I am compelled to admit that the street-car conductors of Rio are superior to our own in courtesy and their equal in attending strictly to business, and that the “Light” probably gets as large a percentage of its fares as does the average line in the United States. In spite of my duty as secret inspector I was utterly unable to find any serious fault with them, thanks perhaps to long and strict American discipline, for there was a great difference between their staid, careful manner and the annoying tomfoolery of the more youthful collectors on the native-owned motor-busses along the Avenida and out the Beira Mar. Part of this result, perhaps, was accomplished by a regular system of increase in wages and a gold star on the sleeve for each five years as inducements to longevity in the service. The Brazilian is noted for his inability to protest against exploitation, but he is very touchy as to the manner in which he is asked to pay, which is perhaps the reason the conductors of Rio never say “fares, please,” but only rattle suggestively the coins in their pockets as they swing from pillar to post along the car. Nor have we ever reached the level of masculine daintiness of the Brazilian capital, where young dandies carry little mesh purses worthy of a chorus-girl, from which they affectedly pick out their street-car fare, dropping the coins from well above the recipient palm in order to avoid personal contact with the vulgarly calloused hand of labor.
Most of the lines of the “Botanical Garden” system are so long that three or four round trips a day was all I could, or was expected to, make; moreover, I was instructed not to return by the same car that carried me out between Rio’s hills to the end of the line, lest I betray my calling. Thus I was forced to visit every nook and corner of half the capital in the natural discharge of my duties. The Botanical Gardens for which the system was named, lay far out on the edge of the salty Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a marvelous collection of tropical and semi-tropical flora. Yet this was made almost inconspicuous by its setting, for all Rio is a marvelous botanical garden. Greater wealth of vegetation has been granted no other city of the world, so far as I know it. Date palms, cocoanut-palms, a multitude of other varieties, each more beautiful than the other, grew in profusion down to the very edge of the sea, all to be in turn outdone by the peerless royal palm. They call it the “imperial palm” in Brazil, because João VI of Portugal, first European emperor to cross the sea to reign in his American domain, to which he fled before the conquering Napoleon, caused this monarch of trees to be brought from the West Indies, and decreed that all seeds that could not be used by the royal family should be burned, lest they fall into the hands of the common people. Slaves stole the surplus turned over to them for destruction, however, and sold them to any who cared to buy, so that to-day the imperial palm is the crowning glory of nature along all the coast of Brazil. In Rio it is never absent from the picture. It grows in the courtyards of cortiços, those one-story tenement blocks of the Brazilian capital, and in the patios of decaying mansions of former Portuguese grandees; it stretches in long double rows up many a street and private driveway; it shades the humblest hovels and the most pompous villas of the newly rich with that perfection of impartiality which only nature attains; it thrusts itself forth from between the rocks along the seashore wherever waves or wind have carried a bit of sustaining soil; it clusters in deeply shaded valleys and climbs to the summits of the encircling mountains, there to stand out in regal isolation above the tangle of tropical creepers and impenetrable jungle that is constantly threatening to invade the tiny kingdom of puny man below. This great city-dwelling forest is one of the chief charms of the Brazilian capital. It seems to grasp the city in its powerful embrace, now affectionately, as if its only purpose were to beautify it, sometimes, as if bent on thrusting man back into the sea from whence he came, insinuating itself into every open space, spreading along every street like the files of a conquering army, invading the parks and the interior courts of houses, where marble pavements in mosaics of bright colors gleam amid great masses of jungle flowers, gigantic cool ferns, and fragrant orange-trees, overtopped by the majestically rustling imperial palm. It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs, bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills, like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength and energy.
My job took me out through older avenues lined with portentous dwellings dating back to colonial days; it dropped me with time to spare beside little praças, slumbering in the sunshine beneath rustling fronds, that carried the mind back to old Portugal, or at the foot of streets which ran up narrowing valleys until they encountered sheer impassable wooded hillsides; it left me at the beginning of rows of houses of every conceivable color, shape, and situation, which twisted their way up gullies or draped themselves over the lower flanks of the hills, some seeming ready to fall at the first gust of wind, some tucked immovably into evergreen tropical settings, the loftiest overtopped only by the imperial palms or by the mountains in the far background. So swift are many of these byways of Rio that a street-lamp in the next block is sometimes well above the moon; so closely are nature and man crowded together that there is absolute primeval wilderness within half an hour’s walk of the Avenida central, and one may come upon clusters of jungle cabins lost in the bucolic calm of the virgin matta almost in the heart of the city limits.
Some of our lines passed through long dark tunnels bored in the granite hills, to reach one or another of those pretty, seaside towns that make up the outskirts of Rio. One ran the full length of Copacabana with its mile upon mile of peerless beach directly facing the Atlantic a short square back of the main street; still others hurried on and on through suburbs that scarcely realized they were part of the city. There was Ipanema, for instance, where the track was lined more often than not with uninhabited cactus desert, the car breaking out every little while from behind a hill upon the welcome perpetual sea breeze, or passing scattered shanties bearing such pathetically amusing names as “Casa Paz e Amor,” or “A Felicidade da Viuvinha,” with a goat and a few hens scratching in the beach sand before them. The Ipanema line was particularly attractive, for it ran so far out that I could take a dip in the sea between inspecting trips without going to the expense of acquiring a bathing-suit.
