TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON
When he was quite a young man Edison failed to get to Brazil for the
same reason that I had failed to get home from Rio—his ship did not
sail. He had journeyed as far as New Orleans in quest of adventure, and
before another chance came he met an old Spanish wanderer who advised
him by all means to remain in the United States. It would probably be
difficult to write on one page what humanity owes that unknown Spaniard.
Later, when his inventions had begun to make him world famous, the
former trainboy sent a man to search all the Amazon region for materials
to be used in his experiments—and it was our privilege to take the
finished product back to the land which the inventor himself had never
reached in person.
The _Brasil_ is one of the three smaller and older boats of the
government line—which is the reason we had much more space in our two
staterooms and considerably better attendance, for these boats are not
popular with “deadhead” politicians and their families. The cabin
passenger list was made up of the usual conglomeration of every human
color, nationality, social and moral standing, from priests to several
of the most repulsive old adventuresses—treated outwardly with complete
equality even by mothers of corruptible daughters—from clean-cut young
Englishmen to licentious, shifty-eyed Brazilian mulattoes. But the real
sight was the steerage quarters on the three decks in the nose of the
ship. Here men, women, and children—the thirty-four latest refugees from
the interior among them—bound for the rubber-fields were so packed
together that individual movement was impossible. Such a network of
hammocks—above, across, under, over one another, the bottom of one
sleeper resting on the belly of his neighbor below, scantily clad women
crisscrossing men who had discarded all but a single short garment—as
one could not have believed possible filled all the space, disputing it
with the animals and fowls the ship carried as food. Sheep and pigs
wandered among the no less frankly natural passengers; six zebu bulls on
their way to improve the native stock at the mouth of the Amazon
occupied stalls in the midst of the turmoil. One venturesome fellow had
as a last resort hung his hammock from the roof above these animals, so
that whenever one of them moved he was lifted hammock and all. There was
a very exact description of the scene in the _Cearense_ novel “O
Paroara” with which I was whiling away my time, and as that was
published sixteen years before, conditions have evidently long been the
same.
Early in the afternoon of the second day we picked up a pilot along the
sandy coast and went over a sandbar into the wide bay of Tutoya, port of
the State of Piauhy, only a little point of which touches the sea. I had
at one time planned to go up the Parnahyba River to Therezina, the
capital, but inquiry proved that this would not be financially
advantageous, so that I contented myself with this brief glimpse of the
state. Many _Piauhyenses_ came on board from the _montarias_, or
ludicrous native rowboats in which they were transferred from the
_giaolas_ (literally “bird-cage,” but “river steamer” in Amazonian
parlance) that were waiting to carry passengers back up the river, and
we had at least a vicarious acquaintance with them.
When I awoke at dawn we were already close to the winking lighthouse
known among British mariners as “Maranham,” and soon afterward there
appeared a town rather prettily situated on a low ridge. We anchored far
out, and it was more than an hour before sailboats brought the
authorities to examine us, but that was a small matter to a man with a
deck-chair and a passable novel. In fact, there was no hurry about going
ashore, for five days would probably suffice to exploit the interest of
São Luiz in the Kinetophone, and the rest of the State of Maranhão was
virtually inaccessible. More than that, when the local manager came on
board through the dingy gray water to pay us his respects he reminded me
that this was Wednesday of Holy Week and that it would be foolish to
spoil the effect of our _estrea_ by attempting to compete with the
priests before Saturday.
In 1612 a Frenchman named La Ravadière founded on an island near the
mouth of the Amazon a city which he called Saint Louis in honor of King
Louis XIII. Two years later the Portuguese drove out the French and the
city became the capital of the province of Maranhão—aboriginal name of
the Amazon—which then included all northern Brazil from Ceará to the
Andes. The island, which is small, is known as Ilha de São Luiz, and the
city is officially São Luiz do Maranhão, though, like most capitals
along this coast, it is better known to the outside world by the name of
the state. Its harbor is shallow, with much tide, so that when one
lands, by launch, rowboat, and finally a negro’s shoulders, the whole
raging sea seems beneath one, and six hours later the place is a
sand-field, with steamers sitting high and dry and barefoot crab-hunters
wandering about on it, as if someone had pulled the cork out of the
bottom of the ocean.
A huge old fort and stone wall face the harbor, and from the
landing-place a stone-paved street lined by carefully trimmed,
haycock-shaped trees slants swiftly up to the venerable cathedral and
the main square, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above. Situated on a
low, but narrow and broken, ridge, its streets stumble rather steeply up
and down in places, and the town is so compact that, once ended, these
passageways break off instantly into dense-green and almost trackless
jungle, except the single Rua Grande, which goes on across the island.
Perhaps it is due to its situation that São Luiz is cooler than its two
degrees from the equator would suggest, though here the constant trade
winds die down, thereby saving the region from the glaring aridity which
characterizes all that part of the continent to the eastward. In fact,
somewhere between Ceará and Maranhão is the dividing line between that
scantily wooded semi-desert and the humid, dense jungle of the Amazon
basin. In many ways São Luiz is the most pleasant little capital along
the coast of North Brazil, and not the least of its charms is the
pleasure of again seeing grass and trees in all the green profusion of
tropical lands. Here one begins to feel that equatorial humidity which
leaves even the clothing damp and sticky; by night strange creatures
singing in the prolific vegetation mark São Luiz as the beginning of the
great Amazonia.
[Illustration: Rural policeman of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of
the region]
[Illustration: From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street
car]
[Illustration: A street of São Luis de Maranhão]
In Brazil it is the custom to interview newspapers rather than to wait
to be interviewed, and immediately upon landing the local manager hired
an automobile in which all of us engaged in the “necessary courtesy” of
calling upon all the editors. Some of them were men of real culture and
widely informed, their full Caucasian complexions burned that coppery
red of those who have lived for generations near the equator. Even the
local cinema manager, who had never been off the little island of São
Luiz, spoke faultless French and would not have been out of place in the
best society of old Europe. A few, on the other hand, had traveled
rather widely, and these were even more inclined than the others to be
dogmatic in their editorial wisdom. One vivacious young editor of rather
forceful and unusually attractive face for Brazil, who looked like a
white man browned up for a minstrel show, who might have been a strong
character and a pleasant, handsome fellow had not some wanton ancestor
casually added a bit of negro blood to his veins and given him the
egotistical volubility, the instability, and the surliness of the
_mestiço_, had no sooner been presented to us than he began talking like
a whirlwind about the United States, neither desiring nor expecting to
have his opinions in any way questioned, his attitude that of a judge
who means to be kindly but who regards his judgments as final. In answer
to one question which I managed to thrust between his closely cemented
words he casually remarked that, though he knew most of Brazil and had
been several times to Europe, he had never visited the United States,
adding in his turbulent flow of speech that he had fear rather than a
desire to do so “because there life is so intense.” In the next sentence
he was assuring, and convincing, his native hearers that the “Collosus
of the North” was purely scientific and commercial, without the
slightest conception of or interest in anything artistic—and then
suddenly he broke forth upon the negro question.
