Brazil on the Move (18 page)

The Brazilian agronomist in charge immediately cried out that he’d lost his Americans. The place had been set up under Point Four. He’d had a Texan, a Virginian, a Californian, and a man from Minnesota. He couldn’t speak too highly of their work. He missed them as friends. When the Point Four money ran out they’d had to pack up and go home.

When the tug of war between the Brazilian congress and President Goulart was resolved so that the federal government got moving again, he hoped to secure Brazilian funds through the Ministry for Agriculture. Now everything was at a standstill. His tractors and mowers were all American. He needed parts. But the first thing he’d do, he said, was to get his American agronomists back. They had promised to come.

He drove us around the fields they had planted in various grasses on terraced hillsides. Some were local and some imported. Many of them looked flourishing. He said that by planting the proper grasses there were plenty of places in the outskirts of Brasília where you could graze cattle successfully. The soils of the planalto, he claimed, had the chemical nutrients needed for agriculture. Only they were locked up. In the States we could use lime to unlock our soils. Here the formula would have to be different but it was known. Technically the problem was solved. It was a question of funds.

Driving back we passed a cutting for the railroad. I said I’d been told the railroad line had been abandoned. It seemed
a pity. Quite the contrary, said our friend from Paraná. There were only twelve more kilometers of track left to lay of a broad gauge line all the way from Belo Horizonte. Freight-service would start by the end of the year. Passengers would continue to use buses and planes.

When he deposited us back at the hotel he showed us what he had in his pockets. Cloth bags full of topazes and aquamarine. He’d been to Cristalina, only a short trip off the main road to Belo Horizonte. Of course there was the cost of cutting them, but in Cristalina you could pick topazes up off the street. His eyes sparkled like the gems. That was Brazil.

One of the pleasantest things about this last visit to Brasília was to be driven around by Dr. Israél. Four years before we had seen him at work managing Novacap. He’d been the city’s first
prefeito
, but now after five years of intense administrative effort, he had been retired by the Goulart administration. Brasília had become his whole life. He couldn’t move away. He lived in the residential suburb across the lake. He must have gotten special soil somewhere. His garden was flourishing. He showed us roses in bloom.

We drove through immense bare expanses of parts of the city that were not even planned yet and around the lake shore to the dam and down to the hydroelectric plant by the waterfall below it. Young Germans from Siemens were putting through the last tests on the two freshly installed generators. There was room for one more when it was needed. Light and power in three weeks, they promised Dr. Israél. He grinned his longtoothed grin and slapped them on the back.

“You see … They said we’d have no lake. They said we’d have no power.”

He took us to see the frame building at the highest point
of the surrounding country where he and President Kubitschek had their quarters in the early days. The place was already a public park and picnic ground, presided over by a new bronze statue of the former president.

You could still see the outlines of the old fazenda which had been the only inhabited spot when the city planners first arrived. The great gushing spring of clear water was still there in the gully among the tall trees but now it was enclosed in a wire fence to keep the picnickers at the park from straying into the adjacent grounds. The country club had taken over the fazenda’s magnificent grove of mangoes for its own private picnickings. Four years before we looked out from under the great dark trees on an incredibly vast prospect of bare hills occupied only by termites and rheas, the odd longlegged wolves and the striped cats of the region. Now the hills were scarred with roads. There were crosshatchings of suburban constructions. Scraps of the city’s skyline jutted up into the horizon.

It was a nostalgic expedition. Dr. Israél showed us the entrance to the beautiful house beside a small waterfall tumbling into a natural rock basin which he’d occupied as prefeito. The new prefeito lived there now. In the old days the place had been known by Dr. Israél’s initials: I.P. The new administration made out that it was named after a yellowflowered tree that grows along the watercourses, called in those parts the
ipé
.

