Finally, if this happens to be your lucky day, it may occur to the attendant to put your book-slip into the automatic tube at his elbow and send it off to the stacks. When the employees at that end of the tube get through discussing politics or the lottery and send the book back by automatic carrier, along with the “bulletin” signed by the man who “executed the request,” a negro attendant wanders over to your seat with it. Then you quickly discover that though the huge volume is devoted to everything from “Gl” to “Gy” there is not a single Gomes in it. This rather surprises you, since Gomes is as widespread in Brazil as Smith in the United States or Cohen in New York, and at least one of that name must have been illustrious at least in the Brazilian sense. But by this time it is four-thirty, and the library takes a recess at five—that is, everyone is ejected and the doors locked by that hour—so you give it up.
Next day you discover quite by accident, your eyes having fallen upon a frieze at the “Theatro Phenix,” that the musician’s name was Carlos Gomes. As soon as the library opens—at ten in theory and about ten-forty in fact—you hasten back and go through the same tape-wound misery again to get the fourth volume of illustrious Brazilians, and wallow for hours through pages upon pages of “Carlos” without finding a single one of them answering to the name of Gomes. Days afterward, when the opera has come and gone, a Carioca acquaintance casually remarks that the man who wrote it was Antonio Carlos Gomes, but that he never used the first name! Back to the library to flounder once more in the ubiquitous red tape, and late that evening you grasp the “A” volume of illustrious Brazilians and finally at nine-thirty—Eureka! “Antonio Carlos Gomes, Paulista, musician, born in Campinas, and ...” and just then you are “put into the eye of the street,” for the library closes at ten and no Brazilian official is so absurd as to let the closing hour catch him still in the act of closing. Wandering homeward or out along the Avenida you muse on how convenient it would be if strangers in our Congressional Library had to look up the 28th president of the United States under the name “Thomas.”
Though at least two-thirds of the people of Brazil do not read or write—more than half because they cannot and the rest because they have no occasion or no desire to do so—Brazilians of the small “upper” class are more cultured in the narrow, bookish sense of the word than the average American of similar rating. “Everyone” knows everyone else in this restricted little circle in Rio, and they retain many of the old-fashioned opinions and manners of the days when the capital was called “the court” and was overrun by the locust swarm of courtiers from the old world. Embracing is still the knightly form of greeting between males in this higher Fluminense society, where it is the custom for a man to kiss a lady’s hand—or glove—upon being presented, and in which young men often give their fathers similar marks of recognition in returning from or departing on a journey of any length. Many of this caste are still monarchists, at least at heart, though they usually find it to their advantage outwardly to acquiesce in, or even to show enthusiasm for, the new form of government.
I attended several “social functions” in Rio—always from a discreet distance, “a mocidade,” which is the same foppish muster of youthful “intellectuals” that is known as “la juventud” in Spanish-America or “la jeunesse dorée” in France, was trying to establish a “Little Theater” for the exclusive use of the élite, “with a view to rehabilitating our histrionic art, so debilitated to-day.” Now and then they perpetrated amateur plays which fortunately were not exposed to the scorn of the general public. One afternoon they arranged a “literary program” for the purpose of raising a monument to Arthur Azevedo, Brazilian dramatist and writer of clever but salacious short stories. It began at four in the handsome new “Theatro Phenix,” usually sacred to the “movies,” and actually got started shortly before five. Being primarily a social event, there were only four of us up in the gallery. On the stage below, two young men in ultra-correct afternoon dress, creased to the minute, displayed themselves to a select female audience in recitations from Arthur’s stories (edited) and plays, with extravagant and unnatural gestures. A self-confident lady who was just recovering from being young, moaned through half a mile of something in French—what this had to do with the glory of Arthur I did not catch, high up under the eaves, unless it was meant to show how well the élite of Rio have copied Parisian manners—and finally there was given a one-act play by the same monumental author, which might have been very funny had the acoustics of the house permitted us gallery slaves to catch more than the reflected mirth of the audience. Through it all a dozen of “our greatest literary geniuses” pranced about the stage before the admiring audience on one excuse or another, while two photographers toiled assiduously taking flashlights from all possible angles of the correctly creased afternoon trousers.
Still another day found me at a soirée musicale in the old “Theatro Lyrico,” back of its newer and more aristocratic municipal successor. This rather breathless old barn was the principal theater of Brazil under the monarchy, and still retains unchanged the imperial loge, a whole furnished apartment in Louis Philippe style. There was only a slight negro strain in the audience, but the orchestra of fifty pieces ran the whole gamut of human complexions. The recital by a pianist still in her teens easily made up for all the tedium I had undergone in attending other “social functions” in the Brazilian capital. As Senhorita Guiomar Novaes has since won high praise in our own land and in Europe, I am pleased to find in my notes on that day’s performance the prophecy, “Here at least is one Brazilian who will prove of world caliber.”
One of the points that distinguish Brazil from Spanish-America is its divergencies of religion. Here, too, the church got in on the ground floor. As early as 1590 the Benedictine monks founded a monastery on the summit of the Morro São Bento; soon afterward the Capucines established themselves on top of the Morro do Castello, and in general the churchmen showed great predilection for the high places of Rio, perhaps to get that much farther away from the wicked world. For centuries Rome ruled Brazil with her customary profitable sternness. Scarcely two centuries ago Protestants attempting to spread their propaganda in the country were roughly treated, and priests publicly burned in the praças of Bahia and other cities the Bibles and tracts offered by American and other colporteurs. To this day and in the cathedral of Rio itself one may find evidences of medieval fanaticism—women of the poorer class making the circuit of the church on their knees, or kissing everything in sight, including floor, walls, and all the wounds of a life-size plaster-of-Paris crucifix under a thin shroud. A few of the hilltops, too, are still sacred to the cloistered life, but the church has lost much of its monopoly and is much less militant and omnipresent than on the West Coast. It is the custom of Brazilian men, even in street-cars or trains going full speed, to raise their hats, often in unison, when they pass a funeral or a cemetery; but the same reverence in passing a church door is by no means so general, and is usually confined to the part-negro portion of the population. Indeed, it is almost unusual to meet a priest, monk, or nun in the streets of Rio, and politically the church is almost an outcast.
