A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL
Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first
morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable
old station of the Central Railway of Brazil. Having a suitcase now and
lacking time to wait for the second-class trailer in which persons so
plebeian as to carry baggage may ride, the trip by taxi cost me—I mean
Linton—9$600 instead of 400 reis! Nor was that the only shock I got at
the station. On my journey northward from Uruguay, with my worldly
possessions in a bundle under one arm, the fact that the railroads of
Brazil have no free baggage allowance had scarcely caught my attention.
But now I was responsible for an outfit consisting of half a dozen large
trunks and an enormous phonograph horn in its special case, totaling
about a thousand pounds. Hence the seriousness of the discovery that for
the single day’s trip from Rio to São Paulo personal baggage paid 256
reis a kilogram and all other kinds 400! No wonder Brazilians drag into
the trains with them all manner of strange and awkward bundles, for
though any portable amount of hand-luggage is transported free of charge
in the passenger-cars, everything else must pay almost its weight in
human flesh. In fact, a fat man can travel more cheaply on Brazilian
railways than can his equally heavy trunk.
There are private, state, and federal railways in Brazil, and the
“Estrada de Ferro Central” belongs to the last category, being operated
by the national government. I had already seen public ownership of
railroads working—or failing to work—in Chile, however, and was
therefore not so surprised at some of the manifestations of the system
as a complete stranger might have been. One quickly learned that
government railways are operated primarily for the convenience of
trainmen and government officials, and that the public is privileged to
fight for any space that may be left after these have been accommodated.
Our cars were as sadly down at heel as any I had seen since leaving
Chile, yet in the station from which we departed stood an official train
of the “Administração e Inspecção” that was the last word in
transportable sumptuousness, its sides almost wholly of plate-glass and
its interior fitted with every luxury. In this, and others like it,
government railway managers and higher officials not only flit about at
will but carry a host of political friends and their relatives down to
the fourteenth cousinship. The “Central” shows a firm belief, too, in
the modern trade-union principle of never letting one man do what four
men might pretend to be doing, so that not only do useless higher
officials swarm but the actual railroad men are little less numerous
than the passengers.
Notwithstanding my rule never to go over the same ground twice when it
can possibly be avoided, I was returning to São Paulo because our
contract with the “Companhia Brazileira” specified that we present the
Kinetophone there during the month of October. The night train would
have been more comfortable and a bit swifter, but I had never been
overland between Brazil’s two largest cities; besides, I wished to have
things prepared for our _estrea_ when “Tut” and Carlos arrived next
morning. The day train covers the 310 miles in twelve hours—at least on
the time-table. For the first of them it was but one of a constant
procession of trains in both directions, not only the “Central” but the
private-owned and contrastingly efficient “Leopoldina” railway
maintaining incessant service to the suburbs. Then we took to climbing
from the coast to the great interior plateau, more or less following a
small river sprawling over rocks and boulders, passing many tunnels that
brought out the incompetence of the train gas-lamps, a low-wooded valley
sinking below us as we rose ever higher. Once out of this and above the
coastlands, we turned southwest across an almost flat plain. By no means
covered with the jungle of the imagination, it was dry and bushy,
sometimes wholly bare, occasionally somewhat grass-grown. Reddish trails
along which wandered mules and donkeys, and now and then one of the
humped sacred bulls of India between the thills of a heavy cart, climbed
away across scrub-covered, mist-touched foothills or low ridges here and
there punctuated with decapitated palm trees. The soft coal that Brazil
imports for her railroads abetted the dustiness of the season in making
the trip uncomfortable. Beyond Cruzeiro, already in the state of São
Paulo, huge dome-shaped ant-hills of hard, reddish earth began to litter
the brownish landscape. The low hills had been ruthlessly despoiled of
their natural adornment by the systematic incendiarism of man, who for
long stretches had made his destruction of the primeval forest absolute.
It struck a note of sadness, this devastation of the beauties of nature
for utilitarian purposes, without even the excuse of necessity, since
the forest had been destroyed merely to save the trouble of cultivating
more intensively and by more modern methods lands that had become weary
from overwork and lack of fertilizing nourishment—and because of the
native superstition that soil which does not produce forest will not
grow anything else. Long lack of rain had left the whole country
powder-dry and water-longing; even the palm-trees drooped as if tired
and thirsty. In folds of the earth clumps of bedraggled banana plants,
sometimes with a few choked coffee bushes beneath them, called attention
to primitive huts before which a black colonist, squatting aimlessly on
the ground, and his numerous brood offered to the sun’s caresses skins
which it cannot tan. It is a nonchalant life at best where the earth
gives a maximum of return for a minimum of exertion. Here and there a
bit of late spring plowing was going on, giving the ground a suggestion
of the same nudity as the happy-go-lucky inhabitants. Now and then, from
the summit of a ridge, we caught sight of an old plantation house with a
long series of walls behind which only a generation ago were herded
troops of negro slaves, and about it vast coffee-fields abandoned for
want of labor. Everywhere was an air of do-nothing poverty and
ruination, coupled with a fatalistic surrender to circumstances. The
unimportant towns along the way, little less thirsty and weary of life,
seemed to be inhabited only by non-producers, ranging from priests to
shopkeepers. At length the thick dust-and-heat haze of day turned purple
with evening, a heavy sun went down somewhere to the west, leaving a
great red blotch irregularly radiating on the horizon, the night grew
almost cold and, two hours behind time, we rumbled into the glass-domed
Luz station.
São Paulo was not what I had left it ten weeks before. Not only had the
drought made it dry and dusty and even more hazy than Rio, but the war
had brought its industry almost to a standstill. Swarms of workmen
without work competed with hungry boys for the chance to sell a few
newspapers. In the poorer section a serious epidemic of typhoid had
broken out; the hotels that had seemed numerous before, now, with only a
guest or two each, appeared trebly so; “actresses” who had always had a
native “friend” to help out, had taken to suicide because even the
_amigo_ could no longer pay their rent. The very _cafés concertos_ in
which rich _fazendeiros_ from the coffee-growing interior had been wont
to squander fortunes on blond charmers from across the sea were
succumbing one by one to the “brutal crisis.” Everywhere the city had a
sad air and many of those one met were too sad to speak; even the
weather was gloomy, in the face of approaching summer. The sun was
rarely seen; palm-trees shivered in a cold wind; disheveled banana
plants huddled together as if for mutual warmth. Professionally the
“industrial capital” looked unpromising indeed. The _Paulista_ had not
yet come to realize that the war was really the opportunity for a land
with such vast resources, so far barely touched by commercial
enterprise, to shake off borrowing and indolence and become one of the
wealthy and powerful nations of the earth.
