ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT
We steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin of Riberão Preto
on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town
of any size. Coffee-fields at length gave way to brush-covered campo and
grazing cattle, the train winding in great curves around slight hills,
like water seeking an outlet or a lost person wholly undecided which way
to go. Early in the afternoon we crossed the Rio Grande into the State
of Minas Geraes, which at once showed itself less developed, more dry
and sandy, with an increasing number of wooded valleys and ridges. There
was some coffee here, too, but cared for in a half-hearted way compared
with the great plantations of São Paulo. We passed a large gang of
Japanese workmen, and many zebus or humped cattle, both in the fields
and working as oxen. The ride was not only too dirty and dusty to be
pleasant, but sparks from our wood-fired engine poured in at the open
windows until, for all my dodging and brushing, a dozen holes were
burned in my still comparatively new movie-magnate garb. One station
stood 3400 feet above sea-level, and we all but shook ourselves and the
cars to pieces as we rattled down again into Uberaba, at an elevation of
2500, just as day was escaping over beyond the mountains.
The place was smaller and less progressive than I had imagined, with
certainly not more than ten thousand inhabitants, instead of the 25,000
credited to it by the “Handbook of Brazil.” I was not over-anxious to
make a contract with the one pathetic little cinema in town, at least
until I had seen what lay beyond and decided whether it would be worth
while to come this far inland. The manager, a clerk in the local
drugstore, was more than eager to present so extraordinary an attraction
to his fellow-townsmen, but fares and baggage rates would have cut
deeply into our profits and I refused to sign without a guarantee of a
conto for two days’ performances. He offered 800$ and would undoubtedly
have given almost any percentage, but I held out for the million reis
until we finally parted good friends but not business associates.
Somehow I had always thought of Minas Geraes as rocky, arid, dry, and
cold, something like upper Peru; the mere name “General Mines” had a
hard and chilly sound to it. But long before noon in Uberaba, high as it
was, I was reminded that it is well north of Rio and almost tropical.
There was an old air about the town, partly because the humidity causes
grass, bushes, and even trees to grow on and about the churches and
other loose-jointed buildings of stone and porous bricks, but also
because Minas is a much older state than São Paulo, overrun by miners
long before the agricultural riches of its neighbor were scratched.
We were off again at one behind the same old narrow-gauge wood burner,
through a rolling, bushy country, and scattered with huge ant-hills,
mildly similar to the Bolivian Chaco. The only real town along the way
was Uberabinha, squatting in the bottom of a sandy and shallow valley,
inhabited by barefoot and red-earth smeared people whose only place of
entertainment seemed to be the double-towered church bulking above the
general hut level. Night was falling when we pulled into Araguary at the
end of the “Mogyana” railway. The tidal wave of baggage-carriers and
hotel touts was only less in size than those farther south, but for once
I escaped them entirely by putting my valise on the head of a negro boy
and wading through the mud with him to a _pensão_ run by an old woman.
The room was really a mud cave, the mattress filled with corn-husks, and
I was reduced to candle-light for the first time in Brazil. But the
special chicken supper was a great relief from the avalanche of meat,
surrounded by wolfing natives, that would have been my lot at a hotel,
and, best of all, the _pensão_ was just across the way from the first
station of the “Goyaz Railway,” on which I was to depart at dawn.
It was pitch dark, with frequent heavy showers, when I set out to wander
incognito through the town. The weak electric-lights along its
mud-and-grass streets and praças suggested fireflies or
will-o’-the-wisps flitting about through the thick, black night. There
was, to be sure, a dentist, who was also owner, editor and printer of
the local paper, and the town undertaker—and the tombstones behind the
lips of many of the inhabitants hinted that he mixed the three
professions.
I came more or less near requiring his services in his least popular
capacity. As we were drawing into the station the mob of porters and
hackmen had given me their special attention, one negro in particular
thrusting his uninviting face through the car-window and pawing me with
his long unwashed hands in that half-affectionate, half-wheedling way of
his class and profession throughout Brazil, at the same time offering
his undesired services some seventy-five times at the top of his voice.
When I could endure him no longer, I rapped him over the knuckles with
the handle of my umbrella. Now a blow, however light and for whatever
provocation, is a shocking indignity in Brazil, only to be properly
wiped out in blood. I was not long, therefore, in recognizing the fellow
again when, during my stroll about town, he suddenly bobbed up
noiselessly out of the night and, after bawling a mouthful of vile
language after me, slipped away again with the information that he would
fix me yet. I gave him no more attention than one usually does a
half-drunken negro in tropical lands, and had entirely forgotten the
incident when I boarded another tottering little train next morning. All
at once a sound caused me to look up from my reading in the first-class
car I was sharing with one other passenger, to see the same negro
advancing swiftly down the aisle toward me, grasping a long and
sinister-looking knife. It was my luck to be unarmed for the first time
in Brazil that I had needed a weapon, having left my revolver with “Tut”
as a protection for the money he might take in. Even my umbrella, which
would not have been wholly useless in a hand-to-hand encounter, was in
the rack above me, and to rise and grasp it might suggest fear. I sat
where I was, therefore, with my feet drawn up on the opposite seat,
where they could shoot out quickly if danger became really imminent, and
stared at the fellow with the unwinking eye of the professional
lion-tamer. Whether it was this or his lack of any other intention than
to retrieve his reputation among his fellows and salve his injured
feelings by a threatening gesture, he confined himself to flourishing
the knife, advancing several times with rolling eyes almost to within
reach of my feet, and then backing away again. Finally he retreated
toward the door with an expression ludicrously like that of a whipped
animal, while I rose and walked leisurely down upon him with the same
fixed stare until he stepped to the ground. During it all neither train
nor local authorities made any attempt to come to my assistance, and I
carried away the impression that I should not have gotten out of
Araguary in a hurry had circumstances forced me to shoot a man of the
same color as the majority of the population.
