Brazil on the Move

by John Dos Passos

  We found an air of cheerful bustle about everybody we met. Everything seemed new and fresh. Most of the people had put up their houses themselves. They were full of hopes and plans. On the main street bars and groceries were springing up. One shack claimed to be a nightclub. A man who said he’d been a stonemason back in Ceará proudly showed off his stock of canned goods and dried fruits and peanuts and a few drums of kerosene. Business wasn’t too bad he said. That very day, so he told us, he’d made the first payment on his lot.

  We were shown the parcel of land a French company had bought to set up a factory to make concrete culverts, the place where a brewery was about to move in, a small sawmill, a temporary laundry below the waterpump.

  Beside a parked truck a priest was conducting an openair service. Little girls were waving palmfronds and singing. That’s where the church was going to be.

  We were introduced to a contractor. His two daughters were schoolteachers. They were going to improvise a school.

  There was even a young man from Ceres, who’d moved away because things didn’t move fast enough for him there. He owned a pickup truck. Everybody needed something hauled. He was doing a landoffice business. He was enthusiastic about his prospects. His friend was a housepainter. Everybody wanted something painted; more contracts than he’d ever imagined.

  Most of the people worked in Brasília. A bus service was set up to take them back and forth. Their gripe was that the fare was too high. Otherwise they were delighted. They said they liked the upland air and the cool nights and the dry climate. Wages were better than they were accustomed to. They were convinced that by the time they took title to their lots their land would be worth a great deal more than they paid for it.

  When the settlers at Taguatinga spoke about Brasília, about the expense of going back and forth from Brasília, it was as if the city actually existed. For them it was already a metropolis. These immigrants were not worried about the problems of finance and the difficulties of transportation any more than our immigrants were a hundred years ago when they settled the western states. They had sold everything they owned and moved out here in the wilderness hundreds of miles from their homes because they believed in Brasília.

  Dom Bosco’s Dream

  The evening before we went back to Rio we were standing beside Osorio’s jeep in front of a pointed white shrine on the brow of a hill overgrown with scraggly trees and dotted with the red clay nests of the termites. Behind us lay miles of dry silent wilderness. This shrine was the first building they put up, Osorio explained, to commemorate the missionary friar who forecast a future civilization for these central highlands. Dom Bosco’s statue looked out across a broad shadowy valley towards the streaks of dust that hung level in the evening air over the opposite ridge.

  A faint roar came to us from the construction work. Draglines, bulldozers, sheepsfoot rollers, graders: earthmoving machines of every type were at work twentyfour hours a day leveling the summit of the long hogback which formed the center of Brazil’s new capital.

  On the horizon beyond, the red sun set in purple behind a smooth distant ridge. Osorio pointed out the white upside down arches of the palace and the pontoon shape of the hotel and the blocks of apartments shapeless under their scaffolding.

  “Soon you’ll see behind them the Triangle of the Three Powers and the downtown district. You can imagine them already,” he said, with a catch in his breath. “The neon lights will go on … You’ll see them reflected in the lake.”

  He pointed out the location of the lot he had bought himself in the residential suburb across the lake from the city. The light scratches of a tractor trail around the flanks of the hills indicated where the lake level would be.

  “You’ll go to your office in a rowboat?” He corrected me. “By motorboat,” he said.

  A ragged grimy man with clearcut dark features stood looking intently up into Dom Bosco’s face as he listened to our conversation.

  “Ask him how he got here. It’s miles from anywhere. Ours is the only car.”

  “He lives here,” answered Osorio grinning. “He’s a charcoal burner from Mato Grosso. He’s cutting trees in all these valleys that will be flooded when they finish the dam.”

  There was no house in sight. Night was coming on fast. The valleys were drowned in dusk. In the tricky light of the last gloaming you could swear you could see the completed city, reflected into the lake from the opposite ridge. The streaks of blue mist might be the surface of the water.

