1977
BRAZIL
Chapter 1
Recently in Rio de Janeiro one of those “human interest” dramas took place, the same small drama that takes place every so often in New York or London or Rome: a newborn baby was kidnaped from a maternity hospital. Her name was Maria da Conceição, or Mary of the Conception, but the newspapers immediately abbreviated this, Brazilian fashion, to Conceiçãozinha, or “Little Conception.”
Conceiçãozinha made the headlines for a week, and while she did it is safe to say that the country’s current inflation, the soaring cost of living, the shifts of power in the government — perhaps even the soccer scores — took second place for most readers.
The hospital staff was questioned. A feebleminded woman wandering in the neighborhood was detained. The police poked into culverts and clumps of weeds and around the favelas, Rio’s notorious hillside slums. Somehow the kidnaping was kept from the baby’s mother, but the young government-worker father was photographed at his desk, in postures of despair. Then, after three days, Conceiçãozinha was found, safe and sound. One of the hospital nurses, who had lost a child of her own by miscarriage shortly before, had stolen her.
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So far it all could have happened in New York, London, or Rome. But now the story becomes Brazilian. The white nurse’s mulatto lover, owner of a small grocery store, had promised her a house to live in if she had a child, and he had already given her the equivalent of fifty dollars for the baby’s layette. So the nurse — determined, she told reporters, “to have a decent place to live in” with “home atmosphere,” and also because she really wanted a baby — concealed her miscarriage and told her lover that the baby would be born on such and such a day. Until then she boarded Conceiçãozinha with her laundress, an old woman living in a favela shack. The nurse was arrested as she took them food. The baby was fat and well. The laundress, who could not read, knew nothing of the hubbub in the papers and protested her complete innocence. When the father was told the good news he sobbed and said, “This is the strongest emotion I have ever felt in my life.” He was photographed embracing the police. Conceiçãozinha was taken back to the hospital, where “the doctors were shouting and the nurses weeping.” Three or four hundred people had gathered outside. The swaddled baby was held up to a window, but the crowd screamed, “Show her little face!” So it was shown “to applause and cheers.”
The next day the drama continued on a lower plane but in even more Brazilian style. The two sets of in-laws quarrelled as to which one would have the honor of harboring the child and her real mother first. One grandmother denied that the chief of police had been asked to be Conceiçãozinha’s godfather, because “that is always a family affair.” And the poor father was faced with fulfilling his promessas. If the baby was found alive, he had promised (1) to pay for four Masses; (2) to stop smoking for a year; (3) to give two yard-high wax candles, as well as a life-size wax model of a baby, to the Church of Our Lady of the Penha; and (4) to climb the steps of the same church on his knees, carrying a lighted candle. This 18th-century church perches on top of a weirdly shaped penha, or rock, that sticks up out of the plain just north of the city. It is a favorite church for pilgrimages and for the fulfilling of promessas. The steps up to it number 365.
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The story of Conceiçãozinha contains a surprising amount of information about Brazilian life, manners, and character. Much of it, of course, is what one might expect to find in any Latin American country. Brazilians love children. They are highly emotional and not ashamed of it. Family feeling is very strong. They are Roman Catholics, at least in outward behavior. They are franker than Anglo-Saxons about extramarital love, and they are tolerant of miscegenation. Also — as one would expect in a very poor and in many ways backward country — many people are illiterate; there are feebleminded people at large who in other countries might be in institutions; and hospitals may not always be run with streamlined efficiency. So far it is all fairly predictable.
But there is more to it than that. The story immediately brings to mind one of Brazil’s worst, and certainly most shocking, problems: that of infant mortality. Why all this sentimental, almost hysterical, concern over one small baby, when the infant mortality rate in Brazil is still one of the highest in the world? The details of Conceiçãozinha’s story are worth examining not only for the interesting light they throw on that contradictory thing, the Brazilian character, but also because the tragic, unresolved problem they present is almost a paradigm of a good many other Brazilian problems, big and small.
First there is the obvious devotion to children. As in other Latin countries, babies are everywhere. Everyone seems to know how to talk to infants or dandle them, and unself-consciously. It is said that two kinds of small business never fail in Brazil, infants’ wear shops and toy shops. The poorest workman will spend a disproportionate amount of his salary for a christening dress (or for milk if he happens to know it is vital to his child’s health). Parents love to dress up their offspring; the children’s costume balls are an important part of Carnival every year throughout the country.
In Catholic Brazil there is no divorce and no legalized birth control, and large families are the rule. Sometimes families run to twenty or more, and five or six children seems to be average. Brazil is a very young country; more than 52 per cent of the population is under nineteen years old. Early marriage is normal, and a baby within a year is taken for granted. Children are almost always wanted — the first three or four at least — and adored.
And yet the infant mortality rate stays appallingly high. In the poorest and most backward regions of the great northeast bulge and the Amazon basin, it is as high as 50 per cent during the first year of life, sometimes even higher. The cities of Recife and Rio, with their large favelas, are two of the worst offenders. During the three days when Conceiçãozinha was hidden in the washerwoman’s shack, and survived, it is a safe guess that more than sixty babies died in Rio.
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Most of this tragic waste of life is due to malnutrition. But often the malnutrition is due not so much to actual lack of food as to ignorance, a vicious circle in which poverty creates ignorance which then creates more poverty. In Rio, for example, there are many worthy free clinics. But fine doctors have been known to resign after working in them for years; they can no longer endure seeing the same children brought in time after time, sicker, weaker, and finally dying because the parents are too ignorant, or too superstitious, to follow simple instructions.
The masses of poor people in the big cities, and the poor and not-so-poor of the “backlands,” love their children and kill them with kindness by the thousands. The wrong foods, spoiled foods, worm medicines, sleeping syrups — all exact a terrible toll on the “little angels,” in paper-covered, gilt-trimmed coffins, blue for boys and pink for girls.
Nevertheless, the population of Brazil is increasing rapidly. Life expectancy has gone up considerably in the last few decades. The indomitable and apparently increasing vitality of Brazil shines through the grimmest death toll statistics. It is like the banana tree that grows everywhere in the country. Cut it back to a stump above ground, and in a matter of hours it sends up a new shoot and starts unfolding new green leaves.