NORTHWARD TO BAHIA
More than five months had passed since my first arrival in Rio when, in
the first days of the new year, I actually started on my homeward way
again. The train from Nictheroy northward left at dawn, after the
unfailing Brazilian habit, and I caught a last glimpse of sunrise over
Rio and its bay before they passed finally from my sight. The mountains
of the cool plateau lay blue-gray along the horizon all that day’s ride
through the singing jungle. The flat _littoral_ was considerably
inhabited, but chiefly with thatched mud-and-reed huts, contrasted only
now and then by a massive, dignified old _fazenda_-house standing, like
some poor but still proud aristocrat, on a commanding knoll above broad
reaches of flat corn, cane, or pasture lands, broken by frequent marshes
grown full of the omnipresent vegetation. At the stations negro boys
highly contented with life sold melons, bananas, mangos, red figs, the
acidulous, parrot-beaked _cajú_, and little native birds in tiny
home-made cages. The scream and groan of crude cane-carts in the fields
or along the dust-thick roads could sometimes be heard above the roar of
the train. Rain had been frequent here during the past weeks, but it had
ceased abruptly at Christmas and the implacable sun had already wiped
out all evidence of moisture. At Macahé we came down to the edge of the
sea again, stretching away emerald-blue and mirror-smooth to the end of
space, then turning inland once more across a sand-blown region, we
descended at Campos, 176 miles north of Nictheroy.
This second city of the State of Rio de Janeiro is an old and somewhat
dilapidated town well spread out on the _campo_, or sea-flat open
country, for which it is named, with a few aged church-towers peering on
tiptoe over the broad cane-fields that surround it. Scattered imperial
palms slightly shade it, and the widest river I had so far seen in
Brazil gives it a light-craft connection with the sea. Neither its mule
cars nor its medieval “Hotel Amazonas,” with a single _banho de chuva_,
or “rain bath,” are fit subjects for unbounded praise, but at least its
chief cinema manager cut short my professional labors by signing on the
dotted line as soon as it was pointed out to him. I left the contract
and instructions to “Tut” with the hotel runner, to be handed to the
tallest man who arrived by train the next Wednesday, and fled on into
the north by the same conveyance by which I had arrived the day before.
The difference between this British-owned line and the
government-operated “Central” was as wide as that between discipline and
license, yet even on this the ticket-offices were miserable little holes
in the wall, barely thigh-high; the sellers always opened as late, and
worked as slowly and stupidly as possible, and it was only by crouching
like an ape and fighting those struggling about the ticket-hole with
trickery, stealth, and bad manners that the traveler could get a chance
to buy the exorbitant-priced tickets and escape paying fifty per cent.
excess on the train. Kilometer-books are sold in Brazil, but they must
be taken to the ticket-window to be stamped and audited and registered
and signed each time the holder wishes to board a train, hence nothing
is to be gained by using them. The shadowy, saw-shaped range on our left
followed us all the blazing, sand-blown day, tantalizing us with
suggestions of cool upland valleys and meadows watered by clear, cold
streams. As the sun crawled round and peered in at my side of the car
the heat grew unendurable, in spite of the electric fans which recalled
the government lines by contrast, and the dust-filled air all but
refused to enter the nostrils. The insignificant stations were crowded
with the curious enjoying their chief daily diversion, but they were
silent and listless beneath the appalling heat.
In his “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin speaks of seeing South American
ant-hills twelve feet high. I had set this down to the exuberance of
youth, but suddenly, not far north of Campos, we came upon great fields
of them, like eruptions on the face of nature, mounds eight, ten,
perhaps even twelve feet high, but here grass-grown, instead of
presenting the solid clay, cement-like surface familiar elsewhere. The
sandy condition of the soil evidently made it possible only to pile them
up in this oval form, so sharply contrasting with the usual sugar-loaf
shape of those made of clay. In mid-afternoon the flat, baking,
sea-level _littoral_ gave way to rolling, then hilly country, and we had
climbed to a height of several hundred meters when we passed from the
little State of Rio de Janeiro into the equally tiny one of Espirito
Santo, for here the great plateau of central Brazil forces its way clear
down to the edge of the sea. Time was when the State of Rio was
enormous, but bit by bit, during the eighteenth century, there was
lopped off from it the much larger states of São Paulo, Minas Geraes,
Goyaz, and finally Matto Grosso, until to-day the population within its
limits—which do not include the federal district and national capital—is
estimated at little more than one fifth that of the old mining province,
vastly less than that of São Paulo and Bahia, and with Rio Grande do Sul
and Pernambuco also outdistancing it.
Coffee-clad hills and a reddish soil gave Espirito Santo a slight
resemblance to São Paulo, though most of it was dense-green with heavy
timber, through which a howling wind-and-rain storm came raging toward
sunset. We halted for the night in Cachoeira do Itapemirim, so called
for the _cachoeira_, or rapids over a series of rocks in the Itapemirim,
the sound of which deadened our footfalls all the way from the station
to the “Hotel Toledo” on the tiny main square. It was little more than a
barefoot village in the bush, but the show would be forced to spend a
night there—nay, two nights, for it would arrive on Saturday—and I soon
added to my collection the signature of the “Turk” who, in addition to a
little cloth-shop and billiard-and-liquor-room, owned a miniature cinema
jutting far out over the rocky river.
Relieved of the feeling that the show was treading on my heels, I let
the morning train go on without me and settled down to make up the sleep
I was in arrears. Four or five hours slumber out of each twenty-four may
be all very well for an Edison, but commonplace mortals require more.
Not only was the hotel as quiet and bucolic as the town itself, but it
had “beds of wire”; both heat and mosquitoes were conspicuous by their
absence; the never-ceasing music of the _cachoeira_ was calming to the
nerves, and if I ever did wake up there were horses to hire for a jaunt
through the surrounding country. Moreover, the town and vicinity were
the scene of one of Brazil’s most famous novels, “Chanaan” by Graça
Aranha of the Brazilian Academy, and just then Minister to The
Hague—though the town itself was supremely ignorant of its celebrity the
world round in the dozen languages into which the tale has been
translated. Even the local editor had never heard of it, though he did
know the author, “because I am _obliged_ to know all Brazilian
diplomats.”
The animal that was intrusted to me for a modest consideration next
afternoon could scarcely have been called a horse, though it resembled
even less any other known quadruped, as the wooden frame thinly covered
with leather and hung with two iron rings into which I could barely
insert the ends of my toes must perhaps be called a saddle for want of a
more exact term. By dint of reducing my right arm to paralysis I
succeeded in forcing the torpid brute up and down the few streets of the
village and out one of the roads that wander off as trails through the
plump, dense-wooded hills about it. But it would have been as speedy and
far more comfortable to have walked, or better still, perhaps, not to
have gone at all, for we were overtaken and imprisoned by one of those
raging storms for which this region seems famous. Immense banks of
snow-white clouds far off on the horizon completely encircled us when we
set out, yet so benign was their appearance that I scarcely noticed
them, except as a detail of the charming landscape, until suddenly they
swept in from all sides at express speed, getting blacker and ever
blacker, until the entire sky was wiped out and the sullen growls of
thunder grew to violent outbursts of anger that deafened the ears like
an artillery barrage, while the wind tore at the trees and bamboo groves
as if it would uproot not only them but the sheer stone “sugar-loaf”
near which the storm had found us. With the help of two negro boys on
muleback and the butt of my heavy native whip I urged the equine
caricature into a lame and ludicrous gallop and reached the edge of town
before I was wholly drenched, taking refuge in a half-finished building.
A negro boy sleeping on a narrow plank high above the still unboarded
floor said he was not ill; evidently he was just lying there to let the
day get by so that he could sleep through the night and then take a good
rest to-morrow. I could only get the head of the alleged horse under
shelter, but it was evident that he had stood out in many worse storms
than mere wind and rain; and there I squatted for three mortal hours,
chiding myself for not having put a bit of reading matter in my pocket.
I might have read the negro boy, I suppose, but he looked like a primer,
just such a crude and simple volume as makes up the whole human library
of Cachoeira do Itapemirim.
