Brazil on the Move (12 page)

Lucio Costa was the first chairman of the board that worked out the plans. Characteristically Costa retired in time to let the spotlight fall on his protégé Niemeyer as chief designer of that highly successful construction. Again when the Brazilian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in 1939 had to be designed, although Costa won the competition he claimed that Niemeyer’s entry was better than his own and in the end the two men collaborated on the final plan.

The design which Kubitschek commissioned for Pampulha was Niemeyer’s first job entirely on his own. He threw his cap over the windmill and developed a startlingly original style. Where Le Corbusier’s and Lucio Costa’s work had tended to straight lines and severe planes, Niemeyer was experimenting with the curves and swelling abstract forms of contemporary sculpture. When as President Kubitschek decided to stake his political future on the Brasília project he told Niemeyer he wanted him to design the new capital, all of it.

Like the wiseacres who raged against Belo Horizonte fifty years ago wellinformed people in Rio and São Paulo will prove to you with paper and pencil that the Brasília project is bound to fail. The Cariocas resent the loss of their capital. The whole scheme, they’ll tell you, was cooked up to enrich the State of Minas Gerais and its politicians. A gigantic real estate speculation at the expense of the Brazilian economy. The city, they claim, will turn out another grandiose failure like the group of watertowers in decorative ironwork in the style of the Eiffel Tower a mayor of Belém in Pará bought at a Paris world’s fair and set up in the center of the old
tropical capital. From that day to this nobody has found any way to connect it to the city’s water system.

They point out that the Pampulha project was a financial failure. A federal law against gambling put the casino out of business. Snails in the lake threatened the residents with schistosomiasis. The bishop refused to consecrate Niemeyer’s gay little blue and white church. In the end a flood came which washed out the dam and left Niemeyer’s famous yacht-club high and dry.

President Kubitschek’s career, his opponents will tell you, has been littered with these unfinished enterprises. The municipal theater at Belo Horizonte was never completed. When Kubitschek left the governorship the building was invaded by squatters and became a slum. Brasília, editorial writers on the Rio newspapers were insisting, would turn out to be a desert favela on a colossal scale.

Why wasn’t the money spent for schools to combat Brazil’s seventy per cent illiteracy, or to start new industries or to stabilize finances, they ask. With the country swept by a ruinous inflation, they tell you, the last thing Brazil needs is the upkeep of a capital five hundred miles from nowhere.

Everything was being done backwards, they said. Instead of first building a presidential palace why didn’t they spend the money on a new railroad? The steel girders that had to be bought in the States were unloaded at Rio, shipped up to Belo Horizonte on the regular gauge railroad, then transferred to the narrow gauge that took them to Anápolis. In Anápolis they were hoisted onto trucks and driven by road to Brasília. Many materials and even drums of gasoline were flown in by air.

The hotel is all very well, these critics said, but wouldn’t it have been better to put the money into finishing the power plant and dam? Meanwhile electricity was being furnished by something like two hundred separate generators all using
fuel oil or gasoline that had to be shipped seven hundred miles up from the coast.

In the summer of 1958 even people in favor of the transfer of the capital were claiming that time was against the project. The work couldn’t be completed in two years. The dam alone would take three.

On the chosen date Brasília would be inaugurated as the capital in a ceremonial sense, to be sure, but when Dr. Kubitschek’s term as President expired work would stop. His successor would certainly come from some other section of the country. No Brazilian politician liked to complete the work of any other politician. The new President would have other fish to fry. What buildings were already completed would remain as one more monument to the Brazilian mania for grandiose projects too hastily undertaken. Government workers and bureaucrats would continue to warm chairs in their offices in overcrowded Rio and to bask on its beautiful beaches. These sceptics were applying to the Brazilians the old adage that used to be applied to the Turks: always building, seldom finish, and never repair.

No matter how sceptical the Rio people may have been in the summer of 1958 about Brasília, the farmers and ranchers of the region seemed to believe in its future. At the Anápolis sales office for land in the new capital the agent said that although his office had only been open twenty days he had already sold fifty lots. The higher priced parcels went first. All the local business men seemed eager to invest. How many of them would build? Most of them, the agent thought. You got a fifteen per cent discount if you built in six months. At the Novacap office in Brasília the people in charge of sales seemed confident that eventually the sale of land would repay the cost of construction.

Brazilians plunge into real estate speculation with the enthusiasm of oldtime Floridians. The galloping inflation forces anyone who lays his hand on a few cruzeiros to invest the money in a piece of land or a house or a car or a radio rather than to see it lose buying power in a bank account. By the same token banks and corporations are driven continually to reinvest their funds.

Osorio, the young engineer from Belo Horizonte—recently graduated from the University of Miami—who drove us around in his jeep part of the time we were in Brasília, said he was already putting all he could save from his pay into a residential lot. Next he said he was planning to buy himself a piece of land within twenty or thirty miles of the capital and to plant it with eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus would furnish a crop of timber every seven years. Everybody we met around Brasília, except the poor candongos who spent their money on drink and prostitutes down in the free city every payday, was investing in some phase of the enterprise. A sizable population was growing up with a stake in the completion of the city.

The augury most favorable to the success of Brasília lay, so it seemed to us, in the growth of Goiânia, a hundred and forty miles inland. Another invented city. Goiânia was designed a couple of decades ago by an architect named Attilio Lima. The plan was transferred right off the drafting board into the bush. When I was there on my way to visit Sayão’s colônia ten years before the town’s development had seemed completely stalled.

In 1958 we found Goiânia to be a flourishing city of fifty or sixty thousand people with paved treeshaded streets, an effective airport and several hotels, clean restaurants, hot and cold running water, and a great air of bustle and activity. Even streetcleaners. We saw them at work. Suburbs were springing up. The people in the stores looked wellfed and welldressed.
A middleclass city like some small agricultural capital in the North American midwest. No sign of the desperate rural poverty that we still found in the outskirts of Anápolis, even though that much older settlement had developed mightily as a milling and cheesemaking center.

