There are endless wooded hills and valleys in Bahia, with old forts on every projecting angle of the city, on both the bay and the ocean side, which recall the days when São Salvador was the proud capital of Brazil, unworried by the suspicion of a future rival. Out beyond the élite section along the Rua Victoria, past the old church said to stand on the very site in which the city was founded, a nose of land jutting out into the sea and swept by unfailing breezes was shaded by an aged fort and lighthouse that made its sloping greensward or quaint stone benches the most ideal place in South America to spend an afternoon lolling over a book. If one felt more energetic, there were amusing characters among the curious wicker fish-traps down on the beach below. Often I walked all morning long entirely within the city limits through dense uninhabited jungle, following soft earth roads down through great valleys with clusters of negro cabins, and shops of the equally superstitious Portuguese with whom they trade, bearing such names as “Fé em Deus,” “Esperanç aem Deus,” “Todo com Deus,” the householders lolling in the shade beneath them and letting Deus do the rest. Here the motto seemed to be “God helps those who wave a flag with His name on it.” It was almost a relief to run across such frankly cynical shop-names as “A Protectora da Probeza” (The Protector of Poverty).
Bahia is built on a peninsula connected with the rest of the continent by a narrow neck of land, and out this runs its railway line, soon to split into three branches which wander away into the interior of the state. My random wandering brought me out across this one morning and on along the shore of an inner arm of the bay, here endlessly lined with negro huts. I was quenching my tropical thirst with a juicy watermelon when a negro stopped to ask if I did not know that I would die if I ate watermelon in the middle of the day, and soon brought a crowd of excited blacks chattering and gesticulating about me. South America is full of such amusing superstitions, concerning the danger of eating certain foods at certain times, or of eating simultaneously two that do not “fit together.” An old dugout sailed me across the breezy neck of the inner bay from Brandão to Itapagipe, sparing me a return tramp of five miles, for at this point the electric cars pass frequently. There is a long beach in this middle-class suburb of Itapagipe, and a little wharf at which crude sailing boats from about the bay unload watermelons and mangos, bananas and big luscious pineapples, the latter selling on the spot for a mere tostão, or those with empty pockets may fish slightly damaged ones out of the water for nothing. On such excursions one must take care not to dress too carelessly, for there are, of course, two classes in the Philadelphia-made street-cars of Bahia and little visible sign to distinguish them, so that on almost every tour through the first-class car the conductor is forced to order men without coats, or collars, or socks, or real shoes, or a proper haircut to go back into the other. On the other hand he, too, has his rebuffs, for almost anyone wearing a frock-coat says haughtily, “I have a pass,” though never offering to show it, and the conductor sneaks obsequiously on.
A favorite recreation of foreign residents and wealthy white natives of Bahia is to visit the principal ships that anchor in the harbor. To many this is the one touch of civilization superior to that at home, as the trains in which the people come to sit for a few minutes are to the inhabitants of interior villages. But most of them come for more material purposes,—the foreign residents to imbibe “real booze” once more, the élite among the natives to defraud the country’s revenues by replenishing their wardrobes at the ship’s barber shop, buying boxes of chocolate, scented soap, perfumes, lingerie, all the smaller luxuries which can only be had at much higher price or not at all on shore, “women of the life” on professional errands or merely to catch a breath of their beloved Europe. There was a steam-laundry on the ships I visited and had I thought of it in time I might have brought my soiled “linen” on board, as did not a few residents, and had it back when the boat returned from Buenos Aires. To entrust anything to the native washerwomen of Brazil, particularly of Bahia, is to risk having it worn for a week or more by the laundress’s husband or lover, and to insure that it shall be beaten to a pulp in some mud-hole, dried among goat-dung, and returned a fortnight or so later more torn and soiled than when it departed.
