Prose (42 page)

It is perfectly true that in Brazil culture and the arts are more respected than in our own industrialized and middle-class country. Perhaps this is due not so much to European tradition as Brazilians like to think, as it is to the fact that, as in government, Brazil is one big family. In spite of examples of the democracy of the arts,—Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, and Portinari—most writers and artists come from the small educated, inter-related upper-class; in various degrees they are all cousins, and a mutual admiration society is apt to result. As in government, feuds become family quarrels; first names are used—even in serious critical articles; everything is taken too personally, and the atmosphere is curiously “feminine.”

Although in this way they are spared the abrupt and cruel fluctuations of reputation that our artists suffer from, they nevertheless pay for the lack of serious criticism and competition. One sometimes feels that a 20th-century Brazilian Samuel Johnson, with all his dogmatism, might do wonders for Brazilian arts,—but maybe that is as bad as saying that Latin American countries
need
dictators.

*   *   *

There are two sayings, Anglo-Saxon and Brazilian, that sound a little alike but have very different meanings. They illustrate very well our different points of view on the career of the artist. We say, puritanically: “He has made his bed and must lie in it.” Brazilians say, soothingly:
Cria fama e deita-te na cama.
“Create a reputation and stay in bed.” Too many genuine talents seem to take to their beds too early,—or to their hammocks. (A favorite way for Brazilian writers to have their pictures taken is pleasantly supine, in a fringed hammock.)

Chapter 8

Groups and Individuals

There is one anecdote Brazilians never tire of telling to illustrate their attitude towards race-relations. When some of the ladies at Pedro II's court refused to dance with the famous Negro engineer André Rebouças, Princess Isabel herself crossed the room and asked him to dance with her. It is a nice story, and true; and it is also true that Pedro II employed several Negroes and mulattoes in high positions and that the devoted Rebouças followed him into exile and eventually died in poverty. Unfortunately this story does not necessarily prove racial tolerance; Princess Isabel was a true princess and had been well brought-up,—
bem educada,
as they say.

There is a better story. In 1950 Katherine Dunham was turned away from one of the big hotels in São Paulo with the excuse that there were no vacant rooms. Overnight this became a national scandal, and within days a law was passed against any discrimination whatsoever in the future. The fact that such a law had never even been thought of up until then tells almost all one needs to know about Brazil's attitude towards the Negro. (The hotel was supposed to have acted as it did out of deference to the prejudices of its North American clientele.)

Brazilians are proud of their fine record in race-relations. Rather, their attitude can be best described by saying that the upper-class Brazilian is usually proud of his racial tolerance, while the lower-class Brazilian is not aware of his; he just practises it. The occasional anti-Negro, or
racista
(and this applies equally well to the occasional anti-semite), usually proves to be one of two types: the unthinking member of “society” who has got into anti-Negro or anti-Jewish “society” in his travels, and has lost his native Brazilian tolerance, or sadder still—the European emigrant who comes to Brazil having suffered in his own country because of his race or poverty, and (probably unaccustomed to Negroes, anyway) despises and is rude to them.

The old upper-class looks down on the new middle-class, because of its vulgarity or bad manners, much more than on the Negroes or mulattoes. Part of this is nostalgia for the days when there was no middle-class, part economic pressure, and part old-fashioned snobbishness. One often feels sorry for the small but growing middle-class; surely old-fashioned Brazil should have more patience with it. The still-simple class-divisions and types seem 19th century,—almost Dickensian, if a writer so remote from everything Brazilian can be mentioned in connection with Brazil.

A young Jewish businessman, intelligent, but not well-read or well-travelled, was astounded when, planning his first trip to the United States, he was warned about “restricted” hotels. The idea of being discriminated against had never occurred to him. Also,—and this illustrates one of Brazil's great weaknesses, its provincialism, built up over long centuries of remoteness from Europe—(it took [ … ] days in a sailing vessel to get to Europe from Brazil, as compared with [ … ] days from North America)—this same young Jew was equally astounded to be told that the sufferings of the Jews under Hitler had anything to do with
him,
he had never realized there was such a thing as racial solidarity.

