets, fish-traps, coarse and fine sieves, mats woven to be used as ceilings below the naked rafters. In Pará State, influenced by Portuguese workers in wicker, there is a home industry of furniture-making in reeds, rushes, wickers, etc. Travellers on the Amazon are startled to be begged to buy large wicker rocking-chairs, perched across the sterns of tiny canoes.

The most famous straw-work, however, are the hammocks woven of cord or thread made from several varieties of palm. They are soft and supple, straw-colored, as fine as silk. They are not used for sleeping in, but hung for siestas on the shady porches. For sleeping, hammocks of woven cotton are used, but coarser ones in bright plaids (the Portuguese, like the Scotch, are devoted to plaids), unsystematic plaids or all-white — the more valuable kind. The foot-wide borders of these hammocks (called “varandas”) are an art in themselves — special patterns, in “knotted lace” with long fringes. In the big ranch houses of the sertãos the “hammock chests” are an indication of the owner’s wealth, big chests of cedar or other fragrant woods where dozens of the valuable snow-white hammocks are packed away with sprigs of marjoram between them.

One casa grande in the State of Ceará had 120 hammocks in its chests, for 120 guests. This was on the fazenda called “California,” built in 1850 and hopefully named “California” for the California gold rush. This fazenda was founded in 1850, without a name. A friend of the owner inquired, “How’s so-&-so with his California?” (referring to the American gold rush of ’49) and so it was named “California.” Besides the hammocks for 120 guests who might want to spend the night, there were special “priests’ hammocks,” for their periodical visits. The lace “varandas” of these showed crosses, crossed lances (emblems of the Passion), and bunches of grapes and ears of wheat (emblems of the Eucharist).

Another art inherited from the Indian is the cúia, or decorated gourd, enamelled black, used as dippers and for bathing. The enamel is a secret, handed down from generation to generation. The decorations are often very beautiful, incised in the gourd and left in natural color, or brightly painted: flowers, fruits, flags, and such sentiments as: Souvenir, Independence or Death! Mother Love, or Happy Birthday.

From the Portuguese and also the Moors, the Brazilian women have inherited the art of lace-making, exquisitely fine lace that taxes the eyes and the patience: a hand’s-breadth is often more than a day’s work. Lace made from thread of banana-leaf fibres instead of commercial thread is particularly rare and valuable. The weavers of Mato Grosso also use this delicate fibre, an art learned from the Paraguayan Indians. Drawn-work, crocheted and knitted lace, embroideries — where the patterns have not been coarsened or “modernized”—are also very beautiful. The most famous lace-makers are from the town of Aracati in Ceará State, but the laces of the State of Santa Catarina, made by descendants of immigrants from the Azores are also famous. There is a whole group of folk-songs devoted to the lace-makers; some of them have to do with the saga of the notorious northeast bandit Lampião (killed in 1938). Strange to say, the war-song of Lampião’s bandits was “The Lace Maker”: “Oh, lace-maker! / Oh woman making lace! / Teach me how to make lace / And I’ll teach you how to love…”

In the gold-mining regions, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Bahia, the goldsmith’s art developed, with much skilled workmanship, often showing Moorish influence in its filigrees and arabesques. The stones set in these pieces are usually rough diamonds, or the many Brazilian semi-precious stones: aquamarines, topazes, amethysts, and tourmalines. A great deal of work is done in Bahia with gold and silver, ivory and coral, often in the form of amulets, lucky charms. The figa, or “fig,” in English, is seen everywhere in Brazil: tiny ones hung around babies’ necks, along with the medal of a saint, and big ones, of wood, hung on the walls. This immemorial image of a clenched fist with the thumb protruding between the first two fingers is seen everywhere in Brazil. (Shakespeare speaks of it, but it antedates Shakespeare by many centuries.) Also from Bahia are the balangandãs, jingling bunches of charms formerly worn by slave women, at their waists, and now collectors’ items. The charms are several inches long: pomegranites, cashew-fruits, musical instruments, phallic symbols, objects of macumba rites. From Goiás come rosaries of gold beads, with the “Our Fathers” of coral or baroque pearls.

In the region of Cariri, until recently the “wild west” of Brazil, land of bandits and religious fanatics, local workmen specialize in making knives and daggers. To this day they made silver daggers to be worn in high boots, and daggers with handles of ivory, enamel or gold filagree. So “wild” is Cariri even now, that during a friendly futebol (“soccer”) game between the teams of two rival towns, above the applause and shouts could be heard the cries of a man selling locally made knives from a basket on his back, like popcorn or Orange Croosh: “Get your little daggers for after the game!”

The art of the saint-makers is traditional, passed on from father to son. Every little household chapel, or “oratorio,” has its wooden images carved by the local saint-maker. Formerly, these saints were sometimes made with the bodies hollowed out, in order to hide gold and diamonds from the government inspectors, and the expression “a hollow saint” is still used to mean a hypocritical person. Figures of saints, made in the days of Aleijadinho, are still being made in the interior. Recently, however, the priests, unfortunately especially foreign priests, not appreciating the primitive in art, and wanting to get money for their churches, have been exchanging these often very remarkable wood carvings for the sentimental contemporary statues of tinted plaster, factory-produced, and sad to say the rural congregations’ tastes are deteriorating as well.

Because of this, many of the good “saint-makers” have now turned to making “miracles” instead, ex-votos, to be offered as payment for promises fulfilled by miracle-working saints at the most popular shrines (Our Lady of Nazareth in Belém, St. Francis of Canindé in Ceará, Good Jesus of Lapa on the banks of the Rio São Francisco, Our Lord of the Good Death in Bahia, Our Lady of Penha in Rio, Our Lady of Aparecida in São Paulo). Each of the churches, usually raised by the Church to the dignity of basilica, has its special rooms for displaying ex-votos, veritable museums of popular art: legs, arms, hearts, heads, ears & eyes, and inner organs, in wood or wax, each attesting to a miraculous cure. Along with them are paintings: fishing-ships, jangadas, saved from storms, hunters from wild beasts or deadly snakes, souls from swarms of devils.

In the field of sculpture, however, the greatest folk-achievement was the figureheads used on the cargo boats on the Rio São Francisco — a custom rapidly dying out. Some of these figureheads are very fine, several feet tall, towering at the bow of the boat, and carved in a style reminiscent of Romanesque sculpture in its strength and simplicity. Animals, women, characters from Afro-Brazilian folk-lore — but principally “the Great Worm,” the most dreadful of the spirits that live in the river.

One speciality that industrialization has not yet touched is the art of carpentry — inherited from the Portuguese ship-builders — particularly the manufacture of […] for flour mills, cotton seed and cheese presses, and other domestic industries. They are complicated pieces, nuts and screws, rollers and scrapers and all worked in hard-wood, and in some cases, such as machinery for making manioc flour or wine or paste from the cashew-fruit, no metal can be used at all. The huge screws, more than six feet high, are carved in spirals, in “bow-wood,” as hard as iron; the enormous wheels and travelling beams are made of whole tree-trunks, without a single nail or screw of metal, held together by a complex system of wooden pegs and joints. The carpenter’s only tools are the axe, saw, adze, chisel, and his two hands.

* * *

Like other primitive peoples, Brazilians of the interior prize their folk-poets, whom they call “singers.” They are often wanderers, playing the violin or guitar, and their verses are improvisations, sung to their own accompaniment but in strict, ancient forms and meters. They appear at rural festas and engage each other in interminable duels of verse, sometimes going on for several days, with the “singers” only stopping to eat and drink. The competitors try to outlast each other in ideas, rhymes, and good-temper. It is an art that could only develop in a Latin tongue like Portuguese, full of rhymes and assonance. The loser of the duel is the one whose rhymes finally fail him, and, exhausted, he yields the victory with a set of verses paying homage to the superior powers of his rival.

These singers are privileged people in the little communities of the sertão. They also have very high opinions of themselves and of their “memories,” the word used to describe “poetic talent.”

“There’s no man like the King,

No woman like the Queen,

No Saint like God Almighty,

And no memory like mine…”

one of them sings.

Before the advent of the radio and television, which now compete with them but so far have not entirely silenced them, these singers were the real newspapers of the backlands; even today they continue to produce detailed and dramatic verse-accounts of the more sensational news. A few days after President Getúlio Vargas’s suicide, a “Brazilian Writer” (as he signed himself) of Recife produced a ballad-pamphlet called “Getúlio in Heaven,” that still sells in the weekly outdoor markets all over Brazil. The recent renunciation of President Quadros has already been put into verses, and the flight of Gagarin, and the biggest and latest aeroplane disaster. Usually the “writers” (who can’t write; someone else takes down the verses for them) sing and declaim their compositions and then sell them in pamphlet form to the by-standers. The covers of some of these pamphlets are themselves works of art; although the text is badly printed, on poor paper, full of misprints and misspellings, the outside sheet is ornamented with crude but impressive wood-cuts.

* * *

Christmas (sometimes called “The Birth”) and New Year’s, or the Good-Year, are celebrated all over Brazil with festas that vary according to local traditions and the racial group predominating in the region. In the north and northeast, with ancient traditions of the “pastoral,” the favorite celebration is the Bumba-meu-boi (“Beat my ox”). A little group of men (as in the classical theatre, women never take part in these performances) act out a story whose hero is the ox, who dances, sings, grows sick, dies, and then comes to life again to general rejoicing and more songs and dances. The bull, with his two dancers inside, is followed by other characters: Matthew, the cowboy, the horse, the donkey, the priest (who comes to give the last rites to the dying ox), the doctor (with an enormous clyster syringe, like a character in Molière), the clown, and the chorus of […]. The music and action are interspersed with songs, and there is always a great deal of ad-libbing in the dialogues, whose wit and appositeness can make the reputation of a Matthew or a clown.

In the coastal regions, where Portuguese influence is stronger, they dance “Fandango” or “Cheganças” (“arrivals”): in a ship built on the site of the festa, they present the dramatic story of the ship Catarineta, based on an old Portuguese tale in verse that dates from the time of the discovery of Brazil. And where Negroes predominate, the play is a “Congo,” also a dramatized tale: at the court of a king of the Congo, rivals betray the kingdom to the white invaders. The crown prince discovers the plot and is killed; then follows a battle, sometimes ending in tragedy and sometimes with the victory of King Congo. All the characters are richly dressed, with velvet capes, satin breeches, and golden crowns. The ambassador of the whites is always an imposing Negro dressed like an English Admiral, with a plumed hat — like Lord Nelson.

