Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  He seemed (and I surely wronged him here) to care nothing for that part of his duties which required him to wear his cassock unless it made money.

  'You should see our Wednesday Novena,' he said. 'The Wednesday Show, continuous performances through the day, the most fashionable thing in town. All the cream of Fortaleza is there. The takin's are something glorious.'

  The takings went to support social welfare schemes and were spent on

  things as prosaic as food, clothing, building materials and tools for self-help projects.

  I listened bemused and grateful for the torrent of information. If I spoke at all it was token stuff to show my appreciation and give the man a breather. I showed him my telex message, and mentioned my fears. To his credit he did not try to convince me that they were groundless, but simply suggested putting them away since there was nothing I could do about them anyway. In his company that seemed a most natural and intelligent course to take.

  He drove me to the docks and helped me to fetch my things. A measure of his influence was that the Zoë G, which that morning had felt like home, now looked the seedy old freighter she would always be when viewed from shore. I said some farewells to the crew, trying to breathe a little of the old camaraderie into them, but the replies were so off-hand that I saw I had long ago been unloaded and forgotten in their minds, relegated to that other world which the Zoë G always sailed away from sooner or later.

  Walsh and I rattled off to Sao Raimundo on an endless and tortuous route. At times we seemed to drive out into the country, only to plunge again into some waterlogged and sand-strewn suburb. The greater part of the city consisted of single-storeyed brick buildings undulating and crumbling in loose foundations. I felt the earth was determined to shake itself loose of an unwanted encumbrance.

  Towards the end we ran along a major road whose surface had all but disappeared, with ditches running alongside and across it. There were cars and many taxis on the road, all looking as though they had been recovered from the wrecker's yard. They flashed as the sun struck the multi-faceted dents in their bodywork, and the doors jiggled visibly in their frames. They slalomed skilfully but recklessly, in a triumph of temperament over common sense, because vehicles in Brazil were supremely expensive.

  We climbed a sandy embankment, crossed a railway line, stumbled over some ditches and arrived at Sao Raimundo.

  For the next few days I ate with the priests, and slept in a hammock down the road in the caretaker's home. Antonio Sa, the caretaker, was a tall, happy man, brown-skinned and handsome who lived with his wife and children in a small brick house. They ate in one room and slept in another, so the third room was available for letting. I shared it with another Englishman, Ian Dall, who was visiting Sao Raimundo, and we paid Antonio a few cruzeiros to help him out while he studied to become an electrician. Ian showed me how to use the hammock, it was a revelation to find that by lying diagonally across it, one could stretch out straight and comfortable rather than be folded up like a banana.

  The next day I presented myself at the Banco do Brasil to see about the guarantee. The bank took me by surprise. I had expected the older style of shabby and discreet banking. Here was a large airy banking hall full of up-to-date office machinery and animated people, promising bustle and efficiency. I found my way to the right official and explained my problem with a translator and several eager minions standing by. The man had a keen, expressionless face of European paleness. He wore spectacles finely framed to foster the impression of a man whose mind ranged far beyond his immediate responsibilities. His suit was an immaculate lightweight grey, and his shoes gleamed on the comfortable carpeting beneath his table. Above all I was struck by his opulent linen. His shirt and handkerchief had that soft and spotless luxury which only dedicated servants can provide and which no amount of Western money and machinery can duplicate.

  He listened carefully and his entourage gazed on respectfully. Then he spoke. The translator informed me that what I wanted could not, unfortunately, be done. The official addressed himself to his papers, and the group obviously expected me to vanish marvellously without another word. The rudeness of it astonished me. I demanded an explanation, and the official raised his head and looked at me as though I really had reappeared from thin air. He smiled at some private and infinitely subtle joke, and even laughed, lightly and delicately. He repeated that it would be 'quite impossible', meaning that only a half-wit could have imagined otherwise. I still refused to evaporate, and was shunted off to others, but nobody seemed capable of even hinting at an explanation.