Next to Bahia. Maranhão has the greatest percentage of African blood of
all the states of Brazil; hence this was a natural topic. It usually is
between educated Brazilians and traveling Americans. The editor’s
opinions on the subject were those of many of his class, long since
familiar to us. There were 900,000 negroes in Brazil, he dogmatized, in
other words about three per cent. of the population(!), who were rapidly
being absorbed and would soon disappear, whereas in the United States
twelve per cent. of the population were negroes, who, being forced to
resist the attitude of the whites, would remain a race apart and a
constant and growing menace. In two or three centuries, he prophesied,
there would be only negroes left in the United States, because they
“reproduce like flies and lie in the shade and live to be a hundred,
while the white men are wearing themselves out by their absurdly intense
living.” _Ergo_, Brazil had been far more fortunate and wise in her
handling of the negro problem than her great neighbor of the North.
It was the same old argument, the rock on which the bulk of Brazilian
and American opinion on this subject always splits. In Brazil the negro
is physically stronger and better fitted to the climate than the whites;
in the United States, as a whole, the reverse is the case. This, and
certain other differences overlooked by most Brazilians, keep the
argument from becoming clean-cut. Yet is the negro, or at least the
part-negro, the best type that can permanently prosper under Brazilian
conditions? No one of tropical experience and an open mind believes that
the white race, pure and unadulterated, can maintain its high standing
for generations in equatorial regions without frequent reinforcements
either by training in, or immigration from, the temperate zones. Can
some such standard be maintained by mixing it with those to whom the
tropics are a natural habitat? Is it better to “wash out the black”
through many generations of lowering the whites, to breed a new type, a
kind of human mule, to fit the climate and conditions, or to keep the
two races strictly, even forcibly, separated? The first is the
Brazilian, the second the American point of view, and the gulf between
them is not easily bridged.
That night we gave a special performance for the press, which was
attended by about forty representatives of São Luiz’ four daily
journals. This and the ceremonial visits were probably worth the
trouble, for the papers next day were equally enthusiastic about the
Kinetophone and its “highly cultured” sponsors, whose names, titles, and
previous condition of servitude they gave in full down to the latest
count of Carlos’ children. Indeed, we became the subject of the chief
editorials, even in the face of religious competition. The most famous
living wielder of a quill in Maranhão took us amiably to task for using
the full name of the inventor on our advertising matter, contending—in
his paper’s two most prominent columns—that it was an indignity to style
“Thomaz A. Edison, like any commonplace mortal, a man whose Godlike
gifts to the world had made him to all mankind for all time the one and
only EDISON.” Naturally such publicity hurt our feelings.
But the result of all this could not be known for three days, Thursday
and Friday being so holy that even churches could not ring their
bells—for which we gave fervent thanks, well knowing that the respite
would be soundly broken on Easter Sunday. The “only one” in town was the
“Hotel Central,” a big colonial two-story building directly across from
the cathedral, and the French proprietor set a table and attended to
business like a Frenchman, instead of being off down the street
gossiping. “Tut” and I had a suite of two rooms shut off from most of
the uproar of the rest of the house, our living-room immense, with three
balconied double windows larger than doors looking down upon the
tree-lined promenade and a part of the sea—when the tide was in. Our
huge four-poster bed, as well as the smaller one we took turns in
occupying, was carefully mosquito-netted, for only white foreigners are
said to be subject to yellow fever. There were hammock-hooks, never
lacking in North Brazil, in all the walls. Of the mahogany tables,
marble-topped bureaus, full-length pier glass in which to admire
ourselves, the big cane settee, the comfortable roomy cane
rocking-chairs, and the score of minor convenient articles of furniture
I will say no more, lest there be a sudden exodus to São Luiz do
Maranhão. To be sure, the shower-bath now and then ran dry, but there
were really only two drawbacks to the “Hotel Central,”—its kerosene
lamps and its “artistas.” Evidently there was no escaping these
self-styled “actresses” who distribute themselves throughout the hotels
of North Brazil, though the old Frenchman assured us that he had always
refused to take them in until the war-bred crisis made their admission
“necessary.”
Being so old a city, São Luiz has a finished aspect quite different from
many others of more recent origin. It is completely paved in square
cobblestones, with very much arched roadways, and all its narrow
sidewalks of flat stones, polished by many generations of feet, are so
slanting that one must take care if he would not, as I all but did more
than once, spill himself wrong end up in the middle of the street. We
had at last outstripped civilization, in its more modern manifestations.
All the way up the coast each state capital had put in electric
street-cars and similar contrivances within a year or so—that is, long
since I had entered South America. Here we had beaten invention to it,
and there was genuine pleasure in seeing drowsy old easy-going mule-cars
again—though we never bothered to wait for them. São Luiz, too, still
lights itself with matches, though that does not mean, as it would
almost certainly in the Andes, that reading is considered bad form. In
fact, it is called the Athens of Brazil, and quite justly, for all the
rest of the country has scarcely produced as excellent a list of
literary men. Graça Aranha, Coelho Netto, the three Azevedo brothers,
João Lisboa, the historian, Manuel Mendes, who turned Virgil and Homer
into widely famed Portuguese verse, Teixeira Mendes, head of Brazilian
Positivists, and Gonsalves Dias, the national poet, are but a few of the
famous sons of Maranhão. Of them all, the most beloved, not merely in
São Luiz but in all Brazil, is Dias, born of a Portuguese shopkeeper of
the interior and his negro slave, and done to death by sharks when the
frail craft on which he was returning from Europe with an incurable
ailment came to grief within sight of the lighthouse on his native
shores. Those who are familiar enough with both tongues to be able to
form a judgment, and who have no national prejudices to overcome, assert
that as a poet the impulsive, licentious Brazilian mulatto was several
rungs higher up the ladder than our own Longfellow. There is a Praça
Gonsalves Dias in São Luiz, and in the center of it, at the top of a
tall column high up among his beloved palm-trees and the singing
_sabiás_ he immortalized in his best known poem, is the poet’s statue,
non-committal as to complexion in its white stone (or plaster) and
giving him the appearance of a wavy-haired Shakespeare. Not far from
this statue, overtopping everything else and giving an aëroplane view of
all the city, is an old shot-tower, of the kind used in former days for
the making of bullets with the aid of gravitation. Dogs are
distressingly numerous, and the charcoal over which the _Maranhenses_
cook in little braziers is carried about town and sold in small baskets
hanging six or eight high at either end of bamboo poles. It is a busy
town every five days, when a steamer comes from Pará or the south;
otherwise it drifts along at a contented, mule-tram pace.
On Thursday evening we stepped across to the cathedral and saw the
ceremony of the “Washing of the Feet.” The bishop, in full purple and
attended by a throng of assistants and acolytes, without music and with
very little light as a sign of mourning, marched along a raised bench
where twelve beggars had taken seats hours before. Several of them were
blind and all of them diseased, and they had been dressed in white
cotton gowns which partly concealed their natural rags. The bishop
placed a silver basin under a foot of each in turn, spilled three drops
of water on it, dabbed them with a napkin, then stooped and kissed the
unsterilized extremity almost fervently, though with something in his
intelligent, clean-cut face which suggested that he did not particularly
enjoy this part of his ecclesiastical duties. Each beggar was given a
loaf of French bread, a copper coin worth nearly a cent, and what looked
like a folded nightshirt, to all of which he clung with both hands as if
expecting the densely packed throng of the faithful, virtually all of
whom could point back to African ancestry, to snatch the gifts away from
him. That night the same class engaged in the annual “hanging of Judas,”
and when morning dawned effigies of the traitor of Gethsemane, in most
fanciful and multicolored garments, swung by the neck from a score of
improvised gibbets.
