The cathedral of Pará
Pará has been called the “City of Beautiful Trees”
Among many forms of “fazendo fita,” it is the custom among the élite of Brazil for the man whom the conductor reaches first to pay the fares of all his friends ahead or behind him in a street-car. It is what the French call a beau geste, but there are times when it has its drawbacks, especially in times of “brutal crises” and a slump in the rubber market. I rode out one day on the longest street-car line in Pará, past the dense Bosque screaming with parrakeet's and flickering with beija-flores, not to mention the large insane asylum and poorhouse, to visit the Liceo of Souza. With me were the professors of botany, horticulture, and agriculture from that institution. On the way I pointed out a magnificent tree which is certain to attract the attention of any foreigner making that journey, and asked to what species it belonged. The three professors looked at one another with puzzled faces, introduced a new topic of conversation in the hope that I might forget my curiosity, and finding me not to be put off so easily, one of them replied, with the air of a sage handing out a gem of wisdom, “E-e uma arvore silvestre—it is a wild tree!” No doubt they thought I took it for a hothouse plant. But it was an episode of my return trip, alone with the professor of botany, which made the journey worth while. As we rumbled along, halting frequently to pick up passengers, I noted that he grew more and more gloomy and taciturn. Not until the conductor arrived from the rear, however, and my companion handed him the equivalent of more than half a dollar in fares, did I suspect the cause of his sadness. The fare-collector, it seemed, though the matter was not mentioned by word of mouth, had put off collection so long that more than a dozen of the professor’s friends and acquaintances had boarded the car, and then the stupid fellow had begun his duties with the back seats, where the professor had fancied himself safe. The result was that common courtesy required him to pay the fares of nearly everyone in the car—and Brazilian professors are little less generously supplied with this world’s goods than their fellows elsewhere. One by one, as the conductor reached them and refused their proffered coin with a word of explanation, the men ahead turned around and thanked their benefactor with as elaborate a bow as the backs of street-car seats permit, to each of which my companion replied with a sweeping gesture of the right hand suggesting intense pleasure and unlimited largess. But the street-cars of Pará, as in most of Brazil, run on the European zone system, and there were four or five separate sections to be paid before we reached the center of the city. We were just starting from the second junction-point when the professor suddenly clutched at me and dived off the car. I might have been puzzled, had I not noted the extreme yet casual care with which he examined the next car for possible acquaintances before we boarded it—well up toward the front.
“You should never divide an ox-hide until you kill the ox,” say the caboclos of Brazil. Vinhães and I had fully expected to make a small fortune in Pará, but we had reckoned without two serious drawbacks,—the “rubber crisis” and the climate. Rain, rivers, and trade winds unite to make the city cooler than its situation warrants. Death by sunstroke is unknown—in all Brazil, for that matter—and by night it was at times almost uncomfortably cold. But the rain which had treated us so kindly for months broke all known records during our engagement in Belém. It was during a raging downpour that the copper-tinted half-owner of the “Bar Paraense” and I drove about in a luxurious taxicab paying our “duty calls” on the editors of the six or eight local newspapers, and it was in a continuation of the same deluge that we opened that evening, taking in more than a conto merely because ours was a novelty for which we could charge double admission. We remained cheerful, however, because everyone assured us that every three days of rain were sure to be followed by three dry days. For that matter, it was asserted that the daily shower came always at a fixed hour in the afternoon, so exactly that people made their appointments “before or after the rain,” without troubling to refer to the clock. All this may be true, but if so, ours was an off year. If there was any one thing we could not be certain of, it was whether or not we could venture out at any hour of the day or night without risking a drenching; and of the twelve nights we played in Pará it rained continuously and in veritable cataracts exactly a dozen.
Luckily, all Paraenses are not afraid of water or we should have been forced to close our doors. The people themselves at length admitted that they had never seen it rain so incessantly. No wonder paroaras find the contrast between the low, heavy skies of Amazonia and the lofty, brilliant ones of Ceará so saddening; even we, from the often wintry North, found the constant downpour, broken only by momentary splotches of steaming sunshine, getting on our nerves. The trees of the praças and avenues seemed to scrape with their upper branches the swollen black clouds which marched slowly over us in closed squadrons day after day.
