by Evelyn Waugh
From fragmentary and not altogether reliable sources I picked up a little history of Boa Vista. It was a melancholy record. The most patriotic Brazilian can find little to say in favour of the inhabitants of Amazonas; they are mostly descended from convicts, loosed there after their term of imprisonment as the French loose their criminals in Cayenne, to make whatever sort of living they can in an inhospitable country. Practically all of them are of mixed Indian and Portuguese blood. There is no accurate census, but a recent medical survey in the Geographical Magazine reports that they are dying out, families usually becoming sterile in three generations; alien immigrants, mostly German and Japanese, are gradually pushing what is left of them up country; Boa Vista is their final halting place before extinction. The best of them go out into the ranches; the worst remain in the town.
They are naturally homicidal by inclination, and every man, however poor, carries arms; only the universal apathy keeps them from frequent bloodshed. There were no shootings while I was there; in fact there had not been one for several months, but I lived all the time in an atmosphere that was novel to me, where murder was always in the air. The German at the Priory constantly slept with a loaded gun at his bedside and expressed surprise at seeing me going shopping without a revolver; the blacksmith, partly no doubt owing to his avocation, spoke of little else; one of his main preoccupations was altering trigger springs so that they could be fired quick on the draw.
There was rarely a conviction for murder. The two most sensational trials of late years had both resulted in acquittals. One was the case of a young Britisher who had come across from Guiana, panning gold. He had no right there and one evening in the café tipsily expressed his willingness to shoot anyone who interfered with him. The boast was accepted as constituting provocation when, a few nights later, he was shot in the back and robbed, while entering his house.
The other case was more remarkable. Two respected citizens, a Dr Zany and a Mr Homero Cruz, were sitting on a verandah talking, when a political opponent rode up and shot Dr Zany. His plea of innocence, when brought to trial, was that the whole thing had been a mistake; he had meant to kill Mr Cruz. The judges accepted the defence and brought in a verdict of death from misadventure.
From time to time attempts have been made to raise the condition of the town. A little before the War a German appeared with ample capital and began buying cattle. He offered and paid a bigger price than the ranchers had ever before received; he fitted out a fleet of large motor launches to take the beasts down to market at Manaos. The project was perfectly sound financially and would have brought considerable advantage to the district, but it was destined to failure. Before the first convoy had reached the market, he had been shot and killed by an official whom he had neglected to bribe. The defence was that he had been shot while evading arrest on a charge of collecting turtles’ eggs out of season. The murderer was exonerated and the boats never reappeared at Boa Vista.
A more recent enterprise had been that of ‘the Company’, so frequently referred to. I never learned the full story of this fiasco, for the Benedictines were deeply involved in it and I did not like to press the question at the Priory. The blacksmith gravely assured me that the scandal had been so great that the Archbishop had been taken to Rome and imprisoned by the Pope. There certainly seemed to have been more than ordinary mismanagement of the affair. Father Alcuin never mentioned it except to say that things had not gone as well as they had hoped. So far as I could gather the facts are these:
A year or two ago, inflamed by charitable zeal, the wealthy Benedictines at Rio conceived the old plan of bringing prosperity and self-respect to Boa Vista. Geographically and politically the town held the key position to the whole, immense territory of the Northern Amazon tributaries. The monks saw that instead of its present position as a squalid camp of ramshackle cut-throats, it might be a thriving city, a beacon of culture illuminating the dark lands about it, a centre from which they could educate and evangelize the Indians. They imagined it, even, as a miniature ecclesiastical state where industry, commerce, and government should be in the benevolent hands of the Church; a happy dream, glowing with possibilities of success to those imperfectly acquainted with the real character of Boa Vista.
Accordingly ‘the Company’ was launched, under the highest ecclesiastical patronage, financed by Benedictine money and managed by the brother of one of the hierarchy. The method by which the town was to be raised to prosperity was, again, sensible enough to anyone who expected normal working conditions. Instead of the cattle being transported to the slaughter-houses at Manaos, they were to be butchered on the spot and tinned. Cheap corned beef, it was assumed, would rapidly take the place of the unnourishing tasso and would provide a more valuable and more manageable export than live cattle. The factory would provide regular and remunerative employment to all in the district and, following the best tradition of big business, ‘the Company’ would also provide the necessaries and amusements on which their wages should be spent; the profits, rapidly circulating, would be used in public services. No one had any ulterior motive; the whole scheme was for the glory of God and the comfort of the people of the place. In Rio, on paper, it all seemed faultless. Operations were begun on a large scale.
The canning factory was built and installed with the best modern machinery, an electric plant was set up, providing the streets and the houses with light; a fine Church, a hospital and a small school were built; there was soon to be a larger school, a Priory and a convent; liberal wages were paid out, two hotels and a cinema opened; a refrigerator provided Boa Vista with the first ice it had ever seen. Everything seemed to be going admirably.
