Brazil on the Move (6 page)

The town lights had gone out. Our immense host brought in an oil lamp and set it on the big Electrolux refrigerator behind the table.

“There have been a series of disappointments,” one of the other doctors burst out. “After the victory we thought that America would assume a world leadership like the Europe our fathers remembered.”

“Without imperialism? How can you do it?”

There was a polite shrugging of shoulders.

“America seems so much weaker in victory,” sighed Dr. Penido. “But,” he banged his fist on the table and went on briskly, “the important thing is that we have produced a successful experiment in international cooperation … Sespe would not exist without the cooperation of both Americans and Brazilians. We have proved that it works. We have learned a method. Now we could go on to do great things, if
just at this crucial moment in the United States you did not seem to lose interest.”

“We feel,” one of the others echoed, “a certain lack of comprehension.”

Dr. Penido yawned and rose to his feet. It was late. We groped our way through unlit streets and freightyards stacked with corded wood back to our sleeping car.

In the morning a small plane came down from the mine at Itabira to pick me up. Now I was going to see where all those orecars came from. As the pilot spiraled up from the airstrip at Valadares to vault the first range of razorbacked mountains I began to note the extent of the devastation of the country. As far as I could see into the murk fires made a red marbling on the cutover slopes. The mountains under us smoldered like burnt papers in a grate.

Pastures along the winding streams showed that fine network of cattlepaths that comes from overgrazing. Houses, usually solitary on a hillock in a valley, were scarce. Near a house you could usually make out the broad bunched leaves of a few banana trees and some tiny green squares of cultivated land. It was hard to imagine how such a sparse population could so ravage the hills. The railroad’s demands for firewood, the burning of charcoal to cook with, and its use in iron furnaces, had already gutted the forests for an enormous tract of country. The logging out of lumber for export did the rest. As we climbed again to clear a new set of granite escarpments the valleys below were drowned in smoke. The plane tore into speeding clouds that packed tight like cotton wool against the windows.

There was no ceiling at all over the airfield at the mine, so we had to turn back. When we landed at Valadares again the Brazilian business man who shared the seat with me shouted
in my ear. “I was anxious,” he said, “until the pilot told me he was the father of eight. The father of eight just has to be careful.”

As we walked with throbbing ears across the field to the shelter, he added that he wondered whether as a foreigner I understood the significance of what I was seeing in the Vale do Rio Doce: “It is climbing a series of steps. First the valley was so unhealthy we could hardly keep up the railroad. The malaria service and public health make sanitary the valley so that we can improve the railroad … America helps Brazil up a step. In the State of Minas Gerais we have the richest iron deposit in the world but to get it out we had only picks and shovels. The American loan buys the machinery to work it … Another step …”

“But what about the campaign against American imperialism?”

“That,” he said, “is the labor of Communists.”

He put his arm around my shoulder and offered to buy my lunch. After lunch, which, since the public health doctors were still in Valadares, turned out to be a second farewell celebration, the father of eight did manage to land us on the wet hilltop airstrip at Itabira. The mountains all around were still draped in clouds. The drenched air made us shiver after the heat of the valley.

The quiet man in khaki who came out to meet us introduced himself as Gil Whitehead, American manager of the mine for the Rio Doce Company. “It’s too bad that you can’t see the peak of Caué,” he said and looked up at the murky ceiling just overhead. “I’d like you to see the magic mountain.”

While we waited for the clouds to lift we drove round the old town that climbed up steep red ridges to a suburb of neat new houses for the skilled workmen and to the big concrete hangar which could house the new machine shops. The valleys below were full of tattered mist. The weather had settled
down to a cold drizzle. The hunks of wet ore shone as they thundered down the chutes into the orecars.

Gil Whitehead had a selfeffacing manner and a slow drawl. Now and then his smoldering sort of humor would let out a sudden flash. He explained how production had increased and how, with the improvement of the railroad, production would increase still more. For Brazil the iron ore, which was going to steel mills in the United States and Canada, where they used it instead of scrap, would mean essential dollars in the world market. And when the new rockcrushing machinery came production would really spurt.

