By and by the water turned from the dense clear-blue of the bay to a grayish color. Several large time-blackened churches appeared on commanding, breezy noses of land, with a few poor houses and miserable huts tucked away in the hollows beneath them. We entered a small river that wound in S-shape through a sort of marsh, passing a three-story agricultural school that loomed up through the palm-tree jungle in apparently utter isolation, and at sunset tied up at the end of a long causeway across a swamp, where a dozen quaint little mule-cars were waiting for us. The fare on these for a two-mile ride was a milreis, which was bad enough, but the driver, singling me out as the only foreigner and person of wealth among the festa-bound horde, and no doubt short of cash for his own celebration, demanded that I pay double fare, and was invited to go to the devil for his pains.
He was going there anyway, it turned out, for if the manager of the more populous afterworld does not own Santo Amaro da Purificação it would be hard to get anyone else to claim it. A long, thin, one-story town, stretching out for a mile or more through low, soggy land, it is inhabited almost entirely by animal-like blacks festooned in dirty rags. Groups of loafing negroes filled every doorway, covered every shady spot, occupied the narrow remnants of dilapidated sidewalks, doing nothing for a living, not even taking in one another’s washing, and living happily ever after for all that. A cross between a ditch and a river flows—or rather, lies—through the length of the town, and in this stagnant sewage the inhabitants not only attempt to swim when the whim comes upon them, but dip up water for cooking purposes. To drink it would evidently kill even a Brazilian negro, so in various parts of the town there are public spigots shut in by iron fences, with an elaborate “office” and a turnstile that can be passed only by paying a vintem for a can of water. Along the noisome canal are a few distilleries, dirty as the rest of the town, and a bit of sugar-cane is grown in the vicinity, but on its edges Saint Amaro of the Purification breaks at once into green rolling campo, which the swarming inhabitants are too indolent to cultivate. Two automobiles had come to show off at the festa, and were so rare a sight that whenever they appeared, jouncing and bumping down one of the so-called streets, with a dozen of the town notables clinging wide-eyed to the seats, all the children and most of the adults took to pursuing them with shouts of “Oo ah-oo-tah-mave!”
The festival really did not begin until next day, but as often happens in Latin-America, the people could not wait and were already celebrating the véspera. About the matrix, or main church, surged immense throngs of leprous, unwashed negroes, hilarious with the drunken-religious orgy. Native rum flowed everywhere. There were forty-two gambling tables running full blast, with crowds of children from six to sixty—if anyone ever lives to that age in Santo Amaro—throwing their money upon them, many so poor that they had only coppers to hazard. Any negro boy who could get a table, mark a square of cloth or cardboard with numbers or colors, and produce a tin can and three dice or any kind of home-made roulette wheel, became forthwith the proprietor of a gambling establishment. The town was lighted by gas—except that most of this was now used to illuminate an “AVE MARIA” in letters ten feet high on the façade of the church. Under this a band blew itself almost brown in the face in honor of the tin Virgin inside the musty old church, before which throngs of gaudily but raggedly dressed negroes were bowing down, crossing themselves on the face, mouth, navel, and finally the body, and displaying curious intermixtures of Catholicism and African fetish worship.
All night long the hubbub lasted. My unknown Brazilian roommate in the “Pensão Universal,” a human sty which had recently opened as a public hostelry and would no doubt close again after the festival, had usurped the bed by piling his junk upon it, and left me a crippled canvas cot. I was awakened frequently by the cold coming up through this, though by no means so often as by the amorous negro swains and wenches retiring from the exciting festivities to adjoining rooms.
High noon found me struggling to get a railway-ticket back to Bahia. It was no easy feat. Eventually we had to break into the inner office and corner the befuddled agent, who replied to our excited demands with a tropically phlegmatic, “But there is no hurry; the train will not really leave at twelve.” Subsequent events proved that he was a better prophet than the printed time-table. We finally dragged away about two, on a railroad built in 1881 and still retaining the same roadbed, rolling-stock, swell-headed old engines and point of view, and rambled along most of the afternoon, until we came to a derailed train and were told to get out and walk. Luckily we were only a few miles from Agoa Cumprida (Long Water), where this branch line is joined by one from up the coast—and on the whole it might be a good thing to make travelers by rail get off every little while and walk a few miles. As the first long cove of the beautiful bay came into view I dropped off and was sailed across the neck of water in one of the ferry dugouts to Itapagipe, where one engagement at the “Theatro Popular” was proving popular indeed.