Another all-day train-ride of little more than a hundred miles brought
me to Victoria, capital of the State of Holy Ghost, or, more exactly, to
a little backwoods station on the opposite side of the long narrow arm
of the sea on which the capital is situated. So placid was this, and so
cool the weather after a heavy rain, that I had to taste it as we were
being rowed across before I could believe that we were down at sea-level
again. It was an easy-going, less aggressive capital than those farther
south, and its prices were so nearly reasonable that I grew bold and
marched into the new and showy four-story “Palace Hotel” on the
waterfront. The “brutal crisis” had dealt Victoria an almost deadly
blow. There was not a show in town, except a free cinema in the liquor
emporium of the little French electric tramway company that sends its
cars wandering along the waterfront for miles in both directions. On one
of these I gradually worked my way out to the home of the “colonel” who
owned the imposing theater—and found that he had passed me on the way
in. I hurried back to town—if that verb may be used in the same sentence
with Victoria’s street-car service—and found that the “colonel” had gone
out home again. But by sternly overcoming adverse fate and the
fatalistic indifference of those accustomed to hang around the theater I
finally had him hunted up, a heavy, middle-aged, over-courteous mulatto,
as was also his manager and, for that matter, almost every conspicuous
citizen in town. Having impressed upon them the extraordinary good
fortune that was soon to descend upon Victoria, I went home to dinner,
telling them to think it over. Their theater, like two former cinemas in
town, had been closed since the first month of the war; they had so
completely lost heart that they were not even having films shipped to
them any more, and felt that it would be impossible to get up a show. I
assured them that wherever the Kinetophone landed there must be a show,
and within half an hour had them worked up to such enthusiasm that
instead of accepting my suggestion that we play Monday and Tuesday and
sail for Bahia on Wednesday, they were imploring me to book for a solid
week.
This having been done, the manager and I made polite and diplomatic
calls on the editors of Victoria’s two pitiful little dailies of four
foolscap pages each, more than half taken up with advertising and the
rest with large-type “news” consisting mainly of birthday greetings to
“our most influential citizens.” Neither of the apathetic
pseudo-journalists caught even a hint of the news value of Edison’s part
in the affair, but they did waste many words in giving a full account of
the “delightful courtesy” which “Dr. Franck,” and the distinguished and
much-titled fellow-citizen who brought him, had shown in visiting them.
Victoria was one of the old settlements of the Portuguese crown when
what afterward came to be known as Brazil was given out in _capitanias_,
having been founded nearly four centuries ago on the island of São
Antonio. It may have 15,000 inhabitants in all the coves and corners of
rocks among which it is scattered, but it is essentially an unimportant,
if picturesque, village. The nucleus of the town is well inland along
the narrow, river-like little roadstead, with a yellow presidential
palace and some other buildings of size, but it is made up chiefly of
one-story buildings quickly running down to huts. There are a few coffee
houses that export, and a few stores that supply the interior, but for
the most part Victoria lives on government salaries—when conditions are
such that these can be paid. How backward it is may be guessed from the
fact that negro coffee-porters have not yet been driven out by whites,
and that it is the outpost of the reign of hammocks which covers all
northern Brazil, at least half the population seeming to spend their
days swinging back and forth inside the baked mud kennels they call
home. An ancient fort in ruins and the clustered sanctuary of Nossa
Senhora da Penha in a striking site on the summit of a stone hill, with
the usual collection of wax and pictured proofs of miracles that have
been wrought here since 1769, are the main sights of interest. For the
ocean is not visible until one has walked—or, if time is no object,
taken the tramway—for miles out through little groves of plump,
rosy-cheeked mangos and along the single street from which most of
Victoria sprawls and scrambles up the rocky, half-wooded hills along her
waterway to her huts perched among huge, blackish granite rocks. Then,
when the calm, boatless sea and the labyrinthian harbor entrance bursts
forth at last from the long, narrow, yellow beach out to which the cars
eventually stagger, there is not a glimpse left of the town itself,
hidden away among its wet-green hills.
“Tut,” Carlos, and the show arrived on time and were eventually coaxed
through the red tape that entangles any state capital and loaded into
the _canoa_, or mammoth log turned into a boat, of the German who
reigned in Victoria as the American Consul. This was gradually rowed,
not directly to the theater, but to the “American’s” wharf, where we
were forced to hire a wagon and lose an hour to cover the hundred yards
remaining. We were installed, however, in time to give the two sections
as advertised—though the managers were so skeptical of my solemn promise
that they would certainly have postponed the opening date had I not been
on the ground to forbid it—and were deluged by such a mob of
pleasure-seekers that we had to close the doors and hold hundreds of
them back until the second section.
Next day the agent of a local steamship line came to the theater and
measured all our trunks, arranging to send the whole outfit to Bahia the
following Monday for about one-tenth what train-travel had led us to
expect. For I had come at last to a break in the railroads up the east
coast of South America and was forced to take to the sea for the first
time since Hays and I had entered the continent at Cartagena, Colombia,
two and a half years before. On Wednesday “Tut” and I took our last
Victorian stroll—the negro boys along the way halting open-mouthed and
gazing up and down him to see where he was spliced—and in the afternoon
I boarded the _Maranhão_ of the Lloyd-Brazileiro and settled down in my
cabin. I had dropped into a Brazilian novel of colonial days and
completely forgotten the life of the harbor and the little capital that
was still crawling slowly on about us, when I was suddenly astonished to
see standing before me the owner and manager of the theater. Those two
stodgy, bashful, rather artless mulattoes had hired a boat and taken the
time and trouble to come out on board to bid me the good-by, which I, in
my American incivility, had completely forgotten. One after the other
they gave me the fraternal South American embrace of a handshake and an
affectionate patting on the back with the left hand, assuring me that
the show would be run with as great care and our percentage as honestly
computed as if I were there in person, that they would see to it that my
entire “company” boarded the Monday steamer, and bade me be sure to stop
and see them if ever I came that way again. The most steel-rimmed
color-line could not but be joggled by such Brazilian amiability.
On the second morning thereafter, with no other incident than being
halted and examined by British cruisers hidden among the Abrolhos
Islands in Brazilian waters, the _Maranhão_ slipped smoothly into the
immense Bay of All Saints, specks of white sails dotting its blue
immensity, distant land with low hills gradually spreading along all the
port horizon, and when I chanced to look up again the City of São
Salvador da Bahia was gazing down upon us from the ridge along which it
stretches for mile after hazy mile.
“Colonel” Ruben Pinheiro Guimarães was manager of the principal
playhouse in Bahia. The ancient “São João,” imperial theater when
Portuguese viceroys ruled Brazil, still kept much of its stateliness in
spite of being rather unkempt and disreputable after more than a century
of constant use. In situation it takes second place to no other in the
world, sitting out on the nose of the upper city, where to step off its
esplanade would be to fall hundreds of feet down to the business section
below, and gazing away across the bay to the utmost limits of the ocean
horizon. Ruben, a _Paulista_ of unbroken Portuguese ancestry, had the
reputation of being somewhat related in business matters to the eel
family; but there is a certain pleasure in flirting with possible fraud,
as with any other kind of danger. It was not until eight at night,
however, that I got his name signed to a “split-even” contract for
twenty-five days, fifteen of them in the theaters of Bahia and ten in
towns about the bay.
Unfortunately São Salvador da Bahia was not an ideal place to settle
down. For one thing, it had a new style in hotels. Elsewhere in Brazil
they had been questionable, here they were not in the least so, for not
one of them pretended to be anything but what it was,—full of frousy
females who had not even the virtue of being young or good-looking, hags
on the last rung of the ladder that leads from concubinage in Europe
through street-walking in Rio down to the gutter of pandering to the
chiefly African rouées of Bahia. Even as hotels they were the worst
imaginable, yet high-priced at that, and with adventurous women from
foreign parts assigned to every other room and constantly hanging out
the windows one had the edifying sensation of living in a brothel.
