Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The change of capital was written into the Brasilian Constitution as far back as 1891, and it had been talked of as early as 1820. Among the reasons originally given for the change one was that Rio de Janeiro, being on the coast, was open to attack from the sea; a capital farther to the west would open up the vast uninhabited stretches of the interior to permanent settlers as no pioneering had (or has) been able to do. The first reason, of course, disappeared with the coming of the air age, but the second is still the chief argument of the pro-Brasília group. There are others, some rather similar to those for the establishment of Washington: legislation, the pro-Brasílias say, will be carried on more efficiently and fairly away from the pressures of the rival cities of Rio and São Paulo; and if the capital is simply the seat of government, senators and deputies will go there to conduct the nation’s business and then return to their own states, rather than be seduced by the attractions of Rio, living there for years at a time and seeing their constituents rarely, if at all, as many of them do now. Also, Rio is badly overcrowded, constantly short of water, and its slums are mushrooming as more and more miserable immigrants trek in from the poorer or drought-stricken areas in search of work. Many of these, the argument goes, will now be drawn to Brasília; and it is true that some thousands of them have already gone there.

While everyone in Brasil who has ever thought about it at all agrees that the interior of the country has to be opened up somehow or other, and the sooner the better, those opposed to Brasília feel that it might be done to begin with more modestly and economically, and by means more in keeping with Brasil’s present desperate financial state. Brasil needs schools, roads, and railroads, above all; then medical care, improved methods of agriculture, and dams and electric power, particularly in the drought-ridden northeast. These things, they feel, should be tackled more energetically and systematically, if necessarily slowly, before undertaking to build a luxury capital, an extravagant show-place, three hours by plane from the fringe of cities along the sea-board. The founding of small towns and villages in the interior, and help with their industries and agriculture — especially by means of railroads and better roads, since at present 50 per cent of all produce spoils before it even reaches the markets — this, the anti-Brasílias say, is what would really open up the interior, and not a new capital. And why build a new capital, they ask, when, even if it may need a thorough overhauling at the moment, they already have one of the most beautiful capitals in the world, complete with government buildings? They think it will be years before the foreign embassies build there, although they have all bought land as a matter of course or of policy, and even longer before the senators and deputies can be persuaded to stay in Brasília for any length of time.

Whoever may be right time will tell, but Brasília is President Kubitschek’s dream. He announced that eventually someone would have to keep the promise made the country in the Constitution in 1891, and he is going to keep it now. His five-year term has two more years to run; on April twenty-first, 1960, the government is supposed to make the great move.

* * *

I arrived there alone on a Friday afternoon clutching a piece of paper bearing the name of the man, a relative of someone important, who was supposed to meet me but never did. The first thing that greeted my eyes as I got off the plane was a three-throned shoe-shine stand against the wall of the small airport building. At the moment I was not in need of a shoe-shine but all departing passengers certainly were. To be sure, it was the tail-end of the dry season, but in the later summer of 1958 one’s first and last impression of Brasília was of miles and miles and miles of blowing red dust.

Inside, the airport is a fair sample of the workaday atmosphere of the greater part of Brasília so far — rather like that of a small bus-station in the United States, a far-west bus station. Men in jeans, wide-brimmed felt hats and high boots, mill about drinking coffee and beer and eating stale pastries. (Women are still scarce in Brasília and I had been the only one on the plane.) There is a small general-store section of battered cans of milk, sardines, and hearts of palm, ropes of dry red sausage, bottles of cachaça, sunglasses, headache remedies, and yesterday’s newspapers. On the wall is a line of little silk banners bearing the magic word BRASÍLIA, and also for sale are plastic plaques embossed in gold with the same word and, in profile, the head from which all this has sprung: Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, in a blur of gold.

The four or five men, looking like engineers — one had a big T-square under his arm — who had arrived with me all got into jeeps and were driven off in clouds of dust. Finally I gave up waiting for my mentor and took the cream-colored Volkswagen Microbus lettered “Brasília Palace Hotel” and was driven off, too, the only passenger. It is over twelve miles from the airport to the hotel; it was a warm, clear day and we drove very fast over the bumpy dirt road.

The site of Brasília is an empty, barren, slightly rolling plateau, four thousand feet above sea-level. The place had been described to me, but I was not prepared for quite such dreariness and desolation: compared with almost any other inhabitable part of this fantastically beautiful country it seems really remarkably unattractive and unpromising. There are no mountains nor even real hills, no rivers, at least not in evidence (there is a small one some miles away and two small streams), no trees of any size, no feeling of height, nor grandeur, nor security, nor fertility, nor even just picturesqueness; not one of the qualities one thinks of as capable of giving a city charm or character. It reminded me, and other members of the party later said it reminded them, of the depressing landscape around Madrid. The two gifts Mother Nature seems to have bestowed on Brasília so far are sky and space, and when one imagines these endless swelling plains covered over with modern white government buildings, monuments, skyscrapers, shops, and apartment houses, the way they are eventually supposed to be, the only natural beauty left it is the sky. Of course there is now to be an artificial lake; there is even a yacht club marked on the map of the city; and friends who have been there in the rainy season say that it is very beautiful to see the rain-storms coming across the plains, from miles away. But for anyone accustomed to the hyper-glamorous beauty of Rio de Janeiro, where miles of white beaches, or even a view of the bay at the end of a city street, can make up for most of the city’s shortcomings, Brasília seems like a sad come-down.

There are a few clumps of palms here and there, but in general the vegetation consists of sparse, scrubby trees, mostly a variety known as “apricot,” which bears small wild fruits, no relation, however, to the true apricot. As far off the road as the eye can see these trees and the coarse grass are coated with the red dust constantly stirred up by passing trucks. Growing out of almost every thin trunk, half-way up, hideous and bigger than a man’s head, is a white ants’, or termites’ nest. When I asked my driver, a depressed, dust-covered young man, about them he said dryly that termites build half-way up the trees to be that much nearer the fruit. Miles apart, a few clusters of roofs can be seen, colonies of the construction workers and other new inhabitants. By far the biggest of these is the “Nucleus of Pioneers,” or “Flagbearers,” to translate its romantic name literally, commonly called simply the Free City. This was officially opened in February 1957, with four hundred people, and now has, incredibly and encouragingly, forty-five thousand. “All built of wood,” said the driver, and we heard that phrase many times because in a Latin country of stone, marble, tiles, and plaster, a whole city deliberately built of wood is a curiosity. “And it certainly is free,” he added, and that was his last remark until we reached the hotel.