Prose (32 page)

More taciturn peoples are likely to be suspicious of talkative ones and to think they are wasting their energy. One frequently meets among intellectuals a sort of Brazilian Hamlet-type, incapable of serious work or action, who seems to be covering up a deep anxiety with words, words, words, a pretended madness, a deliberately fanciful humor that is not frivolity although it resembles it. The earthy humor of the poor, the brutal cartoons in newspapers and magazines, the street boys who laugh at cripples or ugly women—this is directly in line with the humor of the Romans; but the humor of the intellectual is very different, wry, gentle, and a little wild.

They poke fun at their usually bloodless revolutions: “No one fought in that revolution—it was the rainy season.” Like the Portuguese form of bullfighting in which there is no killing, Brazilian revolutions or
golpes
(coups) sometimes seem to be little more than political and rhetorical maneuvering. A man's speeches, his moral and physical courage, are admired, but actual violence is going too far. Duels are still fought in Argentina, but they are out of style in Brazil. Brazil has not fought a major war for almost a century. It has rarely wanted more land, already having more than it knows what to do with.

*   *   *

Jokes tell even more. There is an old favorite, perhaps not even Brazilian originally, about a man walking down the street with a friend. He is grossly insulted by a stranger, and says nothing. The friend tries to rouse his fighting instincts, “Didn't you hear what he called you? Are you going to take that? Are you a man, or aren't you?” The man replies, “Yes, I'm a man. But not
fanatically.
” This is the true Brazilian temper.

Chapter 2

At least as early as the 9th century a land called “Brasil” was already a legend in Europe. It was wherever
bresilium
came from, a wood obtained in trade with the Far East, much in demand for dyeing cloth red. (Perhaps all the red woolens the peasants wear in the paintings of Brueghel were dyed with “brasil” wood?) The Medici Atlas of 1351 shows an island labelled “Brazil,” and this imaginary island keeps re-appearing for several centuries, sometimes in one part of the world, sometimes in another, even after the present Brazil had been discovered. Columbus found the dye-wood tree in the West Indies, but in his eagerness for gold he simply ignored it. But the first ships sent back from the continent of South America were loaded with brasil-wood, and “Brazil,” or “Brasil,” became the common name for the new country. (The spelling varies and sometimes the number; it was also called “The Brazils.”)

In one of the parks of Rio de Janeiro stands a fine, flamboyant example of Latin-American park-sculpture, a much-bigger-than-life-size man dressed in a costume-pageant costume with wide sleeves, fringes, and skirts, and holding onto a ton or so of undulated bronze banner. One side of the huge pedestal says “1900” and the other “1500” and it was set up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral—according to some authorities. As the city has grown, this statue has been shunted from one place to another, and in somewhat the same way historians have shuffled the problem of whether Cabral really did discover Brazil or not. But most of them now agree that he did, in 1500, shortly after Easter. He was supposedly on his way to India in command of a fleet of thirteen tiny ships; if so, he was off his course by some [ … ] thousand miles to the west. Since the best astronomers, navigators, and mathematicians of the day were all employed at the court of King Manoel I of Portugal, it scarcely seems as though Cabral's extended side-trip could have been accidental. Probably the Portugese were really trying to get ahead of the Spaniards, who were very busy exploring the lands further north.

Two years after Columbus's first voyage, Portugal and Spain, then in the full flush of their age of discoveries, had grandly divided all the non-Christian world, known and as yet unknown, between them. The Treaty of Tordesillas, sanctioned by the pope, gave all lands east of a line drawn 370 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands to Portugal, and all lands west of it to Spain. The exact positon of this line was always vague, and the rivalry between the two countries was so strong that even after the treaty they tried to conceal their various voyages and discoveries from each other. (And thus made things harder for the historians.) But Portugal believed, or pretended to believe, that Brazil was within her rightful territories.