The hotel I was finally compelled to endure looked out across the
marvelous bay, upon the “São João,” and down the wide stone-paved street
leading from the upper to the lower town. Up this snorted huge
motor-trucks loaded with meat from the abattoirs, straining automobiles,
and an unending procession of those citizens of Bahia who found it
cheaper to walk than to squander the _tostão_ it costs to be lifted from
the lower to the upper level. Great quantities of freight also ascended
or descended on foot. A trunk or two, with perhaps a valise on top,
often came noiselessly marching up the steep street on negro heads;
bedsteads, bird-cages, bureaus and all other forms of furniture, fruit
in baskets or without, bunches of bananas laid flat on a frizzled pate,
chickens with their legs tied and panting in the roasting sun, every
known and nameable article that cannot cave in an African skull moved by
what is still the cheapest form of transportation in Bahia, even in this
century of steam and electricity.
The former capital and oldest city of Brazil takes its popular name—the
official and correct one is São Salvador—from the immense bay on which
it is situated—the bay which from anywhere in the upper town stretches
away in deepest indigo-blue, everywhere dotted with specks of white
sails, to the low ridges of hills, faint with distance, that all but
surround it. In some ways it has a finer setting than that of Rio,
though it is not so strikingly, so dramatically, beautiful, and the old
capital has the advantage over the new that almost constant trade winds
sweep across it. Bahia is built in two stories, that at sea-level being
at most a few blocks deep and often thinning down to a single row of
buildings. “O Commercio” the _Bahianos_ call this lower part, and it is
almost exclusively a business section, perhaps the only spot in South
America that resembles lower New York in being silent and uninhabited at
night, with only a few watchmen and belated pedestrians treading the
dimly gas-lighted streets.
The upper town is reached either by a hard climb up the stone-paved
roadway, by an American elevator of sixteen-person capacity, or by a
steeply inclined cable railway with single cars. Hotels, stores,
theaters, almost everything except the wharves, wholesale business, and
the main market-place, are on the upper level. Nearly every building
dates back to colonial days and many of the old houses are in splendid
situations, perched on the edge of the ridge at the very base of which
lies the immense bay. But they are taken up almost entirely by the
descendants of slaves, with the accumulated uncleanliness of
generations, and the white minority of Bahia has been driven to the
often less attractive suburbs. The upper and main part of the town is
built chiefly on two ridges, facing the sea and the bay respectively and
in many places falling sheer into them. On their tops the ridges are
thickly inhabited, and the streets crisscross in an effort to conform to
the irregular lay of the land, but every now and then they disappear
through wooded lanes into hilly virgin forests with innumerable huge
trees,—the mammoth _aguacate_, thickly hung with alligator-pears, the
intense green dome-shaped mango, most perfect shade-tree of the tropics,
and here and there palm-trees standing haughtily above all else—for the
rolling ridges are often broken with deep valleys in which negro huts
congregate.
It would be beneath the dignity, as well as contrary to the languid
temperament, of Bahia to take a census, but at the popular Brazilian
pastime of guessing statistics the city professes to have about one
third of a million inhabitants; there is no question that it is the
third city in size in Brazil. Of that number certainly eight out of ten
are negroes, a majority of them full-blooded, with all the traits their
ancestors brought with them from the African bush, plus the faults of
their Portuguese-Brazilian neighbors. Except for the two or three élite
sections, such as that along the summit of the second ridge, there is
scarcely a corner of Bahia in which one cannot stroll an hour or more
and never see any but a black face—with the single exception that even
in the most African quarters the shops are almost invariably kept by
Portuguese, pasty-white of complexion, whether because of the sedentary
indoor lives they lead or because of the contrast to the sea of blacks
about them. One soon comes to know every white face in Bahia, even those
with Caucasian ancestry enough to be individually distinguishable, so
frequently does one notice them in the business streets, theaters,
street-cars, and more pretentious cafés.
More slaves were brought to the province of Bahia than to any other of
Brazil, not only because the planting of sugar and tobacco required much
labor but because this part of Portuguese America was earliest settled.
The original settlers from overseas were too proud to work; the negroes
they brought over to work for them were emancipated and also refused to
work, crowding into town to live on what they could pick up between
their incessant native dances and church festivals, so that we have the
edifying spectacle of an immense state, possessing unlimited natural
resources, virtually bankrupt. It is said that the old colonial life,
the old-time somnolence, Brazil as she was in the olden days, is still
best seen in Bahia. If so, I am glad that my Brazilian journey came at a
later date. Compared with the old capital, Rio seems little more than a
quadroon city, and few negroes among many whites is plainly better for
the negro than to be surrounded on all sides by bad examples of his own
race.
The negroes are so numerous and so sluggish in their movements that
unless one would be jostled at every turn one can travel the streets
only by stepping out of their way. They lie on every corner and in every
gutter; they loll, blocking the streets, in every shaded spot, on every
threshold—wearing a few rags, yet often with a crude native cigar
protruding from their thick lips, irrespective of sex, for Bahia is
Brazil’s tobacco center and “fumo” is cheap—negroes, negroes everywhere,
until they swim in black specks before the eyes when one closes them. It
is another amusing example of the pseudo-civilization of South America
that in the upper town the police will stop any man in full comfortable
dress of summer who wears no coat, while negroes and even a few poor
whites parade anywhere in a ragged, unbuttoned jacket without the
suggestion of shirt or undershirt beneath it and barely enough
suggestion of trousers to save them from complete nudity.
The negroes of Bahia speak Portuguese much as those of our southern
states do English. In their mouths _noite_ becomes “noitche,” _muito_ is
“muitcho,” _senhor_ is “’nhor,” and “’nha” may mean either _senhora_ or
_senhoras_. How much of his Latin garrulousness the negro has caught
from living with that race and how much his ancestors brought him from
the Dark Continent is an interesting question. I do not believe the
native African chatters with such a flow of words and gestures as are to
be seen in any black gathering in Bahia. The cheerfulness and hilarious
gaiety for which the race is noted stands out clearly in the general
temperament of the old capital; while the _Carioca_ is the gloomiest and
most suicidal of Brazilians, the _Bahiano_ rarely shows either tendency.
Down in the swarming market-place in the lower town powerful negroes of
both sexes—the most splendid physical specimens in Brazil are the
blacks—lie languidly about, hoping to sell a few cents’ worth of
something,—pineapples, melons, mangos, sapotes, lemons, huge
alligator-pears at a cent each, the blushing _cajú_, the _jaca_, or
jack-fruit, which grows to watermelon size on the trunks of trees and
has a white meat so coarse that it is eaten only by negroes; bread-nuts
and bread-fruit, bananas, rosaries of what seem to be shelled but
unroasted peanuts, small oranges, green in color—for though there are
fine big seedless ones in Bahia this was not the season for them—and
every other known fruit of tropical America, except a few native only to
the Amazon region. Here one may have a _coco molle gelado_, in other
words, iced milk of green cocoanut, than which there is no better way of
quenching tropical thirst; here one may even find a man who, as a last
resort against starvation, will almost be willing to work, at least to
the extent of carrying away on his head anything less than a grand piano
or the heavier makes of automobiles. Many copper coins, virtually
unknown in the rest of Brazil, are used in the markets of
Bahia,—_vintems_ and double _vintems_, or twenty and forty-reis
pieces—and the negroes still make their computations in the old colonial
terms. In _Bahiano_ market dialect a _meia-pataca_ is 180 reis and a
_pataca_ twice that, though there are no actual coins of those
denominations. Nickel, in one hundred reis pieces and higher, is too
valuable for most negro transactions. As they say in Bahia, with a black
it is “_vintem pa’ cachaza, vintem pa’ farinha, e prompto!_” (a copper
for rum, a copper for mandioca meal, and enough!) He will not work again
until he must have more _cachaza_ and _farinha_. Whenever any real work
is required, such as the digging of sewers, paving of streets, or laying
of street car tracks, gangs of white Europeans have to be shipped in to
do it.
