Sebastien was rather sorry that the long ocean voyage had come to an end. It had been exactly the relaxing experience he had needed, giving him ample opportunity for indulging in some introspective stock-taking.
He had been the only passenger, which was one reason why the shipping company had been willing to let him replace, on such short notice, the originally booked passenger who’d canceled. As far as the captain and crew of the Kirsten Flagstad were concerned, Sebastien was an ideal passenger. He made no complaints, not even when the ship encountered a stretch of bad weather and rough seas. It was not for nothing that he was the nephew of a yachtsman. Sebastien took a lively interest in everything he saw on board, but did not interfere with the ship’s routine or make a nuisance of himself. He was welcomed on the bridge, which was a privilege not always extended to passengers who made the mistake of being too garrulous and demanding.
The ship was not, in fact, going to dock in Belém itself. It was met by a small customs boat, which would ferry Sebastien to the city. After a brief discussion with the customs officer who came aboard the freighter, and who inspected his passport and visa, Sebastien exchanged farewells with the captain and crew he had sailed with, and accompanied the officer to the smaller vessel. It picked up additional passengers, from other commercial ships, and finally from a modest-sized cruise ship, until its deck was crowded—a novel experience for Sebastien, who had had the open deck spaces of the freighter almost to himself for so long.
The customs boat suddenly became a hubbub of activity, with passports, shipping invoices, and other papers changing hands, more officials emerging to handle the small crowd, luggage hauled about, opened, inspected, closed again, and officially passed at last, and the owners of the luggage successfully passing inspection as well. All the while, the boat continued on its way to shore with undeviating slowness, while the bright sails of the many fishing boats which also occupied the broad bay dipped and swirled in the brisk wind. The wind was rising, the sky darkening, and suddenly the rain—straight and hard and cool—came down. It was the kind of precipitation that was a daily event during the rainy season in this part of Brazil.
The boat reached land at last, and a mass of blue-clad porters stormed the gangplank to get on board. Brown and black faces surrounded the passengers, brown and black hands gesticulated wildly. Strange, urgent, incomprehensible phrases assaulted Sebastien’s ears. These men were speaking in Portuguese, a language Sebastien had studied, but they spoke so rapidly and included so many local dialect idioms that Sebastien couldn’t understand them very well. They wanted to carry his luggage to the nearby taxi stand, that much was obvious, but with the airlines now the preferred mode of transportation, there were not enough maritime passengers to go around, so the competition among the porters was fierce. Sebastien, whose travels in comparatively undeveloped countries had made him an old hand at this sort of thing, coolly stood his ground and finally chose one of the less aggressive porters, whose efficiency and politeness he rewarded with a large tip. The man quickly managed to transfer both Sebastien and his luggage to a taxicab.
The taxi negotiated the main thoroughfares of the city’s downtown area with a rather unnerving speed, combined with a blithe disregard of traffic patterns. Sebastien glimpsed tall, dark trees lining the sidewalks to either side, blurring his view of the gaily painted houses erected in rows just beyond them.
The taxi pulled up in front of the Grande Hotel. Sebastien soon found himself in a room on the top floor. The window curtains were all wide open, and light filled the room, emanating from a blue sky piled with white clouds, which looked too massively three-dimensional to be suspended in the atmosphere. Sebastien went out onto the balcony and looked down at a sea of red-tiled roofs stretching out underneath the sky. There were palm trees in the near distance, and beyond them, expanses of green meadows, the brown streak of the river, and seemingly impenetrable forests, in hues of emerald and viridian that gleamed like jewels. The rain clouds, for the time being, had retreated to the far horizon, where, dense and dark, they continued to unload their charge of water onto the lush green land.
If he wished, the bellhop informed him, he might go back downstairs and dine, since the hotel’s dining room had just opened for the evening.
Inside the high-walled dining room, the rows of tables looked like doll’s furniture. The waiters carried in trays filled mostly with the foods of Brazil, bewildering in its variety—crabs, fish, meat stews, chicken, beefsteak, fried potatoes, bread, green vegetables. Subsequent courses included cheese and tropical fruits—pawpaws, alligator pears, and small yellow bananas and thick fruit pastes. The liquid refreshments included coffee, and native or imported wines and beers. Sebastien chose arapaima steak, from a large fish which was usually reared in pens. He ate well, this first exposure to Brazilian cuisine making an extremely positive impression on him.
Sebastien took a brief walk after dinner but saw no reason to venture far from the hotel on this first excursion. He planned to stay in Belém for several days, perhaps for a week or longer. He had plenty of time.
I have plenty of time. I’m in no hurry, because I am idle, he thought as he got ready for bed that night. Am I a bad person? No, I don’t think so. But I am a useless person. Everybody on board the freighter had his work to do…all of the people I’ve seen here in this city, so far, have to work for their living. Well, for once this isn’t entirely a trip for pleasure. I’m here on business. I have important business to take care of. I own property here in Brazil, and I have people who work for me now. I’m on my way to inspect my property and meet my employees. Feeling quite pleased with himself because he had these business matters to attend to in the immediate future, Sebastien went to bed.
