At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Little trellised restaurants are outside Buenos Aires, dancing places where men take their girls. At the home of the rich landowner, whose family may have built an English country house, you are back in the society of the Edwardian rich. The English house has been copied almost too perfectly: the oak beams, the open fireplaces, the English prints and the grim manorial bedrooms. His English lawn has fine grass, not the coarse grass of Europe, and is religiously watered. In the meandering jardín anglais, you stand under the comical rain tree that spits water from its leaves. You see the slap-up flower beds, the swimming pool, the stallions and racehorses in the stables, the grooms and the gig to trot the visitor round the orchards and the fields where the sheep or the beef cattle graze. A butler of fifty years ago will bring an English tea and, by some touch of excess, a bottle of whiskey too. Where is “the family”? In England? No; in Biarritz, Paris, Monte Carlo. The pony trots round, we hear for the first time since childhood the delicious lick of a whip, feel the rumble of hard wheels in our spines, the scented dust rises; some burned-up peasant from Spanish Galicia, lisping his c’s or his z’s with snobbish contempt for his Argentine masters, gossips away to the jaunty foreman and calls him señor. “Before Perón went,” laughs the foreman, “he was the head of the local Peronista delegation and was going to shoot us all. We’ve done with all that nonsense now. He’s an innocent.” But no Galician is an innocent. It is country life, lazy-voiced, drawling, merry, shrewd.

  You have flown over this scene, over the green watery-looking billiard table of the pampas. This is far, far from being the whole of the Argentine. There is the scrub forest of the Chaco, from which (when I was young and worked in the leather trade in London) we used to get our quebracho wood—the “ax breaker”—there is the flood plain that lies between the Paraná and Paraguay rivers; there is wild Patagonia, where the English shepherds emigrated last century and the Welsh colonists still sing their hymns and speak to no strangers, as clannish as the Basques. Along the Paraguay River they grow the yerba maté, which the Jesuits were the first to cultivate in this meat-eating country. The maté supplies the ordinary man the vitamins he would get from green vegetables. And up on the frontier, where the Argentine and Brazil and Paraguay meet, the water of the Iguazú Falls comes crashing in broad beards out of the tropical forest. It is an irony that this rich country disappointed the early travelers. They called it Argentina in despair, for there was no silver. The wealth came first from the clover and the grass, from the horses that sprang from the seventy-two which the Spaniards let go wild four hundred years ago; and from the cattle. Then when the Italians came, bringing the energy of Europe, crops were planted: grain and the frigoríficos, those vast freezing plants and slaughterhouses that stand by the waterside in Buenos Aires, created a nation. At the turn of the century began that industrialization which has enormously enlarged Buenos Aires, drained people into the towns. A new urban middle class appeared. Behind all South American cities lies the empty land where no new immigrant wants to settle.

  The cities of that coast from south of Capricorn to the Equator—how violent is their difference! European in one respect: they are not standardized. Little in Rio recalls Buenos Aires, except a phalanx of tall buildings; and Montevideo has nothing in common with its neighbor over the estuary of the Río de la Plata, except the frigoríficos and the meat ships waiting in the harbor. Across the continent in Chile the people have one official meatless day a week, apart from any religious fast; in Uruguay it is reckoned that everyone, rich and poor, eats one pound of meat daily; in Buenos Aires they eat more. Good meat on the east coast, poor on the west; so the gourmand might divide the continent.