We tossed and creaked along all the morning to cover the seventy miles
of the little bankrupt line that penetrates the south-westernmost corner
of the great interior State of Goyaz. The bustling modern civilization
of São Paulo and the coast had gradually petered out to nothing more
than two telegraph wires jumping from pole to crooked pole across a more
or less rolling wilderness of bushy forest, _pura matta_, as the
Brazilians call uncleared country, in a voice almost of terror. Here and
there were vast, heavily wooded basins around the edge of which we
slowly circled, fighting wood-burner sparks with one eye while taking in
the slight scenery with the other. There was a bit of coffee-growing and
a bit of lumber was being cut, but as a whole the region was completely
undeveloped and unexploited. A flaming purple tree here and there broke
the rolling, bushy, brown monotony. The scant population was a sort of
semi-wild outcast of civilization, wedded to dirt and inconvenience,
living in open-work pole houses covered with aged thatched roofs that
resembled dilapidated and sun-faded straw hats. The men wore wide belts,
with many silver, or imitation silver, ornaments and with half a dozen
leather compartments in them for their money and other small
possessions. In a pocket of their thin cotton coats even our local
fellow-passengers carried the dried covering of an ear of corn, and when
they wished to smoke, which was almost incessantly, they pulled off a
corn-husk, shaped it with a knife, rolled it up and put it behind an
ear, cut off a bit of tobacco from a twist plug, crushed it between
their palms, and rolled a corn-husk cigarette.
At eight we rumbled across the River Paranahyba into the State of Goyaz.
At the same time we crossed the nineteenth parallel of latitude, and the
climate should have been warm and humid; but as all this vast tableland
averages 2500 feet above sea-level, it had distinctly the atmosphere of
the temperate zones. There were a few cattle, less well-bred than those
of Minas. At Goyandira, a few scattered huts beside a small stream, we
were given time to gorge the customary Brazilian meal on a table already
crowded with dishes when we arrived, and at eleven we drew up at
Catalão, last outpost of civilization in this direction, and a
personified End of the Railroad.
It was evident at a glance that I need not consider Catalão from a
business standpoint. Though from a distance it had looked like quite a
town, it was merely a village of a scanty thousand inhabitants scattered
along a small creek, with mangos trodden underfoot, its houses built of
mud plastered on sticks and then whitewashed. Compared even with the
_Mineiros_ over the nearby state border, the _Goyanos_ were
backwoodsmen; beside the energetic, up-to-date _Paulistas_ they had the
vacant expression of ruminating cattle. About the town an almost
treeless world, rather dry for lack of rain, stretched endlessly away in
every direction. When the midday heat had somewhat abated—for there was
nothing cold about Catalão, for all its altitude—I climbed to a barren
hillock topped by an old ruined church in which scores of black rooks
had built their nests and from which bushy and rolling Goyaz spread away
like a lightly broken sea. The view was so vast that one could see the
curve of the earth, the blue haze ever thickening until it grew almost
opaque on a horizon so distant that it seemed raised well above the
general level. The line of this was quite distinct for its entire sweep,
yet it joined almost imperceptibly a sky heaped and piled with irregular
masses of white clouds that cast their broken, fantastic shadows
everywhere across the spreading plains, yet did not conceal overhead the
sky of mother-of-pearl tint. Below, the village, like a capricious waif
that has come here far from nowhere out of mere spite or unsociability,
made itself as comfortable as possible in its shallow hollow among
dark-green masses of mango-trees. Roads, just born rather than made,
straggled out of it in all directions, soon to be lost in the green and
haze-blue immensity, as if man had dared venture only a little way out
into the unpeopled universe, vast and trackless as the sea. A few
venturesome _fazenda_ houses peered forth from their mango groves a mile
or two from the town, but these did not noticeably break the uninhabited
and virgin world, the _sertão_ or _matta_, which mere mention of “the
plains of Goyaz” calls up in the imagination. It was a distinct pleasure
to be again entirely beyond the hubbub of cities, beyond the reach even
of the ubiquitous trolley, with the world below deadly silent but for
the occasional far distant, yet piercing scream of an ox-cart creeping
imperceptibly along one of the languid, haphazard, straggling trails
that appeared from somewhere out in the wilderness. They sounded like
factory whistles, these distant _carros de boi_, with their solid wooden
wheels and total innocence of grease on their turning axles, the scream
of which—_chiar_, the Brazilians call it, aping the sound—ceased at
length abruptly before the principal shop, run by a “Turk,” where the
eight or ten oxen, steered by a driver who prodded them in the neck with
a goad lying over his shoulder without so much as glancing back, and
whom they followed unerringly, fell into the spirit of the scene, the
silence broken now only by the occasional sharp, vexed note of a worried
rook and the somnolent humming of flies. The End of the Railroad means
far away and quiet, indeed, in these seething modern days. Before long
we may not be able to find it at all; yet one feels at times impelled to
come to such ends of the road and climb to a high place overlooking the
world, there to sit and unravel the tangled threads of life into some
semblance of order again before descending to plunge once more headlong
into the fray.
