Brazil on the Move (7 page)

“We Brazilians,” the younger man burst out, “are a people of noble impulses. We hate war and militarism. We believe in progress. We are a people of grandiose illusions. That is why the Communist movement here is like your Mr. Wallace’s party in the States. It flourishes in the best society. Many fine people in all walks of life have allowed themselves to be deceived because no one has offered them a better plan.”

“Then,” said the older man, “there is envy in every human heart. You are rich and we are poor. The Communists play on the envy of the poor for the rich. The cure is a great movement of expansion that will furnish us with new illusions.”

He looked at his watch. His voice suddenly took on the
plush tones of a master of protocol. “It is time to go. His Excellency will be expecting us to make a short call at the palace.”

Next morning the governor’s airplane deposits my young literary friend, the local circuit judge, and me on an airstrip which they tell me is almost exactly in the center of Brazil. As the plane takes off again in a drive of dust we feel small and lonely under the enormous sky.

We are standing beside a new gravel road that stretches straight into the dusty distance in either direction. Behind us is the ragged airstrip and in front of us a line of great trees that hides the river, and all around a rolling country of high scrub vegetation shimmering in the heat.

The sun, already high, beats down on us hard as hail so we take cover under the porch of a long hut thatched with palm leaves. Inside we find a counter and some shelves of groceries and a pale sweatylooking heavyset man with a week’s growth of stubble on his chin. Immediately we are all drinking
cafezinhos
out of the inevitable tiny white cups.

First thing I ask, “Is Bernardo Sayão at the Colônia Agrícola?”

“He is,” says the pale man enthusiastically. Then he explains that we still have three leagues to go. We must be patient. They will have seen the plane and will send out for us from the colônia. Sayão always sends out for people, Sayão attends to everything.

The pale man turns out to be a Russian, from the Ukraine. He has lived twentyone years in Brazil. He made big money in São Paulo as a machinist, but when he heard about the colony and the road into the north he’d moved out here. He steps in back behind a bamboo partition and brings out a diving helmet. Gold, he says, rolling his bloodshot gray eyes;
he dove in the rivers for gold. Was he making money at it? One eye crinkles up like a parrot’s and his face takes on that sly look of the peasant on the steppe. He doesn’t answer but he holds up his thumb and forefinger and rubs them together vigorously.

Before we know what has happened we are adrift in a tumultuous argument about the Soviet Union. The pale man insists that Russia behaves as she does because she is ringed by treacherous enemies. England and America have always been her enemies. My literary friend from Goiânia brings up the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The Brazilian judge, a small brown sparrowlike man with tortoiseshell glasses, perks up and asks if the Russians did right to partition Poland. In 1918 the imperialist nations fought Russia, the pale man shouts back, fingering his diving helmet in a threatening way as if about to use it for a weapon. We lean across the counter and roar at him.

Meanwhile an audience is gathering, an aged scarecrow with a face of stained leather puckered on one side by some sort of ulcer, a soiled barelegged boy with a cast in his eye, a dog, two hens and a rooster. A pig sticks his snout in through a rent in the bamboo wall. Two tiny yellowfaced children peek in beside him.

We are all sweating like horses. The pale man tears the shirt off his damp chest in an agony of conviction. It is all lies we are telling about the Soviet Union. Then he lays his thick forefinger along his nose and crinkles up his eye with that sly look again and says, “In all this there is a mystery … There is a very secret mystery. It is true that there is no liberty now but the secret of Russia is liberty in the future.”

“Look here,” the judge asks him, “if you are such an admirer of the Soviet Union how is it you’ve been spending all these years in Brazil looking for gold like a capitalist?”

Suddenly the pale man smiles all over his face. He slaps his wet chest. He has a friend in São Paulo, he drawls, who is a
doctor and writes very brilliant articles against alcoholism. This doctor wrote a whole book against alcoholism but whenever his friends meet this doctor he is in a bar buying himself a drink. The pale man thrusts out his hand laughing. He shakes hands all around then he brings out another set of cafezinhos on the house.