But everywhere, from the north to the south of Brazil, in the interior and in the cities, the play of the Shepherds appears, the group of shepherds in search of the Christ Child, singing and dancing in his honor. All these primitive plays are traditional, the words handed down from generation to generation, the dialogues, even the clown’s jokes, as well as the songs.

However, all these folk festivals, and there are many others, including a variety of “rodeo” in the northeast, pale beside the great Brazilian passion, the Carnival.

Carnival reached Brazil by way of the old Portuguese Entrudo, a rude form of Carnival on Shrove Tuesday, in which masks figured, and “perfume lemons” (balls of colored wax filled with perfumed water) were thrown, but most of the rough fun consisted in throwing basins of cold water and paper sacks of flour.

In Brazil, in the cities (and Carnival is essentially an urban celebration), the Entrudo was gradually transformed into a mass-masquerade, an enormous public ball with general dancing in the streets and organized parades of dancers as well. (Not including the hundreds of private balls being given at the same time.) The paraders belong to special groups, the “ranchos” (meaning “districts,” of the town) and the “Samba Schools,” each group wearing its special costume, elaborate and often costly. The festivities go on for the three nights, all night long, preceding Ash Wednesday; and everything else comes to a complete stop: stores, banks, all work. The sambas of the year are constantly in the air; the streets are filled with slowly-moving samba-ing crowds, the air filled with confetti and streamers and the odor of the “perfume shooters”—flasks of compressed scented ether, that shoot a fine spray and not only perfume the air but give the person who gets hit a momentary thrill of icy coldness. Women samba with babies solemnly rising and falling rhythmically in their arms. It is a happy, good-humored crowd, one of the greatest shows in the world. It was, that is, because it is sad to say, but true, that Carnival, in the big cities, is rapidly being spoiled — by radio, mostly, and also by commercialism and a false idea of what appeals to the “tourist.” Hollywood movies have had their bad effects, too — a few years ago the favorite Carnival costume was taken from a film that had recently been very popular, and hundreds, or thousands, of Davids and Bathshebas samba-ed in inappropriate and ludicrous getups.

But radio and loudspeakers have done the most damage. Perhaps something can be done to save Carnival. Its essence has always been in its spontaneity and the fact that all the songs, music, and dances came directly from the people themselves. When commercial song-writers start composing songs for it, and when these songs are broadcast long before the day, the freshness has gone. Also, when a crowd of thousands sambaing along, singing their own favorite in unison, is confronted with the same samba or another one blaring over their heads at every corner from loudspeakers, in a different tempo & even interrupted by advertising — they give up singing and dancing, and shuffle along like sheep. Photographers have also been allowed to interfere with the street dancers, interrupting the prize-winning performances to get “good shots.” In Rio during the past two Carnivals the crowds finally whistled and booed some particularly obnoxious photographers out of the streets.

But in Recife, for example, the festival still has an authentic folk-lore flavor. The ordinary man goes out to play, or “to break,” as he calls having fun; if he can afford it, he dresses as a “Prince,” a rooster, Indian, devil, or skeleton (very popular). If he hasn’t any money, he improvises a costume, for example, a “woods beast”—simply a cape covered with leaves, like feathers, supposed to look like the primitive Indians. Or he shaves a strip of hair down the crown of his head, paints it red, and arranges it to look as if he has a tommy-hawk sticking in his skull. Or shaves all his head and paints it blue or green. With a parasol he sets out to dance the “frevo,” wild and acrobatic, danced half-crouching. If all else fails, he can go in rags and paint, simply as a “dirty one.”

Besides the radio and Hollywood, much of the fun has been spoiled by the government forbidding political caricatures, or making sport of the Church — some of the cleverest costumes used to be inspired by these old reliable objects of satire.

Rio de Janeiro has its own original institution, the Samba Schools. They are not exactly schools, — clubs, rather, where the members meet during the last months of the year to learn the songs and dances for the coming Carnival. Much time and money are devoted to these schools, whose members are almost entirely poor Negroes from the favelas. The songs are real folk-poetry and music: the themes are love (most important), “social criticism” of the government, the cost of living, politics, — even futebol. A general theme is given all the “Schools” for each Carnival, such as “The Discovery,” or — a few years ago—“The Discovery of Gold.” In one school, the women members danced with huge imitation gold nuggets sparkling on top of their heads. A favorite costume seems to be vaguely Louis XV, and no expense is spared. Where else in the world could one see three hundred Negroes in blue and white and silver Louis XV costumes, with white curled wigs and plumed hats, dancing down the middle of the main street at 4 AM? After them come the women, swaying and singing as they dance — hung with ropes of silver glass beads — and tiny white lights concealed in all the costumes — courtly, ravishing, gracious, to mad music on strange instruments — a fairyland for a night.

Chapter 7

In the field of contemporary arts, Brazil is certainly best known for its architecture. Not one of the cities along the coast, from Recife to Porto Alegre, is without its cluster, big or small, but ever-growing, of white “sky-scrapers.” (A “sky-scraper” in Brazil is not necessarily very high; ten or twelve stories raises a building so far above the earlier two-, three-, or four-floored buildings that it qualifies for the title.) And each city also has its large apartment houses, private houses, housing-projects, hospitals, and schools, all built in the contemporary idiom. Many of these are excellent, and well-known, even if only through the architectural reviews, to architects the world over. The majority, as everywhere and in all periods, will probably rank only as mediocre attempts to be “in style.” Nevertheless, it is perfectly true that there is probably more good contemporary architecture in Brazil today than in any other of the world’s under-developed but rapidly growing countries.

This important artistic achievement, Brazil’s greatest, is almost entirely due to a group of imaginative, energetic, sophisticated, and daring architects, most of them still quite young. But Brazilians in general, educated ones, that is, are more architecture-conscious than other peoples. Everyone seems to have strong opinions about modern architecture, pro or con (mostly pro), and to be able to speak with assurance of brise-soleils (“break-suns,” or shutters; the French term is usually used) or pilotis (the pillars raising a building one story off the ground), — the two outstanding features of modern Brazilian building. Brazil is also one of the few countries where contemporary architecture is encouraged, — favored, even, — by the government. While Washington, for example, was sticking safely to the Graeco-Roman for a new Supreme Court building, Brazil was putting up what is still considered one of the best examples of modern architecture, the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro. Competitions are required by law for public buildings, and the prizes usually go to the most advanced entries.

We have already spoken of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa in connection with Brasília, but a few other equally important architects should be mentioned. Jorge M. Moreira is perhaps the most “European,” known for his delicate sense of proportion and suitability, his refinement of detail, and careful attention to finish (which unfortunately cannot be said of all Brazilian work). He is the architect of the huge University City going up outside Rio, now long delayed for lack of government funds. Those buildings already completed are admirable, and this enormous work will undoubtedly be Moreira’s masterpiece. Affonso Reidy has always been interested in the sociological side of architecture; among his other such designs is the large working-class development of Pedregulho, with its own school and playgrounds, fitted to the contours of a high hill in the suburbs of Rio. He is also the architect of the new Museum of Modern Art. Sérgio Bernardes is perhaps the most imaginative of all; his style changes from building to building; he loves the spectacular, new materials, “tricks,” and, at their best, his buildings — or bridges or pavilions, — have an unmistakable gaiety and bravura.

There are, of course, others; and all the better-known architects have apprentices working with them, young men from Europe, the United States, Japan, even refugees from Communist China. The architects, as a group, seem to be the freest, happiest, and least provincial people in the country; they never lack for commissions, and in spite of all the ups and downs of government and real estate, their art flourishes.

They have disadvantages, of course. Because of the backwardness of Brazil’s steel industry, steel-girder construction is rarely used; even the highest buildings are of reinforced concrete. Until quite recently there was very little standardization of parts, which made construction expensive and slow. Such parts as are standardized, roofing materials, ceramics, etc., are often not quite standardized enough — the quality is uneven, or the colors or finishes are not permanent. This combined with economic problems is the real explanation of what Henry-Russell Hitchcock called Brazil’s “fantastic disregard for upkeep.”

But building in Brazil has many advantages that foreigners are not apt to realize and that may partly account for its fine tradition of solid, beautiful buildings over the centuries. Things are simplified in many ways: there are no earthquakes or hurricanes; there need be no heating, no screens, not much insulation. Many old houses still have no glass in their windows, just shutters to be barred at night. And though we think of the tropics as constantly swarming with insects, it is possible, in most of Brazil, to sit in the evenings the year round with open windows. Seasonal swarms of moths or termites, wandering fire-flies, bother no one, and a burning spiral joss-stick (called SLEEP WELL) keeps away mosquitoes …

The architect is spared our impedimenta of cellars, complicated window-frames and heating systems. He also has a much freer building code and can put up buildings that in stricter countries would be considered dangerous, or not allowed because of zoning laws. On the other hand, endless wild real-estate speculation hampers him, particularly in the cities, where building lots are too expensive for even the wealthy to have “yards,” and town houses are crowded together, cutting off each other’s views and breezes.

Copacabana Beach is the outstanding example of this unrestricted land speculation. A solid frieze of apartment-houses now cuts off every breath of air from the ocean so that only the privileged few along the front can keep cool; the rest of the huge suburb, really a city in itself, swelters between the wall of buildings on one side and the mountains on the other — and this disastrous lack of planning is being repeated all over Brazil.

Along with the architects, special mention should be made of the landscape-gardener and botanist Roberto Burle Marx. Like too many Brazilian specialists, he is better known outside his own country than in it; many people consider him the greatest landscape-gardener since André Le Nôtre. Until Burle Marx, the average public (or large private) garden in the tropics, or sub-tropics, was an inappropriate, sun-yellowed imitation of the Tuileries. He has changed this by introducing, for the first time, the wealth of native plants and trees in all their exotic colors, shapes, and textures; pools, cascades or falling sheets of water; and real rocks, instead of insipid or melodramatic statuary. For oil-rich Caracas, he is making a public garden bigger than Central Park in New York; and he is also working on public projects in Brazil on a smaller scale. One of his innovations is the use of two varieties of grass for lawns, two shades of green in geometric designs. Brazil’s mosaic sidewalks are famous, particularly those of Copacabana Beach, laid out in black and white waves parallel to the ocean waves. This pattern was copied from the mosaics of Lisbon which commemorate the great earthquake of 1755 and its subsequent tidal wave. In one new garden Burle Marx has repeated this same wave pattern in lighter and darker grasses, a beautiful way of using one of the world’s simplest decorative materials.

