“Suppose,” I said in my most casual tone, “suppose such a man as you are looking for would sign a contract for only six months, that he wanted his salary to start at once, instead of the first of September, and that on the day he signed he would need an advance of about five hundred thousand—er—reis to get a proper movie-magnate silk hat and diamond solitaire, what would be your private remarks when you reached the bathroom?”
“If he had your experience with South Americans, for instance,” came the prompt reply, “I’d have the contract ready within half an hour.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” I replied. “I just wanted to know, from a sociological point of view.”
Whereupon I set out once more and went over all the steamship offices and captains’ favorite bar-rooms with a fine-toothed comb, only to be more than ever convinced that my native land had lost all desire ever to see me again. So, late that evening, having paused at the edge of the impassable sea to shake a fist at the northern horizon, I stopped at Linton’s hotel to sign the contract he had just drawn up. By its terms I was to take full charge of the tour of the Kinetophone in Brazil, playing the entire country, except the states south of São Paulo that I had already seen, ending up on the Amazon six months later, and receiving my first month’s salary at once—as soon as the banks opened. Early next morning a messenger from the steamship-office I had most often pestered brought me word that if I would report at once I could sign on a ship sailing that evening for Pensacola, Florida; and later in the day I was offered a chance to go to New Orleans as a deck-hand. But then, it would have been a long walk from either of those ports to the place I called home.
During the remaining half of August I did little but spend my first month’s salary, chiefly among the tailors of Rio, at prices which made the advertisements in the New York papers look enticing. Linton had arranged his Buenos Aires business to run on without him until we could give the customary special performance before the president of the republic. This he hoped would be within a week, but he had reckoned without Brazilian red tape. The “outfit” arrived the day after I signed the contract,—eight large pieces of what looked like the baggage of a barn-storming company, and Wayne Tuthill of Long Island and the Edison factory. “Tut,” as it was natural he should be quickly dubbed, was a tall, handsome, ingenuous lad of twenty-four, of that clean-cut, clean-minded type of American youth which makes the libertine juventud of South America stand out in such striking contrast. He had never before been outside the United States—which I rated an asset—but had been the unhesitating choice of the company when Linton wired for their best practical electrician and operator who would accept a year’s contract.
On the following day I bade farewell to my little inside room in the German hotel down in the raw-coffee scented heart of Rio, and moved into a new home with what their “want ad” in the Jornal do Brasil described as a “family of all respectability.” There were hundreds of private families only too glad to patch out their income by taking in a “serious cavalheiro” as a paying guest. My new quarters were on the Praia de Botafogo, in the district out beyond the tiny praça and statue of José de Alencar. From my easy-chair I could look out across the bay at one end of the harbor and, though a headland cut off the “Sugar Loaf,” I had a splendid view of all the long, fantastic sky-line of Rio, now silhouetted against the sun-lighted clouds, now standing out in the brilliant sunshine as if barely a stone’s throw away. The room had a southern exposure, too, which is important in Rio, especially toward the end of August with summer coming on. True, there were a few drawbacks. I had to take board as well as lodging, though I was by no means sure that a glimpse into Brazilian family life would offset the heaviness of Brazilian family food. There were good electric lights, but no carpets or rugs, virtually unknown in Brazil, and not a suggestion either of bookshelf or wastebasket, while the table was a tiny thing implying that at most the occupant might have now and then to write a perfumed lover’s note.
Though it was some time before we got our show started, or even got the outfit ashore, we were a busy trio. First and foremost there was the Herculean problem of getting the thing through the customs. This was no such simple matter as going down to the ugly little green Alfandega building on the water front, opening the boxes, paying our duty, and taking them away. Things are not done in that breathless manner in Brazil. Knowing that it costs more to get a moving-picture film into Brazil than to buy it in Europe or the United States, we were prepared to be held up by the mulatto footpads masquerading as a government, if only they would have it over with at once and let us go our way with whatever we might have left. What we needed first of all, it seemed, was a despachante, a native customs broker, familiar with all the ins and outs of the laws on import duties—and an expert in circumventing them. But could we not attend to this matter ourselves, seeing there were three of us in the prime of life, two speaking Spanish and one more or less Portuguese, and with nothing else whatever to do? We could not. We must have the services of a regular despachante—just why, we learned all in due season. The broker, however, did not rob us of occupation; in fact, we were still permitted to do almost all the work. We spent several hours one day hunting out our boxes amid an orderless jumble of many ship-loads of warehoused merchandise and wrestling them out into plain sight. The rest of the afternoon we wasted in coaxing the swarm of supercilious officials who lolled about the place to examine them. They paid us not the slightest attention, until our despachante came to vouch for our existence. Then one of them “examined” the eight boxes by gingerly lifting half of the wooden cover of one of them, glancing at the unopened inner tin casing, and ordering the covers nailed down again. This, however, was only a preliminary formality, and while our broker prepared for the next moves in their regular, deliberate order, we contained ourselves in such patience as we possessed.