  When I was finally ejected on to the pavement, I realized that the Sunday Times would have to start the process again from London, and I sent off another telex and prepared myself to wait.

  Sao Raimundo consisted of the church, a large college for boys and girls, and the parish house where Walsh lived with three or four other priests. The priests were strongly built Irishmen, chosen in part for their fitness. They had adopted Portuguese names and were known to their parishioners as Padres Mario, Eduardo, Brandao, Marcello and so on. The slightest of them all, physically, was Marcello, a visitor from a country parish who had come to Fortaleza some time back to convalesce from a long illness. We were passing the plastic box of cornflakes round the table at my second breakfast when I heard that he was returning the following day, by bus, to his parish in the interior.

  'Where is that?' I asked idly.

  Tguatu,' he said.

  But for that chance I don't suppose I would have gone to Iguatu. Having the name thrust before me again in such a pointed way made it difficult to refuse, though quite whom I was planning to oblige I did not

  know. The notion of allowing a degree of randomness in my movements was already established. My arrival in Fortaleza was itself a fateful accident, and I was intrigued to see how one happening led to another in such a way that, somewhere along the thread of events, it seemed as though a pattern was being woven. I felt impelled to let the pattern emerge, however ominous it seemed.

  'Why don't you come and have a look?' Marcello added, as I knew he would. 'It'll only cost you the bus fare.'

  'Alright,' I said, and lightly for Walsh's benefit, 'Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.'

  Iguatu is two hundred and fifty miles from Fortaleza on the Jaguaribe River, and the journey took most of the day. The countryside moved past like an endlessly revolving backdrop of the same oil palms and swamps and glistening red laterite soil. Signs of that year's massive rainfall were everywhere visible. The road, newly built, was already broken and pot-holed, and in places had been swept away altogether so that we were in any case forced to take a longer route than usual.

  There was a stop for lunch in a barn-like restaurant serving the staple Brazilian meal of steak, rice and coarse floury manioca fried with the meat. After another short stop in the afternoon the bus arrived in Iguatu, just before dark.

  That evening I sat in Father Marcello's small house brushing aside mosquitoes while he tried to give me some idea of the life of the people in his area.

  Most of them are among the thirty or so million peasants in the North of Brazil who are as close to poverty and destitution as any in the world. Since they do not own the land, their condition is virtually feudal, and the tiny resources they have are sufficient only to see them through from one day to the next. When the great natural disasters occur they must succumb, and disasters in the tropics are as regular as the seasons. Cyclone, flood or drought take their toll annually, and because of this inescapable punishment, the victims have been known for generations as the flagelados.

  Their original language is Guarani, and Indian language that was widely spoken in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and parts of other neighbouring countries. They are of Indian descent mixed with Portuguese, and have well-defined cheekbones and broad faces. They are short in stature and have fine smooth skin like toffee, delicately engraved by age.

  Iguatu is a Guarani word meaning beautiful water. It was on Sunday,
24 March, that the beautiful water had suddenly risen and flooded across the banks of the Jaguaribe. The flood lasted for three days and swept many houses away. During the following weeks the victims salvaged what they could from their ruins and took shelter temporarily in the already crowded houses which had survived. So far it had been an ordinary disaster. Then, on the third Sunday, the water rose again but this time much higher and much faster.

  As with the first flood, the water took three days to subside. It had risen forty feet, to touch the lower girders of the big iron railway bridge. Some people in a barge had been torn from their moorings and trapped for a while under the bridge. It was said that they had lost a child. Miraculously that would have been the only known casualty. The second flood left four hundred houses either ruined or totally demolished.

  Hundreds now had no place at all to take shelter, but on the following Thursday before any useful measures could be taken to help them the river rose yet again to its previous highest level.

  I arrived a month later, towards the end of May. In a normal year the rains would have been over, the sky long since cleared and the soil already scorched and dusty in the heat of the dry season. But 1974 was exceptional, as I had already seen in Africa, and the sky was as grey and soggy as wet flannel.