One of the best known residents of Maranhão is a hardy American who came
down twenty years before to set up in Caixas the first cotton-mill in
North Brazil—though cotton had been grown there for more than a century.
There he married, became a power in the cattle and mining industries,
and established a line of river-steamers to that principal town of the
interior. Brazil, as he put it, is an easy country in which to make a
living, but a hard one in which to make a fortune. Once real wealth
begins to show its face, the native politicians see to it that it does
not become too swollen. Cattle are the principal product of the state,
but a sack of salt costing two or three milreis in São Luiz to begin
with, reached the incredible price of 24$ in the interior. All Brazil,
in his opinion, would prove fitted for the white man, once the more
temperate south was filled up; but as yet only the two hundredth part of
the republic was under cultivation.
We opened on Saturday night after the longest period of idleness since
the Kinetophone had made its bow to Brazil. It was perhaps the
combination of good advertising, after-Lent reaction, and the fact that
São Luiz gets few good entertainments that brought greater crowds than
we could accommodate. Our performance, too, pleased more than usual
there, thanks among other things to excellent acoustic properties and to
a few lines in our introductory number from “O Canto do Sabiá,” best
known poem of Gonsalves Dias. The result was that as often as we chose
to open it we filled the house so tightly that I could barely squeeze in
myself. Unfortunately the remodeled shop held only four hundred, but on
the other hand it was the best managed theater we had seen in Brazil,
with “deadheads” almost unknown and the smallest child paying admission.
On Sunday we gave a matinée and three evening performances, packing the
place so full that we had to call upon the police to restrain those who
could not legally be admitted. We took up the tickets inside, as in a
street-car, and needed no door-keepers during the performance, for no
man, with or without a ticket, could have forced his way into that
sardine-box. The street outside was blocked with those waiting to get
into the next _sessão_, the sidewalks lined with chairs filled with
fancily dressed women of the “best families.” That day’s income was
larger than we had had since our first Sunday in Pernambuco, and a
cablegram carried the news of our popularity to the newspapers of Pará.
There is only one place to take a walk of any length in São Luiz. The
Rua Grande turns into a passable road and goes on across the island, but
all other streets soon end in swamp or jungle. I tramped out of town one
morning and returned that afternoon, having covered fifteen of the
twenty miles of island road and return. It was a joy to walk on real
earth again after months of wading in sand, and to be surrounded on
either hand by a great green wall, instead of a glaring half-desert. On
the other hand, the dull skies of the Amazon region were already getting
on my nerves, as they do on those who abandon the almost unbroken blue
sky and sunshine of the eastern coast. Yet on the whole Brazil has a
remarkably even climate for so enormous a stretch of territory, and it
was not much warmer here than in Santa Anna on the Uruguayan border.
Life out of doors in the tropics is a serious thing, however, and here
was the real, humid, densely jungled tropics of the imagination at last.
Bamboos waved their titanic plumes above me; a tree ablaze with scarlet
blossoms flashed forth from the dense verdure; the _fructa-pão_, which
furnishes its vegetable bread to the poorer classes all the way from
Bahia northward, here produced far more abundantly than man required.
Palms ranged from those of fern-like delicacy to the _coco-babassú_,
shaped like a gigantic feather-duster stood on end and producing a bunch
six feet long of red nuts as large as our walnuts. These contain a
kernel of cocoanut meat rich in oil, which was just beginning to be
exported to Europe, and unlimited quantities of which could be had for
the picking and cracking. Butterflies celebrating their nuptials
enlivened the landscape with the flutter of their iridescent
multicolored wings; here and there the _sabiá_, first cousin to our
northern robin, sang his familiar song; once or twice I fancied I heard
the _mãe da lua_ (mother of the moon), the nightingale of Brazil.
Anil was the largest of several small towns along the way, with a
mule-car running the length of it on what used to be a little railroad.
A railway also runs across the island, or at least the rusty rails do,
hoping some day to reach the mainland by a bridge and continue to
Caixas, whence a line already operates to Therezina, capital of the next
state east. Several genuine tropical downpours forced me to seek such
shelter as was available, and the day was done before I returned to São
Luiz. There are many delightful things in the tropics, but none of them
equal the soft dusk of evening. Like most fine things, it is short and
fleeting, no two minutes alike, and barely a few moments seemed to pass
between the last livid rays of the sun, as it veiled itself behind the
light band of clouds along the horizon, and the falling of moonlight in
flecks of silver through the limply drooping fronds of the palm-trees,
stencilled in silhouette against the iridescent sky of a tropical night.
It was almost a full year since my last real walk, but no one in São
Luiz felt more contented with life than I that evening. Yet my tramp was
the only topic of conversation at the cinema, and a newspaper referred
editorially next day to the “incredible energy and endurance of our
distinguished North American visitor,” who could cover thirty miles of
Amazonian ground on his own feet in a single day!
It might have been better for Carlos, too, if he had combatted the
climate of the torrid North with pedestrianism. For some time he had
been losing his _Paulista_ energy, and with it his interest in life. On
the morning after my walk I met him strolling languidly along the main
street, looking more disconsolate and colorless than I had ever seen him
before; but those are common symptoms in the tropics and I thought
little more about it until he failed to join us at dinner that evening.
We found him in bed in his room across the hall, with a raging fever.
The best recommended physician of São Luiz having arrived, I hurried
away to the theater, where both Carlos’ work and my own awaited me.
That night he was neither able to talk nor, apparently, to recognize me.
The native leech had diagnosed his ailment all the way from malaria to
bubonic plague, and had finally settled upon intestinal grippe. Whatever
it was, Carlos was a sick man, and when morning came without any sign of
improvement, I set about arranging to get him into a hospital. There
were two in São Luiz,—the “Beneficencia Portugueza” and the “Santa Casa
da Misericordia.” For several reasons I chose the second. By this time
the invalid could scarcely raise his head, or express himself, except by
monosyllabic gurgles and the rolling of his bloodshot eyes; yet it was a
labor of hours to coax any of his fellow-countrymen to help untangle the
red tape that blocked his immediate entrance to the hospital. A colonel
connected with the cinema at length agreed to go with me to the doctor
whose duty it was to issue tickets of admission, but he insisted on
having an automobile at 10$ an hour with which to cover the four short
blocks of stone-paved street. When the doctor and the colonel had run
through all the gamut of Latin-American salutations, down to the fourth
generation and the family cat, a great many questions were asked me
before Carlos was finally accepted as a patient, as if it were an
extraordinary favor, though the “Santa Casa” was in theory open to all.
Then, a bit of rain coming up, the colonel began talking politics and
remained for more than an hour, through three more showers. When we
finally entered our waiting automobile it was out of gasoline! I raced
back to the hotel, impressed two carriers and a hammock into service,
and got our ailing companion at last into the hands of the nuns just at
nightfall.
