Two points of superiority Brazilian newspapers have over our own—they are not besmeared with the alleged “funny pages” of paint-pot cartoonists, nor do they “feature” divorce cases or any other form of marital misdemeanor, possibly because domestic infidelity is too commonplace to be “news.” On the other hand, they pander to that ultra-morbid streak in the Brazilian temperament which African blood seems to give it. Large front-page photographs of the victims of suicide or revolting crimes are the joy of Carioca editors and readers, the “action of the crime” being posed for in all its gruesome details by models if pictures of the real characters are not available.
Speaking of crimes, there is a good police system in Rio, with several excellent departments and a detective bureau that makes use of the latest European science in the detection and capture of criminals. The prevalence of warnings against “batadores de carteiras,” or pickpockets, is a thermometer of the criminal element. This class is so numerous as to have a thieves’ slang of its own, called “caló” by those who use it, or, in the pamphlet vocabulary published by the police department, “Giria dos Gatunos Cariocas.” Many of the expressions in this criminal dialect of Rio would be Greek even to the man whose native tongue is Portuguese, though a few of them are localisms in more general use. Not a few of the words in the pamphlet grew familiar to my ear before I left Brazil. I learned that “Noah’s Ark” is a pawnshop; to “perform an autopsy” is to go through the pockets of a person fallen in the street; “to strike thirty-one” is to die; a “bond” (in the legitimate language a street-car) is a group of persons; to travel “by Italian bond” is to go on foot; a policeman is a “button” or a “cloud”; a mounted policeman is “a four-footed cardinal,” and “convent” means the Penitentiary. To “give charity” is to kill a person while robbing him; to “disinfect the zone” is to disappear from a given haunt; a patrol-wagon is either a “merry widow” or a “chicken coop”; a “nose” is a person (“He came with three noses”), the real nose being a “smoke-box.” A “soft” is a mattress; a lawyer, a “talking-machine”; “synagogue” stands for head, and “Big Papa” means the President of Brazil. Naturally money has many pseudonyms among the class that is always seeking to lay illegal hands upon it, among them “wind,” “light,” and “arame” (literally, brass or wire). The expression “falta arame” (brass is lacking) is widespread. A ragged youth frequently sidles up to the passer-by, rubbing his stomach and asserting, “Falta arame pa’ matar o bicho” (literally, “money is lacking to kill the worm”); what he really means to say is that he needs money to stop the gnawings of hunger.
It is a common human trait for those somewhat loose in their morals to be doubly stern in outward manners. The Brazilian, even of the more haughty class, is inclined to be lax at home, though in public outward appearance is everything to him. One showy suit of clothes for street and social wear seems to leave the average Carioca willing to spend the rest of his life in his underclothes. It is no unusual experience when calling upon a man to be asked on some pretext to wait until he has put on his outer garments; while among the women the wrapper habit extends from the highest to the lowest ranks of society. The tropical heat partly accounts for this sartorial laxity, but in many ways it typifies the national habit of mind. At home the Brazilian, particularly of the fair sex, can sit for hours in that utterly blank-minded idleness of the Oriental; only when they come out to stroll the Avenida or the Ouvidor late in the afternoon do most of the women put on real clothes and dress their hair. Among the humbler class, the negroes and poor whites of the morros and the narrow valleys between them, or of the one-story tenement houses known as cortiços, there is but slight sense of privacy and much of the family dishabillé and domestic activities are freely exhibited to the public gaze.
Outside his home circle, however, the Brazilian is more than exacting in such matters. In public a man must not only be fully dressed, but is somewhat looked down upon if he indulges in any of those lighter garbs of the “Palm Beach” variety that seem so in keeping with the Brazilian climate. Especially if he is a politician, a business man, a member of high society, or has a desire to attain to any of these categories, must he wear a heavy dark suit and under no circumstances leave off his waistcoat. To be without a coat is a criminal offense in many cities; in the smallest village that has any personal pride, even among many people living in the wilderness of the sertão, it is atrociously bad form. The man riding with a negro functionary in the far interior of the country must cling to his coat if he would not make his companion an enemy for life. One of our recent presidents still has a low rating in certain parts of interior Brazil because he entered a mud village of unwashed, illiterate, largely illegitimate mulattoes in his shirt-sleeves. When several of his party landed in Bahia they were met by a courteous policeman and told either to go back to the ship and get their coats or buy new ones in the shops. Yet in that very city hundreds of men habitually wear no shirt or other garment under an often wide-open coat. More remarkable still, while a man in his shirt-sleeves is denied admittance to some of the most sorry establishments, it is entirely comme il faut for him to come down to the early morning meal in the best hotels in his pajamas. The negro captain of a little steamer far up in Matto Grosso sent word to an American prospector of my acquaintance, who appeared on deck in the latest model of soft shirt, with belt and cravat, that he must not leave his cabin without his coat, yet the majority of the native passengers were lounging about in carelessly buttoned pajamas and kimonos, sockless slippers, the women with their hair down their backs. During my first days in the country a Brazilian aviator made the first non-stop flight from São Paulo to Rio, breaking all South American records for speed and distance. The newspapers shouted with glee at this splendid feat by a “son of the country,” yet one and all commented in caustic editorials on his shocking bad taste in leaving his coat behind and landing at Rio in his shirt sleeves. The street-cars of Rio and every other city of size have at least two classes. The fares are not greatly different, but unless a man is wearing coat, collar, necktie, real shoes—not tamancos, or any other form of sandal—and socks, he must ride second-class. Nor may he carry with him in the higher form of public conveyance anything larger than a portfolio.