  Iguatu as I found it was a town of several thousand inhabitants with a pleasant and prosperous centre running rapidly to seed at the edges. It is built on higher ground on the south side of the river and was largely untouched by the flooding, although the river did undercut the bank in places and bring down a few improvised dwellings. The major part of the damage was on the lower north bank, where poorer people had access to land.

  In the morning Marcello and I walked across the bridge to have a look. On the other side we followed a path that curves away to the left and brought us back to the river and an open sandy expanse littered with debris. It was here that hundreds of homes had recently stood. Most of them had been small two-roomed constructions, some built of brick and others of wattle and daub. The later houses, ostensibly stronger and made of brick, had collapsed altogether and nothing remained to show where they had once stood. There was a moral here somewhere.

  It was obvious that the houses on these shallow banks invited destruction by their very presence. The people cut down the trees for building and for burning. They kept animals, a goat, a donkey, perhaps a cow, which denuded the ground of grasses and shrubs. When the river rose the soil slipped away like sand with nothing to bind it. The process must have happened many times, eating further and further into the land. There was only a limited area available to these people. Beyond were more prosperous houses with walled and fenced gardens.

  We stopped by two old people who were recovering the round clay tiles from their ruined home. The house was now a transparent structure of

  wooden uprights supporting the roof, and the river had laid three feet of sand over the original floor level, so that the old man, short as he was, stood with his grizzled white head through the rafters looking at us across his own roof.

  His name was Manuel Subino dos Santos, and he was a fine, tough old man with a dried and salted look. He told us that he was about seventy years old, sixty-eight or seventy, he was not quite sure. He wore a loose and faded blue T-shirt and shorts, with a string of brown beads round his neck and some kind of silver object hanging at his waist. He was handing the tiles one by one to his wife, Ignacio Zumira da Conceicao, who looked as old and wiry as her husband but said she was only fifty. She wore a printed cotton dress and white headband and she was stacking the tiles. They planned to rebuild their house elsewhere.

  They looked quite indestructible, and seemed calm and at ease with the world.

  'Some other land has been allocated to the homeless for building new houses,' Marcello told me. 'It is on higher ground beyond the town. A committee was formed to cope with the disaster. There's the Volkswagen agent, a businessman with some stores, a local farmer who has some political pull. Then there's the bishop and the parish priest who's another Irishman, and three county councillors and two doctors.

  'There's a national organization too, called Ancar, which is responsible for rural development and they have three people on the committee. I must say they were really quite energetic, and the governor of the state has put a lot into it.'

  It was very pleasant now by the river, with the water running safely far below. On the opposite bank women were slamming their laundry on stones and spreading it to dry on the sand, making a big and colourful patchwork. Upstream a man was fishing. A good place to live, within reach of the water. One could put out a net and keep an eye on it. Handy for cooking, and washing. If only they could find a way to protect the grasses and shrubs, to keep the bank stabilized and resistant to flooding. Why not?

  'Ignorance, perhaps, or apathy. In the past whenever they made an effort to make something better for themselves it was always taken away from them; if not by the elements, then by landowners, soldiers, the powers that be. Over the generations they are left with little desire for improvement. They are hardy and uncomplaining. They take what comes.'

  I took pictures of Dos Santos and his wife, and other less fortunate families whose houses had disappeared entirely. Then Father Marcello went off on his duties and I wandered along the river banks looking and photographing.

  The self-help programme for flood victims was centred round a concrete slaughterhouse, newly built and not yet functioning, on the other side of town. Some families were housed in the building. Others took shelter in hutches of black plastic sheet draped over wooden scaffolding. The families, though large, occupied tiny areas of space and had only the most meagre possessions. I should have examined them more carefully to see what had been rescued, what objects of veneration stood guard over the mat, the saucepan, the water pot, but I was too hot and too distracted by my own discomfort to make the effort.

