EASTERNMOST AMERICA
The new contract with “Colonel” Ruben permitted me to absent myself from
the show and travel when and where I saw fit, he to pay my
transportation only by the most direct routes between the towns in which
the Kinetophone appeared. My faith in Ruben was always limited and my
preference for land over sea travel notorious, hence I decided to strike
off up-country a few days before the date set for us to sail for Maceió,
not only to indulge my incurable wanderlust but to prepare for any
sudden collapse of our sixty-day contract.
“Chemins de Fer Fédéraux de l’Est Bréslienne” seemed as top-heavy a name
for the narrow grass-grown track up the coast as the mammoth stacks made
the little old locomotives. Its tiny cars were designed for the use of
women rather than men, for the seats, instead of facing the open windows
and the world outside, stared into mirrors set in the car walls. We
ground away along the water, past Bomfim, topped by its white “miracle”
church, past Itapagipe beyond the widening water with its little sailing
dugout ferries, crept timidly across the long and aged wooden trestle
over this innermost arm of the bay, and at length lost Bahia to view
just a month from the moment I had first set eyes upon it.
There were a dozen stops at languid little cocoanut villages along the
fringe of the inner bay before the water gave way to dry and bushy
pasture-land at Agoa Cumprida. Most of the passengers changed there for
Santo Amaro, and for the rest of the journey we had more room than
company, which is usually an advantage in Brazil. Heaps of charcoal,
burned from the scrub trees that abound in this fairly fertile but dry
and little cultivated region, lay at most of the stations, at all of
which throngs of men, women, and boys strove to sell dusty fruit and
home-made cakes to the apathetic passengers. The dust lay thick upon us
also when we drew up at noon in Alagoinhas, eighty miles north. That
day’s train was bound up-country to Joazeiro on the São Francisco river,
and it would be twenty-four hours before I could continue along the
coast.
[Illustration: The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil]
[Illustration: The waterworks in a Brazilian city of some 15,000
inhabitants]
[Illustration: A Brazilian laundry]
[Illustration: Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival]
Some chap with a tendency for exaggeration has said that the night has a
thousand eyes; but that is nothing compared to almost any interior
village of South America when a white stranger comes strolling through
it. To walk the length of a street of Alagoinhas was like trying to
stare down some mammoth, bovine, fixedly gaping face, until a sensitive
man could scarcely have refrained from screaming, “For Heaven’s sake go
and do something, or at least draw in your stupid faces!” Spattered over
a lap of broken country and half-hidden in cocoanut and palm groves, it
would be difficult to decide how many of the 15,000 inhabitants it
claims actually dwell in it, were it not their unfailing custom to line
up to be counted. There was not a street in town, which is well inland
and at a slight elevation, but merely wide sloughs of sand between the
monotonous rows of houses; yet I was astonished to find two large and
well-kept cinemas. This, it turned out, was due to a local feud. Two
brothers who owned the “Cinema Popular” had been bosom friends of the
richest man in town, until they, too, bought an automobile. This so
enraged the rich man that he attempted to get even by building another
“movie” house in the hope of putting the brothers out of business. So
far he had not succeeded, and was all the less likely to do so after I
had signed a contract with the brothers for five nights at the
“Popular.” Ruben might take the show to Maceió and Pernambuco as he had
promised, but I did not propose to be caught napping, and if he did, the
Alagoinhas contract would be good in June or July when the Kinetophone
returned without me.
Another car so loose-jointed that the walls constantly creaked and
swayed toiled all the afternoon and into the night to carry a scattering
of passengers to Barracão, another name for Nowhere. It consisted merely
of several huts and a tile-roofed building in which all passengers by
rail from Bahia to Aracajú, or vice versa, must spend the night. The
engine, whistling up about a cord of wood, awakened us long before
daylight and at least an hour earlier than was necessary, for I was
already sitting in our six o’clock train when the other pulled out
Bahia-ward at five. The same seat, the same conductor, and the same
swaying walls as the day before made one feel like a trans-Siberian
traveler, though the 278 miles the train worries through in two days is
scarcely a Siberian distance. The salt-tainted breath of the Atlantic
slashed us now and then in the faces as we rumbled along, for we were
not far inland now. It was gently rolling country, of gray rather than
red soil, producing next to nothing, with here and there some bananas
and mandioca, and long unbroken stretches of scrub jungle. The _tucú_, a
grape-like fruit growing on a palm tree and so thick of skin and large
of stone that there is only a bit of sweetish dampness between them, was
sold at the rare stations.
Soon we crossed an iron bridge and what might have been a river had it
tried harder, into the State of Sergipe, the smallest of Brazil. This
and the little larger State of Alagoas are sliced out of the respective
states of Bahia and Pernambuco down near the mouth of the São Francisco,
which divides them. It is not apparent why they need be separate
states—but then, a foreigner ignorant of local conditions no doubt
wonders in looking at a map of our own country why a little nubbin of
land down at the end of Connecticut must have its own name, capital, and
government, or why both those bits of territory should not join
Massachusetts. The state lines of Brazil follow largely the old colonial
divisions, some natural but more of them artificial, set by the Pope or
the King of Portugal. Of the twenty Brazilian states, nine or ten have
aboriginal Indian names. It is another evidence of the higher value of
time to the American that we have an abbreviation for each of our
states, while the Brazilian has none. North and South American
incompatability of temperament is perhaps nowhere more definitely
demonstrated than in the attitude of the two races toward time. Brevity,
conciseness, and promptitude rank almost as bad manners among
Latin-Americans, whose editorial writers often break forth in
dissertations on “punctuality, that virtue of kings and bad custom of
Anglo-Saxons. Enthusiasts for liberty, we cannot admit that a man shall
be the slave of his watch. Life proves that punctuality is an excellent
virtue for a machine, but a grave defect for a man.”
In the blazing afternoon we came down off the interior plateau, ever
lower to the northward, here reminiscent of southern Texas or northern
Mexico in its aridity, its scattered, thorny, scrub plant life, its
occasional adobe huts, to a flat sea-level _littoral_ that was almost
entirely a dreary waste of snow-white sand, rarely punctuated with
cactus and a few other waterless bushes. Aracajú, capital of the State
of Sergipe, is set in this nearly desert landscape. The large room with
a mosquito-net canopied bed in which I was soon installed in the “Hotel
International” was the best the town had to offer befriended strangers.
Like all the rest of Aracajú, it was on the ground floor, looking out on
a quiet garden of deep sand, and was as airy as the exhaust from a
hot-air furnace. I had already taken it when my eye fell upon a notice
to the effect that for lack of water guests would not be allowed to
bathe for three days. By shouting until the whole hotel force was
gathered about me, and offering to make them all candidates for hospital
treatment, I was conducted, as a special favor to another of those
half-mad “gringos,” into a special “rain bath” for ladies, and freed
myself at last from the soil of Bahia. Then, having induced the landlord
to change the wooden-floored bed for one “of wire,” though he could not
understand why anyone should consider this an improvement, I relaxed and
sallied forth to see what Aracajú had to offer.
