Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Brazilians are a remarkably sober people. Two or three cafezinhos provide enough fuel for them to talk and argue on all night long. The late 19th-century sailor-author Captain Joshua Slocum ( Sailing Alone Around the World ) was, in his earlier days, in command of a ship on the South American coast. He speaks more than once of “my sober Brazilian sailors” who, unlike the sailors of other nationalities, always turned up again after a night in port — with no hang-overs.

Perhaps because Brazilians are usually as indifferent to cooking as they are to physical comfort, the staple diet is rice, dried meat, and black beans, cooked with a great deal of lard and garlic and served with a dish of manioc flour, to be sprinkled over the beans. However, there are many dishes of great refinement that use twenty or thirty ingredients, and wonderful desserts with even more wonderful names like Maiden’s Drool, Bride’s Pillow, and Blessed Mothers (small cakes).

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The conversation in the caffeine-enlivened evenings will alternate between politics, real estate deals (a favorite pastime of all classes), and family reminiscences. Proud of their Latin logic, Brazilians are also a little proud of their reputation for “craziness.” Family traits are cherished; such and such a family will be famous for its bad temper or for its obstinacy or for its green eyes — because looks, too, are very important. A good family nose will be traced down right to the last-born infant. This preoccupation with good looks may come from the knowledge that many of the oldest families have some Negro blood. Since everyone also wants to be as claro, or white, as possible, this is another of those contradictions that seem to bother no one.

Criticizing the country, running down the government and talking about the “national stupidity” with fearful and apocryphal examples are also favorite pastimes. It is sometimes hard to tell whether the speakers are really angry or merely excited, tolerant or unaware of any need for tolerance, naive or extremely sophisticated. Brazilians are mercurial: recently during Carnival a Negro dancing along the sidewalk with his wife suddenly ran into his two mistresses. There was a small riot and some hair-pulling, but an hour later all four were observed gaily dancing the samba together and holding hands. When the wife was asked why she put up with it, she answered helplessly but rather proudly, “He talked me into it. He’s such a pretty talker!”

More taciturn peoples are likely to be suspicious of talkative ones and to think they are wasting their energy. One frequently meets among intellectuals a sort of Brazilian Hamlet-type, incapable of serious work or action, who seems to be covering up a deep anxiety with words, words, words, a pretended madness, a deliberately fanciful humor that is not frivolity although it resembles it. The earthy humor of the poor, the brutal cartoons in newspapers and magazines, the street boys who laugh at cripples or ugly women — this is directly in line with the humor of the Romans; but the humor of the intellectual is very different, wry, gentle, and a little wild.

They poke fun at their usually bloodless revolutions: “No one fought in that revolution — it was the rainy season.” Like the Portuguese form of bullfighting in which there is no killing, Brazilian revolutions or golpes (coups) sometimes seem to be little more than political and rhetorical maneuvering. A man’s speeches, his moral and physical courage, are admired, but actual violence is going too far. Duels are still fought in Argentina, but they are out of style in Brazil. Brazil has not fought a major war for almost a century. It has rarely wanted more land, already having more than it knows what to do with.

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Jokes tell even more. There is an old favorite, perhaps not even Brazilian originally, about a man walking down the street with a friend. He is grossly insulted by a stranger, and says nothing. The friend tries to rouse his fighting instincts, “Didn’t you hear what he called you? Are you going to take that? Are you a man, or aren’t you?” The man replies, “Yes, I’m a man. But not fanatically. ” This is the true Brazilian temper.

At least as early as the 9th century a land called “Brasil” was already a legend in Europe. It was wherever bresilium came from, a wood obtained in trade with the Far East, much in demand for dyeing cloth red. (Perhaps all the red woolens the peasants wear in the paintings of Brueghel were dyed with “brasil” wood?) The Medici Atlas of 1351 shows an island labelled “Brazil,” and this imaginary island keeps re-appearing for several centuries, sometimes in one part of the world, sometimes in another, even after the present Brazil had been discovered. Columbus found the dye-wood tree in the West Indies, but in his eagerness for gold he simply ignored it. But the first ships sent back from the continent of South America were loaded with brasil-wood, and “Brazil,” or “Brasil,” became the common name for the new country. (The spelling varies and sometimes the number; it was also called “The Brazils.”)

In one of the parks of Rio de Janeiro stands a fine, flamboyant example of Latin-American park-sculpture, a much-bigger-than-life-size man dressed in a costume-pageant costume with wide sleeves, fringes, and skirts, and holding onto a ton or so of undulated bronze banner. One side of the huge pedestal says “1900” and the other “1500” and it was set up to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral — according to some authorities. As the city has grown, this statue has been shunted from one place to another, and in somewhat the same way historians have shuffled the problem of whether Cabral really did discover Brazil or not. But most of them now agree that he did, in 1500, shortly after Easter. He was supposedly on his way to India in command of a fleet of thirteen tiny ships; if so, he was off his course by some […] thousand miles to the west. Since the best astronomers, navigators, and mathematicians of the day were all employed at the court of King Manoel I of Portugal, it scarcely seems as though Cabral’s extended side-trip could have been accidental. Probably the Portugese were really trying to get ahead of the Spaniards, who were very busy exploring the lands further north.

Two years after Columbus’s first voyage, Portugal and Spain, then in the full flush of their age of discoveries, had grandly divided all the non-Christian world, known and as yet unknown, between them. The Treaty of Tordesillas, sanctioned by the pope, gave all lands east of a line drawn 370 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands to Portugal, and all lands west of it to Spain. The exact positon of this line was always vague, and the rivalry between the two countries was so strong that even after the treaty they tried to conceal their various voyages and discoveries from each other. (And thus made things harder for the historians.) But Portugal believed, or pretended to believe, that Brazil was within her rightful territories.

On Cabral’s flagship there was a nobleman-merchant, Pero Vaz de Caminha, signed on as a scribe. The wonderfully vivid letter he wrote to King Manoel, describing Brazil and the Indians, or the little he saw of them, has been called “the first page of Brazilian history” and also, with equal justice, “the first page of Brazilian literature.” After a brief account of the voyage west, Caminha calmly announces: “On this day at the vesper hours we caught sight of land, that is first of a large mountain, very high and round, and of other lower lands to the south of it, and flatland with great groves of trees. To this high mountain the captain gave the name of Monte Passoal [“pertaining to Easter”], and to the land, Terra da Vera Cruz. ”