Brazil on the Move

by John Dos Passos

  There has resulted a society where racial tensions are few. As early as colonial times the Jews discovered so little prejudice against them that they had trouble preserving their cultural identity. After a couple of generations of intermarriage they melted away into the rest of the population. The same thing seems to be happening to the Germans and Italians who colonized the southern states and to recent European immigrants pouring into Rio and São Paulo. There is an amoebalike quality about the mild Portuguese culture which absorbs the most diverse elements.

  The growing diversity in the national origins of the Brazilians shows up in public life. One of the leading politicians is ex-President Kubitschek. Oscar Niemeyer is their bestknown architect. The pioneer in modern architecture at São Paulo was named Warschavchik. Rio’s famous afterluncheon speaker is named Herbert Moses. Particularly in São Paulo you meet families with North American surnames that date back to the southern slaveholders who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. There are Smiths who don’t speak a word of English. Even the Japanese, established at first in tightly exclusive colonies, are beginning to melt into the population.

  The patriarchal mentality, combining with the humane impulses of the European nineteenth century, produced during the last fifty years an attitude of tenderness towards the Stone Age peoples of the Brazilian forests. In that period Brazil was a leader in the effort to conciliate and preserve primitive peoples.

  It’s worth noting that one of Brazil’s great military heroes was Candido Rondón, who died a field marshal at the ripe old age of ninetytwo. Rondón was three fourths Indian. His paternal grandfather was a bandeirante out of São Paulo who settled in Mato Grosso and married a Terena Indian. His mother was a Bororó. From the day he entered a military school back in the days of the empire, throughout his long and successful military career, he devoted his great energies to the gradual civilizing of the forest Indians. Like his bandeirante grandfather Rondón was irresistibly attracted to the rainforests and the jungles. He personally mapped and surveyed more undiscovered territory than any Brazilian of his time. It was Rondón who shepherded Theodore Roosevelt during the exploring trip to the River of Doubt that was nearly the end of T.R.

  The Indian Protection Service Rondón set up is unique. He worked out a battery of methods for civilizing the wild tribes without destroying them. At the same time his Boundary Commission to map the disputed frontiers with the Guianas and Venezuela and Colombia accomplished miracles in eliminating international friction. Rondón managed to replace nationalist fanaticism by a spirit of rational give and take. “Never be the first to shoot,” was his motto.

  Along with racial toleration, religious toleration has been the rule. Although Brazil is predominantly Catholic it is one of the few South American countries where Protestant missionaries are not interfered with. The Inquisition never reached Brazil. For a century there religious toleration has been so complete that the average Brazilian city offers today almost as many religious sects as Los Angeles. Alongside of the predominant Catholics you find Episcopalians, evangelistic Protestants of every stripe, Christian Scientists, followers of Auguste Comte, spiritualists, and votaries of various African cults brought over by the slaves. In the thoroughly upto-date city of Pôrto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul we found a half voodoo, half spiritualist group called The White Line of Umbanda announcing its meetings in the newspapers.

  As the threat of a Communist-colored dictatorship looms ever larger, the votaries of the most various religious sects tend to draw together. The last time I was in Rio I attended a meeting organized by a league for the defense of civil liberties. A large crowd, made up of the most diverse elements among rich and poor, gathered on the open lawn between the ranks of great trees that form the square behind what is known as Russell Beach on Guanabara Bay. The Catholic archbishop of Niterói, a number of church dignitaries, several Protestant ministers, a positivist, a representative of the spiritualists and a Jewish rabbi spoke from the same platform.

  The rabbi’s speech was one of the most touching I have ever heard. He told of the oppressions and miseries of his early life in Russia and Poland, the constant harassment on account of his race and his religion, the agony of the escape and the delight of landing in the new world of Brazil. He had been received with hospitality, and with a sort of inattentive friendliness that could hardly be called toleration, because the Brazilians saw nothing particular about him that needed to be tolerated. He was a man like themselves. He spoke with pride and gratitude of his Brazilian citizenship. Only in Brazil had he come to understand the meaning of freedom.

  II

  THE PEOPLE THE LORD PUT THERE

  Travels with a Studebaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sespe: An Alliance That Worked

  My next expedition was to the Rio Doce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Did I know the history of Sespe? I nodded.

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

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