From reeds and floating islands and fallen logs, herons rise, kingfishers, ducks of all sorts. The colors of a butterfly will catch the sun as it flutters out from the forest shadows. A clearing, banana leaves swaying in the wind, tall papayas lifting their clusters of green fruit above the everpresent underbrush of manioc will announce a dwelling, sometimes a shack of boards with a roof of rough shingles, but more often a mere shelter of poles thatched with palm. Always there’s a canoe. This is a population that lives by the river.
We leave the main stream of the river and plough through a network of narrow canals known as igarapés. Though there are differences in the style of boatbuilding and in the shape of their paddles, the people we pass are remarkably like the people we saw in riverside settlements a thousand miles upstream. There is a definite Amazonian type.
Here, if anything, the people seem poorer. Clothes are more ragged, children more naked, utensils more scanty. Sitting on top of the cabin as the boat chugs through the narrow watercourses is almost like visiting the people in their houses. Each house is open to inspection as the boat glides by. It is a life of total poverty; still the people have an independent air. Each house has its own canoes. The better off have outboards, fishnets hung to dry.
Longeared zebu cattle and waterbuffalo wade in distant drowned pastures. Through the more traveled igarapés steamboats ply, headed for distant settlements, towing behind them congeries of various craft. Cargoes are hidden from the sun by layers of large leaves.
In the pondlike head of one inlet, set around with big globular trees that give the effect of willows, we haul in our lines and ask a fisherman why we are not catching any fish.
High water, he answers immediately. The fish are feeding far inland in places where a boat like ours can never penetrate.
He is a tobaccocolored man with a wrinkled face and a long sharp nose jutting out from under the brim of his straw hat. He has a small neat canoe and a wellmade paddle. He paddles in the bow. Within easy reach he has a casting net, a couple of fishspears and a bow with long arrows. Beside them lie some coiled fishing lines and an antique shotgun. He controls his dugout canoe with hardly an effort of the arm.
Where is he going? “Fishing,” he says, with a flash of his eye, “or perhaps to hunt.” He spins the canoe around and heads for a narrow watercourse much too small for our big lumbering motor cruiser. With the air of being monarch of all he surveys he disappears among the trees.
We double back through another narrow passage. We skirt rough wharves and settlements. We explore vast lakelike stretches of water bordering on the Rio Solimoes where gulls circle as over the ocean. Suddenly we are speeding out from a point of land into the junction of two streams. The man at the wheel follows a foamy path of spinning eddies that stretches like a seam between the rivers. On one side is the buffcolored flood of the Solimoes, on the other the dense black flood of the Rio Negro. For a long distance the two waters churn together without mixing. The cruiser staggers from the force of the eddies.
“See,” cries the man at the wheel, “they don’t want to mix …” As he brings the cruiser around in a wide circle he gives a sweep of his hand to point out the wilderness of wide waters which dwarfs the receding forested banks as they melt into the horizon, “but when they mix they form the Amazon.”
VI
BRASÍLA REVISITED
“The Bestlaid Plans” …
You drive out to the airport in the steaming dark over the rackety cobbles of Manaus: you step into a jet plane and in four hours and a half you are in Brasília. It is the greatest contrast imaginable. Manaus is as redolent of the nineteenth century as a story by Jules Verne. The air is dense with green exhalations of the rainforest. Brasília is an arid red. The sun is hot but the air has a cool upland tang. The glimpses, as the plane banks for a landing, of glass and concrete constructions spread like an unfinished world’s fair along the red ridge, between the two arms of the lake, are desperately contemporary. You are reminded of the story that’s going the rounds about how a visiting Russian astronaut cried out on landing in Brasília: “I hadn’t expected to reach Mars so soon.”
In New York Brazilians told us: You mustn’t go to the hotel that was new four years ago. You must go to the new hotel. We found the new new hotel, though of course many floors were still unfinished, to be remarkably pleasant, with its big kidneyshaped swimming pool in the sunny central court, which was flanked by a firstrate restaurant. Under the same management as the Jaraguá in São Paulo it is probably one of the best in South America.
The Nacional stands on a rise overlooking the central bus station where the arterial roads that form the city’s backbone — the fuselage of Lucio Costa’s jet plane — converge through cloverleaves into the roads that serve the wings. From the front door you look out across a rubbly hillside which will someday be Lucio Costa’s modern Montmartre, past large Park Avenue type office buildings occupied by banks and insurance companies, down what corresponds to the mall in Washington, D.C. towards the shining tileshaped twin skyscrapers of the congressional offices. The confusing pile of masonry beyond the bus station will eventually become the white marble pyramid which will house Niemeyer’s interlocking theaters.
To get from the hotel to the bus station on foot is a scramble. If paths for pedestrians were included in the plans, they haven’t been built yet. There are of course no traffic lights. You have to wait for a lull and lope across the broad curving roadways as best you can. Many a pedestrian, so people tell us, has already lost his life on his way to the bus station.
When you finally reach the platform you can walk around in safety. Shining new Mercedes-Benz buses, produced in São Paulo, come in from all directions: Belo Horizonte, Anápolis, Ceres, Goiânia. Escalators take you to the upper levels. There are small stores, newsstands, snackbars, and coffee bars. The place has a cheerful practical look, except that the smooth-finished white concrete of the underpasses is already stained by the pervasive red dust.
There’s no way to see the town without a car. In Brasília a man without a car is a secondclass citizen. The poorer inhabitants will have to grow wheels instead of feet.
The two buildings that flank the Congress Square, the Palacio do Planalto for the executive departments, and the Supreme Court building, are oblongs of transparent glass, each shaded by a broad slab of concrete supported by delicate white buttresscolumns. To my way of thinking they are among Niemeyer’s best. Suited to the climate and the landscape. Fine examples of his paper cutout style. So are the odd little presidential chapel (which according to some irreverent people looks more like a urinal than a house of worship) and the charmingly simple Church of Our Lady of Fátima.
The congress building itself seems to me to be a conspicuous failure. The interior is cramped and illplanned for its purpose. There is a frivolous ugliness about the exterior hard to explain in a designer with such great talent for sculptural effects. Jefferson used to call architecture the most important of the arts “because it showed so much.” Possibly the design of the congress hall expresses the faithful Communist’s scorn for representative democracy.
Niemeyer’s cathedral, an enormous coronet of stressed concrete, remains unfinished. The design calls for glass to fill in the spaces between the soaring piers. It is impressive as it is. One wonders whether it should ever be finished.