Prose (50 page)

I came upon the Church of the Amparo, that figures in the diary, unexpectedly, as it was getting dark. Its trim is dark peacock blue; on top a rusty rooster perches on a rusty globe; there is a minute balcony on either side of a large, faded coat of arms cut out of tin above the door, and over it a three-dimensional Dove of the Holy Spirit, dimly illuminated, nesting behind a quatrefoil window. Seen suddenly blocking the end of an alleyway, this church is stricken but dignified, like a person coming towards one whom one expects to beg, who doesn't beg after all.

Some of the church clocks by which Helena told the time have been removed. At about seven o'clock the light leaves the town rapidly and the surrounding sea of rocks, and the peak of Itambé, turn red. A few church-bells ring and then a great noise comes from the loud-speaker over the Cathedral door and reverberates all over town.
Ave Maria, gratia plena;
the town vibrates with it and the light bulbs on the high cross opposite snap into activity. It is the hour of the rosary, Helena's
terço,
which caused her so much “suffering” at family prayers and which is now broadcast every evening during the month of May. On Sundays the same loud-speaker is used to draw people to mass; at five o'clock it was blaring out
The Stars and Stripes Forever.

In spite of these innovations and the Betty Grable film showing at the one cinema, the town has changed very little since the youthful Helena lived there and raced up and down its steep streets. Most of the streets have no sidewalks, some have narrow ones, two feet or so wide, long slabs of greenish stone raised a little above the cobblestones, the
pé de muleque,
or “ragamuffin's foot,”—that is, the confection we call peanut brittle, which it is supposed to resemble. Down the middle of the street runs another strip of long stones, set flush, much easier to walk on than the sidewalks that every so often stop altogether, or break up into steps. These footpaths are called
capistranas,
after a mayor of Ouro Prêto, who introduced them there.

The houses are thick-walled and solid, in the middle of the town of two or even three stories, but as one gets away from the Cathedral they become smaller and lower and the tile roofs turn to thatched ones. The taller houses have balconies, formerly often completely covered in by the lattice-work cages, called
muxarabis
(from the Arabian
muxara,
a shelter), showing the influence of the Moors on the architecture and way of life of Portugal. From them the women could watch what went on in the streets, in an Oriental seclusion. On either side of the windows giving onto these balconies are little lanterns, globes of colored or milk glass,
luminárias.
(The word has been extended to mean a kind of small cream-filled tart, highly thought of by our diarist.) The same kind of globe, without lights, decorates the railings, and sometimes Tecoma vines or grape-vines are trained along the ironwork.

The window frames are curved at the top, with double sashes of a dozen small panes each. Here the trimming becomes confusing, since some of the wooden frames are marbleized or painted to imitate stone, and some of the stone ones are painted to imitate grained wood. A good many of the windows still have stencils on the lower panes, a form of folk-art that also served to protect the privacy of rooms right on the street. A paper stencil in a formalized leaf-and-flower or other design is held against the glass and patted with a rag dipped in white paint. The effect is very decorative, like frost on the window panes in northern climates, only geometrical. The wide overhang of the eaves contributes to the town's surprisingly Oriental air, and this overhang is filled in solid with molding and is a favorite place for colored stripes and other ornamentation. The houses are in admirably bold or pretty colors. I particularly liked a crushed-strawberry pink one, with a double staircase of blue, and window frames and under-eaves marbleized in the same blue. There are mustard-colored houses with bright yellow and dark green shutters, white with dark blue and peach, mauve with dark blue and yellow. So that passers-by will not be drenched in the rainy season, the mouths of the rain-pipes are carried out two feet or more, across the sidewalks, and the funnels flare like trumpets. It is as if a band had suddenly stopped playing. Sometimes they have tin petals or feathers down them and around the mouth, and this decoration is repeated in tiles set edgewise up the ridges of the roofs, dragon-like and very “Chinese.”

