From the air, the jungle is a close-packed carpet of what might be kale, starred by the palm trees or by puffs of silver. It is unchanging for thousands of miles, without hills or mountains, at any rate in the first fifteen hundred miles or more, and it is apparently uninhabited. Yet in a day’s travel you come across numerous small riverside towns. The palm-thatched houses are propped on thin tall poles on the shore, against the seasonal floods, and there the river boats of all sizes, thatched or boarded against the sun, come with their fruit, their mandioca flour, their beans, their snakeskins, their cloth, to tie up or go phutting off on their daylong journeys up the blinding road of light. The alligator gazes at them from the bank, the angelfish cloud round them at the quays, the bloody piranha wait to attack in the streams and the pools.
In the boat the Indian family lives. The babies crawl about, the woman cooks or hangs out her washing, or calls to her neighbors—for these boats string along in tows, with the family parrot riding at the stern. These journeys start in the cool of dawn; by nine o’clock it is dangerous to expose your skin to the sun: in an hour you are blistered and in a fever of sunburn, deceived by the river breeze or the black, electric cloud-mountains of the coming tropical storm. When the rain comes, sky, forest and river turn to dirt and the spirits sink low, for the heat of the day is close and animal.
At first the jungle wall looks innocent and familiar like any stretch of creepered woodland we know, and there are places, above Manaus, where you would not be greatly surprised to see some well-known church spire rising. Then you notice the sudden flaunting of the fleshier trees, the liana curtains and the metallic leaves of the giant ferns, the immense bamboos and the scores of packed-in growths you may never know the names of, spreading their spell. You breathe the hot rot of the primeval forest floor. And there is a spell. This region acts like a drug. Men settle at Belém and then, once curiosity gets them up the river, they cannot rest until they have gone “further.” I know a Brazilian engineer who took his wife and newborn baby up the river for months. “She knows that I am married also to the jungle,” he said. Traders do well in Manaus and then sell out in order to get away to the upper, more savage reaches of the river. The climate reduces them to skin and bones, the bad diet ruins them, their will is eaten up by the lethargy of the forest, but they are held entranced by it. It is, they say, like a congenial poison and though sickness or exhaustion may make them glad to get out, they are just as likely to go back, as sailors go back to the sea on a bad ship they claim to hate.
The Amazon matches central Africa, but it is an Indian, not a Negro, region. Its soil is leached by rain and flood and can grow little in the way of crops and, of course, there are no cattle. Fresh meat, milk and vegetables must be flown in for those who cannot dispense with these luxuries. Those who live off the land live on nuts, fruits, beans, mandioca flour spread over tasteless dried meat, a little game and, when they can be had, turtles. The people of the Amazon are thin. The figures of the women are as straight as thin-armed boys. The people are all bone and have the Indian sharpness; yet they seem strong. They split the huge bolas of rubber with a blow of the machete; they load the boats, drive the trucks; they can hold the jaws of the alligators shut as they lever them out of the mud; they can hunt the puma, the peccary; they work in the rubber and jute factories. Near Manaus, oil men have found petroleum and are building a refinery. Along the river-banks you see the tall sticks of the prospectors and engineers. There is a strong river trade in snakeskins, indeed in all animals. A boy of fourteen caught a black puma on a fishing line last year. His father, an Austrian collector from Bolivia, had to play it as you play a salmon. A hunter’s story? Down at pretty Belém, at the delta, you pass the little shops where the jaguar and the alligator skins are cured.
