Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Because M.S. Ruys spent only three days at dock in Brazil Ticky and I had only opportunity to nibble at one corner of the Colossus of the South, just enough to sample it for flavor. We liked the flavor and want to go back for a full meal someday, but, as always, we were forced to hurry on if we were to get all the way around the planet. (The man who first said, "It's a small world," certainly must never have tried it; the durn thing is much bigger than I had ever believed.)

  The ship called first at Santos, major pott of the State of São Paulo, the booming Texas of Brazil. Brazilian police came aboard and required all passengers to surrender their passports for police cards before permitting them to go ashore. Ticky did not like this at all and I did not like it too well, nor do I see that it was necessary or useful since other countries get along all right without it. Nevertheless it seemed harmless since the passports were not removed from the ship but stayed in the custody of the cop on watch at the gangway. In any case if we were to go ashore compliance was inevitable; we turned in our passports.

  Santos is not a tourist town and the docks are not laid out to accommodate tourist ships. There was an endless, uncomfortable, and somewhat hazardous walk along the piers, dodging cranes and trucks and railroad cars and rope slings loaded with cargo before we reached one of the guarded exits, where again our permission to go ashore had to be checked. This merely put us on the right side of the fence; there were no taxis nor any prospect of same, nor any public transportation near by. This is not a complaint, because so far as I know Santos does not advertise for visitors. In Rio, a city which does so advertise, ships tie up at the foot of their "Fifth Avenue," Avenida Rio Branco. Fair enough, both ways.

  But the inconvenience does not add to the charm of Santos. After several blocks we came at last to a street with tram rails and presently were able to hop a street car. The trolleys in Santos are Toonerville affairs, dinky, open to the weather at the sides, old, and very crowded. They are a treat to ride, unless you are the sort of person who can't bear to share a taxi and would not think of using the subway; they put me in mind of the San Francisco cable cars and have much the same out-of-date charm. We lurched through narrow streets and swung wildly around corners while the conductor climbed over feet and reached over heads for fares. People swung aboard from either side and jumped off and clung to the sides and ends, all without caring whether the car was moving or stopped. I gathered the impression that the car came to a full stop only for cripples, babies, and sissy norteamericanos.

  I do not see how the conductor managed to collect all the fares; it would be easier to fold a newspaper in a high wind. Perhaps an honor system helped him-the South Americans we met seemed painfully honest in small matters. Or perhaps he was satisfied to collect a good percentage of the fares.

  All the transportation systems we encountered in Brazil were extremely crowded. This is not a criticism; I simply note a fact that is historically an unavoidable growing pain of boom times anywhere. We have not licked this problem and I do not think it can be licked. A booming, prosperous area is always one where people pour in faster than services can be built to accommodate them, which means crowds, choked subways and highways, long waits in restaurants, poor service, high prices-and an overall feeling of excitement, hope, and nervous tension.

  The quiet, leisurely places of cheap servants, low prices, and dolce far niente are stagnant and poor; this is a law of nature and it calls for the lobster-shelled conscience of a Bourbon not to be affected by the poverty underneath.

  Brazil is both of these things at once. The older pattern of extreme wealth and peasant poverty with no middle class still exists side by side with boom times, peasants streaming into the cities to find industrial jobs, and a growing middle class. The barrios bajos of Rio may not be the world's worst slums but they surely win dishonorable mention. They are almost vertical shanty towns, built of trash on hillsides too steep to be useful for commercial buildings; they have not even water, not even a neighborhood faucet, and of course no other services. Here many of the penniless poor from the country wind up, a reservoir of labor, and of disease, vice, and crime . . . and riot and rebellion. The government and the better-off Brazilians are striving to cure these sores, but the problem is mammoth.

  But we were still back in Santos. Santos is an old city and looks it; it is necessary to get far into the outskirts to find the twentieth century. The plazas, the venerable trees in them, and the age-encrusted buildings around them look like a set for a South-of-the-Border musical comedy. The traffic and crowds of the industrial boom swarm through the old streets, a noisy affront to their sleepy, eighteenth century charm.