Approached from the federal capital, São Paulo showed at a glance the
effect on the human race of even a slight difference in climate. Though
not appreciably farther from the equator than Rio, and barely half a
mile above sea-level, its atmosphere was wholly different. The negro
element is conspicuously less and seems to be decreasing, so that a
century hence, São Paulo will have perhaps no more of the African strain
than the Portuguese have now. The average citizen one saw in the
business streets, or in the palatial homes of coffee kings and captains
of industry—not to mention successful politicians—out along the Avenida
Paulista and in other flowery and fashionable suburbs had much less in
common with the motley _Carioca_ than with the people of southwestern
Europe.
“Tut” and Carlos arrived at dawn with the outfit. I had been
disgruntled, though not greatly surprised, to find that our coming had
not been advertised, except with a small portrait of Edison in some of
the newspapers, the ex-bootblack being a true Latin-American in never
believing a promise until it has been fulfilled. This was contrary to
our contract and it would have caused us to lose not one, but several
days had I not obliged the distrustful Spaniard to let us open at one of
his theaters the following night and to plunge at once into advertising,
which I aided by a special performance to the press and “influential
citizens” at six that afternoon. As we were booked for a month in the
city, “Tut” and I took quarters—the scarcity of transients having
brought them within our means—in a palace overlooking the stately and
dignified Municipal Theater, from which we could look down upon the
band-concerts in the gardens below as from a balcony—unless they
coincided with our own performances. Carlos, being in his home town,
joined his increasing family in one of the sections chiefly devoted to
workmen of Italian antecedents.
The “Companhia Brazileira” operated eight cinemas throughout the city,
and these were in the habit of changing their programs nightly, instead
of twice a week. As we were to play in all of them, I set to work to
shift our numbers in such a way as to give us more than twenty-five
combinations of program with our fifteen films, both in the hope that
those who might already have heard one number would be attracted by the
other two and because Brazilians will not stand for _sopa requentada_
(reheated soup), as they call a repetition of program. Our work in São
Paulo was quite different from that in Rio. Here the cinemas ran only
two, or at most three, sessions, totalling less than four hours a night,
with matinées only on Sundays. One man could easily have done all that
the three of us were called upon to do in those days, had he been able
to split himself into triplets at the critical moments. Nor was our
income cut down as much as the difference between two or three and ten
performances a day would suggest, for the theaters were large, with
boxes, balconies and galleries, and the public was accustomed to take
its entertainment in common at reasonable hours. Theatrically, however,
the _Paulistas_ were quite like the _Cariocas_. Their favorite in the
“movies” was a Parisian comedian whose specialty is the
fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-evening-dress brand of humor, and it was
difficult to unseat this king. To be sure, São Paulo audiences did show
a few more signs of life than those in the national capital, an
occasional snigger at least; but on the other hand, unlike Rio, with its
pose for the exotic, they somewhat resented that our records were not
all in the native tongue. “Tut” suggested that we take them out and have
them translated.
Though the “Companhia Brazileira” was required by the terms of our
contract to do all advertising, I decided to try my own hand at
flim-flamming the public. The usual posters, newspaper notices, and
banners were all very well, but I wanted something special, something
unusual, that could not fail to impress upon everyone that “the
Kinetophone, the wonderful talking-moving pictures, the marvel of the
age,” and so on, was in São Paulo for a very limited time indeed, “_só
trez dias_ (only three days)”—after which it would move to another
theater a few blocks away. Our enterprising partners were not so
conservative in advertising as they were lacking in new ideas. But
though they were always harping on the American genius for publicity and
insisting on their eagerness to be shown, they invariably backed water
when any unfamiliar scheme was physically laid before them, and this
dread of the unusual was so often in evidence during our tour of Brazil
that it is evidently a typical Brazilian characteristic. In São Paulo I
hired an Italian dwarf, who had been hanging about appealing for a job,
to parade the streets as a sandwich-man. That particular form of
advertising apparently had never been seen in Brazil. The company highly
approved of the scheme in outline, but refused to sponsor an
unprecedented innovation when the time came actually to carry it out. I
determined, therefore, to risk a few dollars of Linton’s money. Taking
two of our large cloth-mounted portraits of Edison as a background, I
had special sandwich-boards made on a design of my own—except that the
painter, frightened at any suggestion of novelty, reduced my idea to the
commonplace, and then told another man to complete the job. This he did
eventually, under my stern supervision, and I turned the innovation
loose on São Paulo. An hour later, I met my dwarf carrying the two
boards above his head in the form of a banner that had been the “last
cry” in Brazilian advertising for at least a decade! He had some maudlin
excuse to offer for not carrying out my orders and next day he left even
the banner loafing on a corner while he worked at a better job during
the best hours of Saturday, leaving me no choice but to turn him back
into the ranks of the disgruntled unemployed. Thanks to rain, the war,
and other drawbacks, we did so poor a business on several nights that
the ex-bootblack talked of breaking the contract, for though they expect
“um inglez” to live strictly up to his side of an agreement, on their
side a contract means nothing whatever to these people. To make things
worse the milreis dropped again to five to the dollar, yet money was so
scarce that we dared not raise our admission price. By moving every
three days to a new theater, however, we got fair-sized audiences and
did moderately well, though nothing like what we should have done before
the war.
All my other troubles as a theatrical potentate, however, were nothing
compared to my struggle against “deadheads.” Though our contract called
for “complete suppression of the free list during this engagement,” the
carrying out of that clause was quite another matter. Excuses for
entering a theater in Brazil without paying an admission fee are without
number. One might suppose that a Justice of the Supreme Court would be
ashamed to use his office to force his way into a “movie” house,
admittance to which cost barely the equivalent of a quarter. But many
men of that class not only usurped free admission, but usually took
their entire families with them—and the average Brazilian family can
fill many seats. It is the custom in Brazil for theaters to send annual
passes to all higher politicians. Thus the judge is given a richly
engraved yearly pass, which claims to be non-transferable and for his
personal use only. But he cannot, of course, be expected actually to
show it, like a _popular_, or a common fellow, or to have his right
questioned to bring with him such guests as he may choose. It is the
business of everyone connected with the theater to know the judge and
not put him to the annoyance and degradation of showing that pass, which
would be an insult comparable almost to dunning him for a debt. So he
thrusts the obsequious gateman haughtily aside and marches in with his
whole progeny—and a little later a barefoot negro boy appears with an
elaborately engraved annual pass which states that he is a Justice of
the Supreme Court, and he must be let in without question, lest one have
to answer next day to contempt of court!