* * *

Although Brazil did not evolve a distinctive building style (as New England did, for example), its tradition was ancient and honorable and is still alive. One looks out of a sky-scraper apartment-house and sees a family at work building its own house, of mud-and-twigs or mud-and-rubble, with a thatch of straw or grass, according to a model thousands of years old, old long before Brazil was discovered. These huts and houses, little stores and bars, identical all over the country, could not be simpler or poorer, and yet with their white-wash (or pink or blue wash), their heavy shutters and half-doors, their effect is very pleasing. Along the Amazon the houses are more apt to be woven of palm leaves, Indian style, and resemble beautiful basket work. Even the favelas have a melancholy and horrible beauty. Built of old boards, tin cans, bamboo, sacks, any material that comes to hand, they are light and graceful, piled against the hill sides like birds’ nests, painted in faded colors, and festooned with steps, ladders, potted plants, and the inevitable bird-cages.

The big old fazenda houses grew directly from the classical mud-and-twig huts, merely larger-scale, with thicker walls to keep out the heat and the same thatch roofs, later tile. They are not elegant; there are no halls and the rooms open one into another. There are the dark interior bedrooms where the young virgins of the family led their dreary lives. There is also a chapel and frequently a bedroom and sacristy for a resident padre. And always a room for guests, to one side of the porch, perhaps with the lock on the outside, — for although hospitality was obligatory, it was just as well to be cautious. The town houses are the same, only narrower and higher. But the plain facades, stone trims, and long concave sloping roofs (an Oriental effect, derived from Portuguese Macao) are appealing, and also the (again from Macao) ornamented ridge tiles and drain pipes carried out like trumpets above the narrow sidewalks.

By the 16th century Portugal had been de-forested and was a stone building country, and apparently it didn’t occur to early arrivals in Brazil to use wood. The churches were like the houses, and at first carved stone was imported for their facades; later good native stone-cutting emerged. The smallest, earliest churches have paved squares in front for occasions when the congregation was too big to get into the church itself; sometimes these became roofed porches. The Brazilian Jesuit style flowered in the 17th and 18th centuries, and hundreds of beautiful, modest or magnificent, churches were built: Belém, Recife, Fortaleza, Bahia, Rio, São Paulo, and, slightly later, in the last fling of the Jesuit style, the churches of Minas Gerais. There are thirteen in Ouro Prêto alone and all the half-deserted towns of Minas attest to the former wealth and devoutness of the Mineiros.

Unlike the baroque or churrigueresque of Spanish America, the buildings are fundamentally simple and solid, even severe, and over-laid with decoration that grows thicker through the 18th century, with more twisted volutes, more delicate bell towers, and more fanciful windows. The slaves built churches of their own and since the Rosary was always an object of their special devotion the church of “Our Lady of the Rosary” is the high church — often the largest and most magnificent of all, — an odd side-light on the institution of slavery in Brazil.

Most of the art and architecture of this period is as anonymous as that of the middle ages, but two master-sculptors, both mulattoes, are known by name. Master Valentim da Fonseca studied in Europe, and when he returned he was employed by the Viceroy in Rio. He helped lay out the old Passeio Público (now adjoining a section of the city called, for obvious reasons, Cinelândia). Most of his work has vanished and the park is sadly diminished, but the pair of wonderful bronze alligators still there are by “Mestre Valentim.” The other sculptor is known, even outside Brazil, as Aleijadinho, “The Little Cripple,” Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730–1814), the son of an architect and a Negro woman. It is believed that he was a leper, at least he lost the use of his hands; but he continued to work with tools strapped to his wrists. At the same time the Inconfidentes were dreaming of independence and producing their imitative Arcadian poetry in Ouro Prêto, Aleijadinho was producing his much greater and more original, although also belated, art. Designs for churches, wood-carving, stone-carving, — so many works are attributed to Aleijadinho that one becomes sceptical, — nevertheless, his distinctive style can be traced all through Minas. His favorite material was the gray-green soapstone of the region, soft to cut but turning harder with exposure. (It is still much used for pots and pans. According to the Mineiros, nothing is as good as a soapstone pot for cooking the daily rice.) His last and most famous work is at Congonhas do Campo, the Twelve Prophets in front of the church of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos. Crude, but powerful and dramatic, they gesticulate against the white church with its bright blue doors, and against the sweep of bare ore-filled hills.

As in Portugal, the azulejos, blue and white tiles, played a great part in the decoration of churches, and sometimes in the houses of the rich. Not always confined to blue and white, sometimes in browns, yellows, and pinks, whole house-fronts were covered with them, particularly in the northern towns. This material has been revised in contemporary Brazilian architecture, and although it is not always used very tastefully, it is one solution for the serious problem of weathering in a tropical climate.

* * *

Brazil’s appreciation of its architectural heritage came late. Many churches were lost, beginning with those abandoned after the raids of the bandeirantes, and again after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Later, churches were sometimes deliberately torn down for their materials or to make way for wider streets. 1936 when the “modern” building boom began, was a year of drastic demolition, but it was also the year in which SPHAN was set up, the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional, to try to save as many as possible of the historical buildings of Brazil. This service has been directed by one man ever since, Dr. Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, and his modesty and scholarship, and his absolute devotion to an almost hopeless task, have been courageous and admirable. There is little money available for such projects, and the people are indifferent, ignorant, and, as everywhere, resentful of interference with property. It is only too natural for the inhabitants of a remote village to prefer a new filling station to an 18th-century fountain.

* * *

There was one good architect in the French Commission invited to Brazil by João I, Grandjean de Montigny, the first professor of architecture at the Imperial Academy. Most of his buildings, in French neo-classical style, have been destroyed, but his influence can be seen in many 19th-century buildings. The large dignified early 19th-century French-style houses have sunk through the pension level to that of slums; picturesque and wretched, sheltering innumerable families, they are known as “pigs’ heads,”—living quarters one step higher than the shacks of the favelas.

From de Montigny’s delicately-balanced and well-proportioned style, Brazil went almost directly into the hideous neo-baroque public-building style so common everywhere in the world that it goes almost unnoticed. Art Nouveau also hit Brazil, but a rather glancing blow. And then around the early part of the 20th century the very rich started leaving their fazendas and building themselves town houses to please their always independent fancies, from Norman Chateau to Gothic Cathedral to Turkish Bath, often adorned with copies of Roman copies of Greek statues. One famous dark and crenellated Gothic mansion in Rio is fondly known as “the rotten tooth.” It is to be hoped that some of these interesting monstrosities will be allowed to survive and not all quite cleared away in the eagerness for “Order and Progress.”

* * *

Until the present century there is not much to be said about painting in Brazil. Mauritzstad had its Frans Post, who did fresh and still familiar-looking landscapes while in Brazil, then spent long years in Europe painting imitations of them. With the French Comissions the illustrators of genre scenes began to arrive: Debret, Rugendas, Ribeirolles, later Ender, who have given us volumes of fascinating detailed studies of slaves, costumes, street scenes, and buildings of the 19th century. Some of the church-painting that has survived is a fairly high quality, but of interest only to the specialist. But 19th-century easel painting is a dreary waste of realistic-romantic bandeirantes, slave-girls, court functions, and landscapes that look more like France or England than Brazil. It is not until the appearance of painters such as Emiliano di Cavalcanti and Candido Portinari that Brazilian painting can be said to have any life of its own.

On first arriving in Brazil, a stranger — if he is at all familiar with them — is struck by how true to Brazilian scenery are Portinari’s early pictures: the round, almost conical green hills, the Negro women carrying white bundles on their heads, like ants with their eggs, the children playing futebol, the dry, broken graveyards — even details like kites, balloons, and the way the ever-present umbrella is worn hanging from the back of the collar — all are in Portinari’s early work.

At present the abstract movement is triumphant, along with a depressingly out-of-date importation called “Concretismo.” (This has also been taken up by some of the younger poets, who produce poems reminiscent of Eugene Jolas and transition magazine of the ’20s in Paris. The Japanese, notably Manabu Mabe, have made contributions to the abstract movement, but more in their traditional calligraphic style than in that of “action” painters of the west.) The best Brazilian work at the moment seems to be in black-and-white. There are at least half a dozen good engravers, wood-cutters, and lithographers; Feyga Ostrawer, Roberto Delamonica, Edith Berhing, Anna Lyticia; typographers and painters like Aloisio Magalhães.

The São Paulo Biennial, started in 1951 by Francisco Matarazzo, has become an institution like the Biennial of Venice. Although one may have one’s doubts about the desirability of bringing together over four thousand works of art at one time, it has undoubtedly greatly stimulated Brazilian painting with its many prizes, travelling scholarships, and opportunities for those who have to stay at home to see at first hand, for the first time, what is being done in the rest of the world. There is a real painting “boom” in Brazil at present; prices are soaring, collectors collecting, and new galleries are opening up every few weeks, it seems, in all the larger cities.

* * *

Brazilian “formal” or “sophisticated” music — it is hard to know exactly what term to use — is a complex subject in spite of its comparatively small body of work. There are Indian, African (and several different African), and Portuguese influences at work directly, and indirectly in the amazing variety of the folk-music. The music-loving Braganzas had their court composers and performers; the Jesuits their sacred operas and processional music from which many of the still-living folk-forms were derived. Quite recently a large body of late-baroque church-music has been discovered in Minas and is being transcribed and recorded, and undoubtedly much more material remains to be discovered and will help to fill in the long silences in Brazilian musical history.

The one big name in 19th-century music is Carlos Gomes, who was befriended all his life by Dom Pedro II. Unfortunately, his European training is now thought to have spoiled whatever native gifts he had. His most famous opera, The Guarani, based on the highly romantic novel by José de Alencar about a noble Guarani Indian, had a considerable success in 1870, although it has since been cruelly called “Meyerbeer’s best work.” The ballroom of the great semi-abandoned Manaos Opera House is decorated with scenes from The Guarani, and bife-stek Carlos Gomes still figures on the menus of Manaos restaurants.

The best contemporary composer is Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959). He was melodic, prolific, and fluent, if not over-fluent, and made full use of the richness of Brazilian sources (Portuguese, African, Indian, and popular music); his Bachianas and Ciclo Brasileiro are well-known outside Brazil. Villa-Lobos also put together a musical textbook for use in schools (using as examples old songs and singing games), the Guia Practica, which is considered a model of what such books should be.