  We took a bus from Santos to São Paulo, a bus which was as out of place in the plaza of Santos as a spaceship in a corn field, it being at least three per cent more shiny, modern, and gadgeted than the best of Greyhound and Trailways in the States. Once outside the city streets we entered a superhighway toll road straight out of Fortune magazine. It is of the same sort and quality as the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but here the engineers had no railway tunnels already built to help them through the tough places, of which there are plenty.

  The road ran first through miles of banana plantation; the bus ate up this stretch at about ninety, vibrationless on perfect pavement. Then the road reared up and jumped at the Serra do Mar mountains; the bus eased back to seventy and zoomed up and over them, a three-thousand-foot climb in a few minutes, piercing mountains, leaping chasms. There were no hairpin turns, no bad grades, no stretches to make the timid nervous; only on looking back was one aware of the concrete spiderwebs on which we had crossed the gorges.

  But one did look back. The spanking climb right up the face of the mountains produced swiftly changing, garishly dramatic vistas, unreal and improbable. The hot, water-soaked air was not perfectly transparent; we could see the ocean but not the horizon. Instead the tropical haze produced endless stereo depth on depth, a misty Land of Oz in colors too bright and miniature modeling too perfect to be convincing.

  The bus plunged on into the mountains, the skyline pulled in and things came back to their proper sizes. There were signs of intense industrial activity all along the hundred or so kilometres from Santos to São Paulo, tire factories, artificial lakes for water and power, high-tension transmission line towers marching over hill and horizon. The great double road was gardened throughout its length but beyond the dedicated expanse there were many big signboards of the sort that disfigure our own roads but are not very common elsewhere in South America. I could not read them but pictures are pictures and trade names persist; I amused myself by trying to pick out the influence of the Yankee Dollar. The majority of the foreign firms appeared to be ours, with England pushing us hard in second place, and Germany a fairly strong third. The incorporations were Brazilian but the trademarks and names usually made the parent foreign corporation obvious. "Esso" was everywhere, along with "Delco" and "International Harvester" monograms and General Motors and many other heavy-industry firms from the north.

  And Coca-Cola, of course-we rich barbarians have been accused of having added nothing to world culture. This is a most unfair canard; we have contributed Coca-Cola, jukeboxes, and comic books, all worldwide in scope.

  I am only half joking. When the water is not safe to drink, as so often is the case abroad, and your stomach rebels at the idea of more strong coffee, strong tea, or alcohol, Coca-Cola really does offer a pause that refreshes-and you can buy it almost everywhere. As for jukeboxes, the quality of the music is up to the man who inserts the coin; the machine itself is a worthwhile accomplishment. Comic books I won't defend.

  I myself am very weary of being told by scornful Europeans that we have no culture. In the first place it simply is not true, even in the snooty sense in which the sneer is usually put, as in painting, music, and literature we are lustily productive. But in the widest sense we have made the greatest cultural contribution of any society to date, by demonstrating that 160,000,000 people can live together in peace and fr
eedom. Nothing else in all history even approaches this cultural accomplishment, and sneers at our "culture" are both laughable and outrageously presumptuous when emanating from a continent that habitually wallows in its own blood. I'll take Coca-Cola, thank you; it may be vulgar, no doubt it is simply impossibly American, it may lack the bouquet of a Continental wine-but it is not flavored with ancient fratricidal insanities.

  During the trip to São Paulo I sat next to a local citizen. We chatted throughout the ride, he in Portuguese and I in English. I found Portuguese even harder to chew than Spanish, but we got along all right as his acting was more than competent. When we pulled into the outskirts of São Paulo he pointed out places associated with the emperors of Brazil and, at last, helped us off the bus and directed us to the hotel where we had been advised to have lunch. My Spanish had been no trouble to him at all; he simply thought I was speaking English the whole time.