The worst of coming 710 miles up-country from Santos—and the time it had
taken made it seem ten times that—was that I must spend as long, without
even the reward of new sights and experiences, to come down again. The
same glorified way-freight carried us southward in the morning, and for
once it was crowded. Not only were there all my fellow-guests at the
run-down hovel owned by a “Turk” who had lived so long in Brazil that he
seemed to prefer Portuguese to his native Arabic, all of whom had spent
the night playing some noisy form of poker, but a new fork of the
railroad was being opened that day to Roncador (“Snorer,” it would be in
English), and everyone in Catalão who owned shoes had been invited to
ride out and help inaugurate. In consequence our tiny two-car train was
so densely packed with well-meaning but unpleasing mortals of all ages,
sexes, sizes and colors that we mere ticket-holders were crowded out of
seats and forced to stand on the swaying platforms as far as the
junction of Goyandyra. There we had to go without “breakfast,” because
the inaugurators assaulted the limited table supplies in such force that
passengers could not get within grabbing distance. It was perhaps as
well, for hunger is slight suffering compared with watching at close
range the contortions of such a throng stoking away whole knife-lengths
of those viands which they did not spill on the earth floor.
Below Uberaba the “Mogyana” branches, giving me new territory all the
way back to Campinas. Most of it looked unpromising for our purposes,
until nightfall brought me to Franca, only three hours north of Riberão
Preto and the terminus of a daily express. Here were two cinemas, side
by side on the central praça. I drifted into one of them and handed my
card to the owner-manager. When the crowd at last gave us a chance to
talk it over, I set my remarks to the tune of “Oh, this is an
unimportant, far-away little place and I don’t believe we will bother
with it.” The result was that I soon had the man all but on his knees to
have us come. He offered to rent the theater for ten per cent. of the
total receipts, and when I declined the trouble of staging the affair
ourselves, he begged me to let him do everything and take as our share
seventy per cent. of the proceeds. At last I had equalled that fabulous
Chilean contract! Indeed, had I been born with a mean disposition I
fancy I could have made that pillar of Franca do anything, short of
presenting me with his playhouse, to keep me outside the doors of his
hated rival.
I was gone again at sunrise and know naught of Franca, except what may
be seen at night and one added bit of information. It has a match
factory in which a huge stock of an article that the region still
imports from the outside world is locked up by government order because
the owners cannot raise the seven contos in twenty-reis stamps needed to
decorate the boxes before they can be placed on the market. Only once
during that day’s journey did I halt. At Cascavel, fittingly named
Rattlesnake, I took a branch line into the cool, grassy uplands of the
“Brazilian Switzerland” and spent the night in Poços de Caldas. This is
far-famed throughout the country as a watering-place at a goodly
elevation for Brazil, with sulphurous hot springs much frequented by
well-to-do natives during the season. But that was over; the
barracks-like hotel with its monasterial cells of rooms had only a
scattering of guests, and there was no visible reason why the
Kinetophone should journey to a spot that had fallen upon such lean
days. Half a day south I might have taken a direct line from Mogy Mirim
to Rio, but it was eleven days since I had heard our artists sing or
learned how things were faring with my two companions without a tongue
between them. I hurried on, therefore, to Campinas in time to be refused
admittance to our first performance at the “Rink”—until the youthful
manager, catching sight of me, thrust the door-keeper aside with
extended hand.
I found “Tut” and Carlos conversing freely together in a language that
was not Portuguese and certainly was not English. In Jundiahy they had
carried out my first contract so well in the face of rainy weather,
toboggan streets of uncobbled red mud, and a reputation as a “poor show
town,” as to win high praise, while even here in such a metropolis as
Campinas they showed every evidence of being able to give their
performance, watch the doors and at least count the “deadheads,” and
collect our share of the money without my assistance. The manager of the
“Rink” had lived up to his promise in the matter of advertising, and had
sent a street-car carrying a band and entirely covered with posters and
the likeness of Edison over every trolley-line in town. Yet our
audiences were not all they should have been on Brazil’s second
Independence Day, whether by reason of the possibility of a political
upheaval at the change of the national administration, that musical
Campinas was too “high-brow” for what Edison had to offer, or, as we
suspected, because city, state and nation were beginning to feel
seriously the pinch of the “brutal hard times.”
On the morning after our Campinas engagement the show and I again parted
company. While the former sped away up the broad-gauge “Paulista” to São
Carlos and points beyond, I took the slow and narrow “Mogyana” back the
way I had come, intending to catch the noon train westward from Mogy
Mirim toward Rio. But the pleading of a compatriot slightly altered my
plans. In Campinas we had made the acquaintance of a man from New York
and Jerusalem who was misusing his racial talents in strenuous efforts
to refute, in the interests of an American insurance company, the
Brazilian argument of “But why should I have my life insured and leave
my wife a lot of money to spend on some other man when I die?” Ideas,
specially those with a $ attached, sprouted overnight in the fertile
brain of my misplaced fellow-countryman, and bright and early that
Thursday morning he came running down to the station with a new one. He
had suddenly seen a chance to retrieve recent bad fortune by hiring the
Kinetophone outright at the conto for two nights which I had set as the
fixed price for small towns and taking it out to his old stamping-ground
of Amparo, where he proposed to enlist the services of his bosom
companions, the priests, nuns, and other Biblical influences of the
town, into selling tickets beforehand on the church-festival plan. I am
always ready to let a man make money, especially if he makes some for me
at the same time, so we dropped off at Jaguary and took the branch to
Amparo.