* * *

The “poet” is a special figure in Brazil, not at all like the unkown, unread figure of the same name in the United States. There has long been a tradition in Latin countries, old world and new, of poets in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, vice-consuls, consuls, or ambassadors. In Brazil the word “poet” is actually a term of endearment. A man will fondly address a friend who may be an engineer or a politician as “my poet.” Perhaps this is a relic of the days when all educated men wrote poetry; certainly writing poetry is still commoner here than with us. But in spite of this fondness for the idea of the poet as a man of special charm and privilege, unless employed in Foreign Affairs, he has, professionally, an even harder time of it than in the United States. Writing is very poorly paid and there are none of the fellowships and prizes, and a mere handful, compared to the thousands, of academic jobs that make life possible for both poets and prose writers in the United States. The writer has to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or professional journalist; journalism takes the place that teaching does in the United States, and with often just as deadening effect. There is a lack of good magazines and reviews. Every newspaper has its literary page, weekly, sometimes even daily, and it is there that one has to search for the good new poem, the original short story or article, half-lost among the endless warmed-over discussions of Baudelaire or Valéry, of Thomas Aquinas or G. K. Chesterton, and translations of Graham Greene or Mauriac.

The Portuguese language itself is a barrier between Brazilian writers and the public they deserve. For most Americans who study Spanish rarely study Portuguese. More translation can remedy this situation for prose, but poetry is fairly impervious to translations and it is a pity that we remain almost totally ignorant of such fine contemporary poets as Manuel Bandeira (the father-figure of Brazilian poetry), Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cecilia Meireles, Jorge de Lima, Vinicius de Moraes (who wrote the libretto for the opera that was made into the succesful movie BLACK ORPHEUS), João Cabral de Melo Neto — probably the best of the generation after Bandeira, who has written poems of great feeling about the “flagellados” (“beaten ones”) of the north-east.

* * *

In Brazil someone who has been brought up a Catholic, in the usual way, left the church, and then returned to it again, is called a “convert.” In somewhat the same sense of conversion, Brazil is now re-discovering the values of its earlier provincial, romantic, and humorous literature, just as we have been re-assessing our Hawthornes and Twains, although on nothing like our stupendous and costly scale. Even allowing for the inevitable differences, almost all Brazilian literature is sympathetic to us: one colonial understands another. With all its naïveté, religiosity (sermons and more sermons), and sentimentality, — it has many of the characteristics of the literature of our own first three hundred years. And as American literature has been divided into “paleface” and “redskin,” so can Brazilian be divided roughly, in the same way, into that of the city and that of the country, those who looked to Europe, tradition, and “correctness,” and those who were drawn to the wilderness, the Indian, the regional, and felt that only new forms could be used for the experience of a new country. Sometimes, as our own literature, the two strains are oddly woven together.

The poets of the “Inconfidentes” sang of cupids and swans and such un-Brazilian fauna. Yet here are a few lines from the best of them, Thomas Antônio Gonzaga, that Manuel Bandeira quotes in his Anthology of Brazilian Poets of the Romantic Phase. Gonzaga is addressing his great love, Marília de Dirceu:

“You shall not see the skillful Negro

Separate the heavy emery from the course sand,

And the nuggets of gold already shining

In the bottom of the bateia.

You shall not see the virgin forest destroyed,

Nor the burning of the still green underbrush

To fertilize the ground with ashes,

Nor the seeds being sown in the furrows.

You shall not see them rolling the black packets

Of dry leaves of fragrant tobacco,

Nor pressing out the sweet juice of the cane

Between the cog-wheels…”

This is a rare moment of realism and accuracy, as evocative of rural Brazil today as when it was written. A bateia is the wooden bowl used for panning gold. It is still used, as is the destructive system of slash-and-burn farming. Tobacco, fumo, is still sold in long black ropes in the markets, and sugar cane juice, rather like a watery, grassy, molasses, is still a popular drink.

The two outstanding characteristics of the Brazilian romantic poets are their saudades and their anti-slavery sentiments. The fact that they were all sent to Coimbra to be educated probably has something to do with the former. They missed the easy, indulged life of young Brazilian gentlemen and suffered from homesickness as acutely as Brazilian students seem to do now at Boston “Tech” or the Sorbonne or Heidelberg. Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864), one of the greatest of the romantics, is responsible for the “Exiles Song,” the “My Country ’Tis of Thee” of Brazil.

“My country has palm-trees

Where the sabiá sings.

The birds don’t warble here

The way they do there…”

And Casimiro de Abreu (1839–1860) repeats:

“If I must die in the flower of my youth,

My God, let it not be now!

I want to hear the sabiá sing

In the evening, in the orange tree!..” etc.

The sabiá, a rather fat, brown thrush, is, precisely, to Brazilian poetry what the nightingale is to English poetry. Carlos Gomes uses its song in the interlude of his opera THE SLAVE; Brazilian literature is full of sabiás.

Castro Alves (1847–1871) was the most famous Abolitionist poet. His long dramatic poem, “THE SLAVE SHIP,” was given in a form of group-recitation last year, in Rio and São Paulo, and stood the test very successfully; even lines such as:

“Exists a people whose banner serves

To hide such infamy and cowardice!..

My God, My God, what a flag is this…?”

have recovered significance and dignity, a hundred years later.

* * *

Brazil’s “modernismo” movement began with the now-famous “Week of Modern Art” in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, in 1922. Beginning with the influence of the Dadaists and Surrealists, it, too, soon divided between the European-minded and the Indigenous-minded. There was even a small movement within it that called itself Cannibals in their desire to be native Brazilians and nothing else, and issued the “Anthropophagite Manifesto.” The name of Mário de Andrade cannot be omitted — starting as a poet of the “modernismos” he became one of the greatest forces in the Brazilian artistic renaissance. In music, folk art, poetry, and prose — almost everything in contemporary Brazilian artistic life owes a great debt to Mário de Andrade, and although he died in 1945 his name is mentioned constantly.

The two greatest personalities in Brazilian literature are prose writers, and both are fortunately available, at least in part, in English. The first, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), is the greatest writer the South American continent has produced; some critics think the greatest of both American continents, ranking him with our own Henry James. Child of a poor Negro house painter and a Portuguese woman, born in Rio on one of the morros, or hills now covered by the favelas, he worked as typographer and journalist, married a middle-class Portuguese woman, and published book after book of poems, stories, and novels. He grew famous, was highly respected and respectable, and in 1896 founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, whose president he was until he died. He is a deeply pessimistic, sceptical, reserved writer; there is little of the Latin rhetoric and nothing of its romaticism about his style. His best works are Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (published in English under the title of The Diary of a Small Winner), Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba, and some of the tales. Although the period is always the late Empire, and the setting Rio de Janeiro, Machado de Assis’s world is universal and his characters are real — as Tolstoy’s St. Petersburg is universal and Natasha not just a Russian girl.

The other great prose-writer, Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), is the author of one of the world’s strangest books, Os Sertões (published in English as Rebellion in the Backlands). Da Cunha was a military engineer; his book is an account of a military expedition made in 1896 against a religious fanatic, Antônio Conselheiro, “The Counselor,” who had fortified himself and all his followers in the little town of Canudos, far in the interior of the State of Bahia. They managed to hold out there for a year against repeated attacks by Brazilian regiments. The book is partly accounts of futile military manoeuvres, dry reports of suffering and atrocities (which remind one of Hemingway’s famous retreat), and partly a long geographical rhapsody. The whole first half, although not a novel, does for the backlands what James Joyce’s Ulysses does for the city of Dublin. Anyone who wants to get the feel of Brazilian life and landscape at their grandiose and disparate best and worst should read Rebellion in the Backlands. It is reminiscent of one of the Brazilian churches — solidly, almost crudely planned, but covered with a profusion of rich ornamentation and extraneous life, even to the point of being repellent.

It is perfectly true that in Brazil culture and the arts are more respected than in our own industrialized and middle-class country. Perhaps this is due not so much to European tradition as Brazilians like to think, as it is to the fact that, as in government, Brazil is one big family. In spite of examples of the democracy of the arts, — Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, and Portinari — most writers and artists come from the small educated, inter-related upper-class; in various degrees they are all cousins, and a mutual admiration society is apt to result. As in government, feuds become family quarrels; first names are used — even in serious critical articles; everything is taken too personally, and the atmosphere is curiously “feminine.”

Although in this way they are spared the abrupt and cruel fluctuations of reputation that our artists suffer from, they nevertheless pay for the lack of serious criticism and competition. One sometimes feels that a 20th-century Brazilian Samuel Johnson, with all his dogmatism, might do wonders for Brazilian arts, — but maybe that is as bad as saying that Latin American countries need dictators.

* * *

There are two sayings, Anglo-Saxon and Brazilian, that sound a little alike but have very different meanings. They illustrate very well our different points of view on the career of the artist. We say, puritanically: “He has made his bed and must lie in it.” Brazilians say, soothingly: Cria fama e deita-te na cama. “Create a reputation and stay in bed.” Too many genuine talents seem to take to their beds too early, — or to their hammocks. (A favorite way for Brazilian writers to have their pictures taken is pleasantly supine, in a fringed hammock.)

Chapter 8. Groups and Individuals

There is one anecdote Brazilians never tire of telling to illustrate their attitude towards race-relations. When some of the ladies at Pedro II’s court refused to dance with the famous Negro engineer André Rebouças, Princess Isabel herself crossed the room and asked him to dance with her. It is a nice story, and true; and it is also true that Pedro II employed several Negroes and mulattoes in high positions and that the devoted Rebouças followed him into exile and eventually died in poverty. Unfortunately this story does not necessarily prove racial tolerance; Princess Isabel was a true princess and had been well brought-up, — bem educada, as they say.

There is a better story. In 1950 Katherine Dunham was turned away from one of the big hotels in São Paulo with the excuse that there were no vacant rooms. Overnight this became a national scandal, and within days a law was passed against any discrimination whatsoever in the future. The fact that such a law had never even been thought of up until then tells almost all one needs to know about Brazil’s attitude towards the Negro. (The hotel was supposed to have acted as it did out of deference to the prejudices of its North American clientele.)

Brazilians are proud of their fine record in race-relations. Rather, their attitude can be best described by saying that the upper-class Brazilian is usually proud of his racial tolerance, while the lower-class Brazilian is not aware of his; he just practises it. The occasional anti-Negro, or racista (and this applies equally well to the occasional anti-semite), usually proves to be one of two types: the unthinking member of “society” who has got into anti-Negro or anti-Jewish “society” in his travels, and has lost his native Brazilian tolerance, or sadder still — the European emigrant who comes to Brazil having suffered in his own country because of his race or poverty, and (probably unaccustomed to Negroes, anyway) despises and is rude to them.

The old upper-class looks down on the new middle-class, because of its vulgarity or bad manners, much more than on the Negroes or mulattoes. Part of this is nostalgia for the days when there was no middle-class, part economic pressure, and part old-fashioned snobbishness. One often feels sorry for the small but growing middle-class; surely old-fashioned Brazil should have more patience with it. The still-simple class-divisions and types seem 19th century, — almost Dickensian, if a writer so remote from everything Brazilian can be mentioned in connection with Brazil.

