In the cities the immigrants find no housing ready for them, so they pick themselves out a back lot and put themselves up a shack out of whatever materials are cheapest and handiest just the way they would back up in the hills. Individual initiative. They cook on charcoal. They can’t read and write so they don’t need much artificial light. The women and children fetch water in gasoline tins from the nearest pump that may be a mile away, just as they would have gone down to the river back home, and they deposit their excrement behind the fence and throw their garbage out on the path just as they always did. The shacks agglomerate into rattletrap settlements, like the Hoovervilles of depression times in the States.
In Rio—this was in 1948—there were said to be three hundred thousand people living in favelas. Today there are nearer a million. You come on favelas in the most unexpected places. In Copacabana a few minutes walk from the hotels and the splendid white apartment houses and the wellkept magnificent beaches you find a whole hillside of favelas overlooking the lake and the Jockey Club. In the center of Rio a few steps from the Avenida Rio Branco on the hill back of one of the most fashionable churches you come suddenly into a tropical jungletown.
In Rio under the pressure of metropolitan life the favelas are even producing a culture of their own. Their religion is one of the many forms of West African voodoo that have taken root in American soil, known there as macumba. The artistic and social center is the samba school. The favelas are the spawning ground for Brazil’s abundant popular music. I was told of a wealthy songwriter who refused to move out of his favela. How could he? That’s where his music came from. If a foreigner turns up on a visit the inhabitants tend to cluster around to show off their favela’s best points. Some of the shacks are well built and prettily painted. The views are magnificent. Their owners take pride in their dwellings and fight like tigers to retain possession of them. The main trouble is the lack of water and light. There is no garbage disposal, no sewerage. The police don’t dare penetrate; but at that you are probably safer in a Rio favela than in Central park in New York or on a side street in Washington, D.C.
Remembering the smell of dried excrement that haunted the favelas of Rio I could understand the real enthusiasm under Dr. Penido’s kidding manner when he stood looking down with the air of a conqueror from the hill at Aimorés, and spoke of islands of public health. I got the feeling that there was more than sanitation at stake, there was the budding of a civilization.
The Rio Doce Valley was no health resort, at least not yet, but I was beginning to feel the excitement of combat, taking part, if only for a few days, in this battle for public health. The diseases had become as personal as people to these doctors. Tagging around with them in the humorous give and take of rough frontier travel, I had begun to feel as they felt, the hostility that lurked in forest pools and in the garbage thrown out back of the hut by a careless housewife, and to exult with them in every puff of vaporized DDT into a damp corner, or in every quinine injection or atabrin pill that was helping drive back the enemy beyond the blue hills that hemmed the valley.
While we wrangled over the sociology of the favelas, Monty was waiting with some impatience to show us his waterstation. The water was pumped up from the river by diesel pumps so that they wouldn’t depend on the light and power system which so often broke down. It passed through filters and chemical purifiers. Better water than many towns had in the States, Monty insisted proudly. Inside, the walls were fresh painted and the machinery looked well tended and the tiled floors were sparkling clean. “There’s capacity for twice the size of the town,” Monty insisted, “up to fifteen thousand people.”
A man was on his hands and knees mopping the tiles as we walked through. I looked at him twice because he was white-skinned and had tow hair. His face was lined and haggard and dirty. It’s a shock to a northerner in this Rio Doce Valley to find the blond offspring of German or Polish settlers living in the same ragged barefoot dirt as the darkerskinned inhabitants.
“You see,” Monty was explaining enthusiastically as he ushered us out on the terrace, “we’re all set except for pouring a little more concrete. Then only the cleaning up and landscaping left to do.”
I asked who the blond man was. He was not interested. “I dunno. He must be a German. I guess they just hire him for odd jobs.”
We stood a while on the terrace to look down into the valley. The sun was setting red into the murk behind a scraggly line of ravaged forest on the crest of a cutover hill. Touched with sultry copper glints the Rio Doce meandered with a distant hiss of broken water among rocks and scrubby islands. It looked a little like the Susquehanna below Harrisburg. An oddlooking black bird with brown markings like a butterfly was fluttering about a clump of cactus.
Down the path from the waterstation to the favela, naked except for a ragged pair of shorts, with a beaten droop to his shoulders, the blond man went stumbling wearily. He never turned his head to look at us. Holding onto his hand was a little towhaired boy three or four years old who was dressed in short pants and a little striped sweater, a sort of grimy replica of what a little boy of his age would be wearing in some distant northern home. Looking after them I was remembering what a geographer friend had told me in Rio: “Brazil is the greatest experiment in the settling of European man in the tropics, but that doesn’t mean it is always successful.”
Islands of Public Health
Above Aimorés next day the valley was narrower and dustier and drier. Fires burned more fiercely in the hills. A streaky ceiling of smoke and dust hung over the river. On steep eroding pastures, which were a network of dry cowpaths, big zebu cattle grazed in herds. Gangs were working on the line. Occasionally we had to stop while the section gang ahead lowered a new length of track into place. The settlements had a raw backwoods look.
