CHAPTER XII
A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL
Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable old station of the Central Railway of Brazil. Having a suitcase now and lacking time to wait for the second-class trailer in which persons so plebeian as to carry baggage may ride, the trip by taxi cost me—I mean Linton—9$600 instead of 400 reis! Nor was that the only shock I got at the station. On my journey northward from Uruguay, with my worldly possessions in a bundle under one arm, the fact that the railroads of Brazil have no free baggage allowance had scarcely caught my attention. But now I was responsible for an outfit consisting of half a dozen large trunks and an enormous phonograph horn in its special case, totaling about a thousand pounds. Hence the seriousness of the discovery that for the single day’s trip from Rio to São Paulo personal baggage paid 256 reis a kilogram and all other kinds 400! No wonder Brazilians drag into the trains with them all manner of strange and awkward bundles, for though any portable amount of hand-luggage is transported free of charge in the passenger-cars, everything else must pay almost its weight in human flesh. In fact, a fat man can travel more cheaply on Brazilian railways than can his equally heavy trunk.
There are private, state, and federal railways in Brazil, and the “Estrada de Ferro Central” belongs to the last category, being operated by the national government. I had already seen public ownership of railroads working—or failing to work—in Chile, however, and was therefore not so surprised at some of the manifestations of the system as a complete stranger might have been. One quickly learned that government railways are operated primarily for the convenience of trainmen and government officials, and that the public is privileged to fight for any space that may be left after these have been accommodated. Our cars were as sadly down at heel as any I had seen since leaving Chile, yet in the station from which we departed stood an official train of the “Administração e Inspecção” that was the last word in transportable sumptuousness, its sides almost wholly of plate-glass and its interior fitted with every luxury. In this, and others like it, government railway managers and higher officials not only flit about at will but carry a host of political friends and their relatives down to the fourteenth cousinship. The “Central” shows a firm belief, too, in the modern trade-union principle of never letting one man do what four men might pretend to be doing, so that not only do useless higher officials swarm but the actual railroad men are little less numerous than the passengers.
Notwithstanding my rule never to go over the same ground twice when it can possibly be avoided, I was returning to São Paulo because our contract with the “Companhia Brazileira” specified that we present the Kinetophone there during the month of October. The night train would have been more comfortable and a bit swifter, but I had never been overland between Brazil’s two largest cities; besides, I wished to have things prepared for our estrea when “Tut” and Carlos arrived next morning. The day train covers the 310 miles in twelve hours—at least on the time-table. For the first of them it was but one of a constant procession of trains in both directions, not only the “Central” but the private-owned and contrastingly efficient “Leopoldina” railway maintaining incessant service to the suburbs. Then we took to climbing from the coast to the great interior plateau, more or less following a small river sprawling over rocks and boulders, passing many tunnels that brought out the incompetence of the train gas-lamps, a low-wooded valley sinking below us as we rose ever higher. Once out of this and above the coastlands, we turned southwest across an almost flat plain. By no means covered with the jungle of the imagination, it was dry and bushy, sometimes wholly bare, occasionally somewhat grass-grown. Reddish trails along which wandered mules and donkeys, and now and then one of the humped sacred bulls of India between the thills of a heavy cart, climbed away across scrub-covered, mist-touched foothills or low ridges here and there punctuated with decapitated palm trees. The soft coal that Brazil imports for her railroads abetted the dustiness of the season in making the trip uncomfortable. Beyond Cruzeiro, already in the state of São Paulo, huge dome-shaped ant-hills of hard, reddish earth began to litter the brownish landscape. The low hills had been ruthlessly despoiled of their natural adornment by the systematic incendiarism of man, who for long stretches had made his destruction of the primeval forest absolute. It struck a note of sadness, this devastation of the beauties of nature for utilitarian purposes, without even the excuse of necessity, since the forest had been destroyed merely to save the trouble of cultivating more intensively and by more modern methods lands that had become weary from overwork and lack of fertilizing nourishment—and because of the native superstition that soil which does not produce forest will not grow anything else. Long lack of rain had left the whole country powder-dry and water-longing; even the palm-trees drooped as if tired and thirsty. In folds of the earth clumps of bedraggled banana plants, sometimes with a few choked coffee bushes beneath them, called attention to primitive huts before which a black colonist, squatting aimlessly on the ground, and his numerous brood offered to the sun’s caresses skins which it cannot tan. It is a nonchalant life at best where the earth gives a maximum of return for a minimum of exertion. Here and there a bit of late spring plowing was going on, giving the ground a suggestion of the same nudity as the happy-go-lucky inhabitants. Now and then, from the summit of a ridge, we caught sight of an old plantation house with a long series of walls behind which only a generation ago were herded troops of negro slaves, and about it vast coffee-fields abandoned for want of labor. Everywhere was an air of do-nothing poverty and ruination, coupled with a fatalistic surrender to circumstances. The unimportant towns along the way, little less thirsty and weary of life, seemed to be inhabited only by non-producers, ranging from priests to shopkeepers. At length the thick dust-and-heat haze of day turned purple with evening, a heavy sun went down somewhere to the west, leaving a great red blotch irregularly radiating on the horizon, the night grew almost cold and, two hours behind time, we rumbled into the glass-domed Luz station.
