I took him at his word and, having designed a rubber stamp, made him produce packets of the four kinds of tickets used, ran them through a consecutive enumerator, and stamped them all. He who has never tried to stamp 1500 tickets an hour by hand will not realize what a daily task I had laid out for myself merely for the satisfaction of giving Ruben and his satellites proper “fiscalization.” These stamped tickets I handed each night to the ticket-seller and at least one and sometimes all three of us stood at the door ready to protest if anyone entered without a stamped ticket, as well as to see that all went into the locked box beside the door-keeper. After the show all unsold tickets were turned over to me, the treasurer gave me a copy of the official borderaux, or statement of tickets sold and the amount of money taken in, I unlocked the door-boxes and carried home their contents to check him up, and one half the day’s receipts in ragged Brazilian cash went into my pocket before I could be budged out of the “São João” office.
I unmasked one trickster at the very first performance. Being still stranger enough to most of the “São João” force to pass incognito, I wandered up the dingy back stairs to the gallinheiro (chicken roost), as “nigger heaven” is called in Brazil, and found that the negro at the door was accepting money in lieu of tickets. It was not that the money was not quite as good, if anything it was a trifle less flimsy, but somehow it could not be forced into the ticket-box at the taker’s elbow. He resigned from Ruben’s staff less than a minute later.
Long before the first session ended we had closed the inner doors and the lobby was threatening to overflow. For the first time in Brazil I had permitted other “special attractions” to be offered with our own; that is, in addition to the ordinary films Ruben had engaged two stray Italian females who howled through several spasms of what they and most of the audience seemed to think was music. As they had been hired before our contract was made, and their wages were nothing out of our pockets, I could only reasonably demand that the Kinetophone remain the head-liner. The blacks of Bahia, we soon discovered, have not yet reached even the moving-picture stage of development, rum, dances, and church festivals being their high-water mark in recreation, and not ten per cent. of our paid audiences were negroes, in a town where fully three fourths of the population is of that race. But our audiences were large for all that, because the lighter minority came again and again to see the chief novelty that had reached Bahia in several seasons. Even this near-white class, however, was not conspicuous for its prepossessing appearance, and the calm, steadfast, efficient face of Edison, gazing out from our posters through these throngs of indolent, ambitionless mortals, insignificant of physique and racially entangled, gave a striking contrast, typical of the two continents of the New World.
Our first Sunday, in particular, was a busy day. It is the custom all over Brazil for the “excellentissimas familias” to go to the “movies” on Sunday afternoon or evening, and the habit is so fixed that they prefer to pack in to the point of drowning in their own perspiration, even at double prices, rather than see a better show on a week day. For managers naturally take advantage of this fad and offer their poorest attractions—just as Ruben withdrew his “imported artists” on this day—knowing they will fill their houses anyway. If only we could have taken Sunday with us, movable, transportable, and played on that day in every town, we would have made as great a fortune as if the World War had never cast the pall of a “brutal crisis” over Brazil.
By one in the afternoon I was at the theater door in impresario full-dress and managerial smile, greeting the considerable crowd that came to the matinée, and disrupting the plans of those who had hoped to drag five or six children by in the shadow of their skirts or trousers. Then, with scarcely time for a meat-laden Brazilian supper in our disreputable hotel across the street, I came back to the most crowded theater I had seen in months. By 7:30 we had already closed the inner doors and the élite of Bahia continued to stack up in the lobby until that, too, had overflowed long before the first session ended. We were compelled to send policemen in to eject the first audience, and when the house had been emptied and the gates opened again, it flooded full from floor to “paradise” five stories up as quickly as a lock at Panama does with water. Even then all could not crowd in, and we herded them up once more in preparation for a third session, which, though not beginning until after ten, was also packed. Nothing so warms the cockles of a manager’s heart as to watch an unbroken sea of flushed and eager faces following his entertainment. By this time I had met most of the high society of Bahia, all her white and near-white “best families,” with now and then some physically very attractive girls among them, having marched at least once past my eagle eye. That night I carried off more money than had fallen to our lot since our first days in Rio and São Paulo.