Sergipe, it seems, was a part of Bahia until nearly the end of the
colonial period, when it proclaimed itself a sovereign state with the
capital at São Cristovam, a straggling town some twenty miles back along
the railway by which I had come. But that was a league from a harbor,
and the government at length moved to an Indian village on the edge of
this cucumber-shaped bay. _Ara_ is a Tupi Indian word for plenty, and
_cajú_ is the Brazilian name for a fruit that thrives in such
semi-desert regions as the _littoral_ of Sergipe. This is shaped like a
small plump pear, with a smooth silky skin of saffron or brilliant red
color, which grows upside down on a tree not unlike the apple in
appearance, and is particularly conspicuous for the fact that the seed,
shaped like a parrot’s beak, gray in color, and containing a nut that is
delicious when roasted, grows entirely outside the fruit itself,
protruding from its larger end. The meat is white, exceedingly acid, and
sure death alike to thirst and the dye-stuff of garments. There were
barely a dozen Indian fishermen’s huts at Aracajú when it became the
capital in 1855; hence it has an appearance of newness rather than age,
and only two churches—quite sufficient, to be sure, but a great contrast
to Bahia. There is nothing particularly individual about the place, its
“palaces,” houses, or people, who are sufficient for all the Lord meant
them to be in this world and very few of whom are going to the next, if
I may judge by the size of the congregation and the priestly remarks
thereon at early mass the morning after my arrival.
The predominating type of _aracajuano_ is the gray or brown _mestiço_,
and a mixed race is rarely prepossessing in appearance. There are few
full negroes, even fewer pure whites, but every known mixture of the
two, no small number of _mamelucos_, or crosses between Indians and
Europeans, and too many _bodes_ (literally male goats) as the offspring
of Indian and negro are clandestinely called. The cucumber-shaped bay is
really the River Sery-gipe, a name said to mean the abode of a kind of
shrimp which abounds here, and has a troublesome moving sandbar at its
mouth, with less than four meters depth at low tide, making Aracajú the
only Brazilian coast capital which transatlantic steamers cannot enter.
One may see the waves breaking on this bar from almost any point in
town, but the open sea is in view only from the top of the cathedral or
the crest of the highest sand-dunes. Half the coast of Sergipe is made
up of this snow-white sand, in dunes that move with the wind, immense
heaps of the purest white sand covering whole blocks and rising a
hundred feet or more high within two minutes’ stroll of the main hotel.
All but a very few of the streets are ankle-deep in sand, as are the
palm-trees. These few are paved with large flat rocks fitted together in
all manner of irregular patterns. The “bonds” were still operated by
mule-power. There is a pleasing central _praça_, facing the waterfront
and backed by a little garden with a vista of the cathedral through
royal palms, pleasing perhaps because its bit of green lawn is in such
welcome contrast to the glaring sandy brightness elsewhere, but marred
by the statue of some local hero who, according to this monument,
stepped out of somewhere wearing a frock-coat and waving a most properly
creased soft felt hat, crying, “I am going to die for my country!” If he
could see it now he might regret his heroism.
In full sunlight at midday I could have used my umbrella to advantage as
a parasol, if some miserable son of a Brazilian had not stolen it in
Victoria. But he who never walks in tropical sunshine will never enjoy
to the full sitting in the shade, and at least the nights were cool and
breezy. The only thing to grow profane over was that the steamer which
was to carry me to Maceió had not even left Bahia, “because everybody
there is busy with the carnival.” This meant at least three days
squatting among the sand heaps, and perhaps not reaching Maceió until
after the show did, since that was to travel by direct steamer. Worse
still, I had read all the Brazilian novels in my bag, and Aracajú was
not the kind of place to support a bookstore. There was nothing left but
walking, and that soon palls in a sun-glazed town closely surrounded on
all sides by shoe-filling sand-dunes.
This dreary and unproductive soil stretches from five to ten miles
inland for the whole length of the state, with a broad strip of stony,
rolling, clay soil back of that, on which sugar and cotton, tobacco and
_farinha_ are produced in moderate quantity, while the western half of
the state is _sertão_, in which graze scattered herds of cattle. There
is a large weaving-mill in the capital, said to be the best in Brazil,
but still capable of improvement. During my strolls I came upon the
slaughter-house one afternoon and found scores of children showing great
glee at the struggles of the cattle as the blood poured from their
throats until they dropped in their own gore. Such was evidently the
chief education to be had by youthful Aracajú. Here, as in the other
tobacco producing state, Bahia, most of the negro women smoked pipes.
The lazy scrape of _tamancos_ was suggestive not only of the indolence
but of the moral looseness of the place. Though one might have had the
companionship of comely mulatto and quadroon girls for less than the
asking, I sought in vain for a person of even the rudiments of
intelligence with whom to pass the time, and was forced to take refuge
in the state public library instead. Even this was no monument of
learning, though several _sergipanos_ have won Brazilian fame as men of
letters. The building itself lacked nothing in elaborateness, but the
books were those least needed and only half a dozen youths drifted in
daily to read the newspapers and the silly “comic” weeklies from Rio.
Here, however, I learned that “there are two kinds of climate in the
State of Sergipe—hot and humid on the coast and hot and dry in the
interior,” and that the bronze gentleman in the frock-coat and Parisian
hat in the main praça was a “politician, a poet, and a great orator” who
tried to start a revolution here in 1906 and was quite naturally shot
full of holes by federal soldiers. No one can blame him, however, for
wanting to start something in Aracajú; his foolishness lay in the fact
that he seemed to think it was possible.
A two-line cable or two a week, usually on trivial matters and more
likely than not denied a few days later, constituted Sergipe’s
connection with the outside world. No doubt I needed the experience to
realize how dreary life is in these miserable little capitals when one
cannot hurry on as soon as the first interest and novelty has worn off.
The total lack of inspiration, of good example, of anything approaching
an ideal, could not but have killed any originality or ambition, even
had one of these half-breed youths been born with one or the other.
There was no goal in life. Even I felt that in my few days there; how
must it have been with a person born there and suspecting no other life
on the globe? A man may advance under his own gasoline, but unless he
has someone to crank him up he is very apt to die about where he began.
Few of us are equipped with self-starters.
Such reflections as these made me wonder sometimes whether the moving
picture, for all its imperfections and dangers and false view of life,
for all the peculiar inanity and childishness inherent in its dramas, is
not doing as much as anything to give the masses of South America,
particularly of the interior, at least a knowledge of better personal
habits, even if not higher aspirations. Much as this remarkable
invention has been prostituted by cheap mortals, it is an incredible
boon to communities so far from civilization that they never get more of
the great outside world than the films bring them. If you lived in some
sleepy little village in a remote corner of South America, far from
theaters or any other living form of life and thought, you would find
the daily round exceedingly dull, you would passionately crave some
variety, some entertainment, even mildly intellectual, or not at all so,
something to take you for an hour out of the dreary village routine of a
life-time and bring you in touch, if ever so slightly and momentarily,
with the great moving outside world. Thus you would welcome with
considerable enthusiasm even a bad “movie”—unless generations of this
life had so sunk you in sloth that you resented any attempt to drag you
out of it.
But though the “Cinema Rio Branco,” otherwise the state-owned “Theatro
Carlos Gomes,” in the next block was free to me, I found that at best a
stupid way for a man from the outside world to spend his time. Some of
that on my hands I had whiled away by booking the Kinetophone for three
to seven days on its return trip to Rio, we—or rather, they, for by that
time I should be far distant—to wire the manager at least five days
before their arrival. Thus I proposed to make a string of contracts for
“Tut’s” return trip, and leave my duty doubly done when I doffed my
movie-magnate hat up on the Amazon.