  This same heat which I found stifling was the saving of these people. In a temperate winter, given their circumstances, their scanty food and clothing, most of them would have died of exposure. In the tropics, with shelter from the rain, one can subsist a long time on remarkably little. What lacks most is hope and initiative, and this was being supplied, in symbolic form, by a machine for making cement cavity bricks. It was designed by an Englishman working with the Oxfam charity, and it was set up in front of the slaughterhouse. Homeless men who were not working at the time were employed on it, and a great many bricks were already piled up and waiting to be used in the houses which they planned to build for themselves on the new land.

  So they had been given some sort of a promise of a better tomorrow, but it was terribly fragile, just as it was painfully obvious that these people were really not needed. They were unskilled, uneducated, and destitute. The big landowners would never want for manual labour, they had their pick from millions. They were the children of fate, a by-product of centuries of neglect, surplus to requirements.

  Some had been given low army tents to sleep in. Here was a woman with six children, cooking outside her tent. She had built a small but pleasing shelter from woven reeds and grasses to serve as a kitchen. In it her smallest child lay in a cardboard carton. Her husband was at work labouring for ten cruzeiros a day, which was just under a dollar fifty. She did not know for how many days he would be employed.

  'Yes, Sir, I would like to send my children to school, but how can I? They have no clothes.'

  I asked Father Marcello whether he believed her.

  'Oh, I think so. Schooling is cheap enough, it only costs thirty cruzeiros a head and that includes a snack for lunch, but she would have to find a hundred cruzeiros at least for clothing, and then more for paper and pencils.'

  'Ten cruzeiros a day doesn't sound like much,' I said.

  'No,' he replied, looking almost apologetic as though he were to blame. 'It will buy three kilos of rice or beans. It's actually well below the legal minimum, but they are not in a position to complain.'

  Needless to sa
y, the people in the north of Brazil were all thin.

  The bus rattled me back to Fortaleza next day. Alone this time, and going over the same route, I dozed a good deal of the day, with the senseless music of a transistor radio mingling with the bus's roar and enveloping me in a tunnel of fantastic noise.

  It was still only mid-afternoon when I got back to Sao Raimundo, and I was restless. It was my seventh day ashore and at last I was beginning to feel more comfortable with the climate. My curiosity had come to life again in Iguatu and I was no longer a traveller in limbo with one foot at sea and another on land.

  Walter Sa had a telex message from London to say that the Sunday Times was making arrangements for a guarantee with the Bank of London in Fortaleza. Father Walsh said he knew the manager, a Scotsman called Alan Davidson. I called the bank and made an appointment to see Davidson. The young policeman called Samuel had left a note at the house asking me to call at the Maritime Police with my documents. There were some details they had forgotten to ask for.

  'My mother's Christian names again,' I said wearily. T suppose I'd better go.'

  T suppose so,' said Walsh.

  'Well, it can wait until tomorrow,' I said, and set off for the older part of town.

  I found remnants of the old fortifications, a small but pretty park with delicate fences and ornaments, old sidewalks still paved surprisingly with marble flagstones. Lights beckoned from a vaulted gateway set in the middle of a fine old stone building, and I followed faint sounds of music and conversation. The building had been the old prison and was now converted into a museum. Huge rooms with ancient and lustrous hardwood floors were turned over to examples of local art and custom. Behind the prison was a garden of small lawns and pools, with fountains playing and lights concealed in bushes and among palm fronts. Alongside ran an arcade of shops trading in leather work, woven goods and other handicrafts. At scattered chairs and tables young couples or groups entertained themselves with a seemingly endless repertoire of humorous anecdotes, the rattle of speech building up into spasmodic climaxes of laughter. The kids were all impeccably turned out in the pop fashions of the late sixties, mini skirts, brightly coloured flared trousers, tailored shirts and blouses, three-inch platform soles. Physically they were no different from the peasants of Iguatu, but they were planets apart.