Though silver was conspicuous by its scarcity in Bahia, there were other troubles attached to the handling of money. Those familiar only with the quick and convenient methods of American banks can have little conception of the difficulties of banking in South America. No two banks in any city in Brazil, for instance, would accept one another’s checks; worse still, two branches of the same bank in neighboring cities would not transfer funds of their depositors without all the formalities and expense involved in such transactions between foreign countries. Where there is no mutual confidence there can be no credit system, and instead of giving or receiving a check, one must carry a roll of cash, like a professional gambler or a manipulator of politicians. By the time I had four contos laid away in a British bank, exchange had bounded skyward again, and it would only have been to waste what little Linton was making to buy drafts as that rate; yet the bank refused to transfer our account to their own institution in Rio or Pernambuco, except at a high commission. When the day came for us to move northward again I was forced to draw out our earnings in ragged bills of tiny denominations and carry them with me.
Of “deadheads” and official mendicants the “São João” had its full share. Ruben sent ten tickets a day to police headquarters, but those who came on duty gave these tickets to friends and bootblacks and negro relatives, and thrust their way in on the strength of their uniform or badge. We were overrun with grafters filling seats and using up programs for which honest people would have been willing to pay money, while a dozen of the best boxes were permanently allocated to state and municipal officials and powerful politicians. When I protested to “Colonel” Ruben, I learned another interesting little fact,—he was forced to be kind to politicians because, thanks to his political pull, he got this great four-tier theater, built by the government in viceroy days and now belonging to the State of Bahia, rent free! As to the police, he confided to me that he had to be lenient with them in order that they might not be too harsh with him when he offered shows of the “sem roupa” or undress variety.
For all the resentment of frustrated “deadheads” and the attitude of Bahia’s newspapers, which at first gave five lines to Edison’s invention and full pages to the religious debauch of Bomfim, the success of the Kinetophone forced the five or six dailies to give our engagement increasing attention. They were all rather pitiful sheets, and in a town where at least three-fourths of the population never reads it would have seemed highly advisable to have combined them into one good newspaper. That of course would have been impossible, because of Latin-America’s lack of team-work and mutual confidence, as well as the demand of each political faction for its own organ of propaganda. One day there appeared in the best of these sorry journals a long and learned article by a Brazilian purist who, though flattering to the invention and the inventor, asserted that it should be called “Cinephonio” rather than “Kinetophone.” I was feeling in good Portuguese form by this time, and having leisure enough to dig back through the layers of philology to ancient Greece, I sent in an equally long and learned answer that decidedly surprised editor, contributor, and reading public, accustomed only to the type of American business man who is utterly ignorant of, and wholly uninterested in, the native tongue. Comments on this controversy and its astonishing dénouement drifted to my ears from our throngs for more than a week afterward.
Such experiences as this emphasized the unwisdom of the habit of many American firms of sending the same “drummer” to cover both Brazil and Spanish-America. Brazilians have a rivalry toward Argentinos which amounts to hatred; they consider the Castilian tongue particularly the language of the Argentine and at least pretend to regard it as a corruption of their own, of which they are unreasonably proud. Hence the traveling-man who addresses them in Spanish is more apt to arouse resentment than commercial interest. If he cannot speak Portuguese, he will do better to stick to English, using an interpreter when necessary, or take a chance on his French, which most educated Brazilians understand more or less, rather than deliberately to incense them by using the tongue of their rivals and implying its importance over their own.
We had now reached a latitude where it is doubly wise for the white man to exercise regularly, and the daily walk that had always been a custom I now made a stern requirement. Complaints against sluggish livers were almost universal in the small foreign colony, but I noted that they invariably went with large liquor bills and a scorn of pedestrianism, even in its mildest forms. Personally, though it was unquestionably hot and perspiration flowed at the least physical exertion, I found the climate of Bahia agreeing splendidly with me, and a few miles of brisk walking, followed by a refreshing “rain bath,” became a pleasure to which to look forward. “Tut” could frequently be coaxed to go with me, but his Brazilian training made Carlos prefer to loaf about the theater and watch the rehearsing of dancing girls, in the face of my warning that he was now in a different land than his cool and temperate São Paulo. There were fine points to Carlos; one often caught a suggestion that in some such stern environment as the United States he would have turned out a man of parts, but the error of his parents in turning south instead of north across the Atlantic made his struggle with environment a pitched battle, with the odds against him.