At the little stations where the linecar had to wait for the oretrains coming down, there was a great deal going on. There were ferries on the river, flatboats, that traveled on a cable, ingeniously propelled by the force of the current. A shriek of mechanical saws came from the sawmills. Carts were bringing in cut firewood for the railroad or bags of charcoal to be shipped to the charcoalburning iron furnaces up the valley. At every siding the oxteams were churning the dust as they dragged the trunks of peroba trees up from the water’s edge. At a place called Conselheiro Pena three men were maneuvering the great logs up onto a platform with a team of eleven yokes of zebu oxen, and rolling them onto flatcars. Their only tool was the slender poles they used to handle the oxen.
At a place called Timiritinga, which, so the station master proudly explained, had just changed its name from Tarumirím, there was a long wait for the daily passenger train down from Valadares. Monty and I roamed through the ankledeep dust between the two rows of forlorn low houses of plastered adobe, looking at the pigs and the scattered garbage and the open square of sunscorched weeds that was laid out for the praça to be.
“You see,” Monty was saying dreamily, “this work can be expanded indefinitely. We are just in the shape now where we know how to do things … We’ve had five years to make our mistakes and to work up a system. We’ve got the blueprint and all we need to do now is expand it. At first it was all by guess and by God as they used to say in the Navy … When my contract expired I went back home and intended to stay but I got to thinking that this work was about as important as a man could find to do and I said to my wife could she stick it … with the baby and everything … and she said she guessed she could … so back we came. And now when we’re all rearing to go down here and Brazilian organizations are really interested in putting up money for more public health work, it looks as if the American end was petering out, as if there wasn’t much interest in Washington. The folks back home are forgetting about Brazil.”
We went into a little bar to get one of the tiny cups of strong black coffee that are sprinkled through every Brazilian day. An incredibly tattered young white woman with her hair in a ratsnest and her breasts blobbing out of her grimy dress
brought us our coffee. There was a tobaccocolored man with a felt hat and a mustache sitting at the only other table. Right away he told us that Timiritinga had not only changed its name but it had just this day been created a city. Now there would be money to appropriate for public health.
We heard the siren blow from the linecar. That meant that the driver had his orders to proceed. Swallowing the scalding thimbleful of coffee we hurried over to the station. Our friend with the mustache followed us all the way to the linecar explaining how much the people of the new founded city of Timiritinga wanted Sespe to help them with their sanitation. “You see,” Monty nudged me excitedly as we settled back in our seats, “you see, it’s like that all over.”
The Lost Leader
My trip up the railroad ended at a raw new town named Governador Valadares. You could see the outlines of a future city plan scratched out in the red clay among the stumps and carcasses of the felled forest trees. Eight thousand people lived in a straggle of shanties among sawmills and brick kilns. The town lay on a bend of the Rio Doce opposite a great battlemented mountain with a smooth granite face that soared out of sight through the level layers of smoke and mist that roofed in the valley.
In the crowded freightyards beyond the station we found Joaquim waiting for us with his sleeper, which had come up on the passenger train. The car was still oven hot from the day’s sun, and airless because every space between the tracks was piled high with cut wood for the locomotives, but the narrow showerbath where a trickle of tepid water washed off the grimed red dust of the valley was a delight.
All the way up Dr. Penido had been promising us a good restaurant in Valadares so after everybody had bathed we straggled off along the broad main street already planted with trees, up past a new circular park at the intersection of the main streets still in the excavation stage, to a café presided over by a huge lightbrown man in a cook’s hat and apron whom the doctors explained had worked as a tailor until it had occurred to him that he’d rather be a cook. And a very good cook he turned out to be.
After a great deal of steak and rice washed down by Portuguese wine to the tune of that most ingratiating Brazilian toast: “As nossas boas qualidades que não são poucas [To our good qualities, which are not few]”—we sat a long time talking and smoking. The Brazilians were trying to explain to the Americans, still in a gentle friendly way, that they felt let down, after all the propaganda of the Good Neighbor policy and wartime cooperation, by the lack of interest the American people now showed in their problems.
“But you don’t want American capital. You want to develop your own oil industry and your own iron and steel.”
“O petróleo é nosso. That’s mostly propaganda,” said one of the doctors laughing.
“But everybody believes in it. The papers in Rio are full of it.”
“We don’t want American imperialism but we do want American interest and help, especially technical help … and dollars. We’d like more help for public health.”
“Perhaps what hurts us,” said Dr. Penido in his gentle ironical tone, “is a certain lack of comprehension … I feel it myself with Americans, not with all but with some even at this table.” It seemed to me he looked rather hard at Monty. Monty looked glum. “I was two years studying public health at Johns Hopkins … Baltimore is a very nice city. I had a very good time there, met many damn splendid guys, but I felt a certain lack of comprehension.”
