AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO
I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned
fortresses; back of one of them, scarcely a stone’s throw away, rose the
sheer rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” like a gigantic upright thumb, and a
moment later I saw the sun rise red over a great tumble of peaks along
the shore, among which I recognized the “Hunchback” stooping broodingly
over the almost invisible city. A haze hid all of this, except for a
long line of little houses, like children’s blocks, along the foot of
great cliffs. Then bit by bit, as the sun sponged up the mists, the
scene spread and took on detail, until it became perhaps the sublimest
spectacle of nature my eyes had yet fallen upon in all the circuit of
the earth, a sight not only incomparable but one that obliterated the
disappointment inherent in all long-imagined and often-heralded scenes.
The vast bay, of irregular shape and everywhere dotted with islands, was
walled on every side by a tumultuous labyrinth of mountains, some sheer
rounded masses of bare rock and precipitous cliffs on which nature had
not been able to get the slightest foothold, the majority a chaotic maze
of ridges, peaks, and fantastic headlands covered with the densest
vegetation, terminating in lofty Tijuca and with a dim, dark-blue
background of the range called “the Organs.” The city itself, of many
striking colors reflected in the blue-green sea along which it stretched
in endless public gardens and esplanades skirting the water front, was
strewn in and among these hills as if it had been poured out in a fluid
form and left to run into the crevices and crannies, the scum, in the
form of makeshift shanties, rising to the tops of the _morros_ which
everywhere bulked above the general level, the more important of them
crowned by picturesque old castles that stood out sharp-cut against the
green background.
But if nature is peerless in Rio, one quickly discovers that man is
still the same troublesome little shrimp he is everywhere. We crawled at
a snail’s pace past a rocky islet covered with royal palms and a
turreted castle, past seven large Brazilian battleships, among them the
_Minas Geraes_ that had recently mutinied and bombarded the capital, and
finally came to anchor well out in the bay. When our baggage had been
rummaged by a flock of negroid officials quite as if we had arrived from
a foreign country, we were privileged to pay foul-tongued and clamoring
boatmen several thousand reis each to row us the few hundred yards to
the shore. Rio has ample wharves, but passing vessels avoid the use of
them whenever possible, lest the European exploiters pocket whatever
profit the ships pick up on the high seas.
I wandered the crowded and blazing streets for some time before I
decided to try my luck at the “Pensão Americana” in the Rua Larga, or
Wide Street. Here, for six thousand reis a day, I was permitted to
occupy a breathless little inside den and to eat whatever I found edible
among the native dishes set before us on a free-for-all table at noon
and evening. I was back in rice-land again, that inexcusable substitute
for food, the only thing on the menu of which there was anything like
abundance, being served at every meal and on every possible pretext.
This and the _feijão_, the small black bean of Rio Grande do Sul, with
now and then a bit of _xarque_, dried or salted beef, added to give it
distinction, makes up the bulk of any native Brazilian repast in such
rendezvous of starvation as the “Pensão Americana.” The only drink
furnished was water, and one soon learns to avoid that in tropical
Brazil. One dining-room wall was decorated with large glaring
advertisements of beer and shoes, on the other was an enormous and gaily
colored chromo of the Last Supper, at which the fare was as scanty as
our own. The general parlor in the front of the second story and opening
upon the wide street might have been passable as a lounging-place had
not noisy, undisciplined brats been constantly running about it and the
snarly, quarrelsome air of cheap boarding-houses the world over
everywhere pervaded it. The entire establishment was an unceasing
bedlam. Women shrieking as only Latin-American women can gave no respite
from dawn to midnight; most of them kept pet parrots—or toucans, which
are several times worse—and occasionally an entire flock of parrakeets.
My bed proved to be of solid boards with an imitation mattress two
inches thick. The gas is turned off in Rio at ten in the evening, and we
had no electricity. I could not read for lack of light, I could not
sleep because of the sweltering heat inside my cubbyhole, stagnant as
only an interior dungeon in the tropics can be, and the uproar beyond
the half-inch partitions, which in no way deadened the nightly domestic
activities of the families about me. When I did at length doze off
toward dawn it was only to dream madly.
The evening’s determination to move, even if I must sleep in the
streets, was strengthened by the rumpus that awoke me at daylight and by
the thimbleful of black coffee that constituted the only breakfast
served until eleven. I struck out none too hopefully to re-canvass the
town. A white cardboard swinging at the end of a string from a balcony
window, I soon discovered, meant that a room was for rent, but though
these were numerous they were all unfurnished. Those who rented
furnished quarters were expected to eat in the same house, and 6000 was
evidently the rock-bottom price for board and room anywhere in Rio. For
that sum I could get real food and a tolerable room in a hotel kept by a
German in the Rua do Acre in the heart of the downtown section, and it
mattered little that the pungent smell of raw coffee struck one full in
the face in passing the open doors of the warehouses in the Rua São
Bento and the adjoining streets leading to it.
