That night we gave a special performance for the press, which was attended by about forty representatives of São Luiz’ four daily journals. This and the ceremonial visits were probably worth the trouble, for the papers next day were equally enthusiastic about the Kinetophone and its “highly cultured” sponsors, whose names, titles, and previous condition of servitude they gave in full down to the latest count of Carlos’ children. Indeed, we became the subject of the chief editorials, even in the face of religious competition. The most famous living wielder of a quill in Maranhão took us amiably to task for using the full name of the inventor on our advertising matter, contending—in his paper’s two most prominent columns—that it was an indignity to style “Thomaz A. Edison, like any commonplace mortal, a man whose Godlike gifts to the world had made him to all mankind for all time the one and only EDISON.” Naturally such publicity hurt our feelings.
But the result of all this could not be known for three days, Thursday and Friday being so holy that even churches could not ring their bells—for which we gave fervent thanks, well knowing that the respite would be soundly broken on Easter Sunday. The “only one” in town was the “Hotel Central,” a big colonial two-story building directly across from the cathedral, and the French proprietor set a table and attended to business like a Frenchman, instead of being off down the street gossiping. “Tut” and I had a suite of two rooms shut off from most of the uproar of the rest of the house, our living-room immense, with three balconied double windows larger than doors looking down upon the tree-lined promenade and a part of the sea—when the tide was in. Our huge four-poster bed, as well as the smaller one we took turns in occupying, was carefully mosquito-netted, for only white foreigners are said to be subject to yellow fever. There were hammock-hooks, never lacking in North Brazil, in all the walls. Of the mahogany tables, marble-topped bureaus, full-length pier glass in which to admire ourselves, the big cane settee, the comfortable roomy cane rocking-chairs, and the score of minor convenient articles of furniture I will say no more, lest there be a sudden exodus to São Luiz do Maranhão. To be sure, the shower-bath now and then ran dry, but there were really only two drawbacks to the “Hotel Central,”—its kerosene lamps and its “artistas.” Evidently there was no escaping these self-styled “actresses” who distribute themselves throughout the hotels of North Brazil, though the old Frenchman assured us that he had always refused to take them in until the war-bred crisis made their admission “necessary.”
Being so old a city, São Luiz has a finished aspect quite different from many others of more recent origin. It is completely paved in square cobblestones, with very much arched roadways, and all its narrow sidewalks of flat stones, polished by many generations of feet, are so slanting that one must take care if he would not, as I all but did more than once, spill himself wrong end up in the middle of the street. We had at last outstripped civilization, in its more modern manifestations. All the way up the coast each state capital had put in electric street-cars and similar contrivances within a year or so—that is, long since I had entered South America. Here we had beaten invention to it, and there was genuine pleasure in seeing drowsy old easy-going mule-cars again—though we never bothered to wait for them. São Luiz, too, still lights itself with matches, though that does not mean, as it would almost certainly in the Andes, that reading is considered bad form. In fact, it is called the Athens of Brazil, and quite justly, for all the rest of the country has scarcely produced as excellent a list of literary men. Graça Aranha, Coelho Netto, the three Azevedo brothers, João Lisboa, the historian, Manuel Mendes, who turned Virgil and Homer into widely famed Portuguese verse, Teixeira Mendes, head of Brazilian Positivists, and Gonsalves Dias, the national poet, are but a few of the famous sons of Maranhão. Of them all, the most beloved, not merely in São Luiz but in all Brazil, is Dias, born of a Portuguese shopkeeper of the interior and his negro slave, and done to death by sharks when the frail craft on which he was returning from Europe with an incurable ailment came to grief within sight of the lighthouse on his native shores. Those who are familiar enough with both tongues to be able to form a judgment, and who have no national prejudices to overcome, assert that as a poet the impulsive, licentious Brazilian mulatto was several rungs higher up the ladder than our own Longfellow. There is a Praça Gonsalves Dias in São Luiz, and in the center of it, at the top of a tall column high up among his beloved palm-trees and the singing sabiás he immortalized in his best known poem, is the poet’s statue, non-committal as to complexion in its white stone (or plaster) and giving him the appearance of a wavy-haired Shakespeare. Not far from this statue, overtopping everything else and giving an aëroplane view of all the city, is an old shot-tower, of the kind used in former days for the making of bullets with the aid of gravitation. Dogs are distressingly numerous, and the charcoal over which the Maranhenses cook in little braziers is carried about town and sold in small baskets hanging six or eight high at either end of bamboo poles. It is a busy town every five days, when a steamer comes from Pará or the south; otherwise it drifts along at a contented, mule-tram pace.
