John Passos - Brazil on the Move

For bathing, the sea is as delicious as ever.

Drying off in the mild late sun in the salt breeze that was almost cool — the season here is early spring: I’ve seen peach-trees in bloom — I felt a sudden gush of a very Portuguese state of mind: saudades . The Pequeno Dictionário Brasileiro da Língua Portuguêsa describes saudades, rather lyrically I thought, as “the sad and suave remembrance of persons or things distant or gone.”

Four years ago we all enjoyed ourselves particularly on this beach. The surf was just right. The reef cuts the force of the waves.

There are landcrabs if you watch for them. They have a ghostly way of being gone before you see them, set high off the ground on spiderlegs like harness racers.

Gilberto Freyre was at his house in Apipucos. He played host for us for an entire day. It was like living a chapter of Casa Grande e Senzala . He look us out to lunch in the country at an ancient sugar plantation. The sugarmill wasn’t working any more, and the young couple who entertained us, pleasant as they were, were like young couples with artistic tastes you might meet anywhere in the world, but somehow Freyre managed to evoke the sugarmill and the people who’d lived there through the years. He made us feel its history and its folklore … in depth through the years.

It was a day of semitropical beauty you could hardly believe: blue sky sprinkled, as if with confetti, with little halcyon clouds tinted with lavender and primrose and faintest brick color. The cane was a very lightgreen; the mangoes the very darkest green etched in black. In the shimmering sunlight every tree was a different green. There were sheep, and a duck-pond and geese, and cattle in a distant pasture. Country people on scrubby little horses passed along a country lane. Their straw hats, their clothes had a distinctive air. Even their dogs had a Pernambuco look.

The lunch tasted incredibly good. We ate a great deal and drank a great deal. Afterwards Freyre produced a pair of guitar-players. They sang what is called a desafio , a challenge. One man makes up a couplet and sings it and the other caps it. In between they keep the guitar strings throbbing. The whole thing is extemporary. The couplets deal with everything from national politics to the private lives of people in the audience. Everybody is kidded. The guitarists kid each other. The audience applauds a successful crack. For the rest of the day wherever we went the guitarists went with us. They gave a great performance.

In the afternoon we drove through farms and plantations on our way back to Freyre’s house. We drank plenty and talked plenty. We were on the crest of the wave. We dined at the house of a Recife politician. Again the food was much too good. The desafio was going great guns. Afterwards our tireless friends went on to a nightclub, but we, pleading our daughter’s tender years, went back to the Hotel Boa Viajem and to the salty night breeze rustling through the palms and the sound of the surf … Saudades.

This time four years later, the weather’s threatening. The city of Recife has grown skyscrapers from every seam. It looks as if it had doubled in population. No place to park a car. The old town on the island has lost its quaint Dutch look. I miss old buildings I had remembered. If it weren’t that my friends the Ellebys put me up in their house made lively by their children, I’d be feeling depressed indeed.

Among the Americans I find a good deal of gloom. The Alliance for Progress seems stalled. Among the Department of Agriculture people to be sure there’s talk of a real breakthrough in rainforest agriculture. If it’s true it’s the most exciting news since chloroquin. So much to be done … if it weren’t for the Communists.

For the first time, in all my batting around Brazil, walking with a group of Americans at lunchtime into a restaurant, I see real hostility in the faces of the people at the other tables.

The people who for want of a better word we call intellectuals are subject to obsessions the world over. The anti-McCarthyism of the collegiate and bureaucratic classes in the States became an obsession. In Brazil anti-Americanism may be becoming the current obsession of the intellectuals.

In São Paulo, at the lawschool at the old university, I tried to have it out with a group of law students. Personally they couldn’t have been more cordial, but their prejudice stuck out like a sore thumb. First they brought up, as everybody does, our discrimination against Negroes in the South, but they seemed to see the point when I explained that three or four southern states constituted a small part of the population of the United States and that even there an effort was being made. (I might have added that the average southern Negro gets a whole lot better break than a workingman in Brazil.) Why was it, one young man who had been to Los Angeles, insisted, that everybody born north of the Rio Grande considered himself better than anybody born south of it. I pointed out that it was a natural human failing to think of your own group as being tops. The paulistas were famous for that. They laughed. They really had me when they began to ask questions about American writers. They knew Faulkner and Hemingway and Salinger and Cummings. Their questions showed thought and information. I kept thinking: suppose I were talking to a group of students back home; they wouldn’t even know whether Brazilians wrote Spanish or Portuguese. Perhaps it’s our ignorance that galls them so.

It seemed strange to me that they never mentioned the Bay of Pigs. Politeness, maybe.

I may be wrong, maybe I haven’t talked to enough of them; but I don’t seem to find anti-American prejudice among working people. If they know Americans at all they like them, perhaps because we tend to be more openhanded towards working people than the Brazilians. Better wages. The complaint of the housewives is that Americans spoil their maids. The North American idea that people who do manual work should for that very reason get a little better than fair and equal treatment has made little progress in the southern continent. Of course a lot of Brazilian working people vote the pro-Communist and anti-American tickets. They have to vote the way the labor bosses tell them to. It’s a question of bread and butter. They repeat the Communist slogans without paying much attention to them. If they read, they do believe to a certain extent what they read in Ultima Hora , but they don’t seem to feel the hatred the journalists feel who write in it. The working people are too busy trying to get a square meal, a roof over their heads, a few clothes for the children, and the price of a soccer game Sunday.

Modern Communism, what in Brazil you might call the Fidel Castro mentality, is an obsession of the intellectuals. Politics is, after all, the ladder to success. In recent years university students here have given a great deal more time to politics than to study or technical training. Whether they were justified or not, student strikes have paralyzed higher education. Dedication to knowledge: scholarship is almost forgotten as a way of life. Many students, whether Communist or anti-Communist, throw all their energy into the political activities of the student organizations. Being a student has become a profession.

The anti-Communists mostly have to work gratis. The Communists get paid in various ways; traveling expenses to meetings, travel to Cuba or the Soviet Union, board and lodging during indoctrination courses. If they write articles they are sure to get them published. A writer who doesn’t offend the Communists finds his books get a good press. There are Communist claques in the publishing houses and in the newspapers. It’s much easier to swim with the tide than against it.