It was an unusually pleasing little town for Brazil, with all its
streets paved in stone blocks, several pretty little parks, and spread
along so narrow a valley that one could fancy the beans from its
coffee-clad hills rolling right down into the central praça ready for
roasting. But, like all the State of São Paulo, Amparo had unwisely put
all its eggs in one basket—the coffee basket—and whereas ten milreis an
_arroba_ is considered by coffee-growers only a fair price, Brazil’s
chief export was then selling for 3$500! Hence the town was “muito
ruim,” cold, stony dead from the theatrical point of view, and, though
there was a nice little theater with cozy seats and plenty of boxes for
the “excellentissimas familias,” the impresario had lost his nerve
completely. When my friend and guide gently mentioned 600$ a night as
the bargain of a life-time, the manager all but swallowed his neck, then
recovered sufficiently to say that a Portuguese company of the type most
beloved in Brazil had given a first-night the week before, after an
uproar of advertising, and had taken in just 25$! I immediately lost all
desire to bring the Kinetophone to Amparo, though my friend from
Manhattan and the Holy Land, with the admirable buoyancy of his race,
went up to the convent school to talk it over with the mother superior,
and saw his efforts crowned with success—to the extent of an invitation
to dinner.
From Mogy Mirim a shaky little train carried me westward through more
wilderness than coffee, past the lively little town of Itapira roofing a
slight hill, to a helter-skelter village called Sapucahy, where it
unloaded us on a platform, bag, baggage, and bathrobes, and backed away.
As frail a train backed in from the other direction and loaded us up
again, all the Brazilian travelers paying _carregadores_ to set their
bags down from the windows and up again, and after more than an hour of
fuss and frustration we creaked on. The yellow creek of Sapucahy, it
transpired, was the boundary between São Paulo, where the “Mogyana’s”
concession ended, and the State of Minas Geraes, where we had been taken
in charge by the “Rede Sul Mineira,” a branch of the “Brazilian Federal
Railways.”
The land was somewhat swampy now, more wild and unsettled, with parasol
pine-trees beside slender, undeveloped palms with thin tufts of
disheveled foliage. The town of Ouro Fino (“Fine Gold”) was a small,
off-the-main-line sort of place, but here the daily train got in at five
at night and did not leave until five in the morning, so whatever we
might make would be money in pocket. After supper I set out on the steep
hillside up which the town is built and down which run red mud streets,
and at length found at his club—_the_ club, in fact—the manager of the
local theater, a tar-brushed youth of aristocratic manners, or at least
gestures, who naturally accepted and signed without argument the
contract I handed him. Upon my return to the hotel I found the
dingy-looking room I had left an hour before gay with speckless white
bedclothes and fancy mosquito canopy, evidently in honor of the large
theatrical troupe which rumor already had it would soon be following in
my wake. Our train stood all night just outside my window, giving me,
perhaps, too great a feeling of security, for I was all but left behind.
It was already pulling out toward a faint crack in the darkness when I
scrambled on board, breakfastless and not fully dressed, and with the
privilege of paying a fifty per cent. fine on my ticket for not having
bought it at the station.
Long piles of wood for the locomotives stood along the way through a
wilderness inhabited by “poor white trash” in rags smeared with red
earth, who crowded to the doors of their thatched huts as we passed. For
some time we followed the Sapucahy, swollen red with floods that gave a
picturesque appearance to the hilly village of Itajubá on its banks.
This was a friendly little town where everyone spoke to strangers, after
the pleasant manner of back-country districts, but though it has an
important engineering school, it is little more than a grass-grown
hamlet, with a populous cemetery conveniently situated on a hill close
above it, so that all the inhabitants can drink to their ancestors.
Itajubá was just then the object of a general interest out of all
keeping with its size. Just next door to the “Cinema Edison” in which I
arranged for our appearance was the modest home of the new president of
Brazil. There he had lived most of his life—even since his election on
March first, though he was “Dudú’s” vice-president and required by the
constitution to preside over the senate—and he had left less than a week
before for his inauguration.
The train next set me down at Caxambú, another of the watering-places on
the irregular line across southwestern Minas, where the rolling country
from the Plata northward begins to break up almost into mountains and
produces a stratum of hot and cold mineral springs. Huge hotels
accommodate those who come to “take the waters” in Caxambú, as in Poços
de Caidas not far distant, and a mineral water that sells all over
Brazil at a milreis or more a small bottle is here as free as the air.
The largely negro and barefoot local population comes in a constant
stream, carrying every species of receptacle, to a low spot in the
center of town in which the water bubbles up incessantly, and where all
manner of paupers and loafers sit under the feathery plumes of waving
bamboos, drinking in turn out of a broken bottle.