We were incessantly pestered by official mendicants and well-to-do
beggars, by friends of the management or of the cinema employees, by
“influential people” in droves. Favor to a friend, a relative, an
acquaintance, the friend of a friend’s friend, to anyone with an
authoritative manner, and the lack of moral courage that goes with it,
is the curse of all Brazilian door-keepers. If a man had ever met a
person in any way connected with the institution, he expected to get the
glad hand and a smiling invitation to “go right in.” It was not so much
that they were trying to save money; the milreis admission fee was not
serious to the official and influential class; it was _fazendo fita_,
showing off by stalking past the cringing ticket-collector with an air
of daring him to challenge them. To march in with his whole decorated,
upholstered, and perfumed family gave a man the sense of being a person
of superior clay, for whom there are no barriers. This attitude ran the
full gamut of government officials. One of the standing privileges of a
newly appointed Minister of War is to go to the theater and ignore the
ticket collector; it is his visible and final proof of office. Negro
youths employed in the customhouse forced their way in without protest
because some form of trouble would be sure to follow any interference
with that class. My ears were constantly being importuned with, “Please,
senhor, may I go in? I am an ‘artist’ or a poet, or fourteenth cousin of
the _delegado_, or great-grandmother of the town dog-catcher, or a bag
of wind, or....” When mail arrived for me at our consulate the native
clerk was careful to keep that fact to himself if I called during the
day, so that he could bring it to me at night and use it as a ticket for
himself and his female hanger-on. In addition to all this, the
short-sighted managers think it necessary to give permanent passes to
many of the “influential families” in their neighborhood so that others
will see that the place is fashionable and will patronize it. As a
result, those who have money do not need to spend it, because they have
season tickets, and those whom they are expected to imbue with the
desire to go cannot do so because they do not have the money.
A woman of the comfortable class comes to the cinema with two, or even
three nearly full-grown children, and though she knows perfectly well
that they are expected to pay at least half-fare, she presents a single
ticket for herself and starts to drag the children in after her. If the
door-keeper has the courage to halt her, the woman, feigning great
indignation, says:
“Why do _they_ pay admission, little bits of children like that?”
“Yes, senhora,” replies the bowing manager, with far more courtesy than
firmness.
“Oh dear,” sighs the woman, “I have just ten _tostões_ with me for my
own ticket and I’ll have to go way back home and get the rest”—whereupon
the manager hastens to say, “that’s perfectly all right, senhora, go
right in,” for he knows that if she turns homeward it will be in wrath
and he will lose even the “_dez tostões_” she has paid for her own
ticket. As often as she comes to the cinema the woman, and many like
her, works the same trick with a most serious and innocent face.
We had to admit free the chauffeurs of private automobiles in order to
keep the friendship and family influence of the patrons who came in
them. Sometimes it was evident that the cinema was making use of us
during our short engagement to win friends for themselves during the
rest of the season. One manager went so far as to try not to include us
in the program at all one Sunday afternoon, knowing he would fill the
house anyway with Edison’s portrait outside and not have to share the
receipts with us. Then anyone in any way connected with a newspaper,
from the office-boy down to the editor’s third mistress, must be let in
without question or the entertainment is forever blasted in that
community. A decent and unusually good show for Brazil opened near us
one evening. Being newly arrived from Europe, the manager gave two seats
each to the principal newspapers, instead of allowing anyone attached to
them to get in merely by mumbling that fact as they passed the
door-keeper. Next day, after highly praising a salacious and worthless
thing at another theater, the papers one and all announced that no
decent Brazilian families should be seen at this one, and the following
night the police closed the performance.
At the “Cinema High Life”—the mulatto boy operators had chalked the name
on the back brick wall of the stage so that they could remember how to
pronounce it, “Ai Laife,” in three syllables—which prided itself on
attracting “le monde chic” of São Paulo, I counted 215 “deadheads” one
night out of an audience of barely six hundred, and I missed a number
when duties took me away from the door. Moreover I did not count the
score or more in uniform, nor the friends of the stagehands who saw the
pictures from the rear.
I soon cut off some of this dead-heading, but it was at the expense of
much diligence and audacity, not to say diplomacy, for one cannot
manhandle the Brazilians as one can a more straightforward people,
without running the risk of being boycotted by the entire community. It
meant constant vigilance, too, for the crooked are notoriously more
energetic and cunning than the honest. In the beginning I lost
considerable sleep over this petty form of grafting, but one soon learns
in Brazil to take a new view of life, to smile and be “sympathico” and
fit in as well as possible with the society about him. It is the only
society he will find in any appreciable quantity as long as he remains
in the country, and he may as well make the best of it.
Once in a while, though by no means often enough to make up for the
“deadhead” losses, men went to the other extreme in _fazendo fita_. A
fop now and then came in alone and bought an entire box for himself; or
men well known in the community might come the first night with their
families, thrusting the door-keeper aside, and take seats in the
parquet, while the next night, when he came with his bejewelled
mistress, the same man would take the best box available, and pay for
it, less out of a sense of fairness than in order advantageously to
display his prize to his envious fellow-citizens.
However, in compensation for my troubles new honors were heaped upon me.
The Brazilian dearly loves an honorary title, and being unable to think
of any other that would fit a man of my undoubtedly important position
as “concessionary” for all Brazil of a great invention, they took to
calling me “doctor.” In time I grew accustomed to being introduced with
deep bows and the words, “Permita-me presental-lhe o Doutor Frawnck.” In
“movie” circles I let the error pass as unimportant, but when one day
even the American president of the college of São Paulo publicly
addressed me by that title, I protested.
“But you have a bachelor’s degree, haven’t you?” he asked, in some
surprise.
“Yes, I believe so, if I haven’t lost it somewhere along the road,
but——”
“Then you are a doctor in Brazil,” he replied, “for the bachelor’s
degree carries with it that title in this country.”