The grandmother's house still stands, to the right of the Rosário Church, but the Teatro Isabel, formerly on the other side, has been torn down and in its place is a large baby-pink jail from whose barred windows a drunken prisoner yelled at me incomprehensibly. The house is low, its stoop just a few inches off the ground, a deceptively small-looking house with a sweeping, concave old tile roof. The woman who lives there now knew
Minha Vida de Menina
and its author and kindly showed me through. The old rooms for slaves, extending along the street by the church, are let out. Inside there is room after room, high, square, sadly neglected, almost devoid of furniture. The walls are a yard thick, wooden shutters can be closed and barred on the inside; the ceilings are of boards or woven rushes painted white, the two common Brazilian types. After a good many of these high dark rooms we reached the kitchen, where a girl was cooking over an open fire. Stoves here consist of a long iron plate with four pot-holes in it, laid on the edges of a stone trough full of embers. A wood called
candeia
is commonly used. It has a peculiar sweetish smell, sickening until one gets used to it; at the dinner-hour this sweetish stench hovers bluely over Brazilian towns and villages.

Behind the house the grandmother's former garden covers about five acres, sloping down to a brook and a jungle of banana trees. There are huge
jaboticaba
trees, the same ones that Helena used to climb into for refuge. There are a few beds of lettuce and cabbages, and a grove of coffee trees, but everything is overgrown and gone to seed and it is hard to imagine how it must have looked in the old days, tended by the grandmother's ex-slaves. A big sociable pig stood up on his hind legs in his pen, to watch us.

One of the handsomest buildings is Helena's “Normal School,” now the Grupo Escolar, and located in the middle of the town; big, white, rectangular, with bright blue doors and window-frames. Juscelino Kubitschek, the present president of Brazil and a former governor of Minas, was born in Diamantina. He had visited recently and a great canvas banner bearing his smiling face almost concealed the front of the building. There are also a Kubitschek Street and a Kubitschek Place with his head in bronze in it, less than life-size, as if done by the Amazonian head-shrinkers.

The market is a large wooden shed, with blue and red arches, and a sparse forest of thin, gnawed hitching-posts around it. The drovers are still there, with loads of hides and corn, but because of trains, better roads, and trucks, trade has dwindled to next to nothing since Helena's day. Near the Cathedral one is warned from the street or alley where the “bad girls” live. They are extremely juvenile mulattoes, sitting on their doorsteps with their feet stuck out on the cobblestones, gossiping and sucking sugar-cane in the sunshine. The live-forevers that Helena used to pick are still very much in evidence, in fact they are one of the town's few industries besides diamond-mining. They are a tiny yellow-white straw flower, less than half an inch in diameter, on a long fine shiny brown stalk. Tied up in bunches, the bundle of stems bigger than two hands can hold, they lie drying in rows on the streets all around the Cathedral, and freight-cars full of flowers are sent off every year, on their way to Japan. They are used, I was told, for “fireworks,” or “ammunition,” but I suspect that, dyed and glued, they merely reappear in the backgrounds of Japanese trays, plaques, etc. Brazilian-made fireworks play an important role in Diamantina, as they do in all provincial Brazilian towns, and are used in staggering quantities for religious holidays. I was shown a warehouse packed to the ceiling with firecrackers, catherine-wheels and Roman candles; the supply looked much larger than that of food-stuffs on hand at the same wholesaler's.

Diamonds and gold, but chiefly diamonds, still obsess the economy. The hotel manager (a new hotel, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, was finished in 1956), using almost the very words that Helena used in 1893, complained that he had to fly in vegetables from Belo Horizonte. “Here no one's interested in anything but gold and diamonds,” he said. “They say they can't grow vegetables in this soil, but it isn't true. They think of nothing but diamonds, diamonds, diamonds.” It is strange to see, on the side of a miserable little house, a blue and white enamelled sign announcing that here is a diamond dealer. I looked inside one of these houses and could see nothing but overhead a lurid plaster statue of St. George killing the dragon, with a small red electric light bulb glowing in front of it, and under it, on the table, a bunch of live-forevers and a fine pair of scales in a glass case. The scales are covered up at night, like the innumerable caged birds hanging everywhere. Curiously shaped stones, lumps of ores, clusters and chunks of rock crystal and quartzes are everywhere, too, used as door-stops and sideboard decorations. In the cold clear air, the town itself, with its neatness, rockiness, and fine glitter, seems almost on the point of precipitation and crystallization.