As the time was drawing near when we must move on, I appointed the most
responsible man in town unofficial guardian for Carlos and turned over
to him, against ample receipts, his back pay, his salary to the end of
the month, and his fare back to Rio. This should have sufficed amply to
pay his hospital bills and carry him home with something to spare, and I
had no authority to give him more. Next morning we discovered that
Carlos had taken with him our duplicate set of keys, and “Tut” went up
to the hospital to get them. The nun-nurse had them in safe-keeping and
would not turn them over without Carlos’ permission. He could not talk,
but after staring at “Tut” for a long time he faintly nodded. After
still longer effort they succeeded in getting, in faintly whispered
monosyllables, the address of his family in São Paulo. As “Tut” was
leaving, a doctor bustled cheerily into the ward and casually informed
him that Carlos had yellow fever.
The indifferent way in which São Luiz took such things gave one a creepy
feeling that life was held cheaply in those parts. When Carlos’
condition was mentioned to patrons of the cinema that evening they said,
between yawns, “Ja estã liquidado—Oh, he is finished all right,” and
went in to weep at some silly film drama and to giggle at Kinetophone
humor. I insisted on remaining optimistic. Had we not heard a hundred
times that native Brazilians never die of yellow fever, that its
fatalities are confined to white foreigners? In other words, while “Tut”
and I were constant prospective candidates for an Amazonian cemetery, a
man born in São Paulo, accustomed all his life to Brazilian conditions,
should be in no great danger. I was still telling myself these things
when word reached us that Carlos was dead.
By this time we were already on our way to Pará, for ten-day steamers
and theatrical engagements wait for no man. When three men have lived
more closely together than brothers for more than half a year the loss
of one of them is an astonishingly heavy subtraction, one which we felt
all the way from the longer time it took the two of us to tear down the
show and send it on board the _Ceará_, to all those little daily
reminders of the loss of a familiar companion. Of course, when we came
to think it over, natives do die of yellow fever; but as those living in
the regions where it flourishes have either died of it, or recovered
from it, in childhood, the survivors are immune and the effect is as if
the disease were fatal only to Caucasian visitors. Besides, Carlos, born
of Italian parents on the cool Brazilian plateau more than twenty
degrees to the south, was virtually a foreigner up here on the steaming
equator. The period of incubation being longer than the time we had
spent in São Luiz, it was probably the mosquitoes of Ceará that had been
his undoing.
We refitted the phonograph with “Tut’s” automatic starting device, which
had fallen into disrepair, so that North Brazil might continue to be
amused as long as one of us survived. For our troupe, at least, would
perform while anyone remained to turn the crank. There were frail young
ladies in it, and very few who were acclimated to tropical travel; yet
they appeared night after night without changing a hair, doing exactly
as good work as when they left New York, playing fully as well to a
scattering audience on a sweltering afternoon as to a packed house on a
cool evening, never disturbing us with a display of mood or temperament,
never showing the slightest impairment from the climate, the soggy
Brazilian food, the thousand little tropical and Latin-American
annoyances, and never dying of yellow fever. More than once I woke up
dreaming that they were subject to all the ills of living men and women,
or sweated through a nightmare of trying to transport them all in a
small boat, or house them all in a ten-room hotel already half occupied
by persons with whom respectable Americans should not come in contact.
A broad light streak on the ocean ahead announced our approach to the
mouth of the Amazon, the “river-sea,” as the Brazilians often call it,
discoloring the deep-blue Atlantic as far as the eye could reach. Later
the water turned a muddy brown and we began to see the smoke from the
Pará power-house across the flat featureless landscape. Monotonous dense
greenery soon surrounded us, flat, impenetrable forests spreading from
the very edge of the river to infinity on either hand. Everywhere the
vast stream was dotted with sailboats, their lateen sails all dyed some
single bright color,—blue, saffron, red, faded pink. Then flat wooded
islands scattered all about appeared, and finally an opening in the flat
landscape disclosed the low City of Pará, still so far away as to be
almost indistinguishable, and before we could steam up to it swift
tropical darkness had fallen.
We dropped anchor for the night before its long row of lights, the
passengers whiling away the evening with music and dancing, no one
apparently sorry to save a hotel-bill out in the cool breezes of the
quiet river. We were so close to the town that we could hear the night
life under the trees in the central praça and see the electric
street-cars go frequently slipping past. It may have been the sight of
the cathedral, bulking forth out of the night above the rest of the
city, that turned the group of Brazilian men gathered on the after
saloon deck to a discussion of religion—though it was not a particularly
religious discussion. In fact, the crux of every one of a score of
anecdotes was the grafting of priests, and the men one and all agreed
that the ecclesiastics were even more diligent and clever at it than
politicians; but they all took care that the women on board should hear
none of their stories.
A steward called us at daybreak, escaping before I could get hold of the
revolver in the bottom of my valise. A fog half concealed the city,
gradually disclosing, as the equatorial sun burned it away, long rows of
docks and warehouses, the “new” town floor-flat, with a water-tower
standing above the rest, and a fish-market swarming with sailboats and
clamoring people, the old city rising slightly on a knoll topped by the
cathedral. It was more than two hours later that the port doctor came on
board to examine us. As I replied “All right” to the steward who came to
tell me to report, and continued reading in my steamer-chair without
hearing from him again, I fancy it must have been a thorough
examination. The sunshine was falling in streams of molten lead when we
finally hoisted our mud-hook and pulled up to a dock—for the first time
since we had landed in Bahia. A large crowd, astonishingly European in
origin, was gathered along the quay, giving little or no attention to
the heavy showers that every now and then broke forth from a half
cloudless sky.
Vinhães was on hand, with a dozen newspapers containing large
Kinetophone displays, and together we went down into the hubbub of the
hold, through the chaotic network of third-class hammocks, to fight to
have our baggage landed in time for an evening performance. A few ports
back our phonograph had nearly been put out of business by a careless
drayman, and since then I had been taking no chances, though I had to
dog the steps of two negroes, ordered to carry it by the handles, to
keep them from putting it on their heads. In up-to-date Pará, however,
we had only to have it placed in a large and luxurious taxicab and drive
away with it to the “Bar Paraense.” This half-open theater out in the
Nazareth section of town was somewhat more distant from the center than
we should have preferred; but it was the best Vinhães had been able to
get. The labor of setting up emphasized the loss of Carlos, especially
as this was one of those big ramshackle buildings we now and then came
across where it took a score of pulleys to carry our synchronizing cord
from the booth to the phonograph. But at least we returned to
comfortable quarters when our labors were over. The “Café da Paz” was as
well run under its Swiss maître d’hôtel as a high-class European
hostelry with several tropical improvements, and as it was owned by the
same cultured and upright copper-tinted gentleman who had a half
interest in the “Bar Paraense,” the cost of our excellent accommodation
was less than we had paid in some unspeakable hovels. To be sure, hard
times had given several rapid young ladies admission even here, but they
were not on our airy third story, with its huge blind-shaded windows and
its view of all Pará. In the halcyon days of rubber, ended barely two
years before, the “Café da Paz” was the best hotel in North Brazil,
where a small room alone cost more than we were paying now for full
accommodation and where one paid 2$ for a place at table and at least as
much for each dish ordered.