He was awakened by a cacophony of tolling bells. The peals came from a sharp-spired church in a tiny tree-filled square, visible from the balcony of his room. People were walking across the square and entering the church. Sebastien looked at his wristwatch. It was six o’clock, and this was a typical weekday morning in a Catholic country. The bells were summoning the faithful to early Mass.
He breakfasted at seven—freshly baked croissants with butter and jam on the side, accompanied by strong coffee, its potency reduced somewhat by milk and sugar.
After breakfast, Sebastien went for a longer exploratory walk, taking advantage of the fact that it was not yet too hot.
The streets were full of color and even the shadows of the mango trees were bright with the reflected yellows, rose reds, and azure blues of the tiled and painted houses. The strongly contrasted colors seemed to form a mosaic, constantly arresting the eye.
The business section and the two main thoroughfares of the residential section were alive and noisy with automobiles and humming tram cars, but one had only to cross over into any side street to enter a different world, characterized by the lethargic, heavily scented stillness of a hot, tropical land were the urban people live too close together, and where at times there is only a thin line between man, beast, and vegetation. Together, they all drowsed harmoniously in the enervating heat.
Realizing quickly that walking any distance during the daytime in this hot climate was impractical, Sebastien hired a taxi, negotiating an hourly rate.
“Take me through the districts where the ordinary people live,” he instructed the driver.
The man assumed that Sebastien wanted to find a drug dealer, and was dumbfounded when he discovered that nothing could be farther from his intentions. This norte-americano senhor actually wanted to see the slums!
It was as though Sebastien’s acquisition of his uncle’s wealth had made him want to perform a token act of penance, by observing those who were infinitely worse off than himself. The driver drove through the outskirts of the city.
“Are we in any danger here?” Sebastien asked, casually.
The driver shrugged. “We in danger of being accosted by beggars and prostitutes, when we stop for a traffic light, senhor. Otherwise … I have a pistol here in the glove
compartment.”
“Oh, good. That sets my mind at ease,” his passenger said—without irony.
As the city’s suburbs straggled into the close-pressing jungle, the houses became more primitive, with tile and plaster giving way first to mud and boards, and finally, to palm-roofed and -sided huts squatting upon the untamed land. Sebastien saw true slums, where sheets of rusty corrugated metal had been pressed into service as a building material, for walls as well as for roofs. These squalid, ramshackle structures must be as hot as ovens inside, as a result of the relentless beating down of the sun on them. Vegetation crowded close upon all of the dwellings in this poverty-stricken district, as did thick clouds of mosquitoes.
Sebastien tipped the driver generously when the man dropped him off in front of the Grande. The excursion had been educational, if depressing.
Once he was settled in at his hotel, Sebastien continued to explore the city, for both business and pleasure.
His business in Belém was taken care of easily enough. He spent part of three consecutive days at his uncle’s law firm, at the tax registry office, and at his uncle’s bank. At each place, the mere mention of the name Gilberto Leon opened doors, and Sebastien was given VIP treatment. He emerged from the bank with a savings account, a checking account, a credit card, a debit card, a checkbook, and a large portfolio detailing his uncle’s financial holdings—which the bank had now, of course, transferred to him. With all of this business successfully concluded, Sebastien tried his best to play the role of the typical tourist, curious to see the sights.
He was quickly made aware of a few basic ground rules. Sebastien was under no delusions that the United States was a classless society. But Brazil, he soon found out, for all its diversity and cosmopolitanism, was even more class-conscious…and many Brazilians took that fact for granted, and were quite unapologetic about it.
For one thing, in this country, the perceived drudgery of carrying parcels was reserved for the lower classes. No man who was well off enough to wear polished leather shoes and a decent pressed suit with a dress shirt with a collar and a tie, or obviously expensive “casual” clothes, ever carried the smallest package if he could avoid it. To do so would be to lose face. And for a woman who had any pretensions of gentility to carry more than her purse was unheard of.
When Sebastien made the mistake of asking the hotel’s concierge what shops were within walking distance, he was immediately assigned a shadow, in the form of a young boy, the son of another hotel employee.
Whenever Sebastien went on a shopping expedition, he had to have this boy accompany him, to carry his purchases back to the hotel. His democracy-inspired protests were useless, as was his insistence that he was perfectly capable of carrying things himself—it was not done. The concierge could not understand why this made Sebastien feel like some sort of a decadent aristocrat, exploiting the masses. Whenever the senhor left the hotel, the boy must go, too. They returned together, the boy proudly laden with the packages, and occasionally staggering under their weight, while the powerfully built adult man walked empty-handed a step or two ahead of him. Finally, Sebastien availed himself of the obvious solution. He gave the boy, in a lump sum, the equivalent of a couple of weeks’ tips, and told him to make himself scarce. Then he had his purchases delivered to the hotel, a service which the city’s upscale shops provided at no extra cost.
For another thing, although Brazil was in some ways the epitome of a melting pot, it still betrayed signs of an unofficial caste system based upon racial and ethnic distinctions—many of which were bewildering to an outsider such as Sebastien. The Brazilians had developed an entire vocabulary of descriptive terms for their racially mixed population. White and Indian equaled Mameluco, white and Negro, Mulatto, Indian and Negro, Cafuzo. This terminology being insufficient for the needs of such a race-conscious country, the more subtle gradations had their own designations. Cafuzo and Indian equaled Curiboco, Cafuzo and Negro, Xibaro. From that point on, the variations continued, but were not necessarily given their own formal descriptive names.