In the recently opened museum there are the usual polychrome saints and angels, sedan chairs and marriage beds, and then suddenly and horribly an alcove hung with the souvenirs of slavery: rusty chains, hand-cuffs, and leg- and neck-irons draped on the wall; pointed iron prods originally fastened to poles; and worse things. Driving about the region, the sites of the old slave encampments are pointed out. Trees, and a very fine short grass, supposedly from Africa, distinguish them, and they are usually beside a stream and near the pits of old mines. But now there is only the small Negro and mulatto population to show for all the million or more slaves who came here in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I made an excursion to Boa Vista, where Helena's father mined. The mines are abandoned now, although they were worked on a large scale by foreign companies up until a few years ago. There is nothing to be seen but an immense excavation exposing soils of different colors (each with a different name; Burton's book gives an excellent account of them and the different methods of mining), and endless iron pipes. Boa Vista is slightly higher than Diamantina; although it is six or seven miles away one can see a church-tower. The road there is dirt, narrow, winding, and eventually the taxi scrapes over outcroppings of naked rock and splashes through streams. Battalions of grotesque rocks charge across the fields, or stand like architecture, pierced by Gothic-ruin windows. Large slabs balance on top of moldering turrets, with vines, bushes, and even stunted palm-trees on their tops. Helena Morley was not a fanciful child but I wondered at her riding on her borrowed horse, before sun-up, along this nightmare road, hurrying to get back to Diamantina in time for school.

I took with me a life-long friend of Helena's future husband, Dr. Brant, Senhor Antonio Cicero de Menezes, former local director of the Post Office service, now eighty years old, a very distinguished-looking man with a white Vandyke beard and moustaches, like an older, frailer Joseph Conrad. We came back through the hamlet of twenty or so houses that is Palha (straw) today and Seu Antonio Cicero said, in Helena's very phrase, “Now let us descend and suck fruit.” So we sat in the tiny general store, surrounded by household and mining necessities: iron kettles and frying pans, salt beef and soap, and sucked a good many slightly sour oranges. A little boy brought them in a gold-panning bowl and Seu Antonio Cicero prepared them for me with his pocket-knife faster than I could suck. The storekeeper showed me a store room full of these wooden bowls, cowhides and tarry lumps of brown sugar and sieves for panning diamonds, piled on the floor, and boxes and boxes of dusty rock crystals, bound, he said, for the United States, for industrial purposes.

Near there we stopped again to watch a group of men looking for diamonds in a stream beside the road. The head of the group had four men, black and white, working for him; he gave me his name and asked me to print it; here it is: Manoel Benicio de Loyola, “diamond-hunter of Curralinho.” They were shovelling in the shallow, sparkling water, damming it up, releasing it, and arranging piles of gravel on the bank. One of them took up a small quantity of gravel in the wide round sieve and held it just beneath the surface of the water, swirling it skilfully around and around. In a few minutes he lifted it out; the gravel was distributed evenly over the sieve in one thin layer. With the gesture of a quick-fingered housewife turning out a cake, he turned the whole thing upside down on the ground, intact. Senhor Benicio de Loyola then put on his horn-rimmed glasses, lowered himself to his knees in the wet mud, and stared, passing a long wooden knife over the gravel from side to side. In a second he waved his hand, got up and put his glasses back in his pocket, and his assistant got ready to turn out another big gravel pancake, while he and Seu Antonio Cicero talked about a large blue diamond someone had found somewhere a day or two before.

This is the simplest of all forms of diamond “mining.” It goes on all around Diamantina constantly, and enough diamonds are found in this way to provide a meagre living for some thousands of people. One sees them, sometimes all alone, sometimes in groups of three or four, standing in every stream. Sometimes they are holding a sieve just under the water, looking for diamonds, sometimes they are sloshing their wooden bowls from side to side in the air, looking for gold. The bent heads and concentration of these figures, in that vast, rock-studded, crucifix-stuck space, give a touch of dementia to the landscape.

I also made an excursion to Biribiri (accented on the second and last “i”s), an enchanting spot, where Helena used to dance, and leap through St. John's Day bonfires. The factory, for weaving cotton, is still there, but nothing could look less like industrialization. One descends to a fair-sized river and the landscape is green and lush; there are many trees, and fruit trees around the blue- or white-washed stone houses along the one unpaved street. In the middle is the church, better kept up than any of the others I saw, trim, almost dainty. Indeed, it looks like an old-fashioned chocolate box. A blue picket fence encloses the flourishing flower-garden and over the door, below the twin towers, is a large rounded pink Sacred Heart with a crown of realistic ten-inch thorns, green wooden palm branches and blue wooden ribbons. Close around the church stand a dozen real palms, Royal palms, enormously tall and slender, their shining heads waving in the late afternoon sun.