At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Just as, after visiting Spain, you are struck by the gentleness and sensibility of the Portuguese, so you are struck by these qualities in the Brazilians when you come here from the other republics. They have added great wit and a taste for wild comedy. The dislike of violence, the apparent passivity of the Brazilians, has been despised by Northerners and has been laid to the tropical climate and to a disintegration and decadence of character which, it is argued, comes from the tolerance of mixed blood. The latter argument, however, finds no support from science, and sociology shows it to be nonsense. Climate has its influence, but it is only oppressively tropical along the Amazon, where the white race does indeed degenerate rapidly.

  We drove out one night, after a meal of feijoada and palm-tip salad, with a Brazilian playwright and editor, and one of his knowing Negro reporters, a cheerful expert on the popular life in Rio and a connoisseur of the samba. We drove into the collection of pimplelike hills behind the mountains, past those lightless shack towns along little-known roads that skirted strung-out townships. Negro gentlemen in pajama jackets did what they could to guide us, but they had to be gently held up while we asked directions, because they were amiably drunk. We were looking for a samba club but ran into a fiesta on the way. Brazil often offers these gay night scenes. There was a pretty seventeenth-century church standing like a doll’s house on a little hill in the wasteland, one of those churches that have a small graveyard attached in which the ornate funeral monuments look like squads of ghosts in the moonlight. Close by was a bandstand, where a band was thumping its drums and playing its whining and bleating instruments, while someone sang and the women and children stood listening and laughing or wandered about or sat against the church wall. In all Brazil the pretty cotton frocks of the girls give grace to any scene. Their carefully done black hair, the dignity of their carriage and their slenderness are a delight. Only when they speak do they disappoint, for at an early age many lose their front teeth. (A doctor told me there is no chalk in Rio’s water, and the diet of all the tropical parts of South America is deficient in vegetables.)

  At night these noisy, simple little fiestas, without booths and held together by the unending throb and chuckle of the drums, are very gay to look at. There was a stone cross here, its steps covered with candle grease and, inevitably, those offerings which indicated that adepts of macumba were in the crowd. Macumba—it has other names in the old slave-owning regions of Bahia and Pernambuco and is found even along the Amazon, which is Indian country—is an African magical religion. It is very active, despite the hostility of the Church, and has many Christian figures in its mythology. St. Michael and St. George find a place among the traditional good and evil spirits from the African jungle. Crowds of people slip off to see a macumba. Some hotels stage macumbas for tourists, but the adepts regard these as faked.

  It is a religion of incantation, with songs invoking the angels and the demons, sung in a mixture of Portuguese and African, and it has serious, if grotesque, rituals. Evils are cast out by mediums. There is dancing and drunkenness, there is the continual beating of drums which have the power of inducing frenzies, convulsions and trance; these, too, rid the body of disease and the mind of the evils that choke it. The adepts wear the white clothes with the white-fringed trousers of slave days; there is a symbolism of colors in their scarves and in their offerings, grotesque as these sometimes are: a beer bottle, a cigar, a heap of dust, a box of matches.

  Some of the macumba dancing rites take place in beautiful surroundings; I heard of one held by a candlelit waterfall with rock platforms. The “priests” smoke cigars as they dance to smoke out the evil spirits and throw clouds of dust to dispel them too; they strike colored matches to produce the red smoke which is the sign of the Fallen Angel. The people dance until they are exhausted. Some fall into insensibility, and then the priest tests them by giving each a hard blow on the back of the neck to see that insensibility—and therefore purgation—has been achieved. Once it has, a rocket is sent up. A successful macumba can eventually be mistaken for a fireworks display.

