It was midwinter in Rio, yet plump, sun-browned youths rolled in the surf each morning below the wall of her chief driveway and lolled in the shade of the open-air cafés along it. Even in July the lower levels of the city can be unpleasantly hot, which makes it all the more remarkable that it gives such an impression of energy during its business hours. From the wharves to the edges of the mainly residential sections the place pulsates with perspiring activity, though on closer inspection one suspects that the Fluminense is more energetic at play than in productive labor. Whatever his exertions, however, he divides them into short sections separated by the partaking of coffee. All along the Avenida, in every downtown street of importance, there is not a block without its coffee-house, a cool room filled with marble-topped tables on a damp, sawdusted floor, into which one steps from the heated street, silently turns upright one of the score of tiny cups on the table before one, fills it half full of sugar, raps on the table with the head of one’s “stick” until a silent waiter comes and fills what is left of the cup with black coffee, which one slowly sips and, dropping a tostão, a nickel 100-reis piece, beside the empty tasa, wanders on down the street—to repeat the process within the next few blocks.
But with sunset, at least during what Rio likes to refer to as winter, the temperature grows delightful, and it is from then on until a new day warms again that one gets the full tropical fragrance, the un-northern dolce far niente that makes the Brazilian capital so enticing to the wandering stranger. The newcomer soon learns to stay up most of the night and enjoy the best part of the day. Not even Paris was ever more brilliantly lighted than downtown Rio—cynics whisper that the city fathers have a close personal interest in public lighting—not even Parisian boulevards are more scented than the Avenida and its adjacent streets with the pungent odor of mercenary love. Far into the night the Avenida pulsates; long after the theaters and countless cinemas, and the opera in its season, have ended, the surge of humanity continues, punctuated at all too frequent intervals by that most distinctive sound of the night life of Rio,—bass-voiced newsboys singsonging their papers—“A Rua!” “A Noite!”—in the distressingly German guttural peculiar to the native tongue as spoken in the Brazilian capital.
Larger in extent than Paris, broken everywhere by savage, rocky, wooded morros—virgin-jungled hills rising in the very heart of town and which, peeled of their thick scalp of vegetation, prove to be of solid granite—stretching away in great green mounds and ranges standing high into the peerless tropical sky, Rio was as entrancing as Buenos Aires is commonplace. The level parts of the city were flat indeed, flat as if the sea had washed in its débris until it had filled all the spaces between the rocky island hills, and then completely flooded those valleys with houses. Nor did the building stop there. Seeping everywhere into the interstices of its hills, the town was here and there chopped back into them, or, if the morros set sheer rock faces against the intrusion, it climbed upon and over them, until its many-colored houses lay heaped into the sky or spilled down great gorges and valleys beyond. Then always, from whatever point of vantage one saw it, the scene was backed by its peerless sky-line,—the Pico de Gavea with its square head, like a topsail or the conventional symbol for a workingman’s cap; the “Sleeping Giant,” showing nature’s most fantastic carving; hollow-chested Corcovado, the “Hunchback,” peering amusedly down upon puny man playing ant in and out among the tumbled rocks below; the admirable “Sugar Loaf,” keeping eternal watch over the entrance to the bay, the ridges and wooded summits of Tijuca backed far off by the “Organ” range, protruding like broken columns above the distant horizon. “Vedete Napoli e poi mori” might with many times more justice be said of Rio.
It was always a wonder to me how the citizens of the Brazilian capital succeeded in keeping within doors long enough to do their daily tasks. Day or night its peerless scenery and glorious climate were inviting one to come out and play, to forget the commonplace things of life. A local editor complained that the people of Rio do not read in the street-cars, “as our neighbors do in the United States, but spend their time gazing about them and thus lose much opportunity for culture.” Probably he had never been in New York or Chicago, or he would have realized that sometimes people read during their urban travels to keep their minds off the “scenery.” In Rio nature and all outdoors are so much more splendid than any printed page that reading seems a sacrilege. Though I rode along the Beira Mar a dozen times a day, I never succeeded in withholding my eyes from the scene about me; never was I able to miss a chance to gaze across the bay to Nictheroy, or up at the silhouettes of Corcovado and Tijuca; like a great painting it grew upon one with every view.
I passed frequently along this most marvelous boulevard in the western hemisphere, Beira Mar, the “Edge of the Sea,” stretching for miles along the harbor’s edge so close that the ocean spills over upon it on days when it is brava. Between the shady Passeio Publico behind the Monroe Palace and the heroic statue of Cabral on the green Largo da Gloria, the foothills crowd in so closely that there is room for only one street to pass, and right of way is naturally given to the chief pride of the city. Here converge the pleasure seeking traffic and the business bent, to split again presently on the rocky Morro da Gloria, crowned by its quaint little medieval church, the one stream to hurry away through the Rua do Cattete, the other to follow with more leisure the serpentine Beira Mar. This, lined by splendid trees and pretentious residences on the land side, outflanks another rocky hill that would cut it off by passing between walls of man-scarred granite behind it, skirts another arm of the turquoise-green harbor, with a closer view of the gigantic “Sugar Loaf,” and then bursts out through a long tunnel upon the ocean front where marvelous beaches and a succession of boulevards continue for miles through what is rapidly developing into the finest residential section of the Brazilian capital.