  Uruguay

  From Buenos Aires to Montevideo is scarcely an hour’s flight. You take the flying boat from the dock close to the center of the city and fly across the estuary whose opposite bank you cannot see. Some travelers prefer the night journey by the ferry steamer, to see the lights of Buenos Aires drop away and Montevideo come up. I took the plane. Like any weekend Argentine tripper or escaping politician, I arrived in South America’s little Sweden. Sweden (they call Uruguay) for cultural and political reasons. It is, for a large part, a very flat country and bears no physical resemblance to Sweden at all. Uruguay acts as a buffer between the ambitious Argentines and the imperial Brazilians. Pure Reason (assisted by the independent Spanish spirit in the Uruguayans and by the commercial British who found family wars damaging to their trade monopoly) made Uruguay strong. Which was to be Paris—Rio or Buenos Aires? Montevideo keeps the quarreling prima donnas apart. Buenos Aires is a tour de force (Waldo Frank has said) imposing itself on the pampas; Montevideo is an ordinary city with the provincial air blowing in from its pines, its dunes, its flat plains and little hills. Uruguay is a mild place, so well behaved that foreigners smile: all the schoolchildren in neat aprons and carrying their notebooks, hardly any illiteracy, higher education free and generally available; retirement on full pay at sixty; no income tax, no president, but rule by a sacred committee of nine—their nine Cadillacs stand outside the Presidential Palace. Uruguay is the one unmistakable, working democracy and the world’s first pocket Welfare State. One could imagine Ibsen rewriting his plays there. “Prudent, distrustful, sterling, efficient, realistic,” Count Keyserling wrote of the Uruguayans.

  Montevideo is the least American of modern South American cities. It is very Germanic. It even goes in for small British and German motorcars. The Italians have brought it gaiety; from central Europe has come something very serious, the latest books and the best music. And Uruguay is provincial; it is so democratic that even its handsome parks and streets are littered with wastepaper, its people wear standardized clothes, its nightclubs are dim and decorous. They call them boîtes as in Chile, or—horrible word—whiskerías. But conversation is good here; learning is considerable; books are read. There is no dread of “dangerous thoughts.” In José E. Rodó, Uruguay has produced the only great South American thinker. There is intellectual liberty, liberal civilization without the horrors of mass society. Life is like a long weekend with the like-minded. Montevideo is the one place in South America where you see people of all classes enjoying family weekends on the beaches. Acres of bodies brown in the sun. Out they drive in thousands along the miles of Atlantic sands and bathe, sit in the little restaurants and bars, and indulge the national passion for picnicking in the thoughtfully planted pine woods or by the sea. It was once a treeless country, but the good Uruguayans saw that defect was put right. The wealthy can drive out beyond the miles of hotels and villas to the fashionable resort of Punta del Este and look out on that island where nature, with an eye for our education, has placed one of the world’s largest colonies of sea lions. And do not say that the lovely harbor of Montevideo is dull: the Antarctic whaling fleets put in there for the winter. Mr. Onassis had an office there before he moved to Monte Carlo.

  Those beaches were the holiday grounds of the Argentines until Perón stopped his people going to this corrupting liberal land. Some of the hotels closed down. One became a nunnery. But now the weekend parties of Argentines return. There are vociferous reunions in restaurants. People make speeches of welcome and take a semipolitical delight in private parties. Freedom has returned. “Argentines!” say the Uruguayans with amusement and with natural self-congratulation. It is nice to be admired for your sea bathing and political enlightenment. I walked out of the hotel and saw a group of young Argentines putting wreaths of flowers against the statue of Artigas, the Uruguayan national hero, in the main square of Montevideo. The poetic sensibility of the Latins comes out not only in boiling rhetoric but in many gracious private gestures, with flowers.

  Montevideo is a capital bemused with the magic of the number nine. A Committee of Nine, representing the political groups, runs the country. So well regulated are the Uruguayans, so caught by the prosaic magic of fair shares, that even the jobs in the many state organizations are distributed proportionately to the numbers of their political group. If nine
stevedores are required on the docks, they must be in the correct party proportions. This making everything go by nines is a religion.

  And how do the Uruguayans raise money for the government without an income tax? By direct taxation on property, pensions, sales, reserves, profits, banks, and so on, and a good deal by the manipulation of a sliding scale of exchange rates and price regulations in certain areas. This leads to little comedies; on the way to the airport you notice a group of new bungalows and huts. They are really butchers’ shops. Anyone with a car can drive out here and buy meat at half price—on Sundays only. He is avoiding the city sales tax by buying in the country. A day on the beach and then a drive into the pines to buy meat; there are many ways of contentment in Uruguay. There is one alarming thought: why should so much happiness have led to inflation?

