Women were admitted to universities in […]. There are now women in the government, congresswomen, lawyers, doctors, psychoanalysts, and engineers. The head of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, Carmen Portinho, is an engineer, and the graceful viaduct of Canoas near Rio is the work of another woman engineer, Bertha Leitchic. We have seen how active women are in the arts. The pianist Guiomar Novaes has long been world-famous.
Special credit should be given to hundreds of anonymous Brazilian normalistas, — the young girls who start out every year as school-teachers, often in remote villages, in one-roomed school-houses, under heart breaking conditions.
But marriage at seventeen or eighteen and the grim race of procreation are the lot of even the rich and educated. Women themselves are against introducing divorce. Security for herself and her children is the most important thing in life.
Although women got the vote in Brazil in 1934, they still do not have full legal rights. They usually think as their husbands do and accept their husbands’ infidelity as a matter of course. Some will even insist that they are happier than American women, — but that is usually after a visit to the United States, where they have seen how American women “do their own work,” take care of their own children, or support themselves, and appear rushed and harassed.
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Besides careers for women, another new development in Brazil is sports. Only thirty years ago, futebol (“soccer”) was a strictly amateur affair, played for fun by the upper-class. Now like baseball in the United States, it is a big business, with high salaries, the buying and selling of players, and popular national heroes. Every newspaper devotes at least a page to it everyday. In 1958 Brazil was soccer champion of the world. (It is interesting to note that each player on the European tour was alloted thirty pounds of black beans.) The players are all shades, from white to jet black, graceful, nervous and incredibly quick. For years they lacked team play or cooperation.
[Popular heroes—“The Black Diamond,” “Pelé,” story from Carolina Jesus here. In 1958 the basketball champions of the year. Maria Ester. Bruno Hermanny.]
In the country on Sundays, the population of every small village will be out watching the local futebol teams. The big pale-green fields will be edged with people in their Sunday best, carrying babies, carrying umbrellas against the sun. The Kibon (“Eskimo Pie”) man with his yellow wagon, a spun-sugar wagon (home-made, mounted on a bicycle); buzzards and delicate tissue paper kites hang overhead, and the players in their brilliantly striped jerseys and brief shorts are running, running.
It is also a common sight to see the local washerwoman’s line hung with the jerseys of one team, sweaters striped like wasps, a cheerful display, sometimes against the background of a city dump, with buzzards and paper kites hovering above.
Chapter 9. The Republic
The Empire and the Emperor, Pedro II, were synonymous. The chief cause of the fall of the monarchy was undoubtedly the fear of what would happen when Princess Isabel inherited the throne. The Brazilians were suspicious of her husband, the French prince, Count D’Eu (grandson of King Louis Philippe); he was a “foreigner.” Even Princess Isabel’s great gesture, the emancipation of the slaves, couldn’t calm the increasing anxiety about the “French” rule they were sure would follow the death of the sick and prematurely aged Emperor. This is the explanation of how an empire that had lasted for sixty-five years could fall without protest and without struggle.
But the Republic began as an improvised collaboration of ill-assorted elements: the Positivist “clique,” the military group led by Marshal Deodoro, and the great landowners who had been ruined by abolition. (The great number of “Barons” and other titles that appear look strange among the prominent names of the young Republic.) It was a chance collaboration, bound to break up, and it did almost immediately.
The Positivists were the first to disassociate themselves from the new government. “This is not the Republic of our dreams!” they complained. But they left their slogan, “Order and Progress,” on the new flag, and other features of the new regime were influenced by Positivist thought. General Deodoro was the next to go. In spite of having proclaimed the new Republic, he was reluctant to give up his position as an old Imperial General; he disagreed with his former accomplices, fought with the already strong opposition movement in the parliament. He attempted a military coup (or golpe, as Brazilians call it), dissolved the Assembly, and ended by “renouncing”—the first presidential “renunciation.” The Vice President, Marshal Floriano Peixoto, nicknamed “The Iron Marshal” because of his ruthlessness, took over.
His term as president was marked by civil wars and rebellions, two of them very important: the rising of the “Federalists” in Rio Grande do Sul (always the hotbed of rebellion) and the revolt of the Royal Navy, that had never accepted the overthrow of the monarchy and was also jealous of the pre-eminence of the Army in the new government. The “Iron Marshal” stood almost alone but, with the people on his side, emerged victorious from these struggles. The Navy finally joined forces with the south, rebellious admirals with gauchos. In the last bloody battle there, the head of the Navy, Admiral Saldanha da Gama, was killed. Strange to say, Saldanha da Gama is now venerated as the model naval officer — the Brazilian Naval Academy is named for him.
The next president was a civilian from São Paulo, Prudente de Morais, who tried to restore order to the country, divided and exhausted by the struggles of the “Florianistas.” It was also a difficult period. There were no longer riots in the cities nor declarations from the discontented military, but a new phenomenon: religious war in its most brutal form. A strange backlands leader, a sort of rustic saint, appeared, and attracted an immense following of religious fanatics in the arid plains of the northeast. This was Antônio Maciel, called “The Counselor” by his disciples. At first his movement had a religious cast: prayers, penances, forgiveness of sins, and mass pilgrimages of the ever-growing group through the vast wastes of the caatinga, or scrub-forest lands. Then the Counselor announced his new dogma: the Republic was the rule of the Anti-Christ, and they should fight for the return of the “King”—in other words, Dom Pedro II. A long, tragic struggle began. At the beginning it was thought that a mere police-operation, with small numbers of men, could put an end to the movement. But the Counselor’s fanatic followers put up such amazing resistance that the operation assumed almost the proportions of civil war. More and more troops were decimated by the jagunços (a name orignally meaning “ruffian,” but later used for the inhabitants of the backlands in general), entrenched in their stronghold of Canudos, in the harshest region of the interior of Bahia. Many soldiers and officers were killed — even one general. Alarmed, the government organized a full-scale expedition of war, and Canudos was finally utterly destroyed, with its defenders; there were almost no survivors. Today, a great dam across the Vaza-Barris River has flooded the old bloody battlefield of Canudos. The only remaining monument to the siege is Euclides da Cunha’s famous book, Rebellion in the Backlands, (one of the [earlier] masterpieces of Brazilian literature), that had its simple beginnings in his reports as a war correspondent.