“Dr.” Franck I remained, therefore, as long as I continued to manage the
Kinetophone.
With matinées only on Sundays, I found plenty of time for my favorite
sport of tramping the countryside. One afternoon I strolled at random
out beyond the low, dry, reddish cliffs at the edge of town and struck
off in the direction of São Caetano. Great banks of white clouds lay
piled into the sky on all sides, and the dead-dry, almost burning
stretch of rolling country was half-hidden under a haze of red dust. I
passed several suburban beer-halls, each with its “Giocce di Bocce,” or
Italian nine-pin earth court behind it, and wandered on along more red
roads, the light-colored houses scattered over the rolling country
showing up in front and disappearing behind me in the thick, dust-laden
atmosphere as in a fog. Gradually I came to realize that almost a
procession of men, women and children was bound in the same direction,
some tramping the dusty road on weary, blistered feet, others lolling at
their ease in carriages and automobiles. Not a few of the latter were
expensive private cars with chauffeurs in livery.
For nearly an hour I followed the same direction. Then all at once,
topping a slight ridge, I came upon all the concourse that had gone
before—automobiles, carriages, and pedestrians—gathered in a broad bare
space on the brow of a treeless, thirsty hill. Down below the throng was
a small tile-roofed hut with two bar fences so arranged before it that
only one person at a time of the crowd that was jammed up against it
could enter and bend over a sort of counter across the open door to talk
with a man inside. Each ended the interview by handing the man a ten, or
more, milreis note and passed out through a gap between fence and hut.
Though the entire assortment of Brazilian complexions was to be found in
the throng, many were full whites, blond European immigrants as well as
women in silks and diamonds, dandies in gloves, spats and canes—and
every mother’s son and daughter of them talked with bated breath while
they waited their turn to approach the counter. When this came, the men
reverently raised their hats, the women gave a species of curtsey and in
many cases kissed the man’s hand, then conversed with him for two or
three minutes in an undertone, which could not but have been heard by
those crowded nearest to the speaker. Then they paid the fee and passed
on, with as contrite and sanctified a look on their faces as if they had
just ended a private conference with St. Peter. Each carried away a
mammoth visiting card bearing the name Vicente Rodriguez Viera, and at
the exit a shaggy countryman halted each by thrusting forth photographs
of the man behind the counter, which each hastened to buy with a meek
and grateful countenance, as if by divine command.
Inside the hut was an electric push-button which, like the back door,
connected with a rambling lot of _fazenda_ buildings, and near at hand
was a large liquor emporium and two restaurants of a crude,
frontier-like variety. I was preparing to sample the attractions of the
latter when the man behind the counter suddenly rose and strolled toward
the farmhouse in the rear, leaving the perspiring crowd—automobiles,
diamonds and all—to await his sweet will about returning. He was a big
bulk of a countryman, plainly a _caboclo_, or copper-colored native
Brazilian of considerable Indian and probably some negro blood, with a
great bushy black beard. Dressed in an uncreased, broad-brimmed felt
hat, a heavy, dark suit, and black riding-boots, he wore also a colored
handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck, a conspicuous watch-chain
and charm across his slightly prominent abdomen, and huge brass rings on
seven of his fingers considerably enhancing his general air of cheap
vulgarity. His face was puffy under the eyes and had a “foxy” expression
that no one of a modicum of experience with the human race could have
mistaken for anything than what it was,—proof of cunning rascality.
As the fellow was returning to the hut I approached the vendor of
photographs and asked who the man was. His ally gave me a look of
mingled astonishment and disgust for my ignorance and explained that the
noble being was a _curandeiro_, or a “curer.”
“You mean a physician?” I suggested.
“No, senhor, not a doctor; a _curandeiro_.”
“Does he give medicine?”
“None whatever.”
“Does he cure by laying on hands?”
“Not at all. He merely gives them his card and they buy his picture.
After nine days they come back again, and three times in the next month,
and then once or twice a month, if they are still ailing, until they are
cured. He is a _caboclo legitimo_” (a dyed-in-the-wool Brazilian) “and
has been here eight years.”
The “curer” was taking in money at a rate that should have allowed him
to retire in much less time than that, but no doubt pride in his work
kept him at it. Formerly he had operated in São Paulo itself, but had
been banished outside the city limits. An elaborate enameled sign
announced that on Sundays and holidays he gave no cures, “no matter what
the provocation.” As he reëntered the hut, the whole throng uncovered or
curtseyed. A peculiar fact was that a large number of his clients seemed
to be in the most robust of health; no doubt in these cases his cures
were most effective. Several well-dressed little girls were forced in to
consult him, plainly against their wills and better judgment, for they
laughed at the silly fraud, and one of them shocked the sanctimonious
crowd by calling him “velho barbudo” (old bewhiskered). There is a
Brazilian saying that “E mais facil enganar a humanidade que
desenganal-a,” which might be freely translated, “It is easier to
squeeze the human head into an uncouth shape than to squeeze it back
again to normal.”
We found that the Kinetophone appealed less and less as we descended the
scale of wealth and education. In the workingman’s district of Barra
Funda, to which we went after a week down in Santos, we were escorted by
mobs of urchins until we felt like a country circus, but there was
little gain in playing to such audiences. In the slang of Brazil, “brass
was lacking,” and we gave matinées to scatterings of “deadheads” and
half-price children and evening performances to thin, apathetic houses.
The young toughs we would not let in free took revenge by mutilating our
cloth-mounted posters, the managers lost our newspaper cuts, and nearly
half our slight share of the receipts was paid in nickel! We were held
up, too, by one of the ubiquitous national holidays. The second of
November was the _Dia dos Finados_, a sort of Brazilian Memorial Day
sacred to weeping and the laying on of flowers—not to mention
flirting—in all the cemeteries, and not to be enlivened by mere
theatrical performances. Those of the undress variety “got away with it”
by announcing a “solemn program,” but when I protested against this
forced holiday, contrary to contract, the irreverent ex-bootblack grew
wrathy and insisted that on such a day our show was “too frivolous!”