  (Only three words are necessary to travel all over South America: "gracias" and "por favor." They cover all situations.)

  The parks and plazas and monuments to Emperor Dom Pedro II in São Paulo are old; practically everything else is brand new. This is the Dallas of the boom country. It has almost as many people as has Rio de Janeiro-as of 1953, that is; by today it may have more than Rio. It is bursting its britches and new construction is going on all the time and everywhere, even during Christmas holidays. It is not safe to lean against a building there; workmen may come along and yank it down, letting you fall into the excavation. But there will be a new building in its place almost at once.

  We enjoyed a gourmet's lunch on the top floor of a skyscraper hotel. View windows looked out in all directions and I looked out through them. It did not look like Latin America; it looked like Chicago. São Paulo being on a plateau of almost 3000 feet elevation its climate is not as oppressively hot as is Santos; the people are exceedingly energetic. So far as we noticed there was no slow down during the traditional siesta time; they seem to have given up the afternoon nap, which seems deplorable. Progress can be overdone.

  The traffic was fast and hazardous. All Latin Americans drive with courage but Brazilian drivers seem to have even more careless abandon than the others. But their conventions are much like those elsewhere in the continent and we were now somewhat used to them; there were no casualties-which was just as well; in Brazil, if a driver runs you down, he usually sues you; the pedestrian is not assumed to have the right of way.

  We shopped along a street of smart women's shops having the unlikely name of Rua Barão de Itapetininga. I complained that I had seen the inside of every retail shop for ten thousand miles and that we might as well have settled for Denver, but it did me no good. Ticky answered that she had been dragged into every bookstore over the same route and, besides, everybody knew that the quickest way to size up how a country was getting along was to take a look at what was offered for sale there-quantity, quality, variety, and prices.

  I muttered that looking was all right but if she kept up her pace she was going to ruin the economic structure of each country we visited, but she did not hear me; she was already plunging into a blouse shop, her nose quivering like a bird dog catching a scent. The shops certainly did have pretty things and the handmade blouses were among the prettiest. Ticky insisted they were "bargains" and I suppose they were. I never will understand about such things; to my mind a bargain is something I need at a price I can afford.

  Somehow the senhoras were less intimidating than the grim, firm-bosomed females that jostle one in our own department stores. Where do those women go when the stores close? You rarely see them (thank heaven!) anywhere else. My own intense dislike of shopping is based on a fear of being trapped on an upper floor by a mob of them; I think I suffer from a subconscious conviction that they are carnivorous.

  But the senhoras and senhoritas are soft-voiced and gentle even at a stocking counter.

  We had to buy some shoes. That was understandable; South American shoes do even more for the female foot than does a hot water bottle. The designs are indecently sexy. Ticky found, and bought, a pair of black high-heeled slippers the tops of which were nothing but nylon diamond-mesh. They turned bare feet into naked feet, an effect similar to that achieved by dressing a woman in opera-length black hose and a G-string.

  I pointed out that if she wore them she might be arrested; she could not be nakeder if she wore nothing but the shoes because no one would look at anything but her feet-and gasp. "That is exactly the effect I want," she said smugly, "a simple, modest dress and my feet looking out in those and leering. I'll take them." She did not even ask how much they cost.

  Satiated at last with shopping, we loafed for a while in a dreamy, old garden filled with fountains and birds, which is surrounded by the swarming São Paulo retail district and is near the bus station. There was time still to hire a car and a guide, but the garden was so pleasant that we decided to take for granted that São Paulo had public buildings, a race track, and points of historical interest. We knew that it had; the pamphlet we had with us told us so, but we gave them the rest of the day off and stuck with the birds and the fountains.

  At last we walked slowly and reluctantly back to the bus station. The interurban station there is an extremely busy place with a bus pulling out every few seconds and a dozen loading at once; it had a population density as thick as you can get without stacking people in two layers. All seats are reserved and tickets must be bought ahead of time.