But the monks at Rio had reckoned without the deep-rooted, local antagonism to anything godly or decent; a prejudice which at the moment was particularly inflamed by the unforeseen arrival of an irresponsible American with a rival scheme for improvement. His more ambitious proposal was to run a motor road and railway through the impassable bush that separated the town from Manaos, a project more or less equivalent in magnitude to the making of the Panama Canal. Finding that concessions had already been granted to the Benedictines which made his already impracticable railway legally impossible, he fell back on explaining to the inhabitants the great advantages of which they had been deprived, the higher wages he would have paid, the greater prosperity which he would have initiated. The citizens, naturally disposed to see a sinister purpose in any activity, however small, had already become suspicious of the great changes that were taking place. The American emphasized the foreign birth of most of the Order and the relationship between the manager of the company and the high ecclesiastic in Rio, with the result that by the time the monks and nuns reached their new home, they found everyone fairly convinced that a swindle was being perpetrated at their expense. It was only with difficulty and some danger that they succeeded in landing, being attacked with hostile demonstrations and showers of stones.
From then onwards everything went against the Benedictines, who were insulted and boycotted. The canning factory proved a failure; no one would use the ice – an unnatural, impermanent substance, typical of everything foreign; dishonest stuff that had lost half its weight even before you got it home – they didn’t want the hospital, much preferring to sicken and die in their hammocks in the decent manner traditional to the place; no one paid his electric light bill and the plant had to be stopped. The priests went down with fever and, one by one, had to be sent back to Manaos. ‘The Company’ became bankrupt and all further work was stopped. No Priory was built, no big school, no convent. At the time of my arrival things were at their lowest ebb. Father Alcuin was the last priest left and he was so ill that only supernatural heroism kept him at his work. Often he was only able to totter to the Church to say his Mass and then retire to bed in high fever for the remainder of the day. The palatial house in which he was living was the building originally intended for the hospital. Its two big wards were now occupied by a carpenter engaged in making benches for
the Church, and a government vet. who fitted up a laboratory there, which he used from time to time between his rounds of the ranches; he was investigating a prevalent form of paralysis in horses which he attributed to worms. Whatever minute flicker of good still survived in the town was preserved by the nuns, silent, devoted, indefatigable, who lived in appalling quarters near the river-bank, kept a school for the handful of bourgeois daughters, and nursed a Negro and an aged diamond prospector who had arrived separately in a dying condition from up country and were in no mood to respect the prejudices of the town. It was, as I have said, the lowest point; a new Prior was expected daily to reorganize things and set them to rights.
The Priory – as the hospital was now called – was no exception to the rule formulated a few pages above, that the religious are served by idiots. A single Indian boy of impenetrable stupidity looked after us. He had a round, brown face and a constant, mirthless grin which revealed rows of sharply filed teeth. He giggled when observed and would, in occasional bursts of confidence, produce for inspection a grubby sheet of lined paper on which he had tried to copy an alphabet written for him by Father Alcuin. He was absolutely honest, and dazed with delight when, on leaving, I gave him a small tip. His chief duty was to fetch the meals from the convent kitchen, a quarter of a mile away. They arrived cold and dusty, but with surprising regularity. He also rang the Angelus and could always be found by the bell rope half an hour before the time, waiting for the clock hands to reach the appointed place. The rest of his day was spent in talking to a captive monkey that was tethered to a tree in the garden, or in gaping, hour after hour, at the jars of worms which filled the vet’s laboratory.
The only other occupant of the house was the German who had first greeted our arrival; a man typical, except in his eccentricities, of the men of his race which one encounters in remote places all over the globe; part of the great exodus of disillusioned soldiers and students that followed the defeat of 1918, from Germany and the German colonies.
Mr Steingler was not a particularly attractive man. I never discovered what he was doing in Boa Vista. He had a minute and unprofitable plantation up the River Uraricuera where he lived in complete solitude and, I gathered from his conversation, great privation. He spoke vaguely of business he had to do in the town and would often go shuffling off to gossip at the stores; he spoke of some mail he was expecting, but when eventually the boat arrived from Manaos, there was nothing for him; he would sometimes announce his imminent departure, but always stayed on. He said he did not like to leave while Father Alcuin was so ill. The truth was, I think, that he could not bear to leave a place where there were people to talk to him in German; and he liked the food. He was a demonstratively greedy man and used to give great boyish whoops and guffaws of delight as he helped himself to the dishes, for at his farm, as he often explained, he had only farine and tasso.
It is possible that he was staying on at the Priory because absolute destitution awaited him at his farm.
He was a firm atheist and did not disguise his contempt for the activities of his hosts. I tried to point out to him once that it was particularly fortunate for him that some people still had such curious notions – the nuns had nursed him through a grave illness the year before – but he said, ‘No, it is nonsense. It is only for children,’ and of the new Prior who was coming, ‘No doubt it is a step in his career.’