A young Jewish businessman, intelligent, but not well-read or well-travelled, was astounded when, planning his first trip to the United States, he was warned about “restricted” hotels. The idea of being discriminated against had never occurred to him. Also, — and this illustrates one of Brazil’s great weaknesses, its provincialism, built up over long centuries of remoteness from Europe — (it took […] days in a sailing vessel to get to Europe from Brazil, as compared with […] days from North America) — this same young Jew was equally astounded to be told that the sufferings of the Jews under Hitler had anything to do with him, he had never realized there was such a thing as racial solidarity.

It is true that the Negro or mulatto is a “second-class citizen” rarely in important positions or even good jobs, and almost always poor. But since most of the population is in exactly the same situation and suffers the same deprivations, his sufferings do not mark him out as very different from anyone else. Negroes want to be “light,” claro, have “good” (straight) hair, and “good” (not flat) noses. They are sometimes treated with the condescending, indulgent humor found in the southern U.S. — & there are hundreds of Negro myths — but again it is not so very different from the way lower-class whites are treated. They have equal opportunity and education, as far as it goes, which is usually not very far as yet; and in the arts. Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade — all were mulattoes. After Machado de Assis’s death a friend called on his widow. The Senhora Machado de Assis glanced at her husband’s photograph on the table and made her only recorded comment on the fact that she, a white woman, had married a mulatto. “What a pity he was so dark,” she said.

The widespread poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and suffering in Brazil are tragic; for millions, life is hungry and dirty, short and cruel. And yet — to a South African or a North American or anyone who has lived in a colonial country, — to be able to hear a black cook call her small, elderly, white mistress minha negrinha (my little nigger) as a term of affection, comes as a revelation, — a breath of fresh air at last.

It was not planned; it just happened. But Brazil now realizes that her racial situation is one of her greatest assets. Racial mixtures can be seen all over the country. In the north, in the Amazon region, Portuguese and Indian have produced the caboclo, small, well-built, straight noses, bright eyes — a very attractive physical type. The northeast, after generations of poor diet, has produced the cabeça-chata, or “flat-head,” who is also apt to be small, somewhat rickety, with thin arms and legs and a large head, but quick, and certainly prolific. In the south under better living conditions and with little or no Negro admixture, the type is more Portuguese, sometimes with German blood, bigger, fairer, with clear skin, calmer — but pugnacious, even inclined to violence. It is in and around the big cities of Rio and São Paulo that one gets every racial type mixed together, types that have lost their racial clarity along with their former agricultural skills and beautiful backlands manners. A man in Goiás will know the name and habits of every beast and bird around him; but the people of regions that have fallen into agricultural decay are sickly-looking bad farmers, to whom every insect is only a bicho, or every tree is the “five-leaf,” and all are subject to destruction. The importance of nutrition in Brazil is shown by the fact that the richer and older the family, the taller and bigger-boned they are apt to be. Sometimes their servants from the “north” or the “interior” appear almost like dwarfs beside them.

* * *

The Portuguese have naturally been the largest group of immigrants, and they still come in at the rate of 15,000 a year. They are mostly laborers and farmers, servants or gardeners. Also, certain ancient city trades are theirs: old-newspaper-and-bottle-dealing and knife grinding. In the cities, a great deal of freight is pushed about on hand-carts, and this too is the prerogative of the Portuguese. The actual official name for these hand-cart men is “Donkies without Tails.” Their usual costume is wooden clogs, extra wide trousers, undershirts, and large floppy berets, and their faces are handsome, simple and stolid, compared to the often ugly, but subtle and mobile faces of Brazilians of several generations’ standing. In endless jokes the Portuguese appears as absurdly literal-minded and naive. In the 19th- and early 20th-century Brazilian theatre, he was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches and heavy watch chains. In Portugal on the stage at the same time, the Brazilian was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches, etc., etc.

After the abolition of slavery, European immigrants started to arrive in large numbers, going mostly to the States of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Germans, Italians, and after 1908, Japanese all poured in. There are whole towns and villages of Germans in the south of Brazil. At present there are probably about half a million Japanese in the country, who are contributing enormously to the improvement of agriculture, particularly to fruit-growing, in the southern states. São Paulo has Japanese grocery stores, bookshops and even Geisha girls. The 6 million Italians have adapted themselves best of all, probably because the climate and working conditions are not unlike those of Italy, and Portuguese is easy for them to learn.

* * *

The founder and hero of the Indian Protection Service was General Cândido Mariano Rondon (1865–1958). He came from Cuiabá, capital of the State of Mato Grosso, and was himself part Indian. In 1907 as a young captain, he was given the task of building a telgraph network to link Mato Grosso with Amazonas and with the outside world. This meant exploring thousands of square miles of wilderness for the first time. Rondon’s story is full of heroism and self-sacrifice. He believed that the Indians should and could be “pacified,” as opposed to one popular opinion of the day which was all for exterminating them. The motto he gave the Indian Service was “let yourself be killed if necesaary, but never kill,” and many of his lieutenants, soldiers, and workers did just that. He tried never to interfere with the Indians’ way of life. There are still shameful stories of land-greedy men who cheat or murder the Indians, and sad “publicity stunts” involving them, but Rondon set a high standard of behaviour towards primitive men. The territory of Rondônia (larger than the whole of France) is named for him.

Just before the First World War Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting and exploring expedition with Rondon. (He found, sad to relate, that there was just as good game in South America as any ever shot in Africa.) He pays high tribute to Rondon in his book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness,” which probably brought Brazil to the attention of the average American for the first time since Dom Pedro II’s visit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Rondon discovered fifteen major rivers, one named for Roosevelt, built over fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines, and discovered many previously unknown tribes of Indians.

But the Indians continue to be a problem. Tribes that have never seen “civilization” are still turning up, while those that have seen it are gradually dying off in disease and degradation. Sometimes the problem is a dangerous one. As this was written, the body of a young English explorer was found, pierced by seven arrows of the Caiapós’. The isolated rubber-collector or cattle-raiser of Mato Grosso or Pará, living in the atomic age, still has more to fear from arrows or blow-pipes than from bombs.

* * *

One night on board a ship going down the muddy Amazon a young woman doctor was telling stories. She had been fifteen years with the S.E.S.P., the Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública, founded jointly by the United States and Brazil in 1942, and soon to be taken over completely by Brazil. She was twenty-three years old when she entered the S.E.S.P.; she had gone up to Santarém, then another hundred miles or so by launch, and landed with her instruments and a few books at a small village on the Rio Tapajós. The first night a group of wild, ragged men asked her to make out the death certificate of a fellow-villager whose body had just been found in the river: death by drowning. She asked to be left alone with the body and found that, although it had been in the water for some time, the man had died of a stab in the back. Quite alone, at night, knowing that the murderer or murderers must be in the threatening group of men, she had refused to sign the death warrant and ordered someone to go for the nearest police representative — half a day’s trip by motor boat, — she loved her work. She thought that the Indian Protection and the S.E.S.P. were the two best-run services in Brazil.

Small, fat, animated, dark, probably with Indian blood, she was a “modern” Brazilian woman. There are not many like this Amazonian doctor, but there are a few and the numbers are increasing.

Brazil is a man’s country. The double standard could scarcely be more so; little boys are spoilt, according to Anglo-Saxon notion; everything in the home revolves around the head of the house or the son of the family, often referred to simply as “the man.” The male, o macho, is the all-important, all-admired, principal. Women are: “the mother of my children,” “the bearer of my name,” and “religion is for Women.”

But nothing is that simple. Even if poor women trail behind the men, carrying the baby in their arms and the water-jug on their heads, even if the Women’s Pages of the papers are of an unbelievable vapidity, and even if men stay in one room at parties talking of politics & real estate and women stay in another babbling about servants and babies, things have changed a great deal since the first Portuguese carried off the Indian girls. In the old days women were scarce and were kept in harem-like seclusion, peering out at the city streets through muxarabis, or in the dark inner rooms of the old farm houses. For three hundred years they were rarely taught to read or write, and they were married off as young as twelve to neighbours, cousins, even to uncles. All the early travellers’ accounts speak of the timidity of Brazilian women and how rarely they were seen by male guests. They grew white and fat in the darkened rooms, rarely walking, swaying in hammocks, or sitting cross-legged on pillows, while their husbands, according to most accounts, made merry in the slave quarters. After several generations of that sort of life, often the men had not much enterprise, and the wife would, in reality, run the sugar- or coffee-plantation, sitting on her pillows, being fanned, sewing, but issuing a stream of orders all day long.

It is only in the last hundred years that women have been educated in Brazil, and now lower-class girls even more than boys are lucky if they get a year or two of school. Upper-class girls go to convent schools, some good, some bad. But one cannot help but feel that the nuns have too often encouraged complacency and snobbery, not noblesse oblige. In spite of general kindliness, too many upper-class women still treat their servants or social inferiors in the old 18th-century way and let their children grow up doing the same thing.

Since women were illiterate there were naturally no women writers. We can learn the woman’s side of 19th-century life from visitors like Maria Graham or the letters of the many foreign governesses. Some of the talent wasted can be guessed at. The Diary of “Helena Morley” (Alice Brant) is an authentic diary kept in Diamantina in the ’80s by a young girl, certainly a novelist manquée. Women are now prominent in Brazilian letters. Cecilia Meireles is one of Brazil’s best poets. Clarice Lispector is a short-story writer and novelist of considerable originality; and there are many others. The best known of all is Rachel de Queiroz, who at the age of eighteen wrote a short, brilliant novel about Ceará, The ’15, the year of a particularly dreadful drought. She came to Rio, wrote plays and novels, and for many years has had a page in O Cruzeiro, the biggest weekly, in which she is consistently and courageously on the right side of political and social causes. During the Vargas dictatorship, when many intellectuals were arrested or exiled, she spent six months in jail, incommunicado. In 1961 President Quadros invited her to be Minister of Education, and later an ambassador. Although she refused both positions, this was the first time in Brazil a woman had been so honored.

Women were admitted to universities in […]. There are now women in the government, congresswomen, lawyers, doctors, psychoanalysts, and engineers. The head of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, Carmen Portinho, is an engineer, and the graceful viaduct of Canoas near Rio is the work of another woman engineer, Bertha Leitchic. We have seen how active women are in the arts. The pianist Guiomar Novaes has long been world-famous.