“Tut” and I had come on the same ticket from Maranhão. In the list of
passengers published in that evening’s papers we appeared as “Wayne
Tuthill and 1 child.” At dinner we were handed an order from the
sanitary department of the State of Pará, commanding “Wayne Tuthill e
Harrey” to appear at the yellow fever section for examination. It was
evident from the document that only one person was meant by this
Latin-American style of double-barreled name; but out of some mixture of
curiosity and honesty I took it upon myself next morning to point out
the error. For my pains I, too, was commanded to appear at three every
afternoon for the next thirteen days, under penalty of fine and
imprisonment. I protested that I could not regulate my life in any such
bourgeois fashion, and being taken before the head doctor, I informed
him that it was my habit and intention to wander about the state during
my stay in Pará. So effective was my command of Brazilian super-courtesy
by this time that he replied in the same vein, saying all foreigners
coming from either Ceará or Manaos, where yellow fever had broken out,
were put under observation, but that in my case it would be sufficient
if I would report at any time between seven and five on those days when
I happened to be in town.
Strictly speaking, there is no city of Pará, nor is it on the Amazon. In
1615 Castello Branco left Maranhão and founded on the spot where the old
castle of Pará now stands a village at the junction of the Guajará and
Guamá rivers. Both of these are a part of the Amazon system, but they
are separated from the mouth of the river proper by the enormous island
of Marajó, considerably larger than the Republic of Portugal. The
Tupinamba Indians who inhabited the spot were friendly to the newcomers,
and as he had left Maranhão on Christmas Day, Branco named the town
Nossa Senhora de Belém (Our Lady of Bethlehem); and Belém the capital of
the state of Pará is officially and locally to this day. Just two
centuries later “Grão Pará” definitely separated from the _capitania_ of
Maranhão and became a province, a province of slight importance then, in
spite of its enormous size and unlimited tropical forests. In 1852 a
_Paraense_ sent the first steamer up the Amazon, but it was not until
1867 that the world’s greatest river was opened to foreign navigation.
Ten years later the most famous drought in the history of Ceará sent
thousands of _Cearenses_ to open up the great rubber-fields of Grão-Pará
and Amazonas, from which the great riches of Belém and Manaos resulted.
Pará is distinctly a maritime city, though it is ninety miles from the
ocean. With the exception of a short government line to Bragança on the
coast to the west, constructed in 1877, one cannot go anywhere from it
except by boat. It is almost less a Brazilian than a European city, with
little brotherhood for the rest of the republic. In the newspapers of
Pará “America” means New York, which can be reached from there in two or
three days less time than are required for a journey to Rio. It was not
until we had met some fellow-countrymen who had been treading Broadway
ten days before, long after the returning senator of Pará who landed
with us had sailed from the national capital, that we realized why the
eyes of Pará are fixed on the north and east rather than upon the great
country to the south to which it governmentally belongs.
Pará is an exotic growth, a bit of Parisian civilization isolated in an
enormous wilderness, which encroaches so constantly upon it that the
European air of the center of town quickly disappears in grass-grown
alleyways of swamp and jungle. The heavy rains cause this grass to grow
with tropical luxuriance and rapidity, so that there are many wide
streets laid out between unbroken rows of buildings that are nothing but
deep green lawns with a cow-path or two straggling along them. Densest
jungle may be found a short stroll from the central praça, and wild
Indians, living as they did centuries ago, are only a few hours distant.
It is an unfinished city of pompous, got-rich-quick fronts and ragged
rears, with only the old town on its knoll, and the few principal
streets of the new town paved in stone blocks. The rest is much as
nature left it, and while one may find almost anything in this little
culture-importing heart of the city which can be had in the centers of
civilization, a short walk brings one to isolated houses on stilts and
uninhabited clearings through the jungle in which men, driving carts
drawn by one bull, wade to their thighs cutting and loading grass.
Scarcely a rifle-shot from shops offering the latest Parisian creations
one must depend, even for life, on the strength and agility of primitive
man.
Pará has been called the “City of Trees.” Corinthian columns of royal
palms wave their elegant heads in every direction, mammoth tropical
growths of which we of the North do not even know the name shade the
squares and praças; the important streets and avenues are lined with
shade trees, in nearly every case the mango, with whitened trunks as a
protection against tropical plagues and trimmed to a few main branches,
instead of being left to its natural appearance of a deep-green
haystack. There is a wealth of tropical vegetation in parks and gardens,
terminating with the Bosque Rodrigues Alves in the outskirts, a sample
of the real Amazonia, dense wild forest where humidity and semi-darkness
reign and great trees stand on tiptoe straining their necks in the
struggle for air and light above the solid roof of vegetation. Yet the
considerable market gardens on the edges of town, tended by Portuguese
and other white laborers, show what European immigration can and might
do against this prolific militancy of unbridled nature.
In contrast to the surrounding primeval wilderness, there is a
suggestion of the _vieux port_ of Marseilles in the Ver-o-peso
(See-the-weight), the old rectangular landing-place, so named because in
the time of the monarchy fish brought to town were weighed there and
assessed a government tax. It is still the chief port for small vessels,
and may be found almost any morning packed with sailing ships, their
many colored sails giving the scene an effectiveness usually lacking in
the monotonously green aspect of equatorial Brazil. These gather from
all directions, bringing the products of the adjacent mainland, the
Island of Marajó opposite, and of the waters between, and carrying back
to the towns and hamlets scattered along either side of this false mouth
of the Amazon the products of civilization, ranging from French perfume
to manufactured ice. Along the quay of the Ver-o-peso and for some
distance back is the public market, filled with many Amazonian products
unknown in northern climes. First and foremost is the _pirarucú_, a fat,
reddish-brown fish sometimes called the “cod of the Amazon,” so huge
that each scale is nearly two inches across, less often eaten fresh than
salted and boxed in great slabs and shipped to every community along the
river. _Pirarucú_ is the beef of the Amazonian regions, as _farinha_ is
its bread. Turtle flesh is also in great favor, and butter made from the
turtle eggs is the most common in the Pará market. Oil of _capivara_, or
river-hog, of tapir, and even of alligator furnish the _Paraenses_ their
emulsions. The state taxes every fisherman, and the federal government
takes its toll of every turtle, _pirarucú_, or bottle of oil he brings
in. _Castanhas_, or chestnuts, as what we call the “Brazil nut” is known
at home, are to be found in great heaps; these and cacao constitute the
principal products of Grão Pará, with one world-famous exception. There
are scores of such local commodities as _cheiro de mulata_, which might
be translated as “scent of mulatto-girl,” ground up bark sold in little
packages and sprinkled in the frizzled tresses of the purchasers, both
as a perfume and to bring good luck. Of native fruits wholly unknown in
the temperate zones there are no end,—the _mamão_, better known by the
Spanish-American name of _papaya_; the _graviola_, with big green scales
and a cream-like interior similar to the _chirimoya_ of Andean valleys;
the _cupuassú_, with an apple taste; the _barcury_, _maracajú_,
_mangaba_, _muruxy_, _taxperebá_, and many others, less often used as
table fruits than as flavoring to sorbets or ice cream, or what a local
café-keeper stronger on mixing than on spelling advertises as
“cookstails.” The _maxixe_, by the way, which has reached the North in
the form of a Brazilian rag-time dance elaborated from Portuguese and
African originals by the negroes of Pernambuco and Bahia, is in its
legitimate sense an Amazonian pepper. Above all, there is the _assahy_,
the small fruit of a palm-tree not unlike the date in appearance, from
which a non-alcoholic _refresco_ is made, reddish in color and drunk
with _farinha_. This is so great a favorite among _Paraenses_ that they
have a saying:
_Quem vai para Pará para;_ Whoever goes to Pará stops;
_Quem toma assahy fica._ Whoever drinks _assahy_ remains.
