Prose (54 page)

These pillars fascinated us all; they were patted and photographed and discussed for some time, Huxley and others even climbing down from the long porches to look at them from underneath. (They have quickly become a symbol for Brasília, appearing over and over in magazines and newspapers, as well as on the little silk banners, the hotel writing-paper and black imitation-leather zipper bags given to the guests.)

On either side of the entrance are square shallow pools of the same marble as the pillars; one contains a bronze statue of two female figures pierced with holes, by the Brasilian sculptor, Ceschiatti, the other a thin slab, like a sign-post, bearing an inscription in bronze. Also in front of the Palace we were shown a magnolia tree, about a yard high, that had been planted by Secretary Dulles just a few days before. (About a week later President Gronchi planted an Italian cypress in Brasília. There had been plans for Imperial palms grouped near the Palace but lately the variety of palm has been changed to the regional
buriti,
not so tall nor so elegant, but a very presentable tree, nevertheless.) The porch or gallery of the Palace extends beyond it on the left side, then curls around on itself and upwards in a small, exuberant, if snail-like chapel—a sort of airy, Latin, wave-of-the-hand concluding gesture to the static dance of the linked pillars. At least that is the idea; the chapel struck most of us as out of scale, perhaps a shade too small for the pillars. Its snail-with-a-sail facade is topped by a slender brass cross that looks exactly right, but the small window cut through the marble below it, a square hole opening onto space, seems a bit theatrical, even if it is strongly reminiscent of the small windows of the early mission churches in Brasil.

Once inside the Palace, I am sorry to say, the effect of coolness and airy grace vanishes. The decorating was done by Niemeyer and his daughter; the colors are frequently harsh and the furniture seems meagre and badly arranged—but surely many additions and changes will be made. We stepped in onto hot turkey-red carpets, extra-thick (“Nylon foam?” someone tentatively asked the secretary who was showing us around), laid down between walls of mirror and glittering gold tile. A rail-less, red-carpeted ramp (we were told that Secretary Dulles had almost fallen off that) goes up to the right, to the
Salão Nobre.
Here are a grand piano and a few groups of sofas, and upholstered and brass-and-leather chairs, some of which, at first glance, looked like the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair but which, as one discovers on trying them, are a smaller and not too comfortable copy of it.

Perhaps it should be said that Brasil, like Italy, Spain, or Portugal, has never had our northern ideas of comfort in the home. Until recently all beds were very hard, sometimes even of leather or cane, because hard beds are cooler in a hot climate; floors were of stone or tile or bare jacaranda planks; and chairs and sofas, when copied from foreign designs, often used woven cane instead of stuffed upholstery. The thick walls, extremely high ceilings, and small shuttered windows of colonial days were cool and appropriate; the “modern” interior, with its frequently soft and low furniture, light colors, and great areas of glass, has really not been completely adapted (as yet) to the Brasilian climate.

Perhaps we were too harsh in our criticisms as we trooped from room to room; I think that only Huxley failed to comment on the heat and glare. Across either end of the glass box that makes up the Palace is a long room, each with chairs and long table. One is the formal dining room, the other the Dispatch Room. Both are curtained only at the sides, that is, the ends of the box, and the afternoon sun pours into them through the glass front of the building; the wood of the tables was already crackling. The inner walls are panelled with large squares of deeply corrugated jacaranda, Brasil's handsomest wood. On the upper, shaded parts of the walls the effect is very beautiful, almost like tortoise-shell, but lower down, where the sun strikes, it, too, looks dried and lusterless. Perspiring and occasionally dropping onto the nearest chairs, we rudely asked our guide about air-conditioning, but he replied that it wasn't necessary.

A floating staircase goes straight from the
Salão Nobre
and is also carpeted in thick turkey-red. Upstairs, the halls are panelled in delicate tan “Ivory Wood,” or satin wood. We saw only one bedroom, looking like any twin-bedded, chintz-hung guest room, but its adjoining bath was truly magnificent in chromium and thick gray marble, with a square sunken bath sloping from the ends to the middle, like a sagging double bed. Under the bedroom windows, overlooking the swimming-pool, runs a shaded balcony of highly polished slabs of rich green marble, a beautiful material but surely out of keeping with the building's light structure and the over-delicate panelling just inside.

