All disasters, however, save death, may be more or less redeemed by hard work, good luck, and so splendid an apparatus as a well-operated Kinetophone, and before our performance was over the audience had advanced from resentment to enthusiasm, had even burst forth in loud applause, a social faux pas almost unknown at a cinema in Brazil. Chuckles of delight and flattering words could still be heard under the murmuring, silver-flecked palm-trees when “Tut” piloted me to a gay café on the main praça and showed his gratitude by squandering a considerable amount of his extra ten milreis for two small portions of what North Brazil thinks is ice-cream. Cearenses went out of their way to assure us that we had brought the finest music that had ever been heard in the state and the best theatrical performance that had ever been given at such modest prices. Had we come two or three years before, more than one of them asserted, we might have charged seven times as much and packed the house at every one of the ten performances we would be obliged to give.
Vinhães had arranged for us in the “Pensão Bitú,” the “only hotel” in Ceará, as there is only one within even the Brazilian pale of respectability in all these northern capitals. Considering what it might have been, it was almost good, with a constant sea breeze sweeping through our long and narrow room, which almost made us forget that we were within four degrees of the equator. Rumor had it that deaths from yellow fever were frequent in Fortaleza, and though we saw no mosquitoes, “Tut” and I were careful to tuck in the canopied mosquito-nets over our beds. Carlos, across the hall, scorned such refinements, or else it was natural Brazilian carelessness that made him sleep, stark naked, as comes to be the custom of both native and foreigner, and without any protection from possible flying death.
As in the case of Pernambuco, the capital of Ceará is best known to the outside world by the name of the state, only in the interior of which it takes universally its correct title of Fortaleza. The old fort which gives it this name still forms a part of the public promenade near the “only” hotel, and to this day old cannon point bravely out to sea from its several dry, grassy levels. The City of the Fort is one of the most important towns of North Brazil, a comparatively new city, for all its antiquity, rebuilt since the destructive drought of 1845. Situated directly on the sea, without so much as a creek to give its rowboats refuge, it has all the maritime advantages, except a port. Its soil is sandy, almost Sahara-like in its aridity, and though it has some ten praças shaded by castanheiros, mangos, palms, and other magnificent tropical trees, its vegetation is dependent on the almost constant care of man. The city water is abominable, even after being filtered, and wise foreign travelers—there seem to be no foreign residents—and Brazilians from the south quench a thirst which cannot but be frequent in this climate with mineral water or native beer, or by melting the plentiful product of the local ice factory.
More American windmills than in any town of similar size in the United States rise above the monotonous level of Ceará. It is almost entirely of one story, for its people know the terrors of earthquakes and have little faith in their loose, sandy soil. The private buildings of two stories could probably be counted on the fingers, though several churches in the old Portuguese style of architecture and some rather pretentious government edifices bulk above the general mass. Where its right-angled and often wide streets are not paved in rough, unshaped cobblestones it is impossible to walk with any degree of pleasure because of the sand. The landscape reminds one of the driest regions of Arizona, an Arizona of perpetual July, and it is hard to understand how the human race lives here—or why. Yet there is a picturesqueness, a pleasing something about Fortaleza that makes it more interesting than all but the half a dozen most striking Brazilian cities. Its windows are covered with wooden blinds hinged at the top, and from these and the doors peer upon the passer-by a constant double row of people, except during the midday siesta. It is a curious custom of Fortaleza to have water-spouts of tin or zinc projecting from the low flat eaves well out into the street, just far enough to deluge the pedestrian whenever it does rain; and these are always in the form of a conventional alligator, serpent, or dragon, the spout of even the poorest house ending in an open-mouthed monster, the teeth, tin tongue, toothed fin on top, and the smooth one on the bottom never lacking. Vistas of these may be seen for a kilometer or more down almost any street. The variegated bright colors of the house façades are all that break the monotonous symmetry of the fixed architecture, for originality does not seem to be a North Brazilian characteristic. Many doors open so directly upon the scanty or entirely missing sidewalks that they thrust pedestrians off them—which serves them right for not realizing that sidewalks are meant here to be family verandas rather than public passageways.
