Brazil on the Move (17 page)

The floating city has a thriving air that is lacking in dryland Manaus. Motor launches and small steamers crowded
with passengers come and go. Canoes dart back and forth. Afloat you are free from the frustrating heat that acts like a leaden drag on every movement.

Invited for a fishing trip on an official cabin cruiser we rejoice in the coolness of the air over the moving water. The boat makes its own breeze. As he picks his way out through the skiffs and canoes towards the center of the river the man at the wheel points out people scooping up water in buckets. The dwellers on the
flutuantes
get their water from the middle of the river where it is reputed to be cleaner.

The waters of the Rio Negro really are black. The boat skims fast over the smooth lacquer surface. We are trolling with very large spoons on heavy nylon line. We are told that the river fish when they bite come big. This does not turn out to be the day.

There is a great deal to look at as we skirt the shore opposite the city. It is a day of blue sky and a thousand pale lavender-shadowed white blobs of cloud. The greens of the trees which stand kneedeep out of the dark water are incredibly varied. Palms of different shapes sprout out at all sorts of angles. There are misty thickets of bamboo and huge broad-leaved arboreal monsters and spindly saplings with fine pale-green foliage. One of the characteristics of the Amazon forest is the fantastic number of different species to be found in any patch of woodland. You hardly see the same tree twice.

From reeds and floating islands and fallen logs, herons rise, kingfishers, ducks of all sorts. The colors of a butterfly will catch the sun as it flutters out from the forest shadows. A clearing, banana leaves swaying in the wind, tall papayas lifting their clusters of green fruit above the everpresent underbrush of manioc will announce a dwelling, sometimes a shack of boards with a roof of rough shingles, but more often a mere
shelter of poles thatched with palm. Always there’s a canoe. This is a population that lives by the river.

We leave the main stream of the river and plough through a network of narrow canals known as
igarapés
. Though there are differences in the style of boatbuilding and in the shape of their paddles, the people we pass are remarkably like the people we saw in riverside settlements a thousand miles upstream. There is a definite Amazonian type.

Here, if anything, the people seem poorer. Clothes are more ragged, children more naked, utensils more scanty. Sitting on top of the cabin as the boat chugs through the narrow watercourses is almost like visiting the people in their houses. Each house is open to inspection as the boat glides by. It is a life of total poverty; still the people have an independent air. Each house has its own canoes. The better off have outboards, fishnets hung to dry.

Longeared zebu cattle and waterbuffalo wade in distant drowned pastures. Through the more traveled igarapés steamboats ply, headed for distant settlements, towing behind them congeries of various craft. Cargoes are hidden from the sun by layers of large leaves.

In the pondlike head of one inlet, set around with big globular trees that give the effect of willows, we haul in our lines and ask a fisherman why we are not catching any fish.

High water, he answers immediately. The fish are feeding far inland in places where a boat like ours can never penetrate.

He is a tobaccocolored man with a wrinkled face and a long sharp nose jutting out from under the brim of his straw hat. He has a small neat canoe and a wellmade paddle. He paddles in the bow. Within easy reach he has a casting net, a couple of fishspears and a bow with long arrows. Beside them lie some coiled fishing lines and an antique shotgun. He controls his dugout canoe with hardly an effort of the arm.

Where is he going? “Fishing,” he says, with a flash of his
eye, “or perhaps to hunt.” He spins the canoe around and heads for a narrow watercourse much too small for our big lumbering motor cruiser. With the air of being monarch of all he surveys he disappears among the trees.

We double back through another narrow passage. We skirt rough wharves and settlements. We explore vast lakelike stretches of water bordering on the Rio Solimoes where gulls circle as over the ocean. Suddenly we are speeding out from a point of land into the junction of two streams. The man at the wheel follows a foamy path of spinning eddies that stretches like a seam between the rivers. On one side is the buffcolored flood of the Solimoes, on the other the dense black flood of the Rio Negro. For a long distance the two waters churn together without mixing. The cruiser staggers from the force of the eddies.

