Prose (38 page)

During World War II, when Japan seized the plantations of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, there was a brief resuscitation in Amazonian rubber. But Brazil today imports some $40 million worth of Asian rubber each year. The Amazon, deprived of the market for its principal wealth, has also been attempting diversification in recent years. The area now produces substantial quantities of Brazil nuts, jute, lumber, sugar cane, and vegetable oils as well as manganese.

*   *   *

Like other Brazilian resources, lumber has had its brief fling, but it, too, has yet to reach its potential. In the Amazon basin alone, there are at least 5 trillion cubic feet of timber, and there are vast forests of prime woods in the south. One of the most attractive features of the national landscape is commonest in the States of Paraná and Santa Catarina—the groves of araucarias, the Brazilian pine tree. They are very tall trees with straight trunks and arched, bare branches terminating in characteristic cup-shaped bunches of needles. Besides being beautiful, the araucaria is extremely useful; its wood constitutes the principal wealth of the region in which it grows. So sought after was this wood that the government was forced to pass a law in 1942 prohibiting excessive cutting and providing for replanting.

With more than 600 known varieties, Brazil has more palm trees than any other country in the world. They are rich sources of fiber, oils, and fuel. From the leaves of the carnauba, an elegant, tall palm that flourishes only in northeast Brazil, comes a sticky deposit rather like beeswax which, when gathered, powdered, and melted by a difficult and primitive process, produces the famous carnauba wax. It was used in the manufacture of phonograph records, polishes, and varnishes. The carnauba is one of the principal economic supports of the States of Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão, and the people of the dry
sertão
say that is the compensation given them by God for the scourge of drought—since when there is rain the palm produces no wax.

Tobacco is raised in most of Brazil, and has been for centuries an important trade merchandise for the slave dealers. It had developed into an industry in Bahia, whose cigars are famous and good enough to be compared with those of Cuba. Bahia cigarettes are also widely distributed, but the greatest number of cigarette factories is in the State of Rio Grande do Sul.

The European grape, introduced by Italian immigrants, grows very well in Rio Grande do Sul. The wine industry has developed rapidly and today Brazilians are proud of some of their wines, champagnes, and cognacs. In 1960 nearly 8 million gallons were exported to France. Also important to Rio Grande do Sul is wheat, although far from enough is produced to make Brazil self-sufficient. The country usually manages to produce enough corn, beans, and rice for domestic consumption.

Only recently has there been much interest in making use of Brazilian fruit for exportation or canning. Oranges are now exported on a large scale. Bananas, of which Brazil is the world's largest grower, are principally grown in São Paulo. The cashew fruit of the northeast provides the valuable cashew nut, and the fruit is processed in the form of syrups and pastes. And then there is the guava. Guava paste, accompanied by cheese, is a standard dessert all over Latin America.

*   *   *

Brazil's greatest mineral resource is iron. There are practically inexhaustible veins in the country, located mainly in the State of Minas. It is estimated that there are 65 billion tons of iron ore in Brazil, 35 per cent of the world's total reserve. The lack of high-quality coking coal has until recently prevented the development of steel mills commensurate in number with the quantity of ore. However, the coal of Santa Catarina, although of an inferior quality, has been energetically exploited, and the result has been the great steel mills of Volta Redonda, whose construction began in 1942 with U.S. aid. Brazil's iron and steel industry is now the largest industry in Latin America, and exploitation of the ore has barely begun.

The same is true of other mineral reserves. There are deposits of just about every known mineral, including precious and semiprecious stones, scattered throughout the country, some in vast quantities. Only with denser population in these areas and more specialized techniques will Brazil be able to profit from these hidden riches. In Espírito Santo and other areas the government is at present exploring layers of monazite sands rich in radioactive ores.