The Rua do Acre opens out upon the wharves at the beginning of the broad
Avenida Central, gashed from sea to sea straight through the heart of
the business section of Rio. Both in history and appearance this new
main downtown artery of the Brazilian capital is similar to the Avenida
de Mayo in Buenos Aires, which, though it does not rival it in length,
it outdoes in some respects, particularly in the picturesqueness of the
types that pass along it. Old Rio was crowded together in medieval
congestion on the principal point of land jutting into the harbor, and
in time this portion became so densely populated with business and so
inadequate under modern traffic conditions that nothing but surgery
could save it. The major operation of cutting this broad avenue through
the compact old town was intrusted to the Baron of Rio Branco, and it
still officially bears his name. Early in the present century his plans
were carried out at the expense of much cost and destruction, and in
place of a labyrinth of narrow unsavory streets and aged unsanitary
buildings there appeared in an incredibly short space of time a
passageway a hundred meters wide and more than two thousand meters long
running with geometrical precision from the inner harbor to the Monroe
Palace on the edge of the Beira Mar, with the “Sugar Loaf” set exactly
at the end of the vista.
There are many things of interest in downtown Rio, but of them all
perhaps the Avenida Rio Branco is the most enticing. Stroll where one
will on either side of it, to the Arsenal, the Ministries, the palace
where the last emperor of the western hemisphere had his official
residence up to little more than thirty years ago, to the heavy and not
particularly striking cathedral, one is sure to drift unconsciously back
and take again to wandering aimlessly along in the human stream that
surges as incessantly through the Avenida as if the populace were still
enjoying the novelty of moving freely where their ancestors could not
pass. The only other street in old Rio that has anything like the same
fascination is the narrow Rua Ouvidor, as it is still known in popular
speech, though the city fathers long since decreed that it shall be
called the Rua Moreira Cesar. This is to Rio what the Calle Florida is
to Buenos Aires, not merely a populous street but a popular institution.
Along it are the most brilliant shops, in it may be seen the most
exclusive residents of Rio greeting one another with the elaborate and
leisurely formality of their class. Level paved from wall to wall, it is
in reality a broad sidewalk, for here wheeled vehicles may not enter at
any hour whatever. Yet even the enticing windows and the now and then
attractive shoppers of the Rua Ouvidor do not often keep the stroller
long from wandering once more out into the Avenida.
For all its width it is not easy to walk along the Avenida. What might
be called “sidewalk manners” are atrocious throughout South America; in
Rio they are at their worst. This is not because the _Fluminenses_—for
these, too, call themselves “rivereens,” though they are far from any
real river—are especially inconsiderate, but because they are tropical
idlers with no fixed habit of mind, and instead of picking a
straightforward course down the broad avenue they wander back and forth
across one’s path in all sorts of erratic diagonals. The pace of life
slows down noticeably in twelve degrees of latitude, and street crowds
are not only slower but much more stagnant in Rio than in Buenos Aires.
In time the direct and hurrying northerner comes to realize that the
Avenida is not designed to be merely a passageway from somewhere to
somewhere else. It _is_ somewhere itself, a lounging-place, a locality
in which to show off at one’s best, a splendid site for café chairs and
tables. By late afternoon it is often so blocked that passage along it
is a constant struggle; in the evening clumps of seated coffee sippers
and groups of gossiping men fill the broad sidewalks almost to
impassability.
[Illustration: An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo]
[Illustration: Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose]
[Illustration: The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the
National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on the left, a
shack-built hilltop]
These sidewalks of the Avenida were evidently laid with the connivance
of shoemakers. Most of them are mosaics of black and white broken stone
in striking designs and fantastic patterns, here geometrical, there in
the form of flowers, with horsey figures before the Jockey Club,
nautical things before the Naval Club, all of striking effect when seen,
for instance, from the upper windows of the _Jornal do Commercio_
building, but particularly deadly on shoe leather. An architect might
have much to say of the score of splendid structures that flank the
avenue. Some are merely business houses; farther seaward, beyond two
great hotels, are clustered the sumptuous Municipal Theater, the School
of Fine Arts, and the National Library; set a little back from the
street are the Supreme Tribunal and the Municipal Council until the
Avenida breaks out at length into the Beira Mar beside the Palacio
Monröe in its little park. This last marble and granite edifice was
carried back from our St. Louis Exposition and set up chiefly as a
show-place and an ultra-formal gathering-hall, but the Chamber of
Deputies has been meeting there since their old firetrap on the Praça da
República took to falling about their ears. Beyond it lie the blue
waters of the oval bay, across which, always in full view from anywhere
on the avenue, stands the _Pão d’Assucar_, like a rearing monolith, the
thread-like cable that now and then carries a car to or from its summit
plainly visible in the clear tropical sunshine.
However, it is not these more formal things but rather the continual
interweaving of curious and motley types, the air of unworried tropical
indolence that pervades the throng, the brilliance of the night lights
that draw the idler again and again to the chief artery of downtown Rio.