  The ragged man, as pleased as if he were pointing out a mansion, pointed out a tiny leanto way down on the valley floor. “That’s my house,” he said proudly.

  “But it’s at the bottom of the lake.”

  The idea seemed to please the ragged man. “Of course.” He nodded delightedly. “I live at the bottom of the lake.”

  IV

  THE RED DUST OF MARINGÁ

  Monte Alegre

  When you drive northwest from Curitiba, the capital of Paraná, through that state’s beautiful midlands you come after four or five hours to a region densely forested with evergreens. What is known as the Paraná pine, a conifer which is really a kind of araucaria with a habit of growth resembling the umbrella pine of California, gives a special accent to the sharp hills and undulating valleys. In this region the piney forests cover hundreds of square miles. In the middle of them, taking advantage for water power of one of the swift green streams which flow towards the Paraná River to the westward, stands the Monte Alegre papermill.

  Monte Alegre, with its guards and its gates and treeshaded streets and standardized stone houses around green lawns, looks like an oldfashioned company town in New England or eastern Canada. It is the headquarters of the Klabin Industries which furnish about a third of the newsprint used in São Paulo and Rio. This powerful group of companies constitutes a family enterprise very typical of Brazilian big business.

  Three generations ago a Lithuanian immigrant opened a small stationery store in São Paulo. As his business increased he found it hard to keep his store supplied with paper. Shipments from Europe were irregular and unreliable. He started experimenting with making paper himself. Eventually he found himself operating the first successful papermill in Brazil. His sons turned out to be good businessmen. They imported European technicians, bought up vast tracts of virgin forest and built what was in its day a thoroughly uptodate papermill. So that they would be sure not to run out of pulpwood, they embarked on a treeplanting program to renew the forests of Paraná pine as fast as they cut them down. To use the byproducts they branched out into chemicals and plastics.

  In Curitiba, a pleasantly literate city with a handsome public library and quite a background of publishing and historical research, I had met one of the grandsons of the original Klabin. I was there to give a talk at one of the binational centers which offer courses in the English language and library service and lectures on North American topics. While these centers were State Department enterprises, they had at that time considerable local backing, and some of them were said to be selfsupporting. In Curitiba it was amusing to discover that my audience was made up largely of German-speaking people. They came from German families that had been in Paraná for several generations. Some of them had never been in Germany. They told me that if I’d visit the neighboring state of Santa Catarina I would find the atmosphere even more Germanic. Horacio Klabin had heard I was interested in the mushrooming settlements of the hinterland, and handsomely offered to drive our little party out to visit his family enterprises around Monte Alegre. He had a new city of his own he wanted us to see.

  On the drive out, over what was then a dirt road dusty and potholed from continual truck traffic, what struck us most was that so many of the settlers in the dilapidated roadside shacks were blueeyed and lighthaired. Towheaded children were everywhere. Klabin explained to us that these people sprang from a Polish immigration some twenty or thirty years before. Their language was Portuguese and their customs Brazilian. Most of them had forg
otten the Polish language.

  Horacio Klabin was a tall, dark, disenchanted man with a somewhat abstracted manner. His education and cultural formation seemed entirely European. He was up on all the latest developments in art and literature the world over. He evidently read Russian. He was painfully conscious of every development of Soviet expansion and wellinformed on the writers of the famous “thaw” that was then threatening the rigidity of Communist dogma. Dining at his house in Monte Alegre that night, we found the conversation international; we might have been at Fontainebleau or some Parisian suburb along the Marne.

  He put us up at the company hotel. From the engineers and technicians and their wives and families passing through the lobby you could hear almost every European language; a United Nations, the Brazilians called it.