[Illustration: Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former
Brazilian president]
[Illustration: Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes]
[Illustration: The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello
Horizonte, are decorated with paintings]
The same ancient, dirty, German-made cars that had bounced me into
Caxambú bounced me out again in the afternoon, and all the rest of the
day I bumped along at the tail end of a way-freight that seemed
constantly on the point of falling to pieces as it thundered in and out
of the hills on a warped and unrepaired old track. To the north the
earth lay piled high into the heavens, for Minas has some real
mountains. Swift tropical darkness fell, and we went banging on into the
night, our old wood-burner leaving a trail of fireworks behind us that
gave it the suggestion of some fire-spitting dragon of medieval legend,
and yanking us at last into Cruceiro. Next morning I took the direct
line from São Paulo to Rio, and it was pleasant indeed to ride once more
on a broad-gauge, roomy, coal-burning train. Rain had given the country
an aspect quite different from that of two months before, but nothing
could disguise the lesser industry and progress toward civilization in
the State of Rio de Janeiro than in that of São Paulo. Rezende, the
first town over the boundary, proved to be a village posing as a city, a
ragged, barefoot place, overrun with dust and squalor, with ambitionless
loafers and negro good-for-nothings. Professionally, too, it was a
shock; far from finding it worthy of a Kinetophone performance, we could
not have given a dog-fight there to advantage.
The slightly fertile country began at length to tip downward and we
descended through long tunnels between vast opening vistas cut off at
some distance by a great blanket of fog coming up from the sea. At Belem
there was already an atmosphere of Rio, still some thirty miles away,
with frequent towns and suburban service from there on, though we halted
only at Cascadura and drew up at length in the familiar scent and hubbub
of the capital. _Carregadores_ snatched my belongings without so much as
“by your leave” and bundled me into a taxi—which reminds me that inside
my unlocked valise, that had been tossed about and left lying in all
manner of places since leaving Campinas, there were a million and a half
reis of our earnings in Brazilian bills. One’s possessions are so much
safer under such circumstances in South America than in the United
States that what would seem criminal carelessness in the north becomes a
common habit.
It was like getting home again to hear the newsboys bawling “_A Rua!_”
“_A Noite!_” “_Ultimas Noticias!_” in the guttural throat-growl peculiar
to Rio, to be accosted by the same old lottery-ticket vendors, the same
street-car conductors, to see the same “women of the life” strolling the
Avenida and riding invitingly back and forth on the first section of the
“Botanical Garden Line.” There was almost a monotony of familiar faces,
so accustomed had I been for years to always seeing new and strange
ones. The “Sugar Loaf,” hump-shouldered Corcovado, topsail Gavea, lofty
Tijuca, and all the rest still looked serenely down upon the human ants’
nests at their feet with the immutability of nature’s masterpieces.
Yet Rio was different than I had first known it. Had I left it for good
and all when I had expected, I should have had a better impression, but
a false one; I should have known only the winter Rio, which is
magnificent and has little in common with Rio of the summer-time.
Statisticians assure us that, thanks to the trade winds and its greater
proximity to the ocean, Brazil’s metropolis falls several degrees short
of Buenos Aires in the most infernal months of the year, but it is
doubtful whether anyone except the thermometer recognizes the advantage.
In late November it lay sweltering under a lead-heavy blanket of heat
that drenched one at the slightest exertion, mental, moral, or physical.
No sooner did one put on a collar than it melted about the neck—and not
only is a fresh white collar indispensable in Rio, but they cost sixty
cents each and twelve cents a washing, and rarely outlive more than four
journeys to the beat-’em-on-a-rock style of Brazilian laundries.
There was less evidence, however, than I expected of the rioting that
had marked the change of administration a few days before,—a few broken
windows between the office of _O Paiz_, chief journalistic supporter of
“Dudú,” and our first Brazilian playhouse, a bullet-mark in a stone or
brick wall here and there to recall the battling hordes that had surged
up and down the Avenida. The trouble had started on the eve of the
inauguration of the man from Itajubá. Among “Dudú’s” Machiavellian bag
of tricks was a company of government bouncers and strong-arm men under
command of a ruffian known as Lieutenant Pulcherio. On Saturday night,
in the last hours of the detested régime, the lieutenant and his
fellow-officers were discussing their glorious past over a quiet
whiskey-and-soda in the Hotel Avenida bar when a group of the
_populares_ they had so long oppressed stopped to mention what they
thought of them. The political protegees replied to this vile affront to
their noble caste by firing on and attacking with swords the mainly
weaponless _populares_, and among other gallant deeds worthy of their
past killed a negro newsboy of twelve. The _povo_, however, for once
vulgarly resisted their noble superiors by laying hands on bricks and
cobblestones and weltering back and forth across the Largo da Carioca
and the Avenida, managing in the process to prepare the beloved
Lieutenant Pulcherio for funeral.
Early the next morning the opposition newspapers were already pouring
out their pent-up spleen on the head of the outgoing president,
resurrecting censored articles and deluging the disappearing
administration with vituperation. The names they called the “odious
gaucho” were scarcely fit to print; those applied to “Dudú” sometimes
had the genius of intense exasperation. There were columns of such
gentle remarks as:
The four years now terminating mark
the blackest, the most nefast page
in our history, the most painful
calamity with which Providence has
flagellated us since Brazil was
Brazil. During the administration of
the analphabetic sergeant who got
possession of the chief power by
knavery and the imposition of the
barracks, justice was disrespected
and reviled, immorality created
rights of citizenship, robbery and
corruption ruled unrestrained. There
has not been a day since the
inauguration of this unpleasant
mediocrity, degenerate nephew of our
great Deodoro, that the President of
the Republic and his auxiliaries did
not go back on their plighted word,
in which there was not registered a
new political infamy, in which we
did not hear of a new crime or a new
immorality. Praise God, this
terrible four years of darkness is
ended!
