It took a full week to get our outfit through the customs, and it would have taken longer had nature not gifted me with an impatience capable of developing into profanity. Both our despachante and the endless gantlet of scornful officials which our case was forced to run were firm believers in the efficacy of “amanhã”—which is our old friend “mañana” of Spanish-America. How many sheets there were of laboriously hand-written documents, signed every which way by scores of insufferable loafers in the crowded Alfandega, in the intervals between smoking cigarettes, gossiping with friends, scowling with a haughty air upon whoever dared insist on attracting their attention, I have no means of computing. Typewriting is illegal in government business in Brazil, as in most of Latin-America; too many old fogies who know only how to scratch with a pen would have to be dispensed with to make way for such an innovation, and they are the backbone of political parties. In the end Linton had to deposit $700, which it was solemnly promised would be returned to him when the outfit was taken out of the country. Officially, the American dollar is worth 3$120 in Brazil. I immediately reduced the $700 to milreis at that rate, and Linton prepared to pay it. But, we were informed, the government accepts its own money only at 4$120 to the dollar! More figuring resulted in the discovery that we must entrust the Brazilian government with nearly three contos. Thirty-five per cent. of this deposit must be in gold. I began to compute this percentage by dividing by 4$120. The broker smiled at me as at an amusing child. When the milreis is figured back into gold, he explained, the dollar must be taken at 2$120. In other words, a Brazilian government official can demonstrate before your very eyes that thirty-five per cent. of seven hundred dollars is $480!
On the day after our outfit had at last been admitted to practice in Brazil, and the despachante’s seemingly exorbitant demands had been satisfied, one of us happened to be in his office when in dropped the bewhiskered old fossil who had “examined” our stuff. He was cheery and gay now, all dressed up, his sour and haughty official manner wholly gone, and he greeted everyone in the office like old and esteemed friends. After the first embrace or two he and the despachante sat down on opposite sides of the latter’s work table, their hands met once under it, then the fossil rose and went away with a satisfied smile scattered among his untrimmed whiskers and a hand lingering affectionately about one pocket.
Our next task was to hire a lawyer to get the trademark “Kinetophone” registered in Brazil in the name of the Edison Company. This matter is of prime importance to anyone introducing a new invention into the land of “amanhã.” It is not that the Brazilians are so inventive that they can readily imitate new contrivances; on the contrary, their mechanical genius is close to zero. But if he seldom invents or initiates, the “Brazie” is not lazy in the sense of complete indolence. He has the gambling instinct as well as the tropical desire to get through life as easily as possible, and laborious trickery seems to him a lesser effort than work. Being quick to appropriate the ideas of others, he is much given to stealing trademarks.
To tell the truth, the Argentine is worse than Brazil in this respect. There is a regular band of rascals in Buenos Aires who do nothing but steal and register foreign trademarks, while in Rio the traffic is at least unorganized. The laws of both countries give the first person to deposit a trademark in the national archives the sole right to use it. The mark may have belonged for half a century to an American or a European company; it suffices for some argentino or Brazilian to get it registered in his own name to prevent the legitimate owner from using it in that country without paying the thief blackmail. One of this gentry reads in a newspaper or a catalogue of some new foreign invention with a catchy name, rushes to register it as his own, and then lies in wait for the real owner. Even a trademark of the French government tobacco monopoly was stolen by an argentino and France was forced to pay him a handsome sum to get it back. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, Linton had found the Kinetophone already registered. But as the native whose eye had been attracted by the word had not understood what it represented, he had registered it as the name of a lechería, or milk-shop! Nevertheless Linton was compelled to pay him several hundred pesos for the privilege of using the word in his advertising or even in the theater, for the moment he put up a poster or ran a film and record in which the word “kinetophone” appeared, he could have been arrested and his outfit confiscated. It costs only 120$000, including lawyer’s fees, to have a trademark registered in Brazil, yet Americans have been blackmailed out of as much as 30,000$000 for neglecting to do so in time.
It turned out that the Kinetophone had been overlooked by Brazilian tricksters, but we had to wait three days to make sure of this before we dared publicly use the name. Meanwhile we had visited incognito the fifty cinemas then running in Rio, with a view to classifying them for future purposes; we had offered the “A. C. M.” a benefit performance later for the privilege of trying out our apparatus in their hall, and had set out in trio to make our first contract.