[Illustration: Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a
tiny edition of picturesque Rio]
[Illustration: Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João”]
[Illustration: Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements]
[Illustration: A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore]
Yet sometimes it is hard to blame the negro if he just lies in the shade
and a soft breeze and gazes away at the beautiful bay, indigo-blue by
day, shimmering with moonlight by night, ever fresh with the breezes
that lightly ruffle its ocean-like bosom, as if he were making up for
the loafing denied his enslaved fathers. After all, if Nature wished man
to exert himself, why does it produce such perfect weather and cause
bananas and jack-fruit to grow of themselves? The languid
picturesqueness of Bahia is best personified in the typical _Bahiana_,
black or near-black in color, wearing many bracelets and similar
ornaments of tin and wire, sometimes gilded, her immense hips heavy with
bulky skirts only a trifle less gay in color than her waist, shawl, and
turban, placidly smoking a big native cigar and carrying on her head a
small stool or a tiny table, legs-up like a helpless turtle, with
perhaps a closed umbrella lying flat on top of that, on her way to squat
on the one and lean on or raise the other in church or market. If she
has only a single banana with her, the _Bahiana_ will carry it on her
head rather than by hand. I have seen the ancient anecdote of the
negro-girl servant given a letter to post, who put it on her head and
laid a stone on top to keep it from blowing away, duplicated in the
streets of Bahia. Racial languor, however, gives way to passionate
activity when some black troubadour takes to thrumming his guitar and
singing _modinhas_ and _chorados_. These popular ballads of Brazil,
especially of Bahia and Pernambuco, mixtures of the _moda_ and _fado_ of
Portugal and of the tribal rites of savage Africa, are childish in
thought and monotonous of rhythm, weird, languishing, half-wild songs,
often improvised by the unlettered troubadours and accompanied by
sensual dances and strange African movements of the body into which the
whole negro throng gradually merges, discarding all remnants of their
second-hand civilization.
With such an electorate it is scarcely to be expected that Bahia should
swarm with honest politicians. Indeed, it is frankly admitted that
elections there are so corrupt that few bother to go to the polls and
take part in what the native papers refer to as “our electoral farce,”
knowing that the votes cast have nothing whatever to do with the result,
which the government in power fixes beforehand. Graft and misgovernment
are acknowledged to be worse than in Rio. Yet on the surface there is
the usual Latin-American polish. The scavengers of Bahia had not been
paid a cent in months, yet the municipality was building a “palace” in
which a single staircase cost 400,000$000! A year before my arrival a
delegation from the Boston Chamber of Commerce had landed at Bahia on a
water-edge tour of South America, were brought ashore in a magnificent
launch “at the city’s expense,” and treated with such tropical
generosity that their letters to home newspapers bubbled over with
praises of the wonderful hospitality of Bahia. Agostinho Manoel de
Jesus, owner of the launch in which they had landed, was still going
daily to the city treasury asking in vain for his money.
Bahia was said to be the only place left in Brazil where bubonic plague
and yellow fever still persisted. It could hardly be otherwise with rats
running up and down every pipe, with every opening, corner, or slightly
out of the way place covered with accumulated filth, and with sanitary
arrangements almost everywhere in the old town quite beyond the
descriptive powers of Boccaccio. In contrast, great placards and posters
everywhere, bearing the heading “Directoria Geral de Saude Pública”
(General Directory of Public Health) strive to carry out the bluff that
the town boasts a system of sanitation. Even the highest priced hotel
would be instantly condemned in any civilized city; the conditions in
which the vast majority of the population live are beyond any
imagination. During the preceding April thirty-five members of the
foreign colony, almost one third of it and including the English pastor,
had died of yellow fever, which was expected to begin again with the
rains. Yet my hotel furnished no mosquito net and I awoke each morning
bitten in a dozen places—and any Brazilian will tell you that only white
foreigners take yellow fever. In compensation only natives, and chiefly
negroes, die of the equally prevalent bubonic plague. The federal
government offered to send to Bahia the man who disinfected Rio, but the
state government haughtily replied that they were quite capable of
cleaning up the place themselves, and meanwhile sudden death continues
to flourish.
On my first Sunday in Bahia one of her innumerable _festas_ was at its
height, that of “Nosso Senhor do Bomfim,” a miracle-producing shrine of
great popularity among the negroes. On Saturday night the street cars in
that direction were so crowded that I could not even hang on. Bands of
negroes carrying Japanese lanterns, singing, beating drums, tamborines,
and tin cans, marched in almost constant procession past my window down
to the lower city and on out to Bomfim, a section of town three miles
away around the harbor, the electric-lighted façade of its miracle
church standing forth from the night like a monument to the ignorance,
squalor, and hunger of Bahia. From midnight on the throngs were even
thicker, frequently waking me with their maudlin din, for the festival
of Bomfim is especially an all-night affair, with much drinking and
worse. On Sunday afternoon I went out to the scene of the festivities.
There were thirty persons in the street-car, of whom two were white. On
the climb up the hill to the church the way was flanked by two unbroken
rows of beggars, lame, halt, blind, twisted, deformed, degenerate
monstrosities, idiots of all degrees and every percentage of African
blood, every imaginable horror in human form, and just plain nigger
loafers, all holding out their hands, or whatever they had left in place
of them, in constant appeal.
The church itself was so packed that I could only enter by climbing the
stairs to a small side-gallery and look down upon an unbroken sea of
black faces, wrapt up in what sounded like a medieval Catholic service
translated into African voodooism. Among the schemes concocted by the
swarming priests of Bahia is one that shows the suggestion of
originality. At the huge church and monastery of São Antonio the
faithful can buy, at a milreis each, special stamps designed by the
priests, with which to write to St. Anthony in Heaven, and be assured of
a direct answer from him—through his priestly agents on earth, of
course—on any subject.
“Lots of churches in Bahia,” I remarked conversationally to the white
_Bahiano_ beside whom I stood watching the riot of gambling, drinking,
and indecency about the home of “miracles.”
“Oh, not out here,” he apologized. “Here there is only Nosso Senhor do
Bomfim, and São Antonio,” and Sao This and Sao That, naming a dozen or
more as he pointed them out roundabout. “This is only a little corner
suburb of our great city, but in Bahia itself there _are_ churches.”
It is a popular saying in Bahia that there is one church for every day
in the year, an exaggeration probably, but there are scores of massive
old colonial ones, not to mention monasteries full of fat, loafing
monks, on all the best commanding heights and taking up perhaps half the
city’s space. While some are fallen in ruins and are melting away from
the physical impossibility of keeping up so many, even now this
ignorant, poverty-stricken city was building several more, the latest to
cost three thousand contos—though not thirty per cent of the
contributors can read. In contrast, the schools of Bahia are horrible
little dens over butcher-shops and saloons and brothels, with forty or
fifty children packed into rooms that would not be comfortable for ten,
without any arrangements whatever for their bodily requirements. Even at
that, if every school in the city were packed to suffocation from dawn
until dark, not one third the children of school age could attend them.
The public library in this capital of an enormous and potentially rich
state, in a town of one third of a million inhabitants, reported that
“632 books or works of reference were consulted during the year.” Yet
fear or superstition caused every newspaper in town to print long
editorials praising the “beautiful festa of Bomfim” and the honor it did
to “Him whom it honored,” while the drunken debauchery was still going
on.
By the Wednesday after my arrival “Colonel” Ruben, who, whatever his
faults, knew the art of advertising, had the fronts of all street-cars
and every blank wall in town plastered with Kinetophone posters mostly
of his own concoction, announcing to his fellow-citizens that on _Quarta
Feria_—Fourth Festival, to wit: Thursday—would open the Greatest
Cinematographic Occurrence of the Ages; The Eighth Marvel! Surprising!
Stupendous!! Phenomenal!!! The Discovery of the Year. Man no longer
dies! Edison has immortalized him! And at Popular Prices!! Everyone to
the SAO JOAO!!! When a brilliant sun woke me before seven on that
epochal morning, there was no sign of a steamer in all the blue expanse
of All Saints’ Bay. I shaved and was just starting for the “rain bath,”
however, when I caught sight of one nearing harbor. I still had time to
dress, drink the thimbleful of black coffee they call a breakfast in
Brazil, and descend to the wharves before the craft tied up there, with
“Tut” and Carlos hanging over the rail. I brought them up to my hotel,
for as all those in Bahia were equally disreputable it was as well to be
together for mutual protection, but it took us until noon to unravel the
red tape necessary to get our trunks ashore, quite as if we had been
landing from a foreign country.
For all his reputation, “Colonel” Ruben was an engaging fellow, and
though I made it plain to him that I would not trust him out of my
sight, he took it good-naturedly and assured me he welcomed all the
“fiscalization” I could give him.