But if the human audiences did not respond, we now and then got proof,
sometimes in disastrous form, that our entertainment was realistic. In
several of the barn-like theaters in the outskirts of São Paulo we were
obliged to “shoot from the back,” that is, the projecting machine was
set up at the rear of the stage and the pictures were thrown upon the
back of the curtain. One evening some friend of the stage hands brought
a terrier with him. Among the demonstrations of the “Portuguese Lecture”
with which we opened our part of the program was a collie that rushed
out barking upon the screen stage. Barely had he dashed into view this
time when the terrier sprang madly upon him and all but wrecked the
curtain and the performance.
It was not until the fourth of November that my real job began. Our
engagement with the “Companhia Brazileira” was drawing to a close at an
old theater out by the gas-works, and the hour had come for me to find
out whether I was a real “movie” magnate or merely a ticket-taker; for
the carrying out of a contract made by someone else is quite a different
thing from faring forth into the world and making contracts. I set out
for the interior of the State of São Paulo, therefore, with misgivings,
not only as to my own abilities but because only “Tut” and Carlos, who
did not yet speak the same language, were left to run the show.
I was bound for Campinas, third city of the state, but the town of
Jundiahy looked promising and I dropped off there. It was a straggling
coffee center of some sixteen thousand inhabitants, rather picturesquely
strewn over a rolling hillside, at the summit of which bulked a big
yellow building bearing the familiar name “Polytheama.” In the
electric-light plant next door I learned the name of the manager, but I
visited a dozen other buildings before I ran him down, only to find that
the real owner and contract-maker was the prefect and chief mogul of the
town. We found him surrounded by much ceremony and a score of cringing
fellow-citizens in his inner sanctum of the _prefeitura_. I introduced
myself with as brief formality as possible and told him that the
Kinetophone was to end its engagement in São Paulo a week later and that
it might be to his advantage, as well as to that of Jundiahy, to have it
stop there for the night of Friday, the thirteenth, on our way to
Campinas. He replied that he had made a special trip down to São Paulo
to see this new “marvel of the American wizard,” but that he had never
dreamed we might be induced to come to Jundiahy. He was highly
flattered, but could he and his modest little town really afford so
remarkable an entertainment? I offered to book the attraction for a
hundred and fifty dollars. He looked up the rate of exchange in the São
Paulo morning paper, smiled sadly over the figures he penciled on the
margin of it, and regretted that it was impossible to pay a fixed sum,
especially in such hard times.
I took leave of him and turned back toward the station. But I felt
almost superstitious at the thought of failing in my first attempt to
make a contract and yielded to the entreaties of the manager beside me
to return and seek some other basis of arrangement. The prefect showed
more pleasure than surprise at my return and offered to rent me the
“Polytheama” for one night at 80$, we to pay for orchestra, light,
license, employees, and all the rest. I declined. “Tut” could scarcely
be expected to handle so complicated a proposition to our advantage. It
then being my move, I dug down into my portfolio and brought forth a
contract which Linton by some stroke of luck or genius had made in a
small town of Chile, giving him seventy per cent. of the gross receipts.
I would gladly have accepted the “fifty-fifty” basis on which we were
then playing, rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of
the Chilean contract and my ever improving Portuguese I got the prefect
to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the
privilege of charging to his account the cost of our transportation from
São Paulo, just in order not to seem too eager, I agreed. I drew up
duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising
matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next
train north.
It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling
coffee-clad hills, and the siesta hour was not yet over. I took a
_tigre_, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed
myself in a big bare front room of the principal hotel, began my
professional inquiries at once. The important theaters were the “Casino
Carlos Gomes” and the “Theatro Rink.” The former looked rather small and
dainty for our purposes; besides, it ranked as a municipal playhouse,
and I did not yet feel like going into politics on so lavish a scale.
The “Rink” was a great barn of a place of less aristocratic appearance,
and in the course of an hour I coaxed the negro boys attached to it to
rout out the manager. He was a plain, business-like young fellow with
almost American ideas of advertising and management, and we were soon
engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old
programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and
Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and
as he grew interested we sat down at a table on the gloomy unlighted
stage where a Portuguese company was stuttering and ranting through the
comedy they were to perpetrate that night. The first two days we might
devote to Campinas were much more important than the one I had booked in
Jundiahy. For one thing they were Saturday and Sunday, and in addition
the latter was November 15th, Brazil’s Second Independence day. I
proposed that we play five nights at two hundred and fifty dollars a
night. The manager smoked half a cigarette pensively, then said that if
I had only come before the war he would readily have consented, but that
now it was impossible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract on him.
No, he would only split even, and there we stuck for some time. He was
adaptable, however, and we finally came to an agreement. He was to
double the price of admission, advertise “three days only” with much
gusto, including a special street-car covered with banners and filled
with musicians to parade the streets, and give us half the total
receipts. On the less important days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday he
was to give his customary subscription section without our assistance,
we to appear about nine, which is the fashionable hour in larger
Brazilian towns, with the price reduced to the normal one milreis—this
concession to be kept dark, of course, until the double-priced holidays
were over—and we to get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our
sections.
My misgivings had largely taken flight, for before sunset of my first
day “on the road,” in this new sense, I had contracted the principal
theaters in two important towns at better terms than Linton himself had
been able to get in Brazil, and had the show booked for two weeks ahead.
It took me all that evening to draw up the contracts with the “Rink,”
write the contents of them in English for “Tut” and in Portuguese for
Carlos, and explain to the manager our several advertising schemes, but
I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for
frail humanity to be.
After so good a day’s work I decided to allow myself time to look
Campinas over, instead of departing at dawn. It is a place of
considerable importance, both as a coffee center and as the largest and
most prominent city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Only a
few years before it had been a focus of yellow fever; now that scourge
had disappeared and sanitation seemed to have come to stay. Any city on
earth would point with pride to the rectangle of royal palms, here
growing unusually far inland, which surround the Largo Carlos Gomes.
That name is widespread throughout the city, for it was here that the
mulatto, Gomes, composer of the opera “O Guaraní” and generally rated
Brazil’s chief musician, was born. There is a statue of him, baton in
hand, bronze music-desk behind him, in a prominent little square in the
center of town—a fragile fellow of typical Brazilian lack of physique,
overweighed by the mass of unbarbered locks which seem to be the sign of
musicians irrespective of nationality. Campinas appears to have a
special trend toward music, for it is also the birthplace of the
pianist, Guiomar Novaes.