Particularly after the hour of siesta does the capital exchange the
extreme négligée of the household for its most resplendent garb and
sally forth to stroll the Avenida, the women with curiously
expressionless faces, as if they would prove themselves deaf to the
audibly flattering male groups that grow larger and larger until by
sunset the sidewalks become a great salon rather than places of
locomotion. Foreigners and those who have lost the spirit of Rio and
must hurry may take a taxi. These pour so continually past, day and
night, that to cross the Avenida is a perilous undertaking at any hour,
for the personal politeness of the _Fluminense_ does not extend to his
automobiles, and the chances of being run down, particularly by empty
machines cruising for fares, are excellent. Nor is it worth while for
the lone pedestrian to protest, for the odds are against him. Both
private automobiles and those for hire carry two chauffeurs, usually in
white uniforms, less often unquestionably of that complexion, their
faces studies in haughtiness as they gaze down upon the plebeian
foot-going multitude. The extra man is known colloquially as the
“secretary,” and the custom is said to have arisen from the fact that
before the law required meters taxis charged all the traffic would bear
and it often took two men to collect from recalcitrant customers. But
its persistence suggests that there are other reasons, among them the
Brazilian love of sinecures, the terror which solitary labor causes to
the tropical temperament, the pleasure of having a congenial friend
always hanging about, the excess of population over jobs, the real
chauffeur’s need of someone to crank his car, light his cigarette, and
keep an eye on the police, most of all, perhaps, the Brazilian love of
_fazendo fita_. Literally _fazendo fita_ means “making a film,” but by
extension it has come to signify posing for the moving-picture camera,
hence, in the slang of Rio, “showing off.” It is a rare Brazilian who is
not given to acting for the movies in this sense. Watch a traffic
policeman, in his resplendent uniform and white gloves, and you will
find that he is much more seriously bent on displaying his manly form
and graceful deportment to a supposedly admiring audience than on
keeping his street corner clear. Go up to any man with a gold cable
swung across his chest and ask gently, “O s’nhor tem a hora?” and he is
almost as apt as not to reply with a mumbled, “Ah-er-I cannot tell you
the time,” meanwhile grasping first one end of the chain, then the
other, as if he were striving to convince even himself that he has a
watch somewhere attached to it.
It was midwinter in Rio, yet plump, sun-browned youths rolled in the
surf each morning below the wall of her chief driveway and lolled in the
shade of the open-air cafés along it. Even in July the lower levels of
the city can be unpleasantly hot, which makes it all the more remarkable
that it gives such an impression of energy during its business hours.
From the wharves to the edges of the mainly residential sections the
place pulsates with perspiring activity, though on closer inspection one
suspects that the _Fluminense_ is more energetic at play than in
productive labor. Whatever his exertions, however, he divides them into
short sections separated by the partaking of coffee. All along the
Avenida, in every downtown street of importance, there is not a block
without its coffee-house, a cool room filled with marble-topped tables
on a damp, sawdusted floor, into which one steps from the heated street,
silently turns upright one of the score of tiny cups on the table before
one, fills it half full of sugar, raps on the table with the head of
one’s “stick” until a silent waiter comes and fills what is left of the
cup with black coffee, which one slowly sips and, dropping a _tostão_, a
nickel 100-reis piece, beside the empty _tasa_, wanders on down the
street—to repeat the process within the next few blocks.
But with sunset, at least during what Rio likes to refer to as winter,
the temperature grows delightful, and it is from then on until a new day
warms again that one gets the full tropical fragrance, the un-northern
_dolce far niente_ that makes the Brazilian capital so enticing to the
wandering stranger. The newcomer soon learns to stay up most of the
night and enjoy the best part of the day. Not even Paris was ever more
brilliantly lighted than downtown Rio—cynics whisper that the city
fathers have a close personal interest in public lighting—not even
Parisian boulevards are more scented than the Avenida and its adjacent
streets with the pungent odor of mercenary love. Far into the night the
Avenida pulsates; long after the theaters and countless cinemas, and the
opera in its season, have ended, the surge of humanity continues,
punctuated at all too frequent intervals by that most distinctive sound
of the night life of Rio,—bass-voiced newsboys singsonging their
papers—“A Rua!” “A Noite!”—in the distressingly German guttural peculiar
to the native tongue as spoken in the Brazilian capital.
Larger in extent than Paris, broken everywhere by savage, rocky, wooded
_morros_—virgin-jungled hills rising in the very heart of town and
which, peeled of their thick scalp of vegetation, prove to be of solid
granite—stretching away in great green mounds and ranges standing high
into the peerless tropical sky, Rio was as entrancing as Buenos Aires is
commonplace. The level parts of the city were flat indeed, flat as if
the sea had washed in its débris until it had filled all the spaces
between the rocky island hills, and then completely flooded those
valleys with houses. Nor did the building stop there. Seeping everywhere
into the interstices of its hills, the town was here and there chopped
back into them, or, if the _morros_ set sheer rock faces against the
intrusion, it climbed upon and over them, until its many-colored houses
lay heaped into the sky or spilled down great gorges and valleys beyond.
Then always, from whatever point of vantage one saw it, the scene was
backed by its peerless sky-line,—the Pico de Gavea with its square head,
like a topsail or the conventional symbol for a workingman’s cap; the
“Sleeping Giant,” showing nature’s most fantastic carving;
hollow-chested Corcovado, the “Hunchback,” peering amusedly down upon
puny man playing ant in and out among the tumbled rocks below; the
admirable “Sugar Loaf,” keeping eternal watch over the entrance to the
bay, the ridges and wooded summits of Tijuca backed far off by the
“Organ” range, protruding like broken columns above the distant horizon.
“Vedete Napoli e poi mori” might with many times more justice be said of
Rio.
It was always a wonder to me how the citizens of the Brazilian capital
succeeded in keeping within doors long enough to do their daily tasks.
Day or night its peerless scenery and glorious climate were inviting one
to come out and play, to forget the commonplace things of life. A local
editor complained that the people of Rio do not read in the street-cars,
“as our neighbors do in the United States, but spend their time gazing
about them and thus lose much opportunity for culture.” Probably he had
never been in New York or Chicago, or he would have realized that
sometimes people read during their urban travels to keep their minds off
the “scenery.” In Rio nature and all outdoors are so much more splendid
than any printed page that reading seems a sacrilege. Though I rode
along the Beira Mar a dozen times a day, I never succeeded in
withholding my eyes from the scene about me; never was I able to miss a
chance to gaze across the bay to Nictheroy, or up at the silhouettes of
Corcovado and Tijuca; like a great painting it grew upon one with every
view.
