John Passos - Brazil on the Move

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.