“I notice you don’t trust people to any great extent yourself,” I
smiled, thinking to let him down easy.
“Trust!” cried Ruben, with a serio-comic gesture, “I trust my own
teeth—and they bite my tongue!”
I took him at his word and, having designed a rubber stamp, made him
produce packets of the four kinds of tickets used, ran them through a
consecutive enumerator, and stamped them all. He who has never tried to
stamp 1500 tickets an hour by hand will not realize what a daily task I
had laid out for myself merely for the satisfaction of giving Ruben and
his satellites proper “fiscalization.” These stamped tickets I handed
each night to the ticket-seller and at least one and sometimes all three
of us stood at the door ready to protest if anyone entered without a
stamped ticket, as well as to see that all went into the locked box
beside the door-keeper. After the show all unsold tickets were turned
over to me, the treasurer gave me a copy of the official _borderaux_, or
statement of tickets sold and the amount of money taken in, I unlocked
the door-boxes and carried home their contents to check him up, and one
half the day’s receipts in ragged Brazilian cash went into my pocket
before I could be budged out of the “São João” office.
I unmasked one trickster at the very first performance. Being still
stranger enough to most of the “São João” force to pass incognito, I
wandered up the dingy back stairs to the _gallinheiro_ (chicken roost),
as “nigger heaven” is called in Brazil, and found that the negro at the
door was accepting money in lieu of tickets. It was not that the money
was not quite as good, if anything it was a trifle less flimsy, but
somehow it could not be forced into the ticket-box at the taker’s elbow.
He resigned from Ruben’s staff less than a minute later.
Long before the first session ended we had closed the inner doors and
the lobby was threatening to overflow. For the first time in Brazil I
had permitted other “special attractions” to be offered with our own;
that is, in addition to the ordinary films Ruben had engaged two stray
Italian females who howled through several spasms of what they and most
of the audience seemed to think was music. As they had been hired before
our contract was made, and their wages were nothing out of our pockets,
I could only reasonably demand that the Kinetophone remain the
head-liner. The blacks of Bahia, we soon discovered, have not yet
reached even the moving-picture stage of development, rum, dances, and
church festivals being their high-water mark in recreation, and not ten
per cent. of our paid audiences were negroes, in a town where fully
three fourths of the population is of that race. But our audiences were
large for all that, because the lighter minority came again and again to
see the chief novelty that had reached Bahia in several seasons. Even
this near-white class, however, was not conspicuous for its
prepossessing appearance, and the calm, steadfast, efficient face of
Edison, gazing out from our posters through these throngs of indolent,
ambitionless mortals, insignificant of physique and racially entangled,
gave a striking contrast, typical of the two continents of the New
World.
Our first Sunday, in particular, was a busy day. It is the custom all
over Brazil for the “excellentissimas familias” to go to the “movies” on
Sunday afternoon or evening, and the habit is so fixed that they prefer
to pack in to the point of drowning in their own perspiration, even at
double prices, rather than see a better show on a week day. For managers
naturally take advantage of this fad and offer their poorest
attractions—just as Ruben withdrew his “imported artists” on this
day—knowing they will fill their houses anyway. If only we could have
taken Sunday with us, movable, transportable, and played on that day in
every town, we would have made as great a fortune as if the World War
had never cast the pall of a “brutal crisis” over Brazil.
By one in the afternoon I was at the theater door in impresario
full-dress and managerial smile, greeting the considerable crowd that
came to the matinée, and disrupting the plans of those who had hoped to
drag five or six children by in the shadow of their skirts or trousers.
Then, with scarcely time for a meat-laden Brazilian supper in our
disreputable hotel across the street, I came back to the most crowded
theater I had seen in months. By 7:30 we had already closed the inner
doors and the élite of Bahia continued to stack up in the lobby until
that, too, had overflowed long before the first session ended. We were
compelled to send policemen in to eject the first audience, and when the
house had been emptied and the gates opened again, it flooded full from
floor to “paradise” five stories up as quickly as a lock at Panama does
with water. Even then all could not crowd in, and we herded them up once
more in preparation for a third session, which, though not beginning
until after ten, was also packed. Nothing so warms the cockles of a
manager’s heart as to watch an unbroken sea of flushed and eager faces
following his entertainment. By this time I had met most of the high
society of Bahia, all her white and near-white “best families,” with now
and then some physically very attractive girls among them, having
marched at least once past my eagle eye. That night I carried off more
money than had fallen to our lot since our first days in Rio and São
Paulo.
Though silver was conspicuous by its scarcity in Bahia, there were other
troubles attached to the handling of money. Those familiar only with the
quick and convenient methods of American banks can have little
conception of the difficulties of banking in South America. No two banks
in any city in Brazil, for instance, would accept one another’s checks;
worse still, two branches of the same bank in neighboring cities would
not transfer funds of their depositors without all the formalities and
expense involved in such transactions between foreign countries. Where
there is no mutual confidence there can be no credit system, and instead
of giving or receiving a check, one must carry a roll of cash, like a
professional gambler or a manipulator of politicians. By the time I had
four contos laid away in a British bank, exchange had bounded skyward
again, and it would only have been to waste what little Linton was
making to buy drafts as that rate; yet the bank refused to transfer our
account to their own institution in Rio or Pernambuco, except at a high
commission. When the day came for us to move northward again I was
forced to draw out our earnings in ragged bills of tiny denominations
and carry them with me.
Of “deadheads” and official mendicants the “São João” had its full
share. Ruben sent ten tickets a day to police headquarters, but those
who came on duty gave these tickets to friends and bootblacks and negro
relatives, and thrust their way in on the strength of their uniform or
badge. We were overrun with grafters filling seats and using up programs
for which honest people would have been willing to pay money, while a
dozen of the best boxes were permanently allocated to state and
municipal officials and powerful politicians. When I protested to
“Colonel” Ruben, I learned another interesting little fact,—he was
forced to be kind to politicians because, thanks to his political pull,
he got this great four-tier theater, built by the government in viceroy
days and now belonging to the State of Bahia, rent free! As to the
police, he confided to me that he had to be lenient with them in order
that they might not be too harsh with him when he offered shows of the
“_sem roupa_” or undress variety.
For all the resentment of frustrated “deadheads” and the attitude of
Bahia’s newspapers, which at first gave five lines to Edison’s invention
and full pages to the religious debauch of Bomfim, the success of the
Kinetophone forced the five or six dailies to give our engagement
increasing attention. They were all rather pitiful sheets, and in a town
where at least three-fourths of the population never reads it would have
seemed highly advisable to have combined them into one good newspaper.
That of course would have been impossible, because of Latin-America’s
lack of team-work and mutual confidence, as well as the demand of each
political faction for its own organ of propaganda. One day there
appeared in the best of these sorry journals a long and learned article
by a Brazilian purist who, though flattering to the invention and the
inventor, asserted that it should be called “Cinephonio” rather than
“Kinetophone.” I was feeling in good Portuguese form by this time, and
having leisure enough to dig back through the layers of philology to
ancient Greece, I sent in an equally long and learned answer that
decidedly surprised editor, contributor, and reading public, accustomed
only to the type of American business man who is utterly ignorant of,
and wholly uninterested in, the native tongue. Comments on this
controversy and its astonishing dénouement drifted to my ears from our
throngs for more than a week afterward.
Such experiences as this emphasized the unwisdom of the habit of many
American firms of sending the same “drummer” to cover both Brazil and
Spanish-America. Brazilians have a rivalry toward Argentinos which
amounts to hatred; they consider the Castilian tongue particularly the
language of the Argentine and at least pretend to regard it as a
corruption of their own, of which they are unreasonably proud. Hence the
traveling-man who addresses them in Spanish is more apt to arouse
resentment than commercial interest. If he cannot speak Portuguese, he
will do better to stick to English, using an interpreter when necessary,
or take a chance on his French, which most educated Brazilians
understand more or less, rather than deliberately to incense them by
using the tongue of their rivals and implying its importance over their
own.