At present the Palace walls are almost bare; downstairs are two tapestries and a few small paintings by Emilio Di Cavalcanti. This austerity and lack of ornament reminded Huxley of a very different tour he had once made through Buckingham Palace, where every inch of wall space is covered with paintings, and every table loaded with photographs commemorating incidents in the lives of the royal family. We gathered around him in the heat of the upstairs hall while he talked for quite a while, and very entertainingly, about George V's bedroom arrangements.

Outside, workmen were laying turquoise blue tiles in the cavernous swimming-pool while three or four soldiers with their tommy-guns peered over at them—out of curiosity, boredom, or perhaps it was their duty. In the middle of the pool is a high, jagged imitation rock or island, the top of which is supposed to be planted with a garden—at an acute angle. However, I was later told that Niemeyer is not pleased with this “modern” but curiously Gothic-revival detail and may change it.

To the right are the servants' quarters, a long, sunken wing with just a flat roof and a line of narrow windows showing above ground, connected with the Palace by a subterranean passage. This seems an extremely feeble, not to say depressing, solution to the problem of where to put the forty or so servants needed for the Palace. The crystal box is not for them, but there is certainly space enough in all directions, and apparently money enough, to have them at least housed on the surface, like their employers. In the old days, slaves were often kept in the dank basements of Rio houses; even now, the rooms and bathrooms provided for servants in up-to-date and luxurious Copacabana apartment houses shock the sensibilities of foreign residents—but surely in Brasília, sometimes referred to as “the most modern city in the world,” Niemeyer, of all architects, should not have found it necessary to put them underground.

As we were leaving the Palace I realized that its more disappointing features had reminded me, in some way, of the house Niemeyer built for himself in 1954, on a hillside just outside Rio, and when I got back home I looked up what Henry Russell-Hitchcock had had to say about that in his book
Latin American Architecture.
Confirming my own amateur suspicions, I found this: “The pavillion contains only the main living areas and the kitchen. All other facilities are hidden away below the terrace with no relationship at all to the pavillion on top. Only, perhaps, its own designer and his family would find this an altogether comfortable residence…” Niemeyer's house, of course, is not at all like the Palace of the Dawn in Brasília, having been designed “in response to the landscape” in an interlocking set of curves, “in a harmony between the boldly rounded outline of the hills and the sinuous curves of his plan.” Niemeyer's response to the flat empty spaces of Brasília has been this transparent, gracefully supported, but essentially severe, box; but in both cases his solution of practical problems seems to have been the same: put them underneath, or underground, like a lazy housewife shoving household gear out of sight under a deceptively well-made bed.

Off to the south east of the Palace, a small white triangle in the distance, is the “Hermitage of Saint John Bosco” a faithful copy in white marble of an Indian teepee—American Indian, that is, with the open triangular doorway but with a cross on top in place of criss-crossed tent-poles. One of the booklets about Brasília explains the presence of this rather surprising chapel: “In the book
Biographical Memories,
Vol XVI pages 385 and 395, can be found the tale of Saint John Bosco's prophecy. It tells there that Dom Bosco, on the thirtieth of August, 1883, had a dream-vision. We give the quotation in respect to Brasília.

“‘Between the fifteenth and twentieth parallels, in the place where a lake was formed, will be born a great civilization and this will happen in the third generation. Here will be the promised land.'

“We are in the third generation exactly. The great civilization under construction (and which is Brasília) is located between the fifteenth and the twentieth parallels. The lake will be formed by the streams Torto and Gama.

“Thus the prophetic dream of Dom Bosco will be fulfilled.”

Laura Huxley was familiar with the life of this Italian saint, the founder of the Silesian order (which does much work in Brasil), and was eager to start off on a walk to see the “hermitage.” However, it was pointed out that actually the chapel was about a mile away, and at that moment the light was beginning to change to a clear uniform pink, the beginning of the sudden sub-tropical sunset. As we left, a group of small soldiers, members of the Brasília
Guarda Especial,
marched solemnly past changing guard, pounding with their heavy boots; in their unstarched green uniforms, they always look like wilted string beans.