One of the inconveniences of life in Brasília in the summer of 1962 was that the light and power almost inevitably would fail just about seven every evening. Some said it was because the officials of the state of Goiás who controlled the hightension lines from the Cachoeira Dourada (the Golden Waterfall) on the Paranaíba River, from which the power came, would pull the switch as a hint that the federal city better hurry up and pay its bills. Even at the efficient Hotel Nacional, guests would be trapped in the elevators and imprisoned
for hours. The forewarned would avoid the elevators at this time of day and grope their way with candles down the unfinished stairways to the lobby.

The lights failed the very night Dr. Israél invited us to dinner. As it was a moonless night we had to find his house by the light of the Milky Way. He gave one of his snorting laughs as he met us with a candle. “You saw the new generators,” he said. “Come back a month from now and this won’t happen.”

The first thing I saw when I stepped out of the hotel our first morning in Manaus was a curlyheaded young man in a doublebreasted caramelcolored suit. He was waving his arms and shouting in the middle of a crowd of market people and longshoremen. He was jumping up and down from sheer earnestness as he talked. He had a loudspeaker attached to his chest which seemed to be operated by a battery in the suitcase that lay at his feet. At first I thought he was selling patent medicine. It turned out he was a political candidate. Though it was early morning, the sun was hot. He’d already sweated through his doublebreasted suit. He was hoarse. His face was red. He was shouting so I couldn’t follow what he was saying except that his platform was to drive thieves and robbers out of the legislature of the state of Amazonas. I remember thinking: if he’s so hoarse and sweaty this early in the morning how is he going to last six weeks to election day?

The campaign of 1962, though only part of the federal congress, the state legislatures, and some governors were up for election, was one of the most hectic in Brazilian history. It
looked as if politics had finally forged ahead of soccer. In Rio we found that something like seven hundred candidates were contesting fiftyseven seats, to be distributed according to proportional representation among thirteen parties, in the legislature of the new state of Guanabara. When the capital was moved to Brasília, the old federal district which comprised the area of the city of Rio de Janeiro became what the Cariocas like to call “the citystate” of Guanabara. The streets were so festooned with election posters you could hardly see the trees. A loudspeaker truck bellowed from every corner.

There were so many candidates they had been assigned numbers, like social security numbers.

A young man named Pedro Livio MacGregor—he got the name from a Scottish grandfather—who was a candidate for the Guanabara legislature, explained the electoral system to me. We were sitting at a table at the edge of the sunlight beside the wide swimmingpool in the courtyard of the Copacabana Palace Hotel. This is one of the spots in Rio where everybody meets everybody. Besides being a politician my informant was a Spiritualist minister.

The Brazilian
Spiritas
believe that they are in continuous communication with the dead; Jesus Christ in person continues to teach them from the other world. At their house of worship young MacGregor conducted a sort of settlement house for the favela dwellers, which included a clinic where doctors were available without charge. They distributed drugs and babyfoods free, along with advice as to how people should live their lives. “When they come, they know nothing,” he said, “they are like animals, we have to teach them to clean their teeth and to wash their faces.”

His enthusiasm for social service had induced him to run for office. As a Social Democrat (PSD), he relied heavily on the support of ex-President Kubitschek in his campaign.

Describing the elective system he emphasized the fact that really free elections were a novelty in Brazil. According to him
the first was in 1955. Before that, particularly in the back country, people just took the ballots printed beforehand by the parties and handed out to them by the
coroneles
(the colonels), as the local bosses were called; and dropped them in the box. In 1955 official ballots were printed, as in the United States, on which the voter could mark his preference. This election of 1962 would be the first in which the printed ballot, with complete lists of candidates, would be practically nationwide. Another innovation would be that up to a certain date all parties would have free time in TV and radio.

“Everybody has agreed that this must be an honest election,” he said with fervor. He was a rather pale man with extremely lucid eyes. His eyes glowed with enthusiasm. “In spite of everything democracy advances.”