The cloud of dust that has been coming towards us down the road turns out to contain a bus, a junglestained paleblue bus bulging with passengers and packages. The bus stops in front of the palmthatched hut. A few grimy passengers straggle out to have themselves a coffee. The bus is on its way to the colônia. We are fitted in among dogs and bundles and crates of fowls and the bus starts off grinding and lurching on its slow way through the shabby dryseason jungle. After a while we begin to pass clearings where huge stumps and the skeletons of felled trees still smolder from the burning over; then thatched shelters, a few half finished houses of brick. In front of the first tileroofed houses we see a wattled cage that someone explains is a wolf trap.

We drive downhill through a broad street of low houses which are mostly stores. A crazy bamboo shack has a sign,
CAFÉ CERES
. We pass a billiard parlor. We cross a green river on a floating bridge supported on clusters of oil drums lashed together. The Rio das Almas. Everybody points out a small white house on top of a grassy hill. That is where Sayão lives.

We are deposited in front of a set of new brick walls which are marked
GRANDE HOTEL CERES
. We pick our way past the bricklayers, stepping over planking heaped with fresh mortar, and find that the diningroom and a few small alcoves have been completed. The hotel is open for business. The landlady greets us and briskly straightens up a table for our lunch. She speaks English. She comes from the northern part of Bohemia, she says. Oh yes she’d been in the colônia a long time, almost a year.

The place to wash is outside in the yard, two enameled basins on a soapy board and a gasoline can full of water. The tall unshaven man who is washing his face with a great deal of snorting and sputtering turns out to be a Syrian merchant who sells textiles. Yes business is good, good, good. When we settle down to eat I ask the landlady where Sayão is to be found. She shakes her head. He is a hard man to put your finger on. Never stays in one place. She will send a boy over with a message.

“He is not here. Dr. Sayão has gone to Rio,” says a young lighthaired woman, nicely dressed as if for shopping in the city, who walks into the diningroom speaking dogmatic English. She sits down beside us. She comes from Vienna. She has an apartment in Rio. Her husband is a Hungarian. They are settling. If she likes it she will give up her apartment in Rio. If we want to learn about the colónia we must stay many days because it is very interesting. We must come to see her new house. Eventually Dr. Sayão will return.

The rosy young couple who walked in while we were talking turned out to be Swiss. He was an agronomist under contract to the Brazilian Government. Did they know anything about the whereabouts of Dr. Sayão? Oh no they didn’t know anything yet. They had just arrived. Dr. Sayão had fixed them up with a house. They had gotten married and had come to Brazil. They both had blue eyes and light curly hair, and fresh pink and white complexions. Their clothes looked crisp and clean. They walked out hand in hand looking into the jungle with shining eyes.

After we’d eaten the usual meal of rice and beans and meat we strolled around the village of Ceres. The highway cut through the bottom of a wide valley cleared halfway up the hillsides. In every direction among the treestumps straggled clumps of unfinished brick houses. Everywhere bricklayers were working, framing was going up. You caught glimpses
against the sky of the bare brown backs of men setting the tiles on the roofs. That heap of bricks was going to be a moving picture theater; that one was going to be a bank. Here and there a little house already finished in white stucco with painted shutters stood out bright and neat. On all the hills around the great scraggly trees of the ruined jungle crowded rank on rank against the edges of the clearings.

We kept asking for Sayão. “He can’t be far,” people would smile and say.

Everybody was out that afternoon. The American Franciscans who had a little house beside the unfinished church were away on a mission. The young American who ran a brick kiln beside the highway in the middle of town had gone into Anápolis. The Americans who had set up the sawmill down by the river were off in São Paulo.

At Sayão’s office, in the barracks next to the machine shop that kept his roadbuilding machinery in order, we tried to get a skinny young engineer to explain some of the workings of the colony to us but he begged off saying that Sayão would explain it so much better when he came.

Where the devil was Dr. Sayão?

One man pointed north, another pointed south. Out on the road at work. How could one tell?

A stocky little man, with long blond eartabs combed down from under a pith helmet, drove up in a jeep while we were talking. He spoke with authority. Sayão was in Amaro Leite. That meant sour milk. It was a town, a sort of a town. In the north, far in the north. He would be back this afternoon, he announced.
E certo
. How far was Amaro Leite? The stocky man spread out his arms.
Uma infinidade de leguas
 … An infinity of leagues.