Special credit should be given to hundreds of anonymous Brazilian normalistas, — the young girls who start out every year as school-teachers, often in remote villages, in one-roomed school-houses, under heart breaking conditions.

But marriage at seventeen or eighteen and the grim race of procreation are the lot of even the rich and educated. Women themselves are against introducing divorce. Security for herself and her children is the most important thing in life.

Although women got the vote in Brazil in 1934, they still do not have full legal rights. They usually think as their husbands do and accept their husbands’ infidelity as a matter of course. Some will even insist that they are happier than American women, — but that is usually after a visit to the United States, where they have seen how American women “do their own work,” take care of their own children, or support themselves, and appear rushed and harassed.

* * *

Besides careers for women, another new development in Brazil is sports. Only thirty years ago, futebol (“soccer”) was a strictly amateur affair, played for fun by the upper-class. Now like baseball in the United States, it is a big business, with high salaries, the buying and selling of players, and popular national heroes. Every newspaper devotes at least a page to it everyday. In 1958 Brazil was soccer champion of the world. (It is interesting to note that each player on the European tour was alloted thirty pounds of black beans.) The players are all shades, from white to jet black, graceful, nervous and incredibly quick. For years they lacked team play or cooperation.

[Popular heroes—“The Black Diamond,” “Pelé,” story from Carolina Jesus here. In 1958 the basketball champions of the year. Maria Ester. Bruno Hermanny.]

In the country on Sundays, the population of every small village will be out watching the local futebol teams. The big pale-green fields will be edged with people in their Sunday best, carrying babies, carrying umbrellas against the sun. The Kibon (“Eskimo Pie”) man with his yellow wagon, a spun-sugar wagon (home-made, mounted on a bicycle); buzzards and delicate tissue paper kites hang overhead, and the players in their brilliantly striped jerseys and brief shorts are running, running.

It is also a common sight to see the local washerwoman’s line hung with the jerseys of one team, sweaters striped like wasps, a cheerful display, sometimes against the background of a city dump, with buzzards and paper kites hovering above.

Chapter 9. The Republic

The Empire and the Emperor, Pedro II, were synonymous. The chief cause of the fall of the monarchy was undoubtedly the fear of what would happen when Princess Isabel inherited the throne. The Brazilians were suspicious of her husband, the French prince, Count D’Eu (grandson of King Louis Philippe); he was a “foreigner.” Even Princess Isabel’s great gesture, the emancipation of the slaves, couldn’t calm the increasing anxiety about the “French” rule they were sure would follow the death of the sick and prematurely aged Emperor. This is the explanation of how an empire that had lasted for sixty-five years could fall without protest and without struggle.

But the Republic began as an improvised collaboration of ill-assorted elements: the Positivist “clique,” the military group led by Marshal Deodoro, and the great landowners who had been ruined by abolition. (The great number of “Barons” and other titles that appear look strange among the prominent names of the young Republic.) It was a chance collaboration, bound to break up, and it did almost immediately.

The Positivists were the first to disassociate themselves from the new government. “This is not the Republic of our dreams!” they complained. But they left their slogan, “Order and Progress,” on the new flag, and other features of the new regime were influenced by Positivist thought. General Deodoro was the next to go. In spite of having proclaimed the new Republic, he was reluctant to give up his position as an old Imperial General; he disagreed with his former accomplices, fought with the already strong opposition movement in the parliament. He attempted a military coup (or golpe, as Brazilians call it), dissolved the Assembly, and ended by “renouncing”—the first presidential “renunciation.” The Vice President, Marshal Floriano Peixoto, nicknamed “The Iron Marshal” because of his ruthlessness, took over.

His term as president was marked by civil wars and rebellions, two of them very important: the rising of the “Federalists” in Rio Grande do Sul (always the hotbed of rebellion) and the revolt of the Royal Navy, that had never accepted the overthrow of the monarchy and was also jealous of the pre-eminence of the Army in the new government. The “Iron Marshal” stood almost alone but, with the people on his side, emerged victorious from these struggles. The Navy finally joined forces with the south, rebellious admirals with gauchos. In the last bloody battle there, the head of the Navy, Admiral Saldanha da Gama, was killed. Strange to say, Saldanha da Gama is now venerated as the model naval officer — the Brazilian Naval Academy is named for him.

The next president was a civilian from São Paulo, Prudente de Morais, who tried to restore order to the country, divided and exhausted by the struggles of the “Florianistas.” It was also a difficult period. There were no longer riots in the cities nor declarations from the discontented military, but a new phenomenon: religious war in its most brutal form. A strange backlands leader, a sort of rustic saint, appeared, and attracted an immense following of religious fanatics in the arid plains of the northeast. This was Antônio Maciel, called “The Counselor” by his disciples. At first his movement had a religious cast: prayers, penances, forgiveness of sins, and mass pilgrimages of the ever-growing group through the vast wastes of the caatinga, or scrub-forest lands. Then the Counselor announced his new dogma: the Republic was the rule of the Anti-Christ, and they should fight for the return of the “King”—in other words, Dom Pedro II. A long, tragic struggle began. At the beginning it was thought that a mere police-operation, with small numbers of men, could put an end to the movement. But the Counselor’s fanatic followers put up such amazing resistance that the operation assumed almost the proportions of civil war. More and more troops were decimated by the jagunços (a name orignally meaning “ruffian,” but later used for the inhabitants of the backlands in general), entrenched in their stronghold of Canudos, in the harshest region of the interior of Bahia. Many soldiers and officers were killed — even one general. Alarmed, the government organized a full-scale expedition of war, and Canudos was finally utterly destroyed, with its defenders; there were almost no survivors. Today, a great dam across the Vaza-Barris River has flooded the old bloody battlefield of Canudos. The only remaining monument to the siege is Euclides da Cunha’s famous book, Rebellion in the Backlands, (one of the [earlier] masterpieces of Brazilian literature), that had its simple beginnings in his reports as a war correspondent.

The next president, Campos Sales, undertook to straighten out the country’s chaotic financial situation. Under the first two presidents and during the civil war, the country had entered a period of great disorder. The people complained and made bitter jokes, but tightened their belts. They called President Sales “President Selos” (President Stamps) because of the high taxes (and all the stamps the taxes entailed). However, order was restored, money was stabilized, and a period of prosperity began. This period marked the beginning of the remarkable progress of São Paulo, helped by the wave of European immigration that it had encouraged since the beginning of the century.

But the young Republic had still to produce a body of states-men; and in the mixed group of men, idealistic or resentful, that had provoked Dom Pedro’s downfall, there were many quarrels and resignations. So it was natural that when order was restored and the country began to prosper, the men of the old Imperial regime, more gifted and better prepared for the task, came back into power. The newspapers ironically called this new ruling class “the government of the Counselors,” since many of them actually had been Counselors under the Empire. The first was the new president, another Paulista, former Counselor Rodrigues Alves, who did much to beautify the city of Rio and improve its sanitation.

Another Counselor, while a famous Republican, was a figure of great importance for half century: Rui Barbosa (1849–1923), one of the great figures in Brazilian history. He had many talents: a powerful orator, a jurist of the highest calibre, a writer of pure and classical Portuguese. He devoted all his talents to the service of democratic government, and he was famous for his refusal to admit anything approaching the dictatorial, and for his defense of the under-dog. Small and thin, with a weak, nasal voice, nevertheless, he was a formidable opponent, equally respected by popular leaders and famous generals. Too many politicians feared to compete with him, or perhaps they feared his intransigence. The whole nation mourned his death. And until today, in political arguments, the man who manages to quote Rui Barbosa to support his opinions is the one who has the last word.

Another figure who emerged during the Empire and then became a tutelary angel of the Repubic was José Maria da Silva Paranhos — Baron of Rio Branco. With the proclamation of the Republic, he went abroad in a minor diplomatic position. There he stayed, until the government called him back to lend his services as technician and scholar in order to settle the long-disputed question of the Argentine boundary. Rio Branco, a great student of history, argued the case so well that he convinced the arbiter (the American President Grover Cleveland) that Brazil was in the right, and the settlement was favorable to Brazil. In honor of President Cleveland, a vast tract of the recovered territory was named Clevelândia, the name it bears today.

Other questions of disputed boundaries were given to Rio Branco and also settled with profit and honor for Brazil. The Alves government made him Minister of Foreign Affairs, and succeeding presidents, of no matter what party, kept the irreplaceable Baron in Itamaraty (the Department of State). When he died, in 1912, his funeral was the greatest the country had ever seen. Every city in Brazil has one of its principal streets named for him (the Fifth Avenue of Rio is the “Avenida Barão do Rio Branco”); one of the “territories” (not yet a state) is named Rio Branco; and even a huge province of Uruguay is named Rio Branco, in honor of the man who settled its frontier.

Another great man of the Empire who also served the Republic, especially in diplomacy, was Joaquim Nabuco, famous as an Abolitionist, later Ambassador to the United States for many years.

With the return of the “Counselors” Brazil entered on a period of great progress; with the slogan of “Civilize Rio” the old city of Dom João VI began to open up avenues and install port facilities. With the help of a team of young technicians, especially the engineer Pereira Passos and the doctor Oswaldo Cruz, the city began to rid itself of its colonial atmosphere. Yellow fever, which had reached Brazil around 1850, had long been the scourge of the city; the Cariocas called it “the patriot” because it seemed to have a preference for foreigners. But it was now eliminated once and for all by a campaign for better sanitation. Compulsory vaccination against small-pox was introduced and even led to riots and bloodshed in the streets. The poor and ignorant were afraid of inoculation, and the remnants of the Positivist intellectuals sided with the masses, saying that compulsory vaccination was an “attack on the physical integrity of the citizen.”

This period was the golden age of republicanism in Brazil. The country prospered, the money was sound, and coffee held sway. The presidents abandoned all the parliamentary tradition of the Empire and relied on the so-called “policy of governors” that transformed the Congress into a subsidiary of the Executive power. Under this regime, the big states dominated the smaller states, and two states dominated all the rest: São Paulo and Minas Gerais. The presidency long alternated between men from these two states. Since São Paulo was famous for coffee and Minas Gerais for its dairy products, this political arrangement was popularly called “coffee and milk,” café com leite, the usual Brazilian breakfast.

It was not until the last period of the First World War, with the wave of social agitation it produced, that Brazil began to become “socially conscious.” Reforms were demanded, particularly election reforms, since universal suffrage and with it true democracy were in reality just words.