*   *   *

A matter of considerable controversy in Brazil is the extent of petroleum reserves. Some geologists have suggested that the vast sedimentary basins of the Amazon and Paraná, encompassing nearly 2 million square miles, contain extensive reserves. But so far only traces of oil have been found. Due to a fear of foreign exploitation, oil exploration and heavy oil production were restricted in 1953 to a single government monopoly, Petrobrás. Despite valiant wildcatting at a cost of some $50 million a year, Brazil produces only some 30 per cent of its own crude requirements, most of it from the wells in Bahia. And even if there are extensive reserves in the upper Amazon valley, geologists believe that they lie under rock and would present difficult and expensive problems. Transport would not be a problem, because of the nearness of the navigable Amazon. Throughout most of the country, however, transport is one of the basic problems which Brazil must solve before it can begin real exploitation of its truly magnificent resources. Today, Brazil has nearly 24,000 miles of railroads, but most of them are short-haul, east-west lines which penetrate inland only a short distance from the coast. Many of them are of different gauges, and there are few north-south connections in any event. The highway network still under construction will of course help to solve this problem.

Chapter 6

Unself-conscious Arts

The Brazilian of the interior owns almost nothing and has little cash income. He is not a “consumer”; he still makes most of the things he wears and uses. He lives close to the life of the Indian and the primitive African. These are some of the reasons why, once away from the coastal cities, the arts and handcrafts flourish in Brazil as they haven't in the United States since colonial days. Since the man of the interior also has no entertainment (or hadn't until the radio, now man's alter ego in Brazil as everywhere else), he still makes his own: songs; ballads; dances; ancient, sometimes very elaborate, folk-plays and rituals; according to the seasons and the saints' days. He weaves wool and cotton home-spun, plaits straw and wicker, makes pottery, carves. The richness and variety of these native arts owes much to the fact that they, too, like the people, are racially mixed. Portugese and Moorish, African and Indian,—and now in southern Brazil sometimes German, Italian, and Japanese, as well.

A curious fact about Brazilian folk-pottery is that, although familiar to the Portuguese for centuries, the potter's wheel is not used. This is supposed to be because the present-day potters in Brazil learned their art from the Indians rather than from Portuguese tradition. Even without the wheel, the Indians for a thousand years or so have made—and are making—bowls and urns, sometimes of enormous size: huge pots for fermenting liquor, or funerary urns big enough to hold the body of an adult, sitting in foetal position. These pots are built up by the “rope” method, long thin ropes of clay superimposed, round and round, until the required height and shape are reached, then the ridges smoothed down. The backlands potters (women, as with the Indians) make pots of great elegance in this primitive way, decorate them with black, white, and earth colors, and polish them with the rinds of fruit.

Besides dishes & jugs for practical purposes made by women, men sometimes make clay figures, an art derived from Africa. Sometimes colored and glazed, sometimes clay-color, these little statues or whole groups of them depict all the types and activities of their society: the “cowboys,” soldiers, priests, hunters, a wedding, a funeral, a jaguar-hunt, a team of oxen, etc. Women potters occasionally make figures, and at Ipu, in Ceará, they are known for their miniature pots and pans, dishes and furniture and animals—toys for children, sometimes surprisingly like the toys the Greek and Roman potters made for children and that survive in the museums. From Bahia State come sitting-hens, turkeys, snakes, whole trees full of birds—brightly colored and gay. Pots for the baby copy exactly in clay the usual enamel model, those glazed inside costing a few pennies more than the unglazed ones.

Another art has developed in the zones the sociologists call the “leather-culture” (pastoral): a great variety of articles made from calf-skin. The most esteemed, however, are those of deer-skin—and deer are plentiful in the scrub-forests of the northeast. The cowboy's leather costume is made to protect him from the thorns and sharp-edged leaves of the
caatinga,
the scrub-forest, and its varieties of low-growing cacti and thorny trees. It is like medieval armor, made in leather: leggings, serving the same purpose as an American cowboy's “chaps,” but tight-fitting and extending over the top of the foot, like spats; an apron, a “chest-protector,” and over all the leather “doublet,” with long sleeves meeting the leather gloves or mitts. On his head the cowboy wears a leather hat, with a strap under the chin. All these garments are fancifully decorated: embroidered, inlaid in different colored leather, stamped. Their saddles are equally objects of art, and their long, quilted capes, and decorated whips with fine lashes (made from bulls' pizzles).