It is true that the Negro or mulatto is a “second-class citizen” rarely in important positions or even good jobs, and almost always poor. But since most of the population is in exactly the same situation and suffers the same deprivations, his sufferings do not mark him out as very different from anyone else. Negroes want to be “light,”
claro,
have “good” (straight) hair, and “good” (not flat) noses. They are sometimes treated with the condescending, indulgent humor found in the southern U.S.—& there are hundreds of Negro myths—but again it is not so very different from the way lower-class whites are treated. They have equal opportunity and education, as far as it goes, which is usually not very far as yet; and in the arts. Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade—all were mulattoes. After Machado de Assis's death a friend called on his widow. The Senhora Machado de Assis glanced at her husband's photograph on the table and made her only recorded comment on the fact that she, a white woman, had married a mulatto. “What a pity he was so dark,” she said.

The widespread poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and suffering in Brazil are tragic; for millions, life is hungry and dirty, short and cruel. And yet—to a South African or a North American or anyone who has lived in a colonial country,—to be able to hear a black cook call her small, elderly, white mistress
minha negrinha
(my little nigger) as a term of affection, comes as a revelation,—a breath of fresh air at last.

It was not planned; it just happened. But Brazil now realizes that her racial situation is one of her greatest assets. Racial mixtures can be seen all over the country. In the north, in the Amazon region, Portuguese and Indian have produced the
caboclo,
small, well-built, straight noses, bright eyes—a very attractive physical type. The northeast, after generations of poor diet, has produced the
cabeça-chata,
or “flat-head,” who is also apt to be small, somewhat rickety, with thin arms and legs and a large head, but quick, and certainly prolific. In the south under better living conditions and with little or no Negro admixture, the type is more Portuguese, sometimes with German blood, bigger, fairer, with clear skin, calmer—but pugnacious, even inclined to violence. It is in and around the big cities of Rio and São Paulo that one gets every racial type mixed together, types that have lost their racial clarity along with their former agricultural skills and beautiful backlands manners. A man in Goiás will know the name and habits of every beast and bird around him; but the people of regions that have fallen into agricultural decay are sickly-looking bad farmers, to whom every insect is only a
bicho,
or every tree is the “five-leaf,” and all are subject to destruction. The importance of nutrition in Brazil is shown by the fact that the richer and older the family, the taller and bigger-boned they are apt to be. Sometimes their servants from the “north” or the “interior” appear almost like dwarfs beside them.

*   *   *

The Portuguese have naturally been the largest group of immigrants, and they still come in at the rate of 15,000 a year. They are mostly laborers and farmers, servants or gardeners. Also, certain ancient city trades are theirs: old-newspaper-and-bottle-dealing and knife grinding. In the cities, a great deal of freight is pushed about on hand-carts, and this too is the prerogative of the Portuguese. The actual official name for these hand-cart men is “Donkies without Tails.” Their usual costume is wooden clogs, extra wide trousers, undershirts, and large floppy berets, and their faces are handsome, simple and stolid, compared to the often ugly, but subtle and mobile faces of Brazilians of several generations' standing. In endless jokes the Portuguese appears as absurdly literal-minded and naive. In the 19th- and early 20th-century Brazilian theatre, he was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches and heavy watch chains. In Portugal on the stage at the same time, the Brazilian was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches, etc., etc.

After the abolition of slavery, European immigrants started to arrive in large numbers, going mostly to the States of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Germans, Italians, and after 1908, Japanese all poured in. There are whole towns and villages of Germans in the south of Brazil. At present there are probably about half a million Japanese in the country, who are contributing enormously to the improvement of agriculture, particularly to fruit-growing, in the southern states. São Paulo has Japanese grocery stores, bookshops and even Geisha girls. The 6 million Italians have adapted themselves best of all, probably because the climate and working conditions are not unlike those of Italy, and Portuguese is easy for them to learn.

