Sergipe, it seems, was a part of Bahia until nearly the end of the colonial period, when it proclaimed itself a sovereign state with the capital at São Cristovam, a straggling town some twenty miles back along the railway by which I had come. But that was a league from a harbor, and the government at length moved to an Indian village on the edge of this cucumber-shaped bay. Ara is a Tupi Indian word for plenty, and cajú is the Brazilian name for a fruit that thrives in such semi-desert regions as the littoral of Sergipe. This is shaped like a small plump pear, with a smooth silky skin of saffron or brilliant red color, which grows upside down on a tree not unlike the apple in appearance, and is particularly conspicuous for the fact that the seed, shaped like a parrot’s beak, gray in color, and containing a nut that is delicious when roasted, grows entirely outside the fruit itself, protruding from its larger end. The meat is white, exceedingly acid, and sure death alike to thirst and the dye-stuff of garments. There were barely a dozen Indian fishermen’s huts at Aracajú when it became the capital in 1855; hence it has an appearance of newness rather than age, and only two churches—quite sufficient, to be sure, but a great contrast to Bahia. There is nothing particularly individual about the place, its “palaces,” houses, or people, who are sufficient for all the Lord meant them to be in this world and very few of whom are going to the next, if I may judge by the size of the congregation and the priestly remarks thereon at early mass the morning after my arrival.
The predominating type of aracajuano is the gray or brown mestiço, and a mixed race is rarely prepossessing in appearance. There are few full negroes, even fewer pure whites, but every known mixture of the two, no small number of mamelucos, or crosses between Indians and Europeans, and too many bodes (literally male goats) as the offspring of Indian and negro are clandestinely called. The cucumber-shaped bay is really the River Sery-gipe, a name said to mean the abode of a kind of shrimp which abounds here, and has a troublesome moving sandbar at its mouth, with less than four meters depth at low tide, making Aracajú the only Brazilian coast capital which transatlantic steamers cannot enter. One may see the waves breaking on this bar from almost any point in town, but the open sea is in view only from the top of the cathedral or the crest of the highest sand-dunes. Half the coast of Sergipe is made up of this snow-white sand, in dunes that move with the wind, immense heaps of the purest white sand covering whole blocks and rising a hundred feet or more high within two minutes’ stroll of the main hotel. All but a very few of the streets are ankle-deep in sand, as are the palm-trees. These few are paved with large flat rocks fitted together in all manner of irregular patterns. The “bonds” were still operated by mule-power. There is a pleasing central praça, facing the waterfront and backed by a little garden with a vista of the cathedral through royal palms, pleasing perhaps because its bit of green lawn is in such welcome contrast to the glaring sandy brightness elsewhere, but marred by the statue of some local hero who, according to this monument, stepped out of somewhere wearing a frock-coat and waving a most properly creased soft felt hat, crying, “I am going to die for my country!” If he could see it now he might regret his heroism.
In full sunlight at midday I could have used my umbrella to advantage as a parasol, if some miserable son of a Brazilian had not stolen it in Victoria. But he who never walks in tropical sunshine will never enjoy to the full sitting in the shade, and at least the nights were cool and breezy. The only thing to grow profane over was that the steamer which was to carry me to Maceió had not even left Bahia, “because everybody there is busy with the carnival.” This meant at least three days squatting among the sand heaps, and perhaps not reaching Maceió until after the show did, since that was to travel by direct steamer. Worse still, I had read all the Brazilian novels in my bag, and Aracajú was not the kind of place to support a bookstore. There was nothing left but walking, and that soon palls in a sun-glazed town closely surrounded on all sides by shoe-filling sand-dunes.
This dreary and unproductive soil stretches from five to ten miles inland for the whole length of the state, with a broad strip of stony, rolling, clay soil back of that, on which sugar and cotton, tobacco and farinha are produced in moderate quantity, while the western half of the state is sertão, in which graze scattered herds of cattle. There is a large weaving-mill in the capital, said to be the best in Brazil, but still capable of improvement. During my strolls I came upon the slaughter-house one afternoon and found scores of children showing great glee at the struggles of the cattle as the blood poured from their throats until they dropped in their own gore. Such was evidently the chief education to be had by youthful Aracajú. Here, as in the other tobacco producing state, Bahia, most of the negro women smoked pipes. The lazy scrape of tamancos was suggestive not only of the indolence but of the moral looseness of the place. Though one might have had the companionship of comely mulatto and quadroon girls for less than the asking, I sought in vain for a person of even the rudiments of intelligence with whom to pass the time, and was forced to take refuge in the state public library instead. Even this was no monument of learning, though several sergipanos have won Brazilian fame as men of letters. The building itself lacked nothing in elaborateness, but the books were those least needed and only half a dozen youths drifted in daily to read the newspapers and the silly “comic” weeklies from Rio. Here, however, I learned that “there are two kinds of climate in the State of Sergipe—hot and humid on the coast and hot and dry in the interior,” and that the bronze gentleman in the frock-coat and Parisian hat in the main praça was a “politician, a poet, and a great orator” who tried to start a revolution here in 1906 and was quite naturally shot full of holes by federal soldiers. No one can blame him, however, for wanting to start something in Aracajú; his foolishness lay in the fact that he seemed to think it was possible.