One morning I was rowed across the river, or harbor, in a dugout and
tramped for hours in the sand-carpeted forest of cocoanut-palms on the
Ilha dos Coqueiros. It was market-day in the town, and boatloads of the
nuts were coming across to compete with other native products from
farther up the river. The wind was sighing through the cocoanut fronds,
and I discovered that there are windfalls among cocoanuts also, for
there were so many large green ones under the trees that I had only to
stop and drink as often as I got thirsty. Numbers of them rot around the
edge of the stem and fall, and if they are not soon picked up, the decay
penetrates the shell and the nut spills its milk in the sand, leaving
only the husk to be used as fuel or roofing. Even here one was reminded
of the human race. The high trees of aristocratic arrogance ordinarily
had only half a dozen nuts, while the sturdy, ugly, short and squatty
ones bore from fifty to a hundred in tight clusters at the hub from
which the leaves radiate in all directions. A group of inhabitants
scattered along the near side of the island lived in cocoanut
husk-and-leaf huts and produced, besides their staple, which grows
itself, mandioca, melons, and children, all equally weedy and
ill-tended. Everyone above the age of ten or twelve seemed to have his
dugout log, a paddle, a square sail, and a trailing-board, all guarded
in his hut when not in use, and a bright-eyed bronze boy of part Indian
ancestry sailed me back across the harbor in a snapping sea breeze.
The dugouts and fishermen’s sailboats that always stretch along the
waterfront of Aracajú had been augmented by a steamer, the long-awaited
_Ilheos_ of the “Companhia Bahiana de Navegação,” which had at last
drifted over the sandbar at the harbor’s mouth. I hastened to the
company’s office, only to be struck in the eye by a sign headed “23 á 6
horas,” in other words, it being then Saturday, the _Ilheos_ would not
sail until _Tuesday_ morning! By that time the Kinetophone would long
since have left Maceió, even if good “Colonel” Ruben did not run away
with the whole concern during my prolonged absence. If only the sea had
frozen over I could have walked it in far less time than there was still
to wait, for it was only 105 miles to Maceió. But it would have been
many times that in this sand, and there was no other way of covering the
only break in railway travel—except the one between Victoria and
Bahia—along the whole eastern coast of South America.
The trouble was, it turned out, that Aracajú had next day to inaugurate
a new bishop, the first “son of Sergipe” ever to rise to that honor, and
of course Monday would be needed to recover from the celebration. The
archbishop of Bahia, the bishop of Maceió, and a swarm of lesser wearers
of the black robe had come to add dignity to the occasion, and, when I
came to think of it, of course it was they who were holding up the
steamer. Eight on Sunday morning found me at the _egreja matrix_, or
mother church, mingling with many pious negroes ready to give the new
bishop a proper send-off. But the edifice was already filled to about
seven times its capacity with people chiefly of color, and I withdrew
hastily to windward and a park bench. By Monday afternoon recovery from
the inauguration set in, and I ventured to buy my steamer-ticket, took
my last wade in the sands of Aracajú, and went on board for the night.
The bishop of Alagoas had the next cabin to my own and we slept with our
heads against opposite sides of the same half-inch partition. But I
suppose it was because I had no little purple dunce-cap to wear over my
bald spot that the dusky ladies of Aracajú did not come, glistening with
jewels embedded in their well-fed forms, to kiss _me_ good-night—on the
hand.
We began to move at four in the morning, and I went out to watch by the
light of half a moon and the Southern Cross our exit from one of the
most difficult ports in South America. Barely had we crossed the bar
when our sea-going tug began to rock like a canoe, and not only the
bishop but even as old a seadog as I took no interest in the ten o’clock
“breakfast.” The _Ilheos_ claimed to have twin screws, but they must
have been turning in opposite directions, for we made far less speed
than the coast swells that rolled us about like an empty bottle. The
shore was made up almost entirely of dreary wastes of white sand,
sometimes in broad flat stretches, sometimes drifted up into dunes. At
times a suggestion of forest appeared far back of this, but there were
few if any signs of habitation.
About noon the water about us turned from deep blue to a muddy red, a
great streak of which thrust itself out into the ocean from the outlet
of the River São Francisco. We turned into this across a broad sandbar
and found it a mile or more wide, though frequently split up by islands,
long, flat, and green. This river, largest between the Plata and the
Amazon, rises far to the south, near the old capital of Minas Geraes,
and has about the same volume of water as the Hudson. Thatched villages
and small cities line its banks for hundreds of miles and side-wheel
river steamers mount it in two sections, to Pirapora, in Minas Geraes,
terminus of the “Central Railway of Brazil.” We stopped at several
villages near the mouth, then pushed on inland. The rolling had ceased
and the bishop was out now parading the deck behind a big black cigar.
The shores were sandy and nearly flat, with palm-trees, some sugar-cane,
and a considerable population of more or less negroes. At length the
town of Villa Nova, two centuries old for all its name, appeared on the
nose of a bluff, and beyond, on the right-hand or Alagoas bank, the city
of Penedo, not unlike a smaller Bahia in situation, with several bulking
old churches and here and there a majestic imperial palm-tree rising
above all else.
We dropped anchor before Villa Nova, with its several textile mills, and
were soon completely hemmed in by cargo barges, though not before I had
slipped across to Penedo, from which we were to sail at four in the
morning. Considering the time it had taken to get there, it was hard to
believe that this was only forty-five miles north of Aracajú! Before the
town lay one of the side-wheel river steamers, and many “chatties,”
barges, and sailboats, not to mention countless dugout canoes, which ply
the lower São Francisco to the falls of Paulo Affonso, two hundred miles
up and “greater than Niagara,” according to my fellow-passengers. Here
and there groups of women were dipping up water and washing garments, in
the same spots. All the dwellers along its shore drink the muddy São
Francisco, _nature_, or at best filtered through a porous stone. No one
is ever seen swimming in these parts, either in river or sea.
[Illustration: The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay]
[Illustration: Another Brazilian milkman]
[Illustration: Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times]
[Illustration: A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor
gasoline]
I was surprised to find a large number of white people in Penedo, though
mulattoes were in the majority. There was some Indian blood, shown
chiefly in high cheek-bones and wide faces, and as usual there was a big
jail full of happy singing negroes. Full-white brats rolling stark naked
in the mud suggested one of the unfortunate effects of living in a
mainly negro country. Some streets climbed laboriously past overgrown
old churches with Portuguese crowns cut in stone on them, past
projecting balconies that carried the mind back to viceregal days, to
the grass-grown central praça high up on the ridge, overlooking a long
stretch of the red-brown river. It was the affair of a moment to
convince the owner of the “Theatro Sete de Setembro,” alias “Cinema
Ideal,” that the Kinetophone should halt here for three days on its
return trip. He was the big man of the town, with a dozen separate
enterprises, and when a score of persons crowded around us in his
drugstore to listen to our conversation and read over his shoulder
whatever I showed him, we agreed to leave the signing of the contract
for the next day on board the _Ilheos_, on which he, too, was to take
passage.
Anarchy reigned about the decks all night, sailors, stokers, and
visiting parties from shore keeping up a constant hubbub until we got
under way about dawn. A couple of hours sleep as we descended the river
were cut short as we struck the open sea, for though this looked calm
and smooth as a frog pond, the _Ilheos_ rolled like a log and soon took
on the aspect of a phantom ship, with everyone lying like dead wherever
misfortune overtook them. The dreary sandy coast was sometimes broken by
spurs of the low, flat, wooded plateau that stretches all along this
region farther inland. At two in the afternoon we sighted Maceió and its
port of Jaraguá, a smaller city far out on a point of land, with a reef
protecting a scallop in the coast but no real harbor. In one of the
score of sailboats that rushed out to meet us I was astonished to see
Carlos and later “Tut,” whom I supposed already in Pernambuco. They had
lost Wednesday and Thursday of the week before in getting here, had
played four days to tolerable business, and had lost the night just past
in waiting for the boat they now expected to take at any moment.
