The grandmother’s house still stands, to the right of the Rosário Church, but the Teatro Isabel, formerly on the other side, has been torn down and in its place is a large baby-pink jail from whose barred windows a drunken prisoner yelled at me incomprehensibly. The house is low, its stoop just a few inches off the ground, a deceptively small-looking house with a sweeping, concave old tile roof. The woman who lives there now knew Minha Vida de Menina and its author and kindly showed me through. The old rooms for slaves, extending along the street by the church, are let out. Inside there is room after room, high, square, sadly neglected, almost devoid of furniture. The walls are a yard thick, wooden shutters can be closed and barred on the inside; the ceilings are of boards or woven rushes painted white, the two common Brazilian types. After a good many of these high dark rooms we reached the kitchen, where a girl was cooking over an open fire. Stoves here consist of a long iron plate with four pot-holes in it, laid on the edges of a stone trough full of embers. A wood called candeia is commonly used. It has a peculiar sweetish smell, sickening until one gets used to it; at the dinner-hour this sweetish stench hovers bluely over Brazilian towns and villages.
Behind the house the grandmother’s former garden covers about five acres, sloping down to a brook and a jungle of banana trees. There are huge jaboticaba trees, the same ones that Helena used to climb into for refuge. There are a few beds of lettuce and cabbages, and a grove of coffee trees, but everything is overgrown and gone to seed and it is hard to imagine how it must have looked in the old days, tended by the grandmother’s ex-slaves. A big sociable pig stood up on his hind legs in his pen, to watch us.
One of the handsomest buildings is Helena’s “Normal School,” now the Grupo Escolar, and located in the middle of the town; big, white, rectangular, with bright blue doors and window-frames. Juscelino Kubitschek, the present president of Brazil and a former governor of Minas, was born in Diamantina. He had visited recently and a great canvas banner bearing his smiling face almost concealed the front of the building. There are also a Kubitschek Street and a Kubitschek Place with his head in bronze in it, less than life-size, as if done by the Amazonian head-shrinkers.
The market is a large wooden shed, with blue and red arches, and a sparse forest of thin, gnawed hitching-posts around it. The drovers are still there, with loads of hides and corn, but because of trains, better roads, and trucks, trade has dwindled to next to nothing since Helena’s day. Near the Cathedral one is warned from the street or alley where the “bad girls” live. They are extremely juvenile mulattoes, sitting on their doorsteps with their feet stuck out on the cobblestones, gossiping and sucking sugar-cane in the sunshine. The live-forevers that Helena used to pick are still very much in evidence, in fact they are one of the town’s few industries besides diamond-mining. They are a tiny yellow-white straw flower, less than half an inch in diameter, on a long fine shiny brown stalk. Tied up in bunches, the bundle of stems bigger than two hands can hold, they lie drying in rows on the streets all around the Cathedral, and freight-cars full of flowers are sent off every year, on their way to Japan. They are used, I was told, for “fireworks,” or “ammunition,” but I suspect that, dyed and glued, they merely reappear in the backgrounds of Japanese trays, plaques, etc. Brazilian-made fireworks play an important role in Diamantina, as they do in all provincial Brazilian towns, and are used in staggering quantities for religious holidays. I was shown a warehouse packed to the ceiling with firecrackers, catherine-wheels and Roman candles; the supply looked much larger than that of food-stuffs on hand at the same wholesaler’s.
Diamonds and gold, but chiefly diamonds, still obsess the economy. The hotel manager (a new hotel, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, was finished in 1956), using almost the very words that Helena used in 1893, complained that he had to fly in vegetables from Belo Horizonte. “Here no one’s interested in anything but gold and diamonds,” he said. “They say they can’t grow vegetables in this soil, but it isn’t true. They think of nothing but diamonds, diamonds, diamonds.” It is strange to see, on the side of a miserable little house, a blue and white enamelled sign announcing that here is a diamond dealer. I looked inside one of these houses and could see nothing but overhead a lurid plaster statue of St. George killing the dragon, with a small red electric light bulb glowing in front of it, and under it, on the table, a bunch of live-forevers and a fine pair of scales in a glass case. The scales are covered up at night, like the innumerable caged birds hanging everywhere. Curiously shaped stones, lumps of ores, clusters and chunks of rock crystal and quartzes are everywhere, too, used as door-stops and sideboard decorations. In the cold clear air, the town itself, with its neatness, rockiness, and fine glitter, seems almost on the point of precipitation and crystallization.
In the recently opened museum there are the usual polychrome saints and angels, sedan chairs and marriage beds, and then suddenly and horribly an alcove hung with the souvenirs of slavery: rusty chains, hand-cuffs, and leg- and neck-irons draped on the wall; pointed iron prods originally fastened to poles; and worse things. Driving about the region, the sites of the old slave encampments are pointed out. Trees, and a very fine short grass, supposedly from Africa, distinguish them, and they are usually beside a stream and near the pits of old mines. But now there is only the small Negro and mulatto population to show for all the million or more slaves who came here in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
I made an excursion to Boa Vista, where Helena’s father mined. The mines are abandoned now, although they were worked on a large scale by foreign companies up until a few years ago. There is nothing to be seen but an immense excavation exposing soils of different colors (each with a different name; Burton’s book gives an excellent account of them and the different methods of mining), and endless iron pipes. Boa Vista is slightly higher than Diamantina; although it is six or seven miles away one can see a church-tower. The road there is dirt, narrow, winding, and eventually the taxi scrapes over outcroppings of naked rock and splashes through streams. Battalions of grotesque rocks charge across the fields, or stand like architecture, pierced by Gothic-ruin windows. Large slabs balance on top of moldering turrets, with vines, bushes, and even stunted palm-trees on their tops. Helena Morley was not a fanciful child but I wondered at her riding on her borrowed horse, before sun-up, along this nightmare road, hurrying to get back to Diamantina in time for school.
I took with me a life-long friend of Helena’s future husband, Dr. Brant, Senhor Antonio Cicero de Menezes, former local director of the Post Office service, now eighty years old, a very distinguished-looking man with a white Vandyke beard and moustaches, like an older, frailer Joseph Conrad. We came back through the hamlet of twenty or so houses that is Palha (straw) today and Seu Antonio Cicero said, in Helena’s very phrase, “Now let us descend and suck fruit.” So we sat in the tiny general store, surrounded by household and mining necessities: iron kettles and frying pans, salt beef and soap, and sucked a good many slightly sour oranges. A little boy brought them in a gold-panning bowl and Seu Antonio Cicero prepared them for me with his pocket-knife faster than I could suck. The storekeeper showed me a store room full of these wooden bowls, cowhides and tarry lumps of brown sugar and sieves for panning diamonds, piled on the floor, and boxes and boxes of dusty rock crystals, bound, he said, for the United States, for industrial purposes.