Rubber, the second national industry of Brazil, is of course the life of
Pará, which is the reason the city had lost most of its old-time energy.
Not only was the rubber market in a chaotic state on account of the
World War, but the Amazon was just beginning to feel seriously the
competition of the planted rubber-fields of Ceylon, where, in contrast
to the high prices of Amazonia, the cost of living is perhaps the lowest
in the world. Warehouses that two years before could not hold the rubber
that poured in upon them now had a few dozen of the big balls scattered
about their huge floors. There they were being cut up—giving them a
striking resemblance to dried meat—to make sure the rubber-gatherer had
not included a few stones or a low-grade near-rubber called _caucho_ and
packed in heavy boxes of native wood for export. All Amazonia, from the
laborers who tap the trees to the speculators and explorers and their
long train of hangers-on, was feeling the change acutely.
Vinhães never recovered from his astonishment at the difference between
this Pará and the one he had known on previous trips. In the good old
days of only a few months back Pará was sure it would soon outstrip
Paris, so that it had many public and private buildings out of all
keeping with its present condition, sumptuous three-story structures
marked “Municipal School” on the outside that were mere dusty ruins
within, pretentious mansions sitting out wet and lonely, knee-deep in
grass, on an imaginary avenue. Then throngs of humanity, all leaving
money behind them, poured in and out of the gateway to the Amazon.
To-day, with her chief commerce languishing in the throes of death, Pará
was provincial again—a stranger attracted attention and everyone knew
everyone else. Even now there were few beggars, thanks, perhaps, both to
habit and to the scarcity of negro blood, but in the days of prosperity,
we were assured, almost any barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ had a conto
or two in his pocket. The “Theatro da Paz,” built in the time of the
monarchy more than thirty years before, and the most sumptuous in Brazil
until the municipal theaters of Rio and São Paulo were constructed, had
not been opened in months. On its façade still hung the remnants of
advertising of one of the favorite entertainments of the old
money-flowing days:
_Theatro Da Paz
Setembro, 1912_
A Grande Revista Paraense
BORRACHO FALSA
(false rubber)
It had indeed played them false.
A negro is almost conspicuous in Pará, and it is a question whether
there are not more _caboclos_, that is, Indian mixtures, than mulattoes.
Not merely did the exploiting of the Amazonian region begin late in the
life of the monarchy, but the northern part of Brazil freed its slaves
before the national decree of emancipation was promulgated. The city
itself rivals the southernmost states as a European Brazil. White men,
from English merchants to barefoot Portuguese laborers, their olive
skins seeming strangely pale in the blazing sunshine, make up almost a
majority of the population. It is a dressy, formal community for all
that, and notwithstanding the heat of a sea-level city on the equator.
Politicians in wintry garb, their high silk hats tilted against the sun
ever so slightly, an umbrella grasped in their sweat-dripping hands, may
be seen making their way to the palace, on the roof-tree of which
vultures are languidly preening themselves. Now and then these
overdressed gentlemen cast a wise but circumspect eye upon the
_mameluco_ and mulatto women passing with bundles on their heads, moving
their hips slightly yet conspicuously, filling the air with their
personal odor mingled with that of the _cheiro de mulata_ sprinkled in
their hair, their thin low waists showing coppery or brown skins that
are more suggestive than nudity. On Sunday afternoons an automobile
parade speeds up and down the Estrada de Nazareth, the men stiffly
correct in attire down to wintry woolen spats, the women—but these are
most apt to be European adventuresses who have seen better and younger
days, who spend their evenings on the stage of the “Moulin Rouge,” but
who now sit in pompous bourgeois correctness in their open taxis, ever
buoyed up by the hope of attracting the husband of some bejeweled
resident along this finest of Pará’s avenues, a hope in which they are
frequently not disappointed. It is characteristic of the Brazilian point
of view that not only do the legitimate ladies of these sumptuous
residences lean on their powdered elbows at the windows studying in
detail their possible rivals, but that they see nothing amiss in joining
the procession, so long as they have a close male relative along to
protect them from scandalous tongues.
There is an old bullring in Pará, but it has long been used only as a
school. The two churches in Brazil at all worth seeing are the
Candalaria of Rio and the Sé, or cathedral, of Belém. The latter is
imposing in structure and situation and has several artistic pictures.
Catholicism, however, by no means has everything its own way in the
metropolis of the Amazon. For one thing, there are said to be eight
Masonic lodges, with a membership of nearly eighty per cent. of the male
population. Electricity and gasoline have almost entirely taken the
place of the screaming ox-carts so familiar there not many years ago.
The “Pará Electric Railways and Lighting Company” had already given the
city good British service for six years. The cars, unlike those in the
rest of Brazil, have a center aisle, probably because the incessant
rains would make the crawling under side-curtains an unendurable
nuisance. If anything, the division into classes is more marked than in
Rio itself. The man with a missing sock or collar pays almost the same
fare as his fully dressed fellow and rides in exactly the same kind of
car, except that on the outside it is branded with the word “Segunda.” A
famous American ornithologist, who knows more of the interior of Brazil
and its bird life than all Brazil’s thirty millions, had been standing
on a corner signaling in vain to car after car to carry him and a
suitcase full of feathered trophies out to the Museo Goeldi when it
became my pleasure to explain to him the Brazilian system of “baggage”
street-cars.
[Illustration: My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every
station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky negroes with
nothing on their mind but a couple of trunks]
[Illustration: Dolce fare niente between shows in Pará]
[Illustration: The cathedral of Pará]
[Illustration: Pará has been called the “City of Beautiful Trees”]
Among many forms of “_fazendo fita_,” it is the custom among the élite
of Brazil for the man whom the conductor reaches first to pay the fares
of all his friends ahead or behind him in a street-car. It is what the
French call a _beau geste_, but there are times when it has its
drawbacks, especially in times of “brutal crises” and a slump in the
rubber market. I rode out one day on the longest street-car line in
Pará, past the dense Bosque screaming with parrakeet's and flickering
with _beija-flores_, not to mention the large insane asylum and
poorhouse, to visit the Liceo of Souza. With me were the professors of
botany, horticulture, and agriculture from that institution. On the way
I pointed out a magnificent tree which is certain to attract the
attention of any foreigner making that journey, and asked to what
species it belonged. The three professors looked at one another with
puzzled faces, introduced a new topic of conversation in the hope that I
might forget my curiosity, and finding me not to be put off so easily,
one of them replied, with the air of a sage handing out a gem of wisdom,
“E-e uma arvore silvestre—it is a _wild_ tree!” No doubt they thought I
took it for a hothouse plant. But it was an episode of my return trip,
alone with the professor of botany, which made the journey worth while.