Rio gives the impression of being overcrowded. With emancipation the ex-slaves flocked into town in quest of an easier livelihood than that on the plantations, and immigration streams clog here. The swarms of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, hawkers, adult newsboys, two drivers for each automobile, the crowds frequently seen struggling for jobs, to say nothing of the plethora of government functionaries, suggest an oversupply of human beings. More than once in strolling along the wharves I came upon a hundred men fighting for work where twenty were needed to coal or stevedore a ship, often standing up to their knees in sea-water along the Caes Pharoux battling for a seat in the tender waiting to carry the score to their labors. Nor were they “bums” either, but muscular, honest workmen, nearly all of the Caucasian race; while just across the way indolent mulatto government employees lolled in the shade of the customhouse as if they had settled down for life and need never again exert themselves. A “pull” with the foreman who chooses the workmen for a given job is usually essential to being taken on, and he naturally expects his “rake-off.” One day a riot broke out among these wharf laborers; two “fiscals” of the stevedores’ union were killed by members who claimed they had been discriminated against; and the newspapers treated the matter as if it were a frequent occurrence.
Not the least picturesque of the many strange types of Rio are her street vendors, who pass all day long in almost constant procession. The Brazilian woman is not fond of shopping, or at least of going to market. She has the Moorish custom of keeping to the house; she feels most comfortable in négligé, and public appearance requires elaborate full dress; nor does the blazing sunshine invite to unnecessary exertion. This tendency to stay home, and the excess of men over jobs, has given rise to innumerable street-hawkers, who go from door to door, selling both the necessities and the luxuries of life. In the early morning, often before sunrise in the winter months of July or August, one is often awakened by a cry of “Verdura! Verdureiro!” and looks out to see the “vegetable-man” jogging along under a load of green-stuff that would break an ordinary man’s back. Then barely has one dropped off again before there comes a bellow of “Vassoura! Vassoureiro! ’asooooreeeeiro!” from the brush-and-broom man, who marches by all but lost under an arsenal of potential cleanliness, with a side-line of baskets and woven baby-chairs to complete his concealment. Meanwhile from down the street comes the increasing wail of “’llinha! Gallinha Gorda! (Chicken! Fat Chicken!),” and past the iron grilled window shuffles a barefoot man with two large baskets at the ends of a pole over his shoulder, or on the back of a horse or mule, offering housewives their day’s roast or broiler. In Rio people always buy their chickens on the hoof and avoid the risks of cold storage. Then comes the “Peixe! Camarão!” man, whom we might call the fish-and-shrimp seller, pausing here and there to cut up a fish on one of the round board covers of his two flat baskets. He disappears earlier in the day than the others, however, for seafood exposed after nine or ten in the morning to the unshaded heat of Rio is likely to make a greater appeal to the purchaser’s olfactory than to his optic nerves.