We had now reached a latitude where it is doubly wise for the white man
to exercise regularly, and the daily walk that had always been a custom
I now made a stern requirement. Complaints against sluggish livers were
almost universal in the small foreign colony, but I noted that they
invariably went with large liquor bills and a scorn of pedestrianism,
even in its mildest forms. Personally, though it was unquestionably hot
and perspiration flowed at the least physical exertion, I found the
climate of Bahia agreeing splendidly with me, and a few miles of brisk
walking, followed by a refreshing “rain bath,” became a pleasure to
which to look forward. “Tut” could frequently be coaxed to go with me,
but his Brazilian training made Carlos prefer to loaf about the theater
and watch the rehearsing of dancing girls, in the face of my warning
that he was now in a different land than his cool and temperate São
Paulo. There were fine points to Carlos; one often caught a suggestion
that in some such stern environment as the United States he would have
turned out a man of parts, but the error of his parents in turning south
instead of north across the Atlantic made his struggle with environment
a pitched battle, with the odds against him.
There are endless wooded hills and valleys in Bahia, with old forts on
every projecting angle of the city, on both the bay and the ocean side,
which recall the days when São Salvador was the proud capital of Brazil,
unworried by the suspicion of a future rival. Out beyond the élite
section along the Rua Victoria, past the old church said to stand on the
very site in which the city was founded, a nose of land jutting out into
the sea and swept by unfailing breezes was shaded by an aged fort and
lighthouse that made its sloping greensward or quaint stone benches the
most ideal place in South America to spend an afternoon lolling over a
book. If one felt more energetic, there were amusing characters among
the curious wicker fish-traps down on the beach below. Often I walked
all morning long entirely within the city limits through dense
uninhabited jungle, following soft earth roads down through great
valleys with clusters of negro cabins, and shops of the equally
superstitious Portuguese with whom they trade, bearing such names as “Fé
em Deus,” “Esperanç aem Deus,” “Todo com Deus,” the householders lolling
in the shade beneath them and letting _Deus_ do the rest. Here the motto
seemed to be “God helps those who wave a flag with His name on it.” It
was almost a relief to run across such frankly cynical shop-names as “A
Protectora da Probeza” (The Protector of Poverty).
Bahia is built on a peninsula connected with the rest of the continent
by a narrow neck of land, and out this runs its railway line, soon to
split into three branches which wander away into the interior of the
state. My random wandering brought me out across this one morning and on
along the shore of an inner arm of the bay, here endlessly lined with
negro huts. I was quenching my tropical thirst with a juicy watermelon
when a negro stopped to ask if I did not know that I would die if I ate
watermelon in the middle of the day, and soon brought a crowd of excited
blacks chattering and gesticulating about me. South America is full of
such amusing superstitions, concerning the danger of eating certain
foods at certain times, or of eating simultaneously two that do not “fit
together.” An old dugout sailed me across the breezy neck of the inner
bay from Brandão to Itapagipe, sparing me a return tramp of five miles,
for at this point the electric cars pass frequently. There is a long
beach in this middle-class suburb of Itapagipe, and a little wharf at
which crude sailing boats from about the bay unload watermelons and
mangos, bananas and big luscious pineapples, the latter selling on the
spot for a mere _tostão_, or those with empty pockets may fish slightly
damaged ones out of the water for nothing. On such excursions one must
take care not to dress too carelessly, for there are, of course, two
classes in the Philadelphia-made street-cars of Bahia and little visible
sign to distinguish them, so that on almost every tour through the
first-class car the conductor is forced to order men without coats, or
collars, or socks, or real shoes, or a proper haircut to go back into
the other. On the other hand he, too, has his rebuffs, for almost anyone
wearing a frock-coat says haughtily, “I have a pass,” though never
offering to show it, and the conductor sneaks obsequiously on.
A favorite recreation of foreign residents and wealthy white natives of
Bahia is to visit the principal ships that anchor in the harbor. To many
this is the one touch of civilization superior to that at home, as the
trains in which the people come to sit for a few minutes are to the
inhabitants of interior villages. But most of them come for more
material purposes,—the foreign residents to imbibe “real booze” once
more, the élite among the natives to defraud the country’s revenues by
replenishing their wardrobes at the ship’s barber shop, buying boxes of
chocolate, scented soap, perfumes, lingerie, all the smaller luxuries
which can only be had at much higher price or not at all on shore,
“women of the life” on professional errands or merely to catch a breath
of their beloved Europe. There was a steam-laundry on the ships I
visited and had I thought of it in time I might have brought my soiled
“linen” on board, as did not a few residents, and had it back when the
boat returned from Buenos Aires. To entrust anything to the native
washerwomen of Brazil, particularly of Bahia, is to risk having it worn
for a week or more by the laundress’s husband or lover, and to insure
that it shall be beaten to a pulp in some mud-hole, dried among
goat-dung, and returned a fortnight or so later more torn and soiled
than when it departed.
About a week after we opened in Bahia, Ruben drifted around to my usual
station in the course of the evening and said that he would like to
lengthen our contract from twenty-five to ninety days. I declined at
once, at least on a fifty per cent. basis. He next offered to pay the
baggage haul in addition; then he promised to defray all our traveling
expenses, and to cover all the territory from Bahia to Pernambuco. I
promised to think this over.
Though I had not found Ruben “crooked as a bed-spring,” as some of his
former business associates described him, I knew that he had not been
designed with a T-square—and Ruben knew that I knew it. But he was a
good “mixer” and an excellent manipulator of politicians, which is a
great advantage in Brazil, and is acquired with great difficulty by a
foreigner, no matter how well he may learn the language. Besides, Ruben
had the most American ideas on advertising of any Brazilian I had ever
met and though, of course, he expected to make something out of us, it
was a question whether we would not get more ourselves while he was
making his profit than we could make alone. Sometimes a crook, well
watched, is a better business partner than an honest man, for he is
likely to take a chance and is rarely as slow to see an opportunity as
are more sincere individuals.
I did not, however, care to spend three months in that corner of the
world. I hoped, in fact, to be well up the Amazon by that time, and
after sleeping on it I agreed with the “colonel” on a sixty-day contract
at the terms he had offered. By this time my practice in Portuguese made
it easy to draw up an elaborate document of twelve articles that even a
corporation lawyer would have had difficulty in evading. In effect, it
made Ruben our advance agent, with the privilege of paying himself, and
left me merely my managerial duties. Indeed, this document and what had
led up to it so took the “colonel’s” eye that next day he informed me he
needed a man of my “pulse,” or American energy, and that as soon as I
got the Kinetophone back to the United States I must return and become
manager of the big new theater he was soon going to build on the
triangular vacant lot near the “São João”!
“Muito obrigado,” I replied, that being Brazilian for “much obliged.”
We were to play in Bahia and about the bay until carnival time, come
back to the “São João” for those festive days, and then turn northward.
On the morning of January 26 we tore down the show and loaded it into
the special baggage-tramcar Ruben had furnished, moving under guidance
of his part-Indian mulatto sub-manager out to the suburb of Rio
Vermelho. This was a sea-beach village of mainly well-to-do white
residents—though no one seemed to bathe, at least in the sea, in
Bahia—three miles from the center of town through densely wooded valleys
of mango and alligator-pear, jack-fruit and bread-fruit trees, all
heavily loaded with their products. We played to packed houses, with few
“deadheads,” for here Ruben had little fear either of politicians or
police. The cinema of A Barra, another seaside suburb to which we moved
three days later, was an outdoor place of sandy bottom, a sheet-iron
wall, and only a suggestion of roof, always comfortable with the trade
wind sweeping through it. There I could go to the show and look at the
brilliant moon at the same time, and our film-men could be heard talking
and singing blocks away.
Having performed the extraordinary feat of sleeping seventeen
consecutive nights in the same bed, I decided that I needed a change of
scene. Up at the head of the bay was a town called Santo Amaro da
Purificação, where Ruben had planned to take us; but a religious
festival having broken out there, he changed his mind, saying that
negroes celebrating church _festas_ do not spend money on cinemas. I
went over to see whether he was right, and incidentally to revel in the
“purification” attached to the town’s name.