“Meanwhile,” he said and pointed to a little brown man with a hammer trudging up the road in the rain, “we are using the only rockcrusher that, in these parts, never gets out of order.”

He glanced out of the window. The rain had stopped but the clouds hung lower than ever. “Let’s go on up anyway.” He drove me up the broad zigzag road that vanished into a ceiling of cloud. “You’ve heard them speak of metaling a road,” he said. “Well this road is sixty per cent pure iron.”

When we stepped out of the car the driven clouds snapped like wet toweling in our faces. He told me I was standing on top of two hundred and fifty million metric tons of hematite. The trouble was it was such a long way to Pittsburgh.

He pointed to a quarrylike face of rock. “Simplest operation in the world. All we have to do is blast it down. Since we started in 1944 we’ve taken twentythree meters off the top of the peak.” My eyes followed the sweep of his hand. Under the glistening rock face men were at work among the piles of ore with little sledgehammers, making small ones out of big ones.

Here and there they lit fires of sticks or broken boards for a little warmth. There were spindling white men and tall broadshouldered Negroes and small compact wiry men in all
shades of coffee and copper and bronze. Some wore sandals and some were barefooted. Many had gunnysacks tied around them against the cold. A few had tattered cloaks or mud-caked ponchos. As they worked away their hammers rang on the dense ore.

That was my first sight of the Brazilian working man in the mass, of the longsuffering happygolucky nomadic hordes who spread over the vast extent of the country moving from plantation to mine to lumbermill or construction camp, illnourished, ridden with illness, enduring cold and heat and hunger, tightening their belts, and singing their sambas and breeding children and somehow getting the work done.

A few days later, five hundred miles to the west I saw the same people under happier conditions. This was at Ceres, a new agricultural settlement which the great roadbuilder Bernardo Sayão was opening up on the Rio das Almas in the western part of the State of Goiás.

Flying west through the bumpy air over the knotted snarl of the mountains of Minas Gerais there were mighty few towns to look down on and almost no roads. You saw below you a lioncolored landscape of burnedover slopes with green strips of cultivated land spreading up the river bottoms. Rarely a tiny house shone white as sugar in the slanting morning light. The hills were a tangle of wandering mule and cattle tracks. Men and animals had walked there for centuries.

This infinity of wandering tracks testified to the still nomadic life of the backlands. A man and his family would live in some cabin in the hills until the land they worked was worn out and then they would have to pull up stakes and walk, with their few possessions on their heads, for hundreds of miles to find some patch of virgin brush which they could burn over for a new plantation. They burned the larger trees for charcoal.
The first few years the scorched forest loam gave them good crops, but the winds blew it off and the rains washed it away and the crops ate it up and after a while they had to move on again.

The copilot, a dapper young man from Rio who spoke very good English, came back into the cabin to explain that the state of Minas was one of the oldest settled sections of Brazil, a little stagnant now, but—he spread out his arms—with an immense future. Far to the north on the indigosmudged horizon, he pointed out the clouds that hid Caué, the iron mountain. I told him I had just come from there. “Before it was gold,” he shouted excitedly, putting his lips against my ear. “Now it is iron … The iron deposits stretch across the state of Minas in the shape of a gigantic dollar sign.”

He went back to his place when the plane began to lose altitude over Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. Spiraling down for a landing we had glimpses of the regular avenues lined with trees and the tall white buildings of the city which was started fifty years ago on a plan based on L’Enfant’s plan for Washington.

Nearer the airfield shone the angular constructions of glass and concrete designed by Niemeyer and some other pupils of Le Corbusier’s for a suburban development round the lake of Pampulha. Among these buildings at Pampulha are some of Niemeyer’s most original and imaginative works. It is odd that a professing Communist should have designed such a pretty church. Unfortunately the project, suffering the fate of so many projects in this land of magniloquent blueprints, received a setback from a most unexpected cause. The lake was discovered to be full of snails infested by the wicked little schistosoma. Until some way is found of killing the parasite or the snail, the development of Pampulha was said to be at a standstill.