As we rumbled along, halting frequently to pick up passengers, I noted
that he grew more and more gloomy and taciturn. Not until the conductor
arrived from the rear, however, and my companion handed him the
equivalent of more than half a dollar in fares, did I suspect the cause
of his sadness. The fare-collector, it seemed, though the matter was not
mentioned by word of mouth, had put off collection so long that more
than a dozen of the professor’s friends and acquaintances had boarded
the car, and then the stupid fellow had begun his duties with the back
seats, where the professor had fancied himself safe. The result was that
common courtesy required him to pay the fares of nearly everyone in the
car—and Brazilian professors are little less generously supplied with
this world’s goods than their fellows elsewhere. One by one, as the
conductor reached them and refused their proffered coin with a word of
explanation, the men ahead turned around and thanked their benefactor
with as elaborate a bow as the backs of street-car seats permit, to each
of which my companion replied with a sweeping gesture of the right hand
suggesting intense pleasure and unlimited largess. But the street-cars
of Pará, as in most of Brazil, run on the European zone system, and
there were four or five separate sections to be paid before we reached
the center of the city. We were just starting from the second
junction-point when the professor suddenly clutched at me and dived off
the car. I might have been puzzled, had I not noted the extreme yet
casual care with which he examined the next car for possible
acquaintances before we boarded it—well up toward the front.
“You should never divide an ox-hide until you kill the ox,” say the
_caboclos_ of Brazil. Vinhães and I had fully expected to make a small
fortune in Pará, but we had reckoned without two serious drawbacks,—the
“rubber crisis” and the climate. Rain, rivers, and trade winds unite to
make the city cooler than its situation warrants. Death by sunstroke is
unknown—in all Brazil, for that matter—and by night it was at times
almost uncomfortably cold. But the rain which had treated us so kindly
for months broke all known records during our engagement in Belém. It
was during a raging downpour that the copper-tinted half-owner of the
“Bar Paraense” and I drove about in a luxurious taxicab paying our “duty
calls” on the editors of the six or eight local newspapers, and it was
in a continuation of the same deluge that we opened that evening, taking
in more than a conto merely because ours was a novelty for which we
could charge double admission. We remained cheerful, however, because
everyone assured us that every three days of rain were sure to be
followed by three dry days. For that matter, it was asserted that the
daily shower came always at a fixed hour in the afternoon, so exactly
that people made their appointments “before or after the rain,” without
troubling to refer to the clock. All this may be true, but if so, ours
was an off year. If there was any one thing we could not be certain of,
it was whether or not we could venture out at any hour of the day or
night without risking a drenching; and of the twelve nights we played in
Pará it rained continuously and in veritable cataracts exactly a dozen.
Luckily, all _Paraenses_ are not afraid of water or we should have been
forced to close our doors. The people themselves at length admitted that
they had never seen it rain so incessantly. No wonder _paroaras_ find
the contrast between the low, heavy skies of Amazonia and the lofty,
brilliant ones of Ceará so saddening; even we, from the often wintry
North, found the constant downpour, broken only by momentary splotches
of steaming sunshine, getting on our nerves. The trees of the praças and
avenues seemed to scrape with their upper branches the swollen black
clouds which marched slowly over us in closed squadrons day after day.
Nowhere in Brazil did the iniquitous “deadhead” flourish so abundantly
as in Pará. Two boxes and a row of orchestra seats of the “Bar Paraense”
belonged to the brewery which furnished the liquid refreshments; similar
accommodations were reserved permanently for the families of the
_empreza_, or management: as many belonged to the chief of police—though
he always assigned his rights to friends, and forced his way in with as
many as he chose to bring with him; every “authority,” municipal, state,
and federal, from the president to the most lowly clerk, was accustomed
to walk in without being challenged; the six moth-eaten little
newspapers were given a dozen seats a night, and these having been sold
or given away, any loafer or boy who chose to state that he was a
newspaper-man must be let in, under penalty of possible scurrilous
attacks in the next edition; scores of unkempt part-negroes appeared
nightly with a card stating they were detectives; insolent half-African
policemen in uniform not only forced their way in, but habitually
dragged a turmoil of friends or progeny with them; it had long been the
custom to count the average Brazilian family of parents and six children
as three adults, though each child expected to occupy a full seat; the
“artists,” “advertisers on the curtain,” “electrical inspectors,”
“volunteer firemen,” and what not who expected to get in on one excuse
or another were without number. Every _Paraense_ of any African ancestry
seemed to be on the police force, even the chief being distinctly
tar-brushed, and to have no other duty than to attend Kinetophone
performances. More than once I counted forty policemen in uniform in an
audience of less than ten times that number, not to mention more
“authorities” and other forms of grafters than I could estimate. Truly,
a government is often a useless as well as an expensive luxury. Though
policemen and higher officials always swarmed, we never got a suggestion
of assistance from them. One night a crowd of ridiculously garbed
students who were celebrating the reopening of the academy after the six
months’ annual vacation forced their way in some forty strong, yet not
one of the hundred official “deadheads” in the house raised a whisper.
On another occasion I had the doors closed during our part of the
entertainment in order that the audience should not be disturbed by
late-comers. In the middle of a number the chief of police arrived and
demanded that he and a group of friends be admitted at once, on penalty
of everyone of us being placed under arrest. There was the same staid
attitude on the part of the grafting politicians from the palace and the
_urubús_ that lazily preen their feathers on the roof of it after a
rain—scenting from afar any chance of gorging themselves and circling
around it in their black carrion-crowlike garb, pretending whenever they
are observed that they do not wish to feed and strolling nonchalantly
off, only to hurry back as soon as they are free from observation.
A long article appeared in the chief Pará newspaper one morning
“proving” that a Brazilian youth invented the Kinetophone in 1908! I
should have wired Edison; he would have been astonished. I was not,
however, for I had read even more amazing things in Brazil. According to
the “Dictionary of Famous Brazilians,” a _Paraense_ invented both the
balloon and the flying-machine—that is, he got as far as Paris on a
government subvention to “perfect his great invention” and had a bully
time among the _grisettes_, though he never rose bodily above the
ground. The same work of many volumes, as well as the “History of
Parahyba” taught in the schools of that state, is authority for the
statement that the typewriter was invented by a _Parahybano_ priest
named Francisco João de Azevedo. As he was already editing the first
newspaper of North Brazil in 1826, the typewriter must be an older
machine than we suspect. “Blessed be he who bloweth his own horn, lest
it be not blown,” said Mark Twain. Nearly every state of Brazil gets out
an elaborate volume, resembling our high school or college annuals,
praising itself to the skies and including pictures not only of its many
more or less imaginary industries, but portraits of all its “influential
citizens”—who can afford it.
The “Estrada de Ferro de Bragança” operates a 16-mile commuters’ branch
out along the shore of the river-mouth to Pinheiro, as well as a main
line of more than a hundred miles to the town for which it is named.