On Thursday evening we stepped across to the cathedral and saw the ceremony of the “Washing of the Feet.” The bishop, in full purple and attended by a throng of assistants and acolytes, without music and with very little light as a sign of mourning, marched along a raised bench where twelve beggars had taken seats hours before. Several of them were blind and all of them diseased, and they had been dressed in white cotton gowns which partly concealed their natural rags. The bishop placed a silver basin under a foot of each in turn, spilled three drops of water on it, dabbed them with a napkin, then stooped and kissed the unsterilized extremity almost fervently, though with something in his intelligent, clean-cut face which suggested that he did not particularly enjoy this part of his ecclesiastical duties. Each beggar was given a loaf of French bread, a copper coin worth nearly a cent, and what looked like a folded nightshirt, to all of which he clung with both hands as if expecting the densely packed throng of the faithful, virtually all of whom could point back to African ancestry, to snatch the gifts away from him. That night the same class engaged in the annual “hanging of Judas,” and when morning dawned effigies of the traitor of Gethsemane, in most fanciful and multicolored garments, swung by the neck from a score of improvised gibbets.
One of the best known residents of Maranhão is a hardy American who came down twenty years before to set up in Caixas the first cotton-mill in North Brazil—though cotton had been grown there for more than a century. There he married, became a power in the cattle and mining industries, and established a line of river-steamers to that principal town of the interior. Brazil, as he put it, is an easy country in which to make a living, but a hard one in which to make a fortune. Once real wealth begins to show its face, the native politicians see to it that it does not become too swollen. Cattle are the principal product of the state, but a sack of salt costing two or three milreis in São Luiz to begin with, reached the incredible price of 24$ in the interior. All Brazil, in his opinion, would prove fitted for the white man, once the more temperate south was filled up; but as yet only the two hundredth part of the republic was under cultivation.
We opened on Saturday night after the longest period of idleness since the Kinetophone had made its bow to Brazil. It was perhaps the combination of good advertising, after-Lent reaction, and the fact that São Luiz gets few good entertainments that brought greater crowds than we could accommodate. Our performance, too, pleased more than usual there, thanks among other things to excellent acoustic properties and to a few lines in our introductory number from “O Canto do Sabiá,” best known poem of Gonsalves Dias. The result was that as often as we chose to open it we filled the house so tightly that I could barely squeeze in myself. Unfortunately the remodeled shop held only four hundred, but on the other hand it was the best managed theater we had seen in Brazil, with “deadheads” almost unknown and the smallest child paying admission. On Sunday we gave a matinée and three evening performances, packing the place so full that we had to call upon the police to restrain those who could not legally be admitted. We took up the tickets inside, as in a street-car, and needed no door-keepers during the performance, for no man, with or without a ticket, could have forced his way into that sardine-box. The street outside was blocked with those waiting to get into the next sessão, the sidewalks lined with chairs filled with fancily dressed women of the “best families.” That day’s income was larger than we had had since our first Sunday in Pernambuco, and a cablegram carried the news of our popularity to the newspapers of Pará.