I took “Tut’s” room at the “Hotel Petropolis,” a massive, one-story
building on a sort of terrace that caught a hit of breeze and on the
sides of which were painted letters several feet high announcing it the
“Only Place in Maceió without Mosquitoes.” It had little of anything
else, for that matter, except good mosquito-nets over the beds to keep
out the mosquitoes it did not have. By dark the “Lloyd-Brazileiro”
steamer _Bahia_ arrived, and “Tut” and Carlos and Ruben’s mulatto
sub-manager sailed away, while I went over to the theater in which they
had played and contracted not only for three days on their return trip,
but for five days in Parahyba, capital of the state north of Pernambuco.
How hard Maceió had been hit by the prevailing hard times was suggested
on every hand, not only in out-of-works and light cinema receipts, but
by such posted information as:
NOTICE
On this date our telephone was disconnected from the respective
Company until our further orders, in view of the brutal crisis which
at the present time atrophies everything and everyone.
Maceió, January 1, 1915. João Ramos e Cia.
The capital of Alagoas, however, proved to be more of a city than it
looks from a distance. Most of it lies in a pocket between the sea and a
ridge, a large, almost land-locked bay running far in behind it. Mainly
three-story buildings lined the well-paved streets in the business
section, and new American street-cars of the electric “Companhia
Alagoana de Trilhos Urbanos” covered several pleasant suburbs. No
sooner, however, does one return to a region of railways and street cars
than missing arms and legs begin to appear. The people of Maceió were
visibly of higher class than those of the State of Bahia, though by no
means beyond possible improvement. Even the outskirt huts were
whitewashed and often noticeably clean, and women and children, and even
men, in many cases wore spotless white garments. Heaps of cotton bales
at the railway station and on the wharves reminded one of our own South,
but though there was ample evidence of African ancestry, there were
almost no full-blooded negroes among the population. The percentage of
white and near-white inhabitants was striking after Bahia; but here,
too, were the familiar north-Brazil concomitants of huge churches and
tiny one-room schools. Mangos and bread-fruit dropped in the central
praça, amid the myriad remains of tropical bugs lured to death by its
blazing electric-lights.
My only personal acquaintance with the élite of Maceió was due to
professional duties. When the show arrived, “Tut” had discovered that
the local electricity was of a freak type,—100 volts and 100 cycles,
whatever that means—a sort of non-union electricity evidently, for all
our phonograph motors refused to work with it. The English engineer at
the power-house figured out on paper that all would be well, but as the
“juice” is not turned on in Maceió until 6 P. M., his error was
discovered only when the audience was storming the doors on the opening
night. While the manager strove to keep the house amused with ordinary
films, “Tut” and Carlos raced about town and at last found in a café a
little electric fan. They borrowed the motor that operated it, but this
had to be cleaned and oiled before it would take up its new task, so
that it was nine o’clock before our part of the show was given; and as
Maceió usually goes to bed by eight, Ruben had to give back much of the
money, and the bungled _estrea_ injured business during the rest of our
stay. It turned out that the café and the fan belonged, sub rosa, to one
Dr. Armando Vedigal, a well-to-do lawyer and member of one of Maceió’s
“best families.” True to his race, as well as to his calling, this
gentleman, finding he had someone in a tight place, proceeded to squeeze
him. He demanded 100$ for the use of the motor for four nights, of at
most thirty minutes each. The whole fan costs six to eight dollars new
in the United States, and perhaps 35$ in Brazil; and as its perfection
was mainly due to Edison, it amounted almost to renting an apparatus for
two hours’ use to the inventor thereof at three times its original cost.
“Tut” had left the payment to me. Unfortunately I could not ignore it,
as I should have preferred, because the lawyer was a political power and
would have made it unpleasant for the owner of the theater unless his
“rake-off” was forthcoming, so the only American thing to do was to pay
what he demanded. I determined, however, to have at least the
satisfaction of expressing our gratitude to the fellow in person, and
after considerable insisting I was shown the way to his house. It was an
ostentatious one enclosed in a large private garden in the best part of
town and filled with those things into which persons of wealth and
“social standing” the world round turn the proceeds of such clever
“strokes of business.” The great man received me with a dignity
befitting his lofty station, and invited me into his chair-forested
parlor. He had the dainty aristocratic fingers, hands, and form of those
who, for generations back, have taken good care not to let their muscles
develop, lest someone suspect them of having once earned a dollar by
vulgar work, and he was dressed in the very proper heavy, black, full
frock-coat dress of his class, even on the equator.
I began by expressing our thanks for the use of the motor, to which he
instantly replied, “Ah, to be sure, I was _so_ delighted to be able to
serve you, and—and——”
He was plainly waiting for me to encourage him with, “Yes, that was _so_
kind of you” and a gentle pat on the shoulder, instead of the swift kick
farther down which he so richly deserved. I bowed, and took to
expressing in the most polished Portuguese I could summon my admiration
for a man who had the nerve to demand several times the price of a
machine for such a brief use of it. I had intended to work him up slowly
to the point where my remarks would feel like the threshing of nettles
on a bare skin, but the men of northern Brazil are dynamic with pride
and quick to flare up at any suggested slight, so that I had barely
reached the word _roubar_ (rob), first of a long and culminative list
with a sting, when he bounded into the air and asked if I really knew
the meaning of that word in Portuguese. I assured him that I did, and
the action, too, in any land or clime, whereupon he demanded in a
neighbor-waking voice whether I had come to call him a thief in his own
house. When I informed him that I had come for that express purpose, he
bellowed, “_Rua!_ Off with you! Out of my sight,” at the same time
hastening to pick my hat off the rack and hand it to me. I was going
anyway, now that he had caught my hint, but I did not propose to let his
wrath hasten matters. As I stepped leisurely out upon the veranda he
slammed the door and informed me in the bellow of a mad bull that he
would “pay me back”—not the 100$ unfortunately—“the first time he met me
on the street—to-morrow!”
“Why not to-day?” I queried, for it was barely dusk and there were
street-cars, if it was beneath his dignity to walk.
This redoubled his fury. “_Era uma fita_”—it was a regular movie, as the
Brazilians say, to see him giving an impersonation of a fire-eater for
the benefit of his wife and children, and shouting. “Let me at him! Let
me eat him!” while his wife and three small sons clung to his arms,
legs, and other appendages, screaming the Brazilian form of, “Don’t kill
him, Pa! Oh, don’t shoot him, for my sake!” He allowed the pistol he had
caught up to be wrested from his hand, but the howls and screams of the
whole family could still be heard when I turned the next corner—and I
was not running at that.
[Illustration: Ladies of Pernambuco]
[Illustration: A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper]
[Illustration: Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk
and a dancing-girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos behind the
drummer]
It was playing with fire, of course, not because these hot-headed
northerners are particularly brave, but because of the disadvantage
which a stranger and a foreigner would have in any contest with a
powerful local politician. Had he shot me, it would probably not have
been difficult for him to “fix it” to escape punishment, whereas the
reverse would almost certainly have meant many years in an unpleasant
climate. I was too exasperated to consider these things at the time,
however, and having returned to the mosquito-less hotel and strapped on
my revolver, I spent the evening hanging about the cinema, the town
billiard-room, and the other nightly gathering-places where a
“gentleman” with such a debt might come to pay it; but the lawyer’s
strength must have been unequal to that of his frenzied wife and
children, for I saw no more of him during my stay in Maceió.