Three days later all of us, including Ruben in person, took a side-wheel steamer across the bay to São Felix, planning to spend a week away from the city. Across the deck from me sat a white woman with three chain bracelets, one wrist watch, seven very large rings on four fingers of the left hand, six more on the four fingers of the right hand, a gold watch-chain some two yards long about her neck, enormous showy earrings, a gold locket and pendant, and various other gaudy odds and ends. This paragon of taste, it turned out, was one of our party. She was from Montevideo and Ruben had brought her along to do a Spanish dance sem roupa—no wonder she needed to be covered with jewelry—for the benefit of the matutos, or “country gawks,” of the interior.
A couple of hours carried us across the main bay and we entered a narrow inlet which soon swelled into another and smaller bay that gradually narrowed down until we found ourselves in an immense river, the Paraguassú, with low bushy sides and water well up to the branches of the few trees at high tide. Villages, towns, and single old fazenda-houses under their majestic royal palms appeared here and there, at some of which we tied up. Others sent on board or took ashore two or three of the plantation family in flimsy dugout logs paddled by more or less naked negroes. Most of the towns had names ending in “gipe” and lived on their exports of fumo and charutos (tobacco and cigars), that weed, as well as fruit and cacao, growing abundantly back in what looked like rather a barren and bushy land. The river narrowed, winding through low hills, and at sunset we sighted the twin towns of São Felix and Cachoeira, on opposite sides of the stream and connected by a long railway-and-foot-bridge, at the foot of a series of rapids over black jagged rocks that halt navigation and give the latter town its name.
As usual bedlam broke loose between the chaotic-minded passengers and the aggressive boatmen, carregadores, and touts fighting for business. Though there was an abundance of men in ragged, baggy uniforms, no one seemed to have any authority. One evil-eyed, half-baked looking fellow who drew a razor in the midst of the turmoil turned out to be the hotel-keeper who had been told to prepare rooms for “the entire Kinetophone company,” and who did not propose to be outwitted by a rival. We let them fight it out, put our light baggage into a ferry “canoe” with Carlos and the undress “artist,” and sent them across the river—our theater being in São Felix and the boat-landing in Cachoeira. Then we walked a mile or more along the rough-and-tumble stone streets of what appeared by the weak gas-lamps to be a town transported bodily from the heart of the Andes, paid sixty reis at the bridge turnstile, and brought up at the tiny “Cinema São Felix.” There Ruben and the Italian owner broke into such garrulous greetings that it was after eight before we finally dragged our guide and mentor away to the “hotel” of the belligerent seeker-after-guests, who was now grieving over the unexpected scantiness of our “company.”
Of the pseudo-meal foisted upon us after two hours of shouting, swearing, and insisting, I will say nothing, and even less of the boiler-factory din that seethed through the tiny pens divided by thin wooden partitions reaching only halfway to the un-ceiled roof, except to remark that, as soon as the show was installed next morning, “Tut” and I might have been seen moving across the river to the “Hotel das Naçoes” in Cachoeira. This second city of the State of Bahia—equal in size to Texas—was only a languid backward village, without electric-lights, without even a wheeled vehicle, unless one counts the tri-weekly side-wheel steamer or the little railway that rattles up to Feira do Sant’ Anna and straggles 165 miles west into the interior of the state. There are several moderately large tobacco and cigar warehouses, but almost the only sign of industry in either of the twin towns was our advertising,—a deluge of posters and handbills, and a parade of taboletas, or large movable street-signs, accompanied by negro boys beating cymbals, drums, and tin pans. We charged double prices, because the theater was too small to make anything less worthwhile—and we played to 128 paying clients and a score of “deadheads”!
Next day the Italian cinema-man begged us with tears in his voice to cut the entrance fee in two, and as some such drastic action seemed necessary to save us from bankruptcy, I agreed—and that night we had 89 paid admissions! These interior towns are so sunk in sloth that they seem to resent any attempt to shake them out of the somnolence of their ancestors, out of that apathetic indifference to the advances of civilization which makes them scorn even the few opportunities of a life-time to see something new and important, to get some hint of the world’s progress. Only the barbaric recreation of drunken church festivals appeals to them.