Besides the art of pottery, the women of the north and northeast have inherited the art of working in straw from their Indian grandmothers: mats, bags, baskets, hats. In one part of Ceará they make straw hats similar to the “Panamas” of Panama and Chile in their softness and fineness. Baskets, fish-traps, coarse and fine sieves, mats woven to be used as ceilings below the naked rafters. In Pará State, influenced by Portuguese workers in wicker, there is a home industry of furniture-making in reeds, rushes, wickers, etc. Travellers on the Amazon are startled to be begged to buy large wicker rocking-chairs, perched across the sterns of tiny canoes.

The most famous straw-work, however, are the hammocks woven of cord or thread made from several varieties of palm. They are soft and supple, straw-colored, as fine as silk. They are not used for sleeping in, but hung for siestas on the shady porches. For sleeping, hammocks of woven cotton are used, but coarser ones in bright plaids (the Portuguese, like the Scotch, are devoted to plaids), unsystematic plaids or all-white—the more valuable kind. The foot-wide borders of these hammocks (called “varandas”) are an art in themselves—special patterns, in “knotted lace” with long fringes. In the big ranch houses of the
sertãos
the “hammock chests” are an indication of the owner's wealth, big chests of cedar or other fragrant woods where dozens of the valuable snow-white hammocks are packed away with sprigs of marjoram between them.

One
casa grande
in the State of Ceará had 120 hammocks in its chests, for 120 guests. This was on the
fazenda
called “California,” built in 1850 and hopefully named “California” for the California gold rush. This
fazenda
was founded in 1850, without a name. A friend of the owner inquired, “How's so-&-so with his California?” (referring to the American gold rush of '49) and so it was named “California.” Besides the hammocks for 120 guests who might want to spend the night, there were special “priests' hammocks,” for their periodical visits. The lace “varandas” of these showed crosses, crossed lances (emblems of the Passion), and bunches of grapes and ears of wheat (emblems of the Eucharist).

Another art inherited from the Indian is the
cúia,
or decorated gourd, enamelled black, used as dippers and for bathing. The enamel is a secret, handed down from generation to generation. The decorations are often very beautiful, incised in the gourd and left in natural color, or brightly painted: flowers, fruits, flags, and such sentiments as:
Souvenir,
Independence or Death!,
Mother Love,
or
Happy Birthday.

From the Portuguese and also the Moors, the Brazilian women have inherited the art of lace-making, exquisitely fine lace that taxes the eyes and the patience: a hand's-breadth is often more than a day's work. Lace made from thread of banana-leaf fibres instead of commercial thread is particularly rare and valuable. The weavers of Mato Grosso also use this delicate fibre, an art learned from the Paraguayan Indians. Drawn-work, crocheted and knitted lace, embroideries—where the patterns have not been coarsened or “modernized”—are also very beautiful. The most famous lace-makers are from the town of Aracati in Ceará State, but the laces of the State of Santa Catarina, made by descendants of immigrants from the Azores are also famous. There is a whole group of folk-songs devoted to the lace-makers; some of them have to do with the saga of the notorious northeast bandit Lampião (killed in 1938). Strange to say, the war-song of Lampião's bandits was “The Lace Maker”: “Oh, lace-maker! / Oh woman making lace! / Teach me how to make lace / And I'll teach you how to love…”

In the gold-mining regions, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Bahia, the goldsmith's art developed, with much skilled workmanship, often showing Moorish influence in its filigrees and arabesques. The stones set in these pieces are usually rough diamonds, or the many Brazilian semi-precious stones: aquamarines, topazes, amethysts, and tourmalines. A great deal of work is done in Bahia with gold and silver, ivory and coral, often in the form of amulets, lucky charms. The
figa,
or “fig,” in English, is seen everywhere in Brazil: tiny ones hung around babies' necks, along with the medal of a saint, and big ones, of wood, hung on the walls. This immemorial image of a clenched fist with the thumb protruding between the first two fingers is seen everywhere in Brazil. (Shakespeare speaks of it, but it antedates Shakespeare by many centuries.) Also from Bahia are the
balangandãs,
jingling bunches of charms formerly worn by slave women, at their waists, and now collectors' items. The charms are several inches long: pomegranites, cashew-fruits, musical instruments, phallic symbols, objects of
macumba
rites. From Goiás come rosaries of gold beads, with the “Our Fathers” of coral or baroque pearls.