On Cabral's flagship there was a nobleman-merchant, Pero Vaz de Caminha, signed on as a scribe. The wonderfully vivid letter he wrote to King Manoel, describing Brazil and the Indians, or the little he saw of them, has been called “the first page of Brazilian history” and also, with equal justice, “the first page of Brazilian literature.” After a brief account of the voyage west, Caminha calmly announces: “On this day at the vesper hours we caught sight of land, that is first of a large mountain, very high and round, and of other lower lands to the south of it, and flatland with great groves of trees. To this high mountain the captain gave the name of
Monte Passoal
[“pertaining to Easter”], and to the land,
Terra da Vera Cruz.
”

The mountain, in the present State of Bahia, still bears the same name. The King changed Vera Cruz to Santa Cruz, the official name until the middle of the century, when, over ecclesiastical protests, it became Brazil. But on the first maps it is either “Brazil” or the “Land of Parrots.” Along with dye-wood, macaws were sent back to Europe, and their brilliant colors, large size, and loud shrieks obviously made a deep impression. (In 1531 a French ship took back three thousand leopard-skins, three hundred monkeys, and “six hundred parrots that already knew a few words of French.”) On a
mapus mundi
published the year after Cabral's voyage the coastline of Brazil is not much more than a guess, but Caminha's “groves of trees” are there, lined up as formally as in a Portugese garden, and under them sits a group of giant macaws, to give explorers some idea of what to expect.

Even if not very original in the 16th century, the first name of
Vera Cruz
must have seemed appropriate. Cabral was a Knight of the Order of Christ and the fleet's sails and banners bore its red cross. The men landed to celebrate Easter Sunday with Mass, and set up a large cross. And for weeks they had all been watching the brilliant stars of the Southern Cross overhead; the fleet's astronomer also wrote to the King, just about this useful constellation. Ever since, Brazil has felt itself to be uniquely “The Land of the Southern Cross.” It is on the flag; the nation's highest award is the Order of the Southern Cross; the present unit of money, the
cruzeiro,
is named for it,—and so are thousands of bars, restaurants, bus-lines, business firms, and manufactures. And with the frequent Brazilian abruptness of transition between the spiritual and the material, the 1,000
cruzeiro
note, the highest denomination of money, shows a portrait of Cabral on one side and an engraving of that first Easter Mass on the other.

(In exactly the same way, the biggest church in Rio de Janeiro, Our Lady of Candelaria, where all official religious services took place until the change of capital in 1960, sits in a square completely surrounded by the country's richest banks, as if illustrating a thesis on the relations between Church, State, and High Finance. Or in the same way Brazilian conversation can veer from the eternal verities of Thomas Aquinas to the eternal real estate deals, and back again.)

*   *   *

Caminha was a good reporter; he describes the Indians' looks and behaviour, their food and houses, the brand-new wild life. He grows almost lyrical, as all the early voyagers did, over these first few idyllic honeymoon days,—in the amazing century when countries and continents intermarried and new countries were conceived. In his unscientific way, he was also the first of a long line of naturalists and ethnologists, some of the world's greatest, that has since been fascinated by South America and Brazil.

The Indians were friendly and docile, too docile for their own good, as was to be proved. Presents were exchanged, one of which was grimly prophetic: they gave the Portuguese head-dresses of their exquisite feather-work, and in return the Portuguese gave them one of the red woolen stocking caps worn by laborers. They attended the Easter Mass and mimicked the white men, kneeling, crossing themselves, and singing a hymn of their own. Afterwards, the Portuguese hung “tin crucifixes” that they had thriftily “saved from another voyage,” around their necks.

The Portuguese were mercifully lacking in the bloodthirsty missionary zeal of the Spaniards. However, perhaps because he felt it was expected of him, or had some dim inklings of Manifest Destiny, Caminha wrote: “Our Lord gave them fine bodies and good faces, as to good men, and He who brought us here I believe did not do so without purpose.” There is even a hint of envy, perhaps the earliest trace of the romantic, Noble-Savage,
Indianismo
that later colored the Brazilian imagination so strongly. The Indians were “clean and fat and beautiful,” and they appeared to be healthier and stronger than the Portuguese themselves. As for the women: “she was so well-built and so rounded and her lack of shame was so charming, that many women of our land seeing her attractions, would be ashamed that theirs were not like hers.” The Portuguese had always been romantically drawn to women of darker races; they had long taken Moorish wives and Negro concubines (there were already [ … ] Negro slaves in Portugal). In Brazil it was only natural for them to become eager miscegenationists almost immediately.