There is great fluidity about Brazilian politics as about everything else in that rapidly evolving country. Ever since the end of the Vargas regime the state governors have been increasing in importance. The first governor of Guanabara was Carlos Lacerda. His term still had two years to run. Although he himself was not a candidate for office, the fact that he is Brazil’s most accomplished anti-Communist made him the chief voice of the opposition against the candidacy for the federal chamber of deputies of a gentleman named Leonel Brizola who was about to retire as governor of the
gaúcho
state of Rio Grande do Sul.

In Brazil, as in England, you don’t have to be a resident of your constituency to run for offices in the national government. Although there were many local issues and local personalities involved, the underlying national issue of the campaign of 1962 was whether Brazil, in the so-called cold war, should incline towards Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Communist powers, or towards the United States, and its Alliance
for Progress program. Lacerda opposed the Communists. Brizola spoke their language. In our curious age, when, among the Western peoples whose institutions the Communists are undermining, anyone who vigorously opposes them is spoken of as a controversial figure, Lacerda has been, almost since boyhood, the most controversial of controversial figures in Brazilian public life.

It was in Washington that I first met Carlos Lacerda.

Ever since our uproarious motor trip into the hills of Minas Gerais in the days when driving a car in backcountry Brazil was a sporting proposition I’ve always had my face fixed for a laugh when I went to call on the Whites. By the fall of 1952 they had moved to Washington from Rio. This time I could hear Bill’s and Connie’s voices laughing inside when I rang the doorbell of their Georgetown apartment.

From the livingroom I could hear a voice with a foreign accent pronouncing the words: “Oopaylong Ca-seedy.” Immediately I was introduced to a tall strikingly handsome man. In one hand he was brandishing a pearlhandled cap pistol. A glittering holster was draped over one shoulder. Perched on his head above his shellrimmed glasses was a small boy’s cowboy hat.

The Whites explained him as a Brazilian journalist who had come to Washington to receive an award from the Inter-American Press Association. His English was fluent but erratic. His high spirits were catching. He shared our taste for the absurd. We all laughed our heads off about Oopalong Ca-seedy.

Connie had been helping him buy Wild West equipment for his children before starting home. They had been showing it off to Bill with appropriate gestures. The Whites’ living room was littered with wrapping paper, striped jumpers, cowboy suits, towheaded dolls, assorted gadgets from the Five and Ten.

His taxi was waiting to take him to the airport. We helped him pack up his purchases into a couple of shoppingbags and very reluctantly bade him goodby.

In the excitement I’d failed to catch his name. “He’s the nicest man in Brazil,” the Whites told me after he’d gone. “His name is Carlos Lacerda.”

A number of years went by before I ran into Carlos Lacerda again at a luncheon in one of the mountain resorts near Petrópolis. The Brazilian friend who was driving us up from Rio started to tell his life history as soon as we were free of the dense traffic of the city.

In those days the Petrópolis road climbed the steep slope hairpin by hairpin through great trees and flowery underbrush. My friend would catch his breath in the middle of a sentence while he swung the little car around another curve. His wife could talk of nothing but how excited she was about meeting Carlos Lacerda. She’d voted for him twice, she said she was going to vote for him again. We were going to pick him up at his country place and take him along to lunch with a lady named Lota de Macedo Soares.

Dona Lota had just built the modernest of modern Brazilian houses. We were looking forward to seeing the house. Our friend’s wife said she had seen plenty of modern houses. It was Lacerda she wanted to see.

“He’s charming to meet,” the husband said, “but when you put a typewriter in front of him he becomes vindictive. He’s a terrible man. Didn’t he kill Vargas?”

“I thought Vargas shot himself.”

“Lacerda’s attacks in his newspaper drove him to it … Carlos Lacerda’s the most dangerous man in Brazil.”

“How come?”

My Brazilian friend couldn’t answer. He was busy avoiding an onrushing truck on a particularly sharp curve. We all breathed again when he pulled off the road at the top of the
hill to a stall where he bought us coffee and crisp little meatpies. While we munched, and looked down over the tops of the trees at the incredible view of the bay of Guanabara simmering in the sunny haze between purple toothshaped mountains, he continued his briefing.