“Does he give medicine?”
“None whatever.”
“Does he cure by laying on hands?”
“Not at all. He merely gives them his card and they buy his picture. After nine days they come back again, and three times in the next month, and then once or twice a month, if they are still ailing, until they are cured. He is a caboclo legitimo” (a dyed-in-the-wool Brazilian) “and has been here eight years.”
The “curer” was taking in money at a rate that should have allowed him to retire in much less time than that, but no doubt pride in his work kept him at it. Formerly he had operated in São Paulo itself, but had been banished outside the city limits. An elaborate enameled sign announced that on Sundays and holidays he gave no cures, “no matter what the provocation.” As he reëntered the hut, the whole throng uncovered or curtseyed. A peculiar fact was that a large number of his clients seemed to be in the most robust of health; no doubt in these cases his cures were most effective. Several well-dressed little girls were forced in to consult him, plainly against their wills and better judgment, for they laughed at the silly fraud, and one of them shocked the sanctimonious crowd by calling him “velho barbudo” (old bewhiskered). There is a Brazilian saying that “E mais facil enganar a humanidade que desenganal-a,” which might be freely translated, “It is easier to squeeze the human head into an uncouth shape than to squeeze it back again to normal.”
We found that the Kinetophone appealed less and less as we descended the scale of wealth and education. In the workingman’s district of Barra Funda, to which we went after a week down in Santos, we were escorted by mobs of urchins until we felt like a country circus, but there was little gain in playing to such audiences. In the slang of Brazil, “brass was lacking,” and we gave matinées to scatterings of “deadheads” and half-price children and evening performances to thin, apathetic houses. The young toughs we would not let in free took revenge by mutilating our cloth-mounted posters, the managers lost our newspaper cuts, and nearly half our slight share of the receipts was paid in nickel! We were held up, too, by one of the ubiquitous national holidays. The second of November was the Dia dos Finados, a sort of Brazilian Memorial Day sacred to weeping and the laying on of flowers—not to mention flirting—in all the cemeteries, and not to be enlivened by mere theatrical performances. Those of the undress variety “got away with it” by announcing a “solemn program,” but when I protested against this forced holiday, contrary to contract, the irreverent ex-bootblack grew wrathy and insisted that on such a day our show was “too frivolous!”
But if the human audiences did not respond, we now and then got proof, sometimes in disastrous form, that our entertainment was realistic. In several of the barn-like theaters in the outskirts of São Paulo we were obliged to “shoot from the back,” that is, the projecting machine was set up at the rear of the stage and the pictures were thrown upon the back of the curtain. One evening some friend of the stage hands brought a terrier with him. Among the demonstrations of the “Portuguese Lecture” with which we opened our part of the program was a collie that rushed out barking upon the screen stage. Barely had he dashed into view this time when the terrier sprang madly upon him and all but wrecked the curtain and the performance.
It was not until the fourth of November that my real job began. Our engagement with the “Companhia Brazileira” was drawing to a close at an old theater out by the gas-works, and the hour had come for me to find out whether I was a real “movie” magnate or merely a ticket-taker; for the carrying out of a contract made by someone else is quite a different thing from faring forth into the world and making contracts. I set out for the interior of the State of São Paulo, therefore, with misgivings, not only as to my own abilities but because only “Tut” and Carlos, who did not yet speak the same language, were left to run the show.
I was bound for Campinas, third city of the state, but the town of Jundiahy looked promising and I dropped off there. It was a straggling coffee center of some sixteen thousand inhabitants, rather picturesquely strewn over a rolling hillside, at the summit of which bulked a big yellow building bearing the familiar name “Polytheama.” In the electric-light plant next door I learned the name of the manager, but I visited a dozen other buildings before I ran him down, only to find that the real owner and contract-maker was the prefect and chief mogul of the town. We found him surrounded by much ceremony and a score of cringing fellow-citizens in his inner sanctum of the prefeitura. I introduced myself with as brief formality as possible and told him that the Kinetophone was to end its engagement in São Paulo a week later and that it might be to his advantage, as well as to that of Jundiahy, to have it stop there for the night of Friday, the thirteenth, on our way to Campinas. He replied that he had made a special trip down to São Paulo to see this new “marvel of the American wizard,” but that he had never dreamed we might be induced to come to Jundiahy. He was highly flattered, but could he and his modest little town really afford so remarkable an entertainment? I offered to book the attraction for a hundred and fifty dollars. He looked up the rate of exchange in the São Paulo morning paper, smiled sadly over the figures he penciled on the margin of it, and regretted that it was impossible to pay a fixed sum, especially in such hard times.
I took leave of him and turned back toward the station. But I felt almost superstitious at the thought of failing in my first attempt to make a contract and yielded to the entreaties of the manager beside me to return and seek some other basis of arrangement. The prefect showed more pleasure than surprise at my return and offered to rent me the “Polytheama” for one night at 80$, we to pay for orchestra, light, license, employees, and all the rest. I declined. “Tut” could scarcely be expected to handle so complicated a proposition to our advantage. It then being my move, I dug down into my portfolio and brought forth a contract which Linton by some stroke of luck or genius had made in a small town of Chile, giving him seventy per cent. of the gross receipts. I would gladly have accepted the “fifty-fifty” basis on which we were then playing, rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of the Chilean contract and my ever improving Portuguese I got the prefect to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the privilege of charging to his account the cost of our transportation from São Paulo, just in order not to seem too eager, I agreed. I drew up duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next train north.