The waterworks in a Brazilian city of some 15,000 inhabitants
A Brazilian laundry
Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival
Some chap with a tendency for exaggeration has said that the night has a thousand eyes; but that is nothing compared to almost any interior village of South America when a white stranger comes strolling through it. To walk the length of a street of Alagoinhas was like trying to stare down some mammoth, bovine, fixedly gaping face, until a sensitive man could scarcely have refrained from screaming, “For Heaven’s sake go and do something, or at least draw in your stupid faces!” Spattered over a lap of broken country and half-hidden in cocoanut and palm groves, it would be difficult to decide how many of the 15,000 inhabitants it claims actually dwell in it, were it not their unfailing custom to line up to be counted. There was not a street in town, which is well inland and at a slight elevation, but merely wide sloughs of sand between the monotonous rows of houses; yet I was astonished to find two large and well-kept cinemas. This, it turned out, was due to a local feud. Two brothers who owned the “Cinema Popular” had been bosom friends of the richest man in town, until they, too, bought an automobile. This so enraged the rich man that he attempted to get even by building another “movie” house in the hope of putting the brothers out of business. So far he had not succeeded, and was all the less likely to do so after I had signed a contract with the brothers for five nights at the “Popular.” Ruben might take the show to Maceió and Pernambuco as he had promised, but I did not propose to be caught napping, and if he did, the Alagoinhas contract would be good in June or July when the Kinetophone returned without me.
Another car so loose-jointed that the walls constantly creaked and swayed toiled all the afternoon and into the night to carry a scattering of passengers to Barracão, another name for Nowhere. It consisted merely of several huts and a tile-roofed building in which all passengers by rail from Bahia to Aracajú, or vice versa, must spend the night. The engine, whistling up about a cord of wood, awakened us long before daylight and at least an hour earlier than was necessary, for I was already sitting in our six o’clock train when the other pulled out Bahia-ward at five. The same seat, the same conductor, and the same swaying walls as the day before made one feel like a trans-Siberian traveler, though the 278 miles the train worries through in two days is scarcely a Siberian distance. The salt-tainted breath of the Atlantic slashed us now and then in the faces as we rumbled along, for we were not far inland now. It was gently rolling country, of gray rather than red soil, producing next to nothing, with here and there some bananas and mandioca, and long unbroken stretches of scrub jungle. The tucú, a grape-like fruit growing on a palm tree and so thick of skin and large of stone that there is only a bit of sweetish dampness between them, was sold at the rare stations.
Soon we crossed an iron bridge and what might have been a river had it tried harder, into the State of Sergipe, the smallest of Brazil. This and the little larger State of Alagoas are sliced out of the respective states of Bahia and Pernambuco down near the mouth of the São Francisco, which divides them. It is not apparent why they need be separate states—but then, a foreigner ignorant of local conditions no doubt wonders in looking at a map of our own country why a little nubbin of land down at the end of Connecticut must have its own name, capital, and government, or why both those bits of territory should not join Massachusetts. The state lines of Brazil follow largely the old colonial divisions, some natural but more of them artificial, set by the Pope or the King of Portugal. Of the twenty Brazilian states, nine or ten have aboriginal Indian names. It is another evidence of the higher value of time to the American that we have an abbreviation for each of our states, while the Brazilian has none. North and South American incompatability of temperament is perhaps nowhere more definitely demonstrated than in the attitude of the two races toward time. Brevity, conciseness, and promptitude rank almost as bad manners among Latin-Americans, whose editorial writers often break forth in dissertations on “punctuality, that virtue of kings and bad custom of Anglo-Saxons. Enthusiasts for liberty, we cannot admit that a man shall be the slave of his watch. Life proves that punctuality is an excellent virtue for a machine, but a grave defect for a man.”
In the blazing afternoon we came down off the interior plateau, ever lower to the northward, here reminiscent of southern Texas or northern Mexico in its aridity, its scattered, thorny, scrub plant life, its occasional adobe huts, to a flat sea-level littoral that was almost entirely a dreary waste of snow-white sand, rarely punctuated with cactus and a few other waterless bushes. Aracajú, capital of the State of Sergipe, is set in this nearly desert landscape. The large room with a mosquito-net canopied bed in which I was soon installed in the “Hotel International” was the best the town had to offer befriended strangers. Like all the rest of Aracajú, it was on the ground floor, looking out on a quiet garden of deep sand, and was as airy as the exhaust from a hot-air furnace. I had already taken it when my eye fell upon a notice to the effect that for lack of water guests would not be allowed to bathe for three days. By shouting until the whole hotel force was gathered about me, and offering to make them all candidates for hospital treatment, I was conducted, as a special favor to another of those half-mad “gringos,” into a special “rain bath” for ladies, and freed myself at last from the soil of Bahia. Then, having induced the landlord to change the wooden-floored bed for one “of wire,” though he could not understand why anyone should consider this an improvement, I relaxed and sallied forth to see what Aracajú had to offer.