Friends tell you laughingly about his European “vacation.” Not an idle moment. In Paris he spent his time negotiating a deal with a French concern to install a subway in Rio which is to be financed largely by French funds. In West Germany he contracted for a hospital. He is not known to have done any work during the week he spent in Sicily. On the steamboat back from Italy he whiled away his time preparing a volume of his speeches for publication, and translating a Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, which he had found amusing one night in New York, from English into Portuguese for production in Rio.
VIII
THE UNEASY NORTHEAST
(meditations out of a traveler’s notebook)
Boa Viajem, Recife, September 13, 1962
The name of the beach means “pleasant journey.” It brings up a picture of people riding out from the city in the old days to wave to their friends tacking out from the harbor entrance on sailing ships into the onshore breeze. I don’t find the hotel as pleasant as it seemed when I was there with my wife and daughter four years ago; rebuilt and modernized, it lacks the rustic air it had. Maybe it’s that my family has gone back to the States. There’s been an immense amount of building. The beach has taken on a standardized resort look.
The fishermen have been chased away. Watching their jangadas was one of the real pleasures of our stay in Recife four years ago.
The jangada is a boatshaped raft made of logs of various light woods. The fishermen push them out in the morning over the heavy surf. Using a lateentype sail they cruise far out into the ocean. They fish with casting nets and hook and line. They steer with a paddle and with moveable leeboards pushed down between the logs, like on the Kon-Tiki. They are awash most of the time. We never did get to go out on one but it was a constant pleasure to follow their skillful navigation, tacking back and forth into the wind; and then the return in the afternoon running before the wind through gaps in the black reef that gave its name to this capital city of the ancient sugar state of Pernambuco, and back through the surf onto the beach.
The fishermen stored their gear in neatly made shelters of plaited palmleaves, up under the endlessly swaying rustling coconut palms. The catches they brought ashore in their deep baskets seemed pathetically small. These waters are not rich in fish.
For bathing, the sea is as delicious as ever.
Drying off in the mild late sun in the salt breeze that was almost cool — the season here is early spring: I’ve seen peach-trees in bloom — I felt a sudden gush of a very Portuguese state of mind: saudades. The Pequeno Dictionário Brasileiro da Língua Portuguêsa describes saudades, rather lyrically I thought, as “the sad and suave remembrance of persons or things distant or gone.”
Four years ago we all enjoyed ourselves particularly on this beach. The surf was just right. The reef cuts the force of the waves.
There are landcrabs if you watch for them. They have a ghostly way of being gone before you see them, set high off the ground on spiderlegs like harness racers.
Gilberto Freyre was at his house in Apipucos. He played host for us for an entire day. It was like living a chapter of Casa Grande e Senzala. He look us out to lunch in the country at an ancient sugar plantation. The sugarmill wasn’t working any more, and the young couple who entertained us, pleasant as they were, were like young couples with artistic tastes you might meet anywhere in the world, but somehow Freyre managed to evoke the sugarmill and the people who’d lived there through the years. He made us feel its history and its folklore … in depth through the years.
It was a day of semitropical beauty you could hardly believe: blue sky sprinkled, as if with confetti, with little halcyon clouds tinted with lavender and primrose and faintest brick color. The cane was a very lightgreen; the mangoes the very darkest green etched in black. In the shimmering sunlight every tree was a different green. There were sheep, and a duck-pond and geese, and cattle in a distant pasture. Country people on scrubby little horses passed along a country lane. Their straw hats, their clothes had a distinctive air. Even their dogs had a Pernambuco look.
The lunch tasted incredibly good. We ate a great deal and drank a great deal. Afterwards Freyre produced a pair of guitar-players. They sang what is called a desafio, a challenge. One man makes up a couplet and sings it and the other caps it. In between they keep the guitar strings throbbing. The whole thing is extemporary. The couplets deal with everything from national politics to the private lives of people in the audience. Everybody is kidded. The guitarists kid each other. The audience applauds a successful crack. For the rest of the day wherever we went the guitarists went with us. They gave a great performance.
In the afternoon we drove through farms and plantations on our way back to Freyre’s house. We drank plenty and talked plenty. We were on the crest of the wave. We dined at the house of a Recife politician. Again the food was much too good. The desafio was going great guns. Afterwards our tireless friends went on to a nightclub, but we, pleading our daughter’s tender years, went back to the Hotel Boa Viajem and to the salty night breeze rustling through the palms and the sound of the surf … Saudades.
This time four years later, the weather’s threatening. The city of Recife has grown skyscrapers from every seam. It looks as if it had doubled in population. No place to park a car. The old town on the island has lost its quaint Dutch look. I miss old buildings I had remembered. If it weren’t that my friends the Ellebys put me up in their house made lively by their children, I’d be feeling depressed indeed.
Among the Americans I find a good deal of gloom. The Alliance for Progress seems stalled. Among the Department of Agriculture people to be sure there’s talk of a real breakthrough in rainforest agriculture. If it’s true it’s the most exciting news since chloroquin. So much to be done … if it weren’t for the Communists.
For the first time, in all my batting around Brazil, walking with a group of Americans at lunchtime into a restaurant, I see real hostility in the faces of the people at the other tables.
The people who for want of a better word we call intellectuals are subject to obsessions the world over. The anti-McCarthyism of the collegiate and bureaucratic classes in the States became an obsession. In Brazil anti-Americanism may be becoming the current obsession of the intellectuals.
In São Paulo, at the lawschool at the old university, I tried to have it out with a group of law students. Personally they couldn’t have been more cordial, but their prejudice stuck out like a sore thumb. First they brought up, as everybody does, our discrimination against Negroes in the South, but they seemed to see the point when I explained that three or four southern states constituted a small part of the population of the United States and that even there an effort was being made. (I might have added that the average southern Negro gets a whole lot better break than a workingman in Brazil.) Why was it, one young man who had been to Los Angeles, insisted, that everybody born north of the Rio Grande considered himself better than anybody born south of it. I pointed out that it was a natural human failing to think of your own group as being tops. The paulistas were famous for that. They laughed. They really had me when they began to ask questions about American writers. They knew Faulkner and Hemingway and Salinger and Cummings. Their questions showed thought and information. I kept thinking: suppose I were talking to a group of students back home; they wouldn’t even know whether Brazilians wrote Spanish or Portuguese. Perhaps it’s our ignorance that galls them so.