I passed frequently along this most marvelous boulevard in the western
hemisphere, Beira Mar, the “Edge of the Sea,” stretching for miles along
the harbor’s edge so close that the ocean spills over upon it on days
when it is _brava_. Between the shady Passeio Publico behind the Monroe
Palace and the heroic statue of Cabral on the green Largo da Gloria, the
foothills crowd in so closely that there is room for only one street to
pass, and right of way is naturally given to the chief pride of the
city. Here converge the pleasure seeking traffic and the business bent,
to split again presently on the rocky Morro da Gloria, crowned by its
quaint little medieval church, the one stream to hurry away through the
Rua do Cattete, the other to follow with more leisure the serpentine
Beira Mar. This, lined by splendid trees and pretentious residences on
the land side, outflanks another rocky hill that would cut it off by
passing between walls of man-scarred granite behind it, skirts another
arm of the turquoise-green harbor, with a closer view of the gigantic
“Sugar Loaf,” and then bursts out through a long tunnel upon the ocean
front where marvelous beaches and a succession of boulevards continue
for miles through what is rapidly developing into the finest residential
section of the Brazilian capital.
The Beira Mar is the show-place of Rio and of Brazil. It is sometimes as
if one were asked to admire a costume without seeing more than the lace
along the bottom, the eagerness of its people to impress the visitor
with the undoubted splendor of this glorious seaside driveway. Yet there
are many other strips and corners of the city that are well-nigh as
sumptuous or as picturesque; the difficulty is to hunt them out among
the _morros_ and foothills that everywhere divide the capital into
almost isolated districts. Walking is all very well, but perspiration
flows quickly and copiously in Rio, and a perpetually drenched shirt is
not entirely conducive to pleasure; and the city is so incredibly
extensive that even tramway exploration becomes serious to the man with
a weak financial constitution. There are two street-car systems and they
operate what is perhaps the best surface system in the world; but it is
also the most expensive. Take a street-car ride from one end of Rio to
another and back and you have spent, thanks to the “zone system”
imported from Europe, the equivalent of half a dollar; and as there are
lines out through all the score or more of gaps between the hills and
_morros_, I quickly made the discovery that if I attempted to explore
all the city, even by street-car, I should probably have the privilege
of swimming home.
What was my joy, therefore, to learn that the superintendent of the
“Botanical Garden Line,” which covers all the more beautiful half of
Rio, came from the town in which I had spent much of my boyhood. I had
long wanted the experience of being a street-car conductor or motorman,
and made application at once. My fellow-townsman hesitated to give me
any such place of responsibility unless I would agree to stay for some
time, but he was quite ready to appoint me a _fiscal segreto_ of the
system under his charge, at the most munificent salary I had ever drawn
in my life—six thousand a day! That was exactly enough to pay for my
room and board in the German hotel of the Rua do Acre; still it was
decidedly better to be paid for riding about town than to have to pay
for that privilege, and with my living and transportation assured until
I sailed my chief problems were solved.
The “Botanical Garden Line” begins at the principal hotel on the Avenida
Central, about which every car loops before setting forth again on its
journey to some part of that section of Rio most worth seeing. I was
furnished a book of free tickets and had only to take a back seat on any
of these cars and, while reading a newspaper or seeing the scenery as
inconspicuously as possible, casually notice whether the conductor
showed an inclination to forget to ring up fares or to break any other
of the strict rules of the company. My tickets were good only for the
oceanside half of town, for though they were under the same North
American ownership the two car systems did not connect, and anyone
traveling all the way through town must walk a block from the hotel loop
to the cars of the business section. This, however, was more compact and
less interesting to the casual visitor than the region in which I had
been given free transportation.
I was frequently seen thereafter boarding a “bonde da Light” at the
Avenida hotel, or alighting from one after a long journey seaward. The
company was officially known as the “Light and Power,” whence the
abbreviation of ownership; and as the first electric street-cars
introduced into Brazil were financed by bonds that were offered for sale
to the Brazilians with much advertising, and there was no other term for
them in the national vocabulary, the street-cars that finally came were
dubbed “bonds,” and so they remain to this day, except that, as the
Brazilian, like all Latins, cannot pronounce a word sharply cut off in a
consonant, he usually calls them “bondes,” in two syllables.
The “bondes” of Rio are as excellent as those to be found anywhere on
the globe, particularly on the more aristocratic “Botanical Garden
Line.” Naturally, when a street-car company can get a quarter for a ride
across town it can afford to maintain the best of service. The cars are
all open, there are five persons, and five only, to a seat, smoking is
allowed on all but the first three benches, and the law forbids those
not properly dressed to ride in the first-class cars, there being
second-class trailers for workmen and the collarless at certain hours of
the day, on which those carrying bundles larger than a portfolio are
also obliged to travel. Street-cars, like every other enterprise in
Brazil, carry a heavy incubus of official “deadheads” and politicians.
Soldiers, sailors, gasmen, mailmen, customhouse employees, street
lighters, policemen, and a dozen other types in uniform ride free by
crowding upon the back platform. They are not allowed seats, as are the
swarms of politicians with elaborately engraved yearly passes—which they
consider it beneath their dignity to be asked to show; but with those
exceptions there are no “standees.” Law, custom, natural politeness and
the lack of haste of the Brazilian are all against permitting a person
to crowd into a filled car, no matter what the provocation. Laws are not
always obeyed to the letter in the liberty-license atmosphere of South
America’s most recent convert to republicanism, but during all my stay
in Brazil I never saw a passenger attempt to board a full street-car.