Ceará is famous for its hammocks—redes, or nets, they call them in Portuguese, for lack of an exact word. They are woven of cotton grown in the state—by hand still in the sertão, though by machinery in town factories—and great heaps of them lie for sale in the most nearly picturesque market-place in Brazil. This is a large square in the center of town, partly roofed over, and here, too, sit women selling home-made lace, which constitutes perhaps the second most important industry of the state. The hammock is the favorite bed of the Cearense, and his lounge, cradle, and easy-chair; wherever the visitor enters, a hammock offers him its lap. In and about among vendors and buyers, and down the white-hot streets, wander blind beggars led by a sheep, often wearing several bells to announce its coming. Many women and children, and some men, wear about their necks a little black hand made of ebony, as a protection against the evil eye. The leisurely traveler from the south is struck by the scarcity of African blood; a full negro is almost never seen and the prevailing mixture is Indian with white. The flat head of the Cearense is legendary, and the average complexion is a half-burnished copper. Their own citizens admit that four fifths of the people of Ceará are mestiços with a greater or less percentage of aboriginal blood, and this gives them an individuality among their largely African fellow-countrymen, with many of the characteristics of the South Americans of the Andean regions. In place of the hilarious indifference of blacker Brazil, they face life with the rather melancholy fatalism of the New World aborigines.
In their native dances, such as the samba, the Cearenses display tumultuous passions and an ardent temperament in great contrast to their quiet everyday manner, and the scent of a merry-making throng of sweating, rarely washed people of the mestiço rank and file has a suggestion of that of a den of wild animals, mixed with the odor of home-made perfume. Politics is always a seething pot, and the bickerings of parties ever on the verge of bursting forth in violence. The Cearense is easily recognizable elsewhere in Brazil by his speech, the peculiar accent of the region, especially in the country districts, consisting of raising the tone of the last unaccented syllable in each phrase, giving a sort of singsong rhythm and an upturned ending to each sentence, like the flip of the tail of a playful fish. Fortaleza, however, prides itself on its modernity and worldly-wiseness, and feels little but scorn for the uncouth, singsongy mattuto or sertanejo of the interior, startled out of his wits by his first encounter with such extraordinary manifestations of civilization as an automobile or one of the ancient but recently electrified street-cars of the state capital.
On Sunday evening people poured in upon us so rapidly that I had to stand like a buttress in the middle of the stream, just inside the door, and split it into two channels so that our ticket-takers could do their duty. There was one unexpected step just above me, and not too much light, so that some fifty or sixty of the ladies of Ceará fell into my arms during the course of the evening. It would be exaggeration to say that the majority of them were worth embracing, though now and then a real gem appeared among the gravel—just the ones whose footing was surest. As our theater belonged to the state, of course every third cousin of a grandniece of a government employee expected to march in at will. Vinhães had arranged with the chief authorities that we were to donate four loges, as many upper boxes, and thirty-five seats, and also let in those wearing uniforms. But there is no such thing as satisfying the “deadhead” appetite of Brazilians. Officials, from state president down to government bootblack, would not be hampered by presenting passes; if I dared to halt a flashily dressed courtesan, the head door-keeper came rushing up to draw me aside and warn me that it was fatal to open strife with that class, as their political influence was all-powerful. I left it mainly to Vinhães to curb the voracity of his own countrymen, but even he found the task impossible. As “deadheads” multiplied, he donned his most resplendent black garb and called upon the delegado of police, offering to send as many free passes as he needed, if only he would not allow plain-clothes men to come in without them. The delegado assured him that three would be sufficient. He sent six for good measure—and that night almost the first man to arrive was one who showed a document proving that he was a plain-clothes man and insisted on bringing three friends in with him. Vinhães opposed him with un-Brazilian firmness. The man went away, and soon afterward the delegado and his be-diamonded wife entered, whereupon Vinhães caused him to state within hearing of all the door-keepers that only those with passes were to be admitted. Barely had the illustrious couple disappeared within when a boy policeman, wearing the white uniform which takes the place on Sundays of the week-day khaki, marched up to Vinhães and told him that he was under arrest and must report at once to the delegacia, on order of the delegado! He refused to go. The policeman returned to the station and came back with still more urgent orders. Again Vinhães declined to obey, and as the police were about to use force he stepped inside and entered the box of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—to learn that the delegado knew nothing whatever of the order purported to have been given out by him, which had been signed in his name by his escribano on complaint of the latter’s friend, the disgruntled plain-clothes man. Thereupon the boy policeman took to marching to and fro, assuring everyone that he was wholly innocent in the matter, and all the policemen on duty gathered in a compact group and spent the rest of the evening chattering and waving their arms excitedly over their heads. Sad fate it must be to live permanently the life of the helpless native in this land of political pull.
