Unlike Bahia, Recife had no ridge to build on; hence it is deadly flat, with only Olinda five miles to the northwest rising above the featureless landscape, though far behind the city one may make out the wooded hills that merge gradually into the flat-topped chapadas of the sertão of the interior. It stands on the sandy beach of a lagoon delta where two rivers, neither of them of much importance, meet, and the compact old town, with the wharves, banks, and most of the business houses, is really on an island, protected now not only by the natural reef, but by a long breakwater behind which ships anchor. There is no bay; hence steamers which do not enter the inner port must in rough weather land their passengers in a “chair” running on a cable from the breakwater. Many a traveler to South America remembers nothing of Pernambuco except that hair-raising landing.
As Bahia is a city of hills and wooded ridges, so Pernambuco is one of waterways and bridges. The so-called River Capibaribe runs, or at least ebbs and flows, through town, and there are a score of natural canals, estuaries, and mud sloughs filling and emptying with each tide, while hundreds of dwellers in thatched huts of the suburbs have the advantages of Venice in so far as a chance to pole themselves about on their rude rafts goes. Marshy salt water comes in and around the city at every tide, and the rivers, coves, or quagmires to be crossed in a journey through it are numerous—doubly so since several of its many bridges have been condemned for vehicular traffic. Palm trees, chiefly of the cocoanut family, grow everywhere, and between its waterways the city of bridges is noted for its dry and sandy soil; hence one can scarcely stray from the paved streets without wading either in water, mud, or sand.
Properly speaking, Recife is the older section of the town, out near the reef, and given over mainly to business. The modern city covers several times more territory than that, including country-like outskirts of such suggestive names as Capunga, Afflictos, and Sertãozinho among its suburbs. There is Afogados (Drowned Man) out past the Five Points station on the beach, a big suburb of mud and thatched huts among swamp bushes and a network of tidewater, with lanes of mud that snap like the cracking of a Sicilian whip when the tide is out and the tropical sun blazing down upon them. In other directions, still within the city limits, are miles of old estates and aged plantation-houses living out their dotage under magnificent royal palms. To get about this broken up city there were big new English and American street-cars, so new that passengers were not yet permitted to put their feet on the seats. It was less than a year since the old mule-cars for which Pernambuco was long famous, had been superseded—in the outskirt of Torre they might still be seen—and ragamuffins who had never heard the word “bond” in its ordinary significance made frequent use of it in its Brazilian sense. The new company was pushing its lines in every direction and already the tramway was advertising itself as ready to furnish electric-light to business houses along its lines. Thus, though one had the sense of treading on the heels of modernity in Pernambuco, in all northern Brazil, the pre-invention age always succeeded in eluding one and escaping just over the edge of the horizon.
Besides its brand new electric street-car system and the three lines of the “Great Western” leaving it in as many directions, Recife has five amusing little railroads, “toy locomotives hitched to a string of baby-carriages,” as “Tut” called them, which do a volume of noisy, dirty, dusty business to the north and northeast of the city. For many years these ancient contrivances of an English company were the only urban traffic in and about Recife. One crowds into a tenement-house of a station, wages pitched battle about a knee-high hole in the wall to buy a ticket, enters an ancient closed wooden box on wheels suggestive of what trains must have been in the days of Charlemagne, amalgamates with variegated Brazilians on a hard, misshapen wooden seat, and waits. When one has waited long enough to run down to “B.A.” and back, there come ten or twelve ear-splitting screeches and back-breaking jolts, and the train is off for some other “station” fifty yards away, with a deluge of smoke, soot, and cinders which penetrate to the utmost recesses of one’s person. For a long hour the contrivance screams its sooty way through endless dusty streets in which the irreconcilable tropical sunlight of February strikes one full in the face like the fist of an enemy, and at the end of that time the weary traveler may descend five or even six, miles away, at Olinda, or at some of the plantation-town suburbs shaded by many trees, yet dreary with their sand in place of grass. There are two such lines to Olinda, out past Santo Amaro with its British cemetery and across a broad swamp by a causeway; but the company claims that the concession is no longer worth the holding since the coming of electric competition. No doubt Pernambucanos considered these medieval trains a wonderful innovation and convenience when they first appeared, but it is more pleasant now to depend on electricity—or to walk.
I waded for miles barefoot along the beach to Olinda one day. Palm-trees edged the curve of the shore with their inimitable plumage, streaking the staring white sunlight with slender shadows. Thatched huts along the beach, with all the Atlantic and its breezes spread out before them, suggested where many a well-to-do family of Recife spends its summers. An old wreck here and there protruded from the surface of the sea, relics of some collision with the easternmost point of the New World. Olinda piled high on its hill amid palm-trees and many huge old churches, takes on the air of both, of age and reverence and the regal dignity of the royal palm. Its many old buildings are clustered rather closely together; it seems still to scorn business as thoroughly as in the olden days, and to spend most of its time gazing across the swampy flatlands at its materialistic rival, or out upon the blue sea which is so rarely seen from Recife.