“See,” cries the man at the wheel, “they don’t want to mix …” As he brings the cruiser around in a wide circle he gives a sweep of his hand to point out the wilderness of wide waters which dwarfs the receding forested banks as they melt into the horizon, “but when they mix they form the Amazon.”

You drive out to the airport in the steaming dark over the rackety cobbles of Manaus: you step into a jet plane and in four hours and a half you are in Brasília. It is the greatest contrast imaginable. Manaus is as redolent of the nineteenth century as a story by Jules Verne. The air is dense with green exhalations of the rainforest. Brasília is an arid red. The sun is hot but the air has a cool upland tang. The glimpses, as the plane banks for a landing, of glass and concrete constructions spread like an unfinished world’s fair along the red ridge, between the two arms of the lake, are desperately contemporary. You are reminded of the story that’s going the rounds about how a visiting Russian astronaut cried out on landing in Brasília: “I hadn’t expected to reach Mars so soon.”

In New York Brazilians told us: You mustn’t go to the hotel that was new four years ago. You must go to the new hotel. We found the new new hotel, though of course many floors were still unfinished, to be remarkably pleasant, with its big kidneyshaped swimming pool in the sunny central court, which was flanked by a firstrate restaurant. Under the same management as the Jaraguá in São Paulo it is probably one of the best in South America.

The Nacional stands on a rise overlooking the central bus station where the arterial roads that form the city’s backbone—the fuselage of Lucio Costa’s jet plane—converge through cloverleaves into the roads that serve the wings. From the front door you look out across a rubbly hillside which will someday be Lucio Costa’s modern Montmartre, past large Park Avenue type office buildings occupied by banks and insurance companies, down what corresponds to the mall in Washington, D.C. towards the shining tileshaped twin skyscrapers of the congressional offices. The confusing pile of masonry beyond the bus station will eventually become the white marble pyramid which will house Niemeyer’s interlocking theaters.

To get from the hotel to the bus station on foot is a scramble. If paths for pedestrians were included in the plans, they haven’t been built yet. There are of course no traffic lights. You have to wait for a lull and lope across the broad curving roadways as best you can. Many a pedestrian, so people tell us, has already lost his life on his way to the bus station.

When you finally reach the platform you can walk around in safety. Shining new Mercedes-Benz buses, produced in São Paulo, come in from all directions: Belo Horizonte, Anápolis, Ceres, Goiânia. Escalators take you to the upper levels. There are small stores, newsstands, snackbars, and coffee bars. The place has a cheerful practical look, except that the smooth-finished white concrete of the underpasses is already stained by the pervasive red dust.

There’s no way to see the town without a car. In Brasília a man without a car is a secondclass citizen. The poorer inhabitants will have to grow wheels instead of feet.

The two buildings that flank the Congress Square, the Palacio do Planalto for the executive departments, and the Supreme Court building, are oblongs of transparent glass, each shaded by a broad slab of concrete supported by delicate white buttresscolumns. To my way of thinking they are among Niemeyer’s
best. Suited to the climate and the landscape. Fine examples of his paper cutout style. So are the odd little presidential chapel (which according to some irreverent people looks more like a urinal than a house of worship) and the charmingly simple Church of Our Lady of Fátima.

The congress building itself seems to me to be a conspicuous failure. The interior is cramped and illplanned for its purpose. There is a frivolous ugliness about the exterior hard to explain in a designer with such great talent for sculptural effects. Jefferson used to call architecture the most important of the arts “because it showed so much.” Possibly the design of the congress hall expresses the faithful Communist’s scorn for representative democracy.

Niemeyer’s cathedral, an enormous coronet of stressed concrete, remains unfinished. The design calls for glass to fill in the spaces between the soaring piers. It is impressive as it is. One wonders whether it should ever be finished.

Though the long horizontals of the apartment buildings suit the city plan better than the occasional outbreak of New York style skyscrapers, the routine monotony of their design becomes depressing. The apartments themselves, seen from the inside, show little interest on the part of the designers for the needs of the people who have to live in them. The rows of identical concrete hutches for lower income renters express, even more perfectly than some federal housing in the United States, the twentieth century bureaucrat’s disdain of the faceless multitudes to whose interests he is supposed to be devoted and whose exploitation furnishes his keep. The worst shack in the adjacent shantytowns of Cidade Livre or Taguatinga would be a better place to live.

