Brazil on the Move (25 page)

A gentleman from the state government appears to take me to the guesthouse. Brazilian friends in Rio have arranged for the governor to take me along on a tour of the state starting tomorrow. I say goodby to my American escorts.

Aluísio Alves, a man of thirtynine who is present governor of Rio Grande do Norte, is, so it has been explained to me, one of the young men with a passion for social service who represent a new breed of Brazilian politician. It is this new
breed of politician that will give the Communists a hard time.

He was born in Angicos, a little hamlet in the longstaple cotton region in the center of the state. He studied in Natal and took his law degree at the University of Alagoas in Maceió, an ancient city on the coast a hundred or so miles south of Recife. At twentyone, while still a student, he was elected federal deputy, one of the youngest on record. In Rio he became national secretary of the Democratic Union and a friend of Carlos Lacerda’s. Along with Lacerda he was one of the founders of the
Tribuna da Imprensa
which he edited during Lacerda’s exile. Since then there have been political differences between the two, particularly since Alves was elected governor of his home state in 1960 with Social Democrat backing.

On the way to the guesthouse I got the notion that—although possibly for political reasons the Alves administration was keeping Americans at arm’s length—the American troops had left not too unpleasant memories behind them in Natal.

At the guesthouse I was ushered into a princely pink bedroom hung with mirrors and festooned with plush that looked out through shuttered windows on a garden on one side and an airy terrace on the other. In Brazil it’s always a feast or a famine. The shower in the bathroom not only worked, but the water was hot. A shower was a godsend after all that dust. We’d arrived with half the state of Paraíba caked on our necks. I lunched in solitary splendor at a great oval table set as if for a state banquet.

Afterwards I was driven to the seat of government which the present incumbent has renamed Palacio da Esperanza (the Palace of Hope). Governor Alves is a showman. From the beginning of his campaign for the governorship he has used the green flag of hope as a trademark.

A green flag fluttered over the building and the official cars parked outside had green flags. Aluísio Alves makes a great play for the young. The government palace was as full of
teenagers as Washington, D.C. during the Easter vacation. The central stairway swarmed with boys and girls. They chattered in the anterooms. There were so many youthful committees packed into the governor’s office that you could hardly see his desk.

Aluísio Alves has, like so many Brazilians, the knack of looking younger than he is. He is a slender man with sunken cheeks. Except for his harassed air of a man in the middle of a political campaign he looks almost as youthful as the highschool kids all about him.

He has a brusque decisive manner. His Portuguese is so clear and sharp I can understand every word. In a flash he arranges an appointment with Bishop Sales whom I have asked to see. He tells off a young man from his secretariat to see that I get to the afternoon’s
comicio
. He himself is up to his neck in appointments. He explains that he is not up for election. He is campaigning for a favorable legislature. His term has three more years to run.

José Augusto who has been detailed as my guide is a student of law. Right in Natal he’s learned fluent English. He’s too young to have learned it from the Americans. He’s so younglooking I don’t like to ask his age. He has plans for the diplomatic service. Itamarití. No, his secretarial work doesn’t interfere with his studies. It is good practice. He’d like to go to the States, to perfect his English and to see. He almost got a fellowship but something went wrong. The man who was backing him died. He wishes it could be this year. Next year will be too late. He’ll be training for the foreign service. Already he has the suave diplomat’s manner, but under it you feel a somewhat steely personality. I’d bet that young man will go far.

The meeting was interesting. An enormous crowd packed a Y-shaped intersection of streets. Green bunting, signs, posters, campaign mottoes. Rockets sizzle up from the outskirts of the crowd to go bang overhead in the rosy sky of the swift twilight.
Bats—or were they some kind of nighthawk?—flitter overhead. Night comes on fast.

The governor is giving account of his administration. He talks in front of a floodlit screen. When he needs to explain a point of finance he has the figures thrown on the screen from a slide. He’s explaining his budget to the public. He has a clear sharp way of putting things. While he does occasionally pull out the organ notes of the professional orator his story hangs together; the public servant accounting to his constituents.