His appearance was extremely odd, for he carried himself with the stiff back of an infantryman while his loose sandals made him drag his feet in an incongruous manner, when he walked. He wore a shiny and threadbare suit of blue serge, a ‘boater’ straw hat, a crumpled white collar and a narrow black tie. His ankles were bare and his sandals of his own manufacture. He invariably carried an absurd little ebony cane with a dented silver crook. We went to the café together most nights, but he would seldom accept a drink, saying at first that he could not drink beer when it was not iced; later I realized it was because he could not afford it himself and in this one form would not take hospitality he could not return, so to cover his pride I used to invent reasons – that a boat was expected, that Father Alcuin was better, that it was my birthday – and then he would drink the warm beer with relish and laugh loudly at whatever was said.
We talked in a laborious mixture of French and English, over neither of which languages Mr Steingler had much command; indeed he seemed to be barely intelligible in any language; his fluent Portuguese seemed to cause endless misunderstandings at the café and even his German seemed to puzzle Father Alcuin. The difficulty lay chiefly in discovering which of his many languages Mr Steingler was trying to speak. Conversation at meals was always uneasy, for Father Alcuin knew no English and only the most formal French; most of the time he and Mr Steingler would stumble along in German, occasionally explaining some obscure point in Portuguese; then, feeling that I was being left out of things, they would attempt to draw me in. Mr Steingler would suddenly bow towards me, beam, and make curious animal sounds in the roof of his mouth.
As a rule Father Alcuin was too ill to eat; when he was in fever he kept to his room but in the days of intermission he usually sat at table with us, drinking a little soup. I do not think he ever liked me much or understood what I was doing in his house, but he accepted my presence without complaint as he accepted all the other hardships of Boa Vista. Only on the subject of Freemasons did he show any violent emotion. It is possible that they had taken some sinister hand in the fiasco of ‘the Company’.
Was it really true that the King of England was a Mason?
I replied that I thought he was.
‘Is that how he became King? Did the Masons put him on the throne?’
‘No, he is king by legal hereditary right.’
‘Then how did the poor man fall into their power?’
It was useless to explain that English Masons were for the most part Headmasters and Generals with, as far as I knew, no criminal activities.
‘That is what they say until they have you in their power. And the Prince of Wales, is he a Mason too? Is that why he does not marry? Do the Masons forbid it?’
I think he began to suspect me of secret Masonry after a time, in spite of my conscientious assistance at Sunday Mass.
The Church was, considering the villainy of the place, surprisingly well attended; largely, I suppose, because the nasal singing of the girls’ school provided the only kind of entertainment of the week. These children, shepherded to their places by the nuns, were dressed up in clean muslin veils and, the wealthier of them, long white cotton gloves; they wore innumerable medals and coloured ribbons and sashes, proclaiming their different degrees of piety. They sang sugary little vernacular hymns in tremulous, whining voices. They occupied the greater part of the Church. Beside them were the elderly women in best dresses and clean stockings. What with this weekly blossoming of femininity, and the concrete architectural ornaments of the building, the candles and the artificial flowers, Sunday Mass was the nearest thing to a pretty spectacle that Boa Vista provided, and the men assembled in fair numbers to enjoy it. They did not come into the Church, for that is contrary to Brazilian etiquette, but they clustered in the porch, sauntering out occasionally to smoke a cigarette. The normal male costume of the town was a suit of artificial silk pyjamas, which many of the more elegant had washed weekly, so that on Sundays they carried themselves with an air of great refinement and caution. Some minutes before the Elevation they might be seen unfolding their handkerchiefs and spreading them on the bare boards of the floor; then, when the bell rang, they would delicately kneel on one knee, rise, shake out the handkerchief, refold it and tuck it away in the breast pocket. This, however, was the practice only of the most pious; the majority remained throughout propped against the walls, staring at the napes of the girls’ necks. A priest told me that when he was new to the country he had remonstrated with the men, telling them that this was no fashion in which to hear Mass.
‘We haven’t come to hear Mass,’ they had replied, fingering
the revolver butts in their holsters. ‘We’re here to see you don’t interfere with our women.’
I found very little to occupy my time. There was an edition of Bossuet’s sermons and a few lives of the Saints in French for me to read; I could walk to the wireless office and learn that no news had been heard of the Boundary Commissioner’s boat; I could visit the English-speaking blacksmith and watch him tinkering with antiquated automatic pistols. This young man would not come with me to the café on account of his having recently beaten the proprietor – an act of which he was inordinately proud, though it can have required no great courage since he was a very old man and slightly crippled. I could give bananas to the captive monkey and I could study the bottled worms in the laboratory; I could watch the carpenter in his rare moments of industry, sawing up lengths of plank. There was really quite a number of things for me to do, but, in spite of them all, the days seemed to pass slowly.