We stand high up in the Opera House at Manaus and look down on what for forty years has been a dying city. We see the Negro and the Amazon rivers divide, immense melancholy highways through forest that surrounds us for thousands of miles. We are in a kind of midocean. It looks innocent. Hard to believe all the tales of the poison trees, the stinking and the narcotic blossoms, the pools solid with giant toads and heaped with alligators, the terrible processions of ants, the hourly battles between mantis and beetle, the fantastic and disgusting lives of the parasites, the awful breeding and killing that goes on every minute. The hummingbirds rape the passion flowers and when the birds have gone, the huge butterflies—biding their time—follow in flocks to the scene the birds have betrayed to them. Yet, if nature is incredible here, man, too, has been astonishing. He found the secret of the rubber tree and when we see these half-naked men splitting the balls of rubber in some city warehouse, we see an industry that once made millions, now reduced almost to its primitive state once more. He built Manaus in the boom. He imported the city mainly from Portugal, all the cobblestones and black-and-white marble of the pavements, almost all the bricks and tiles. Some marble, especially in the Opera House, came from Italy and England. In a few years he created a spectacular capital; in a few years the boom ended, and now the city rots, the steel rusts, the walls crack.
Yet Manaus is not dead. The Indians trade on the river, the big ships sometimes come up in the nut season, or the jute season. If the town has decayed, it is nonetheless full of life. The airplanes land at the handsome airport. There is a luxury hotel. The modern world has not given up here, even if most of the food has to be flown in at heavy expense to sustain the impudence of modern man. And when we go back to Belém at the Amazon’s mouth and see the shipping there, we once more have that sense of dramatic awakening we feel everywhere in Brazil.
We wait at night at the airport of Belém, listening to the deafening noise of the crickets, for the plane to take us back to New York. We have flown over ten thousand miles in South America. We are standing only a mile or two from the huge red maw of the greatest river in the world. It has been a journey through superlatives of size, through all that Nature is capable of in mountain heights, river, jungle, desert and plain. What can we compare with those thousands of miles over the Peruvian desert or the Andes, or over the jungle of Brazil? What was mere romance to us has now become real memory. We have seen the unparalleled lights of Rio like brooches pinned and pearls strung over the sea. We have seen Cotopaxi in its shirt of snow, the cobbles of the Inca highways, the Cyclopean stone of their temples; we have stood under the rain tree and the ombú and have gazed over harbors sailors have told us of: Valparaiso and Callao, Macao and Pernambuco. We have eaten the mango, drunk the Chilean wine, kicked avocado pears in the streets. We have seen the alligator in his river and seen butterflies the size of handkerchiefs. We have been frozen and breathless at Titicaca and have eaten its wonderful giant trout; we have had the night sit on us like a hot elephant in the tropics. We have talked with Indians, Negroes, mestizos and mulattoes, with all the Spanish and Portuguese mixtures, with great men, with ordinary men and the poor. We have seen the Indian woman trotting down the street shuttling her llama wool; we have seen the wives and daughters of the millionaires of Lima, Buenos Aires and Rio, in their diamonds and emeralds. In Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, in the Argentine, Uruguay and Brazil, we have seen seven versions of Iberian civilization transplanted, some feudal, some ultra-modern, all violently different and continuing that tradition of explosive individuality which they brought from Europe. We have been plunged into a life whose values are often basically distinct from our own, and which is awake and creative. What, we must ask, will this continent become when it is fully opened up and its huge natural resources used? All travelers in South America are staggered by its wealth and its prospects. They are overcome by its beauty. We have had the incredible luck to see a continent at the moment of its awakening.
[1956]
2
Portugal
The first things one must understand about Portugal are that Portugal is not Spain and the Portuguese language may look like Spanish in print, but sounds impenetrably unlike it.
There was
, for example, the shouting man in the chief café of the Portuguese town of Évora. Évora is a small place of twenty-two thousand people, with a square of white arcades, standing like a pile of hot white china on a bluff in the brown and melancholy plateau of the region they call the Alentejo, which spreads south of the Tagus to the Spanish frontier. The shouting man was tall, gaunt and black haired, with agitated and flashing eyes; he was making gestures two yards wide with his fingers spread apart and talking with all his body. Adventures, tales, people, opinions poured out of him, though one could not hear exactly what, because Portugal is the land of tiles. The houses, the churches, the banks, the cafés are tiled inside and often outside, too, and the tiles echo so that one or two men in a room sound like a crowd in a bathroom.
