Yet it still had all the outward concomitants of a real city. For almost the first time in Brazil I had my clothes washed properly, and in hot water. John Chinaman, virtually unknown in the rest of the republic, did it. Even the chief places of amusement for money-oozing rubber-gatherers were still open, though the more aristocratic of the inmates had gone back to France or sought more promising pastures, leaving the field to stolid, vulgar, Polish and Russian Jewesses. As in all Brazil, there was no attempt to bolster up waning commerce by selling better things more cheaply; on the contrary, the rare victim was expected to make up for the absence of his fellows. Restaurants and hotels habitually made one thousand to fifteen hundred per cent. profit on their food. A kilogram of beef cost a milreis in the market, or even less after the day warmed; and this was cut into from ten to fifteen so-called beefsteaks that sold as high as two milreis each in the restaurants, even of workingmen. In the market three oranges cost 100 reis; on the restaurant table across the street one cost five times that; a mamão selling for 300 reis was cut into five or six pieces at 500 each. But the Brazilians, too indolent or too proud to go into the restaurant business themselves, continued as usual “fazenda fita” and paid whatever was demanded by their exploiters; or, if they could not pay, they remained away hungry in the darker corners of their homes.
Manaos is a white man’s city, if there is one in Brazil. Not only are the shops mainly in the hands of Europeans or “Turks,” but virtually all manual labor is done by barefooted white men,—Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian for the most part. The boínas of the Pyrenees are frequently seen on the heads of carters and carriers; the laboring class, both male and female, is largely from the Iberian peninsula,—Portuguese women of olive-white complexions darkened by the grime of a life-time, with huge earrings dangling against their necks, and men who would look perfectly at home in any Spanish pueblo or Galician mountain village. Many of the customs of Rio have been imported, too,—the bread-man’s whistle, the vegetable peddler with his two baskets, the stick-clapping, walking clothing-stores from Asia Minor. Yet, according to the American of most standing in Manaos, eight months a year is as much as any white foreigner should live in the place. He knew many a bright, well-educated young Englishman, who had been sent out hale and hearty, to remain so physically, but to become so childish in mind that he had sometimes wondered whether there was not something in the German claim that the British are degenerating. Is civilization, after all, determined by climate? “After a white man has lived steadily for twenty years in the tropics, the less said about him the better, as a general rule,” asserted this exiled fellow-countryman. Energy depends, in his opinion, on variable climate; the monotony of perpetual summer saps ambition; bracing Europe and North America must forever remain breeding-, or at least feeding-grounds for the rulers of tropical lands.
Strangely enough, there are no classes in Manaos street-cars, and one may ride even without socks. The tramway and electric-light system is English owned and is so British that the cars run on the left-hand track; yet its intellectual motive power was furnished by a man from far-off Maine. I had not spoken a word of English since leaving Pará, and naturally lost no time in finding an excuse to make his acquaintance. He had brought with him his native adaptability. It has always been a great problem in Brazil to get street-car fares into the coffers of the foreign companies operating them. Cash registers are of little use, for they respond only to actual ringing. It is more common to require the conductor to carry a booklet of receipts and hand one out whenever a fare is paid. But the difficulty is to make people demand the receipts, for the usual Brazilian way is to wave a hand backward at the conductor, as much as to say, “Oh, keep the money! The company is rich, and they are foreigners anyway.” Years ago some street-car manager thought up the plan of making each receipt worth two reis to charity, the company once a month paying to the nuns’ hospital that amount for each one turned in to them. This system, widespread in Brazil, was in vogue in Manaos when the man from Maine arrived, but it was not working perfectly. The new manager knew that charity to others is a far less potent motive with Brazilians than possible personal fortune and the universal love of gambling. He withdrew the charity clause, therefore, gave each of the receipts a number, and on the second day of every month the Manaos tramway company holds a lottery drawing, with the first prize 100$ and the rest in proportion. It is a rare Manaoense who does not demand his receipt for fare paid nowadays.