  In the morning after walking through the huge papermill, we crossed the river to the development Horacio Klabin was promoting on his own on the green hillside facing the plant. His idea was to furnish homes that working people and technicians could buy on the installment plan, so as to get them out of the semifeudal atmosphere of the company town. Everything in the new city was to be independent of the papermill. White walls, red tiles, green louvers. Flowering shrubs, beautiful vegetation. There was an air of modest originality about these constructions. He showed us a variety of whitewalled residences of different sizes, tailored to the salaries of the people he wanted to see buy them. Four of the most attractive villas were set on a terrace that cut into the steep riverbank. A Frenchman owned one, a Hungarian another, a German a third. The last was occupied by the Brazilian salesagent for the real estate enterprise.

  When Horacio Klabin showed us his nursery on the summit of the hill, his manner took on real animation. This was his hobby. He muttered deprecatingly that his whole family was obsessed with planting trees. The trees he wanted to grow at Monte Alegre were olives.

  In colonial times the Brazilians were not allowed to plant olive trees, so that olive oil should remain a Portuguese monopoly, he explained. Since independence nobody had thought to try to grow olives on a large scale in Brazil. He had imported stock and seeds from Portugal and Spain and Italy and the Near East. He had some California varieties. His young trees were thriving. Soon they would bear. If he could introduce an olive oil industry into central Paraná, he said with his reserved smile, he really would have accomplished something for his country.

  Seven Year Old City

  Next day he arranged for a small plane to take us further to the north and west to the new town of Maringá.

  The first thing we noticed as we circled for a landing over the rawlooking airstrip was the red earth. Newly planted coffeetrees stretched in neatly checked rows in every direction, uniform deepgreen balls. From the air the plantations looked like a red checkerboard evenly set with green glassheaded pins. There is a great deal of red earth in the interior of Brazil, but this earth of Maringá was redder than red.

  We had hardly a chance to stretch our legs, cramped from the plane ride, before an eager young man strode up to us with his hand out exclaiming that we were the guests of the Northwest Paraná Development Company and that he was going to show us the city of Maringá which seven years o’clock was only forest primeval. Like many things in Maringá our guide’s English was new and rather hastily put together. He had learned it out of a phrasebook. He would say “o’clock” when he meant “ago.” We got along famously all the same. His cheerful enthusiasm made up for everything. As he ushered us into his car, which was deeply stained in red, he added that he could show us the forest primeval just as it had been seven years o’clock because a few acres had been left in their natural state for a public park.

  The soil was perfect for coffee he told us. These new plantations just coming into bearing were proving profitable, but already the planters had to be looking around for new crops. They were all too conscious that they had to face a world surplus of coffee. Some were setting out longstaple cotton between the rows of coffeetrees. Others were turning to corn, and the brown beans which were the national staple, and soya and cattle. Texans from the King Ranch were crossing their famous Santa Gertrudis breed with the local zebu to find a type of cattle that suited the region exactly. The pastures were unbelievably lush. This was one of the richest bands of soil in the world. “Look at this soil,” our friend scraped a little off the side of his jeep. “It will grow anything.”

  Maringá made us think of Mark Twain’s and Bret Harte’s Wild West of a hundred years ago, except that the pioneers rode jeeps instead of horses and arrived by plane instead of by stage coach. Everybody we talked to was full of bluesky speculations and slaphappy confidence. Our friend drove us through billowing clouds of red dust as he explained the layout of the city to be. It was like a Florida development in one of the great booms, only with a note of fantasy exclusively Brazilian.

  We were shown residences and office buildings in the most original architectural styles, freshplanted parks, a jockey club for horse racing, a handsome tiled pool at the swimming club, and a children’s playground with the most uptodate equipment.

  The forest preserve was an incredibly beautiful stretch of primeval tropical woodland with a pond and a slathouse for growing orchids. A naturalist’s dream. The place was full of birds and butterflies and grotesque tropical flowers. Up in the tops of the seventy foot trees there was a rustling that we were told was monkeys, but nothing would induce our small arboreal cousins to show their faces.

