CHAPTER VII
BUMPING UP TO RIO
Upon the thirty-first parallel of south latitude, three hundred and sixty miles north of Montevideo, there is a town of divided allegiance, situated in both the smallest and the largest countries of South America. When the traveler descends from the “Uruguay Central” he finds it is named for Colonel Rivera, the Custer of Uruguay, who made the last stand against the Charrúa Indians and was killed by them in 1832. But as he goes strolling along the main street, gazing idly into the shop windows, he notes all at once that the signs in them have changed in words and prices, that even the street has an entirely different name, for instead of the Calle Principal it has become the Rua Sete de Setembro, and suddenly he awakens to the fact that instead of taking a stroll in the town of Rivera, in the República Oriental del Uruguay, as he fancied, he has wandered into Santa Anna do Livramento in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the United States of Brazil.
There is no getting away from the saints even when the tongue and nationality and even the color of the population changes, for the Portuguese adventurers who settled the mighty paunch of South America were quite as eager for celestial blessings on their more or less nefarious enterprises as were their fellow scamps and contemporaries, the Spanish conquistadores. But the stray traveler in question is sure to find that another atmosphere has suddenly grown up about him. Barracks swarming with muscular black soldiers, wearing long cloaks, in spite of the semi-tropical weather, as nearly wrong side out as possible, in order to display the brilliant red with which they are lined, give a belligerent aspect to this warmer and mightier land. Negroes and piccaninnies and the unpainted makeshift shacks that commonly go with them are scattered over all the landscape; oxen with the yokes on their necks rather than in front of their horns testify to the change from Spanish custom; instead of the pretty little plaza with its well-kept promenades, its comfortable benches, and its well-tended flower plots that forms the center of Rivera or any other Spanish-American town that has the slightest personal pride, there is a praça, muddy, untended, seatless, and unadorned. The sun, too, has begun to bite again in a way unfamiliar in the countries in southern and temperate South America.
Rivera and Santa Anna do Livramento are physically a single town. The international boundary runs through the center of a football field in which boys in Brazil pursue a ball set in motion in Uruguay, and climbs up over a knoll on the top of which sits a stone boundary post, the two countries rolling away together over plump hills densely green in color, except where the enamel of nature has been chipped off to disclose a reddish sandy soil. Surely Brazil, stretching for thirty-seven degrees of latitude from Uruguay to the Guianas, a distance as far as from Key West to the top of Labrador, with a width of nearly as many degrees of longitude from Pernambuco to the Andes and covering more space than the continental United States, is large enough so that its inhabitants need not have crowded their huts to the very edge of the boundary line in this fashion, as if they were fleeing from oppressive rulers, or were determined that little Uruguay shall not thrust her authority an inch farther north.
I went over into Brazil early in the day, it being barely three blocks from my “Gran Hotel Nuevo,” which was neither grand, new, nor, strictly speaking, a hotel. But when the sockless manager-owner of the main hostelry of Sant’ Anna asked me two thousand something or other for the privilege of lying on a hilly cot not unlike a dog’s nest in a musty hole already occupied by several other guests, I concluded to remain in Uruguay as long as possible. In Montevideo a cablegram had advised me to make myself known to the Brazilian railway officials at the frontier and learn something to my advantage. I could not shake off a vague uneasiness at entering with slight funds a country of which I had heard many a disagreeable tale and where I expected to undergo the unpleasant experience of not understanding the language. Yet when at length I found the station-master of the “Compagnie Auxiliaire,” in a red cap but, I was relieved to note, a white skin, we talked for some time of the general pass with sleeping-car accommodations which the discerning general manager of the railways of southern Brazil seemed bent on thrusting upon me, before I realized that he was speaking Portuguese and I Spanish, and understanding each other perfectly.
It is 2058 miles by rail from Montevideo to Rio de Janeiro, and the cost of this overland trip to the average traveler with a trunk or two and a moderate appetite would be about $150. One may leave the Uruguayan capital on Monday, for instance, by one of the three weekly trains, and arrive in the Brazilian capital on the following Saturday, spending only one night motionless on the way—if one is contented to be a mere tourist rather than a traveler and is not overburdened with baggage. For this must be carried the mile or more over the frontier, at which it is examined by a band of stupid and discourteous negroes, who seem to delight in putting as many obstacles as possible in the way of the well-to-do traveler. Not being included in that category, my own day’s halt in Rivera was entirely by choice; but for those more in haste than curious for a glimpse of Brazilian life it is cheaper, faster, and more comfortable to make the journey by sea.
The daily train northward leaves Santa Anna at 7:35, which is seven by Uruguayan time, and I was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour for midwinter June to find the world weighed down under a dense, bone-soaking blanket of fog. The street lamps of both countries, judging daylight by the calendar rather than by the facts, kept going out just half a block ahead of me as I stumbled through the impenetrable gloom, the streets by no means improving at the frontier. I might have crossed this without formality had I not chosen to wake the negro guard from a sound sleep in his kiosk and insist upon his doing his duty. One would fancy that an official stationed five feet from a Spanish-speaking country would pick up a few words of that language, yet these customhouse negroes professed not to understand a word of Spanish, no matter how much it sounded like their native Portuguese. At length, with a growl for having been disturbed, the swarthy guardian waved a hand at me in a bored, tropical way, drew his resplendent cloak about him again, and stretched out once more on his wooden bench.
It was a long mile of slippery mud and warm humidity to the station, where black night still reigned and where yet another African official came to revisar my baggage, for much contraband passes this frontier in both directions. Finally something resembling daybreak forced its reluctant way through the gray mass that hung over and crept into everything, and our narrow-gauge half-freight took to bumping uncertainly northward. What a change from the clean, comfortable, equal-to-anywhere trains of Uruguay! Even our “primeiro,” with its two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other, was as untidy, unmended, slovenly as the government railways of Chile, and every mile forward seemed to bring one that much nearer the heart of happy-go-lucky Latin-America.
The parasol pine trees of southern Brazil