* * *

The troubles began in the barracks; led by a few more ambitious or more politically advanced generals, the young officers became aroused. 1922 was the first centenary of Independence, celebrated with great public festivities, and on the 5th of July of that year the famous death march of the “18 of Copacabana” took place, the first serious episode in the rebellion. Two years later, also on the 5th of July, revolution broke out in São Paulo. The rebels’ chief complaints were that the Republic was becoming bureaucratic; that it still had not got rid of the corrupt politicians who had overthrown the Empire; and that political power was still in the hands of the old bosses in the interior, without taking into account the growing strength of the cities. This was the time of the first labor-agitations in Brazil and the formation of the first groups of the far left, the anarchists. The president was Artur Bernardes from Minas Gerais, rigid and narrow-minded; he demanded that Congress declare a state of siege for his entire term in office. And out of this “second 5th of July” of 1924 grew the movement of rebellion that in 1930 was to upset the “old Republic.” The rebellious troops, driven back to Rio Grande do Sul, began one of the most singular movements in the history of Brazilian revolutions: the march of the “Prestes Column.”

About 2,000 men, civilians, and soldiers, had refused to surrender to the government when the generals did. They were led by a group of young officers who have all left their marks on modern Brazilian history, but the most important for the moment, since he later bacame leader of the Brazilian Communists, is Luiz Carlos Prestes. They left Rio Grande do Sul, hid out in the forests of the State of Santa Catarina, and reached Mato Grosso. Then, like the 17th-century bandeirantes, the column made its way through the interior of Brazil, most of it as yet not even mapped. Prestes led them through the wild northeast, from Piauí to Bahia. It was not an army of aggression; they only defended themselves when attacked. They respected the people they came in contact with, and requisitioned no more than they needed, food and horses, giving receipts for everything they took, to be paid on “the victory of the Revolution.” In general, the population received them with sympathy, or at least did not oppose them. Prestes became a legendary figure, and the newspapers gave him the sobriquet of “Knight of Hope.” Finally, after almost two years of marching through the hinterlands of Brazil and covering 25,000 kilometres, the column split in two, one part finding political asylum in Bolivia, and the other in Argentina.

All the leaders of the column were to return as victors in 1930. All except Prestes, who during his exile stumbled on Marxism, became a member of the Communist Party, and went to Russia. He appears again as the leader of the pro-Communist movement of 1935, which provided the pretext for setting up the Vargas dictatorship.

In 1930 the president was Washington Luiz, from São Paulo. But instead of keeping to the “coffee and milk” understanding, and letting “milk,” or a president from Minas Gerais, follow him, he succeeded in getting another Paulista elected as his successor. The powerful State of Minas naturally resented this tipping of the scales in favor of the rival state and aligned itself with the ever-present rebellious military elements. They won the support of the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Getúlio Vargas, — a politician until then almost unknown to the rest of the country — and revolted against President Luiz. The “old Republic” had reached the end of its days, and the saying was, it was “ripe to fall.” One by one, the state governors were put out by the insurrectionists. The exiled officers became the leaders of the movement, and at first it appeared that the governor of Minas would be able to seize power — the plan all along. But they hadn’t counted on the political talents, opportunism, and qualities of leadership of the gaucho Vargas, who very quickly broke with all his early fellow-revolutionaries and became the President of the Provisional Government.

The Vargas dictatorship had arrived. Immediate elections were promised, but Vargas kept putting them off. São Paulo (the richest state in Brazil) was powerless, as well as humiliated by the conquerors, who handed it over to the mercies of the “officers” of the revolution. In 1932, under the awkward slogan of “Constitutionalization,” São Paulo got ready to fight. There was talk of secession. The Paulistas took up arms as one man, but the rest of the country did not follow them, & Vargas, now running the army, crushed the “Constitutionalistas.”

In the meantime he was having trouble maintaining his dictatorship, and in 1934 he had to permit elections for a new Congress. This Congress voted for a new and very liberal constitution, incorporating most of the […] of the revolutionaries of ’22, ’24, and ’30: secret ballot, female suffrage, and the representation of all classes. This same Congress then appointed Vargas president of the “New Republic,” for a term of four years. The liberals & the revolutionary officers had triumphed; everything seemed for the best in the best possible of worlds. But Vargas, the “caudilho” of the frontier, did not care for the restrictions the new constitution placed on him and began to show his hand. The Communists promoted a united front movement of all the leftists, under the name of “Alliance of Liberation,” and led by Prestes, who had returned from Russia, they succeded in stirring up revolution in Rio and in the northeast. Vargas quickly crushed this revolt, too, this time with great severity.

It was the time of fascist power: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, and Salazar in Portugal. Vargas allied himself with Brazil’s fascist party, the “Integralistas.” Protected by the “state of war” he had decreed in order to combat the leftists, he secretly ordered his advisers to draw up a fascist-style constitution (copied, it was said, from that of Poland); he sent advance emissaries to all the states to guarantee the support of the governors, and he sent to jail, en masse, as political prisoners, all intellectuals and politicians who carried any weight with the public. On the 10th of November, 1937, in a surprise move, he surrounded the two houses of Congress with troops, closed them, and put his secret constitution into effect. (The people quickly called it the “Polish” one.) Under the name of the “New State,” fascism began in Brazil.

The idea of dictatorship was intolerable to the majority of Brazilians; nevertheless, it is true that in spite of the abuses of power, it never took on (at least, not openly) the worst aspects of European fascism. As one commentator said, it was fascism “Brazilian-style,” i.e., “fascism with sugar.” No public executions, no shootings, no concentration camps. After the first few months most of the political prisoners were released; only a few leaders, condemned by the inquisitorial ”Security Tribunal” remained in jail. Other leaders went into exile. The “Integralistas” themselves, who had been ridiculed by Vargas and robbed of all power, revolted; this revolt was also brutally put down.

At the start of World War II Vargas did not conceal his sympathies for the Axis powers, and the first Nazi victories lent support to his attitude. But public opinion, even gagged as it was by the dictatorship, made the most of every opportunity of showing its partiality for the Allies. President Roosevelt, for his part, did all he could to bring Brazil over to the side of the Allies, particularly after Pearl Harbor. Brazil ceded military bases to the Americans; the air-lift was established between Natal and Dakar, by means of which large numbers of American troops and quantities of supplies crossed the ocean. Finally, after the sinking of Brazilian ships by German submarines, campaigns in the newspapers, and demonstrations in the streets, Vargas was forced to declare war against the Axis powers. A contingent of Brazilian soldiers was sent to fight in Italy and suffered losses. At the end of the war in 1945, Brazil, in spite of Vargas and the dictatorship, was proud to be among the victorious Allies.

It was scarcely possible to maintain the “New State,” typically fascist, even if moderate, after the enthusiasm Brazil had shown for the Allies and her own returning soldiers. The United States put discreet pressure on Vargas to permit free elections. The press, with one accord, disobeyed the government censorship, and Vargas was never able to impose it again. Finally, in October 1945, the highest-ranking military officer, realizing that the dictatorship was tottering, ordered Vargas out, and he was sent into exile, not abroad, but to his far-off fazenda, in Rio Grande do Sul.

Elections were held. The opposition candidate was the Brigadier General Eduardo Gomes, the only survivor of the national heroes, the “18 of Copacabana” of 1922. But even if Vargas was out, the political machine of the dictatorship was still functioning, and the same leaders who had supported the “New State” were still in power. They succeeded in electing their candidate, General Eurico Dutra, Vargas’s ex — Minister of War, who had been called the “Constable of the New State.”

Surprisingly enough, once in power Dutra showed respect for the constitution, (a liberal constitution was again in effect) and no tendency to seek personal power or permit military excessess. But he was a friend, an ally, of the deposed dictator. The political rights of Vargas had not been revoked; the necessary electoral reforms did not take place. So that, at the end of Dutra’s five years in office, “Getúlio” ran again. He took advantage of the emotional paternalism the enormous propaganda machine of the “New State” had been preaching to the people for eight years — and that the Dutra government had not unmasked. And in 1951 Vargas, in a landslide victory, was again in power, this time as lawfully elected president.

But times had changed. Dutra had governed honestly and respected the law. The group that came back into power with Vargas was eager for power, fame, and money. The presidency was surrounded by a morass of corruption. The opposition fought bitterly and violently against Vargas and “Getúlismo.” Carlos Lacerda, editor of the opposition newspaper, “Tribuna da Imprensa,” was his most outspoken opponent and exposed graft and chicanery in government circles, and in Vargas’s own family. (Vargas himself was believed to be honest, but deluded, and increasingly helpless.) Members of Vargas’s bodyguard plotted to assasinate Lacerda. The attempt failed; Lacerda escaped with a bullet in the foot, but a young Air Force Major, who was with Lacerda to protect him from just such an attack, was killed. This political assassination produced a national scandal. Lacerda publicly accused the president of having instigated the crime. (It was later proved, however, that Vargas was ignorant of the whole thing.) The Air Force was determined to find out who was responsible for the death of their comrade; a group of them captured the culprit in the Presidential Palace itself. High-ranking members of the armed forces then demanded the president’s renunciation, in a dramatic scene early in the morning of August 24th, 1954. Vargas apparently agreed; still in pajamas and dressing gown, he retired to his bedroom — and shot himself through the heart.

Happily, with the amazing Brazilian talent for resolving the worst crises peacefully, the country was not thrown into chaos by the president’s suicide. The Vice-President, Café Filho (Coffee, Jr.), took power exactly as if the position had become vacant in a more normal way. (The current joke, of course, was: “What does the butler say when he knocks on the president’s door in the morning?” “Time for coffee.”) At the end of his term there were new elections. The candidate of the old “Getúlista” group was Juscelino Kubitschek, from Minas Gerais; the opposition was a general, Juarez Távora, one of the “young officers” of ’30, who had later turned against Vargas. However, the Vargas machine was still powerful, in spite of the suicide, — or perhaps because of it. (Vargas had been a father-figure to the masses of the poor, particularly in the cities. His funeral in Rio, rather, the procession carrying his coffin through the streets to the airport to be taken back to Rio Grande do Sul, was a frightening and touching display of mass-hysteria.) Kubitschek won by a narrow margin; and since the soldiers and civilians who were for Távora began to question the legality of the election, the “Getulista” generals, with all the means of power at their command, gave “golpe preventivo,” declared the country in a state of siege for days and ensured the inauguration of Kubitschek.

Once in power, Kubitschek proved to be without rancor; he was hyperactive, optimistic, and ambitious. He undertook his great work, the building of the new capital, Brasília. He encouraged industrialization and began the construction of great dams in order to increase the country’s supply of electrical power. But his government, more than any other, was favorable to corruption and graft. All the wealth of the country remained in the hands of a few powerful political and economic groups. Inflation, which had begun to grow in the days of Vargas, now increased at a nightmare rate. The cost of living increased every day; the false prosperity of Kubitschek’s much-vaunted “development” finally was exposed.

