We found the party at breakfast. The dining room looked like a Marriage at Cana by one of the more animated Venetians. A variety of people ate, talked, argued, gesticulated about a long table that groaned with dishes of fried eggs and plates of ham and patties of manioc flour, all stacked about a row of stately poundcakes down the middle. At one end the blond hostess was pouring out oceans of coffee and hot milk. At the other sat the large monsignor, his cassock enlivened by a little red piping, who was the candidate for Lieutenant-Governor. Maids rushed in and out with plates and cups. New arrivals greeted each other with abraços. Precinct workers slid in and out with messages.
Outside, the geese in the courtyard kept up an uneasy hissing, ducks quacked from a pool, children romped, drivers raced the motors of their cars. Bem-ti-vís piped in the trees overhead.
Eventually the governor emerged from a conference in a back room. People were loaded into cars, handbags were stowed away. Aluísio Alves, a green handkerchief in his hand, took his place in the first car and we were off across the countryside. In the first village there was a new school and a new well to be inaugurated. The children had green scarves and danced up and down chanting: “Aluísio, Aluísio.” The teachers and authorities stood beaming in the sun. On the edge of the crowd boys set off rockets.
And so on, village by village, new schools, water systems, public privies, speeches, singing school children, green bunting that lashed about in the seabreeze, until, at a palm-thatched fisherman’s hamlet near Cape São Roque we changed to jeeps for a run along the coast.
Cruising in a jeep over the white beaches and the tawny dunes was terrific. It was almost like being on skis. We skimmed round the edges of dunes, past endless variations of surf on shining sand, on rocky ledges; and blue sea and green shallows and japanesy little villages under coconut palms with canoes and jangadas ranked on the beach in front of them.
This coast north of Natal is very beautiful but dreadfully poor. Fish are scarce. The only reliable income comes from crawfish which abound under the reefs and ledges. Only now with new roads opening up is it profitable to market them. Schemes are in the works to set up refrigerating equipment so as to ship out the lobstertails for which the demand in the world market seems endless.
At each village the governor visits the school. There’s a little parade through the sandy streets with the local authorities and precinct workers, and a speech, songs, cheers, flower-petals scattered like confetti over the governor’s head, rockets and cherry bombs. The governor tells of his unsuccessful efforts to get equipment from the federal government for schools and clinics, for road building, for water systems. (Actually he’s working with the Alliance for Progress but he doesn’t make a point of it.) He points to the new public privy or the deep well or the school he’s built or repaired. Some schools have gone without even having the walls cleaned since the administration of Washingtón Luíz more than thirty years ago. He tells how much there is to do. He makes a touching personal appeal. “If you are satisfied vote for the men who will help me; if not, vote against me.”
We turned inland at a place on a clear palmfringed river called Rio do Fôgo. In a patch of richer appearing country with little plantations of papaya and manioc and banana we ate lunch at a long table in the breezeway of a wellkept schoolhouse in the midst of a great crowd of bystanders. The children and old men and women watched every mouthful. The staple here seems to be tapioca instead of rice. All along this coast they bring you green coconut water to drink, a delight because the sun is hot and the dust parching.
During the afternoon, having changed back to the cars that had come through back roads to meet us we drove through some of the most depressing inland country I had ever seen. Agave grown for fiber was the main crop. Often there was no other vegetation. The plantations were indicated by rows of dreary hovels with fiber in heaps beside them. Men, women, and children had a drab and dusty look.
We reach a real jumping off place, in the midst of a vast sunsmitten plain. Two straggles of dilapidated shacks form a sort of crossroads — only there isn’t any real road — with a tin windmill to pump water at the intersection. The windmill has broken down. The broken parts are mournfully brought out for the governor’s inspection.
The landowner looks almost as badly off as his tenants. “I wouldn’t live here,” he says with some bitterness, “except that it’s the only land God saw fit to give me.”
It was dark by the time we reached Touros. Touros was a goodsized fishing town on the beach. The people seemed full of beans. A band played. Floodlights lit the speakers’ platform set up in the square across from a recent monument attractively contrived out of aluminum sheets to simulate a jangada. The firmament resounded with the explosion of rockets and, fortunately at some distance, behind the church, somebody set off bombs so loud they must have been sticks of dynamite.
Aluísio Alves was at his best. He told us about his last visit to Touros in the course of an unsuccessful campaign and how he got there late and the people waited all night to hear him, and how their friendliness had cheered him. He told of the three years of work that still lay ahead of him in his battle against disease and illiteracy. Eighty per cent couldn’t read or write. Ninetyeight per cent suffered from schistosomiasis. Of every two children born, one child died in infancy. “People of Touros, with your help we shall change all this — our campaign is the campaign of hope.” And the green pennants waved.
The governor and his party were to be put up in a small house perched on a sand dune. Half the population of Touros had gotten there ahead to receive us. In fact they had eaten up most of the dinner laid out on a variety of tables set end to end. About all that was left was a little spaghetti, still cold in the can. There was one chair for the governor, but no more.
The porches were full of boys and girls who had come from interior towns to the speaking. The problem was where people would sleep. There were no beds and few cots and hammocks. As the large monsignor and I were the oldest, we were assigned to the privacy of a tiny leanto which housed tools back of the house. A cot was found for me and an effort was made to swing a hammock above it for the monsignor. Alas, we were both large men. There was no way of fitting us into the space. The monsignor handsomely retired and I was left alone. God knows where he slept. It was just as well I was out in the leanto because the racket in the house was indescribable. Everybody in town wanted to speak to the governor.
The governor went off to a dance given in his honor. He had addressed the crowd about two dozen times during the day. He had just finished a fulldress oration. He had driven eight or ten hours through the heat and the dust. He is a rather slight man. He must be made of iron.
Mossoró, September 16: the Long Long Sunday
A heavy shower of rain on the roof woke me at about four-thirty. When the rain stopped rockets started hissing up all around the house and exploding in the sky overhead. They have the loudest rockets in Touros I’ve ever heard. I mucked around in the yard behind the kitchen, awash with thin mud from the rain, in search of the washbasin. There was only one. Shaved among the awakening teenagers on the porch looking out on the long slow green spuming waves advancing towards the beach below the house out of a pearly ocean in the morning twilight.
Met our hosts. In the hubbub last night I didn’t have a chance to sort them out. The reddish-haired stocky man must be the paterfamilias. There are various sons, one a young man on crutches. The two elderly women stoking up a small charcoal brazier in the kitchen must be the maids. Nobody seems to be disturbed by the house having been turned last night into something like the New York subway at rush hour. We have to admit that the accommodations are plain.