*   *   *

In the hotel lounge before starting out, Maya, the Polish girl, had run into another Polish former-refugee, Countess Tarnowska, who had invited us all to come to the Santos Dumont Hotel in the Free City for a drink before dinner. Some time before Countess Tarnowska had opened a movie house in Annapolis and shortly after the founding of Brasília she opened another one in the Free City. There were then three hundred people in the town and her cinema was in a wooden barn; now she has the largest building there, of corrugated iron, seating three hundred people, and there is even a rival movie house. She is young and handsome; in excellent English she told us blithely, “We love it here! Of course there are lots of fires. The bank next door burned down yesterday. We were frightened for the cinema a bit, but everything turned out all right. Too bad you missed the excitement!” Dressed in blue jeans, with a straw hat tightly bound down with a white scarf that swathed her neck, she and her beautiful dark-eyed daughter, also in jeans and khaki shirt, had resembled two heroines of an old western, a sepia western, since they were both covered with the usual dust.

We now drove towards the city, over the head of the bird, where the Esplanade of the Three Powers will be. At present it is a confusing, noisy scene of earthwork, trucks and bulldozers, with work going on day and night. Someone behind me was trying to explain the lay-out of the Esplanade. “You see, it's a triangular rectangle,” he kept saying. The Englishman was trying to find the land acquired by his country for its future Embassy and when a vague area of the scrubby, termite-infested land was pointed out to him he said, “Oh! I'm so disappointed!” in such a crestfallen way that everyone laughed.

We passed the “superblocks” of apartments being built by the
institutos;
skeletons of steel and cement, it was hard to tell much about them except that they are very high and very close together, and again, with infinite space in all directions, it is hard to understand why they should be placed together at all, and with courtyards and area-ways not much larger than those in Rio—explicable because there actually is very little building space left, and real-estate values are higher than in New York.

The streets of Brasília have been planned to do away with traffic lights completely by means of over- and under-passes. Since the present capital is famous for the terrifying speed of its traffic, light-jumping, mad bus-drivers, and high accident rate, this is one innovation that has been welcomed by all.

*   *   *

It was growing dark when we reached the Free City, but it was not too dark to see it: almost that old, familiar, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer frontier town, but real, and greatly enlarged. The wide dirt streets are without sidewalks—“Imagine what it's like when it rains!” we told each other—and the wooden houses, with peaked roofs and occasional false fronts, are set close together, all shapes, sizes, and colors. We passed the corrugated iron cinema, and a big red barn with
IGREJA PRESBYTERIANA
in white letters across the gable. The traffic is mostly trucks, of all makes and ages, and jeeps, jeeps, jeeps, American, English, and Brasilian-made, with a few old cars and even a few men on horseback, all churning up thick clouds of dust.

The Hotel Santos Dumont is a low building, indistinguishable from the rest except for its sign and a few metal porch chairs placed on a narrow strip of cement flush with the street. Once inside, however, we seemed to have been bodily transported to a new little
boîte
or espresso bar in Greenwich Village—new because all the colors were bright and fresh, almost the only fresh colors I saw in the whole of Brasília. It was a rectangular room about thirty feet long, with a varnished bamboo bar and two boys in mess jackets; the table cloths were scarlet, there were black “drugstore” chairs, and bright yellow and green frills around the windows. Music was playing; I looked and saw Villa Lobos, Stravinsky, and Bartók records lying on the victrola. All this had been lugged in six hundred miles or more by truck. The Santos Dumont was modestly doing its best to be chic and cheerful and I think all our hearts warmed towards it.

Tables were pushed together and Countess Tarnowska, now clean and polished in an India print dress and bandanna, called for whiskey sours. But our temperate little party, perhaps slightly over-awed by Huxley (he had spoken once or twice about the unnecessary drinking and smoking that go on in the United States), refused alcohol for the most part and drank orange juice, which was mysteriously available. Countess Tarnowska, the daughter, and a heavy, blond Polish gentleman who was staying at the hotel, too, had just returned from a three-weeks' hunting trip, farther to the west, and she began telling us about it. They had had bad luck; they had been after
onça,
the Brasilian jaguar, but hadn't found any, and instead they had shot a great many of what she referred to with flashing eyes as “stags.” It had been the daughter's first hunting trip and, said her mother proudly, “She shot twelve alligators.” From hunting Tarnowska went on to speak of murderous propensities she had observed in Brasil in general and in Brasília in particular. “They like killing,” she assured Huxley, with beautiful vivacity, and told an anecdote about a recent gratuitous shooting. At my end of the table the Huxleys, Maya, the Englishman and myself all being rather strongly anti-shooting, man or beast (and my own experience of Brasilians being that they are the least bloodthirsty of peoples) the conversation began to fall a little flat, and Huxley, who had said almost nothing so far, shaded his eyes with his hand and seemed lost in meditation over his mysterious orange juice.