I am compelled to admit that the street-car conductors of Rio are
superior to our own in courtesy and their equal in attending strictly to
business, and that the “Light” probably gets as large a percentage of
its fares as does the average line in the United States. In spite of my
duty as secret inspector I was utterly unable to find any serious fault
with them, thanks perhaps to long and strict American discipline, for
there was a great difference between their staid, careful manner and the
annoying tomfoolery of the more youthful collectors on the native-owned
motor-busses along the Avenida and out the Beira Mar. Part of this
result, perhaps, was accomplished by a regular system of increase in
wages and a gold star on the sleeve for each five years as inducements
to longevity in the service. The Brazilian is noted for his inability to
protest against exploitation, but he is very touchy as to the manner in
which he is asked to pay, which is perhaps the reason the conductors of
Rio never say “fares, please,” but only rattle suggestively the coins in
their pockets as they swing from pillar to post along the car. Nor have
we ever reached the level of masculine daintiness of the Brazilian
capital, where young dandies carry little mesh purses worthy of a
chorus-girl, from which they affectedly pick out their street-car fare,
dropping the coins from well above the recipient palm in order to avoid
personal contact with the vulgarly calloused hand of labor.
Most of the lines of the “Botanical Garden” system are so long that
three or four round trips a day was all I could, or was expected to,
make; moreover, I was instructed not to return by the same car that
carried me out between Rio’s hills to the end of the line, lest I betray
my calling. Thus I was forced to visit every nook and corner of half the
capital in the natural discharge of my duties. The Botanical Gardens for
which the system was named, lay far out on the edge of the salty Lagoa
Rodrigo de Freitas, a marvelous collection of tropical and semi-tropical
flora. Yet this was made almost inconspicuous by its setting, for all
Rio is a marvelous botanical garden. Greater wealth of vegetation has
been granted no other city of the world, so far as I know it. Date
palms, cocoanut-palms, a multitude of other varieties, each more
beautiful than the other, grew in profusion down to the very edge of the
sea, all to be in turn outdone by the peerless royal palm. They call it
the “imperial palm” in Brazil, because João VI of Portugal, first
European emperor to cross the sea to reign in his American domain, to
which he fled before the conquering Napoleon, caused this monarch of
trees to be brought from the West Indies, and decreed that all seeds
that could not be used by the royal family should be burned, lest they
fall into the hands of the common people. Slaves stole the surplus
turned over to them for destruction, however, and sold them to any who
cared to buy, so that to-day the imperial palm is the crowning glory of
nature along all the coast of Brazil. In Rio it is never absent from the
picture. It grows in the courtyards of _cortiços_, those one-story
tenement blocks of the Brazilian capital, and in the patios of decaying
mansions of former Portuguese grandees; it stretches in long double rows
up many a street and private driveway; it shades the humblest hovels and
the most pompous villas of the newly rich with that perfection of
impartiality which only nature attains; it thrusts itself forth from
between the rocks along the seashore wherever waves or wind have carried
a bit of sustaining soil; it clusters in deeply shaded valleys and
climbs to the summits of the encircling mountains, there to stand out in
regal isolation above the tangle of tropical creepers and impenetrable
jungle that is constantly threatening to invade the tiny kingdom of puny
man below. This great city-dwelling forest is one of the chief charms of
the Brazilian capital. It seems to grasp the city in its powerful
embrace, now affectionately, as if its only purpose were to beautify it,
sometimes, as if bent on thrusting man back into the sea from whence he
came, insinuating itself into every open space, spreading along every
street like the files of a conquering army, invading the parks and the
interior courts of houses, where marble pavements in mosaics of bright
colors gleam amid great masses of jungle flowers, gigantic cool ferns,
and fragrant orange-trees, overtopped by the majestically rustling
imperial palm. It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of
Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels
of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs,
bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle
sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills,
like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength
and energy.
My job took me out through older avenues lined with portentous dwellings
dating back to colonial days; it dropped me with time to spare beside
little _praças_, slumbering in the sunshine beneath rustling fronds,
that carried the mind back to old Portugal, or at the foot of streets
which ran up narrowing valleys until they encountered sheer impassable
wooded hillsides; it left me at the beginning of rows of houses of every
conceivable color, shape, and situation, which twisted their way up
gullies or draped themselves over the lower flanks of the hills, some
seeming ready to fall at the first gust of wind, some tucked immovably
into evergreen tropical settings, the loftiest overtopped only by the
imperial palms or by the mountains in the far background. So swift are
many of these byways of Rio that a street-lamp in the next block is
sometimes well above the moon; so closely are nature and man crowded
together that there is absolute primeval wilderness within half an
hour’s walk of the Avenida central, and one may come upon clusters of
jungle cabins lost in the bucolic calm of the virgin _matta_ almost in
the heart of the city limits.