The inauguration took place in the early afternoon of Sunday, the
fifteenth of November, anniversary of the day on which the republic was
declared. In Brazil this ceremony is as simple as the swearing in of a
juror. The incoming president takes the oath privately, signs his name,
bids farewell to his predecessor, and the thing is done. On this
occasion things moved even more swiftly. The instant the other had taken
his place, “Dudú” sprang into an automobile, even forgetting in his
haste to embrace the new president, according to time-honored Brazilian
custom—of thirty years’ standing—and fled to the protection of
Petropolis and his youthful consort. He had good precedent for his
eagerness; other retiring presidents of Brazil have done likewise. When
Campos Salles left the presidency in 1902 he was stoned by the populace,
yet all Brazilians agree that he was by no means as corrupt or poor a
president as the “unpleasant mediocrity” who was just then fleeing.
It quickly began to be apparent, however, that perhaps “these terrible
four years of darkness” were not entirely ended. The new president was
considered an honest and, within Brazilian limits, a democratic man, but
he was evidently not quite strong enough to throw off the domination of
the national boss, the “odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul.
It was partly due to this feeling of disappointment, partly to the
increased wrath caused by publication of censored articles left over
from “Dudú’s” reign, reciting unbelievable official thievery and
corruption, and to the release of great bands of political prisoners
from dungeons in the islands of the bay, where they had been sent
without trial or even accusation, that serious riots again broke out
soon after my return to the capital. This time the fuss was started by
students from the schools of medicine, law, and the like, who decided to
“bury” the ex-president. Something like burning in effigy, this was
considered a great insult not only to the former executive in person but
to the army which he, as a field marshal, represented. The army general
in command of the police brigade of the federal district went out to
stop the outrage. The students were already parading the streets with a
gaudily gilded “coffin” and using the offensive nicknames of “Dudú” and
“Rainha Mãe,” when the brigade was set in motion. Before it could
accomplish its purpose, orders came from the newly appointed minister of
justice to let the students go on with their _brincadeira_ (child’s
play), whereupon the general in command rode back to the ministry and
resigned—knowing he was to be dismissed next day anyway. Meanwhile the
students had been joined by an immense mob of _populares_, mainly
barefooted out-of-works and men of the porter, street-sweeper and hawker
type, who marched back and forth through the business section and at
length broke out in attacks on “Dudú” sympathizers or beneficiaries,
which resulted in several deaths. When night fell a regiment of cavalry,
another of infantry, and all the police of the federal district were
protecting the palace of Cattete and that of Gaunabara, in which the new
president had chosen to make his home. Nictheroy, across the bay, also
was seething; even São Paulo threatened to join the revolt, to avenge
the insult of having been offered the most unimportant post in the
cabinet, with oily words about being the “agricultural state par
excellence.” But the new government, like the old, had too firm an ally
in the army for a revolution, with no other support than the weaponless
_populares_, to be successful. Gradually the rioting died away, though
by no means the criticism of the new administration, and Brazil settled
down to another four years not unlike those that had just been so
fittingly brought to a close, but which were to be marked a few months
later by the assassination of the “odious gaucho.”
Though they were empty, I did not feel like again taking our old rooms
out on the Praia do Flamengo. They seemed hot and stuffy; the very
waters of the bay felt tepid; even the president’s palace of Cattete
next door had been abandoned in favor of the newer and more sumptuous
one of Guanabara. I hunted Leme and Copacabana over in vain for quarters
overlooking one of those peerless beaches where the air from the open
ocean might make life endurable, but the houses along the shore belong
to the well-to-do, who do not have to take roomers even in “brutal hard
times.” During my search I accidentally dropped into the Cinema
Copacabana, a pleasant little place in one of the most prosperous
sections of town. The slow-witted Portuguese who announced himself the
owner and manager soon proved to be merely the hen-pecked consort of the
real director. But the place promised well, if properly managed, and I
finally signed it for five days—and fled to Petropolis for Thanksgiving.
Out at the Praia Formosa—which is no more a beach than it is beautiful—I
found a mob of drenched and wilted people fighting about a tiny,
discolored hole in the station wall, of the height of the average man’s
knees, for the privilege of buying tickets to the “summer capital.” For
though there were many daily trains, even when train schedules were
being reduced all over Brazil because of the war-created difficulty of
importing coal, there were thousands of regular commuters and few places
left for the poorer _Cariocas_ who scraped together enough for a
round-trip ticket or two during the season. Most of the commuters had
their permanent seats, with their names and their business or rank
posted on the backs of them, and the mere traveler had to wander through
several cars before he could find a place, like a stranger seeking a pew
in a fashionable church.
The Leopoldina Railway between Rio and Petropolis is the oldest in
Brazil, having been opened to the foot of the range in 1854 so that
Emperor Pedro II could flee from hot weather and yellow fever in the
summer months. We raced without interruption across a low, jungled plain
until the mountains grew up impassable above us. Formerly this region
was well cultivated, but man was unequal to the grim struggle with
nature, especially after the emancipation of the only race that could
cope with the swampy, matted jungle, and to-day the ruins of many a
plantation house lie buried beneath the invading bush, while the few
hovels with their little fenced gardens look like islands in the tangled
wilderness. Yet we sped through many suburban villages shaded with
palm-trees and adorned with immense tumbled rocks. On top of one of
these, high above the surrounding landscape, sat the two-spired church
of Penha, a famous place of pilgrimage. A few peasants were plowing and
loading cut grass upon carts drawn by zebu-sired oxen. Puffs of white
clouds, like exploded shells, hung here and there above the brilliant
horizon. The three-cows advertisement of a well-known malted milk
company suddenly loomed up against the background of jungle, its
Portuguese words making it doubly fantastic in this exotic setting. Here
and there we passed section gangs poling themselves homeward in their
unpumpable hand-cars with long bamboo staffs, like Dutch canal boats.