The city we call Pernambuco claims 200,000 inhabitants, and of these perhaps one in three could pass as white. Even in the huts lining the water or mud labyrinths of the outskirts whites are numerous, though often as trashy as the negroes. It is surprising that as one nears the equator in Brazil the proportion of Caucasian blood increases, but it is easily explained. All that part of South America which thrusts itself halfway across the sea to Africa had many slaves, but Bahia not only grew a crop which required more labor, but, its port being then the national capital, it had the advantage of fame, as well as its great bay as a safe landing-place. The result is that while Bahia is a negro town, Pernambuco is a city of mulattoes, with a mixture of types that can only be differentiated by the rich color-terminology of Brazil. On the whole, the Recifense is a more pleasant individual than the blacker, more slovenly, more impudent Bahiano. Like most of the people of North Brazil, he talks in a kind of singsong, ending almost every sentence with não (no) or ouvioú? (did you hear?). There are few really masculine voices in Brazil, and the persistent cackle of poor, cracked trebles, chattering constantly at high speed about nothing, eventually gets on the nerves, unless one has been spared that troublesome equipment. The chief business of the city is still that of the “mascates,” in a larger sense,—the exporting of sugar and cotton and the importing of things needed by the growers of sugar and cotton, with the usual large proportion of the benefits sticking to the fingers of the fortunately placed middlemen. Carregadores de assucar, or sugar porters, wearing a sort of football head-mask over their hats, are among the most familiar sights of the old city, and the pungent odor of crude sugar strikes one in the face everywhere in the wharf and warehouse section. The sugar comes from the engenhos in crude, dark-brown form; the tropical heat causes it to ooze out until not only the bags but the half-naked negroes who handle them are dripping and smeared with molasses from top to bottom. When the rotting bag bursts entirely the contents is spread out in the sun and barefoot negroes are sent to wade ankle-deep back and forth in it, until it is dry enough to be shoveled up again.
There are not so many churches per capita in Recife as in Bahia, but they are by no means scarce, while the schools are if anything worse,—miserable little one-den huts hanging on the edges of mud-holes or salt-water marshes, according to the state of the tide. The president of Pernambuco asserted in his annual message that the state schools could not afford to import from the United States the school furniture needed, because of the high tax imposed upon it by the federal government! Of higher institutions, of course, there is no such scarcity as in the elemental grades. The Gymnasio Pernambucano, or High School of Pernambuco, where are promulgated the bachelor degrees that make men “doctors,” and not much else, is a large conspicuous building next that of the state congress—and it had 69 pupils. Of the Faculdade de Dereito, or Law School, similar remarks may be made. In the old business section of Recife especially the condition of streets and buildings left much to be desired, but under the energetic and honest new president promising progress was already beginning to be made.
On Saturday night our share of the receipts had been more than a conto and toward midnight on Sunday I carried home a roll of ragged Brazilian bills large enough to choke a rain-pipe. I was somewhat surprised, therefore, that the “bust-up” came as early as the following Wednesday. I knew it would come sooner or later, but I had expected to be able to stave it off a week or more longer. When “Colonel” Ruben turned up that night, we had already been reduced to “reheated soup.” This, coupled with the fact that he had loudly and widely advertised “Six Days Only!” and had now decided to stay five more, had greatly reduced our audiences. Ruben took one look at the house during the first section, suddenly decided that he had received a cable from his wife requiring his immediate return to Bahia, and disappeared in that direction so swiftly that I have never seen him since. Up to the last he had insisted daily, if not hourly, that I must return when my contract with Linton expired and become manager of his theater-to-be. He departed owing me a paltry 83$ as our share of that evening’s receipts, but he left on my hands not only the “Theatro Moderno” until the following Sunday at a rental of 300$ daily, two dusky young gentlemen whom he had brought with him from Bahia as his assistants, and the unpaid bills for several half-page advertisements in the local papers, but so many other creditors that he saw fit to embark at daylight from an unusual place.
Still, this was little compared with what he might have done, and probably we had made more money with his experienced assistance than we should have made alone. I, too, might have run away, had I cared to leave Americans in general and Edison in particular in such repute as Ruben enjoys to this day in Pernambuco. Instead, I spent a breathless Thursday preparing to meet the new conditions that had been forced upon us. We were certain to lose money that night and the next, but by special advertising and improved programs I hoped to make it up on Saturday and Sunday. We still had the two calungos, or ten-foot monk and dancing-girl figures on men’s legs, for though one of Ruben’s creditors had attached these, he allowed us to use them until our departure. I sent them out with drums and handbills, not only through the town, but to all its suburbs and outskirts, including even aristocratic Olinda. In short, for the first time I was a full-fledged theatrical manager, renting, advertising, managing, auditing, running the whole show—even mechanically, too, for that night “Tut” got a touch of some tropical ill and had to be sent home—and, unfortunately, paying the bills. For in spite of all our efforts Saturday night left us with the balance slightly on the side of expenditures. I had already begun, however, to prepare the territory ahead. J. A. Vinhães, Junior, a Carioca engaged in the film-furnishing business in North Brazil, had offered to take over Ruben’s contract and extend it to the Amazon. He was an unusually honest-looking, energetic young man, good company and experienced, as well as widely known in “movie” circles, and before the week was ended he had sailed away toward Pará, and possibly Manaos, as our self-paid advance agent.
My troubles apparently ended, “Tut” and I were sitting at “breakfast” Sunday morning in proper best-boarding-house-in-town style when the waiter suddenly handed me several letters from Linton, bearing neither stamps nor signs of post-office handling. They had been written on board ship on the way north from Buenos Aires, and announced that, the Kinetophone having ended its labors in the Argentine, Linton was on his way home, as soon as he could find a wife he had left in Rio, with the two Spanish-speaking outfits. With the letters he forwarded some new posters and Turco Morandi, formerly manager of one of the largest theaters in “B.A.,” lately advance agent for the Argentine Kinetophone, and noted for his double-width, steel-riveted honesty. It was he who had brought the letters to Pernambuco, and about noon he appeared in person, dressed in the latest Jockey Club style, and announced himself as the new manager of the Kinetophone in Brazil.