Some of our lines passed through long dark tunnels bored in the granite
hills, to reach one or another of those pretty, seaside towns that make
up the outskirts of Rio. One ran the full length of Copacabana with its
mile upon mile of peerless beach directly facing the Atlantic a short
square back of the main street; still others hurried on and on through
suburbs that scarcely realized they were part of the city. There was
Ipanema, for instance, where the track was lined more often than not
with uninhabited cactus desert, the car breaking out every little while
from behind a hill upon the welcome perpetual sea breeze, or passing
scattered shanties bearing such pathetically amusing names as “Casa Paz
e Amor,” or “A Felicidade da Viuvinha,” with a goat and a few hens
scratching in the beach sand before them. The Ipanema line was
particularly attractive, for it ran so far out that I could take a dip
in the sea between inspecting trips without going to the expense of
acquiring a bathing-suit.
Many a visitor to Brazil has returned home convinced that her capital
has no slums. It is an error natural to those who do not stay long or
climb high enough. The traveler who subsidizes the exertions of a pair
of chauffeurs or who scuffs his soles along the mosaics of the Avenida
Rio Branco, justly admiring the Theatro Municipal for all its imitation
of the Paris Opéra, admitting that the Escola de Bellas Artes and the
Bibliotheca Nacional are worthy of their setting, and that the Beira Mar
and the seascape beyond are unrivaled, often leaves without so much as
suspecting that there is a seamy side to this entrancing picture, that
he who has seen Rio only on the level knows but half of it. Indeed, even
the leisurely wanderer who covers the entire network of tram-lines
within the city has by no means completed his sight-seeing; to do so he
must frequently strike out afoot and climb.
For the slums of Rio are on the tops of her _morros_, those rock
hills which, each bearing its own musically cadenced name, rise
everywhere above the general level. The _Carioca_—the inhabitant
of Rio is more apt to call himself by this name than by the more
formal term _Fluminense_—hates physical exertion such as the
climbing of hills, and the flat places of the city are in high
demand for residential as well as business sites. A few sumptuous
villas clamber a little way up them within automobile reach, but
the upper flanks and summits of the _morros_ are left to the
discards of fortune. Here the poorer classes congregate, to build
their shacks and huts of anything available,—fragments of dry
goods boxes, flattened out oil cans, the leaf base of the royal
palm—every shape and description of thrown-together hovels,
inhabited by washerwomen, street hawkers, petty merchants, dock
laborers, minor criminals, victims of misfortune, and habitual
loafers. Barely two blocks back of the justly admired Municipal
Theater there rises such a hill, so densely crowded with makeshift
dwellings that only men of moderate girth can pass comfortably
along the dirt paths between them; it would take a persistent
walker weeks to investigate all the other congested hilltop towns
within the city. There the stroller from below finds himself in
quite another world than the Avenida at his feet, a world whose
inhabitants stare half-surprised, half-resentfully at the man with
even a near-white collar, yet many of whom have such a view from
the doors of their decrepit shanties and such a sea breeze through
the cracks in their patchwork walls as the most fortune-favored of
other lands may well envy.
These scores of _morros_ rising above Rio’s well-to-do level are of many
shapes, some only a little less abrupt and striking than the “Sugar
Loaf” at the harbor’s entrance, others great rounded knolls over which
the town has spread like fantastic unbroken jungle, those in the older
part of town terminating in feudal looking castles or former monasteries
turned to modern republican use, some of them so high that the sounds of
the traffic and the trafficking below are drowned out by the hilarity of
negro boys rolling about the dusty shade in old frock coats and what
were once spotless afternoon trousers, gleaned from the discard of the
city beneath. There are white people living on the summits of the
_morros_,—recent immigrants, ne’er-do-wells of the type known as “white
trash” in our South—but easily four out of every five of the hilltop
inhabitants are of the African race, and he who thinks the negro is the
equal of the white man under equality of opportunity should climb these
slum-ridden hills and see how persistently the blacks have risen to the
top in Rio, though there is so slight a prejudice against the negro in
Brazil that his failure to gain an eminence in society similar to his
physical elevation must be just his own fault. It is chiefly from her
hilltops, too, that come what Rio calls her _gente de tamanco_, wearers
of the wooden-clog soles with canvas slipper tops which are the habitual
footwear of the poorer sockless _Cariocas_. The falsetto scrape of
_tamancos_ on the cement pavements is the most characteristic sound of
the Brazilian capital, as native to it as its perpetual sea breeze and
its sky-piercing _palmeiras imperiaes_.
It was dusty on the _morros_ at the time of my “slumming,” for Rio was
suffering from what the authoritative “oldest inhabitant” called the
worst drought in forty years, and long lines of the hilltop inhabitants
were constantly laboring upward with former oil cans full of water on
their heads. The shortage of water had grown so serious that even down
on the level the supply was shut off from dark until daylight; the ponds
in the Praça da República and similar parks were so low that the wild
animals living there in a natural state of freedom were in danger of
choking to death. But hardships are familiar to the people of the
hilltops, and there was an air of cheerfulness, almost of hilarity,
about the long row of public spigots on the Largo da Carioca behind the
Avenida Hotel at the end of the old Portuguese aqueduct, to which the
_morro_ dwellers descended for their water, as slaves once carried from
the same spot the supply for all the city.
