Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The next day the drama continued on a lower plane but in even more Brazilian style. The two sets of in-laws quarrelled as to which one would have the honor of harboring the child and her real mother first. One grandmother denied that the chief of police had been asked to be Conceiçãozinha’s godfather, because “that is always a family affair.” And the poor father was faced with fulfilling his promessas. If the baby was found alive, he had promised (1) to pay for four Masses; (2) to stop smoking for a year; (3) to give two yard-high wax candles, as well as a life-size wax model of a baby, to the Church of Our Lady of the Penha; and (4) to climb the steps of the same church on his knees, carrying a lighted candle. This 18th-century church perches on top of a weirdly shaped penha, or rock, that sticks up out of the plain just north of the city. It is a favorite church for pilgrimages and for the fulfilling of promessas. The steps up to it number 365.

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The story of Conceiçãozinha contains a surprising amount of information about Brazilian life, manners, and character. Much of it, of course, is what one might expect to find in any Latin American country. Brazilians love children. They are highly emotional and not ashamed of it. Family feeling is very strong. They are Roman Catholics, at least in outward behavior. They are franker than Anglo-Saxons about extramarital love, and they are tolerant of miscegenation. Also — as one would expect in a very poor and in many ways backward country — many people are illiterate; there are feebleminded people at large who in other countries might be in institutions; and hospitals may not always be run with streamlined efficiency. So far it is all fairly predictable.

But there is more to it than that. The story immediately brings to mind one of Brazil’s worst, and certainly most shocking, problems: that of infant mortality. Why all this sentimental, almost hysterical, concern over one small baby, when the infant mortality rate in Brazil is still one of the highest in the world? The details of Conceiçãozinha’s story are worth examining not only for the interesting light they throw on that contradictory thing, the Brazilian character, but also because the tragic, unresolved problem they present is almost a paradigm of a good many other Brazilian problems, big and small.

First there is the obvious devotion to children. As in other Latin countries, babies are everywhere. Everyone seems to know how to talk to infants or dandle them, and unself-consciously. It is said that two kinds of small business never fail in Brazil, infants’ wear shops and toy shops. The poorest workman will spend a disproportionate amount of his salary for a christening dress (or for milk if he happens to know it is vital to his child’s health). Parents love to dress up their offspring; the children’s costume balls are an important part of Carnival every year throughout the country.

In Catholic Brazil there is no divorce and no legalized birth control, and large families are the rule. Sometimes families run to twenty or more, and five or six children seems to be average. Brazil is a very young country; more than 52 per cent of the population is under nineteen years old. Early marriage is normal, and a baby within a year is taken for granted. Children are almost always wanted — the first three or four at least — and adored.

And yet the infant mortality rate stays appallingly high. In the poorest and most backward regions of the great northeast bulge and the Amazon basin, it is as high as 50 per cent during the first year of life, sometimes even higher. The cities of Recife and Rio, with their large favelas, are two of the worst offenders. During the three days when Conceiçãozinha was hidden in the washerwoman’s shack, and survived, it is a safe guess that more than sixty babies died in Rio.

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Most of this tragic waste of life is due to malnutrition. But often the malnutrition is due not so much to actual lack of food as to ignorance, a vicious circle in which poverty creates ignorance which then creates more poverty. In Rio, for example, there are many worthy free clinics. But fine doctors have been known to resign after working in them for years; they can no longer endure seeing the same children brought in time after time, sicker, weaker, and finally dying because the parents are too ignorant, or too superstitious, to follow simple instructions.

The masses of poor people in the big cities, and the poor and not-so-poor of the “backlands,” love their children and kill them with kindness by the thousands. The wrong foods, spoiled foods, worm medicines, sleeping syrups — all exact a terrible toll on the “little angels,” in paper-covered, gilt-trimmed coffins, blue for boys and pink for girls.

Nevertheless, the population of Brazil is increasing rapidly. Life expectancy has gone up considerably in the last few decades. The indomitable and apparently increasing vitality of Brazil shines through the grimmest death toll statistics. It is like the banana tree that grows everywhere in the country. Cut it back to a stump above ground, and in a matter of hours it sends up a new shoot and starts unfolding new green leaves.

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Indeed, the banana tree is a fairly good symbol for the country itself and for what has happened and is still happening to it. Brazil struck all the early explorers as a “natural paradise,” a “garden,” and at its best moments it still gives that impression — a garden neglected, abused, and still mostly uncultivated, but growing vigorously nevertheless. Great resources have been squandered, but even greater ones are still there, waiting. Barring some worldwide disaster, material prosperity seems bound to arrive. But it is the mismanagement and waste of both human and material wealth along the way that shocks the foreigner as well as the educated, sensitive Brazilian. To give only one example of this: because of inadequate roads, poor transportation, and lack of refrigeration, some 40 per cent of all food produced spoils before it reaches the big markets.

Exploding birth rate and infant mortality, great wealth and degrading poverty — these are the two big paradoxes. But along with them come many smaller ones repeating the pattern, overlapping and interacting: passionate and touching patriotism combined with constant self-criticism and denigration; luxury and idleness (or admiration of them) combined with bursts of energy; extravagance and pride, with sobriety and humility. The same contrasts even appear in Brazilian history, periods of waste and corruption alternating with periods of reform and housecleaning.

Brazil is very big and very diverse. Brazilians vary widely from one region to another. A man may be a “Carioca” (from Rio — the name probably comes from an Indian expression meaning “white man’s home”), a “Paulista” (from São Paulo), a “Mineiro” (from the State of Minas Gerais) or a “Bahiano” (from the State of Bahia), and he is proud of the peculiarities of his own region.

But not only does he vary geographically, he varies historically. Men from two, three or more eras of European history live simultaneously in Brazil today. The coastal cities, from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon River to Pôrto Alegre in the south, are filled with 20th-century men with 20th-century problems on their minds: getting on in the world and rising in it socially, how to pay for schools and doctors and clothes. Then in the surrounding countryside is a rural or semirural population who lead lives at least half a century behind the times, old-fashioned both agriculturally and socially. And for the people of the fishing villages, for those living on the banks of the great rivers, for cowboys and miners — all the backlands people — time seems to have stopped in the 17th century. Then, if one ventures even a little farther on, one enters the really timeless, prehistoric world of the Indians.