  Brazil

  You leave Montevideo, fly up the Atlantic coast of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro. The arrival over Rio at night is a magnificent experience. Flying has not stolen the drama of the most fantastic harbor in the world. At night all capitals are the ville lumière, but Rio displays an unexampled intricacy in the hard and ingenious magic of light. You never knew that electricity could be so fantastic simply in the course of fringing hills and water. Those brooches high in the sky as we turn, are golden ships; those long insectile shapes like centipedes, devils’ coach horses and sacred beetles fixed in their jeweled battle pieces, are the quays, the peninsulas, the promontories, the sugarloaves. There are the pearl strings that go from bay to bay, from mountain to mountain, with a recklessness that turns you into a child exclaiming with wonder. Nature has gone the limit of its possibilities in South America—in mountain, snow and glacier, in prairie, desert and jungle, in the huge red-river systems like the Río de la Plata, the Amazon and the Orinoco. But in Rio, a sort of theatrical folly has been added to the natural fecundity. For here are harbors in colonies, mountains upended in collections of furry cones and shaggy pyramids. The jungle curtains the ends of streets, hangs over the roofs of the low, pink-walled colonial homes, or sets off modern buildings that shoot up in stacks of steel and shuttered glass. Even the sea is rich as it breaks along the splendid curve of Copacabana and sends up a soft smoke of hot foam over the high buildings. At night Midas changes Rio to gold.

  By day, when the gold has gone, if we climb a few hundred yards from the sea’s edge, we are looking into the pulpy green, underwater world of the tropical forest. It hangs heavily down upon us, entices from shade to shade. Flowers are as big as faces, leaves are like bodies, stems are like human legs. You half expect to hear the sap pumping and the strange plants speak. Those leaves like swords, like scissored cardboard, like fire, like feathers, like the lolling tongues of huge animals; those trunks so bulbous; those flowering creepers like bursts of colored smoke—all combine to give the tropical hothouse the look of an overpowering court. A court which suddenly becomes silent and motionless the moment your step is heard. We stand only a yard or two off the road, in one of these tropical gardens, and have the baffling sensation that someone or something has, in that very instant, slipped away to tell someone else. We are left with the impudent sexual stare of flowers (they have none of the innocence we imagine in the flowers of our milder climates)—the jacaranda, the flame drip, the yellow cassia and silver imbauba, the hibiscus, the banana and the little red flower like a traffic light, called “the shameless Mary.”

  Cities that are crushed between mountains and sea commonly spread up the mountains, if only for air. Not so Rio. Its originality is that the rich keep to the flat and drive the slums into the hills of the city. So there is not only twentieth-century Rio fitted between the hills, but the hill villages, the shack villages, or favelas, which crop up just above the roofs of the offices, the rich apartment houses and even the brilliant tunnel that takes the speedway out of Flamengo into Copacabana. It is as if slums of native huts, made of old timber, corrugated iron, flattened petrol cans, bamboo, palm leaves and sacking were built on the skyline of the Rue de la Paix or were dotted about Manhattan in the 50’s at the twentieth-floor level. There is old nineteenth-century Rio, three stories high, a refuge from the blinding light, where the houses lie in the shade of large trees and the rooms have the relief of air and semidarkness. And there is Rio of the mid-twentieth century, built at an astonishing speed, a place of tall steel-and-glass boxes where people fry in the summer, are blinded by light, catch chills from the air conditioning or are driven quietly mad by its relentless buzz. It is not quite like that, of course; but the Brazilians inherit the Portuguese weakness for leaving nothing alone. They bulldoze the hills away, tunnel under them, fill in large areas of the central bays—so that some people fear the lovely colony of anchorages will one day be solid concrete. So the wretched are driven up to the favelas. There are dangerous favelas, perilous at night, hardly policed. At least one of them is better off and has television sets and nightclubs. But most have no light except the candle or the oil lamp on the table; and the life of the women is the perpetual journey for water. You look out of the office windows and watch the women carrying their empty petrol cans down and their full ones up the steep red mud paths. When the tropical rains come the red soil dissolves, the hillside slips, the shacks are crushed.