The man was surrounded by a respectful group of short, stoutish listeners who said nothing. “Who is that man who talks so much?” we asked the waiter. The waiter said, “He is a Spaniard.” He was. He was the gay caballero in person, the stage Spaniard as the Portuguese see him—the man of emphasis, theater, fantasy, distraction, explosion, words.
The group of small Portuguese listened in the obliging and acquiescent manner of their nation. They do not like Spaniards much: from Spain, says the Portuguese proverb, no good wind blows. “We do not take them too seriously,” they say. “They are fantastics. We are a small nation. We have to work. You will perhaps find our country lacking in drama.” They say this wistfully but with a good deal of irony; and perhaps they will tell the old tale of the Portuguese and the Spanish student: At the university, the Spaniard proclaimed that one day he would be Archbishop of Salamanca; the Portuguese modestly said he was content to be the parish priest of his village. Years later the two friends met in a Spanish village. The Portuguese had indeed become the parish priest, the Spaniard was a mere ragged sacristan. “What has become of your great ambition?” the Portuguese asked. The Spaniard replied with pride, “Had it not been for my great ambition I should never have risen as high as this.”
Spain is hermetic. It turns a mere shoulder to the Atlantic, and where it faces the sea, that sea is the Mediterranean. But Portugal faces the long roll of the great ocean. It has been called five hundred miles of Atlantic beach. There are no Spanish extremes of climate. Here everything is warm and mild; the Atlantic moistens the air, the rainclouds come and go over a fair and delicate sky.
One can see from an aircraft that the great tableland of Spain breaks at the Portuguese frontier into lower hills and small wooded mountains. There are scarcely any peaks as high or as wolfish as those that put their black ears through the cloud when the aircraft is passing from the Bay of Biscay to the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The lionlike tableland and dry rock, the clear air, give way to smaller country; and a haze, no more than a puff of tobacco smoke, gives a tenderness to the brilliant light of Portugal. The great river Douro which, like the Tagus, has come hundreds of miles out of Spain, lies as green as oil between the terraced ravines where the vines of the north are growing, and everywhere there are woods of pine and oak, chestnut and birch and eucalyptus, and in the marshes by the coast, the rice fields and the long pyramids of white salt. We are in a country altogether gentler than Spain. We are flying over a garden, and the sun, though very hot, boils rather than flames.
When the plane wheels over the heat haze of sea and sand and comes down at Lisbon airport, the buildings there indeed have the Iberian stare, but the gay colors in which they are painted—the saffrons, the greens, the pale blues and pinks and lilacs—soften the blinding effect. One smells an air that moves among flowers, hangs under fat palms and has honey in it. There is sweetness. One is going to be living in a sort of gâteau laced by some sweet liqueur. Consideration, quiet, a domestic simplicity, make the fine buildings of the airport a place of ease. The very language of the people, with its closing vowels, cooing o’s, its slow shuffling sh’s, diphthongs which strike like guitar notes and sobs in the middle of a word, and its habit of cutting off syllables and running words together, as if the speaker had awakened too briskly from sleep, suggests a Spanish blunted and softened by the crunch and shishing of the Atlantic on the shores.
Why are Spain and Portugal separate? It is a question which puzzles Spaniards but the Portuguese not at all. They have (they say) been able “to imagine themselves as a people,” in spite of their similarities of history. Before the twelfth century they were not separate, and for a short time they were ruled by Philip II—a Spanish royal coach can be seen in the fantastic museum of royal coaches at Belém, outside Lisbon.
The seaboard formed and aided the Portuguese; they were seamen and traders. Spanish power stood between them and Western Europe, and in the struggle of Britain and France against Spanish totalitarianism, the Portuguese became their natural allies in sea warfare. The westward-looking Portuguese turned by need to the sea and the foreigner; the Spaniard turned against him.