The unavoidable excursion for all visitors to Rio is, of course, the
ascent of the “Sugar Loaf.” For centuries after the discovery of Brazil
and the founding by Mem da Sá of the village of São Sebastião at the
mouth of the putative “River of January” this enormous granite thumb,
its sides so sheer that they give no foothold even to aggressive
tropical vegetation, was considered unscalable. But in time this, like
so many of mankind’s impressions, was proved false and by the middle of
the last century it had evidently become a favorite feat to salute the
city from the summit of the Pão d’Assucar. At any rate, in running
through an old file of the _Jornal do Commercio_ at the National Library
I found in a number dated “Corte e Nitherohy, December 8, 1877,” among
many appeals to “His Gracious Majesty in the shadow of whose throne we
all take refuge,” the following item:
This morning the American Senhores—here followed four American
names—set out at 5 A.M. and climbed to the top of our Pão d’Assucar,
arriving at 7:11. This climbing of the Sugar Loaf is getting so
frequent that before long no doubt someone will be asking for a
concession for a line of bonds to that locality.
The writer, of course, considered this the height of sarcasm, and a
clever thought improved by its connection with the burning question of
the hour, for in the same issue there was a notice that more street-car
bonds were about to be offered for sale, and the sheet was strewn with
complaints against the “Botanical Garden Rail Road, which is not living
up to the concession which His Gracious Majesty was pleased to grant it
in 1856, but is oppressing the people of this Court for the benefit of a
heartless corporation.” Yet if that particular scribe were permitted to
peer out for a moment from the after world of newspaper writers he would
find that his bon mot has entirely lost its sting, for that is exactly
what someone has done, and to-day there is a line of “bonds” to the top
of the “Sugar Loaf.”
Traveling out to the end of the Beira Mar, continuing on around the
harbor instead of dashing through one of the tunnels leading out upon
the open Atlantic, one comes to a station beyond the Ministry of
Agriculture—set on this rocky neck of land, no doubt, so that the
ministers may have a constant sea breeze and catch no scent of the
tilling of soil. On the way the massive Pão d’Assucar, here suggestive
rather of a loaf of French bread stood on end, grows more and more
gigantic, the long span of cable to the summit swinging across the sky
like a cobweb, and the timid have often been known to turn back at this
point rather than risk their lives in the aërial journey before them.
There are many of these striking forms of granite monoliths along the
coast of Brazil, though of them all Rio’s “Sugar Loaf” is probably the
most dramatic. The cable tram had been in operation about a year, the
company being Brazilian and the machinery German. At the station
visitors are sold tickets at once—after which they are incessantly
pestered by hangers-on of the company to buy beer and the like at the
station café until a car is ready for the journey. The conveyance is
similar to a small closed tramcar, with wire-grated windows, the end
ones open, a locked door, and benches on two sides, except that instead
of having wheels beneath there are rollers above, which run on two
cables of about two inches in diameter. Sliding smoothly upward at
nearly a 45-degree angle, the first car carried us to the top of a rock
hill called the Penedo da Urca, 220 meters high, where we were let out
to walk a few hundred yards—and given ample opportunity to quiet our
nerves with beer and sandwiches. From this another car swung us across
the bottomless wooded chasm between the two peaks on a cable that sagged
considerably of its own weight and set us down on the bald rock top of
the Pão d’Assucar, 1250 feet above the sea.
At this late afternoon hour the “Sugar Loaf” casts its own shadow far
out across the entrance to the harbor. The city is apt to be a bit hazy,
the sun, or the moon, often just red blotches in the dusty air in time
of drought, but its hills and the countless islands of the bay seem
solid rocks with woolly wigs of forest and jungle. The ferry crawling
across the bay to Nictheroy, ocean-going steamers creeping in and out of
the harbor, leave their paths sharp cut and clear behind them as the
trail of a comet shooting across the sky. Almost directly below, the
Morro Cara de Cão (“Dog’s Face”) stretches upward in a futile effort to
rival the giant above. On its projecting nose the Fortaleza São João
faces that of Santa Cruz, inaccessible on the Nictheroy side opposite,
midway between them is a little island bearing the Fortaleza da Lage,
and still farther in, completing the quartet of watchdogs that guard the
entrance to Brazil’s chief harbor, lies the fortified island of
Villegaignon, named for the Frenchman who once installed his forces here
and disputed possession of the bay with Mem da Sá. One can look as
directly down into every activity of São João Fortress as from an
airplane, the roll of drums rising half-muffled to the ears as tiny ants
of soldiers, drilling in squads, take minutes to march across the
two-inch parade ground. As the sun goes down behind the bandage of
clouds along the lower horizon, the scene clears somewhat of its bluish
dust-and-heat haze and discloses the myriad details of the vast
spreading city, strewn in and out among its _morros_ until it resembles
some fantastic and gigantic spider. Evening descends with indescribable
softness, the world fading away out of sight through a gamut of all
known shades of color, the wash of the sea on a score of sandy beaches
and on the bases of rocky islands and hills coming up like hushed
celestial music. Then a light springs out of the void, another and
another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes,
until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very
warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and
all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some
fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else
is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence
blows the caressing air of evening.... But only the foolhardy would
attempt to paint such scenes in words; like all the regal beauties of
Rio they reveal themselves only to those who come to look upon them in
person.
Yet there are many who regard the view from the Corcovado as still more
striking. The “Hunchback,” rising a thousand feet higher than the “Sugar
Loaf,” leaning over the city as if it were half-amused, half-disgusted
by the activities of the tiny beings below, is more easily accessible. A
little independent tram-line runs out along the top of the old
Portuguese aqueduct bringing water to the Largo da Carioca, crossing
high above a great gully filled with town and metropolitan bustle,
winding away among wooded hills strewn with costly residences, to Aguas
Ferreas; or one may walk there by any of several routes lined by old
mansions and scattered shops and, if courage is equal to physical
exertion in the tropics, climb in a leisurely three hours to the summit.