The “G.W.B.R.,” or Great Western of Brazil Railway, is English, which
accounts for its being so called, though it runs from Maceió to Natal
through the easternmost part of the four easternmost states in the
western hemisphere. On the first day of the month in which I arrived
daily service had been inaugurated between Maceió and Pernambuco, but
lack of coal was making it impossible to keep this up and the line was
soon to go back to the old schedule of three trains a week. In other
words, I had accidentally chosen just the time to spare myself another
day in the capital of Alagoas. The train that left at dawn on the
225-mile run was long and heavy, with all reasonable comforts and many
minor evidences of English management, among them the habit of being on
time. This line is a part of the 786 miles leased for sixty years to the
British corporation by the government, and the contract reads that no
rental shall be paid for it until the gross income for all of them
exceeds 6,200$ per kilometer, after which ten per cent. of the receipts
shall be paid into the public treasury. The result is a problem similar
to that on the line from São Paulo to Santos. One million pounds
sterling was spent to improve the leased lines, but even that would not
have been enough had the company not been so fortunate, as the chairman
of the stockholders in London told them, as to have had a partial
failure of crops along their lines that year and to have been thereby
saved from contributing £36,000 to the government! The largest expense
of the company is for coal and its largest income from the hauling of
sugar, with second-class passengers next, according to an item in the
official report headed “Passenger and Live Stock Transportation.” No
doubt it would be hard to separate the two in Brazil.
The line to Pernambuco ran well inland through a dry and dusty but
fertile land, varying from rolling to big rounded hills, among which the
train wandered back and forth seeking an outlet. In places it was
somewhat forested, or seemed recently to have been cleared; but most of
it was thickly inhabited, compared with almost any other part of Brazil.
Big _engenhos_, or sugar mills, often punctuated the landscape with
tall, smoke-belching stacks; immense fields of sugar cane were
everywhere being harvested, and though it was February, workmen were
hoeing with big clumsy _enxadas_ cane-sprouts in the same plots in which
mature cane was being cut. Most of the canes came from the fields tied
in two bundles on the backs of horses, to be dumped in heaps at the
stations and then carefully corded on the railway cars. At least half
the stations had a long train of red and yellow cane loaded or loading
on the sidetrack, and our way was frequently blocked by similar trains
bound for Recife. These and the many large _engenhos_, the little
private railways on the _fazendas_, with their screeching English or
Belgian dwarf locomotives, and the evidence of movement and industry
everywhere, gave one the feeling of having once more reached a land of
ambition. Pernambuco is Brazil’s greatest sugar-producing state. Thanks
to this fact and to an unusually honest government, it enjoys a
prosperity second only to that of São Paulo, and possibly of Rio Grande
do Sul, in the entire republic. Cotton and mandioca also are important
crops, often growing together, and bales of the former lay piled up at
many stations. Everything, the cane-fields, the sugar-mills, the large
old plantation-houses in choice locations and guarded by half a dozen
majestic royal palms, even the swarms of beggars at the stations—gave
the impression of an old and long-established community.
It was a constant surprise to find it cooler up on this slight plateau
than in the sugar-fields of Tucumán, twenty-five degrees nearer the
South Pole, and I never could reconcile myself to the total absence of
jungle. Both these conditions were evidently due to the same cause,—the
constant strong trade winds that sweep across all this paunch of South
America and blow the rains, without which jungle cannot grow even on the
equator, farther inland. Water was so scarce that there were only
shallow mud-holes for the rare cattle, and all the region appeared
sorely in need of irrigation. As in Egypt, the dry soil or the glaring
sun seemed to produce blindness, and there were many sightless wretches
among the beggars that swarmed every station. Indeed, the sugar-cane,
the cotton, the lack of moisture in air and soil, the very _engenhos_,
carried the mind back to the land of the Nile. Mendicants in the last
stages of every loathsome disease thrust their ailments, their frightful
faces, their leprous finger-stumps upon one wherever the train halted.
All the people of this region,—beggars, bootblacks, or politicians—have
the habit of touching, patting, pawing one over to attract attention,
and it was only by constant vigilance that I could keep myself free from
often noisome personal contacts. Then, in that liberty-is-license South
American way, swarms of ragged urchins and shiftless men poured into the
cars at every station, fingering the spout of the empty water-can,
squatting in the vacant seats, thrusting their attentions upon the
passengers, stark naked children, with navels protruding several inches
from their rounded stomachs, scampered in and out of every opening, no
attempt whatever being made by trainmen or station police to reduce this
annoying anarchy. Many beggars and tramps used a sugar-cane as a
staff—perhaps as a sort of last straw against starvation.
I do not believe in charity, or at least in promiscuous giving, but the
Brazilian does, and every one of the beggars who flock about the
stations throughout northern Brazil seems to get something for his
trouble. Some of them were frankly Africans, but there were others whose
negro blood showed only in their love of sucking a sugar-cane, the most
work for the least gain of any labor on earth. Even the prosperous
cities are not free from this eleemosynary multitude. When the
archbishop of Pernambuco returned to his palace after the inauguration
of the “son of Sergipe,” he found 235 beggars waiting at his door. The
Brazilian no doubt feels that to give alms through an institution would
be to pay most of it into the capacious pockets of its managers or
sponsors, whereas if he gives himself, he knows that the gift actually
reaches the needy person—if, indeed, he is needy. Also, he is more apt
than not to be superstitious and to fancy that if he does not give, his
own affairs will not prosper; most of all, he is constantly at his old
pastime of “fazendo fita”—showing off. Hence impudent, able-bodied
beggars are a pest to society and to the travelers’ peace throughout the
country, particularly in the blazing north.
A brilliant moon waiting at the edge of the stage to do its turn even
before that of the unclouded sun was finished, gave us a continuous
performance, with the lighting never dimmed. As we neared Recife there
was less cultivation, and beyond Cabo White flat sand and miserable huts
took the place of the rolling, fertile, well-housed country—though even
here there was not the squalor of Bahia. A desert of sand, an almost
unpeopled wilderness had surrounded us for some time before the low
lights of Recife began to spring up across the level moon-bathed
landscape, and the sandy and swampy land of the Brazilian _littoral_
continued until our train rumbled out upon the very beach of the
moon-silvered Atlantic.
It was already 7:40, and there was no time to be lost if I was to take
up my professional duties that evening. About noon we had met the
up-train with the day’s newspapers and I had caught up with the world
and its doings again. Pernambuco has the best journals north of Rio, one
of which claims to be the oldest in Latin-America, and I had been
delighted to find in several of the most important dailies half-page
Kinetophone advertisements, and in all of them articles to the effect
that “Edison’s new marvel” had opened the night before with all three
sessions crowded to capacity by delighted audiences. But newspaper
stories and facts often have little in common. I sprang into the first
automobile to offer its services and, after a jouncing over cobblestones
that felt like being tossed in a blanket, was set down at the “Hotel
Recife.” This was said to be the best in town—which was certainly
slanderous language toward the others. Razor and shower-bath having
transformed me from a dust-bin discard to the personification of Beau
Brummel on a tropical excursion, I raced away to the “Theatro Moderno.”
There I was agreeably surprised. Ruben met me with the fraternal embrace
at the door of a large new theater, perhaps the most sumptuous in which
we had played in Brazil; the receipts the night before had been the best
in weeks, and crowds were even then clamoring for admission. The
sugar-prosperity of Pernambuco, abetted rather than injured by the World
War, combined with plentiful advertising in newspaper displays and
articles, in posters and handbills, and by the gyrations through the
streets of two _bonecos_, or dolls, ten feet high, had done the trick.