About a week after we opened in Bahia, Ruben drifted around to my usual station in the course of the evening and said that he would like to lengthen our contract from twenty-five to ninety days. I declined at once, at least on a fifty per cent. basis. He next offered to pay the baggage haul in addition; then he promised to defray all our traveling expenses, and to cover all the territory from Bahia to Pernambuco. I promised to think this over.
Though I had not found Ruben “crooked as a bed-spring,” as some of his former business associates described him, I knew that he had not been designed with a T-square—and Ruben knew that I knew it. But he was a good “mixer” and an excellent manipulator of politicians, which is a great advantage in Brazil, and is acquired with great difficulty by a foreigner, no matter how well he may learn the language. Besides, Ruben had the most American ideas on advertising of any Brazilian I had ever met and though, of course, he expected to make something out of us, it was a question whether we would not get more ourselves while he was making his profit than we could make alone. Sometimes a crook, well watched, is a better business partner than an honest man, for he is likely to take a chance and is rarely as slow to see an opportunity as are more sincere individuals.
I did not, however, care to spend three months in that corner of the world. I hoped, in fact, to be well up the Amazon by that time, and after sleeping on it I agreed with the “colonel” on a sixty-day contract at the terms he had offered. By this time my practice in Portuguese made it easy to draw up an elaborate document of twelve articles that even a corporation lawyer would have had difficulty in evading. In effect, it made Ruben our advance agent, with the privilege of paying himself, and left me merely my managerial duties. Indeed, this document and what had led up to it so took the “colonel’s” eye that next day he informed me he needed a man of my “pulse,” or American energy, and that as soon as I got the Kinetophone back to the United States I must return and become manager of the big new theater he was soon going to build on the triangular vacant lot near the “São João”!
“Muito obrigado,” I replied, that being Brazilian for “much obliged.”
We were to play in Bahia and about the bay until carnival time, come back to the “São João” for those festive days, and then turn northward. On the morning of January 26 we tore down the show and loaded it into the special baggage-tramcar Ruben had furnished, moving under guidance of his part-Indian mulatto sub-manager out to the suburb of Rio Vermelho. This was a sea-beach village of mainly well-to-do white residents—though no one seemed to bathe, at least in the sea, in Bahia—three miles from the center of town through densely wooded valleys of mango and alligator-pear, jack-fruit and bread-fruit trees, all heavily loaded with their products. We played to packed houses, with few “deadheads,” for here Ruben had little fear either of politicians or police. The cinema of A Barra, another seaside suburb to which we moved three days later, was an outdoor place of sandy bottom, a sheet-iron wall, and only a suggestion of roof, always comfortable with the trade wind sweeping through it. There I could go to the show and look at the brilliant moon at the same time, and our film-men could be heard talking and singing blocks away.
Having performed the extraordinary feat of sleeping seventeen consecutive nights in the same bed, I decided that I needed a change of scene. Up at the head of the bay was a town called Santo Amaro da Purificação, where Ruben had planned to take us; but a religious festival having broken out there, he changed his mind, saying that negroes celebrating church festas do not spend money on cinemas. I went over to see whether he was right, and incidentally to revel in the “purification” attached to the town’s name.
One of the little steamers of the “Navegação Bahiana” that sail the bay, leaving three times a week for most of the towns around it, departed at high tide with a considerable crowd bound for the festa. It was hot under the lee of the land, but once out on the blue water nothing could have been more pleasant, at least in so far as weather was concerned. We stopped at three towns on as many islands and passed many smaller ones along the base of the bay shore, almost everywhere piled up in hundred-foot cliffs. The soil, even on the smallest islands, was of that deep-red color common to much of Brazil, and royal palms lifted their proud heads over a reed-and-mud negro hut on many a little island. We picked up festa-dressed passengers at several villages. Perhaps one out of twenty of my fellow-travelers showed no traces of negro ancestry. Bad teeth were universal among them, more unsightly still in the case of those with a smile like a flash of a brass-shop window, who could afford the ministrations of the wandering “dentists” that inflict interior Brazil.