Yet the capital pulsates with many religions. The transplanted faiths of the many races that make up the modern Carioca are so numerous that, if we may believe a native writer, “every street has a different temple and every man a different belief.” There are several sects of African fetish worshippers, Methodists, Maronites, Baptists, Physiolatras, Presbyterians, Satanists or worshippers of the devil, Congregationalists, “Drinkers of Blood,” “Brothers,” Adventists, Jews, followers of the “black mass,” Swedenborg disciples of the New Jerusalem, exorcists, literary pagans, sacerdotistas of the future, descendants of the Queen of Sheba, worshipers of the sea, and defenders of many other exotic dogmas, not to mention a large building back of the Avenida Central occupied by the “A.C.M.” (Associação Christão de Moços), in other words, the Y.M.C.A. As far away as the Uruguayan border I had heard an unfrocked priest lecture on one of the newer faiths of Brazil and was astonished to hear the loud and general applause whenever he made a thrust at the fanaticism or immorality of South American priesthood. Up in the Andes he would have proceeded along that tack in public for about two minutes before having a pressing engagement with the undertaker. In Santa Maria my astonishment was as great when I passed an imposing Protestant stone church on one of the principal streets and heard the minister—speaking his Portuguese with a thick German accent—openly preaching his particular doctrine to a large Brazilian congregation. Freedom of worship reigned indeed; in that morning’s newspaper there was a complaint from a town not far away that it could get no mail from Friday until Monday, because its postmaster was an “Adventista do 7º Dia!”
The cult of the sea is found chiefly among the colonies of fishermen scattered about Guanabara Bay. Some of these will under no circumstances leave the sea or its beaches. Their children swim at two and go fishing with the adults at ten. The moon enters considerably into their fanaticism, and their veneration for and fear of the “Mother of Water” is inferior only to their dread of the police, before whom, or in the presence of non-conformists, they pretend to be strict Catholics. One-fifth of all the spiritualist propaganda in the world is published in Brazil, according to a native who made an investigation of the question. This superstition is so widespread that men high in government and business circles have been known to refuse to take a street car which the rabble has left empty because “it is full of bad spirits.” Synagogues are numerous in Rio, for there is a large Jewish colony, running through all the gamut of society as well as of commerce, and widely varying in orthodoxy and religious rites. There are rich Jews in business along the Avenida who spend their winters “playing the markets” and their summers up in Petropolis. In the less showy streets live swarms of poor Armenian, Moroccan, Russian, Austrian, Turkish, French, English, German, Arabian, and even African Jews, all engaged in their customary occupation of buying and selling something or other. About the Praça Tiradentes and in its radiating ruas seethe Jewish women of the streets and their male companions and exploiters, the caftenes, from all the ghettoes of Europe.
There are said to be more than eighty thousand Syrians in Brazil, of whom by no means all wander through the streets slapping together a pair of sticks. Down about the Rua da Alfandega and the lower point of the city “Turks” own important business houses; in the colony are clever craftsmen and even a few doctors, politicians, and journalists. More than half the Brazilian Syrians are Maronite Christians from the Lebanon; the rest are orthodox Mohammedans of somewhat lower social strata, who earn their primitive livelihood as carregadores, carriers of mankind’s material burdens, as shop-servants, and as petty peddlers. Though many of these “Turks” find the difference in language a great barrier to their native loquacity as bargainers, their qualities are near enough those of the Brazilians to cause them to fit quickly into their environment.
Mohammedanism is not confined to the Syrians in the religious medley that characterizes the capital of Brazil. Thousands of former slaves are more or less followers of the Prophet of Medina, though barely aware of it themselves. The negroes shipped out to Brazil in the olden days were from many little nations scattered through the far interior of Africa; hence their religions were as varied as their tongues. But just as the general language of that continent, the cubá, suffices for simple conversation throughout Africa or among the blacks of Rio, so the negro religions practiced in the Brazilian capital may be roughly divided into two general classes. The alufás are more or less Mohammedan, with a background of African superstitions; the orixás are a still more primitive sect upon which the influence of the prophet was never brought. Outwardly, of course, nearly all the blacks are good Catholics, but their saints and gods have been crossed with those of the church until it is a wise negro who knows an African from a Catholic deity. Then, too, the unadulterated fetish worship imported with the slaves still persists, and Obeah and voodoo practices sometimes give evidence of their existence. According to a reputable native writer there are in the everyday crowd that surges through the Avenida, medicine men, magicians, voodoo chiefs, feiticeiros who will agree to mix a love philter or to bring misfortune upon an enemy by mumbling an incantation over a concoction of rat tails, cat’s head, finger and toe nails, and the innocent passer-by would never dream what absurd African rites are taking place behind more than one commonplace façade. There are “holy men” living in the very heart of Rio surrounded by a swarm of servant-women with whom they live in polygamy as in the wilds of the black continent, yet many of whom dress for public appearance quite like their Christian fellow-countrymen, play “bicho,” and die leaving to their heirs many contos of reis. Negro Brazilians who know French and even English, who have been educated abroad and have in some cases become senators, or presidents of states, “men to whom I lift my hat and with whom I shake hands,” in the words of the native investigator, still cling secretly to the old African superstitions. There are rich Brazilians who send their sons to Africa to study the religions of their forefathers, and traffic between Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco and several West African ports is heavy.