A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor gasoline
I was surprised to find a large number of white people in Penedo, though mulattoes were in the majority. There was some Indian blood, shown chiefly in high cheek-bones and wide faces, and as usual there was a big jail full of happy singing negroes. Full-white brats rolling stark naked in the mud suggested one of the unfortunate effects of living in a mainly negro country. Some streets climbed laboriously past overgrown old churches with Portuguese crowns cut in stone on them, past projecting balconies that carried the mind back to viceregal days, to the grass-grown central praça high up on the ridge, overlooking a long stretch of the red-brown river. It was the affair of a moment to convince the owner of the “Theatro Sete de Setembro,” alias “Cinema Ideal,” that the Kinetophone should halt here for three days on its return trip. He was the big man of the town, with a dozen separate enterprises, and when a score of persons crowded around us in his drugstore to listen to our conversation and read over his shoulder whatever I showed him, we agreed to leave the signing of the contract for the next day on board the Ilheos, on which he, too, was to take passage.
Anarchy reigned about the decks all night, sailors, stokers, and visiting parties from shore keeping up a constant hubbub until we got under way about dawn. A couple of hours sleep as we descended the river were cut short as we struck the open sea, for though this looked calm and smooth as a frog pond, the Ilheos rolled like a log and soon took on the aspect of a phantom ship, with everyone lying like dead wherever misfortune overtook them. The dreary sandy coast was sometimes broken by spurs of the low, flat, wooded plateau that stretches all along this region farther inland. At two in the afternoon we sighted Maceió and its port of Jaraguá, a smaller city far out on a point of land, with a reef protecting a scallop in the coast but no real harbor. In one of the score of sailboats that rushed out to meet us I was astonished to see Carlos and later “Tut,” whom I supposed already in Pernambuco. They had lost Wednesday and Thursday of the week before in getting here, had played four days to tolerable business, and had lost the night just past in waiting for the boat they now expected to take at any moment.
I took “Tut’s” room at the “Hotel Petropolis,” a massive, one-story building on a sort of terrace that caught a hit of breeze and on the sides of which were painted letters several feet high announcing it the “Only Place in Maceió without Mosquitoes.” It had little of anything else, for that matter, except good mosquito-nets over the beds to keep out the mosquitoes it did not have. By dark the “Lloyd-Brazileiro” steamer Bahia arrived, and “Tut” and Carlos and Ruben’s mulatto sub-manager sailed away, while I went over to the theater in which they had played and contracted not only for three days on their return trip, but for five days in Parahyba, capital of the state north of Pernambuco. How hard Maceió had been hit by the prevailing hard times was suggested on every hand, not only in out-of-works and light cinema receipts, but by such posted information as:
NOTICE
On this date our telephone was disconnected from the respective Company until our further orders, in view of the brutal crisis which at the present time atrophies everything and everyone.
| Maceió, January 1, 1915. | João Ramos e Cia. |
The capital of Alagoas, however, proved to be more of a city than it looks from a distance. Most of it lies in a pocket between the sea and a ridge, a large, almost land-locked bay running far in behind it. Mainly three-story buildings lined the well-paved streets in the business section, and new American street-cars of the electric “Companhia Alagoana de Trilhos Urbanos” covered several pleasant suburbs. No sooner, however, does one return to a region of railways and street cars than missing arms and legs begin to appear. The people of Maceió were visibly of higher class than those of the State of Bahia, though by no means beyond possible improvement. Even the outskirt huts were whitewashed and often noticeably clean, and women and children, and even men, in many cases wore spotless white garments. Heaps of cotton bales at the railway station and on the wharves reminded one of our own South, but though there was ample evidence of African ancestry, there were almost no full-blooded negroes among the population. The percentage of white and near-white inhabitants was striking after Bahia; but here, too, were the familiar north-Brazil concomitants of huge churches and tiny one-room schools. Mangos and bread-fruit dropped in the central praça, amid the myriad remains of tropical bugs lured to death by its blazing electric-lights.
My only personal acquaintance with the élite of Maceió was due to professional duties. When the show arrived, “Tut” had discovered that the local electricity was of a freak type,—100 volts and 100 cycles, whatever that means—a sort of non-union electricity evidently, for all our phonograph motors refused to work with it. The English engineer at the power-house figured out on paper that all would be well, but as the “juice” is not turned on in Maceió until 6 P. M., his error was discovered only when the audience was storming the doors on the opening night. While the manager strove to keep the house amused with ordinary films, “Tut” and Carlos raced about town and at last found in a café a little electric fan. They borrowed the motor that operated it, but this had to be cleaned and oiled before it would take up its new task, so that it was nine o’clock before our part of the show was given; and as Maceió usually goes to bed by eight, Ruben had to give back much of the money, and the bungled estrea injured business during the rest of our stay. It turned out that the café and the fan belonged, sub rosa, to one Dr. Armando Vedigal, a well-to-do lawyer and member of one of Maceió’s “best families.” True to his race, as well as to his calling, this gentleman, finding he had someone in a tight place, proceeded to squeeze him. He demanded 100$ for the use of the motor for four nights, of at most thirty minutes each. The whole fan costs six to eight dollars new in the United States, and perhaps 35$ in Brazil; and as its perfection was mainly due to Edison, it amounted almost to renting an apparatus for two hours’ use to the inventor thereof at three times its original cost.
“Tut” had left the payment to me. Unfortunately I could not ignore it, as I should have preferred, because the lawyer was a political power and would have made it unpleasant for the owner of the theater unless his “rake-off” was forthcoming, so the only American thing to do was to pay what he demanded. I determined, however, to have at least the satisfaction of expressing our gratitude to the fellow in person, and after considerable insisting I was shown the way to his house. It was an ostentatious one enclosed in a large private garden in the best part of town and filled with those things into which persons of wealth and “social standing” the world round turn the proceeds of such clever “strokes of business.” The great man received me with a dignity befitting his lofty station, and invited me into his chair-forested parlor. He had the dainty aristocratic fingers, hands, and form of those who, for generations back, have taken good care not to let their muscles develop, lest someone suspect them of having once earned a dollar by vulgar work, and he was dressed in the very proper heavy, black, full frock-coat dress of his class, even on the equator.