The Americans, from the manager down, were agreed that all the land of southern Brazil was of excellent fertility. It was better where there was timber, but the campo, which the natives will not try to cultivate because it does not yield immediate results, will also produce in abundance almost any temperate or semi-tropical crop, if it is worked a year or two to let the air into it and is sufficiently manured to offset the two per cent. of iron which makes the soil so red. Not the least of the advantages over the floor-flat pampas, from the grazier’s point of view, was the rolling character of the ground. With hollows and ravines there were no floods, yet always water, so that the cattle did not wear themselves out in the dry season by wandering in search of it. Thousands of head of stock were born, raised, and driven to slaughter in the same hollow, the country being often not even wire-fenced. All were enthusiastic over southern Brazil as a land of promise for white colonists with youth, health, a little patience, who were willing to earn their living from the soil instead of “sponging” on others, after the fashion of the natives; and all considered the Argentine overestimated, just now in the limelight, but with no such great future before it as southern Brazil.
I continued my journey in the private-car of my fellow-guests, which was picked up by the tri-weekly train some time during the second night. When the sun again rose above the horizon, we found ourselves in the richest and most famous state of Brazil, the coffee-growing land of São Paulo. Our coach had been hooked on directly behind the engine, ahead of the baggage-car, so that we had to get off to reach the dining-car—whereby hangs a tale. The “hawg” man and I reached there together, without his interpreter, whose place I had to take and explain at great length why any man, least of all one whose façade quaked as he walked, could not be satisfied with small cakes and coffee, like reasonable human beings, instead of demanding eggs and toucinho—which means bacon in a Portuguese dictionary but salt pork in a Brazilian mind—and getting into a rage because there was none of the latter on board and commanding a large steak in its place. Then, as if that were not trouble enough, my famished ward proved himself a poor traveler in Brazil by complaining vociferously just because one poor little fly got cooked with his eggs. It may have been my fault, too; for I had not yet grown accustomed to the Spanish letter “l” becoming an “r” in Portuguese, and no doubt, speaking with a Castilian accent, I inadvertently ordered flied eggs.
Sorocaba was the largest town of the day’s journey, and with it the cruder rural section, the rude wooden houses of new colonists, and the parasol pine-trees largely disappeared, while palms increased. Nowhere from Montevideo northward had I seen an acre of sterile land, though certainly not one-tenth of what I had seen was under cultivation. On a pole before each house now was a white banner with the likeness of a saint, which had hung there since St. Peter’s Day a fortnight before. The railroad made a complete circle around São Roque in its deep lap of hills, and gradually, in mid-afternoon, there grew up a constant succession of villages. We passed groups of unquestionably city people, and presently São Paulo itself burst upon us, far away and strewn up along, over, and about a dry and treeless ridge. Then it disappeared again for quite a time, while the villages changed to urban scenes, streets began to take on names, electric-cars to spin along beside us, endless lines of light-colored houses of concrete with red-tile roofs appeared, and at last we came to a halt in a great glass-vaulted modern station in the second city of Brazil—second, that is, in population, for it is first in energy and industry, capital of the most progressive state of the union and the first real city on the main line north of Montevideo.
Swinging my trunk under one arm, I set out to find a lodging in keeping with my sadly depleted pocketbook. The first part of that task was in no way difficult. Of all the cities of the earth, as far as I know it, perhaps only Paris has more hotels, pensões, and lodging-houses per capita than São Paulo. There seemed to be at least one for every half-dozen possible guests. In all but the best of them there were two or more beds in each room, as if they some day expected to have a veritable flood of clients; but this prospective congestion mattered little, for they rarely had anyone to share the room, though they doubled the bill if one asked to have a room alone. When it came to considering these accommodations on the score of cost, however, the task of a man with a flattened pocketbook was serious, for the prices in the poorest “doss-house” were appalling. Democracy and popular education, even their pale reflections, seem to bring with them the cult of the white collar, which grows more fervent as one approaches the equator; hence scores of muscular Spanish and Portuguese immigrants had opened hotels in São Paulo who should have been out planting corn or hoeing coffee. Competition is not always a benefit. The hotels of São Paulo were atrocious in price and poor in quality precisely because there was so much competition, scores of hotel-keepers, each with runners, touts, and a host of hangers-on, trying to make a fortune in six months out of the three or four guests a week which fate sent them, that they might return to end their days at ease in the land of their birth. For it was not the native Paulistas who ran the countless hostelries of all classes, but easy-fortune seekers from overseas.
The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo
Santos, the Brazilian coffee port
A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in Nictheroy