São Paulo was not what I had left it ten weeks before. Not only had the drought made it dry and dusty and even more hazy than Rio, but the war had brought its industry almost to a standstill. Swarms of workmen without work competed with hungry boys for the chance to sell a few newspapers. In the poorer section a serious epidemic of typhoid had broken out; the hotels that had seemed numerous before, now, with only a guest or two each, appeared trebly so; “actresses” who had always had a native “friend” to help out, had taken to suicide because even the amigo could no longer pay their rent. The very cafés concertos in which rich fazendeiros from the coffee-growing interior had been wont to squander fortunes on blond charmers from across the sea were succumbing one by one to the “brutal crisis.” Everywhere the city had a sad air and many of those one met were too sad to speak; even the weather was gloomy, in the face of approaching summer. The sun was rarely seen; palm-trees shivered in a cold wind; disheveled banana plants huddled together as if for mutual warmth. Professionally the “industrial capital” looked unpromising indeed. The Paulista had not yet come to realize that the war was really the opportunity for a land with such vast resources, so far barely touched by commercial enterprise, to shake off borrowing and indolence and become one of the wealthy and powerful nations of the earth.
Approached from the federal capital, São Paulo showed at a glance the effect on the human race of even a slight difference in climate. Though not appreciably farther from the equator than Rio, and barely half a mile above sea-level, its atmosphere was wholly different. The negro element is conspicuously less and seems to be decreasing, so that a century hence, São Paulo will have perhaps no more of the African strain than the Portuguese have now. The average citizen one saw in the business streets, or in the palatial homes of coffee kings and captains of industry—not to mention successful politicians—out along the Avenida Paulista and in other flowery and fashionable suburbs had much less in common with the motley Carioca than with the people of southwestern Europe.
“Tut” and Carlos arrived at dawn with the outfit. I had been disgruntled, though not greatly surprised, to find that our coming had not been advertised, except with a small portrait of Edison in some of the newspapers, the ex-bootblack being a true Latin-American in never believing a promise until it has been fulfilled. This was contrary to our contract and it would have caused us to lose not one, but several days had I not obliged the distrustful Spaniard to let us open at one of his theaters the following night and to plunge at once into advertising, which I aided by a special performance to the press and “influential citizens” at six that afternoon. As we were booked for a month in the city, “Tut” and I took quarters—the scarcity of transients having brought them within our means—in a palace overlooking the stately and dignified Municipal Theater, from which we could look down upon the band-concerts in the gardens below as from a balcony—unless they coincided with our own performances. Carlos, being in his home town, joined his increasing family in one of the sections chiefly devoted to workmen of Italian antecedents.