  Macumba is a pervasive form of African spiritism with a serious ethical side. The believers think that by the end of this century the world may be destroyed and that Satan will have been redeemed; many describe it as a “White” or healing magic. Its ethic of the war against sin, its cheerful borrowing of Christian saints, its ceremonies of baptism have alarmed the Church, for the strength of African tradition is immensely powerful. We are only beginning to learn about the African imagination from native African artists. Against the White Magic must be set the Black that works evil against enemies. Rich people in Copacabana are convinced that their Negro servants place beer bottles—as a macumba offering—at the street corners to puncture their masters’ tires and that macumba, in its way, has a political as well as a religious magic character.

  The popular movement in Brazil exists in an emotional fashion. Vargas, the late president who committed suicide, represented it in the manner of a benevolent demagogue, manipulating it gently rather than dramatically leading it. He was the god of the poor in Rio; but the true wretchedness of Brazil is in the interior, in the dejected villages and towns. The extraordinary thing about masses is their power to turn everything into popular song and wit and, of course, the samba.

  One of the first things I heard that night at the samba club, which was organized by a committee of Negro dockworkers, was the famous and mournful samba recording the suicide of Vargas. The words are the complete letter he left to his followers at his death. It was like listening to a newspaper article set to music. It made a strange death dance for the Negro crowd in the open hall under the moon. We sat bemused by the deafening yet subtle manipulation of the drums, in which new clicks, new thumps of doom come in, step by step, against the rhythm and presently grow in power until they dominate it. The timing of these players—young laborers all of them—and their relaxed demeanor, as if they were passively waiting for the inner voice and listening with an inner ear, is a wonder; they awaken the same expectation in yourself until presently this curious, impersonal, sexual poetry captivates you. But it is the squeaking and peculiar sounds, hostile to our ears, that come from the small three-leaved metal instrument, the tambourine and the seed of the shaken gourd, that catch the nerves. They are slyly soothed by that slow sob of the deep drum; it beats like a heart.

  The band we listened to was one of the scores that march for days in uproar round the streets in the Carnival, the saturnalia in February or March, banging in an orgy of noise and reviving themselves, as they totter along, by icy whiffs of ether.

  We sat all night drinking beer and strong spirits, watching the footwork and the entranced goggling of the dancing couples. Beside us sat a tremendous old lady covered in gold—gold spectacles, gold rings, bracelets—sitting before a large three-tiered cake covered with green-and-pink icing. She was with her exquisite daughter, whose ancestors must have come from ancient Assyria. It was a gentle evening. One after the other the members of the committee put their arms round our shoulders and leaned on us, as they gazed with delight at the heat of the dance and then smiled affectionately at us. Outside, the lovers sat on the dangerous steps in the rocks that lead up from the shacks, and the whites of large eyes looked like flowers among the scented bushes. We drove back to Rio at dawn. The fantastic bays were like quiet opal, creaming on the sand in whispers as the yellow sun came up. The earth, for a moment or two, was new.

  The most dramatic transition from new to old, from present to past, is the journey from the new city of Belo Horizonte—250 miles north of Rio—to the old gold-mining town of Ouro Prêto, not far off. It was from this town, the greatest producer of gold in the world in the eighteenth century until the mines gave out, that the Portuguese kings and the Church gathered the enormous riches of the Portuguese abbeys and churches. The glory of Ouro Prêto is in its lovely and fantastic baroque churches, each different in design, in its use of tower and scrolls of masonry and color, in its sixteen famo
us fountains, but most of all in the works of the greatest of all Brazilian masters, the crippled mulatto sculptor, Aleijadinho. He has been called the El Greco of Brazilian sculptors, because of the audacity of his religious carvings. Their distortions are imaginative; Brazilian art and literature have a strong feeling for exaggeration, distortion and satirical caricature and wit. The huge figures at the church in Congonhas do Campo are his.

  Traditionally, mining is an industry that is violent in its human relationships, whereas the slave life on the adjacent plantations of old Portuguese Brazil was patriarchal and, within restrictions, self-indulgent and benevolent. I flew in a number of small hops through this region. First up the coast from Rio to Salvador in Bahia; then to Aracaju, Macao (Maceió); afterward to Recife in Pernambuco and on to Fortaleza and Belém. These were charming journeys. You are never far from the sea; you are going round the hot bulge of the sizzling South American leg of mutton. You find yourself in the Brazil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among lovely churches and monastic establishments, pretty streets and fine houses, and all the painted grace of the ancien régime where life is modern enough but retains the old idle things of more leisured times.