Still, even after canvassing all the objections, you have to admit that the designers of Brasília have created a magnificent frame for a future city. The long straight thoroughfares, the vast open spaces between low white buildings are exhilarating. It’s a city for the automotive age, for the age of jets
and helicopters. Its vast spaces match the vast smooth arid ridges of the landscape of the planalto.

The lake greatly enhances the effect of the city and of the landscape. It is blue. I was afraid it would turn out muddy. It reflects the desert clouds and the gaudy sunsets and the bright firmament of the upland nights. There’s a yachtclub and sailboats. We saw people fishing in it. Competent engineers after my last visit had told me so much about the possibility of seepage through the earth dam, that I had ceased to believe in the lake, but there it is, and protected from pollution by what looks to a layman like a thoroughly adequate sewage disposal plant.

Already signs are appearing of a post-Niemeyer architecture. The University of Brasília, which was only started some eight months back, is already conducting classes amid the hammering of carpenters and the dust of construction. Students on their way to lectures step over candongos laying tiled floors. The one building that’s almost finished, named Os Dois Candongos for two bricklayers who were killed in its construction, offers a series of wellproportioned whitewalled halls, some lit from above and some from the side, which open on patios landscaped with specimens of the native vegetation of the planalto. It’s all in human scale. A skillful balance—important under that glary sky—seems to have been struck between too little and too much light in the classrooms.

Courses in law, administration, humanities, Portuguese literature are already functioning. There is a school of architecture headed by Alcides da Rocha Miranda who designed the buildings we walked through. The curriculum so we were told is modeled on that of North American universities, and there is considerable emphasis, unusual in Brazil, on night school and extension courses for boys and girls who have to work to support themselves. The homey dormitory in frame and plaster with Japanese style woodwork balconies is a pleasure to look at after so much glass and concrete.

In the cafeteria there some of the teachers fed us one of the best
feijoadas
I ever ate. Feijoada is the Boston baked beans of Brazil and oddly enough also tends to appear on Saturdays. If the instruction proves as good as the cookery the University of Brasília should go far.

The Japanese, by the way, have added greatly to the variety of the architecture of Brasília by the daintily proportioned chancellery they have put up on their embassy lot. Our State Department, too, has done well with its chancellery. The courtyard is unusually attractive. There, and, in some of the suburban houses across the lake, you can see some intimation of the appearance of a Brasília style, suited to the light and to the climate and to the needs of the human beings who are going to inhabit the city.

When Oscar Niemeyer put up a residence to live in himself, way out of town near the country club, he built himself an oblong house with a tile roof and tall windows in the simple Brazilian colonial style which, in the first giddy enthusiasm for Le Corbusier’s glass and steel, used to be considered hopelessly outmoded. People tell you he only built it to please his wife, but there it is.

Brasília is hungry for green. In areas laid out for parks and squares you see expanses of driedup turf, dead saplings, shriveled shrubberies testifying to the unsuccessful efforts of some municipal gardener. Not even palms seem to be doing well. Vegetation has a look of struggling not only against drought but against some peculiar quality in the soil.

Four years before we had seen the grim faces of a Japanese family trying, in what looked like a tolerable piece of bottomland, to grow truck crops. Even their hardiest vegetables, like cabbage and squash, had a sickly look. If the Japanese can’t grow vegetables on a piece of land, there is something wrong.

After considerable asking around we were introduced to a gentleman from Paraná. He had emigrated to Brazil from Germany thirtyseven years before. He started as an interpreter with the federal Department of Agriculture, became a Brazilian citizen, and now owned land in Paraná where he did well, so he said, with the sale of timber. He also raised coffee and longstaple cotton. He was in Brasília to set up a tourist agency. With his help we found the agricultural experiment station at Sucupira.