There is only one place to take a walk of any length in São Luiz. The Rua Grande turns into a passable road and goes on across the island, but all other streets soon end in swamp or jungle. I tramped out of town one morning and returned that afternoon, having covered fifteen of the twenty miles of island road and return. It was a joy to walk on real earth again after months of wading in sand, and to be surrounded on either hand by a great green wall, instead of a glaring half-desert. On the other hand, the dull skies of the Amazon region were already getting on my nerves, as they do on those who abandon the almost unbroken blue sky and sunshine of the eastern coast. Yet on the whole Brazil has a remarkably even climate for so enormous a stretch of territory, and it was not much warmer here than in Santa Anna on the Uruguayan border. Life out of doors in the tropics is a serious thing, however, and here was the real, humid, densely jungled tropics of the imagination at last. Bamboos waved their titanic plumes above me; a tree ablaze with scarlet blossoms flashed forth from the dense verdure; the fructa-pão, which furnishes its vegetable bread to the poorer classes all the way from Bahia northward, here produced far more abundantly than man required. Palms ranged from those of fern-like delicacy to the coco-babassú, shaped like a gigantic feather-duster stood on end and producing a bunch six feet long of red nuts as large as our walnuts. These contain a kernel of cocoanut meat rich in oil, which was just beginning to be exported to Europe, and unlimited quantities of which could be had for the picking and cracking. Butterflies celebrating their nuptials enlivened the landscape with the flutter of their iridescent multicolored wings; here and there the sabiá, first cousin to our northern robin, sang his familiar song; once or twice I fancied I heard the mãe da lua (mother of the moon), the nightingale of Brazil.
Anil was the largest of several small towns along the way, with a mule-car running the length of it on what used to be a little railroad. A railway also runs across the island, or at least the rusty rails do, hoping some day to reach the mainland by a bridge and continue to Caixas, whence a line already operates to Therezina, capital of the next state east. Several genuine tropical downpours forced me to seek such shelter as was available, and the day was done before I returned to São Luiz. There are many delightful things in the tropics, but none of them equal the soft dusk of evening. Like most fine things, it is short and fleeting, no two minutes alike, and barely a few moments seemed to pass between the last livid rays of the sun, as it veiled itself behind the light band of clouds along the horizon, and the falling of moonlight in flecks of silver through the limply drooping fronds of the palm-trees, stencilled in silhouette against the iridescent sky of a tropical night. It was almost a full year since my last real walk, but no one in São Luiz felt more contented with life than I that evening. Yet my tramp was the only topic of conversation at the cinema, and a newspaper referred editorially next day to the “incredible energy and endurance of our distinguished North American visitor,” who could cover thirty miles of Amazonian ground on his own feet in a single day!
It might have been better for Carlos, too, if he had combatted the climate of the torrid North with pedestrianism. For some time he had been losing his Paulista energy, and with it his interest in life. On the morning after my walk I met him strolling languidly along the main street, looking more disconsolate and colorless than I had ever seen him before; but those are common symptoms in the tropics and I thought little more about it until he failed to join us at dinner that evening. We found him in bed in his room across the hall, with a raging fever. The best recommended physician of São Luiz having arrived, I hurried away to the theater, where both Carlos’ work and my own awaited me.
That night he was neither able to talk nor, apparently, to recognize me. The native leech had diagnosed his ailment all the way from malaria to bubonic plague, and had finally settled upon intestinal grippe. Whatever it was, Carlos was a sick man, and when morning came without any sign of improvement, I set about arranging to get him into a hospital. There were two in São Luiz,—the “Beneficencia Portugueza” and the “Santa Casa da Misericordia.” For several reasons I chose the second. By this time the invalid could scarcely raise his head, or express himself, except by monosyllabic gurgles and the rolling of his bloodshot eyes; yet it was a labor of hours to coax any of his fellow-countrymen to help untangle the red tape that blocked his immediate entrance to the hospital. A colonel connected with the cinema at length agreed to go with me to the doctor whose duty it was to issue tickets of admission, but he insisted on having an automobile at 10$ an hour with which to cover the four short blocks of stone-paved street. When the doctor and the colonel had run through all the gamut of Latin-American salutations, down to the fourth generation and the family cat, a great many questions were asked me before Carlos was finally accepted as a patient, as if it were an extraordinary favor, though the “Santa Casa” was in theory open to all. Then, a bit of rain coming up, the colonel began talking politics and remained for more than an hour, through three more showers. When we finally entered our waiting automobile it was out of gasoline! I raced back to the hotel, impressed two carriers and a hammock into service, and got our ailing companion at last into the hands of the nuns just at nightfall.