The “Companhia Brazileira” operated eight cinemas throughout the city, and these were in the habit of changing their programs nightly, instead of twice a week. As we were to play in all of them, I set to work to shift our numbers in such a way as to give us more than twenty-five combinations of program with our fifteen films, both in the hope that those who might already have heard one number would be attracted by the other two and because Brazilians will not stand for sopa requentada (reheated soup), as they call a repetition of program. Our work in São Paulo was quite different from that in Rio. Here the cinemas ran only two, or at most three, sessions, totalling less than four hours a night, with matinées only on Sundays. One man could easily have done all that the three of us were called upon to do in those days, had he been able to split himself into triplets at the critical moments. Nor was our income cut down as much as the difference between two or three and ten performances a day would suggest, for the theaters were large, with boxes, balconies and galleries, and the public was accustomed to take its entertainment in common at reasonable hours. Theatrically, however, the Paulistas were quite like the Cariocas. Their favorite in the “movies” was a Parisian comedian whose specialty is the fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-evening-dress brand of humor, and it was difficult to unseat this king. To be sure, São Paulo audiences did show a few more signs of life than those in the national capital, an occasional snigger at least; but on the other hand, unlike Rio, with its pose for the exotic, they somewhat resented that our records were not all in the native tongue. “Tut” suggested that we take them out and have them translated.
Though the “Companhia Brazileira” was required by the terms of our contract to do all advertising, I decided to try my own hand at flim-flamming the public. The usual posters, newspaper notices, and banners were all very well, but I wanted something special, something unusual, that could not fail to impress upon everyone that “the Kinetophone, the wonderful talking-moving pictures, the marvel of the age,” and so on, was in São Paulo for a very limited time indeed, “só trez dias (only three days)”—after which it would move to another theater a few blocks away. Our enterprising partners were not so conservative in advertising as they were lacking in new ideas. But though they were always harping on the American genius for publicity and insisting on their eagerness to be shown, they invariably backed water when any unfamiliar scheme was physically laid before them, and this dread of the unusual was so often in evidence during our tour of Brazil that it is evidently a typical Brazilian characteristic. In São Paulo I hired an Italian dwarf, who had been hanging about appealing for a job, to parade the streets as a sandwich-man. That particular form of advertising apparently had never been seen in Brazil. The company highly approved of the scheme in outline, but refused to sponsor an unprecedented innovation when the time came actually to carry it out. I determined, therefore, to risk a few dollars of Linton’s money. Taking two of our large cloth-mounted portraits of Edison as a background, I had special sandwich-boards made on a design of my own—except that the painter, frightened at any suggestion of novelty, reduced my idea to the commonplace, and then told another man to complete the job. This he did eventually, under my stern supervision, and I turned the innovation loose on São Paulo. An hour later, I met my dwarf carrying the two boards above his head in the form of a banner that had been the “last cry” in Brazilian advertising for at least a decade! He had some maudlin excuse to offer for not carrying out my orders and next day he left even the banner loafing on a corner while he worked at a better job during the best hours of Saturday, leaving me no choice but to turn him back into the ranks of the disgruntled unemployed. Thanks to rain, the war, and other drawbacks, we did so poor a business on several nights that the ex-bootblack talked of breaking the contract, for though they expect “um inglez” to live strictly up to his side of an agreement, on their side a contract means nothing whatever to these people. To make things worse the milreis dropped again to five to the dollar, yet money was so scarce that we dared not raise our admission price. By moving every three days to a new theater, however, we got fair-sized audiences and did moderately well, though nothing like what we should have done before the war.
All my other troubles as a theatrical potentate, however, were nothing compared to my struggle against “deadheads.” Though our contract called for “complete suppression of the free list during this engagement,” the carrying out of that clause was quite another matter. Excuses for entering a theater in Brazil without paying an admission fee are without number. One might suppose that a Justice of the Supreme Court would be ashamed to use his office to force his way into a “movie” house, admittance to which cost barely the equivalent of a quarter. But many men of that class not only usurped free admission, but usually took their entire families with them—and the average Brazilian family can fill many seats. It is the custom in Brazil for theaters to send annual passes to all higher politicians. Thus the judge is given a richly engraved yearly pass, which claims to be non-transferable and for his personal use only. But he cannot, of course, be expected actually to show it, like a popular, or a common fellow, or to have his right questioned to bring with him such guests as he may choose. It is the business of everyone connected with the theater to know the judge and not put him to the annoyance and degradation of showing that pass, which would be an insult comparable almost to dunning him for a debt. So he thrusts the obsequious gateman haughtily aside and marches in with his whole progeny—and a little later a barefoot negro boy appears with an elaborately engraved annual pass which states that he is a Justice of the Supreme Court, and he must be let in without question, lest one have to answer next day to contempt of court!