Meanwhile we learned many interesting details about Brazilian customs laws and those who enforce them. Portland cement, we found, pays duty on gross weight. More than half the barrels of such a shipment had been broken in transit, or by the wharf stevedores who landed it, and all vestige of cement had been lost. The customs men carefully gathered the scattered barrel-staves together, weighed them, and charged the assignee duty on them as cement! Regular merchants in Rio have a despachante, we learned, who does all the customs business of his client at a fixed rate of twelve milreis a box, large or small. If he succeeds in avoiding any part of the duty due, the merchant pays him half that amount as a reward. Thus there arrives a box of twenty pairs of shoes, on which the duty would be sixty dollars. The despachante arranges with some of his friends in the customhouse to let the box in for twenty dollars, and the assignee pays that amount in duty and gives the broker, in addition to his customary twelve milreis, one half of the forty dollars saved. The Brazilians have no word for bribery; they use the expression comer (to eat). A merchant who has been forced to pay full legal duty on a bill of goods asks his despachante anxiously, referring to the strict new customs official who passed on it, “Elle já come?” To which, perhaps, comes the sad answer, “Não, ainda não come” (He doesn’t eat—yet). A few weeks later the merchant sends the honest man a few bottles of perfumery or some equally welcome present. If he sends them back, he is not yet “ripe.” But at length word goes round, “Já come” (Now he eats), and the merchants whose goods pass through his hands heave a sigh of relief.
“When your shipment arrives,” a foreigner long engaged in business in Rio explained, “and the duty is large, say twenty or thirty contos, you go to the customhouse yourself and say to the conferente, ‘I shall be in my office from three to four to-morrow.’ Then you go away. The conferente is the official examiner; his assistant, who opens and closes the boxes and does the other manual labor, is called his “fiel” (faithful one). You cannot be a successful merchant in Rio without being on friendly terms with your conferente and his “fiel.” When his work ends, at three, he drops in to see you before he goes home, and the matter is fixed up to the satisfaction of both parties. If you try to fight the system you are up against it. Only half the articles that come into Brazil are on the tariff schedule, and if a conferente has it in for you he will decide that your declaration is made out wrong, no matter how you make it out, and will fine you for trying to flimflam the government—and a certain percentage of all fines go to the man who discovers the ‘irregularity.’ Then before goods leave the customhouse they must have the government consumption-tax stamps on them, and there is another fine chance to ‘eat.’ The man who was at the head of the stamp-selling down there for thirty-two years was recently retired on a pension and written up in the papers as ‘a life-long and faithful servant of the Republic’; yet ever since I have lived here he could be ‘fixed’ at from one fourth to one half the legal price of the stamps. The young fellow who now has his job doesn’t ‘eat’ yet, so all the merchants are cursing him, and his fellow-officials accuse him of fazendo fita—of showing off. But word is going round now that he is beginning to ‘eat’.”
Beautiful scenery evidently does not beautify character. The dishonest officials cannot plead the excuse of necessity, for their legal income is high. Inspectors get three contos, conferentes eight hundred to a thousand milreis a month, which surely is generous to men who work only from eleven to three, with much “tolerance” as to absences during that time and at least sixty-five legal holidays a year. “Tariff legislation,” says an outspoken Brazilian publicist, “more than any other one thing, has been the source of the corruption that has rotted public service, and in the growth of the sinister privileges fostered by the ‘protective’ system there is almost sole responsibility for the widespread perversion of ideals.”