The road to Anápolis to be sure had not been paved but a broad graded thoroughfare had taken the place of the old rutted trail wandering through the wilderness.

People told us that in central Brazil their economy didn’t have the booms of the coffee country but that they didn’t have the slumps either. Their products were upland rice and beans and wheat and cattle, all items in short supply in a nation that still had to import much of its food from abroad. They were independent of the export market. They were feeding Brazilians and getting rich on it. Already they were flying beef to Belém.

To a certain extent Goiás and Mato Grosso seemed to have prospered on the economic misfortunes of the coast. The inflation, the disastrous droughts in the northeasterly bulge, poverty and overcrowding in the coast cities were forcing people to move inland in search of a square meal. Ten years before whole families were on the move on foot and by oxcart out into the agricultural colonies along the western river-valleys of Goiás. Now in 1958 the migration was mostly by truck.
Pau de arara
(parrot’s perches) they called these jouncing trucks. They were true pioneers. They came buoyed up by the certainty that nothing they found in the new settlements could be worse than the poverty they had left behind.

A month before our visit to Brasília there had occurred what the directors of Novacap still spoke of as “the inundation.” Fortyfive hundred people were unloaded from trucks almost overnight into the wilderness. They had heard about the new capital. They believed in Brasília. They wanted to settle there, so they arrived without asking leave of anybody.

The authorities at Novacap had plans drawn up to build what they called “satellite cities” to accommodate the population they knew would be attracted to the scene and to keep their capital city from becoming a rural slum before it was ever completed. They hadn’t expected to need these plans so soon.

“We improvise,” insists Dr. Pinheiro. In a few days they improvised a satellite city which they named Taguatinga.

Taguatinga was about twenty kilometers outside of the city limits of Brasília. To reach it we bounced over a rough road through a scrubby wilderness where an occasional rhea, the broadbilled South American ostrich, still loped among the termite nests. It certainly didn’t look like a country where a man could live off the land.

It was exactly a month after the town’s first settlement. We found hundreds of neat little houses ranged along recently staked out streets where watermains were already being laid. A pumping station had tapped what they claimed was an ample supply of water. Electric light was on its way. A moveable clinic in a whitepainted trailer furnished a firstaid station.

The mayor, a little old man dry and chipper as a cricket, turned out to have been a schoolmate of Dr. Pinheiro’s at Ouro Prêto. He was chosen he told us, because he knew how to get along with working people. He showed us the blueprint of the city in a little office that smelt of raw boards.

Any settler could occupy a ten by thirty meter lot without down payment, but he had to build a house immediately and within a reasonable time to start paying the five hundred cruzeiros monthly which would earn him title in five years. That was less than four dollars according to the exchange of the time. Many of these refugees from the droughtstricken regions of eastern Brazil and from Bahia and from the baked out towns in the backlands of Minas seemed to have brought a little money with them, enough to buy some building materials.
A good many of their houses were brick with tile roofs. Some had one brick wall and the rest of rough boards, to be replaced later, so their owners told us. Perhaps half the settlers lived in shelters of palmettoleaf thatch.

We found an air of cheerful bustle about everybody we met. Everything seemed new and fresh. Most of the people had put up their houses themselves. They were full of hopes and plans. On the main street bars and groceries were springing up. One shack claimed to be a nightclub. A man who said he’d been a stonemason back in Ceará proudly showed off his stock of canned goods and dried fruits and peanuts and a few drums of kerosene. Business wasn’t too bad he said. That very day, so he told us, he’d made the first payment on his lot.

We were shown the parcel of land a French company had bought to set up a factory to make concrete culverts, the place where a brewery was about to move in, a small sawmill, a temporary laundry below the waterpump.

Beside a parked truck a priest was conducting an openair service. Little girls were waving palmfronds and singing. That’s where the church was going to be.

We were introduced to a contractor. His two daughters were schoolteachers. They were going to improvise a school.

There was even a young man from Ceres, who’d moved away because things didn’t move fast enough for him there. He owned a pickup truck. Everybody needed something hauled. He was doing a landoffice business. He was enthusiastic about his prospects. His friend was a housepainter. Everybody wanted something painted; more contracts than he’d ever imagined.

Most of the people worked in Brasília. A bus service was set up to take them back and forth. Their gripe was that the fare was too high. Otherwise they were delighted. They said they liked the upland air and the cool nights and the dry climate. Wages were better than they were accustomed to.
They were convinced that by the time they took title to their lots their land would be worth a great deal more than they paid for it.

When the settlers at Taguatinga spoke about Brasília, about the expense of going back and forth from Brasília, it was as if the city actually existed. For them it was already a metropolis. These immigrants were not worried about the problems of finance and the difficulties of transportation any more than our immigrants were a hundred years ago when they settled the western states. They had sold everything they owned and moved out here in the wilderness hundreds of miles from their homes because they believed in Brasília.

The evening before we went back to Rio we were standing beside Osorio’s jeep in front of a pointed white shrine on the brow of a hill overgrown with scraggly trees and dotted with the red clay nests of the termites. Behind us lay miles of dry silent wilderness. This shrine was the first building they put up, Osorio explained, to commemorate the missionary friar who forecast a future civilization for these central highlands. Dom Bosco’s statue looked out across a broad shadowy valley towards the streaks of dust that hung level in the evening air over the opposite ridge.

A faint roar came to us from the construction work. Draglines, bulldozers, sheepsfoot rollers, graders: earthmoving machines of every type were at work twentyfour hours a day leveling the summit of the long hogback which formed the center of Brazil’s new capital.