One of the little steamers of the “Navegação Bahiana” that sail the bay,
leaving three times a week for most of the towns around it, departed at
high tide with a considerable crowd bound for the _festa_. It was hot
under the lee of the land, but once out on the blue water nothing could
have been more pleasant, at least in so far as weather was concerned. We
stopped at three towns on as many islands and passed many smaller ones
along the base of the bay shore, almost everywhere piled up in
hundred-foot cliffs. The soil, even on the smallest islands, was of that
deep-red color common to much of Brazil, and royal palms lifted their
proud heads over a reed-and-mud negro hut on many a little island. We
picked up _festa_-dressed passengers at several villages. Perhaps one
out of twenty of my fellow-travelers showed no traces of negro ancestry.
Bad teeth were universal among them, more unsightly still in the case of
those with a smile like a flash of a brass-shop window, who could afford
the ministrations of the wandering “dentists” that inflict interior
Brazil.
By and by the water turned from the dense clear-blue of the bay to a
grayish color. Several large time-blackened churches appeared on
commanding, breezy noses of land, with a few poor houses and miserable
huts tucked away in the hollows beneath them. We entered a small river
that wound in S-shape through a sort of marsh, passing a three-story
agricultural school that loomed up through the palm-tree jungle in
apparently utter isolation, and at sunset tied up at the end of a long
causeway across a swamp, where a dozen quaint little mule-cars were
waiting for us. The fare on these for a two-mile ride was a milreis,
which was bad enough, but the driver, singling me out as the only
foreigner and person of wealth among the _festa_-bound horde, and no
doubt short of cash for his own celebration, demanded that I pay double
fare, and was invited to go to the devil for his pains.
He was going there anyway, it turned out, for if the manager of the more
populous afterworld does not own Santo Amaro da Purificação it would be
hard to get anyone else to claim it. A long, thin, one-story town,
stretching out for a mile or more through low, soggy land, it is
inhabited almost entirely by animal-like blacks festooned in dirty rags.
Groups of loafing negroes filled every doorway, covered every shady
spot, occupied the narrow remnants of dilapidated sidewalks, doing
nothing for a living, not even taking in one another’s washing, and
living happily ever after for all that. A cross between a ditch and a
river flows—or rather, lies—through the length of the town, and in this
stagnant sewage the inhabitants not only attempt to swim when the whim
comes upon them, but dip up water for cooking purposes. To drink it
would evidently kill even a Brazilian negro, so in various parts of the
town there are public spigots shut in by iron fences, with an elaborate
“office” and a turnstile that can be passed only by paying a _vintem_
for a can of water. Along the noisome canal are a few distilleries,
dirty as the rest of the town, and a bit of sugar-cane is grown in the
vicinity, but on its edges Saint Amaro of the Purification breaks at
once into green rolling campo, which the swarming inhabitants are too
indolent to cultivate. Two automobiles had come to show off at the
_festa_, and were so rare a sight that whenever they appeared, jouncing
and bumping down one of the so-called streets, with a dozen of the town
notables clinging wide-eyed to the seats, all the children and most of
the adults took to pursuing them with shouts of “Oo ah-oo-tah-mave!”
The festival really did not begin until next day, but as often happens
in Latin-America, the people could not wait and were already celebrating
the _véspera_. About the _matrix_, or main church, surged immense
throngs of leprous, unwashed negroes, hilarious with the
drunken-religious orgy. Native rum flowed everywhere. There were
forty-two gambling tables running full blast, with crowds of children
from six to sixty—if anyone ever lives to that age in Santo
Amaro—throwing their money upon them, many so poor that they had only
coppers to hazard. Any negro boy who could get a table, mark a square of
cloth or cardboard with numbers or colors, and produce a tin can and
three dice or any kind of home-made roulette wheel, became forthwith the
proprietor of a gambling establishment. The town was lighted by
gas—except that most of this was now used to illuminate an “AVE MARIA”
in letters ten feet high on the façade of the church. Under this a band
blew itself almost brown in the face in honor of the tin Virgin inside
the musty old church, before which throngs of gaudily but raggedly
dressed negroes were bowing down, crossing themselves on the face,
mouth, navel, and finally the body, and displaying curious intermixtures
of Catholicism and African fetish worship.
All night long the hubbub lasted. My unknown Brazilian roommate in the
“Pensão Universal,” a human sty which had recently opened as a public
hostelry and would no doubt close again after the festival, had usurped
the bed by piling his junk upon it, and left me a crippled canvas cot. I
was awakened frequently by the cold coming up through this, though by no
means so often as by the amorous negro swains and wenches retiring from
the exciting festivities to adjoining rooms.
High noon found me struggling to get a railway-ticket back to Bahia. It
was no easy feat. Eventually we had to break into the inner office and
corner the befuddled agent, who replied to our excited demands with a
tropically phlegmatic, “But there is no hurry; the train will not
_really_ leave at twelve.” Subsequent events proved that he was a better
prophet than the printed time-table. We finally dragged away about two,
on a railroad built in 1881 and still retaining the same roadbed,
rolling-stock, swell-headed old engines and point of view, and rambled
along most of the afternoon, until we came to a derailed train and were
told to get out and walk. Luckily we were only a few miles from Agoa
Cumprida (Long Water), where this branch line is joined by one from up
the coast—and on the whole it might be a good thing to make travelers by
rail get off every little while and walk a few miles. As the first long
cove of the beautiful bay came into view I dropped off and was sailed
across the neck of water in one of the ferry dugouts to Itapagipe, where
one engagement at the “Theatro Popular” was proving popular indeed.
Three days later all of us, including Ruben in person, took a side-wheel
steamer across the bay to São Felix, planning to spend a week away from
the city. Across the deck from me sat a white woman with three chain
bracelets, one wrist watch, seven very large rings on four fingers of
the left hand, six more on the four fingers of the right hand, a gold
watch-chain some two yards long about her neck, enormous showy earrings,
a gold locket and pendant, and various other gaudy odds and ends. This
paragon of taste, it turned out, was one of our party. She was from
Montevideo and Ruben had brought her along to do a Spanish dance _sem
roupa_—no wonder she needed to be covered with jewelry—for the benefit
of the _matutos_, or “country gawks,” of the interior.
A couple of hours carried us across the main bay and we entered a narrow
inlet which soon swelled into another and smaller bay that gradually
narrowed down until we found ourselves in an immense river, the
Paraguassú, with low bushy sides and water well up to the branches of
the few trees at high tide. Villages, towns, and single old
_fazenda_-houses under their majestic royal palms appeared here and
there, at some of which we tied up. Others sent on board or took ashore
two or three of the plantation family in flimsy dugout logs paddled by
more or less naked negroes. Most of the towns had names ending in “gipe”
and lived on their exports of _fumo_ and _charutos_ (tobacco and
cigars), that weed, as well as fruit and cacao, growing abundantly back
in what looked like rather a barren and bushy land. The river narrowed,
winding through low hills, and at sunset we sighted the twin towns of
São Felix and Cachoeira, on opposite sides of the stream and connected
by a long railway-and-foot-bridge, at the foot of a series of rapids
over black jagged rocks that halt navigation and give the latter town
its name.
As usual bedlam broke loose between the chaotic-minded passengers and
the aggressive boatmen, _carregadores_, and touts fighting for business.
Though there was an abundance of men in ragged, baggy uniforms, no one
seemed to have any authority. One evil-eyed, half-baked looking fellow
who drew a razor in the midst of the turmoil turned out to be the
hotel-keeper who had been told to prepare rooms for “the entire
Kinetophone company,” and who did not propose to be outwitted by a
rival. We let them fight it out, put our light baggage into a ferry
“canoe” with Carlos and the undress “artist,” and sent them across the
river—our theater being in São Felix and the boat-landing in Cachoeira.
Then we walked a mile or more along the rough-and-tumble stone streets
of what appeared by the weak gas-lamps to be a town transported bodily
from the heart of the Andes, paid sixty reis at the bridge turnstile,
and brought up at the tiny “Cinema São Felix.” There Ruben and the
Italian owner broke into such garrulous greetings that it was after
eight before we finally dragged our guide and mentor away to the “hotel”
of the belligerent seeker-after-guests, who was now grieving over the
unexpected scantiness of our “company.”