The fact that the _bonecos_ represented a friar and a dancing-girl
respectively, and that their public promenading was accompanied by
antics which a more circumspect people would have considered highly
indecent, seemed to have been an advantage rather than otherwise in
Pernambuco.
“Tut” had found the hotels so uninviting that he was sleeping in his
hammock on the stage of the theater. Our first move, therefore, was to
investigate what all foreign residents assured us was the best
stopping-place in Recife,—a _pensão_ kept by a European woman known as
the “Baroness.” It was out in the suburb of Magdalena, twenty minutes by
electric tramway from the center of town—except that passengers lost
more time than that in walking across a condemned bridge which would not
carry the cars. The _pension_ consisted of several buildings, one large
and pretentious, the rest simple and of one story, scattered about a big
enclosed yard shaded by many magnificent tropical trees and looking out
behind on one of the many arms of the sea which divide Recife into
separate sections. We took a large room together, opening directly on
the garden, with a mammoth tree over our very door. There were some
drawbacks—no electric lights, for instance, that improvement not yet
having reached Pernambuco in public form, though a few places had a
private plant. Also the “garden” was deep in sand, for lawns are unknown
in this part of the world. But a high fence, as well as dogs and
servants, made it possible to leave our doors wide open night and day to
the ever-cooling trade wind, and there was a quiet homelikeness as well
as cleanliness about the place that made us feel as if we had suddenly
left dirty, noisy, quarrelsome Brazil behind.
The “Baroness” had the advantage of good servants from German steamers
interned in Pernambuco, the nearest port of refuge for many of those in
the South Atlantic when the war broke out. In fact, all Pernambuco was
fortunate in having about five hundred men of similar antecedents to
serve it that winter. The excellent band of the _Cap Vilano_, for
instance, made not only the most energetic but the best music in North
Brazil at the “Café Chic,” just around the corner from our theater—at
the equivalent of a dollar a night to each of the musicians. The war had
brought Recife other things. Its sugar and cotton having kept it from
succumbing to the “brutal crisis” that flagellated the rest of Brazil,
it had the reputation of being the best-to-do city in the country.
Consequently, adventuresses of all nationalities had come up in droves
from dead Rio and impoverished São Paulo, and Recife had more high class
members of the profession that needs no training than most cities of
five times its population.
Though we often hear of it, there is really no city of Pernambuco. What
we call by that name is properly designated by one almost unknown to
foreigners. Pernambuco is an old Indian word that is only correctly
applied to the entire state, but it has long been the custom not only of
seafaring men and all foreigners, but of the Brazilians themselves not
resident within the state, to call its capital Pernambuco. Its real name
is Recife, and the story of its founding is not without interest. In
1531 Pedro Lopez Pereira established on the only hill in this vicinity a
town which was called Olinda, and which in time became a very
aristocratic center. But though it had a beautiful site on the open
ocean, Olinda had no port, and boats could only land behind the
_recife_, or reef, some miles farther south. On Christmas day of 1598
Jeronymo de Albuquerque formally gave the name Recife to the cluster of
trading posts that had grown up there, and built the fortress by which
the city is still, at least in theory, defended. The settlers at the
“Reef” were almost entirely Portuguese merchants, whom the aristocrats
of the proud residential town of Olinda called “mascates”—peddlers or
hawkers. The rivalry and ill-feeling between the two towns grew apace.
The colonial nobility of Olinda, resenting any interference from their
lowborn neighbors, wished to form an independent republic on the style
of Venice, and the quarrel finally developed into what is known in
Brazilian history as the “War of the Mascates.” Naturally the
“peddlers,” having nearly all the material advantages, had the best of
it; new authorities arriving from Portugal ended the struggle, and
Recife became the city, port, and capital of the region, leaving Olinda,
small and isolated on its hill, still proud of its aristocratic origin,
but a mere suburb of the modern city.
Unlike Bahia, Recife had no ridge to build on; hence it is deadly flat,
with only Olinda five miles to the northwest rising above the
featureless landscape, though far behind the city one may make out the
wooded hills that merge gradually into the flat-topped _chapadas_ of the
_sertão_ of the interior. It stands on the sandy beach of a lagoon delta
where two rivers, neither of them of much importance, meet, and the
compact old town, with the wharves, banks, and most of the business
houses, is really on an island, protected now not only by the natural
reef, but by a long breakwater behind which ships anchor. There is no
bay; hence steamers which do not enter the inner port must in rough
weather land their passengers in a “chair” running on a cable from the
breakwater. Many a traveler to South America remembers nothing of
Pernambuco except that hair-raising landing.
As Bahia is a city of hills and wooded ridges, so Pernambuco is one of
waterways and bridges. The so-called River Capibaribe runs, or at least
ebbs and flows, through town, and there are a score of natural canals,
estuaries, and mud sloughs filling and emptying with each tide, while
hundreds of dwellers in thatched huts of the suburbs have the advantages
of Venice in so far as a chance to pole themselves about on their rude
rafts goes. Marshy salt water comes in and around the city at every
tide, and the rivers, coves, or quagmires to be crossed in a journey
through it are numerous—doubly so since several of its many bridges have
been condemned for vehicular traffic. Palm trees, chiefly of the
cocoanut family, grow everywhere, and between its waterways the city of
bridges is noted for its dry and sandy soil; hence one can scarcely
stray from the paved streets without wading either in water, mud, or
sand.
Properly speaking, Recife is the older section of the town, out near the
reef, and given over mainly to business. The modern city covers several
times more territory than that, including country-like outskirts of such
suggestive names as Capunga, Afflictos, and Sertãozinho among its
suburbs. There is Afogados (Drowned Man) out past the Five Points
station on the beach, a big suburb of mud and thatched huts among swamp
bushes and a network of tidewater, with lanes of mud that snap like the
cracking of a Sicilian whip when the tide is out and the tropical sun
blazing down upon them. In other directions, still within the city
limits, are miles of old estates and aged plantation-houses living out
their dotage under magnificent royal palms. To get about this broken up
city there were big new English and American street-cars, so new that
passengers were not yet permitted to put their feet on the seats. It was
less than a year since the old mule-cars for which Pernambuco was long
famous, had been superseded—in the outskirt of Torre they might still be
seen—and ragamuffins who had never heard the word “bond” in its ordinary
significance made frequent use of it in its Brazilian sense. The new
company was pushing its lines in every direction and already the tramway
was advertising itself as ready to furnish electric-light to business
houses along its lines. Thus, though one had the sense of treading on
the heels of modernity in Pernambuco, in all northern Brazil, the
pre-invention age always succeeded in eluding one and escaping just over
the edge of the horizon.