The train sped away through endless rows of coffee, stretching out of
sight over rolling horizons. The region seemed more fertile than that
about São Paulo city, with a redder soil, though this may only have been
because here it had recently rained. Unlike those elsewhere, the
Brazilian coffee bushes stood out on the bare hillsides entirely
unshaded, the fields often looking as if they had been combed with a
gigantic comb. Within an hour I stopped at Villa Americana, a small
country town with a plow factory, a cotton-and-ribbon-mill, and a
fertile landscape in every direction. It is the railway station for
large numbers of Americans, or ex-Americans, chiefly farmers, who are
scattered for many miles roundabout. I found the first of them opposite
the station, a doctor who had been practicing here for a quarter of a
century, and who stepped to the telephone to call upon one of the colony
to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress,
looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern
states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of
a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived
in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant
church which he had been mainly instrumental in building.
In 1867 bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states
emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the
federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first
tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and
several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he
had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started anew
as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the
Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family
during Sherman’s march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older
generation in this region had fought through the war as “Johnny Rebs,”
as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon
after the beginning of reconstruction days “to escape carpet-baggers,
free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going
to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again.” They still called
Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, “them down East
Yanks,” and seemed hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any
of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery,
the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders
of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans
were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the
resultant advantages in production when high prices prevailed. But the
majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these
conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more
prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up
to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought
about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their
color-line.
Most of these transplanted Americans now admit that they would probably
have done better, at least economically, to have remained in the United
States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain
the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern
plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of
the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as “belonging to the
overseer class,” others as “right low down trash.” On the whole, the
colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards
of morality, though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was
surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my
guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies
were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their
pronunciation had peculiar little idiosyncrasies, such as giving a
Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our
language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United
States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their
English. Their farm-hands they called “comrades,” though these were in
almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average
of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about
it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese
with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes
Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, preferred
that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on
English. Among the “low down trash,” most of the second generation was
said to know no English whatever. On the whole, the colony was another
demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her
immigrants to any such extent as does the United States.
When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all
that goes with it, the son “hitched up” and drove me out through
eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit
another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern
mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and
keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English
vocabularies and the mountaineer’s self-reliance. Yet they were not
always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely of wit, with a manner
which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is
the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony
introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in
Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their
way into town. When the Americans first arrived, they had planted much
cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned, and
they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving
their attention chiefly to corn and beans.
It is a great misfortune to Brazil that nearly all her rivers run inland
to the Plata or the Amazon, for lack of this natural transportation has
undoubtedly retarded the development of the country, though it has
probably also abetted the development of railroads. Particularly in the
State of São Paulo there is perhaps as great a network of them as
anywhere in the western hemisphere outside the United States. No fewer
than five systems, better laid and equipped than the Brazilian average,
and with many branches, connect São Paulo city with the rest of the
state and with those to the north and south, while a few months after I
passed that way one of these opened direct rail communication to
Corumbá, far across the wilderness of Matto Grosso on the Paraguay
river. One of the results is that the coffee state is surprisingly well
developed, with many important towns, vastly more agriculture, and much
less forest than the imagination pictures.
As far as Rio Claro, a few hours north of Villa Americana, the railroad
service was excellent. Beyond that large, one-story, checkerboard,
monotonous town ran a wood-burning narrow-gauge, the tenders piled high
with cordwood. Though ours was a “limited” train, passing many stations
without officially stopping, the British “staff” system required the
engineer to exchange orders with every station master, and made it
necessary to slow down to a walk at every settlement. The farther we got
into the interior the more often were we entrusted to wood-burners, the
smaller became the trains, the closer the engines with their deluge of
smoke, sparks, and cinders, and the more we pitched and rolled along the
narrow tracks, which wound incessantly among low hills. The landscape
grew more and more wild, almost a wilderness in places, though no such
tropical jungle as I had imagined, with sometimes no real stop for an
hour or more.
São Carlos was a lively town of some 15,000 people in a hollow among
rolling hills, its houses separated by masses of green trees. There were
plenty of Fords at the station and swarms of _carregadores_,
baggage-carriers with license numbers on their caps—you couldn’t sell
your old shoes in Brazil unless you wore a license showing that the
politicians had given you permission to do so. Here one was struck again
by the fact that great competition does not necessarily mean low prices.
Considering themselves lucky to get a job or two a day, these carriers
growled at anything less than a milreis for the slightest exertion, and
expected enough for carrying a suitcase across the street to keep their
families for a week.
In the best room available at the best hotel I could scarcely turn
around without barking my shins, and the window opened so directly on
the sidewalk that the shoulder of every passer-by seemed to jostle me.
The weather was volatile as a Brazilian, with heavy downpours for ten
minutes alternating with ten minutes of sunshine. I waded down into the
valley through wide streets reeking in blood-red mud and up to the
“Theatro São Carlos,” the manager-owner of which I at length unearthed,
in spite of the prevarications of his negro servants. As usual he was
one of the pillars of the town, of that aristocratic flimsiness of the
man who has never done any real work for generations back, and his air
said plainly that he knew he could outwit any simpleton of a foreigner.
I set my first demands high, therefore, in order to give him the
satisfaction of feeling that he had driven a close bargain when he at
length agreed to as much as I had expected and ten per cent. more than I
would have accepted under compulsion. I got his name signed to duplicate
contracts while he was still under the influence of my hypnotic eye and
was giving him instructions, in the guise of information, on advertising
and the arrangement of programs, when he remarked casually:
“Of course Edison himself comes with the show? Our people will be as
anxious to see him as to get acquainted with his new invention, of which
I have heard such splendid reports.”
“Why—er—it may be that he will not be able to get here,” I stammered.
“You see, he has several little things on hand; besides, he is a married
man and—and——”
How excellent my Portuguese and my winning salesman manner had become
was proved by the fact that in the end I did not have to abrogate the
contract for two days at the “Theatro São Carlos.”
[Illustration: At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth
charged with the advertising painted his own portrait of Edison. He may
be made out leaning affectionately on the right shoulder of his
masterpiece]
[Illustration: The central praça of Campinas]
[Illustration: Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church
above the town]
[Illustration: Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is
surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations]
The town of Araraquara proved to be of about the same size and activity
as São Carlos, and especially well off in public buildings somewhat out
of proportion with its general appearance. Clustered in the center,
about the large, red-earth praça, was the church, an old sheet-iron
playhouse, an ambitious Municipal Theater, closed as usual, a large and
well-arranged cinema bearing the unescapable name “Polytheama,” and,
across the street in a red lot of its own, an ambitious new two-story
building labeled in English the “Araraquara College.” I took a turn
through several of the wide, irregular, red-smeared streets to make sure
that the place was worth playing, then found that the man I sought was
also manager of the largest store in town, next door to his playhouse.
