John Passos - Brazil on the Move

The waiter produces elegantly broiled slices of a large fish I don’t catch the name of. Lime and Bacardi. (Exiled from Cuba, Bacardi rum is now produced in Recife.) After the long drive and the dust and the crowded governor’s palace and the jampacked comicio the stillness is delicious, the emptiness, the moonlit water.

The figure at the bar turns out to be a local poet. He’s been at the bar a long time. He weaves down the terrace to greet us. He hovers around the table. Talking, gesticulating, expostulating, there seem to be three or four of him. I get the feeling the place is crowded. He shows an amazing knowledge of North American writing. He loves Sherwood Anderson: Poor White, Winesburg, Ohio …

Poor Sherwood, I’m thinking, so many years dead. How he would have enjoyed this scene. The unfamiliar inlet between mysterious hills in the moonlight. The empty terrace, the puzzled waiter; José Augusto, who’s a proper young man, explaining apologetically that the gentleman really is a very good poet … How Sherwood Anderson would have enjoyed the scene and the drunken poet praising him.

We had to tear ourselves away in a hurry. My appointment with Bishop Sales was at nine and it suddenly transpired that his episcopal residence was not in Natal, but in a fishing village called Ponta Negra, fourteen kilometers away. Our suggestion to the chauffeur that we mustn’t keep the bishop waiting, caused him to tear off at such speed through the complicated moonlit streets of Natal and along a narrow bumpy road that skirted a great moonwashed beach that I really thought he’d be the end of us. It was only when I explained to him that it was not extreme unction I was seeking from the bishop but an interview, that he saw the point and slowed down.

Bishop Sales has a dark eager aquiline countenance with just a touch of Savonarola. His spare frame has a vigorous athletic look under the black cassock. He sits on a small hard chair in his bare little office, talking with his legs crossed in a rather unecclesiastical manner.

His program to combat Communism, he says right away, is only one of a dozen programs in various parts of Brazil. It is not a program of religious propaganda, he insists. He wants to awaken a sense of human dignity and of the duties of citizenship in a democracy.

In furtherance of this general aim, he conducts courses in reading and writing: alphabetization, he calls it, over the radio.

He wants a Christian labor movement that will be independent of politicians and Communists and also of employer influences. He wants trade unions that will really stand up for the rights and dignity of labor.

Like Aluísio Alves his appeal is to the teenagers. Every week he invites a group of young people from interior towns and villages to spend three days at Ponta Negra for an indoctrination course. He furnishes them with small batterypowered radios to take home so that they can tune in on the lessons and lectures he broadcasts every day: alphabetization, hygiene, sanitation, simple information that people need in the back country. The young people tune in and explain the lessons to their parents.

He takes me into the next room, where a group of boys and girls, some of them so young they must still be in grade school, are peering at sentences written on a blackboard. Their faces shine when he addresses them. They are having fun, like boy or girl scouts in the States.

“See how they enjoy it,” he says eagerly when we go back to his office. He pours me a glass of coconut water.

“Communist propaganda succeeds,” he says, “because nobody has shown enough interest to talk to the people first. You see how they light up. They know I am interested in them.”

He went on to lament the fact that many great Brazilian capitalists were so shortsighted — out of a mistaken nationalism perhaps — as to back Communist agitators. He regretted too that the U. S. State Department wouldn’t subsidize any of the church programs for promoting the democratic faith. He needed all the help he could get. There was so much to be done.

The chauffeur drove us back to town at a snail’s pace when I told him I wanted to enjoy the sight of the beach and the rocky coast in the moonlight. The enormous bed at the government guesthouse couldn’t have been more comfortable. It had been a long day.

José Augusto and I joined the governor’s caravan in the early morning at a flourishing sugar plantation near Ceará Mirim some miles inland from Natal. The refinery was working. Smoke rose from its tall yellowbrick chimney. A wonderful little toy locomotive with a funnelshaped stack was shunting in little cars full of cane. The sort of little locomotive you want to wrap up and take home.

Under the trees opposite, on a knoll that stood up out of a glaucous ocean of cane that stretched to the horizon, cars were stacked every which way against a big comfortable house.

We found the party at breakfast. The dining room looked like a Marriage at Cana by one of the more animated Venetians. A variety of people ate, talked, argued, gesticulated about a long table that groaned with dishes of fried eggs and plates of ham and patties of manioc flour, all stacked about a row of stately poundcakes down the middle. At one end the blond hostess was pouring out oceans of coffee and hot milk. At the other sat the large monsignor, his cassock enlivened by a little red piping, who was the candidate for Lieutenant-Governor. Maids rushed in and out with plates and cups. New arrivals greeted each other with abraços. Precinct workers slid in and out with messages.

Outside, the geese in the courtyard kept up an uneasy hissing, ducks quacked from a pool, children romped, drivers raced the motors of their cars. Bem-ti-vís piped in the trees overhead.

Eventually the governor emerged from a conference in a back room. People were loaded into cars, handbags were stowed away. Aluísio Alves, a green handkerchief in his hand, took his place in the first car and we were off across the countryside. In the first village there was a new school and a new well to be inaugurated. The children had green scarves and danced up and down chanting: “Aluísio, Aluísio.” The teachers and authorities stood beaming in the sun. On the edge of the crowd boys set off rockets.

And so on, village by village, new schools, water systems, public privies, speeches, singing school children, green bunting that lashed about in the seabreeze, until, at a palm-thatched fisherman’s hamlet near Cape São Roque we changed to jeeps for a run along the coast.

Cruising in a jeep over the white beaches and the tawny dunes was terrific. It was almost like being on skis. We skimmed round the edges of dunes, past endless variations of surf on shining sand, on rocky ledges; and blue sea and green shallows and japanesy little villages under coconut palms with canoes and jangadas ranked on the beach in front of them.

This coast north of Natal is very beautiful but dreadfully poor. Fish are scarce. The only reliable income comes from crawfish which abound under the reefs and ledges. Only now with new roads opening up is it profitable to market them. Schemes are in the works to set up refrigerating equipment so as to ship out the lobstertails for which the demand in the world market seems endless.

At each village the governor visits the school. There’s a little parade through the sandy streets with the local authorities and precinct workers, and a speech, songs, cheers, flower-petals scattered like confetti over the governor’s head, rockets and cherry bombs. The governor tells of his unsuccessful efforts to get equipment from the federal government for schools and clinics, for road building, for water systems. (Actually he’s working with the Alliance for Progress but he doesn’t make a point of it.) He points to the new public privy or the deep well or the school he’s built or repaired. Some schools have gone without even having the walls cleaned since the administration of Washingtón Luíz more than thirty years ago. He tells how much there is to do. He makes a touching personal appeal. “If you are satisfied vote for the men who will help me; if not, vote against me.”