Caminha concludes by saying that they had seen no gold, nor silver, nor any metal at all, but “the interior appears very large. Its waters are quite endless. So pleasing is it that if one cares to cultivate it, everything will grow.”
Se plantando, dar.
This phrase is now a familiar saying, but it has changed its meaning, from a promise to a reproach to someone who is neglecting obvious opportunities. Surely that simple reversal of meaning reveals a great deal about the long history of the undeveloped resources and possibilities of Brazil since the year 1500.

*   *   *

Cabral left behind two convicts, who were last seen bewailing their fate while the Indians tried to console them. The condemned men were supposed to learn the Indians' language and to convert them to the True Faith. This was the usual Portuguese practice and no one knows how many hundreds of these wretched men were dropped along the coast. Most vanished forever, but here and there one survived and became a “great chief,” took many Indian wives and produced many children. The
caboclo
(half-Indian, half-Portuguese) daughters would be ready to marry the next generation of Portuguese adventurers that arrived, and in this way a solid foundation was laid for a mixed, and easily mixable, race. Early Brazilian history has several half-legendary convict-heroes. In fact, its personalities are an oddly assorted crew: condemned convicts, devout Jesuit missionaries (Loyola was just starting his great work), and Portuguese noblemen, usually younger sons, who became the
capitães-mores,
the “great captains.”

But no gold had been found; there were no cities to ransack such as the Spaniards had found on the western coasts of the continent, and for a quarter of a century more Brazil was left almost untouched.

*   *   *

Two things that everyone knows about Brazil are that it is the same size as the United States (now that Alaska is a state), and that the seasons there are the reverse of ours. It is big, stretching from north of the Equator to south of the Tropic of Capricorn, and west to the foothills of the Andes, an area of 3.3 million square miles. And while it is perfectly true that livestock (including dogs and cats) imported from northern countries have a hard time of it the first few years, and swelters through the Brazilian summers (January through March) in “winter” coats,—to say that the seasons are reversed is too strong. The Equator is not that much like the bottom frame of a mirror. Caminha thought the climate “equable,” and although he really didn't know, he was more or less right.

Brazil is tropical and sub-tropical, with few extremes of temperature. The Amazon is roughly parallel to the Equator, yet, surpringly, the average temperature at Santarém, a third of the way up the river, is only seventy-eight degrees. In the cooler south, frosts occur only rarely as far north as São Paulo. If one can generalize at all about such a vast country, the average North American would be apt to say it is all just a little too hot. Never as hot as New York City in a prolonged heat wave, or as cold as a winter in Washington, D.C.—altogether a bit lacking in variety. On the other hand, the rainfall varies entirely too much,—over eighty inches a year in the Amazon basin, and in the northeast in some places it can scarcely be measured in inches at all. The State of Ceará is so dry and the sunshine so monotonous that when the sky is overcast the Cearenses greet each other hopefully with “What a beautiful day!”

The warm climate is still blamed by many historians, including Toynbee, and by the Brazilians themselves fairly continuously, for the country's lack of development and almost everything else wrong with it. It is held responsible for the “laziness” they regard as the greatest national defect (although on occasion it can be considered as a virtue, too). According to the usual theory, man needs alternating seasons and the stimulation of cold weather to keep him energetic and “progressing” properly. But this may not be true at all. “Laziness” may well be due more to bad health, poor food, and boredom, than to climate. Man is the most adaptable of animals. As we learn more about tropical diseases, nutrition, and psychology, and if the lot of the poor Brazilian is ever improved so that he is healthier and has more to work for in life, the old-fashioned, moralistic idea of “laziness” may disappear for good—and the Brazilians have one less item burdening their consciences.