Besides its brand new electric street-car system and the three lines of
the “Great Western” leaving it in as many directions, Recife has five
amusing little railroads, “toy locomotives hitched to a string of
baby-carriages,” as “Tut” called them, which do a volume of noisy,
dirty, dusty business to the north and northeast of the city. For many
years these ancient contrivances of an English company were the only
urban traffic in and about Recife. One crowds into a tenement-house of a
station, wages pitched battle about a knee-high hole in the wall to buy
a ticket, enters an ancient closed wooden box on wheels suggestive of
what trains must have been in the days of Charlemagne, amalgamates with
variegated Brazilians on a hard, misshapen wooden seat, and waits. When
one has waited long enough to run down to “B.A.” and back, there come
ten or twelve ear-splitting screeches and back-breaking jolts, and the
train is off for some other “station” fifty yards away, with a deluge of
smoke, soot, and cinders which penetrate to the utmost recesses of one’s
person. For a long hour the contrivance screams its sooty way through
endless dusty streets in which the irreconcilable tropical sunlight of
February strikes one full in the face like the fist of an enemy, and at
the end of that time the weary traveler may descend five or even six,
miles away, at Olinda, or at some of the plantation-town suburbs shaded
by many trees, yet dreary with their sand in place of grass. There are
two such lines to Olinda, out past Santo Amaro with its British cemetery
and across a broad swamp by a causeway; but the company claims that the
concession is no longer worth the holding since the coming of electric
competition. No doubt _Pernambucanos_ considered these medieval trains a
wonderful innovation and convenience when they first appeared, but it is
more pleasant now to depend on electricity—or to walk.
I waded for miles barefoot along the beach to Olinda one day. Palm-trees
edged the curve of the shore with their inimitable plumage, streaking
the staring white sunlight with slender shadows. Thatched huts along the
beach, with all the Atlantic and its breezes spread out before them,
suggested where many a well-to-do family of Recife spends its summers.
An old wreck here and there protruded from the surface of the sea,
relics of some collision with the easternmost point of the New World.
Olinda piled high on its hill amid palm-trees and many huge old
churches, takes on the air of both, of age and reverence and the regal
dignity of the royal palm. Its many old buildings are clustered rather
closely together; it seems still to scorn business as thoroughly as in
the olden days, and to spend most of its time gazing across the swampy
flatlands at its materialistic rival, or out upon the blue sea which is
so rarely seen from Recife.
The city we call Pernambuco claims 200,000 inhabitants, and of these
perhaps one in three could pass as white. Even in the huts lining the
water or mud labyrinths of the outskirts whites are numerous, though
often as trashy as the negroes. It is surprising that as one nears the
equator in Brazil the proportion of Caucasian blood increases, but it is
easily explained. All that part of South America which thrusts itself
halfway across the sea to Africa had many slaves, but Bahia not only
grew a crop which required more labor, but, its port being then the
national capital, it had the advantage of fame, as well as its great bay
as a safe landing-place. The result is that while Bahia is a negro town,
Pernambuco is a city of mulattoes, with a mixture of types that can only
be differentiated by the rich color-terminology of Brazil. On the whole,
the _Recifense_ is a more pleasant individual than the blacker, more
slovenly, more impudent _Bahiano_. Like most of the people of North
Brazil, he talks in a kind of singsong, ending almost every sentence
with _não_ (no) or _ouvioú?_ (did you hear?). There are few really
masculine voices in Brazil, and the persistent cackle of poor, cracked
trebles, chattering constantly at high speed about nothing, eventually
gets on the nerves, unless one has been spared that troublesome
equipment. The chief business of the city is still that of the
“mascates,” in a larger sense,—the exporting of sugar and cotton and the
importing of things needed by the growers of sugar and cotton, with the
usual large proportion of the benefits sticking to the fingers of the
fortunately placed middlemen. _Carregadores de assucar_, or sugar
porters, wearing a sort of football head-mask over their hats, are among
the most familiar sights of the old city, and the pungent odor of crude
sugar strikes one in the face everywhere in the wharf and warehouse
section. The sugar comes from the _engenhos_ in crude, dark-brown form;
the tropical heat causes it to ooze out until not only the bags but the
half-naked negroes who handle them are dripping and smeared with
molasses from top to bottom. When the rotting bag bursts entirely the
contents is spread out in the sun and barefoot negroes are sent to wade
ankle-deep back and forth in it, until it is dry enough to be shoveled
up again.
There are not so many churches per capita in Recife as in Bahia, but
they are by no means scarce, while the schools are if anything
worse,—miserable little one-den huts hanging on the edges of mud-holes
or salt-water marshes, according to the state of the tide. The president
of Pernambuco asserted in his annual message that the state schools
could not afford to import from the United States the school furniture
needed, because of the high tax imposed upon it by the federal
government! Of higher institutions, of course, there is no such scarcity
as in the elemental grades. The Gymnasio Pernambucano, or High School of
Pernambuco, where are promulgated the bachelor degrees that make men
“doctors,” and not much else, is a large conspicuous building next that
of the state congress—and it had 69 pupils. Of the Faculdade de Dereito,
or Law School, similar remarks may be made. In the old business section
of Recife especially the condition of streets and buildings left much to
be desired, but under the energetic and honest new president promising
progress was already beginning to be made.
On Saturday night our share of the receipts had been more than a conto
and toward midnight on Sunday I carried home a roll of ragged Brazilian
bills large enough to choke a rain-pipe. I was somewhat surprised,
therefore, that the “bust-up” came as early as the following Wednesday.
I knew it would come sooner or later, but I had expected to be able to
stave it off a week or more longer. When “Colonel” Ruben turned up that
night, we had already been reduced to “reheated soup.” This, coupled
with the fact that he had loudly and widely advertised “Six Days Only!”
and had now decided to stay five more, had greatly reduced our
audiences. Ruben took one look at the house during the first section,
suddenly decided that he had received a cable from his wife requiring
his immediate return to Bahia, and disappeared in that direction so
swiftly that I have never seen him since. Up to the last he had insisted
daily, if not hourly, that I must return when my contract with Linton
expired and become manager of his theater-to-be. He departed owing me a
paltry 83$ as our share of that evening’s receipts, but he left on my
hands not only the “Theatro Moderno” until the following Sunday at a
rental of 300$ daily, two dusky young gentlemen whom he had brought with
him from Bahia as his assistants, and the unpaid bills for several
half-page advertisements in the local papers, but so many other
creditors that he saw fit to embark at daylight from an unusual place.
Still, this was little compared with what he might have done, and
probably we had made more money with his experienced assistance than we
should have made alone. I, too, might have run away, had I cared to
leave Americans in general and Edison in particular in such repute as
Ruben enjoys to this day in Pernambuco. Instead, I spent a breathless
Thursday preparing to meet the new conditions that had been forced upon
us. We were certain to lose money that night and the next, but by
special advertising and improved programs I hoped to make it up on
Saturday and Sunday. We still had the two _calungos_, or ten-foot monk
and dancing-girl figures on men’s legs, for though one of Ruben’s
creditors had attached these, he allowed us to use them until our
departure. I sent them out with drums and handbills, not only through
the town, but to all its suburbs and outskirts, including even
aristocratic Olinda. In short, for the first time I was a full-fledged
theatrical manager, renting, advertising, managing, auditing, running
the whole show—even mechanically, too, for that night “Tut” got a touch
of some tropical ill and had to be sent home—and, unfortunately, paying
the bills. For in spite of all our efforts Saturday night left us with
the balance slightly on the side of expenditures. I had already begun,
however, to prepare the territory ahead. J. A. Vinhães, Junior, a
_Carioca_ engaged in the film-furnishing business in North Brazil, had
offered to take over Ruben’s contract and extend it to the Amazon. He
was an unusually honest-looking, energetic young man, good company and
experienced, as well as widely known in “movie” circles, and before the
week was ended he had sailed away toward Pará, and possibly Manaos, as
our self-paid advance agent.