The first-class seats, cane-covered in respect for the climate, were
divided by an extra arm in the middle, obviating personal contact, which
is the way train seats should be, no matter what fat men or honeymooning
couples may prefer. Many of my fellow-travelers were as much worth
watching as the scenes along the way. Here a man as black as a
beachcomber’s hopes of signing on in Singapore leaned back in pompous
full-dress in his placarded seat, acting like the millionaire president
of some great corporation as he pored over the contents of his elaborate
leather portfolio. I would have given the price of a Brazilian meal to
have seen the couple across the aisle from me suddenly transported to
one of our “Jim Crow” states. He was a self-important mountain of a man,
as white as you or I; she, just as self-important, dressed in rich
plumes and Paris fashions, hideous with diamonds and other glittering
pebbles, was about one-third negro. One poor woman farther on had only
ten fingers, two ears, and as many wrists—her skirts covered her ankles,
strangely enough—on which to wear her jewelry, though she had made the
most of her meager opportunities by putting three or four rings on each
finger. Still farther along an old woman in mourning had bits of black
cloth sewed over her earrings. A nice jet nose ring about two inches in
diameter would have been so much more original, and as becoming, and
would have made conspicuous one’s poignant grief even to those who might
miss so commonplace an adornment as earrings.
There came a stretch of swamp and uninhabited lowland, thick with
bulrushes, then heavily wooded hills grew up before us and we came to a
halt at the edge of the plain. A little engine, built like a kangaroo,
took charge of two of our cars and shoved them up the steep mountainside
on a rackrail track. Now we were buried in narrow cuttings, now gazing
upon magnificent panoramas that opened out through dense woods. There
overhung the line many tremendous boulders, on one of which, large as a
house, some wag had written in red paint, “_Va com esta_” (Take this
along with you). The vegetation presently became sodden wet; the
incessant singing of the jungle, scarcely noticed until it stopped, died
away and vast views opened out on what we had left behind. Flooded with
the rays of a full moon, the far-off range of mountains cut a jagged
line across the sky. It grew cooler every minute; the air became
clearer, and as the oppression of wilting heat wore away a drowsiness
came upon us. At Alto da Serra, some 2500 feet above but barely a mile
farther on than the station at the foot of the range, civilization began
again, with all its pleasant and unpleasant concomitants.
Petropolis, fashionable resort of the wealthy _Cariocas_, national
legislators and foreign diplomats, lies snugly ensconced among the cool
hills, a charming assemblage of villas peering forth from tropical
gardens. The former emperor for which it is named made the town to order
by importing three thousand German and Swiss settlers in 1845, as
examples of cleanliness and industry to his own people. Formerly the
entire government came here during the summer months, but when the
mosquito and his playmate, yellow fever, were routed, most of the native
officials went back to the city, though the diplomats remain, pleasantly
cut off from the rough world of practical politics, which seems far away
indeed, instead of merely an hour and a half distant by Brazil’s best
train service. There is a suggestion of a German watering-place about
Petropolis, with its bizarre little residences, its trim streets lined
by bamboo hedges, its roses, hydrangeas and honeysuckle, its
“kiss-flowers” gathering honey from the fuchsia-trees. The Teutonic type
has persisted in spite of interbreeding and comparative isolation from
the fatherland in a strong Brazilian environment, and up to the
beginning of the war there were still German schools in Petropolis. A
spotless room in one of its quiet summer hostelries is a relief after
months of Brazilian hotel squalor and uproar; or, if one’s income is
limited, there are cheap and pleasant rooms to be had with the German
inn-keepers.
But Petropolis is tropical enough to be unpleasantly warm on a summer
noonday, and among her honeysuckle are horrid hairy spiders as large as
belt-buckles, with perhaps a deadly bite. Like Rio, the town spreads up
many narrowing valleys, fresh green Cascatinha with its weaving-mill
beside a rivulet sliding down a sloping rock and breaking in little
cascades at the bottom, or the restful tree-lined banks of canals
meandering away through the wooded hills. Through the gap by which the
railway creeps up to the plateau may be dimly made out all the Carioca
range and, faintly, the well-known form of the Pão d’Assucar. There is a
vast panorama of Guanabara Bay and all its islands, but Rio is only
hazily suggested, and nearer views of it are much more striking. Another
world on quite another plane spreads out below, careless, happy-go-lucky
negro huts straggling up the wooded valleys as high as they can easily
climb, the soothing sound of mountain brooks, playfully taking little
rocky tumbles here and there without much hurt, joining the birds in
making a kind of sylvan music.
Pedro II still sits out here in a little palm-topped square under the
filtered sunlight or the summer moon, his book closed over a finger, the
tails of his Prince Albert falling on either side of his armchair, his
congress gaiters fitting the ease of his posture, gazing benignly forth
from his great black shovel beard with the studious, half-dreamy look of
the man who hated action. He is by no means our preconceived notion of
an emperor, but a dreamy, easy-going, democratic aristocrat who seems
eminently in his place here in this quiet village far from the rumble of
the world and the heat and labors of the day below. Small wonder he was
the last emperor of this turbulent, pushing western hemisphere. “A great
Brazilian,” they had called him in celebrating his birthday a few days
before, “who gave happiness to his people during almost half a century.”