Brazilian comicios, particularly in this mad campaign of ’62, never end. José Augusto says it’s time to dine. Gradually the chauffeur manages to back his car out of the crowd.

A full moon has risen above the Atlantic. Natal rises from the sea in ranks of stucco cubes, theatrically lit by the streetlights against a background of high black headlands. It is really beautiful in the moonlight. We eat at the aviation officers club, on a terrace overlooking an inlet. The place has the look of having been built by the Americans twenty years back. We are absolutely alone there except for a solitary figure at the bar inside.

The waiter produces elegantly broiled slices of a large fish I don’t catch the name of. Lime and Bacardi. (Exiled from Cuba, Bacardi rum is now produced in Recife.) After the long drive and the dust and the crowded governor’s palace and the jampacked comicio the stillness is delicious, the emptiness, the moonlit water.

The figure at the bar turns out to be a local poet. He’s been at the bar a long time. He weaves down the terrace to greet us. He hovers around the table. Talking, gesticulating, expostulating, there seem to be three or four of him. I get the feeling the place is crowded. He shows an amazing knowledge of North American writing. He loves Sherwood Anderson:
Poor White, Winesburg, Ohio
 …

Poor Sherwood, I’m thinking, so many years dead. How he would have enjoyed this scene. The unfamiliar inlet between mysterious hills in the moonlight. The empty terrace, the puzzled waiter; José Augusto, who’s a proper young man, explaining apologetically that the gentleman really is a very good poet … How Sherwood Anderson would have enjoyed the scene and the drunken poet praising him.

We had to tear ourselves away in a hurry. My appointment with Bishop Sales was at nine and it suddenly transpired that his episcopal residence was not in Natal, but in a fishing village called Ponta Negra, fourteen kilometers away. Our suggestion to the chauffeur that we mustn’t keep the bishop waiting, caused him to tear off at such speed through the complicated moonlit streets of Natal and along a narrow bumpy road that skirted a great moonwashed beach that I really thought he’d be the end of us. It was only when I explained to him that it was not extreme unction I was seeking from the bishop but an interview, that he saw the point and slowed down.

Bishop Sales has a dark eager aquiline countenance with just a touch of Savonarola. His spare frame has a vigorous athletic look under the black cassock. He sits on a small hard chair in his bare little office, talking with his legs crossed in a rather unecclesiastical manner.

His program to combat Communism, he says right away, is only one of a dozen programs in various parts of Brazil. It is not a program of religious propaganda, he insists. He wants to awaken a sense of human dignity and of the duties of citizenship in a democracy.

In furtherance of this general aim, he conducts courses in reading and writing: alphabetization, he calls it, over the radio.

He wants a Christian labor movement that will be independent of politicians and Communists and also of employer
influences. He wants trade unions that will really stand up for the rights and dignity of labor.

Like Aluísio Alves his appeal is to the teenagers. Every week he invites a group of young people from interior towns and villages to spend three days at Ponta Negra for an indoctrination course. He furnishes them with small batterypowered radios to take home so that they can tune in on the lessons and lectures he broadcasts every day: alphabetization, hygiene, sanitation, simple information that people need in the back country. The young people tune in and explain the lessons to their parents.

He takes me into the next room, where a group of boys and girls, some of them so young they must still be in grade school, are peering at sentences written on a blackboard. Their faces shine when he addresses them. They are having fun, like boy or girl scouts in the States.

“See how they enjoy it,” he says eagerly when we go back to his office. He pours me a glass of coconut water.

“Communist propaganda succeeds,” he says, “because nobody has shown enough interest to talk to the people first. You see how they light up. They know I am interested in them.”

He went on to lament the fact that many great Brazilian capitalists were so shortsighted—out of a mistaken nationalism perhaps—as to back Communist agitators. He regretted too that the U. S. State Department wouldn’t subsidize any of the church programs for promoting the democratic faith. He needed all the help he could get. There was so much to be done.

The chauffeur drove us back to town at a snail’s pace when I told him I wanted to enjoy the sight of the beach and the rocky coast in the moonlight. The enormous bed at the government guesthouse couldn’t have been more comfortable. It had been a long day.