The Beira Mar is the show-place of Rio and of Brazil. It is sometimes as if one were asked to admire a costume without seeing more than the lace along the bottom, the eagerness of its people to impress the visitor with the undoubted splendor of this glorious seaside driveway. Yet there are many other strips and corners of the city that are well-nigh as sumptuous or as picturesque; the difficulty is to hunt them out among the morros and foothills that everywhere divide the capital into almost isolated districts. Walking is all very well, but perspiration flows quickly and copiously in Rio, and a perpetually drenched shirt is not entirely conducive to pleasure; and the city is so incredibly extensive that even tramway exploration becomes serious to the man with a weak financial constitution. There are two street-car systems and they operate what is perhaps the best surface system in the world; but it is also the most expensive. Take a street-car ride from one end of Rio to another and back and you have spent, thanks to the “zone system” imported from Europe, the equivalent of half a dollar; and as there are lines out through all the score or more of gaps between the hills and morros, I quickly made the discovery that if I attempted to explore all the city, even by street-car, I should probably have the privilege of swimming home.
What was my joy, therefore, to learn that the superintendent of the “Botanical Garden Line,” which covers all the more beautiful half of Rio, came from the town in which I had spent much of my boyhood. I had long wanted the experience of being a street-car conductor or motorman, and made application at once. My fellow-townsman hesitated to give me any such place of responsibility unless I would agree to stay for some time, but he was quite ready to appoint me a fiscal segreto of the system under his charge, at the most munificent salary I had ever drawn in my life—six thousand a day! That was exactly enough to pay for my room and board in the German hotel of the Rua do Acre; still it was decidedly better to be paid for riding about town than to have to pay for that privilege, and with my living and transportation assured until I sailed my chief problems were solved.
The “Botanical Garden Line” begins at the principal hotel on the Avenida Central, about which every car loops before setting forth again on its journey to some part of that section of Rio most worth seeing. I was furnished a book of free tickets and had only to take a back seat on any of these cars and, while reading a newspaper or seeing the scenery as inconspicuously as possible, casually notice whether the conductor showed an inclination to forget to ring up fares or to break any other of the strict rules of the company. My tickets were good only for the oceanside half of town, for though they were under the same North American ownership the two car systems did not connect, and anyone traveling all the way through town must walk a block from the hotel loop to the cars of the business section. This, however, was more compact and less interesting to the casual visitor than the region in which I had been given free transportation.
I was frequently seen thereafter boarding a “bonde da Light” at the Avenida hotel, or alighting from one after a long journey seaward. The company was officially known as the “Light and Power,” whence the abbreviation of ownership; and as the first electric street-cars introduced into Brazil were financed by bonds that were offered for sale to the Brazilians with much advertising, and there was no other term for them in the national vocabulary, the street-cars that finally came were dubbed “bonds,” and so they remain to this day, except that, as the Brazilian, like all Latins, cannot pronounce a word sharply cut off in a consonant, he usually calls them “bondes,” in two syllables.
The “bondes” of Rio are as excellent as those to be found anywhere on the globe, particularly on the more aristocratic “Botanical Garden Line.” Naturally, when a street-car company can get a quarter for a ride across town it can afford to maintain the best of service. The cars are all open, there are five persons, and five only, to a seat, smoking is allowed on all but the first three benches, and the law forbids those not properly dressed to ride in the first-class cars, there being second-class trailers for workmen and the collarless at certain hours of the day, on which those carrying bundles larger than a portfolio are also obliged to travel. Street-cars, like every other enterprise in Brazil, carry a heavy incubus of official “deadheads” and politicians. Soldiers, sailors, gasmen, mailmen, customhouse employees, street lighters, policemen, and a dozen other types in uniform ride free by crowding upon the back platform. They are not allowed seats, as are the swarms of politicians with elaborately engraved yearly passes—which they consider it beneath their dignity to be asked to show; but with those exceptions there are no “standees.” Law, custom, natural politeness and the lack of haste of the Brazilian are all against permitting a person to crowd into a filled car, no matter what the provocation. Laws are not always obeyed to the letter in the liberty-license atmosphere of South America’s most recent convert to republicanism, but during all my stay in Brazil I never saw a passenger attempt to board a full street-car.