Though it is state property, the federal government imposes a federal
tax of twenty per cent. on its tickets, and, being Brazilian, its daily
train starts at the crack of dawn. This was the old overland route from
São Luiz to its offspring, Pará, yet the train made rare and short
stops, for there was little but endless bush and genuine tropical jungle
during the whole nine hours’ run. Here and there were patches of corn,
but the scattered inhabitants along the way were mainly engaged in the
production of children. The latter were habitually stark naked; the
women dressed in two thin cotton garments covering them from neck to
bare heels; men naked to the waist lounged in huts that were mere stick
skeletons smeared with mud, sometimes slipping on a jacket, without
buttoning it, when they came outside. Personally, I prefer the frank
loin-cloth of the East Indian.
In Bragança itself, as along the way, the scarcity of African, and the
prevalence of Caucasian, blood was surprising, with Indian mixtures in
considerable evidence. The _vigario_, or parish priest, with whom I had
some conversation on this and kindred subjects, asserted that the
_caboclo_, or part-Indian native, was in general lazier and more
worthless than the negro mixtures; but this I had found by no means the
usual Brazilian opinion. Everything is relative, and this native of
sleepy Parahyba considered the people of Amazonia “incredibly indolent.”
Bragança boasts as well as shows its age, having won the title of
_villa_ a century ago. There are electric-lights, but most of the
streets are grass-grown and the jungle jostles the town on every side.
It was once called Souza de Caeté, from the river in which it washes its
clothes and along which fishermen and crabmen, carrying baskets full of
squirming _carangreijos_, plod in barefoot contentment.
A hovel, masquerading as the “Pensão da Mulata,” had all its rooms
occupied—several times each, in fact—but was sure it could accommodate
me, for what was the hanging of one more hammock? The place was too
mulatto-ish even for my adventurous taste, however, and by appealing to
the station agent I was taken to a shop kept by a Gallego and his
Andalucian wife, who furnished food and hammock-hooks to “persons of a
certain class,” into which I evidently fell, for I got a room in which
only a bed was lacking and was served a tolerable supper. My hosts did
not run a _hotel_, they explained, because to do so they would have to
hang out a sign and pay a heavy government license and tax. With only
the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock to cover me, I slept little from
midnight on because of the cold, abetted by frequent deluges. The
Gallego had given many solemn promises to wake me, but had shown no
signs of carrying them out up to the time I was dressed and ready to
push off. A fine pickle I should have been in had I missed the only
train for four days. My bill having been paid the night before, I
stepped noiselessly out the window and let them sleep on, hurrying
through the fading light and the swampy streets to the station. At least
there was the satisfaction of knowing that I would never have to catch
another Brazilian train. That night, after a mere thirty-five hours’
absence, I found my shoes, valise, even the band of my hat covered with
green mold in my airy room at the “Café da Paz.”
The end of my engagement with the Kinetophone was nearer than I had
expected. After several communications to the man who held the
theatrical monopoly of Manaos, Vinhães had at last received a cable in
code which we deciphered as “Nous réfusons toute proposition.” Very
Parisian, of course, and definite in any language. The fact was,
according to every test we could give by absent treatment, that Manaos
was deader than Pará. The latter has at least its shipping and its
supplying of the interior, but the exotic city of the Amazonian
wilderness depends for its existence almost solely on rubber.
The rivalry between the two cities of the Amazon has always been acute,
and Pará was chuckling with tales of its rival’s come-down in the world.
Manaos, the _Paraenses_ asserted, always copied their improvements, and
would ruin itself rather than admit it was not Pará’s equal. When Pará
formed a zoo, Manaos immediately followed suit. Then rubber fell and the
zoo-keeper came to the state minister in charge and said, “_S’nho’,
falta comida pa’ os bichos_.” “No food for the animals, eh? Well, I tell
you what you do. Listen”—but the story is worth the telling only in the
language of the scornful, sarcastic _Paraenses_—“_Olhe, vocé mata tal
bicho e da á comer aos outros, ouvioú_.” “_Sim, s’nho’_,” replied the
zoo-keeper, and he went away and killed such and such an animal and fed
it to the others, even as he had been ordered. A day or two later he
came back with the same story, and went home to apply the same solution.
This was repeated for weeks, until only the jaguar was left. The
minister stared at the zoo-keeper for a long time when he came to report
this state of affairs, and scratched his head in perplexity. Then, a
brilliant idea suddenly striking him, he cried: “_Olhe, então vocé solta
o tal onça!_” Whereupon the keeper bowed his head and went back to turn
the jaguar loose, even as the minister had commanded, and thus ended the
Manaos zoo. That of Pará was bidding fair to suffer a like, if more
humane fate, for all the facetiousness of the _Paraenses_ at the expense
of their poverty-stricken brethren up the river. Two years now the
ragged, barefoot employees of the Pará zoo had been mainly dependent
upon the charity of the Austrian women in charge of it, and there was
even then a man sitting across the table from us who had come down to
carry the most valuable of its birds and mammals back to the Bronx.
April 21st, national holiday of Brazil in honor of the drawing and
quartering of Tiradentes, is now doubly famous as the exact date on
which I last ran a Kinetophone show. I have said that it rained every
night during our Pará engagement, but that afternoon the sun beat down
with equatorial fury. In the sheet-iron booth under the sheet-iron roof
the sweat streamed down into my eyes until I could not make out the
projection on the canvas, and the crank rubbed the skin off the inside
of several fingers. That night, in honor of the occasion, I put on a
“GREAT DOUBLE PROGRAM” so that nearly all my old film-friends came out
upon the screen to do their turns and give me a chance to bid them
farewell. The next afternoon “Tut” and I went out and pulled down the
show, and the travel-worn trunks disappeared forever from my sight as
they were rowed out to the _Ceará_, now on her return voyage. Because
she was taking with her also the state senator and the archbishop of
Pará, the military band and great mobs of _populares_ came down to the
wharf, giving us the sensation of making a holiday of our parting when
“Tut” stepped into a rowboat and slipped away into the humid night
toward the port-holes reflected on the placid bosom of the river.
With him went Vinhães, one Brazilian whom I had found strictly honorable
in all his dealings. Naturally, as our engagement in Pará was over, the
rains had abruptly ceased. Turned out upon the world alone again for the
first time since I had joined Linton in Rio more than eight months
before, I wandered idly along the streets, wondering what on earth I
could do to pass the evening. Almost unconsciously my steps carried me
back to the “Bar Paraense,” but there was only a pitiful audience of
twenty or so, and most of those sat in the second-class seats watching
an inexcusable mess of screen rubbish. I took refuge in my room and
whiled away the time making a final report on our tour. Out of 221 days,
we had played 196, losing the rest in traveling or holidays, giving 40
matinées, or 236 performances of an average of nearly three sessions
each. We had appeared in 49 theaters in 29 towns of 11 states, and had
failed on only one contract,—that at Itajubá, where a disrupted railroad
had forced us to remain an extra day in Ouro Fino. Our total income had
been 54,665,000 reis, of which my own share had been 6,882,000. Though
it was months later before I again had news of my adventurous ward, the
Kinetophone maintained its high American reputation to the end.
Beginning in Natal, “Tut” not only fulfilled all the contracts I had
arranged for his return trip, but carried the “eighth marvel” clear down
to Rio Grande do Sul—a remarkable feat in view of the fact that he made
the rest of the tour entirely alone, training local talent in each town
to put on and take off the phonograph records. That _tour de force_ made
me wonder if, after all, my own services had been mainly ornamental.