But a rackrail train leaves Aguas Ferreas at two each afternoon, and he
who can more easily endure the cackling of tourists may spare himself
the ascent afoot. A powerful electric engine thrusts the car up the
mountainside before it, by a route so steep that the city below seems
tilted sharply away from the sea. Much of the way is through dense,
jungled forest, that militant tropical Brazilian forest which comes down
to the very gates of Rio and pursues the flabby-muscled urban population
into the very downtown streets of the capital. Sometimes the road is cut
through solid rock, at others it glides through long tunnels of
vegetation, to emerge all at once in the clear blue sky a few steps from
a sight that is not likely to be forgotten in one brief life-time.
From the cement platform that has been built out to the edge of the
summit one might look down from daylight until dark without seeing all
the details of the city at his feet, the tumult of jungled hills about
him, the bay with its countless islands of every possible shape, all
spread out as upon some huge relief map made with infinite care upon a
flat, turquoise-blue surface from which everything protrudes in
sharp-cut outline. Nictheroy, several miles away across the bay, seems
close at hand, the “Sugar Loaf” is just one of many insignificant rocks
bulking forth from the mirroring blue surface below, and the roar of the
beaches comes faintly up from all sides.... But the funiculaire company
is apparently jealous of their view, or of its competition with other
things demanding attention, for the visitors are soon hurried down
again—as far as a hotel and café built in the woods by the thoughtful
corporation, where one may follow the old Portuguese aqueduct for miles
through thick damp forest, if one has the energy and strategy necessary
to escape the ubiquitous purveyors of beer and sandwiches.
Perhaps the finest experience of all—for there are so many vantage
points about Rio that the visitor is constantly advancing his
superlatives—is the ascent of Tijuca, highest of all the summits within
the city limits, more than a thousand feet above the Corcovado and 3300
above the sea, its top not infrequently lost in the clouds. This may be
reached from front or rear, as a single hurried trip of three or four
hours or as the climax of one of those many all-day walks that may be
taken within the bounds of Rio without once treading city pavements; and
its charm is enhanced by its freedom from exploiting companies or too
easy accessibility.
A prolongation of a principal boulevard lifts one quickly into the
hills, or one may strike out from the end of the Gavea car-line upon an
automobile road that winds and climbs for nearly fifteen miles along the
cliffs above the sea, always within the city limits yet amid scenes as
unlike the familiar Rio as the Amazon jungle. Here and there are tiny
thatched cabins all but hidden beneath the giant leaves of the banana,
pitched away up 45-degree hillsides, climbing as high as their energy
endures, the huts inhabited by shade-lolling negroes as free from care
for the morrow as the gently waving royal palm trees far above them. Now
and then one passes a rambling old house of colonial days, perhaps a
mere _tapera_ now, one of those abandoned mansions fallen completely
into ruin after the abolition of slavery, of which there are many in the
fifty-mile periphery of Rio. Then for long spaces there is nothing but
the tumultuous hills heavily clothed with dense, humid green forest
piled up on every side, the square, laborer’s-cap summit of Gavea, the
Roman nose of its lofty neighbor, and other fantastic headlands in ever
bluer distance, with the ultra-blue sea breaking in white lines of foam
far below and stretching to the limitless horizon. The ascent is often
abrupt, sometimes passing a tropical lagoon with waving bamboo along its
edges, perpendicular walls here and there rising to summits as smooth as
an upturned kettle, sheer slopes of rock, so clear of vegetation as to
be almost glassy in appearance, standing forth into the sky as far as
the eye can follow, while everywhere the imperial palms wave their
plumage, now high above, now on a level with the eye, their cement-like
trunks stretching down to be lost in the jungle of some sharply V-shaped
valley.
But the more ordinary way to Tijuca is to take the Alta Boa-Vista car
out one of the many fingers of Rio, past the formerly independent town
in which once lived José d’Alencar, Brazil’s most prolific novelist, to
a sleepy suburban hamlet well up the mountainside and of the same name
as the peak above. Most travelers call that the ascent of Tijuca, or at
least are content with a climb, by automobile preferably, a few hundred
feet higher to a charming little waterfall almost hidden in tropical
verdure. But the real excursion begins where the automobile road and the
average tourist leave off. For two hours one marches steadily upward
through cool dense tropical forest, its trees ranging from tiny to
immense giant ferns, bamboos, and palms lining all the way. The trail
grows steeper and more zigzag, winding round and round the peak until it
breaks forth at last frankly in steps cut in the living rock and climbs,
between two immense chains that serve as handrails, straight up to the
summit, a bare spot like a tonsure or an incipient baldness in the
otherwise unbroken vegetation.
Here is a view in some ways superior even to that from the Corcovado,
for one sees not only all Rio, no portion of it hidden by the range
beneath, but the whole seven hundred square miles of the most extensive
federal district on earth, and mile upon mile away up country, over
chaotic masses of hills, through the villages along the “Central” and
“Leopoldina” railways, to the haze-blue mountains of Petropolis and the
“Organ” range. Every island in Guanabara Bay, from huge Gobernador in
the center of the picture to the tiniest rock sustaining a palm-tree,
all Nictheroy and its woolly and rumpled district beyond, stand out in
plain sight; and on the other side of hills that seem high when seen
from the city but which from here are mere lumps on the surface of the
earth, are beaches without number, the soft, tropical Atlantic spreading
away to where sea and sky melt imperceptibly together.