Not all hawkers cry their wares. Some have, instead, their own special noise-makers. The cake-and-sweetmeat man, with his large glass-sided showcase on top of his head, strides along, blowing a whistle that looks like half a dozen cartridge shells of varying size stuck together, or like the conventional Pan’s Pipes, and the shrilly musical sound these emit causes every child within hearing to canvass its pockets, parents, or friends for a tostão. When a customer appears the cake-man squats from under his load, depositing it on the pair of crossed sicks in the shape of a saw-horse that he carries under one arm, and the bargaining begins. The tin-man goes by, carrying a great stack of pots and pans and calling attention to his existence by shaking a frying-pan fitted with a clapper. The scissors-grinder stops every few yards to bring every nerve to the top of the teeth by running an iron hoop over his emery-wheel, in the hope of attracting trade. The man who sells plants and flowers comes along, incessantly and regularly beating with a light stick the side of the blooming box on his head. The seller of azucarillas, the ephemeral sweets of Spain, is as familiar a figure as in the Iberian peninsula; the “ice cream” merchant marches about with what looks like an oxygen or gas cylinder on his back, playing a steel triangle to call attention to his little gambling wheel, guaranteed to teach children to gamble early in life by taking a chance on his effervescent delicacies. A few vendors have a limited district, with grouped customers, especially the bread-man who, with his great basket on his head and the stool to hold it under one arm, has only to station himself in the pateo, or courtyard, of a cortiço to be surrounded by a clamoring throng, children snatching the long loaves faster than their parents can buy them and rushing excitedly into their one- or two-room homes with the bread hugged tightly against their soiled chests. But the majority tramp all day long, some treading the hot cobbles in bare feet, some wearing the noiseless alpargatas of Spain and Portugal, many scraping along the cement pavements in wooden tamancos, invading every nook and corner of the city and punctuating the whole day long with their cries and signals. With rare exceptions they are Portuguese or Spanish—it would be beneath the dignity of a native Brazilian to carry things about in the hot sunshine; but the clothing trade is almost entirely in the hands of “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrian, who peddles his wares in every corner of the great republic in which the human race sprouts. In Rio this perambulating clothing-shop announces himself by slapping together two lath-like sticks, making a noise similar to, yet entirely distinct from, that of the plant-and-flowers man. From daylight until dark he plods, to wander back to his noisome little den when night settles down without a slap left in his arm. During his first year or two he carries his goods on his back, and looks at a distance like a walking department store. But by the second year he has usually scrimped enough to buy an elaborately decorated chest of drawers and to hire a youthful or newly-arrived fellow-countryman to carry it, while he wanders along with nothing to do but slap his sticks together and engage in the long-winded bargaining which is unavoidable in any financial dealing with the Brazilian housewives peeping out through their window gratings. But the “Turk” is a more clever bargainer than the best of them, and within three or four years he is almost certain to have advanced to the ownership of a little pushcart and by the end of five years it is a strange mishap if he has not set up a shop, become a local nabob, and driven native competitors entirely out of his district.
This does not by any means exhaust the list of vendors who add their noises to the general hubbub of Rio. No one who has spent a week there could forget the cambistas, the lottery-ticket sellers of all ages and both sexes who invade the inmost privacy with their raucous howls, or the never-ending cries of newsboys, some of whom spread their wares on the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Central, while others race in and out of the narrow streets on either side of it. Nor should one overlook, even if it were possible, the creaking of enormous carts, their two wheels twelve feet or more in diameter, with which an immense log or a granite boulder is transported through the streets to the accompaniment of hoarse-voiced cursing of the mule-driver in charge.
If one grows weary of wandering Rio’s sun-bathed and colorful avenues and ruas, there are indoor places worth seeing. The National Library, for instance, is a magnificent building, at least in its material and inanimate aspects. The human element is somewhat less perfect. The president himself could not take a book out of the library; everyone knows he would be sure to keep it or hock it. Being scribbled by hand, the card catalogue is by no means easily legible; it is set so near the floor that the reader of American height all but breaks his back in reaching it, and there are so many authors of the same name that to hunt up a given one is a serious task. Then there is a splendid Brazilian system, evidently imported from Portugal or some still less respectable region, under which directories, biographies, and the like are always arranged in alphabetical order according to the first name.
Let us suppose that the only Brazilian opera of any importance, “O Guaraní,” is soon to be given in the Municipal Theater, and that you wish to know something about the man who wrote it. The announcement mentions that his name is Gomes. You enter the sumptuous hall of the library, hat in hand, wait for the negro attendant and his white bosom companion to stop gossiping and give you a hat check, then you climb to the next floor and, doubled up like a jackknife, claw through the catalogue until you get the serial number of a biographical dictionary in many volumes, containing the life story of the “Most Illustrious Brazilians”—of whom there seem to be millions. Having filled out a “bulletin” explaining which book you wish to consult, giving author, title, the date, the “number of the set,” the “indication of the catalogue,” your own name, address, and other detailed personal information back to the fourth generation, you enter the sumptuous reading-room. Or, more exactly, you wait patiently at the door thereof until you are handed a senha, a slip of paper which gives you the right to enter and—if you can still produce it—to exit. That in hand, you choose a seat and write the number of it on the “bulletin,” hand this to the gossiping tar-brushed attendant, and go and sit down. The attendant finishes his gossip, looks at the slip, and carefully puts it under a book on his desk. By and by he ends another gossip, picks up the book, is astonished to find a slip under it, reads it carefully, and puts it under another book on another part of the desk. Meanwhile you cannot go to look up the books you might want to read at some future date, because you cannot leave the reading-room without giving up your senha with the attendant’s “o.k.” on it. You cannot bring along a book of your own to read meantime, because any Brazilian knows that you would bring some worthless pamphlet and manage to exchange it for a valuable library volume. There is nothing to do but sleep, or study the scattering of fellow-sufferers in the reading-room, where you are sure to be struck by the absence of women. An old maid did enter the library one day while I was there, but she was stared at so steadily that neither she nor the men in the room did any reading.