Prose (53 page)

It might strike a critical visitor as ironical that for over two years thousands of workers have been left to build wooden houses or shacks and shift for themselves, while the first two buildings to be completed should both be called “Palace.” However, to be fair, besides the Free City, attempts are being made to provide decent housing for workers and white-collar workers. Two blocks of five hundred houses each, “row” houses, designed by Niemeyer, have already been built by the
Fundação da Casa Popular,
and five “superblocks” of apartments are now going up, financed by five of the Brasilian
institutos,
a form of syndicate peculiar to Brasil, handling pensions, hospitalization, or loans, or functioning, as in this case, as banks.

At the end of four years, when enough housing will have been completed, the Free City is supposed to be razed; in fact, by then, one branch of the artificial lake is supposed to be rippling above its streets. Those most violently opposed to Brasília cynically predict that the Free City will never be razed; that it will remain and probably grow, the slums of the future city, like the wild and uncontrollable growth of shacks that now surrounds Rio de Janeiro.

(Also to be fair it should be explained that although the word “palace” for a president's residence may sound strange to American ears, in Latin countries the word does not have the overtones of royalty it has for us. It can mean merely “mansion,” and
palacete,
“small palace,” is often used for any large house.)

Surely it is to Kubitschek's credit that he has probably the most sophisticated taste in architecture of any head of any government. Educated Brasilians are apt to feel that although their country is in a bad transitional period, backwards in many respects, and may not have made much of a stir in the other arts, it has reason to be proud of its contemporary architecture. The outstandingly beautiful Ministry of Education building in Rio was begun in 1937, the very first and still one of the very few government buildings to be commissioned in modern international style. (Chandigarh was not begun until almost fifteen years later.) After all, Kubitschek could have chosen to build an Old Colonial capital, or a Greek-and-Roman, or even one in a particularly monstrous Swiss-chalet style that has sometimes been thought appropriate for Brasil. But as far as his choice of style goes the only objections I have heard of have been from the Army, which does not feel that an airy, glassy, or floating edifice will represent its view of things. But perhaps all generals secretly yearn for crenellations and drawbridges.

*   *   *

A friend of mine, a Rio interior decorator who had just finished doing up the new hotel, had made reservations for me by two-way radio. The Brasília Palace Hotel is in one block, a hundred and thirty-five rooms, one room thick and three stories high; only a small central section rests on the ground, the rest of the building on either side being supported by concrete pillars covered with black-anodized aluminum. At night these pillars almost disappear and the hotel appears to float like a luxury-liner, an effect that seems to be dear to Niemeyer's heart these days.

The entrance, reminding me vaguely of a New York subway entrance, is down a flight of steps into a sunken lobby; over it, at ground level, is a large, pleasant lounge, full of Saarinen chairs and marble-topped coffee-tables. The three floors of rooms face east to the Palace of the Dawn; three corridors run the full length of the west side of the building. There is one public staircase, about four feet wide, and two small elevators (one was not working when we were there), each holding at the most six people, so that there will certainly be serious traffic problems when the hotel is filled with its quota of three hundred guests. The entire west wall is made of large blocks of cement, five inches or so thick, and regularly set into each block are rows of little round glasses—real drinking glasses, the bell boys like to inform one—their circle-ridged bottoms sealing the wall on the outside. They let in the light in thousands of spots on the walls and gray carpeting of the corridors, an effect that is extremely pretty but unfortunately, from the moment the sun starts down the western sky until early next morning, fiendishly hot. Also, I wondered how could the insides of all those little glasses ever be cleaned? Already the more casual type of guest had begun to leave cigarette butts and other odds and ends in those within reach. Between each floor a row of blocks has been left without the glasses; the holes open into an airspace above the halls, where small screened openings alternate with light fixtures along the ceilings. This is supposed to provide ventilation, but not a breath of air came from the vents, and at night, when I walked the corridor to my room at the very end, before reaching its white formica doorway I would be dizzy from the heat. The bathroom ceilings are pierced with holes into this common airspace, too, with the unhappy result that one clearly hears the man next door taking his bath, limb by limb. The rooms, however, are large and cool, and except for the dressing-tables, well furnished. In the dressing-table mirrors a woman of barely average height (myself) sees only her chin.

