Dr. Brant has given me the following information about the value of money at the time the diary was kept.
The mil reis (a thousand reis, the plural of real, or “royal”) was worth twenty cents of U.S. money. (As a banker, Dr. Brant points out that the dollar has since been devalued, so that a mil reis would be worth ten cents of today’s money. But as Helena says, we are speaking of “bygone days” and it seems simpler to keep it at the earlier evaluation.) Five mil reis would therefore be a dollar, 100 reis two pennies, and so on. Dr. Brant gives a list of approximate prices of goods and labor at the time:
A pound of meat: 10¢
A pound of sugar: 3¢
A dozen eggs: 4¢
A quart of milk: 4¢
A pound of butter: 12¢
A pair of shoes: $3.00
A good horse: $20.00
Average rent for a good house: $8.00 a month
A cook: $2.00 a month
Wages of Negroes employed in mining: 40¢ a day (paid to the whites who rented them out. In the town, or in agriculture, Negro wages were less.)
Arinda receives about $100 for the diamond she finds, page 6, Helena makes $6.00 by selling her mother’s gold brooch without a diamond in it, page 172 ff.; and the grandmother sends home a present of $10.00 to her daughter, on page 48, etc.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many friends and acquaintances for the help they have given me, both as sources of information about Diamantina and its life and vocabulary, and with the actual work of translation. Thanks are due:
In Diamantina, to Antonio Cicero de Menezes and his granddaughter; to Armando Assis, manager of the Hotel de Tourismo; and to many other inhabitants who showed me the way or went with me, invited me into their houses, and patiently repeated and spelled out the names of things.
To Vera Pacheco Jordão, who went with me to Diamantina and came to my assistance when my Portuguese failed me; to Manuel Bandeira; to Dora Romariz; to Otto Schwartz; and to Mary Stearns Morse, who typed the difficult manuscript.
To Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, head of the Patrimonio Artistico of the Brazilian Department of Education, who took an interest in the book and who got out the Department’s collection of photographs of Diamantina for me to choose from.
To my friend Pearl Kazin, who, in New York, received the manuscript and gave me invaluable help with it.
To my friend Lota de Macedo Soares, who reluctantly but conscientiously went over every word of the translation with me, not once, but several times.
To Dr. Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant, who also went over every word of the translation, and without whose remarkable memory for the customs and idioms of Diamantina in the ’90’s a great deal of detail might have been lost. I am grateful to him for many suggestions, and many of the footnotes are his.
But most thanks of all are, of course, due to Dona Alice herself for her wonderful gift: the book that has kept her childhood for us, as fresh as paint. Long may she live to re-tell the stories of “Helena Morley” to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Sítio da Alcobacinha
Petrópolis
September 1956
A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians
When Aldous Huxley and his wife visited Brasil recently, the Cultural Division of Itamarati, the Brasilian Department of Foreign Affairs, arranged for them to make a trip to Brasília, the new capital of the country, with an additional trip farther into the interior to see the Uialapiti Indians. The Department of Foreign Affairs is always referred to as Itamariti because it is housed in the former home of the Barons of Itamariti in Rio de Janeiro, a handsome, solid residence, really a palace on a small scale. Behind its high walls, surrounded by magnificent Imperial Palms, are a garden and a formal pool complete with swans, where diplomatic dinner-parties are held.
The Brasilian nobility created by the first and second Emperors were fiercely nationalistic and proud of their semi-civilized country, and for their titles they invariably chose Indian place-names, such as Itaboraí, Tamandaré, or Itamarati. One could graph modern Brasilian history very patly on the three points connected by the Huxley trip: by way of Itamarati to the safe, democratic insipidity of the name “Brasília,” and then beyond, to the dwindling tribes along the Xingu River, Indian again, for here as in the United States, many geographical names have held to their originals, or approximations of them.
Ten people went on the trip: Huxley and his Italian wife; two men from Itamarati, one the head of the Cultural Division, José Meira Penna; Antônio Callado, editor-in-chief of the biggest Rio morning paper, and his English wife; a Polish-Brasilian girl who practices architecture in Rio; a young Englishman from the British Embassy; a girl who had been acting as the Huxleys’ interpreter in Rio; and myself, the only American. They were all to fly to Brasília from the state of Minas Gerais where the Huxleys had been taken to see a colonial town or two, and I was to meet them there for lunch, on a Saturday at the big new Oscar Niemeyer hotel.
Brasília is about six hundred miles northwest of Rio, in the state of Goiás; at present the railroad nearest to it ends at Annapolis, a small town eighty-five miles away. It takes three days, and trains on both regular gauge and narrow gauge tracks, to reach Annapolis from Rio; from there trucks and jeeps can go on to Brasília. So far only two trainloads of material for the new capital have managed to make the trip that way; all the rest — the staggering quantities of cement, bricks, steel, glass and wood necessary to start building a modern city — have gone by road, by bad roads — everything, that is, that has not been flown in by plane. Since gasoline is the biggest item of importation in Brasil, accounting for some 24 per cent of its dollar expenditure, this attempt to build a city before building a railroad to its site is one of the most serious criticisms of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s new capital.
The change of capital was written into the Brasilian Constitution as far back as 1891, and it had been talked of as early as 1820. Among the reasons originally given for the change one was that Rio de Janeiro, being on the coast, was open to attack from the sea; a capital farther to the west would open up the vast uninhabited stretches of the interior to permanent settlers as no pioneering had (or has) been able to do. The first reason, of course, disappeared with the coming of the air age, but the second is still the chief argument of the pro-Brasília group. There are others, some rather similar to those for the establishment of Washington: legislation, the pro-Brasílias say, will be carried on more efficiently and fairly away from the pressures of the rival cities of Rio and São Paulo; and if the capital is simply the seat of government, senators and deputies will go there to conduct the nation’s business and then return to their own states, rather than be seduced by the attractions of Rio, living there for years at a time and seeing their constituents rarely, if at all, as many of them do now. Also, Rio is badly overcrowded, constantly short of water, and its slums are mushrooming as more and more miserable immigrants trek in from the poorer or drought-stricken areas in search of work. Many of these, the argument goes, will now be drawn to Brasília; and it is true that some thousands of them have already gone there.
While everyone in Brasil who has ever thought about it at all agrees that the interior of the country has to be opened up somehow or other, and the sooner the better, those opposed to Brasília feel that it might be done to begin with more modestly and economically, and by means more in keeping with Brasil’s present desperate financial state. Brasil needs schools, roads, and railroads, above all; then medical care, improved methods of agriculture, and dams and electric power, particularly in the drought-ridden northeast. These things, they feel, should be tackled more energetically and systematically, if necessarily slowly, before undertaking to build a luxury capital, an extravagant show-place, three hours by plane from the fringe of cities along the sea-board. The founding of small towns and villages in the interior, and help with their industries and agriculture — especially by means of railroads and better roads, since at present 50 per cent of all produce spoils before it even reaches the markets — this, the anti-Brasílias say, is what would really open up the interior, and not a new capital. And why build a new capital, they ask, when, even if it may need a thorough overhauling at the moment, they already have one of the most beautiful capitals in the world, complete with government buildings? They think it will be years before the foreign embassies build there, although they have all bought land as a matter of course or of policy, and even longer before the senators and deputies can be persuaded to stay in Brasília for any length of time.