Pure-blooded Indians who had become “civilized,” that is, Europeanized, were called Tapuyos or Caboclos, but they were actually rare, and although Sebastien heard the term Caboclo used occasionally, it was usually in connection with the cowboys and other working men of the more inland plains.
Who worked for a living, and what kind of work was done, was the basis of another strict social hierarchy.
The Brazilian housewife who had servants did not do her own marketing—that chore was delegated to her cook or houseboy. And so, in a grocery store or at the market, among those who haggled over their personal purchases, the outsider could observe these agents in action, too. They came equipped with large empty baskets or tote bags, and they shopped with a critical air of superiority which plainly said to the seller, I work for a prestigious household, I have its money with me, and I buy a great deal—therefore, it is up to you to give me a good price for my mistress, if you want us to continue to patronize your establishment. Those who bought for themselves were noticeably more anxious and easy to please, and there were those impoverished people who window-shopped or wandered about the outdoor markets unable to buy, but still welcoming this distraction from their monotonous living.
Sebastien consulted his guide book, with an eye toward experiencing the true local culture, as opposed to what he dismissed as stereotypical “touristy” sights. Rising before dawn one morning and strolling through the streets, taking advantage of the lingering nocturnal coolness of the air, Sebastien made his way to the old marketplace near the harbor.
Even at this early hour of the morning, these streets were crowded and the wide gates enclosing this market square were propped open, with the vendors already behind their stalls for the morning’s bargaining. In the nearby harbor, the fishermen had hauled in their sails, and heaps of freshly caught fish filled the palm-woven baskets lying upon the quai beside the boats. The men brought the baskets to market and spilled out the fish upon the counters in a rippling, undulating flow, the shining bodies slipping about with a fluid movement which almost suggested they were still swimming about freely in the sea. The fish sparkled in the morning sunlight, so recently drawn from the water that their bright variegated colors had not yet faded into a dull uniform grayness. There were also shrimps and crabs in abundance, and the spaces under the stalls were full of live turtles still imprisoned in traps. There were fruits and vegetables in smaller quantities, and roots and herbs for seasonings.
Sebastien noticed one corner stall, obviously specializing in native curios. The dark-skinned man in charge, who looked part Indian, sported many tattoos, and spoke an oddly accented Portuguese. He presided over a cluttered array of jars and bottles and boxes. There were teeth and bones and skins, roots, horns, beads—all thrown together in casual disorder.
This vendor had for sale necklaces of beads and tiny carved statues—from the Amazon, he explained, but from the far regions of the Amazon, beyond even Manáos. The carvings were made from scraps of various exotic woods, or from the jarina nut, the latter transformed from its natural shape of a smooth oval into miniature birds and turtles and other creatures. Some of the necklaces bore a small carved human hand, as well. This was not a native Indian symbol, but a good-luck charm of European origin. Sebastien even saw the figa, the clenched fist with the thumb inserted between the index and second finger.
The vendor informed Sebastien that he could have his choice of one of these necklaces for eighty centavos, the equivalent of fifty United States cents. The Brazilian obviously knew a big spender when he saw one. An old woman who had been standing nearby, watching the two men, shook her head suggestively at Sebastien, muttering that the price was too high. “Caro, muito caro!” she protested. It obviously grieved her to see an ignorant young foreign gentleman being taken advantage of.
“Ah, ma bonito,” Sebastien assured her, with a smile, and he bought the figa necklace that attracted him the most, one with black, white,
and plain brown wooden beads strung together with bright scarlet thread. When he inspected the beads more closely, Sebastien was surprised, and amused, to see that the white ones were in fact carved into the shape of tiny skulls, complete with empty eye sockets and toothy grins.
“It is a love charm, senhor,” the vendor assured him. “Wear it, and the one you love will be drawn to you, irresistibly. Or hang it over your bed, and in your dreams you will see your destined true love—the one you will love, and who will love you.”
Quite a bargain, Sebastien thought as he paid the man. It’s well worth the eighty centavos, just to hear the ballyhoo! The one I love, indeed! That’s a laugh!
Determined to “go native,” at least for an hour or so, he explored farther.
In order to experience the full flavor of Pará, a visitor had to walk through the natives’ market, located well away from the downtown business district. The shops along the upper streets which catered to the tourist trade were banal and colorless by comparison. The vendors, somewhat to Sebastien’s surprise, were friendly but not aggressive. Bananas, sold directly from big bunches, seemed to be popular as snacks. Watermelons—elongated, pale green ones—were another fruit offered for sale. Many of the stalls carried an inventory of used clothing items.
Back at the hotel, Sebastien entertained himself by loitering in the public areas and observing some of his fellow guests. He had already been in Belém long enough to have formed an unfavorable opinion of most of them.
Brazilian Cattle Baron (Siren Publishing Ménage and More ManLove) Page 7
