BORRACHO FALSA
(false rubber)
It had indeed played them false.
A negro is almost conspicuous in Pará, and it is a question whether there are not more caboclos, that is, Indian mixtures, than mulattoes. Not merely did the exploiting of the Amazonian region begin late in the life of the monarchy, but the northern part of Brazil freed its slaves before the national decree of emancipation was promulgated. The city itself rivals the southernmost states as a European Brazil. White men, from English merchants to barefoot Portuguese laborers, their olive skins seeming strangely pale in the blazing sunshine, make up almost a majority of the population. It is a dressy, formal community for all that, and notwithstanding the heat of a sea-level city on the equator. Politicians in wintry garb, their high silk hats tilted against the sun ever so slightly, an umbrella grasped in their sweat-dripping hands, may be seen making their way to the palace, on the roof-tree of which vultures are languidly preening themselves. Now and then these overdressed gentlemen cast a wise but circumspect eye upon the mameluco and mulatto women passing with bundles on their heads, moving their hips slightly yet conspicuously, filling the air with their personal odor mingled with that of the cheiro de mulata sprinkled in their hair, their thin low waists showing coppery or brown skins that are more suggestive than nudity. On Sunday afternoons an automobile parade speeds up and down the Estrada de Nazareth, the men stiffly correct in attire down to wintry woolen spats, the women—but these are most apt to be European adventuresses who have seen better and younger days, who spend their evenings on the stage of the “Moulin Rouge,” but who now sit in pompous bourgeois correctness in their open taxis, ever buoyed up by the hope of attracting the husband of some bejeweled resident along this finest of Pará’s avenues, a hope in which they are frequently not disappointed. It is characteristic of the Brazilian point of view that not only do the legitimate ladies of these sumptuous residences lean on their powdered elbows at the windows studying in detail their possible rivals, but that they see nothing amiss in joining the procession, so long as they have a close male relative along to protect them from scandalous tongues.
There is an old bullring in Pará, but it has long been used only as a school. The two churches in Brazil at all worth seeing are the Candalaria of Rio and the Sé, or cathedral, of Belém. The latter is imposing in structure and situation and has several artistic pictures. Catholicism, however, by no means has everything its own way in the metropolis of the Amazon. For one thing, there are said to be eight Masonic lodges, with a membership of nearly eighty per cent. of the male population. Electricity and gasoline have almost entirely taken the place of the screaming ox-carts so familiar there not many years ago. The “Pará Electric Railways and Lighting Company” had already given the city good British service for six years. The cars, unlike those in the rest of Brazil, have a center aisle, probably because the incessant rains would make the crawling under side-curtains an unendurable nuisance. If anything, the division into classes is more marked than in Rio itself. The man with a missing sock or collar pays almost the same fare as his fully dressed fellow and rides in exactly the same kind of car, except that on the outside it is branded with the word “Segunda.” A famous American ornithologist, who knows more of the interior of Brazil and its bird life than all Brazil’s thirty millions, had been standing on a corner signaling in vain to car after car to carry him and a suitcase full of feathered trophies out to the Museo Goeldi when it became my pleasure to explain to him the Brazilian system of “baggage” street-cars.
My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky negroes with nothing on their mind but a couple of trunks
Dolce fare niente between shows in Pará