Between the hotel block and the dining-room wing is a small space about as big as a tennis court and here grass had been planted and was being watered. Otherwise, in front and in back of the hotel, and for the half-mile tract between it and the presidential palace, the red dust blew unchecked. (A week or so after this, when President Gronchi of Italy visited Brasília, a thin layer of cement was poured over the area in front of the Palace.) Dust seeped into the hotel, tingeing the carpets and one's clothing and the gray marble floor of the lounge was powdered with it. I watched a workman trying to clean this floor with an electric polishing machine. After producing a few big spirals edged with banks of red dust, he gave up the attempt.

This particular floor comes to an end in a free-form curve four feet higher than the floor of the dining-room, into which the lounge opens. Plants and cacti hide coyly beneath the overhang, invisible from the lounge. The one occasion on our trip when I saw Aldous Huxley openly irritated was when, just after he arrived the next day, he started walking down the lounge, against the light, and almost fell over this drop. He showed distinct signs of anger, for him, and remarked that the handrail had been in use for some thousands of years and it seemed “a shame to abandon such a useful invention.”

In front of the dining-room is the biggest swimming-pool I have ever seen: oval, lined with blue tiles, as yet waterless. The Presidential pool, at the far side of the Palace, is bigger than the standard Olympic pool, and this is a much bigger one than that. Permanent quarters for the hotel employees have not yet been built. Beyond the pool is a wooden paling, and inside it a collection of wooden shacks. Maids, bell boys, and chefs in their white hats, skirt the blue tile abyss and vanish into this shabby compound, and the dining-room looks out on it.

Concealed behind a curving black wall on the dining-room level are a bar and cocktail lounge, and also there was the source of some annoyance to the Huxley party—a loud, Brasilian equivalent of Muzak, which was turned on for two hours at lunch and dinner. The food was not bad, considering that all supplies have to be brought by truck or by plane from at least as far away as Annapolis; there were almost no vegetables, but always airlifted pineapples or papayas to provide us with vitamins, as well as the mushy Delicious apple, as ubiquitous here as in the United States.

That Friday night two far-off couples and I dined all alone in the big dining-room, the canned music struck up with the canned consommé, and the extra waiters looked on. After dinner two younger couples appeared in the lounge, with a baby in a basket and another small child to each couple. One mother in plaid slacks ran races with her little boy; the other joggled her baby's basket with her foot and read a detective story.

*   *   *

This peaceful family life, without the fathers, went on all the next morning. Around noon, when I was expecting my own party to arrive, several cars drove up rapidly from the direction of the airport and at least forty fashionably dressed men and women poured noisily down the steps into the subterranean lobby. They had come by special plane from São Paulo to attend a banquet and a ball that President Kubitschek was giving for them at the hotel that evening. The almost deserted, oddly domestic lounge suddenly swarmed with bejeweled women in sack dresses and men in pin-stripe suits. Parties like this, I was told, take place every week-end; in an air-age version of the hospitable old Brasilian custom of “showing the house to the visitors,” Kubitschek invites groups from Rio, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and other cities. Once, even, a whole convent of young girls came by special plane to look things over at the President's invitation. Tales of these week-end parties, of course, only increase the indignation of those opposed to Brasília on economic grounds—besides the expenses of entertainment, they say, just that much more gasoline is being used, in addition to the thousands of gallons burnt up by the trucks and planes bringing in building materials.

Five or ten minutes later the Huxleys and their party did arrive: very quiet, carrying books and cameras, and, slightly travel-worn, but looking alert and curious compared to the giddier set still swarming around the room-clerks. Laura Huxley and Maya Osser, the Polish-Brasilian architect, are old friends of mine, and I knew most of the others slightly or had met them.