Of the pseudo-meal foisted upon us after two hours of shouting,
swearing, and insisting, I will say nothing, and even less of the
boiler-factory din that seethed through the tiny pens divided by thin
wooden partitions reaching only halfway to the un-ceiled roof, except to
remark that, as soon as the show was installed next morning, “Tut” and I
might have been seen moving across the river to the “Hotel das Naçoes”
in Cachoeira. This second city of the State of Bahia—equal in size to
Texas—was only a languid backward village, without electric-lights,
without even a wheeled vehicle, unless one counts the tri-weekly
side-wheel steamer or the little railway that rattles up to Feira do
Sant’ Anna and straggles 165 miles west into the interior of the state.
There are several moderately large tobacco and cigar warehouses, but
almost the only sign of industry in either of the twin towns was our
advertising,—a deluge of posters and handbills, and a parade of
_taboletas_, or large movable street-signs, accompanied by negro boys
beating cymbals, drums, and tin pans. We charged double prices, because
the theater was too small to make anything less worthwhile—and we played
to 128 paying clients and a score of “deadheads”!
Next day the Italian cinema-man begged us with tears in his voice to cut
the entrance fee in two, and as some such drastic action seemed
necessary to save us from bankruptcy, I agreed—and that night we had 89
paid admissions! These interior towns are so sunk in sloth that they
seem to resent any attempt to shake them out of the somnolence of their
ancestors, out of that apathetic indifference to the advances of
civilization which makes them scorn even the few opportunities of a
life-time to see something new and important, to get some hint of the
world’s progress. Only the barbaric recreation of drunken church
festivals appeals to them.
I took advantage of the Sunday train to visit Feira do Sant’ Anna,
thirty miles up-country. This line was built back in the seventies, yet
the names of Hugh Wilson and other Americans still appear on various
bridges and viaducts. The train climbed for half an hour, and still we
could look down upon the twin towns close below, but once up on top of
the flat, rather dry and sandy, plateau it raced along at decent
Brazilian speed. The slender branches of the mandioca were numerous, and
here I saw my first tobacco-fields in Brazil. At one station a mile from
the town it served saddle-horses were waiting for the men and enormous,
bungling, two-wheeled mule-carts with wicker armchairs in them for the
women. It would have been dreadful if one of the white-collar class had
been forced to walk that mile along the smooth, dry, cool summer road.
For it was pleasant and breezy up here, though the elevation was not
great; even at summer midday one could walk comfortably in the sun
bareheaded—provided one could walk anywhere comfortably. My preconceived
notions of this region proved entirely false. I had expected dense
jungle and forest, and humid, leaden heat; on the contrary, it was not
only dry and cool, but almost bare of vegetation.
Feira do Sant’ Anna, so named for the great cattle-fairs that were held
here on St. Ann’s day, is less than a century old, a one-story town
sitting out unsheltered on a dry, sandy, plain. Two streets wider than
Broadway cross at right angles in the center of town, and are fully
paved with cobblestones and lined with small bushy shade trees. On
Monday market-days these are thronged with countrymen and women from a
hundred miles around. To-day a cockfight under a big tree on the
outskirts seemed to be the only activity. Two roosters without
artificial spurs, but with bloody heads and necks, entirely featherless
in spots, pecked at each other eternally, while bullet-headed negroes
and mulattoes stood around them betting—if they still had any
coppers—one owner or the other occasionally picking up his bird,
spraying a mouthful of rum-and-water on its head and neck, and setting
them at it again, until one fell from utter exhaustion and the other,
wabbling drunkenly on his bloody feet, uttered a feeble crow of victory.
Wells with good American force-pumps marked the town a rare one for
interior South America, where the inhabitants generally drink from some
nearby creek or mud-hole; but drought had left little at the bottoms
even of the wells, and this scant supply negro boys were delivering to
various parts of town in casks on mule or donkey-back, a blue enameled
government license on the forehead of each four-footed animal.
[Illustration: The site on which Bahia was founded]
[Illustration: Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a
steam-laundry of Bahia]
[Illustration: Taking a jack-fruit to market]
When we got back to Bahia on February 10 a brand new hotel had been
opened on the space left between Ruben’s present theater and the
invisible one I had the opportunity of some day managing. It was a
five-story, flat-iron _placete_ on the height of the city, the highest
building in Bahia, or, indeed, in the state, and was the wonder of the
region. The only elevator in the paunch of South America, except the
outdoor one between the lower and higher city, ran all the way up it,
but when “Tut” and I entered, it refused at first to work, whereupon I
stepped out again to get something I had forgotten.
“Oh, don’t be afraid!” cried the servant, himself ashy with fear, who
was attempting to manipulate it, “it won’t fall.”
On the fifth floor, spoken of with a catch of the breath in Bahia, we
had a pleasant little room with a vast outlook over city and ocean—and
as it was starting in to acquire a reputation, the place was strictly a
hotel and not a brothel. Materially it was a great relief from what we
had been enduring for weeks past, and the unwonted sensation of living
in well-nigh civilized surroundings again was welcome, but a hotel,
after all, takes its tone from its guests and servants, and these being
_Bahianos_, it was doubtful whether so expensive an establishment would
be able to keep its head above water. Speaking of water, the
shower-baths were extra, as usual in Brazil, but when I confided to the
manager that I would move out again next day, he hastened to assure me
that no one would notice when I bathed.
Street-cars and walls were again flaunting Kinetophone advertisements
inviting everyone to come and see the “marvel of the age.” But it was
“reheated soup” in Bahia now, and out at Itapagipe, where we had played
three nights to crowded houses only a week before, the Latin enthusiasm
had effervesced and we had only a straggling audience. If only we had
had some new numbers, say a couple of Caruso! The second night was
worse, with our share only 36$, and the owner refused to give a show at
all on the next and last night, saying the few days before carnival were
the worst in the year in the theatrical business, as everyone with a
_tostão_ was keeping it to buy masks, confetti, and scented water.
Carnival costumes and the silly soprano speech that goes with them were
already beginning to appear in the streets, and by noon on Sunday
negroes and half-negroes in fantastic make-up were everywhere. Most of
the “São João” employees were drunk or excited or parading the streets
by the time we opened for the matinée, and as I could watch the door as
well from there, I sat down behind the wicket and became ticket-seller.
Few ticket-offices in the world can compare with that of the old “São
João” in situation, under the deep colonial porch, open to all the trade
winds of the blue Atlantic, golden-bathed by day and silver-lighted by
night, lying a few hundred feet below and stretching away unbrokenly to
the coast of Africa.
Masked figures came, asking for tickets in the falsetto they hoped would
disguise their voices, as well as the usual haughty, tar-brushed class
in the full dress of public appearance. I quickly acquired the
professional ticket-seller’s “snappy” language and could toss out a
handful of change or a concise bit of information quite as scornfully as
the most experienced station-agent in my native land. Not a great many
spectators entered that afternoon, however, for which I did not blame
them. Why pay to go inside a musty old theater when the brilliant summer
day outside is full of free entertainments? Only two weeks before there
had been a similar celebration, but there is a constant string of this
expensive tomfoolery the year round in Bahia. The amount spent on
trolley-car and automobile floats alone would have built a good
school-house, to say nothing of the bands of music, costumes, and
playthings. Scores of automobiles filled with fantastically garbed men
and girls crawled through the streets, while thousands afoot were
arrayed in wild and generally ugly and orderless fantasy, with masks or
head-pieces equal to Bottom the Weaver. It was evident that the paraders
were mainly from the lower classes and had little originality of ideas
in designing costumes. Nearly everyone’s slight sense of humor prompted
him to pose as the opposite of what he was in real life; every negro who
could afford it wore a rosy-cheeked mask and white gloves; many of the
few whites had blacked up or donned negro masks, and perhaps half the
men were made up as women, while there was a perfect rage, particularly
among the part-negro girls, to appear in male attire, their hips
bursting through their otherwise loosely flapping nether garments.
“Ladies of the life” took advantage of the spirit of the day and sat
bare-legged in their balconies over the main streets, the police, of
course, never interfering, since correction or suppression are unusual
and unpopular in South America. We cancelled the third “section” that
night and joined the throng parading the streets amid cloud-bursts of
confetti, rivers of scented water, and maudlin uproar, and after looking
in at a popular ball that had many suggestions of a witch dance in the
heart of Africa I went home for my last night’s sleep in São Salvador da
Bahia.