The chief moving-picture man of Brazil, with a string of cinemas in Rio and São Paulo and connections elsewhere, was a Spanish ex-bootblack. Like his colleagues and rivals, he informed us that it was not customary in Brazil to pay a fixed sum for such a novelty as we had to offer, that he “never risked a cent,” but that he would be willing to talk to us on a percentage basis. Then we found that the ex-bootblack had Missouri blood in his veins—perhaps because he had once driven mules—and that he would not believe in the drawing powers of Edison’s new invention until he had been shown. We had no misgivings as to our ability to show him, so we went out along the Mangue Canal, with its mirrored double row of royal palms on either bank, and rented for a day the old open-work wooden “Theatro Polytheama,” where we gave the doubting Thomases of the “movie” world, and a throng of newspaper men and “influential citizens,” a convincing private exhibition.
Next day we signed a “fifty-fifty” contract with the ex-bootblack to play for sixty days in his establishments in Rio, São Paulo and vicinity. By that time it was already September 7th, the first of Brazil’s two Independence Days, and “Tut” and I had taken up our abode on the Praia do Flamengo in the district called Larangeiras, or “Orange-trees.” It was nearer town than my former room; moreover, while I am duly exhilarated by the beauties of nature, no amount of scenery will make up for a constant diet of black beans and dry rice, surrounded on four sides by a constantly caterwauling Brazilian family dressed in soiled underwear or grease-spotted kimonos. As a matter of fact I lost nothing even of scenery by the change. We had a marvelous view of the “Sugar Loaf,” of all the great bay and its islands, of Nictheroy and the hazy outline of farther Brazil beyond. With our feet on our own railing we could see the steamers that might be bringing us news from home come slipping in at the harbor’s mouth, or watch a blood-red sunset on the cloud billows across the bay. We were four doors from the President’s palace of Cattete, and in the morning we could stroll across the Beira Mar in our bathing-suits to dive off the president’s private wharf and swim out to the little warship he always kept ready for the day when motives of health should force him to leave Brazil in a hurry. Men, women and children, with a towel over their shoulders, were familiar morning sights all along the Beira Mar—the women, of course, chiefly of foreign origin, for no real Brazilian lady would ever dream of bathing—at least in semi-public. Swimming was allowed along Rio’s magnificent driveway until nine in the morning, and some bathers were to be seen now and then at other hours, for, as the resplendent black policeman on our corner told us, while he watched several of them pass. “Oh, yes, they do bathe after nine, but it is against the law.”
Finally, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, the fourteenth of September, we gave the first public exhibition in Brazil of the Kinetophone—and before midnight we had given eleven of them. We had opened in the “Cinema Pathé” on the Avenida Central, in many ways the proudest and most fashionable motion-picture house not only of that sumptuous thoroughfare but of all Brazil; but our début was not attended with the customary formality. For a week Linton had been cooling his heels in the anteroom of the Cattete Palace, hoping to have the honor—and incidentally the prestige and publicity—of giving the president of the republic a private exhibition before disclosing the virtues of the new invention to the general public. But those were busy times in government circles, for, in addition to his manifold political troubles, the president had recently acquired an eighteen-year-old wife, so that at length we were forced to start without his blessing and the customary send-off of important novelties in Latin-American countries. By this time the World War was on in earnest and Brazil was loudly complaining of “A Crise,” or hard times; yet when our first day at the “Cinema Pathé” was ended, we found that the box-office had taken in considerably more than three million—reis! Even in real money that was better than a thousand dollars.
That very night Linton fled to Buenos Aires, leaving behind a document making me the “Brazilian concessionary” of the Kinetophone, and the weight of the whole enterprise fell abruptly on my shoulders. My first duty was to get our share of the opening day’s receipts. High noon having been agreed upon as the time to divide the previous day’s earnings, I called at that hour upon the general manager for Rio of the “Companhia Brazileira,” to get our half of the three million in cash—Brazilian cash, unfortunately—and carried it to the British bank. That was a daily formality thereafter, for while we had all due respect for the Brazilian and his business methods, we adopted the same viewpoint in dealing with him as the Scotchman who, asked for a recommendation by a retiring clerk, wrote:
“This is to certify that Sandy McCabe has worked for me the past twelve years. Regarding his honesty I can say nothing, as I never trusted him.”