Huxley is, of course, tall, pale, and thin, but he undoubtedly looks even taller, paler, and thinner than usual in Brasil, where most men, at least by Anglo-Saxon standards, are short and dark. Also, while the Brasilians were thinking of the season still as “winter” and in spite of the temperature were wearing dark suits and ties, Huxley always wore beige or light gray suits, or a white sports jacket, and he favored an extremely long, pale, satin necktie with Persian horsemen on it. His long hair, combed straight back, is a uniform gray-brown, his features large but well-modelled; he has beautiful teeth. Laura Huxley is about twenty years younger than her husband, small, trim, and blonde, with a rather large head and enormous gray-green eyes set far apart, in a remarkable Campigli-like style of Italian good looks. She is polite and friendly and animated, in French, Italian, or English, as the need arises. She shares Huxley's passionate interest in medicines, mescalin, and subliminal advertising, but on a more personal and practical level; in fact she adores to doctor people and occasionally handed out her various special pills to one or the other of us. With Huxley, it is hard to tell how much he is seeing, and since he usually talks very little, what he is thinking. By long self-discipline an original cool, English detachment seems to have been overlaid with an Oriental, or simply mystical, non-attachment. There is a slight cast to his bad eye, and this characteristic, which I always find oddly attractive, in Huxley's case adds even more to his veiled and other-worldly gaze. When examining something close to, a photograph or a painting, he sometimes takes out a small horn-rimmed magnifying glass, or, for distant objects, a miniature telescope, and he often sits resting his good eye by cupping his hand over it. He is unfailingly patient, never seems to tire (whenever anyone grew apprehensive about this his wife assured us that he never
does
tire), and smiling sweetly, displays occasional mild outbursts of interest. But he gives the impression of being inwardly absorbed in a meditation of his own, far removed from the possibly frivolous scenes of man's efforts that the Brasilian and Department of Foreign Affairs was proffering, and we all, to degrees that varied with our temperaments, behaved with him slightly like nervous hostesses.

After lunch and a two hours' rest we were taken off on a brief tour of the sights of Brasília, starting with the Palace of the Dawn. Kubitschek, meanwhile, had arrived for the party by his private Viscount. He sent over the old Lincoln convertible he keeps in Brasília, for the guests of honor. The Callados went with them; the rest of us climbed into the cream-colored Microbus and tagged along behind. Around the Palace is a barbed-wire fence and at the gate are a sentry box and two soldiers in tin helmets with tommy-guns under their arms. The Presidential car swept through the open gate but the sentries, not having been notified about the other car, refused to let us in and shut the gate under the bus's nose. The driver tried to explain but the young soldier said “No, no!” firmly and finally rather crossly, hugging his gun. The young Englishman hopped down from the bus and exclaimed “This is outrageous!” in the traditional English manner. Then someone drove back to the hotel, brought back the password, or at least permission for us to enter, and we were admitted after all, to catch up with the others.

The Palace of the Dawn is a large, rectangular, greenish (because Ray-Ban) glass box, framed lengthwise by swooping, off-white, pillars, ten on the far side in an unbroken series, and eight on the front, allowing a space for the entrance. From the outside it is certainly one of the most beautiful of all Oscar Niemeyer's buildings. The pillars, in particular, are an architectural triumph: it is, after all, no mean feat to invent a new “order.” If one imagines a chain of huge white kites, poised upside down, then grasped by giant hands and squeezed in on the four sides until they are elegantly attenuated, one can picture them fairly accurately. They are covered with slabs of a crystalline Brasilian marble, and their bases, that is, the heads of the upside-down kites, theoretically narrow to point zero, and actually the part resting on the ground is only about six inches wide. In his
Modulo
article Niemeyer says that by means of these delicate dimensions he hoped to give the Palace “lightness and dignity—as if it had just landed gently on the earth.” And in this he has succeeded completely, even if the other-planet atmosphere of all Brasília just now comes to his assistance—the incongruous soldiers, the strange, clumsy hotel, the hit-or-miss shacks and palm-trees, might all have “just landed,” too—the effect of the Palace is completely original and yet immediately acceptable as a masterpiece of lightness and grace.