Nowhere in Brazil did the iniquitous “deadhead” flourish so abundantly as in Pará. Two boxes and a row of orchestra seats of the “Bar Paraense” belonged to the brewery which furnished the liquid refreshments; similar accommodations were reserved permanently for the families of the empreza, or management: as many belonged to the chief of police—though he always assigned his rights to friends, and forced his way in with as many as he chose to bring with him; every “authority,” municipal, state, and federal, from the president to the most lowly clerk, was accustomed to walk in without being challenged; the six moth-eaten little newspapers were given a dozen seats a night, and these having been sold or given away, any loafer or boy who chose to state that he was a newspaper-man must be let in, under penalty of possible scurrilous attacks in the next edition; scores of unkempt part-negroes appeared nightly with a card stating they were detectives; insolent half-African policemen in uniform not only forced their way in, but habitually dragged a turmoil of friends or progeny with them; it had long been the custom to count the average Brazilian family of parents and six children as three adults, though each child expected to occupy a full seat; the “artists,” “advertisers on the curtain,” “electrical inspectors,” “volunteer firemen,” and what not who expected to get in on one excuse or another were without number. Every Paraense of any African ancestry seemed to be on the police force, even the chief being distinctly tar-brushed, and to have no other duty than to attend Kinetophone performances. More than once I counted forty policemen in uniform in an audience of less than ten times that number, not to mention more “authorities” and other forms of grafters than I could estimate. Truly, a government is often a useless as well as an expensive luxury. Though policemen and higher officials always swarmed, we never got a suggestion of assistance from them. One night a crowd of ridiculously garbed students who were celebrating the reopening of the academy after the six months’ annual vacation forced their way in some forty strong, yet not one of the hundred official “deadheads” in the house raised a whisper. On another occasion I had the doors closed during our part of the entertainment in order that the audience should not be disturbed by late-comers. In the middle of a number the chief of police arrived and demanded that he and a group of friends be admitted at once, on penalty of everyone of us being placed under arrest. There was the same staid attitude on the part of the grafting politicians from the palace and the urubús that lazily preen their feathers on the roof of it after a rain—scenting from afar any chance of gorging themselves and circling around it in their black carrion-crowlike garb, pretending whenever they are observed that they do not wish to feed and strolling nonchalantly off, only to hurry back as soon as they are free from observation.
A long article appeared in the chief Pará newspaper one morning “proving” that a Brazilian youth invented the Kinetophone in 1908! I should have wired Edison; he would have been astonished. I was not, however, for I had read even more amazing things in Brazil. According to the “Dictionary of Famous Brazilians,” a Paraense invented both the balloon and the flying-machine—that is, he got as far as Paris on a government subvention to “perfect his great invention” and had a bully time among the grisettes, though he never rose bodily above the ground. The same work of many volumes, as well as the “History of Parahyba” taught in the schools of that state, is authority for the statement that the typewriter was invented by a Parahybano priest named Francisco João de Azevedo. As he was already editing the first newspaper of North Brazil in 1826, the typewriter must be an older machine than we suspect. “Blessed be he who bloweth his own horn, lest it be not blown,” said Mark Twain. Nearly every state of Brazil gets out an elaborate volume, resembling our high school or college annuals, praising itself to the skies and including pictures not only of its many more or less imaginary industries, but portraits of all its “influential citizens”—who can afford it.
The “Estrada de Ferro de Bragança” operates a 16-mile commuters’ branch out along the shore of the river-mouth to Pinheiro, as well as a main line of more than a hundred miles to the town for which it is named. Though it is state property, the federal government imposes a federal tax of twenty per cent. on its tickets, and, being Brazilian, its daily train starts at the crack of dawn. This was the old overland route from São Luiz to its offspring, Pará, yet the train made rare and short stops, for there was little but endless bush and genuine tropical jungle during the whole nine hours’ run. Here and there were patches of corn, but the scattered inhabitants along the way were mainly engaged in the production of children. The latter were habitually stark naked; the women dressed in two thin cotton garments covering them from neck to bare heels; men naked to the waist lounged in huts that were mere stick skeletons smeared with mud, sometimes slipping on a jacket, without buttoning it, when they came outside. Personally, I prefer the frank loin-cloth of the East Indian.
In Bragança itself, as along the way, the scarcity of African, and the prevalence of Caucasian, blood was surprising, with Indian mixtures in considerable evidence. The vigario, or parish priest, with whom I had some conversation on this and kindred subjects, asserted that the caboclo, or part-Indian native, was in general lazier and more worthless than the negro mixtures; but this I had found by no means the usual Brazilian opinion. Everything is relative, and this native of sleepy Parahyba considered the people of Amazonia “incredibly indolent.” Bragança boasts as well as shows its age, having won the title of villa a century ago. There are electric-lights, but most of the streets are grass-grown and the jungle jostles the town on every side. It was once called Souza de Caeté, from the river in which it washes its clothes and along which fishermen and crabmen, carrying baskets full of squirming carangreijos, plod in barefoot contentment.