Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande do Sul
A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of us and made our train half an hour late
A cowboy of southern Brazil
I wrapped myself in all the garments I possessed, regretting that I owned no overcoat, as we shivered jerkily onward across a wild, shaggy, mist-heavy country inhabited only by cattle and with no stopping-place all the morning, except Rosario, entitled to consider itself a town. I fell to reading a Porto Alegre newspaper of a day or two before, for as I could usually guess the meaning of the spoken tongue, so I could read Portuguese, like a man skating over thin ice—as long as I kept swiftly going all was well, but if I stopped to examine a word closely, I was lost. Brazilians would have you believe that Portuguese is a purer form of the tongue from which Spanish is descended; Spanish-speaking South Americans assert that Portuguese is a degenerate dialect of their own noble language and even go so far as to refer to it privately as “lingua de macacos,” of which phrase the last word is the Portuguese term for monkey. Thanks to my long familiarity with their tongue I found myself siding with the Castilian branch of the family.
On the printed page it was hard to treat this new tongue with due seriousness. I found myself unable to shake off the impression that the writer had never learned to spell, or at least had not been able to force his learning upon the printer. The stuff looked as if the latter had “pied” the form, and then had not had time to find all the letters again or have the proof corrected. Thus cattle, instead of being ganado, as it should be, was merely gado; general had shrunk to geral, and to make matters worse still more letters were dropped in forming the plural, so that such monstrosities as geraes and automobeis shrieked at the reader in every line. Fancy calling tea chá; think of writing esmola when you mean limosna! It suggested dialect invented by a small Spanish boy so angry he “wouldn’t play any more,” and who had taken to horribly mispronouncing and absurdly misspelling the tongue of himself and his playmates, yet who had not originality enough to form a really new language. And what a treacherous language! The short, simple, everyday words were the very ones most apt to be entirely different; thus dos was no longer “two” but “of the”; “two” was now dois in the masculine and duas in the feminine, and there was still a dous—the plural form, I suppose. A trapiche was no longer a primitive sugarmill, but a warehouse; a cigar had become a mere charuto. The Portuguese seemed to avoid the letter “l” as zealously as do the Japanese, replacing it by “r”—la plaza had been deformed into a praça, el plato had become o prato. Where they were not doubling the “n,” contrary to all rules of Castilian spelling, they were leaving it out entirely, and one was asked to admire the silvery rays of a lua! A man had been brought before a judge because he had seen fit to espancar his wife, yet the context showed that it was no case of the application of the corrective slipper. I was reading along as smoothly and calmly as in English when all at once the headline “Esposição International de Borrachas em Londres” struck my eye. Válgame Diós! An International Exposition of Drunken Women! Seven thousand miles away, too! And why in London, rather than in Glasgow? That particular headline would have cost me much mental anguish had I not had the foresight in Montevideo to buy a “Portuguez-Hespanhol” pocket vocabulary. And what, of all things, should borracha be, in this absurd, mispronounced dialect, but rubber, and no drunken woman at all, thus depriving the article at once of all interest!
The chief trouble with written Portuguese is that it has never been operated on for appendicitis. Parts that have long since ceased to function have not been cut off, as in the close-cropped Spanish, and such words as simples, fructa, and the like retain their useless unpronounced letters until the written word is almost as absurdly unlike the spoken one as in English. Yet the tongue of Brazil has at least the advantage that it is in some ways easier to pronounce than Spanish. The guttural Castilian j, for example, over which the foreign tongue almost invariably stumbles, is missing, and while few Americans can say jefe in the Spanish fashion they can all give it the Portuguese sound “shefe”; and if mejor taxes the Anglo-Saxon palate, melhor is perfectly easy. Moreover, life is a constant holiday in Portuguese. Domingo and sabbado are days of rest under any name; but it seems unwise to mislead a naturally indolent people into thinking that every day is a “feast day” by calling Monday “second festival,” Tuesday “third festival” and so on, forcing the stranger to do some finger and toe counting to find that quarta-feira, or “fourth festival,” was none other than this very Wednesday so foggily hanging about us. To hear the kinky-haired trainman tell me in a long series of mispronunciations that if I chose to let this one go on without me I could get another train at “twenty:thirty-two on fifth feast-day” required some nimble mental exertion to figure out that the lunatic was trying to say 8:32 P. M. on Thursday.
The line out of Santa Anna is really a branch of the long and important one from Uruguayana on the Uruguay River, dividing Brazil from the Argentine, to the large “lagoon towns” of Pelotas and Rio Grande on the Atlantic. About noon we tumbled out of our rattling conveyance at Cacequy and took another train, on the line to Porto Alegre, capital of the enormous “estado gaucho,” or “cowboy state,” southernmost of Brazil and larger than all Uruguay. It rambled in and about low hills, with an excellent grazing country spread out to the horizon on every hand, and at four—beg pardon, sixteen o’clock—set us down at the considerable town of Santa Maria on a knoll among wooded hills, the junction where those bound for the capital of the state must take leave of those on their way to the capital of the republic. I was privileged to occupy room No. 1 in the chief hotel of the town, which was no doubt a high honor. But as it chanced to be between the front door of the building and the cobbled entrance corridor, with either window or door opening directly on crowds of impudent newsboys, lottery vendors, and servants, it was not unlike being between the devil—or at least a swarm of his progeny—and the deep sea. Indeed, it quickly became evident that Brazilian hotels of the interior would prove no better than those in the three southern countries of South America, where the traveler is expected to pay a fortune for the privilege of tossing out the night on a hilly cot and where the meals never vary an iota,—beginning unfailingly with fiambre, or thin slices of cold meat, and hurrying through several dishes of hot meat, down to the inevitable dulce de membrillo, a hard quince jelly which is the sad ending of all meals at the lower end of South America. Nowhere does the Latin-American’s lack of initiative show more clearly than in the kitchen. To increase my gloom, the French proprietress, whose every glance caused my thin pocketbook to writhe with fear, manipulated the items so cleverly that, though placards on the walls announced the rate as seven milreis a day, and I was there only from sunset until a little after sunrise, she handed me a bill for 13,500 reis!