He went on to talk in a dreamy voice about European culture. He had lived in Paris as a child. As he talked I could see him, short pants and bare knees, playing in the Parc Monceau. The loss of Paris was something no Brazilian could get over, the loss of that feeling of being linked to the evolving traditions of European civilization: the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the French, link by link, through the ages. The war had blacked out Europe and Brazilians missed that stimulus. The North Americans didn’t have it. It was hard to put your finger on it. It was something that made a man feel part of civilization. Perhaps that was why they were disappointed in the United States.
The town lights had gone out. Our immense host brought in an oil lamp and set it on the big Electrolux refrigerator behind the table.
“There have been a series of disappointments,” one of the other doctors burst out. “After the victory we thought that America would assume a world leadership like the Europe our fathers remembered.”
“Without imperialism? How can you do it?”
There was a polite shrugging of shoulders.
“America seems so much weaker in victory,” sighed Dr. Penido. “But,” he banged his fist on the table and went on briskly, “the important thing is that we have produced a successful experiment in international cooperation … Sespe would not exist without the cooperation of both Americans and Brazilians. We have proved that it works. We have learned a method. Now we could go on to do great things, if just at this crucial moment in the United States you did not seem to lose interest.”
“We feel,” one of the others echoed, “a certain lack of comprehension.”
Dr. Penido yawned and rose to his feet. It was late. We groped our way through unlit streets and freightyards stacked with corded wood back to our sleeping car.
The Rockcrusher That Never Gets Out of Order
In the morning a small plane came down from the mine at Itabira to pick me up. Now I was going to see where all those orecars came from. As the pilot spiraled up from the airstrip at Valadares to vault the first range of razorbacked mountains I began to note the extent of the devastation of the country. As far as I could see into the murk fires made a red marbling on the cutover slopes. The mountains under us smoldered like burnt papers in a grate.
Pastures along the winding streams showed that fine network of cattlepaths that comes from overgrazing. Houses, usually solitary on a hillock in a valley, were scarce. Near a house you could usually make out the broad bunched leaves of a few banana trees and some tiny green squares of cultivated land. It was hard to imagine how such a sparse population could so ravage the hills. The railroad’s demands for firewood, the burning of charcoal to cook with, and its use in iron furnaces, had already gutted the forests for an enormous tract of country. The logging out of lumber for export did the rest. As we climbed again to clear a new set of granite escarpments the valleys below were drowned in smoke. The plane tore into speeding clouds that packed tight like cotton wool against the windows.
There was no ceiling at all over the airfield at the mine, so we had to turn back. When we landed at Valadares again the Brazilian business man who shared the seat with me shouted in my ear. “I was anxious,” he said, “until the pilot told me he was the father of eight. The father of eight just has to be careful.”
As we walked with throbbing ears across the field to the shelter, he added that he wondered whether as a foreigner I understood the significance of what I was seeing in the Vale do Rio Doce: “It is climbing a series of steps. First the valley was so unhealthy we could hardly keep up the railroad. The malaria service and public health make sanitary the valley so that we can improve the railroad … America helps Brazil up a step. In the State of Minas Gerais we have the richest iron deposit in the world but to get it out we had only picks and shovels. The American loan buys the machinery to work it … Another step …”
“But what about the campaign against American imperialism?”
“That,” he said, “is the labor of Communists.”
He put his arm around my shoulder and offered to buy my lunch. After lunch, which, since the public health doctors were still in Valadares, turned out to be a second farewell celebration, the father of eight did manage to land us on the wet hilltop airstrip at Itabira. The mountains all around were still draped in clouds. The drenched air made us shiver after the heat of the valley.
The quiet man in khaki who came out to meet us introduced himself as Gil Whitehead, American manager of the mine for the Rio Doce Company. “It’s too bad that you can’t see the peak of Caué,” he said and loo
ked up at the murky ceiling just overhead. “I’d like you to see the magic mountain.”
While we waited for the clouds to lift we drove round the old town that climbed up steep red ridges to a suburb of neat new houses for the skilled workmen and to the big concrete hangar which could house the new machine shops. The valleys below were full of tattered mist. The weather had settled down to a cold drizzle. The hunks of wet ore shone as they thundered down the chutes into the orecars.
Gil Whitehead had a selfeffacing manner and a slow drawl. Now and then his smoldering sort of humor would let out a sudden flash. He explained how production had increased and how, with the improvement of the railroad, production would increase still more. For Brazil the iron ore, which was going to steel mills in the United States and Canada, where they used it instead of scrap, would mean essential dollars in the world market. And when the new rockcrushing machinery came production would really spurt.
“Meanwhile,” he said and pointed to a little brown man with a hammer trudging up the road in the rain, “we are using the only rockcrusher that, in these parts, never gets out of order.”
He glanced out of the window. The rain had stopped but the clouds hung lower than ever. “Let’s go on up anyway.” He drove me up the broad zigzag road that vanished into a ceiling of cloud. “You’ve heard them speak of metaling a road,” he said. “Well this road is sixty per cent pure iron.”
Brazil on the Move Page 4