  The bus for Santos has some other name, I never did find out what. I was trying unsuccessfully to buy tickets and succeeding only in holding up a queue of others equally anxious when a man came to my rescue. He had the face of a jovial hawk and about twenty words of English, which was eighteen more than I had of Portuguese. With his help I got the tickets, then he firmly kept us from getting on the wrong bus.

  He stayed with us then, to keep us straight, and flipped his lapel to show some sort of shield; I understood from the gesture that he was a plainclothesman. But he was not satisfied that we understood his status. He pulled down his lower eyelid to show that he was an "eye," then pantomimed in detail the operations of a pickpocket, plus other gestures adding up to a charade that he was assigned there to protect the crowd from pickpockets.

  It was clear to us and I suppose it was equally clear to any pickpocket present. But he was a most successful goodwill ambassador for his country. He kept us from getting on several more buses, put us on one at last and spoke to the driver about us, then waved us out of sight.

  The run by sea from Santos to Rio de Janeiro is only overnight. The Ruys stood into Rio Harbor before breakfast; Ticky and I got up early and watched it from the bridge by invitation of the Captain. The regulations of every ship state that passengers are not permitted on the bridge; I have yet to be in a ship in which the master felt it necessary to enforce the rule. This was the first time Captain Verwijs had invited us and it was a treasured privilege, for Rio has the most glorious harbor in the world.

  Oh, I'll admit that it is not a scientific statement; I have not seen all the harbors in the world. But in the course of some years at sea as a youngster, plus other trips since, I have seen a lot of them and I have compared notes with others who have seen the important ones I have missed. I am not counting uninhabited fjords in Norway nor anything like that; I speak of seaports. I stick by the statement and strongly doubt if anyone can be found who has seen Rio who will vote for any other harbor.

  Sydney Harbor has its backers for the honor, but, while Sydney's harbor is beautiful, it is not in the same league. The approach to Seattle through Puget Sound is lovely but the Seattle roadstead is not much to see. Golden Gate has one fine view; Rio has a hundred. As for New York Harbor, the approach up Bedloe Channel is essentially ugly, despite the famous skyline and the beloved Statue of Liberty.

  Rio, lovely Rio, is the one harbor without fault or blemish, a sight for travelers which cannot disappoint, a case where the glorious reality exceeds the build-up.

&nbs
p; Provided the weather is good, of course, since the inside of one rain storm looks much like the inside of any other. We were lucky indeed to draw a golden day. I hope you are equally lucky but don't expect it; Rio has heavy rainfall right through the year.

  I do not understand the geology of Rio. The bay looks like a flooded river valley among mountains, but no major stream runs into it; the principal drainage of the back country parallels the coast line behind a row of mountains and discharges a couple of hundred miles away. The land must be slowly sinking into the sea here to produce this wonderfully complicated shore line, but what accounts for the curious conoidal mountains? Are they the cores of volcanoes laid bare by eons of erosion?

  If I could tuck in a souvenir picture folder at this point I would not attempt the silly task of describing Rio. On second thought I won't attempt it anyhow but will risk only brief comments. Can half a ton of blueprints and a dozen thick books of specifications convey the breath-taking beauty of a jet bomber in flight?

  There are hills, mountains, inlets, points, bays, and beaches in such profusion that it cannot all be seen from any one point, even from the top of Corcovado. There is a great city spilled like gems into this three-dimensional primitive beauty. There is lush tropical jungle, rain forest, covering all but the city itself, the bay, and the hunching summits of rock.

  The much-pictured Sugarloaf is only one of a dozen sugarloaf mountains here. The compass-scribed sweep of world-famous Copacabana has a dozen rivals, each unfairly overshadowed in fame by the misfortune of being too close to the one with the famous name.

  I had known as everyone knows that Copacabana was backed solidly by tall buildings in a dazzling modern style designed for enjoyment of tropical climate, but I had not known that this free and generous architecture framed all the beaches and spread throughout the city. Rio looks as if it were fifty years into the future. By comparison all of our own cities look as antiquated as a rolltop desk.