“Dudú,” looking most comfortable and contented with life, was driving
about the quiet streets of Petropolis with his girl wife behind a pair
of prancing iron-gray horses and a liveried driver frozen in stone. As
in all towns where kings and presidents are regular residents, no one
paid him the slightest attention, though the same pair would no doubt at
that moment have brought the business, and perhaps the peace, of Rio to
a standstill.
There was a nice little up-to-date cinema just outside my window that
would have been an ideal place for us to have made several hundred
dollars—if only we had come to Brazil when the world was still going
round. For the moment it was inhabited by a Portuguese barn-storming
company, and the manager had not only lost heart over the “brutal
crisis,” but had so extraordinarily good an opinion of himself and his
establishment that nothing would induce him to offer us more than forty
per cent. I would not have made a contract at that rate with St. Peter
for a series of performances on the Golden Stairs, and as the only other
cinema in town was small and unimportant, and run by an Italian too
artless to do business with to advantage, there was nothing left but to
fold up my arguments and say good-day.
I came down to Rio to see the show come in, but got a scare instead, for
it did not appear, and we were due to open in Copacabana the following
night. They turned up that evening, however, with a tale to tell. When
they reached Ouro Fino for the Saturday engagement, they found that
bandits had torn up the railway between there and Itajubá, evidently out
of spite against the new president. “Tut” had been equal to the
occasion, however, for though they could not fulfill the Itajubá
contract—the only one we ever failed to carry out—they did not lose the
date, but played a second time in Ouro Fino to a good Sunday house. Then
they had returned to São Paulo, catching the night train and paying a
fortune of 400$ to get themselves and the outfit back to Rio in time,
though nothing like what they would have had to pay had not the
baggage-man mistaken them for “artists” and the trunks for their
wardrobe and stage costumes. Otherwise all had gone smoothly with them,
except for one flattering error on the part of a charming young society
lady of Franca. That town had been placarded, as usual, with our large
three-sheet posters of Edison, and it was natural that “Tut’s” six feet
and more of height should have drawn the attention of the susceptible
sex as he sauntered about the streets. That evening the young lady in
question was heard remarking to her escort, “Isn’t it strange that
Senhor Edison looks so old in his pictures when he is really so young
and handsome?”
During our stay in it, the American flag was somewhat overworked in
Copacabana, there being one over our cinema door and another in a sand
lot a block away in which a battered and paintless one-ring American
circus had recently opened. Not often, I wager, have American showmen
directly competed so far from home. We soon made friends with the animal
trainer, whose ten years of knocking about Brazil had brought out into
sharper relief his native Iowa dialect and point of view. Among his
collection of moth-eaten animals in rusty old cages were two of savage
disposition. The hyena had several times bitten him, but “Frank,” the
tiger, which sprang at anyone who came within ten feet of the cage, was
the only one really to be feared.
“Once,” said the exiled Iowan, holding up the ring finger of his left
hand, which was curled up in a half-circle, “I was doing my act at a
burg up in Minas when ‘Frank’ made a swipe at me with one paw. Lucky she
didn’t get all her claws in, or it would have been good-by hand, but she
happened to get just one claw into the inside of this finger at the
base. She pulled, and I was so scared I guess I pulled too, and she
peeled the whole inside of the finger off the bone—tendons, nerves,
veins and all. I hid that hand behind me so the audience couldn’t see
the blood, or ‘Frank’ smell it, whelted her a few, and finished the act.
I couldn’t go out, for the animals would have followed me into the
audience; I had to finish the act and let them go out the regular way,
like they’ve been trained. Then I wrapped up my hand in a towel and
hiked over to a drug store and he threw a whole bottle of iodine into
it, and then they called in one of these here native doctors and he
chopped around in it and did it up in pasteboard, which of course bent,
so that he had to chop into it every day or so and near killed me, and
finally it twisted into this shape and stayed there. And that guy had
the nerve to charge me a hundred and fifty mil! After the first dressing
I went over to a bar and had a whole glass of rye whiskey and then about
a quart of this nigger rum they call _cachaza_ on top of it—but hell, I
didn’t feel it any more’n milk, and for four nights I never got a wink
of sleep. I was afraid to drink anything for fear of making it worse,
but finally I says, ‘Oh, to hell with it! I’m going to have a sleep,’
and I went out and got drunk—God, I never got so drunk before in my
life! And then I went home and slept a whole night and a day. But it
sure does make a man sick at his stomach to get caught by an animal.”
“Tut” and I had taken a room—my seventh residence in Rio—out at the end
of the tunnel in Leme—so called because a rock shaped like a _leme_, or
rudder, juts out into the ocean at the end of the beach. By this time
Christmas was drawing near and shops were everywhere offering
“_brinquedos á granel_” (playthings by the bushel), and the rains had
come on in earnest. Rio was suffering so severely from the “brutal
crisis” that people in the cinema business had lost their nerve
completely, and it began to look as if the show would catch up with me
before I could make a new contract. For several days I dashed about in
pouring rain before I finally succeeded in running to earth in the bosom
of his own family—which is very bad business form in Brazil—a man with a
string of theaters in Rio, Nictheroy, and the two largest towns of Minas
Geraes. I quickly got his name signed to a sixteen-day contract and,
relieved of the fear of having the show run over me, settled down to
take life easy again.