While we waited the judge and I went walking along the river. “This I suppose will be the principal
avenida
,” he was saying as we stumbled past wandering trucks through the
deep dust. “They shouldn’t cut down those trees. That should be the public garden right along the river.”

All at once he was seized with a fury of cityplanning. He pointed here and there among the charred stumps, indicating parks and public buildings. I began to see columns sprouting among the trees, monuments to national heroes, bronze generals on horseback. The little judge’s chest swelled.

We started across the floating bridge. The sun had set behind forested hills. In the hurried twilight of the tropics a slight coolness rose from the swift mustardgreen water.

“Soon there’ll be a new bridge,” said the judge proudly and pointed to the unfinished cement piers on the riverbank.

At the end of the bridge we met a very tall slender young man with fine sharpcut features and almost black skin. He wore the usual ragged workclothes. He grabbed the judge’s hand and smiled with all his broken teeth. The judge asked him how he was doing, was he married yet, were there any pretty girls in the colônia? The young man talked fast and smiled some more and grabbed the lobe of his left ear with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. That gesture meant O.K. He shook our hands again.

When we walked on the judge explained that this young fellow had been janitor at the courthouse in Goiãnia. He’d been starving to death there on eight hundred cruzeiros a month. Now he was making fortyfive a day laying bricks. “The man is happy.”

By the time we get back to the Grande Hotel Ceres it is so dark we have a hard time finding it. No word from Sayão. The dining room is jammed with men eating by the light of two lanterns and a candle. There are bearded men in hunting jackets who look like prospectors, there are salesmen and surveyors and engineers working on the road and the new bridge. Everybody is eating fast and talking fast. The dim light glints in eager eyes, on sweating cheekbones. When I grope my
way out to the waterbucket to wash my face by the light of the lantern I see that the man ahead of me, a bullnecked character with a strawcolored beard, wears a large pearl earring in one ear. The night is already cool. From somewhere comes a smell of cape jessamine. Down in the dark valley an accordion is playing and a voice is singing a samba.

We are up at daylight standing around outside the office beside the repairshop in the valley with the construction foreman. There are bulldozers and road patrols. The place looks like a construction camp in the States. “No, he’s not back yet.”

“Yes he is,” says the young man from São Paulo. “He got in from Amaro Leite at half past one … He’ll be along any minute.”

“Isn’t it early?”

“He never gets tired. He sleeps while he drives.”

The man with the helmet and the yellow eartabs drives up in his jeep. “He’s back,” he says in an excited tone. “His stomach is a little upset … He has a slight fever.” The men crowd around the jeep with a look of concern on their faces. “But that is nothing … For Sayão that is nothing.”

A battered sedan drives up. There’s a pretty girl on the front seat. The freshfaced man in khaki shirtsleeves behind the wheel seems hardly much older. As he steps to the ground we can see that he is a broadshouldered sixfooter. He shows even white teeth in a smile as he walks towards us. His step has a vigorous spring to it. He is older than he looked at a distance. There are thoughtful crowsfeet round his eyes. In fact the pretty girl is his daughter.

“Sayão, at your service,” he says.

He rubs his hand over his rough chin and mutters apologetically that the barber is looking for him. He ate some
beans and manioc flour in Amaro Leite that didn’t set well. He isn’t quite up to scratch this morning. He’ll be all right. Let’s go. He waves us into the back seat of the sedan and introduces the pretty girl as his eldest. Her father ought not to be out, she starts to tell us in remarkably good English, but she long ago gave up trying to do anything with him. He is incorrigible.

Sayão is talking to his men. He addresses a few words directly to each man in a pleasant offhand leisurely tone. Now and then he taps a man on the arm or lets a hand slide along his shoulders. When he turns towards us to step into the driver’s seat we can see that he is a great deal older than he seemed at first glance. A man in his late forties. His eyes are a little bloodshot from the night driving yesterday. He swings the car around carelessly and drives down the highway. As he drives he leans back over the seat to tell us about the colônia.