  Brazil, more than any other of the republics, is a country that absorbs the alien life. It is the one major melting pot of South America, the one place of positive ferment. Our only chance of judging it is by its cities and it would of course be true to say that only the cities are modern, that the rest is backward, often wretched and isolated; but we can make certain guesses from the cities and above all from their architecture. The sudden awakening from long colonial sleep came first with the late abolition of slavery in 1888, later than anywhere else, but (most important) without bloodshed or deadening race segregation; and then with the late arrival of industrialization. Lúcio Costa (who, with Niemeyer, Serrador, Baumgart, Rino Levi, Warchavchik, Burle Marx and others, is a leading figure in Brazil’s architectural revolution) puts these two facts first in explaining it.

  The abolition of slavery had shown that the traditional style of building was no longer efficient. Brazil’s first modern building to be mounted on pillars—pilotis—was designed in 1931, and since then Brazil has been exuberant in its bold modern designs. A final stimulus—as so often happens in art—was a fundamental difficulty, the lack of steel. The architects had to do what they could with reinforced concrete—on this coast there are no earthquakes. Sun, concrete, vegetation—“these,” Costa said, “are the données.” Sometimes originality has been extravagant, as in Niemeyer’s famous church of Saint Francis at Pampulha outside the astonishing new city of Belo Horizonte. The church, a series of parabolas of glass and concrete and tiles, decorated by the painter Portinari, looks like a fantastic phosphorescent snail on the march. (The bishops refused to consecrate it.) In the same town Niemeyer built the lake casino, a minor masterpiece which follows the shoreline of the lake, and which combines a theater, cinema, restaurants, cafés and swimming pools. Some of the luxury hotels, like the hotel at Petrópolis, said to be the largest in the world, are built on a casino plan.

  What must strike the connoisseur of Brazilian architecture is its élan, its variety and its freedom from those boring surfaces to which the cult of shape and function too commonly leads. In the new villas of Belo Horizonte the sharp, boxlike lines have been ingeniously broken, the impersonal stare has gone; graceful snakelike ramps, cagelike galleries all light and air, verandas shaded by grille and Venetian shutter, and outer walls in beautiful patterns of color as if they were textiles or even wallpapers—which is, incidentally, an extension of the old Portuguese tradition—relieve and divert the ennui of the eye. The brise-soleil (or outer shutter), which brings shade to these tall buildings in the tropics, is a Brazilian device though it was Le Corbusier who suggested the movable shades which project from the walls of the Ministry of Education. These interest the eye and, like the honeycomb grilles in the walls of schools, hos
pitals and apartment houses, make fascinating patterns of light and shade in the rooms.

  Personal privacy is as strongly desired by the Brazilians as by the British, and modern architecture—so obviously designed for the collective life—hardly seems to offer this intimacy. There are, however, many examples of private building. Above all, gardens and trees have been drawn into the setting. You can see examples in São Paulo created by Rino Levi, the distinguished Italian in that very Italian city. The apartment house built by Lúcio Costa at the Parque Guinle is delightful.

  It is typical of the present generation of Brazilians to want the new, rich thing, whatever it is. São Paulo, as sudden as Chicago in its growth, was ambitious to possess famous French pictures and has bought a collection which, however, has not yet been housed in that city. Insofar as they inherit from the Portuguese, the genius is decorative and exotic, even indiscriminate. “The Spanish-speaking republics,” an old diplomat said to me, “are pyramids tottering on their apexes. Brazil is a pyramid standing on its base. It is as well founded as Mexico and is the one country that is really creating an indigenous and original culture.”

  That sense of the loss of loved, hated and continually imitated Europe is absent. There was no violent break with Europe. The relationship between Brazil and Portugal is close. The Spanish-speaking countries were separated from Spain by wars of independence. Brazil separated peacefully with a lawyer’s sigh, and some writers have said that to the practical virtues of the Portuguese the Brazilians have added an aristocratic sense which the Portuguese have lacked. For until 1889, Brazil was a monarchy, the only monarchy on the American continent. The Emperor’s palace—now the National Museum—may be seen in Rio, and up in the mountains at Petrópolis is a summer resort that recalls Cintra or Saint-Germain-en-Laye. You can visit the houses of old families in Rio who once belonged to the nobility of the Brazilian court. They speak French like the old White Russians did, but they have no tradition of hostility to the republic.