There were elections. The official candidate was one of the generals of the “golpe preventivo” that had helped ensure Kubitschek’s taking power, Henrique Lott. The other candidate was the ex-Governor of the State of São Paulo, Jânio Quadros, a young politician (a few months younger than President Kennedy) whose career had been meteoric. From history teacher, he had gone up all the steps of the political ladder — from alderman to presidential candidate — never having finished one term in office. (In Brazil a man cannot run for one office while holding another, so Quadros resigned regularly from each of his offices.)

Quadros was elected by a tremendous majority, the biggest election ever held in Brazil. The people wanted a change, wanted law, wanted austerity, even — to escape from the spiralling inflation and the long years of the Vargas regime and its successor. There was an atmosphere of hope and pride. In the first seven months of his presidency, Quadros appeared to be fulfilling his electoral promises, and already the country felt the effects of his administration.

Known as a difficult and temperamental man, he had already “renounced” once during his candidacy but had become reconciled to the parties backing him.

Brazil was hopeful when Quadros entered office in 1961, and at first all went well. As he had in São Paulo, Quadros ordered investigations into graft, fired superfluous government employees, and began reform and development programs. Congressional leaders became disturbed, however, when Quadros began sounding them out about the possibility of his being granted additional powers. Late in August, Lacerda made the sensational revelation that he had been asked to join a Quadros plot to close down Congress entirely.

On the morning of August 25, Quadros readied a resignation letter that, like the one supposed to have been left by Vargas seven years earlier, claimed devotion to Brazil and hinted at threats from mysterious foreign powers. Debate still rages over whether Quadros actually meant to resign or whether he was merely making a dramatic play for more power. In any case, the resignation was submitted and accepted by Congress. The country was stunned by the news that the president had “renounced” and on the following day he was on his way to England.

The Vice-President was João (“Jango”) Goulart, a protégé of Vargas since the days of Vargas’s exile in the south and head of the labor “syndicates” since the days of Vargas. He was in China at the time of Quadros’s defection and suspected by the military heads of being red. They vetoed his return to take over the presidency, and for a week things were at a standstill: would Goulart be president, or wouldn’t he? Rio Grande do Sul, as always, was the war-like state (and its governor was Goulart’s brother-in-law), for its “native son.” It prepared for civil war under the slogans of “Legality,” and “upholding the constitution.” The army officers in the north obviously did not want civil war, but they were afraid of Goulart’s leftist politics. Finally, the crisis was again solved by the “spirit of compromise” (the very expression, like “land of unfulfilled promise,” is almost a red flag to a Brazilian at present). The Congress voted a change to “parlamentarismo,” that is, Goulart would be allowed to take office as president, but his powers would be curbed by having a prime minister — a system copied more or less after that of West Germany. The new cabinet was chosen. (It was immediately called the “bifocal government.”) The country returned to a Parliament, the system responsible for the greatness of the Empire, some say, and, say others, responsible for its fall.

It is still too early to foresee the results of the change.

Chapter 10

The United States and Brazil have many things in common besides both being in the Western Hemisphere and sharing the name of Amerigo Vespucci. It is time we got to know and appreciate each other better; time that the United States gave more to Brazil than loans and those less attractive features of our culture that are thought to be “Americanizing” the world. The United States and Brazil have more in common than coffee and Coca-Cola, although we now have a great deal of both of those.

We are both big countries and very much aware of our size. Perhaps number, gigantism, the “biggest” this or that, mean too much to us. Culturally, too, although we have such different traditions, there are similarities. Both the U.S. and Brazil remained rather cautiously imitative for two hundred years or more, and both have suffered from (let us face it) inferiority-feelings at different periods in our histories. But we laugh at the same jokes, enjoy the same movies, and have almost the same legends of the “frontier,” Indian chiefs, gold-rushes, pioneers, hunters, and savage beasts. Americans and Brazilians are equally quick to sympathy, on the side of the under-dog, hospitable, and kind; both have a sense of national destiny, of great things ahead, and the word “democracy” can still move us deeply.

By a combination of good luck and good mangagement, the U.S. has solved many of the administrative and economic problems of capitalistic democracy earlier than Brazil has. But we should not let that blind us to the many valuable things in the Brazilian “way of life.” Brazil is coping with her Indian problem at least as well as, if not better than, we are ours. And certainly the social and racial problems left over from the days of slavery are being solved more gracefully, and with less suffering, in Brazil than in any other part of the world today. We may never be able to solve our race problem in the Brazilian way, but at least we should be able to think about it calmly.

In personal relations, their less guilt-ridden moral code and their franker attitude towards sex and marriage seem more adult than ours, and preventive of the miseries of prolonged adolescence and over-romanticism. The Brazilian lack of aggressiveness, willingness to compromise, live and let live, love and let love, and their acute sense of the ridiculous in public and private pretentiousness, are all qualities that we could use more of. Their enjoyment of life has not yet been spoiled by the craze for making money; they have not yet added up the hard sum of so much money, so much pay. Although this may come as the inevitable price of further industrialization, perhaps the Brazilians will somehow be able to make it less harsh and driving than we have done.

There are no earthquakes in Brazil, and no hurricanes. There is plenty of space. There is no death penalty. Brazil has no real enemies, has had no real war for almost a hundred years, and never has had a war of conquest. Brazil has no atomic bombs, and so far has never expressed any desire for them. Although the army has helped put an occasional president in or out of power, there has never been a military dictatorship, nor does the military show signs of craving one, — this was clearly demonstrated once more in the last governmental crisis.

Perhaps because of the lack of a middle-class, because the country has been divided between the very few rich and the many poor for so long, it is more democratic, in the popular sense of the word, than many other countries. There is little or no awareness of the insidious degrees of class feeling humanity is capable of. It is perfectly true that an enterprising young man or woman, in the arts or the professions, can pass from one extreme of society to the other without self-consciousness or condescension on the part of any one. Also, although there are proud old aristocratic families, they have never been of such great wealth and grandeur over long periods of time that they can consider themselves natural autocrats. No one is that rich in Brazil. There have been too many political ups and downs; too many families were ruined by the emancipation. There are no vast fortunes, no industries that circle the globe, no “oil for the lamps of China.”

The “Integralistas,” Brazil’s one proto-fascist party, existed only briefly twenty years ago. There are communists and nationalists […].

There have been short-lived slogans like “The petroleum is ours” (o Petroleo é nosso) — even if there is not believed to be much petroleum in the country. The anti-American nationalist is almost always one of two types. Like the few “racistas” or anti-semites in Brazil, the first comes usually from the class of the “nouveau riche” and is very rarely a native Brazilian but a recent or first-generation immigrant. (Most of the new fortunes in the country have been made by immigrants.) His business has been granted privileges and strong government protection. Naturally he is afraid of foreign competion, particularly American large-scale competition and particularly if his own product is inferior or producing unfairly big profits. The other type of anti-American nationalist is, as is usual everywhere, the man who feels he must blame all his troubles on others: Jews, Negroes, or another nation. In political office such men can stir up anti-American feeling among the poor and ignorant. But since to most of the very poor and ignorant in Brazil, America means almost nothing, a land as remote as Atlantis, the blame is more apt to be put on a local politician. And it should be remembered that in both World Wars the Brazilian government was on the side of the Allies.

* * *

It is hard, almost impossible for the very rich to understand the poor, — something that Americans, with all their good intentions, often don’t seem to realize. National poverty can produce the same symptoms and reactions everywhere, China or Brazil. Anything a foreigner questions in Brazil, from inefficiency to dirt, from unpainted public buildings to city-manners, from bad transportation to infant mortality — before blaming it on climate, laziness, or national character in general, he should first ask himself “Can this be traced back to simple poverty?” Nine times out of ten it can.

And yet it is not just money that Brazil needs, — far from it. As Eugênio Gudin, Brazil’s most highly respected economist, and Finance Minister under President Dutra, said recently in a fine article in O Globo, Rio’s widely circulated afternoon paper:

“The principal cause of Brazil’s economic underdevelopment resides in the great scarcity, on all levels, of men prepared for the task of increasing national productivity, from engineers, entrepreneurs, and administrators of high calibre, to skilled workmen … Our chief goal, therefore, should be the formation of nuclei of educated men …

“For this we need … to import hundreds of technicians and teachers, and to send thousands of students to foreign countries, not only in the fields of the sciences but also in the various branches of engineering and industrial techniques…”

[Gudin] blames the present inflation and sad state of affairs in great part on the building of Brasília and the wild government waste & spending of the Kubitschek era. The United States helped build Brasília, just as we helped [text breaks off]

Large loans to an extravagant corrupt Federal government for vague areas of activity do no good. The only practical way to help Brazil is by helping the “educated nuclei,” and the industries and developments that will actually increase the country’s income.

There is no problem in Brazil that good government, good administration, could not resolve. This fact alone makes Brazil unique among the nations of the world. Under a good government, industrial and material progress would undoubtedly take place at a tremendous rate — all the essentials are there.

But before we condemn Brazil for not having achieved good government as yet — we should distinguish between “progress,” “culture,” and “civilization,” all very different things. The idea of “civilization” has never been especially connected with that of good government. If one had to choose: Is “bad” government so much worse than “good” government that leads to large-scale wars? Is an occasional assassination (although Brazil has actually had very few of them), or an almost-bloodless revolution, any worse than the death of thousands of innocent soldiers? Brazil has a considerable body of both sophisticated and still-living folk-culture. It has many qualities of character and society that go only with high civilization. While I am not making any exaggerated cultural or social claims for Brazil — still, the Greeks got along with bad governments, and so did the Italians of the Renaissance — and no one thinks much the worse of them for it today.

Obviously barring some world-wide disaster, Brazil is going to push and be pushed into industrialization. For the time being however, it is still one country where human-man, poor as he may be, is still more important than producing-man or consuming-man or political-man.

Everyone who visits Brazil agrees that ordinary, average Brazilians are a wonderful people: cheerful, sweet-tempered, witty, and patient — incredibly patient. To see them standing in line for hours, literally for hours, in lines folded back on themselves two or three times the length of a city block, — only to get aboard a broken-down, recklessly-driven bus and return to their tiny suburban houses, where, these days, as like as not, the street has not been repaired, nor the garbage collected, and there may even be no water — is to wonder at their patience. It seems that there should be a revolution every month or so. They have never had the government they deserve, and one wonders how long it will be before they get it.