The Church of the Rosário that figures prominently in Helena’s diary, standing next door to her grandmother’s house as it does, is still the most impressive. It is the Negroes’ church, built by slaves in the middle of the eighteenth century; inside are three black saints: St. Benedict, St. Iphigenia, and St. Somebody; his name was unidentifiable. There are three crystal chandeliers, a great deal of red dust and faded blue paint, and a slightly rickety blue gallery for the black choir. The church has settled and everything is now askew. As in many old Brazilian churches, the ceilings are made of narrow boards, so that the scenes from the Life of the Virgin painted on them, copied from heaven knows what hand-me-down sources, are scored through by black lines. These ceilings have a sad appeal, like letters written in old copy-book handwriting on lined paper.
In front of this church there is a big tree of the ficus family. Looking up into its branches one is surprised to see a large black beam stuck in them, crosswise, then a rusty lantern and other indistinguishable rusty odds and ends that have no business being thirty feet up off the ground, in a tree. This is one of the town’s modest “sights,” and proves to be what is left of an enormous crucifix that once stood where the tree now stands. The air-borne seed started growing out from the side of the cross, grew upwards and downwards and took root, and now has taken over, broken up, and lifted the whole cross in the air: ladder, lantern, pliers, hammer and all.
These crosses are a common feature of the countryside around Diamantina, sometimes with all their accoutrements, sometimes bare or simply with stiff wooden streamers arranged over the arms and a flat tin rooster on top. The bird called João de Barro, John of the Mud, or Clay, builds his beehive-shaped adobe nests on the arms, and the hammock bird slings his woven ones underneath. One cross, on the high ridge of rock opposite the town, now burns brightly at night with hundreds of electric light bulbs. At Sopa (soup), where Helena’s father went “to open a mine,” there is a fine one, with a white skull and cross-bones on the black wood, silvered Roman centurions’ helmets, and a flat rose-red “seamless garment” like a pattern for a child’s dress. It stands near a small church known as the “Chinese Church” because the eaves of the roof and tower are turned upwards in Oriental style, a common feature of Brazilian colonial architecture, traced directly to the Portuguese colony of Macão. One becomes accustomed to it in Rio de Janeiro, but here far off in a desolate countryside it is strange to come across this church like a baby pagoda, and a crucifix almost as tall, loaded with its grim set of Christian iconography-toys.
The interiors of Helena’s various churches are disappointing, cramped and musty, the Portuguese-style wedding-cake altars crowded with old artificial flowers and incongruously dressed, bewigged saints. The confessionals, however, are sometimes quaint and pretty: upright boards about five feet high; the priest sits on one side on a chair, the penitent kneels on the other; but the boards are gilded and painted in pastel blues and pinks, the upper part pierced with holes like a colander, or with long slits that make them vaguely resemble Biblical musical instruments, possibly some sort of organ. And the “masts” Helena speaks of as being set up on certain holy days lie in the sacristies or along the side aisles of their churches the rest of the year, big as telephone poles, painted in winding blue and white stripes.
I came upon the Church of the Amparo, that figures in the diary, unexpectedly, as it was getting dark. Its trim is dark peacock blue; on top a rusty rooster perches on a rusty globe; there is a minute balcony on either side of a large, faded coat of arms cut out of tin above the door, and over it a three-dimensional Dove of the Holy Spirit, dimly illuminated, nesting behind a quatrefoil window. Seen suddenly blocking the end of an alleyway, this church is stricken but dignified, like a person coming towards one whom one expects to beg, who doesn’t beg after all.
Some of the church clocks by which Helena told the time have been removed. At about seven o’clock the light leaves the town rapidly and the surrounding sea of rocks, and the peak of Itambé, turn red. A few church-bells ring and then a great noise comes from the loud-speaker over the Cathedral door and reverberates all over town. Ave Maria, gratia plena; the town vibrates with it and the light bulbs on the high cross opposite snap into activity. It is the hour of the rosary, Helena’s terço, which caused her so much “suffering” at family prayers and which is now broadcast every evening during the month of May. On Sundays the same loud-speaker is used to draw people to mass; at five o’clock it was blaring out The Stars and Stripes Forever.
In spite of these innovations and the Betty Grable film showing at the one cinema, the town has changed very little since the youthful Helena lived there and raced up and down its steep streets. Most of the streets have no sidewalks, some have narrow ones, two feet or so wide, long slabs of greenish stone raised a little above the cobblestones, the pé de muleque, or “ragamuffin’s foot,”—that is, the confection we call peanut brittle, which it is supposed to resemble. Down the middle of the street runs another strip of long stones, set flush, much easier to walk on than the sidewalks that every so often stop altogether, or break up into steps. These footpaths are called capistranas, after a mayor of Ouro Prêto, who introduced them there.
The houses are thick-walled and solid, in the middle of the town of two or even three stories, but as one gets away from the Cathedral they become smaller and lower and the tile roofs turn to thatched ones. The taller houses have balconies, formerly often completely covered in by the lattice-work cages, called muxarabis (from the Arabian muxara, a shelter), showing the influence of the Moors on the architecture and way of life of Portugal. From them the women could watch what went on in the streets, in an Oriental seclusion. On either side of the windows giving onto these balconies are little lanterns, globes of colored or milk glass, luminárias. (The word has been extended to mean a kind of small cream-filled tart, highly thought of by our diarist.) The same kind of globe, without lights, decorates the railings, and sometimes Tecoma vines or grape-vines are trained along the ironwork.
The window frames are curved at the top, with double sashes of a dozen small panes each. Here the trimming becomes confusing, since some of the wooden frames are marbleized or painted to imitate stone, and some of the stone ones are painted to imitate grained wood. A good many of the windows still have stencils on the lower panes, a form of folk-art that also served to protect the privacy of rooms right on the street. A paper stencil in a formalized leaf-and-flower or other design is held against the glass and patted with a rag dipped in white paint. The effect is very decorative, like frost on the window panes in northern climates, only geometrical. The wide overhang of the eaves contributes to the town’s surprisingly Oriental air, and this overhang is filled in solid with molding and is a favorite place for colored stripes and other ornamentation. The houses are in admirably bold or pretty colors. I particularly liked a crushed-strawberry pink one, with a double staircase of blue, and window frames and under-eaves marbleized in the same blue. There are mustard-colored houses with bright yellow and dark green shutters, white with dark blue and peach, mauve with dark blue and yellow. So that passers-by will not be drenched in the rainy season, the mouths of the rain-pipes are carried out two feet or more, across the sidewalks, and the funnels flare like trumpets. It is as if a band had suddenly stopped playing. Sometimes they have tin petals or feathers down them and around the mouth, and this decoration is repeated in tiles set edgewise up the ridges of the roofs, dragon-like and very “Chinese.”