  At lunch in the airconditioned restaurant of the scarcely finished hotel our friend explained that Maringá hadn’t really made a start until seven years before. The city already had eight thousand inhabitants, with an estimated fifteen thousand in the environs, schools, a newspaper, a hospital, and twentytwo banks.

  The development company he worked for began as a land-selling scheme. Thirty years before a British concern had obtained title to hundreds of square miles of the richest red-soil land in the world in northern Paraná and in the western part of the state of São Paulo. They had built a railroad and promoted Londrina, fifty miles nearer the city of São Paulo.

  Now Londrina was a staid and established provincial city famous for its white skyscrapers, its treeshaded streets and handsome airport. The London company, in the sweeping liquidation of British holdings brought about by the second war, sold out to a Brazilian concern.

  “Maringá is all Brazilian,” cried our guide. “We have settlers from everywhere, from Minas and Ceará, refugees from the droughts of the North East; from Santos and the gaucho country to the south.” There were Greeks and Spaniards and Portuguese and Italians, refugees from the ironcurtain countries of Eastern Europe, and a few Japanese gardeners.

  Since the land was almost all disposed of, the company had turned to producing and marketing agricultural products. Of course, our guide admitted, they had their difficulties. The roads were bad. The railroad service couldn’t be worse. The state and national governments were far away. He brought his fist down on the table and burst out with the oft repeated adage: “Brazil grows at night when the politicians sleep … Eeneetiative!” He smiled broadly. “We do it ourselves.”

  Opposite the hotel we found them laying the foundations for the cathedral of Maringá. Inside a little shed we saw the maquette. It was to be the tallest cathedral in South America, a concrete cone three hundred and seventytwo feet high, set on twelve pointed gables, one for each of the twelve apostles. It would cost thirty million cruzeiros. Already they had raised five million. Their bishop was a young man, very enterprising, our guide pointed out. He gave us a colossal wink. The bishop was promising the coffee planters five years without a frost if they put up the funds.

  Old Maringá

  We continued our tour. He drove us out into the outskirts to show us a row of ramshackle stores and a bar or two along a rutted road. They were frame buildings with clapboard false fronts all deeply coated with the cloying red dust.

  “Like western cinema, not?” He made bang bang noises
with appropriate gestures. We agreed it did look like the set for a Western. “This is old Maringá,” he said in a tone of disgust, “builded ten years o’clock.” He gave a snort. “Soon we tear down.”

  Inside the city the dust had been bad enough but in the outskirts you strangled in it. Our handkerchiefs were stained red from trying to wipe it off our sweaty faces. Our guide noticed that we were choking. We must not worry about the dust he told us consolingly. They had a doctor there, a very good doctor, who had discovered that the dust of Maringá was rich in terramycin. Maybe we had some infection; the dust of Maringá would cure it.

  V

  THROUGH BRAZIL’S BACK DOOR

  From the Snowpeaks into Amazonas

  In the summer of 1962 my wife and daughter and I took the jet flight from New York which landed us, long before we had become accustomed to the thought of arriving there, in Lima. After a couple of weeks amid the mystifications of Peruvian politics and the marvels of ancient textiles and sculptured ceramics in the Lima museums and the grandeur of the Stone Age architecture of the Andes, we are heading for Brazil.

  Our plane left the old Faucett airport before dawn, circled over the dim city and the shrouded ocean and turned sharply into the daybreak. Now we are boring into the glare of the risen sun as we climb over the cocoacolored mountains that thrust up like islands through the cottony overcast which hangs eternally over the seaboard desert of the Pacific slope. No more vegetation on them than on the face of the moon. The first waters we see below us, thin trickles taking a northward course down the far slopes of the coastal cordillera, are already bound for the Amazon.

  Except for some high thin cirrus the air is clear beyond the coastal range. The further mountains rear rock faces of up-ended strata, black organshapes in the shadow. Beyond, crystal sharp against a green horizon, tower the snowpeaks.