He proved to be a short, unshaven young Italian who had not been long in
Brazil, which accounted for his being so good-hearted and easy-going
that I had no difficulty in taking sixty-five per cent. away from him
for Saturday and Sunday night performances. I might have had as large a
share of the special Sunday children’s matinée, but as what had become a
custom required him to distribute candy and toys to the children, I took
pity on him and split that part even.
One of my fellow-countrymen was head of the college. His most noticeable
characteristics were as a smoker of corn-husk wrapped cigarettes and as
an authority on the history of Brazil. He had long been a teacher and
would have preferred to spend his summer vacations in the land of his
forefathers; but these came in December and January, when it is cold in
the United States, and it would take nearly the two months to reach and
return from there, while he could cross to Lisbon in twelve days and
spend most of his vacation comfortably tramping about southern Europe.
His Brazilian wife and two bilingual daughters were almost American in
point of view, though by no means in appearance. The boys of Brazil, the
head master asserted, are more tractable than American boys, also more
superficial, learning more easily but forgetting much more quickly—a
statement frequently heard from American educators throughout South
America. That they were tractable was quickly evident, for when a native
teacher sent to show me over the establishment called a boy away from a
football game—rugby is popular even with workmen on coffee estates in
São Paulo State—he trotted meekly off to do an errand without a hint of
resentment. There were half a dozen American boys in the school, all
Brazilian born of men from our South, and not merely had they taken on
many of the characteristics of their companions, but they had washed-out
complexions and no suggestion of that “scrappiness” familiar on our own
playgrounds. This pastiness of skin is general among the sons of
northerners born in Brazil and quite different from the color of the
blonde descendants of Portuguese in whom the Goth crops out.
Morally the head master had been thoroughly Brazilianized. He had grown
tolerant of the many little things which are not quite as they should
be, having lost the familiar American longing to reform the world and
fallen into many of the lesser vices and easy-going customs of Brazil.
He had, however, introduced coëducation into his school, against the
advice of the natives, because he believed it necessary to proper sex
development, and now the families that had been most strongly against it
sent their children to the college. In the afternoon we drove by
automobile to the professor’s fruit-farm, which a former slave was paid
75$ a month to keep in order. Two of his piccaninnies followed us around
like pet raccoons, constantly holding plates of fruit within our reach,
and the atmosphere of the place was much what it must have been in our
South before the war when the “mastah” visited one of his plantations.
On our return we met an American farmer from far out in the country. He
had come to Brazil twenty years before, when already an adult, but he
spoke English with considerable difficulty and a distinct accent, though
his Portuguese was by no means perfect.
Beyond the River Mogy Guassú, the first I had crossed since leaving São
Paulo, I changed from the “Paulista” railway system to the winding and
narrow-gauge “Mogyana.” We passed many fields of charred stumps,
suggesting how _matta_ was cleared for the planting of coffee. The rare
towns were monotonously alike, dull-white walls and red-tile roofs of
the same shade as the soil, which turned all light-colored animals,
including the children who played in it and the men who worked in it, a
pinkish hue. This red soil is the terror of housewives in São Paulo
State, especially in the dry season, when it sifts thickly over
everything and clings tenaciously to every exposed surface. Soon we were
completely surrounded by coffee fields, _sertões_ of coffee, a world
absolutely shut in by coffee bushes, which actually brushed the sides of
the train and stretched away, endless and straight and unerring as the
files of a well-trained army, up and down over hill and dale, with never
the slightest break in alignment, into the dense-blue horizon for mile
after swift mile.
One plantation through which we traveled for more than an hour has
2,500,000 bushes; an English corporation owns an unbroken sixteen
kilometers of coffee trees, crisscrossed by a private railway. Down in
the hollow of each _fazenda_, or section of plantation, were long rows
of whitewashed, tile-roofed huts, all run together into one or two
buildings, sometimes with a church attached. These were the homes of the
_colonos_, or coffee workmen, once negro slaves, now chiefly Italians,
though I caught glimpses of a number of Japanese, the women still in
their native dress and carrying their babies on their backs by bands
across the breast. Some years ago a few ship-loads of Japanese were sent
to Brazil, landing in Santos, and most of them came so directly into the
back country, and are so nearly segregated there, that even their racial
tendency for imitation has not caused them to throw off home customs.
Here and there, too, were groups of European immigrants still in the
costumes of their homelands in the year, in some cases distant, when
they left them. Italian colonization succeeded negro slavery closely in
São Paulo State, which owes its prosperity and its leadership in the
world’s coffee production mainly to these newcomers. In addition to
their living quarters and modest wages, the _colonos_ are usually given
a piece of ground on which to plant corn, black beans, and mandioca for
their own use, and sometimes permission to graze a few head of stock.
One of the chief troubles of the coffee _fazendeiro_, however, is the
tendency of Italian _colonos_ to abandon the sun-drenched fields as soon
as they get a bit of money together and go to town to engage in some
minor form of business.
Coffee blossoms and berries are often found on the same bush at the same
time, and there are seven grades of the product, according to the time
in which it is picked. The regular harvest is from May to July or
August. Then the ground under the bushes is carefully swept, if it is
smooth, or is spread with cloth, and the berries are scraped from the
branches with one motion of the hand, sparing as many leaves as
possible, after which all is swept together and sent to great drying
platforms that look not unlike concrete tennis courts. The _colonos_
labor on the piece-work system, each family being responsible for a
given number of plants and the picking being paid by the liter. The
berries are planted some eight feet apart in both directions, making
straight rows from four angles. It is better to set out young plants
from a nursery, but this is too slow a process for large plantations.
Some of the land was formerly treeless campo, but a large part, and the
most fertile, has been cleared of dense _matta_ in the crude and
wasteful way of pioneer communities, leaving only here and there a
majestic tropical tree topping a ridge. The plant begins to produce in
about four years, and has been known to continue to the age of a hundred
and thirty, growing up from the stump as often as it is cut down. An
ordinarily good tree will produce twenty-five quarts of berries, which
in their maturity considerably resemble small cherries, the two coffee
beans inside requiring continual attention before they are finally dried
and sorted and disappear in sixty-kilogram sacks in the direction of
Santos and the outside world.