  There was an open-air exhibition of modern art in the main square of Salvador, on the tremendous cliff on which the town is built—there is a strong vogue for art sculpture in all important Brazilian towns. Down the street are the old warehouses of the plantations. The churches are splendid. The Jesuit church of São Francisco in Salvador is one of the loveliest in the country. As you walk under the superb paneled roof the late-afternoon sun turns the golden altar and all the gold in the church to chaotic fire. The white pillars are bound in golden tropical leaves from which the naïve and pink human figures look out like little dolls, and tropical birds perch among them with nuts in their beaks. The harsh, nasal sound of the Latin chant rises in this riot of luxury; its formal monotonous discipline puts order on a mind disordered by the fantasy of art. For most of us, aliens to this flamboyant art, the beauty of these churches is external; at São Francisco, it is in the flowering scrolls of the façade. The church of Nossa Senhora do Pilar in Salvador is reckoned one of the most delicate and lovely exteriors in Brazil. It is surpassed, travelers tell us, only by the Churrigueresque art of Mexico.

  Salvador is a town of churches and old doorways, of gramophone shops that blare out sambas and tangos all day while the crowd hangs round the doorways listening. The population is chiefly Negro or mulatto. It is a place of cotton frocks, beauty parlors, barbershops. White trousers, white shirts, white frocks, everywhere, give these places a littered appearance. In the superb blue and steaming bay, the steep-prowed fishing boats in the Portuguese style come in with their lateen sails; and the purple pineapples, the bananas, the mangoes and the innumerable other fruits are heaped in the market and carried in baskets on yokes in the street. We never, in the north, eat pineapples like these, without acid or stringiness, as soft as scented water ices to the mouth. The Brazilian picks out his mango and smells it first, as if he were pausing to accept or reject the bouquet of a wine, making sure it has just the right, faint exhalation of the curious turpentinelike fragrance. In tropical countries, the scents and savors of the fruits are a refined pleasure of the senses. They are like wines in their vintages; indeed the fruit of South America is really the wine of the country, and the juices offered at the stalls belong to a world of natural soft drinks that is closed to palates hardened by alcohol. For myself, though I cannot drink the sweet Guaraná which is consumed all over Brazil, I find the dry Guaraná sold in the Amazon delicious. Most of the whiskey in South America, by the way, is a swindle, the gin deserves only to be drowned, the lager beer is excellent and the various vodkalike fire waters are for desperation.

  North of Salvador is a foaming coast of white china clay, scrub and coconut palms. The country scene is made delightful by the sight—made so well-known to us by painters—of Negro women washing their linen and spreading out the sheets on grass that is as green as parrots. I watched a team of expert, nearly naked men play football at midday and some sweatless Negro athletes running through the town in training. At noon, on some little plane, a “mixed” of goods and passengers, you bump over the estuaries of the copra trade, tip giddily over the palms and come grating down on a blazing strip in the low jungle oven.

  The company in these planes is familylike: a nun meeting relations, a couple of sailors, a Swiss trader, mothers and children. A car picks them up at the airport and takes them off into the trees. You step out into flame, crawl to the shade of a shed, where some silent man with a wheelbarrow of large green coconuts hacks the top off with one frightening slash of his machete, sticks a straw in it and hands it to you without a word. He knows what you want: a drink of that cold, refreshing milk; the knowing scrape out the yoghurtlike pulp afterward.