José Augusto and I joined the governor’s caravan in the early morning at a flourishing sugar plantation near Ceará Mirim some miles inland from Natal. The refinery was working. Smoke rose from its tall yellowbrick chimney. A wonderful little toy locomotive with a funnelshaped stack was shunting in little cars full of cane. The sort of little locomotive you want to wrap up and take home.

Under the trees opposite, on a knoll that stood up out of a glaucous ocean of cane that stretched to the horizon, cars were stacked every which way against a big comfortable house.

We found the party at breakfast. The dining room looked like a Marriage at Cana by one of the more animated Venetians. A variety of people ate, talked, argued, gesticulated about a long table that groaned with dishes of fried eggs and plates of ham and patties of manioc flour, all stacked about a row of stately poundcakes down the middle. At one end the blond hostess was pouring out oceans of coffee and hot milk. At the other sat the large monsignor, his cassock enlivened by a little red piping, who was the candidate for Lieutenant-Governor. Maids rushed in and out with plates and cups. New arrivals greeted each other with abraços. Precinct workers slid in and out with messages.

Outside, the geese in the courtyard kept up an uneasy hissing, ducks quacked from a pool, children romped, drivers raced the motors of their cars. Bem-ti-vís piped in the trees overhead.

Eventually the governor emerged from a conference in a back room. People were loaded into cars, handbags were stowed away. Aluísio Alves, a green handkerchief in his hand, took his place in the first car and we were off across the countryside. In the first village there was a new school and
a new well to be inaugurated. The children had green scarves and danced up and down chanting: “Aluísio, Aluísio.” The teachers and authorities stood beaming in the sun. On the edge of the crowd boys set off rockets.

And so on, village by village, new schools, water systems, public privies, speeches, singing school children, green bunting that lashed about in the seabreeze, until, at a palm-thatched fisherman’s hamlet near Cape São Roque we changed to jeeps for a run along the coast.

Cruising in a jeep over the white beaches and the tawny dunes was terrific. It was almost like being on skis. We skimmed round the edges of dunes, past endless variations of surf on shining sand, on rocky ledges; and blue sea and green shallows and japanesy little villages under coconut palms with canoes and jangadas ranked on the beach in front of them.

This coast north of Natal is very beautiful but dreadfully poor. Fish are scarce. The only reliable income comes from crawfish which abound under the reefs and ledges. Only now with new roads opening up is it profitable to market them. Schemes are in the works to set up refrigerating equipment so as to ship out the lobstertails for which the demand in the world market seems endless.

At each village the governor visits the school. There’s a little parade through the sandy streets with the local authorities and precinct workers, and a speech, songs, cheers, flower-petals scattered like confetti over the governor’s head, rockets and cherry bombs. The governor tells of his unsuccessful efforts to get equipment from the federal government for schools and clinics, for road building, for water systems. (Actually he’s working with the Alliance for Progress but he doesn’t make a point of it.) He points to the new public privy or the deep well or the school he’s built or repaired. Some schools have gone without even having the walls cleaned since the administration of Washingtón Luíz more
than thirty years ago. He tells how much there is to do. He makes a touching personal appeal. “If you are satisfied vote for the men who will help me; if not, vote against me.”

We turned inland at a place on a clear palmfringed river called Rio do Fôgo. In a patch of richer appearing country with little plantations of papaya and manioc and banana we ate lunch at a long table in the breezeway of a wellkept schoolhouse in the midst of a great crowd of bystanders. The children and old men and women watched every mouthful. The staple here seems to be tapioca instead of rice. All along this coast they bring you green coconut water to drink, a delight because the sun is hot and the dust parching.

During the afternoon, having changed back to the cars that had come through back roads to meet us we drove through some of the most depressing inland country I had ever seen. Agave grown for fiber was the main crop. Often there was no other vegetation. The plantations were indicated by rows of dreary hovels with fiber in heaps beside them. Men, women, and children had a drab and dusty look.