After leaving Belo Horizonte we flew west for hours and hours. The few tiny settlements were out of sight of the airfields, which become more and more rudimentary as we advanced into the rolling country, interspersed by great plains, of the then new state of Goiás. After seven hours flight from Rio we were in Goiânia. This new capital of a new state was only fifteen years old. It consisted of an avenue of feathery trees to the governor’s palace, some public buildings and a few cross streets of rough stuccoed houses, a new hotel already falling to pieces, and some very nicely printed booklets of plans for the future.

The hotel was a collector’s item. This was a time in South America when the more cheerful travelers collected bad hotels as a sort of hobby. I kept thinking of Dr. Penido’s reflections about how much education it took to keep a toilet clean. One of the oddities of this particular bathroom was that the doorknob would come off in the hand of the unhappy guest, thereby trapping him in the malodorous precinct. Banging on the door brought no response. The procedure was to escape by climbing over the transom that led into the adjoining kitchen. Busy clouds of flies buzzed back and forth over that transom.

Though pigs still rooted in the muddy streets, Goiánia already boasted a school of music and an academy of letters. I sat in the hotel’s tiny bar, drinking excellent cold beer with a couple of congenial members of the Goiánia academy, while waiting for a suitable hour to call on the governor, who had hospitably offered to send me out to the federal agricultural colony the next day on one of his planes. They had brought along some magnificent booklets describing the plans for the new federal capital of Brazil which was to be established on a high plateau about a hundred miles to the north, a plateau that boasted, they told me, a delicious temperate climate, where wheat grows in abundance and where all the plants and
animals of the temperate zone, including European man, would flourish.

The development of Brazil has been blocked for three hundred years by the colonial mentality of a people trapped between the mountains and the sea, they said. The way to break loose was to move the center of the nation boldly up into the plateau. Their eyes shone and their chests expanded as they talked.

This must have been, I kept thinking, how our early enthusiasts for the North American West talked and glowed, sitting in some rickety tavern on the site of Washington City, when the subject turned to the Ohio or the great dimly discerned prairies west of the Mississippi.

Before modern sanitation and trucks and airplanes all this was a dream; but now, my hosts kept assuring me, it was possible. The federal capital was written into the constitution. It had to come true. By history and tradition and by its racial admixtures Brazil was the best adapted of all the nations of European stock to conquer the tropics. The first step towards achievement would be moving the federal capital.

When I asked whether there was any way of reaching this marvelous plateau, they said it would be difficult. You had to go by a small plane to a rather uncertain airstrip. From there it was eight hours horseback up to the site. If it rained, it would be hard to get back. Neither of them had ever been.

“But where does the Communist movement fit into all this enterprising talk? Haven’t you already got too much bureaucracy?”

The younger of my hosts spoke up.

“At eighteen I was a Communist, like everybody else. We have malaria and jungle fever and a million diseases, but our worst disease is poverty. Young intellectuals feel trammeled at every hand by poverty. We thought communism was a cure for poverty. It seemed to open new careers for young
men of brains. Now I am twentyseven and I have discovered that communism is just another way of dominating the masses. Instead of curing poverty it makes poverty universal. We have got to find other alternatives … The Communists now do not make propaganda for communism. They make propaganda against … against North America … against the rich, against anybody who is successful. In Rio they tell the poor people living in the favelas: ‘We will throw out the landlords and you shall live in luxury in the hotels and the apartment houses in Copacabana.’ It is simple. It works. Many of our most intelligent men, particularly poets, artists, architects are subject to this illusion. They have not thought the thing through to the end.”

“It is up to you North Americans to give us an alternative,” said the older man. “During the war the speeches of the great Roosevelt gave us an ideal to fight for. Since he died the United States seems to be drifting. You seem suddenly old and reactionary. We read about the Marshall Plan for Europe, but when the Communists tell us it is imperialism we tend to believe them. All we see here is the scarcity of dollars.”