The State of Ceará has long been notorious for its seccas, or deadly droughts. Of the four or five states in the so-called “dry zone” of Northern Brazil it is the most harshly treated by the moisture-sponging trade winds. An all-wise native editor has it that “in Ceará there has always been less lack of water than of instruction and practical knowledge of the most rudimentary notions of agronomy.” A simple hot-air pump would do wonders, he contends, for wood is plentiful; and even crude windmills with cloth sails have been known to make garden spots of the driest parts of the state. All this may be true enough, but the traveler in primitive South America never ceases to marvel at the improvidence of wilderness people, which often costs them so dearly. High as he stands in some respects among his fellow-Brazilians, the Cearense has not the energy and initiative needed to overcome his one great natural disadvantage—at least as a people, and even the editor admits that individuals could do nothing, since to supply themselves with a special source of water would merely be to have all their neighbors camp upon them in dry weather. Hence the state continues to endure periodical drought and famine with Indian fatalism, dying off, emigrating to the Amazonian region, or awaiting a change in the weather, “como Deus quere—whatever God wishes.”
They call 1877 “O Anno da Fome”—“The Year of Famine”—in Ceará, but there have been others nearly as deadly. When the never-ceasing winds from the Atlantic refuse to bring rain with them, or carry it too far into the interior, the trees grow bare, covering the ground with their leaves, as in lands where winter reigns; the naked beds of rivers tantalize thirsting man and beast—the maps of Ceará divide its streams between “perennial” and “non-perennial”—even the hardy roots of the mandioca dry up, and there is nothing left but flight or death. In the worst years human skeletons have been strewn along the trails from the interior to Fortaleza; and even in the capital sufficient aid has often been unobtainable, so that plagues have added to the misery of the hordes of refugees, and people have died so continuously that there has been neither time nor energy to bury them. Those wealthy enough to die in their hammocks are carried off in them; the corpses of others are tied hands and feet to a pole and borne to some sandy hollow beyond the town, over which hover clouds of gorged and somnolent vultures. Many of the starving become earth-eaters, which may postpone but not alleviate their fate. The more enterprising abandon what to them is their native land and take up life anew along the Amazon, enduring as best they can the gloomy heavens and months of constant rains which make that region so different from their own cloudless land.
The opening up of the Amazon basin, and the consequent enormous increase in the production of rubber, was largely due to the droughts in Ceará. Nomad by atavism through his Indian ancestors, the irregularities of the season and the impossibility of counting on a certain to-morrow has made the Cearense more so, and it is a rare spot that has been inhabited by the same family for generations. First they went to the rubber-fields singly, then in bands, and finally in whole ship-loads, contracted and shipped by regular recruiting agents. In the Amazonian wilderness they may die of fevers or other dread ailments, but at home they are sure to die of drought, so in years of extreme dryness the risk is worth taking. If they live through all the dangers of the wilderness along the “Sea-River” and escape the onslaughts of the swarms of touts and harlots of all colors and nationalities who prey upon descending rubber-gatherers at Manaos and Pará, their return to Ceará is much like that of an Italian immigrant from America to his native village. So rare and so important, in fact, is the native of Ceará who returns from the rubber-fields to his dry but beloved home that a special term has been coined for him; they call him a paroara—one who has been beyond Pará.