Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

A young Jewish businessman, intelligent, but not well-read or well-travelled, was astounded when, planning his first trip to the United States, he was warned about “restricted” hotels. The idea of being discriminated against had never occurred to him. Also, — and this illustrates one of Brazil’s great weaknesses, its provincialism, built up over long centuries of remoteness from Europe — (it took […] days in a sailing vessel to get to Europe from Brazil, as compared with […] days from North America) — this same young Jew was equally astounded to be told that the sufferings of the Jews under Hitler had anything to do with him, he had never realized there was such a thing as racial solidarity.

It is true that the Negro or mulatto is a “second-class citizen” rarely in important positions or even good jobs, and almost always poor. But since most of the population is in exactly the same situation and suffers the same deprivations, his sufferings do not mark him out as very different from anyone else. Negroes want to be “light,” claro, have “good” (straight) hair, and “good” (not flat) noses. They are sometimes treated with the condescending, indulgent humor found in the southern U.S. — & there are hundreds of Negro myths — but again it is not so very different from the way lower-class whites are treated. They have equal opportunity and education, as far as it goes, which is usually not very far as yet; and in the arts. Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade — all were mulattoes. After Machado de Assis’s death a friend called on his widow. The Senhora Machado de Assis glanced at her husband’s photograph on the table and made her only recorded comment on the fact that she, a white woman, had married a mulatto. “What a pity he was so dark,” she said.

The widespread poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and suffering in Brazil are tragic; for millions, life is hungry and dirty, short and cruel. And yet — to a South African or a North American or anyone who has lived in a colonial country, — to be able to hear a black cook call her small, elderly, white mistress minha negrinha (my little nigger) as a term of affection, comes as a revelation, — a breath of fresh air at last.

It was not planned; it just happened. But Brazil now realizes that her racial situation is one of her greatest assets. Racial mixtures can be seen all over the country. In the north, in the Amazon region, Portuguese and Indian have produced the caboclo, small, well-built, straight noses, bright eyes — a very attractive physical type. The northeast, after generations of poor diet, has produced the cabeça-chata, or “flat-head,” who is also apt to be small, somewhat rickety, with thin arms and legs and a large head, but quick, and certainly prolific. In the south under better living conditions and with little or no Negro admixture, the type is more Portuguese, sometimes with German blood, bigger, fairer, with clear skin, calmer — but pugnacious, even inclined to violence. It is in and around the big cities of Rio and São Paulo that one gets every racial type mixed together, types that have lost their racial clarity along with their former agricultural skills and beautiful backlands manners. A man in Goiás will know the name and habits of every beast and bird around him; but the people of regions that have fallen into agricultural decay are sickly-looking bad farmers, to whom every insect is only a bicho, or every tree is the “five-leaf,” and all are subject to destruction. The importance of nutrition in Brazil is shown by the fact that the richer and older the family, the taller and bigger-boned they are apt to be. Sometimes their servants from the “north” or the “interior” appear almost like dwarfs beside them.

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The Portuguese have naturally been the largest group of immigrants, and they still come in at the rate of 15,000 a year. They are mostly laborers and farmers, servants or gardeners. Also, certain ancient city trades are theirs: old-newspaper-and-bottle-dealing and knife grinding. In the cities, a great deal of freight is pushed about on hand-carts, and this too is the prerogative of the Portuguese. The actual official name for these hand-cart men is “Donkies without Tails.” Their usual costume is wooden clogs, extra wide trousers, undershirts, and large floppy berets, and their faces are handsome, simple and stolid, compared to the often ugly, but subtle and mobile faces of Brazilians of several generations’ standing. In endless jokes the Portuguese appears as absurdly literal-minded and naive. In the 19th- and early 20th-century Brazilian theatre, he was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches and heavy watch chains. In Portugal on the stage at the same time, the Brazilian was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches, etc., etc.

After the abolition of slavery, European immigrants started to arrive in large numbers, going mostly to the States of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Germans, Italians, and after 1908, Japanese all poured in. There are whole towns and villages of Germans in the south of Brazil. At present there are probably about half a million Japanese in the country, who are contributing enormously to the improvement of agriculture, particularly to fruit-growing, in the southern states. São Paulo has Japanese grocery stores, bookshops and even Geisha girls. The 6 million Italians have adapted themselves best of all, probably because the climate and working conditions are not unlike those of Italy, and Portuguese is easy for them to learn.

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The founder and hero of the Indian Protection Service was General Cândido Mariano Rondon (1865–1958). He came from Cuiabá, capital of the State of Mato Grosso, and was himself part Indian. In 1907 as a young captain, he was given the task of building a telgraph network to link Mato Grosso with Amazonas and with the outside world. This meant exploring thousands of square miles of wilderness for the first time. Rondon’s story is full of heroism and self-sacrifice. He believed that the Indians should and could be “pacified,” as opposed to one popular opinion of the day which was all for exterminating them. The motto he gave the Indian Service was “let yourself be killed if necesaary, but never kill,” and many of his lieutenants, soldiers, and workers did just that. He tried never to interfere with the Indians’ way of life. There are still shameful stories of land-greedy men who cheat or murder the Indians, and sad “publicity stunts” involving them, but Rondon set a high standard of behaviour towards primitive men. The territory of Rondônia (larger than the whole of France) is named for him.

Just before the First World War Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting and exploring expedition with Rondon. (He found, sad to relate, that there was just as good game in South America as any ever shot in Africa.) He pays high tribute to Rondon in his book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness,” which probably brought Brazil to the attention of the average American for the first time since Dom Pedro II’s visit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Rondon discovered fifteen major rivers, one named for Roosevelt, built over fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines, and discovered many previously unknown tribes of Indians.

But the Indians continue to be a problem. Tribes that have never seen “civilization” are still turning up, while those that have seen it are gradually dying off in disease and degradation. Sometimes the problem is a dangerous one. As this was written, the body of a young English explorer was found, pierced by seven arrows of the Caiapós’. The isolated rubber-collector or cattle-raiser of Mato Grosso or Pará, living in the atomic age, still has more to fear from arrows or blow-pipes than from bombs.