John Passos - Brazil on the Move

It’s so much easier to appeal to envy, hatred and malice than to work out rational solutions: therein lies the success of the Communist play for power.

The landlords in the Northeast are no bargain either. Many of them would rather die than give their tenants a break. The basic trouble is that there’s not enough to go around. I was told the story of a man in Pernambuco who personally beat up one of his tenants for planting banana trees round his hut. I suppose the landlord thought that if the tenant had a few bananas to eat he wouldn’t cut cane at the going rate. Still, if the politicians would only give them a chance the pineapplegrowers’ cooperative might well do more to raise the standard of living around Sapé than the peasant leagues.

We cross into Rio Grande do Norte. Now the land is really poor but there are less people on it. The long rolling hills are shaped a little like the great green hills of Normandy, but they are sandy and arid. Scraggly vegetation under a flaming sun. In the valleys we see traces of abandoned sugar plantations. Here and there the stump of a brick chimney rises among the ruins of an old refinery. Even where there’s still cultivation the cane has a starved look. There is a great deal of it. From one rise we look out into the shimmer of sunlight on enormous canefields, blue like the shimmer on a lake.

The first sign of Natal, the state capital, is a row of old U.S. radio masts left over from World War II sticking up from the top of a hill. Then there are military hangars, nicely painted airport buildings on a vast empty expanse of concrete landingstrips. We are driving on a hardtop road that is unmistakably American. To the right, bluffs jut into the misty blue ocean over great spuming purple rocks. The seabreeze is suddenly cool. The large seedylooking gray building is a hospital. Visiting Americans put up there, Doug Elleby says, by arrangement with the nuns, because the hotel is so horrible.

We stop off at the hotel in the center of town. An unappetizing dump. A few discouraged looking customers sit sweating in the lobby. Gin and tonic is available in the bar but no sandwiches. We’ve had no lunch. It’s three in the afternoon and we are ravenous. All we can get to eat is some dried up strips of Dutch cheese. No bread.

A gentleman from the state government appears to take me to the guesthouse. Brazilian friends in Rio have arranged for the governor to take me along on a tour of the state starting tomorrow. I say goodby to my American escorts.

Aluísio Alves, a man of thirtynine who is present governor of Rio Grande do Norte, is, so it has been explained to me, one of the young men with a passion for social service who represent a new breed of Brazilian politician. It is this new breed of politician that will give the Communists a hard time.

He was born in Angicos, a little hamlet in the longstaple cotton region in the center of the state. He studied in Natal and took his law degree at the University of Alagoas in Maceió, an ancient city on the coast a hundred or so miles south of Recife. At twentyone, while still a student, he was elected federal deputy, one of the youngest on record. In Rio he became national secretary of the Democratic Union and a friend of Carlos Lacerda’s. Along with Lacerda he was one of the founders of the Tribuna da Imprensa which he edited during Lacerda’s exile. Since then there have been political differences between the two, particularly since Alves was elected governor of his home state in 1960 with Social Democrat backing.

On the way to the guesthouse I got the notion that — although possibly for political reasons the Alves administration was keeping Americans at arm’s length — the American troops had left not too unpleasant memories behind them in Natal.

At the guesthouse I was ushered into a princely pink bedroom hung with mirrors and festooned with plush that looked out through shuttered windows on a garden on one side and an airy terrace on the other. In Brazil it’s always a feast or a famine. The shower in the bathroom not only worked, but the water was hot. A shower was a godsend after all that dust. We’d arrived with half the state of Paraíba caked on our necks. I lunched in solitary splendor at a great oval table set as if for a state banquet.

Afterwards I was driven to the seat of government which the present incumbent has renamed Palacio da Esperanza (the Palace of Hope). Governor Alves is a showman. From the beginning of his campaign for the governorship he has used the green flag of hope as a trademark.

A green flag fluttered over the building and the official cars parked outside had green flags. Aluísio Alves makes a great play for the young. The government palace was as full of teenagers as Washington, D.C. during the Easter vacation. The central stairway swarmed with boys and girls. They chattered in the anterooms. There were so many youthful committees packed into the governor’s office that you could hardly see his desk.

Aluísio Alves has, like so many Brazilians, the knack of looking younger than he is. He is a slender man with sunken cheeks. Except for his harassed air of a man in the middle of a political campaign he looks almost as youthful as the highschool kids all about him.

He has a brusque decisive manner. His Portuguese is so clear and sharp I can understand every word. In a flash he arranges an appointment with Bishop Sales whom I have asked to see. He tells off a young man from his secretariat to see that I get to the afternoon’s comicio . He himself is up to his neck in appointments. He explains that he is not up for election. He is campaigning for a favorable legislature. His term has three more years to run.

José Augusto who has been detailed as my guide is a student of law. Right in Natal he’s learned fluent English. He’s too young to have learned it from the Americans. He’s so younglooking I don’t like to ask his age. He has plans for the diplomatic service. Itamarití. No, his secretarial work doesn’t interfere with his studies. It is good practice. He’d like to go to the States, to perfect his English and to see. He almost got a fellowship but something went wrong. The man who was backing him died. He wishes it could be this year. Next year will be too late. He’ll be training for the foreign service. Already he has the suave diplomat’s manner, but under it you feel a somewhat steely personality. I’d bet that young man will go far.

The meeting was interesting. An enormous crowd packed a Y-shaped intersection of streets. Green bunting, signs, posters, campaign mottoes. Rockets sizzle up from the outskirts of the crowd to go bang overhead in the rosy sky of the swift twilight. Bats — or were they some kind of nighthawk? — flitter overhead. Night comes on fast.

The governor is giving account of his administration. He talks in front of a floodlit screen. When he needs to explain a point of finance he has the figures thrown on the screen from a slide. He’s explaining his budget to the public. He has a clear sharp way of putting things. While he does occasionally pull out the organ notes of the professional orator his story hangs together; the public servant accounting to his constituents.

Brazilian comicios, particularly in this mad campaign of ’62, never end. José Augusto says it’s time to dine. Gradually the chauffeur manages to back his car out of the crowd.

A full moon has risen above the Atlantic. Natal rises from the sea in ranks of stucco cubes, theatrically lit by the streetlights against a background of high black headlands. It is really beautiful in the moonlight. We eat at the aviation officers club, on a terrace overlooking an inlet. The place has the look of having been built by the Americans twenty years back. We are absolutely alone there except for a solitary figure at the bar inside.