*   *   *

The founder and hero of the Indian Protection Service was General Cândido Mariano Rondon (1865–1958). He came from Cuiabá, capital of the State of Mato Grosso, and was himself part Indian. In 1907 as a young captain, he was given the task of building a telgraph network to link Mato Grosso with Amazonas and with the outside world. This meant exploring thousands of square miles of wilderness for the first time. Rondon's story is full of heroism and self-sacrifice. He believed that the Indians should and could be “pacified,” as opposed to one popular opinion of the day which was all for exterminating them. The motto he gave the Indian Service was “let yourself be killed if necesaary, but never kill,” and many of his lieutenants, soldiers, and workers did just that. He tried never to interfere with the Indians' way of life. There are still shameful stories of land-greedy men who cheat or murder the Indians, and sad “publicity stunts” involving them, but Rondon set a high standard of behaviour towards primitive men. The territory of Rondônia (larger than the whole of France) is named for him.

Just before the First World War Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting and exploring expedition with Rondon. (He found, sad to relate, that there was just as good game in South America as any ever shot in Africa.) He pays high tribute to Rondon in his book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness,” which probably brought Brazil to the attention of the average American for the first time since Dom Pedro II's visit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Rondon discovered fifteen major rivers, one named for Roosevelt, built over fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines, and discovered many previously unknown tribes of Indians.

But the Indians continue to be a problem. Tribes that have never seen “civilization” are still turning up, while those that have seen it are gradually dying off in disease and degradation. Sometimes the problem is a dangerous one. As this was written, the body of a young English explorer was found, pierced by seven arrows of the Caiapós'. The isolated rubber-collector or cattle-raiser of Mato Grosso or Pará, living in the atomic age, still has more to fear from arrows or blow-pipes than from bombs.

*   *   *

One night on board a ship going down the muddy Amazon a young woman doctor was telling stories. She had been fifteen years with the S.E.S.P., the Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública, founded jointly by the United States and Brazil in 1942, and soon to be taken over completely by Brazil. She was twenty-three years old when she entered the S.E.S.P.; she had gone up to Santarém, then another hundred miles or so by launch, and landed with her instruments and a few books at a small village on the Rio Tapajós. The first night a group of wild, ragged men asked her to make out the death certificate of a fellow-villager whose body had just been found in the river: death by drowning. She asked to be left alone with the body and found that, although it had been in the water for some time, the man had died of a stab in the back. Quite alone, at night, knowing that the murderer or murderers must be in the threatening group of men, she had refused to sign the death warrant and ordered someone to go for the nearest police representative—half a day's trip by motor boat,—she loved her work. She thought that the Indian Protection and the S.E.S.P. were the two best-run services in Brazil.

Small, fat, animated, dark, probably with Indian blood, she was a “modern” Brazilian woman. There are not many like this Amazonian doctor, but there are a few and the numbers are increasing.

Brazil is a man's country. The double standard could scarcely be more so; little boys are spoilt, according to Anglo-Saxon notion; everything in the home revolves around the head of the house or the son of the family, often referred to simply as “the man.” The male,
o macho,
is the all-important, all-admired, principal. Women are: “the mother of my children,” “the bearer of my name,” and “religion is for Women.”

But nothing is that simple. Even if poor women trail behind the men, carrying the baby in their arms and the water-jug on their heads, even if the Women's Pages of the papers are of an unbelievable vapidity, and even if men stay in one room at parties talking of politics & real estate and women stay in another babbling about servants and babies, things have changed a great deal since the first Portuguese carried off the Indian girls. In the old days women were scarce and were kept in harem-like seclusion, peering out at the city streets through
muxarabis,
or in the dark inner rooms of the old farm houses. For three hundred years they were rarely taught to read or write, and they were married off as young as twelve to neighbours, cousins, even to uncles. All the early travellers' accounts speak of the timidity of Brazilian women and how rarely they were seen by male guests. They grew white and fat in the darkened rooms, rarely walking, swaying in hammocks, or sitting cross-legged on pillows, while their husbands, according to most accounts, made merry in the slave quarters. After several generations of that sort of life, often the men had not much enterprise, and the wife would, in reality, run the sugar- or coffee-plantation, sitting on her pillows, being fanned, sewing, but issuing a stream of orders all day long.