My troubles apparently ended, “Tut” and I were sitting at “breakfast”
Sunday morning in proper best-boarding-house-in-town style when the
waiter suddenly handed me several letters from Linton, bearing neither
stamps nor signs of post-office handling. They had been written on board
ship on the way north from Buenos Aires, and announced that, the
Kinetophone having ended its labors in the Argentine, Linton was on his
way home, as soon as he could find a wife he had left in Rio, with the
two Spanish-speaking outfits. With the letters he forwarded some new
posters and Turco Morandi, formerly manager of one of the largest
theaters in “B.A.,” lately advance agent for the Argentine Kinetophone,
and noted for his double-width, steel-riveted honesty. It was he who had
brought the letters to Pernambuco, and about noon he appeared in person,
dressed in the latest Jockey Club style, and announced himself as the
new manager of the Kinetophone in Brazil.
There was nothing niggardly about Linton. My six months being up, he
offered to let me turn over the job at once, take the first boat either
to Manaos or to the United States at his expense, draw my salary up to
the time the show started south again, collect traveling expenses from
Manaos back to the mouth of the Amazon, and promised to pay me later
whatever might be due on my commission basis. “Tut” was to get a
percentage of the receipts for taking charge of the show, and to make
such use of Morandi, to whom Linton had already advanced a considerable
sum, as he saw fit. When they ran out of audiences in the North, the
three were to take the show back down the coast, playing in the smaller
towns until Linton himself returned to pick them up.
Had there been any evidence that my labors had been unsatisfactory, I
should have vanished forthwith. But the letters expressed satisfaction,
and Linton was not a man to indulge in flattery. Moreover, I wished to
see the rest of Brazil, and I did not want to see it as a foot-loose
tourist. I much preferred to go on to Manaos as manager of the
Kinetophone, with all the prestige thereunto appertaining, to be forced
to mix with all kinds of people, to be mistaken now and then for Edison
himself. Besides, I could not take advantage of Linton’s extraordinary
generosity. Instead of needing another man we could easily have gotten
along with one less, for “Tut,” who was some little inventor himself,
had improved upon Edison by wiring the phonograph in such a way that it
could be touched off from the booth, and any fool could be taught in a
few minutes to put on and take off the records. Then there was Vinhães,
already on his way. If Morandi had arrived a few days earlier, I might
have sent him on ahead instead, or left him with the show and played
advance agent myself. Worst of all, however, Linton, as almost any
American would have done under the circumstances, had chosen the worst
possible man to send to Brazil. Morandi not only spoke Spanish, but was
an _argentino_, and if there is one thing Brazilians resent more than
being spoken to in Castilian it is to hear it spoken with the accent of
their greatest national rivals. In the end I coaxed the fashionable
newcomer to go away somewhere and lose himself, while I spent what I had
looked forward to as a pleasant Sunday afternoon wondering who I could
get to drown him.
For the first time in Brazil I had to cut out the Sunday matinée and
announced an evening performance given over entirely to the
Kinetophone—six numbers in each section, with a ten-minute interval in
which to change audiences. This meant double labor for “Tut” and Carlos,
but it would save us 50$ for the rent of ordinary films, 10$ for a
native operator, and should prove a great drawing card. It did.
Unfortunately I had set the opening at the early hour of six, and the
coming of Morandi caused both “Tut” and me to forget the change.
Accustomed to arrive at the theater at 6:30 and have half an hour of
ordinary films before our turn came, we sauntered down town as usual,
and, as we stepped off the street-car, what should greet our astonished
ears but the notes of one of our numbers known as the “Musical
Blacksmiths.” It was like hearing one’s own voice issuing from the lips
of a stranger. Never in all Brazil had a Kinetophone number been given
without either “Tut” or myself in attendance. We dashed into the
theater—and found Carlos calmly running the show! The audience had taken
to stamping and giving other evidences of impatience, and the plucky
_Paulista_, having taught a native how to put on the records, had
started the performance. I raised his salary forthwith.
In our three sections that night we took in considerably more than a
million, recouping all our losses, and it was a double pleasure not to
have to split the receipts with Ruben. But there was that dashed
_argentino_ to spoil the effect of our efforts. Luckily, he was already
complaining of the “insupportable” heat and complete loss of appetite,
while kind, if unknown, friends had filled him full of tales of yellow
fever and the plague, so that he had come to me almost with tears in his
eyes and called my attention to the wife and five children he had left
in Buenos Aires. It took us the better part of Monday and Tuesday, and
cost nearly half a million reis to pay his debts, release him from the
slimy tentacles of the customhouse, and set him on his way with a ticket
to Rio, but the relief was worth the exertion.
By this time we had moved over to the “Polytheama,” an open-air theater
in which I had arranged to play three nights at popular prices. I took
advantage of this breathing-spell to run out into the interior of the
state, not to the end of the line, for that would have meant two days
absence and missing a performance, but as far as Bezerros, where the
daily train meets itself coming back. The branch runs due west from
Recife, and by starting at seven and getting back at five, with constant
traveling, I covered 72 miles and return!
Jaboatão on its knoll was buzzing with energy where the shops of the
combined railways had concentrated. Hills shrouded in blue veils began
to appear as soon as we had crossed the sandy coast strip. Farther
inland it grew rolling, everywhere dreary, dry, and bushy, with many
tunnels and long iron viaducts. Cotton was growing here and there in the
arid soil, but it was scant and small, with one bush where in our
southern states there would have been eight or ten. This region of rare
reed-and-mud huts bore slight resemblance to that along the line from
Maceió northward, with its endless trains of cane, its crowded
population, and mammoth old fazenda houses. Negro blood was noticeably
less as we left the coast, for slaves were imported chiefly by
sugar-planters and were not needed, nor, indeed, useful, in the grazing
regions. There were said to be many cattle in the state, but they must
have been farther inland, where there was still something to drink.
Passengers had to carry water with them, for neither trains nor stations
furnished it. Yet only two years before this region had complained of
heavy rains! Even the dining-car service of the lines to the north and
south of Recife was lacking, because some petty politician of the
interior had a contract with the government to furnish passengers an
alleged meal at one of the stations, and the English who have taken the
line over are compelled, during the sixty years of their lease, to stop
every train there for twenty minutes.
At the “Polytheama” that night we had a remarkably good audience, many
evidently having put off coming, Brazilian fashion, until the last
performance. When we had torn down the show and packed up, “Tut” went
home and Carlos to wherever he slept, and after a shower-bath under a
spigot, I swung “Tut’s” hammock between two pillars of the open-air
theater. This was to be almost my first actual traveling with the show,
and it was time I tried out what my companions had been enduring for
months. It is many years since I have waked with that curious sensation
of wondering where I am, so that I had no difficulty in orienting myself
when there came a beating on the cinema door at daybreak. One of the
carters I had hired to take our stuff to the station had arrived with
one of those tiny, ancient, two-wheeled carts of North Brazil in which
the misplacing of a bag of flour suspends the horse in the air. His
companion did not turn up until an hour later, after the other had
dragged all the trunks to the door, and it was perilously near
train-time when I at last sent them hurrying across the cobblestones to
the Brum station way over in old Recife. By the time the usual hubbub
and quarreling, grafting and exorbitant charges, coaxing and assisting
the insufficient and lazy railway employees to get our outfit on board
was ended, I was congratulating myself on my foresight in having
arranged for another man to pay our traveling expenses. There was 12$500
duty to pay for taking our trunks out of the state, a similar amount for
importing them into the next state north, express charges about equal to
first-class tickets for each trunk, and while the fares were not
high—five dollars for nearly three hundred miles—the twenty per cent.
surcharges of the federal and state governments respectively on the
tickets made the final total a considerable sum.