Many a visitor to Brazil has returned home convinced that her capital has no slums. It is an error natural to those who do not stay long or climb high enough. The traveler who subsidizes the exertions of a pair of chauffeurs or who scuffs his soles along the mosaics of the Avenida Rio Branco, justly admiring the Theatro Municipal for all its imitation of the Paris Opéra, admitting that the Escola de Bellas Artes and the Bibliotheca Nacional are worthy of their setting, and that the Beira Mar and the seascape beyond are unrivaled, often leaves without so much as suspecting that there is a seamy side to this entrancing picture, that he who has seen Rio only on the level knows but half of it. Indeed, even the leisurely wanderer who covers the entire network of tram-lines within the city has by no means completed his sight-seeing; to do so he must frequently strike out afoot and climb.
For the slums of Rio are on the tops of her morros, those rock hills which, each bearing its own musically cadenced name, rise everywhere above the general level. The Carioca—the inhabitant of Rio is more apt to call himself by this name than by the more formal term Fluminense—hates physical exertion such as the climbing of hills, and the flat places of the city are in high demand for residential as well as business sites. A few sumptuous villas clamber a little way up them within automobile reach, but the upper flanks and summits of the morros are left to the discards of fortune. Here the poorer classes congregate, to build their shacks and huts of anything available,—fragments of dry goods boxes, flattened out oil cans, the leaf base of the royal palm—every shape and description of thrown-together hovels, inhabited by washerwomen, street hawkers, petty merchants, dock laborers, minor criminals, victims of misfortune, and habitual loafers. Barely two blocks back of the justly admired Municipal Theater there rises such a hill, so densely crowded with makeshift dwellings that only men of moderate girth can pass comfortably along the dirt paths between them; it would take a persistent walker weeks to investigate all the other congested hilltop towns within the city. There the stroller from below finds himself in quite another world than the Avenida at his feet, a world whose inhabitants stare half-surprised, half-resentfully at the man with even a near-white collar, yet many of whom have such a view from the doors of their decrepit shanties and such a sea breeze through the cracks in their patchwork walls as the most fortune-favored of other lands may well envy.
These scores of morros rising above Rio’s well-to-do level are of many shapes, some only a little less abrupt and striking than the “Sugar Loaf” at the harbor’s entrance, others great rounded knolls over which the town has spread like fantastic unbroken jungle, those in the older part of town terminating in feudal looking castles or former monasteries turned to modern republican use, some of them so high that the sounds of the traffic and the trafficking below are drowned out by the hilarity of negro boys rolling about the dusty shade in old frock coats and what were once spotless afternoon trousers, gleaned from the discard of the city beneath. There are white people living on the summits of the morros,—recent immigrants, ne’er-do-wells of the type known as “white trash” in our South—but easily four out of every five of the hilltop inhabitants are of the African race, and he who thinks the negro is the equal of the white man under equality of opportunity should climb these slum-ridden hills and see how persistently the blacks have risen to the top in Rio, though there is so slight a prejudice against the negro in Brazil that his failure to gain an eminence in society similar to his physical elevation must be just his own fault. It is chiefly from her hilltops, too, that come what Rio calls her gente de tamanco, wearers of the wooden-clog soles with canvas slipper tops which are the habitual footwear of the poorer sockless Cariocas. The falsetto scrape of tamancos on the cement pavements is the most characteristic sound of the Brazilian capital, as native to it as its perpetual sea breeze and its sky-piercing palmeiras imperiaes.
It was dusty on the morros at the time of my “slumming,” for Rio was suffering from what the authoritative “oldest inhabitant” called the worst drought in forty years, and long lines of the hilltop inhabitants were constantly laboring upward with former oil cans full of water on their heads. The shortage of water had grown so serious that even down on the level the supply was shut off from dark until daylight; the ponds in the Praça da República and similar parks were so low that the wild animals living there in a natural state of freedom were in danger of choking to death. But hardships are familiar to the people of the hilltops, and there was an air of cheerfulness, almost of hilarity, about the long row of public spigots on the Largo da Carioca behind the Avenida Hotel at the end of the old Portuguese aqueduct, to which the morro dwellers descended for their water, as slaves once carried from the same spot the supply for all the city.
The unavoidable excursion for all visitors to Rio is, of course, the ascent of the “Sugar Loaf.” For centuries after the discovery of Brazil and the founding by Mem da Sá of the village of São Sebastião at the mouth of the putative “River of January” this enormous granite thumb, its sides so sheer that they give no foothold even to aggressive tropical vegetation, was considered unscalable. But in time this, like so many of mankind’s impressions, was proved false and by the middle of the last century it had evidently become a favorite feat to salute the city from the summit of the Pão d’Assucar. At any rate, in running through an old file of the Jornal do Commercio at the National Library I found in a number dated “Corte e Nitherohy, December 8, 1877,” among many appeals to “His Gracious Majesty in the shadow of whose throne we all take refuge,” the following item:
This morning the American Senhores—here followed four American names—set out at 5 A.M. and climbed to the top of our Pão d’Assucar, arriving at 7:11. This climbing of the Sugar Loaf is getting so frequent that before long no doubt someone will be asking for a concession for a line of bonds to that locality.