The only other American resident of Manaos was Briggs. It was doubly worth while to call on Briggs, for in addition to the good fellowship which quickly arises between compatriots exiled in far-off lands, free beer was unlimited to those to whom Briggs took a liking—and for those who have to pay for it, beer is a rare luxury in Manaos. Briggs was the man who made Manaos endurable, who kept it cool and quenched its thirst, a man who always made one think of ice and iced drinks, though there was nothing icy about him. He was dictator and commander-in-chief of the ice-plant at the tall Manaos brewery, native owned but, strangely enough, run by a German. I hesitate to admit, failed, in fact, to compute, the number of times I might have been seen emerging from Briggs’ sanctum wiping from my mustache the circumstantial evidence of a glass of beer.
Of other amusements and pastimes there were still a few automobiles for hire and a rare surviving café chantant, or—well, when the semimonthly steamer from Rio came in with the list of prizes in the national lottery a government band sat before the lottery agency and played all the morning, while firecrackers were exploded and the lottery winnings were paid. That was the Manaos idea of industry and “combatting the present grave crisis.” The zoo was gone, of course, and the imposing state theater, the azulejo dome of which rose high above all else except the cathedral tower, had not been opened for more than two years and was a dried-mud ruin within. It was not as in the “good old days” when a carregador got a fortune for carrying a seringueiro’s trunk across the praça, and spent it to hear imported opera sung in the proud theater at the top of the knoll. There were still dramatic companies direct from Europe, changing every night as they made the rounds of the three theaters under one ownership—but they came on reels that fit into a lantern. The plot of the story they told was never a mystery; it consisted succinctly of the adventures of two men and a woman or, in contrast, of two women and a man. These original and refreshing themes, presented nightly under a new title and disguised in a new near-Parisian costumes, continued to attract such stray coins as still remained in Manaos, not to mention those to whom there are no earthly barriers. I had often told myself that what Brazilian theaters needed was a turnstile at the entrance, and was surprised to find that the cinemas of Manaos had exactly that thing. But system and strictness lead haunted lives in Brazil. I stood at the door of the principal cinema one evening and counted just as large a percentage of “deadheads” as even the Kinetophone had ever attracted. For instead of having a register on the turnstile and requiring the door-keeper to turn in a ticket for every click of the stile or pay the price of one, he was allowed to use his own judgment as to who should go in free—and the judgment of a Brazilian door-tender! In short, Manaos was entirely an exotic city, which even the few caboclos and Indians paddling down to market in their canoes do not tinge with the local color and things native to Amazonia.
I had come up the Amazon with the faint hope of being able to make my way overland from Manaos to the capital of British Guiana. Such a trip should be wild enough to allay any craving for the wilderness for some time to come, and even if one could scarcely call plunging along jungle trails taking to the open road, the effect would be about the same. Even in Manaos, however, no one knew whether or not it was possible to reach Georgetown by land. Launches and batelões, a species of Amazonian barge, sometimes went up the Rio Branco to the frontiers of Brazil to bring down cattle, but they could go only at the height of the rainy season, when the Rio Branco was flooded, and the last one had made the trip in August, nearly nine months before.
“He who has no dog goes hunting with the cat,” the Brazilians say, so I turned my attention to the possibility of making the journey through my own exertions. That, too, it seemed, was out of the question. Even had I bought a canoe and hired a crew, it would have required at least two months of constant, laborious paddling to bring me to the Guianese frontier; and as to walking, that would have been as impossible in this Amazonian wilderness as on the open sea. My hopes had reached their lowest ebb when word reached my ears that heavy rains in the interior were rapidly raising the Rio Branco, and that if they continued, the first batelão of the season would set out for what is known as the Brazilian Guyana on May 25. I settled down to endure with as much patience as I could muster a wait of half a month, and in all likelihood more, in such a climate and surroundings.
An Amazonian landscape