The plants were brought to Brazil from French Guiana long ago, and
coffee-growing was a paying business in the State of São Paulo “until
the government heard of it.” The number of non-producers who get a
finger into the coffee cup before it reaches the actual consumer is
beyond belief. Taxes begin with so much per thousand “feet” of plants,
and continue incessantly until the product reaches the retail market.
Transportation from the field to Santos is ordinarily two or three times
as much as from Santos to New York, and a sack for which the grower
received ten dollars the grocer in the United States has been known to
sell for forty-five, even in the days before the World War produced so
many experts in profiteering. It is often asserted that the coffee
_fazendeiro_ makes more profit out of renting the bottom lands, where
the danger of frost makes the planting of coffee inadvisable, as
_chacaras_, or small market gardens, or from the catch crops that can be
planted between the rows after picking-time, than from his many times
more acres of coffee-trees. Throttling taxes are his greatest trial, and
the prophecy is frequently heard that this growing habit of Brazilian
government will eventually ruin the great coffee industry of São Paulo.
At sunset we coasted down into Riberão Preto, fourth city of the state,
in the bottom of a great shallow bowl of earth lined uninterruptedly
with coffee bushes as far as the eye could reach. In the pink glow of
evening a _carregador_ put me and my baggage into a carriage before I
had time to express any personal desires on the subject, and I was
driven through the Saturday night activities of a lively, rather
frontier-like town to the chief hotel. What the other half dozen in town
must have been I dread to imagine, for this resembled nothing so much as
a dingy, careless, unadorned, lack-comfort style of barn, suggesting
that I was getting back again into the real South America, away from the
fringe of near-civilization on the coast. It was seething with
travelers, salesmen, an Italian theatrical company, servants, dogs, and
innumerable caged parrots, and I was assigned another of those
intolerable ground-floor rooms opening directly on the street that are
unescapable in the one-story towns of interior Brazil. Nor had I had
time to test the one comfort of such establishments, the shower bath,
when a jangling bell demanded that all guests come to supper at once, on
penalty of going without it entirely.
It would be difficult to speak kindly of Brazilian hotels. As in
Spanish-America, nothing but black coffee is to be had until _almoço_,
or “breakfast,” between ten and eleven, which is followed about sunset
by _jantar_. Both these meals are heavy, lacking in everything but
quantity, and made up almost entirely of meat. This _carne verde_
(“green” meat), having just been killed and so called to distinguish it
from _xarque_ or _carne secca_, the salted or sun-dried variety familiar
in the rural districts, is cooked in several different ways, all of
which leave it hopelessly tough. Whether in hotels or railway-station
restaurants, the menu is unvarying, and eight or ten huge plates of meat
are slapped down in the middle of a long, noisy, public table, where
each guest grasps what he can before his neighbors make way with it. To
save time or trouble all dishes are served at once, and are habitually
cold before they reach the ultimate consumer. There is a great paucity
of vegetables, even potatoes being considered a luxury and rarely
reaching the interior of the country. Instead, there stands on every
table a glass jar of what looks like coarse yellow salt, but which
proves to be _farinha_, flour made of the mandioca or _yuca_ that is
served boiled in the Andean countries, and which is used throughout
Brazil to thicken soups, or eaten dry.
The hotel proprietor usually gives his attention exclusively to the bar,
which he claims to be the only paying part of his establishment. By
night a servant sleeps just inside the front door, leaving room between
it and his cot for the belated guest to squeeze through; in the daytime
the _pateo_ is an uproar of unguided servants and ill-bred children. If
you ask to have your bread brushed off after the waiter has dropped it
on the floor you are henceforth known as “that curious gringo”; if you
prefer your coffee or soup made without having an unwashed cook
frequently dip in her spoon to taste the progress and toss the residue
back into the pot, there is just one way to get it—by bringing your own
cook with you. In your room the mirror is certain to be placed at about
the height of the average American’s belt buckle, so that to shave
requires either kneeling on the floor or sitting on something, usually
not to be found, about the size of a soapbox. Hot water being unknown,
shaving becomes an ordeal equal to trying to shut out the sight of a
mulatto across the table inhaling a mammoth all-meat meal with such boa
constrictor ease that he needs only to give the tail of an occasional
extra large mouthful an affectionate pat with his knife as it goes down.
Whatever he lacks in other ways the typical Brazilian hotel-keeper makes
up for in prices. He is rarely a native, and you can scarcely expect a
European to come over and set up hotels in the wilderness of South
America out of mere love for his fellow-man. Usually his only interest
is to make as much as possible as soon as possible and hurry back to his
native land. Not merely are the rates high, but it is the almost
invariable custom to manipulate the items in such a way that a stay of
twenty-four hours becomes at least two days. Personally, I early adopted
the habit of handing the proprietor the amount called for by his posted
daily rate and assuring him that I would look on with great interest
while he collected more than that; but the native Brazilian has the
notion that he loses caste if he protests at any price charged him, so
that the foreigner’s refusal to be fleeced is sure to make him
conspicuous, even if it does not cause his fellow-guests to rate him a
freak and a nuisance.
Nearly every street of Riberão Preto runs out into red earth, a
tenacious soil that is tracked along the sidewalks and into every shop
and dwelling, until the whole town takes on a reddish tinge. Near the
center of town, at the lowest spot of the hollow in which it is built,
there is a perpetual frog chorus, and from the outskirts coffee-fields
stretch up out of the great shallow bowl and away over endless horizons.
The Italian company announced its début on the evening after my arrival
by shooting off fireworks, one advertising scheme that had not occurred
to me. There were so many cinemas in town that I had to spend real money
to visit several of them before I was competent to decide which one
would best answer our purposes. All those of importance, it turned out,
from the municipal “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” covering a whole block in the
center of town, down through the inevitable “Polytheama” to the
loose-mannered “Casino,” flowing with liquor and aging French
adventuresses, were in the hands of a hard-headed Spaniard of long
Brazilian experience, so that I considered myself fortunate to get his
name at the bottom of a contract giving us fifty-five per cent. of the
gross receipts during a six-day engagement.