  This is copra- and cotton-growing country. The plane comes down in Recife, which is called Pernambuco by sailors. It is on the most easterly hump of the South American leg of mutton, halfway between Rio and the mouth of the Amazon on the coastal route. Recife is the direct Atlantic airport for Africa and Europe. You land among the mango trees and a car bumps you over the bad roads into that flat Venetian city. The families, the young men and girls sit, silently, on the low walls of the serene, lagoonlike rivers in the hot night that is unendurable indoors. In your hotel you like listening to people talking all night long in the street below. When do they sleep in these places? Not in the morning. They are up at seven. Most journeys begin before dawn, when you pull yourself together with three or four cups of strong black coffee, before getting down to the real bouts of coffee drinking in the daylight hours. In this climate you are always drinking, sitting, mopping until—acclimatized at last—you watch without interest the flies sticking to your shirt. Recife has some of the oppression and desuetude of the tropics; a gray day there will be like lead. The trousers of the dockworkers are dirty and torn, coconut shells litter the gutters, beggars are numerous. You see the mulatto women asleep over their babies against the walls, or whining for alms, and others crying lottery tickets. Quite a portion of the population seems to be peddling ties and belts on the streets. It is a packed and dusty, swarming little town. There are sores and scars on the mahogany and malarial faces. To the mixture of races you saw at Salvador there is the addition of the old Dutch stock at Recife. There are pictures of the Portuguese victory over the Dutch in one of the churches. There is a superb golden sacristy here which has the beautiful blue Portuguese tiles; and in all the churches the decorations, the little pillared and petticoated balconies, are made of hardwood painted chalk-white or in clever imitation of marble. There was wood here, but not much stone, except the gray soapstone; much of the granite and stone and tiles, even the cobbles and bricks, were originally brought from Portugal in ballast.

  All these coastal towns, where scrub and jungle and palm grove are not far off and sometimes come in to engulf, are interesting chiefly for the people. At the barber’s in Recife, the fat man cutting your hair is almost asleep as he leans against you; some of his customers are fast asleep at eleven in the morning. On the blue river at Recife, with its brown Venetian shadows from quays, bridges and buildings, the crabcatchers go out on their curious plank boats, poling what seems no more than a board across the water; later, they will carry dozens of these electric blue crabs on strings through the streets. The suburbs of Recife are enchanting, the pretty houses are under the deep shade of the trees: the mangoes holding their fruit like large solid green tears, the palm, and the banana, that joyous and giant vegetation which is itself a kind of light masonry. In the gardens grow the millions of empty, vivid flowers and among them the golden and silver birds fly. At a street corner I remember the bamboo cages of a bird market where the birds gave their piercing tropical whistles and the blue macaws screeched like temperamental opera singers who have lapsed into vulgarity.

  Amazonia

  In South America there are two major experiences w
hich humble and dwarf the traveler, which could easily exhaust a lifetime, which make him feel like an irrelevant insect: I have written of one of them—the Andes. There remains the Amazon, not only the greatest river in the world but the immense, almost untouched tropical forest which extends for nearly three thousand miles from the Andes to the mouth. Amazonia is a country in itself, totally without roads—for you cannot count the few miles of road that run out of Belém at the mouth, or from towns like Santarém, Manaus in Brazil and Iquitos in Peru—knowable only by the numberless waterways that spread like veins from the gross red arteries of the main rivers. Not always red; at Manaus, the great Río Negro comes in gray and silver, and for miles the two unmixing waters—the Amazon and the Negro—flow side by side. It is hard to know which of these seas of water—they will rise more than forty feet when the rains come—is the main one. You are looking down on a huge brown drainage system of innumerable lakes and tributaries and there is no feature in the unchanging landscape by which you can pick them out and name them with certainty. From the paddle steamers that go up to Manaus—those flat-bottomed, wood-burning houseboats, several stories high, with their scores of hammocks slung on the lower decks so that they look like floating laundries—the continuous jungle is a low wall standing back from a vivid green verge of reeds and grass and sand. I flew a thousand miles up the Amazon from Belém to Manaus; and, once there, up the Río Negro by boat.