A two-line cable or two a week, usually on trivial matters and more likely than not denied a few days later, constituted Sergipe’s connection with the outside world. No doubt I needed the experience to realize how dreary life is in these miserable little capitals when one cannot hurry on as soon as the first interest and novelty has worn off. The total lack of inspiration, of good example, of anything approaching an ideal, could not but have killed any originality or ambition, even had one of these half-breed youths been born with one or the other. There was no goal in life. Even I felt that in my few days there; how must it have been with a person born there and suspecting no other life on the globe? A man may advance under his own gasoline, but unless he has someone to crank him up he is very apt to die about where he began. Few of us are equipped with self-starters.
Such reflections as these made me wonder sometimes whether the moving picture, for all its imperfections and dangers and false view of life, for all the peculiar inanity and childishness inherent in its dramas, is not doing as much as anything to give the masses of South America, particularly of the interior, at least a knowledge of better personal habits, even if not higher aspirations. Much as this remarkable invention has been prostituted by cheap mortals, it is an incredible boon to communities so far from civilization that they never get more of the great outside world than the films bring them. If you lived in some sleepy little village in a remote corner of South America, far from theaters or any other living form of life and thought, you would find the daily round exceedingly dull, you would passionately crave some variety, some entertainment, even mildly intellectual, or not at all so, something to take you for an hour out of the dreary village routine of a life-time and bring you in touch, if ever so slightly and momentarily, with the great moving outside world. Thus you would welcome with considerable enthusiasm even a bad “movie”—unless generations of this life had so sunk you in sloth that you resented any attempt to drag you out of it.
But though the “Cinema Rio Branco,” otherwise the state-owned “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” in the next block was free to me, I found that at best a stupid way for a man from the outside world to spend his time. Some of that on my hands I had whiled away by booking the Kinetophone for three to seven days on its return trip to Rio, we—or rather, they, for by that time I should be far distant—to wire the manager at least five days before their arrival. Thus I proposed to make a string of contracts for “Tut’s” return trip, and leave my duty doubly done when I doffed my movie-magnate hat up on the Amazon.
One morning I was rowed across the river, or harbor, in a dugout and tramped for hours in the sand-carpeted forest of cocoanut-palms on the Ilha dos Coqueiros. It was market-day in the town, and boatloads of the nuts were coming across to compete with other native products from farther up the river. The wind was sighing through the cocoanut fronds, and I discovered that there are windfalls among cocoanuts also, for there were so many large green ones under the trees that I had only to stop and drink as often as I got thirsty. Numbers of them rot around the edge of the stem and fall, and if they are not soon picked up, the decay penetrates the shell and the nut spills its milk in the sand, leaving only the husk to be used as fuel or roofing. Even here one was reminded of the human race. The high trees of aristocratic arrogance ordinarily had only half a dozen nuts, while the sturdy, ugly, short and squatty ones bore from fifty to a hundred in tight clusters at the hub from which the leaves radiate in all directions. A group of inhabitants scattered along the near side of the island lived in cocoanut husk-and-leaf huts and produced, besides their staple, which grows itself, mandioca, melons, and children, all equally weedy and ill-tended. Everyone above the age of ten or twelve seemed to have his dugout log, a paddle, a square sail, and a trailing-board, all guarded in his hut when not in use, and a bright-eyed bronze boy of part Indian ancestry sailed me back across the harbor in a snapping sea breeze.
The dugouts and fishermen’s sailboats that always stretch along the waterfront of Aracajú had been augmented by a steamer, the long-awaited Ilheos of the “Companhia Bahiana de Navegação,” which had at last drifted over the sandbar at the harbor’s mouth. I hastened to the company’s office, only to be struck in the eye by a sign headed “23 á 6 horas,” in other words, it being then Saturday, the Ilheos would not sail until Tuesday morning! By that time the Kinetophone would long since have left Maceió, even if good “Colonel” Ruben did not run away with the whole concern during my prolonged absence. If only the sea had frozen over I could have walked it in far less time than there was still to wait, for it was only 105 miles to Maceió. But it would have been many times that in this sand, and there was no other way of covering the only break in railway travel—except the one between Victoria and Bahia—along the whole eastern coast of South America.
The trouble was, it turned out, that Aracajú had next day to inaugurate a new bishop, the first “son of Sergipe” ever to rise to that honor, and of course Monday would be needed to recover from the celebration. The archbishop of Bahia, the bishop of Maceió, and a swarm of lesser wearers of the black robe had come to add dignity to the occasion, and, when I came to think of it, of course it was they who were holding up the steamer. Eight on Sunday morning found me at the egreja matrix, or mother church, mingling with many pious negroes ready to give the new bishop a proper send-off. But the edifice was already filled to about seven times its capacity with people chiefly of color, and I withdrew hastily to windward and a park bench. By Monday afternoon recovery from the inauguration set in, and I ventured to buy my steamer-ticket, took my last wade in the sands of Aracajú, and went on board for the night. The bishop of Alagoas had the next cabin to my own and we slept with our heads against opposite sides of the same half-inch partition. But I suppose it was because I had no little purple dunce-cap to wear over my bald spot that the dusky ladies of Aracajú did not come, glistening with jewels embedded in their well-fed forms, to kiss me good-night—on the hand.