That is the huge difference. In every century the Portuguese has admired the foreigner; he will go to astonishing lengths of hospitality, friendship and even humility in order to oblige him. The man in the garage or office will leave his work at once to show the visitor his town, pointing out the carvings in a library or the sculpture in a cathedral, and the traveler in Portugal finds everywhere people who are, with almost artless courtesy, his friends. The educated are good linguists; they prefer to speak French rather than Spanish. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the most favored foreigners have been first the French—whom the Spaniards detest—and then the British. Foreign electric signs are mounted on the roofs of the squares and avenues of Lisbon; foreign domestic goods pack the Lisbon shops; a British company owns the tramway system in the capital. Foreign fleets anchor in the splendid estuary of the Tagus; foreign sailors have given famous nicknames to the squares. And when the Spaniard tells the Portuguese that they, too, are Iberians, and that they have enslaved themselves to the foreigners, the industrious Portuguese, a grave and patient man, points to his contacts with the world at large and says he is placidly free from that violent love-hate toward Europe which has been the dramatic but often destructive conflict in Spanish life. Tact, sensibility, a regard for the sentiments rather than the passions—this comes out at once in the Portuguese. This does not mean that he lacks the hard core of Iberian pride; foreigners who have employed servants in Portugal and Spain say that the Portuguese is not to be casually treated and requires a regard for his private feelings, interests and life which the Spaniard is indifferent to as long as he can amuse himself.
Portugal is one of the two surviving corporate states in Europe, designed on the Italian-Fascist model but very different from the excitable government of General Franco. Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, did not rise to power after conducting a civil war against his own countrymen. He is not a general, nor even, in his early career, a politician. He is a professor of economics and a bachelor from the old University of Coimbra, and he was put into power by the army a couple of years after the military coup of 1926. He has ruled undisturbed ever since.
Salazar’s portrait can be seen in many offices in Lisbon. It is the picture of a shy, wistful, rather sly, shrewd and sad-looking man, even cruel, in an ascetic way, in the mouth. He is not Big Brother. One is more inclined to call him Big Sister. He is reputed to be a fanatical worker, relentless to his assistants, deeply and ironically cunning in his political moves. He appears very little in public. He is a pious Catholic. The power of the Church is far less in Portugal than in Spain, for the country has retained a good deal of the liberalism of its constitutions of the 1820s, which Spain never did. The Church has never recovered from the dissolution of the monasteries in 1834, when they were turned into barracks. That power increased under Salazar, but his aim has been to create something in the nature of the peasant Catholic state—certainly not Fascism.
There are of course secret police, and people are noticeably cautious about talking politics, but occasionally one hears a public outburst. On the tram coming in from Be
lém one day the conductor said to me, “There’s no freedom here. The government is corrupt. We are silenced. We have the lowest standard of life in Europe and we are in chains.” I have seen lower standards of life. No one took any notice of the conductor, perhaps out of Portuguese politeness to foreigners: they did not wish to involve me; perhaps out of fear of being concerned with politics; perhaps they were not interested. The taxi driver to whom you say, “Everyone seems happy here,” replies quizzically, “Anyone who says he’s happy is not Portuguese.” And if one says to a doctor, a professor or a businessman that Salazar has obviously modernized the country to an enormous extent—for the difference between Portugal twenty-five years ago and Portugal today is immense; in housing alone the advance is remarkable—and has put Portugal economically on its feet, he becomes touchy and says, “Yes, but it is frustrating and destroying to be ruled by an accountant.”
Portugal has not lost all its liberal spirit. There is opposition to Salazar, and it is hard to know what goes on underground; but when trial elections were held a year or two back, the opposition came from the older generation. The suspicion was that the young, apparently, had lost interest in politics, a tendency to be noted all over Europe. As for the corporate state, that is one more of the political blueprints which the Iberian nations excel in producing—and never really put into effect. Cynics point out that the final organization to cap the pyramid of corporations has never been created. The government is simply a “strong government,” based on army support, which is tiding the country over the change from backwardness into modern techniques; it has made, for example, notable inroads on illiteracy. The pro-Nazi phase of Spain never spread to Portugal, which is inevitably the ally of those who control the sea and, like maritime nations generally, little subject to fanaticism.
At Home and Abroad Page 8
