It would be difficult to speak kindly of Brazilian hotels. As in Spanish-America, nothing but black coffee is to be had until almoço, or “breakfast,” between ten and eleven, which is followed about sunset by jantar. Both these meals are heavy, lacking in everything but quantity, and made up almost entirely of meat. This carne verde (“green” meat), having just been killed and so called to distinguish it from xarque or carne secca, the salted or sun-dried variety familiar in the rural districts, is cooked in several different ways, all of which leave it hopelessly tough. Whether in hotels or railway-station restaurants, the menu is unvarying, and eight or ten huge plates of meat are slapped down in the middle of a long, noisy, public table, where each guest grasps what he can before his neighbors make way with it. To save time or trouble all dishes are served at once, and are habitually cold before they reach the ultimate consumer. There is a great paucity of vegetables, even potatoes being considered a luxury and rarely reaching the interior of the country. Instead, there stands on every table a glass jar of what looks like coarse yellow salt, but which proves to be farinha, flour made of the mandioca or yuca that is served boiled in the Andean countries, and which is used throughout Brazil to thicken soups, or eaten dry.

The hotel proprietor usually gives his attention exclusively to the bar, which he claims to be the only paying part of his establishment. By night a servant sleeps just inside the front door, leaving room between it and his cot for the belated guest to squeeze through; in the daytime the pateo is an uproar of unguided servants and ill-bred children. If you ask to have your bread brushed off after the waiter has dropped it on the floor you are henceforth known as “that curious gringo”; if you prefer your coffee or soup made without having an unwashed cook frequently dip in her spoon to taste the progress and toss the residue back into the pot, there is just one way to get it—by bringing your own cook with you. In your room the mirror is certain to be placed at about the height of the average American’s belt buckle, so that to shave requires either kneeling on the floor or sitting on something, usually not to be found, about the size of a soapbox. Hot water being unknown, shaving becomes an ordeal equal to trying to shut out the sight of a mulatto across the table inhaling a mammoth all-meat meal with such boa constrictor ease that he needs only to give the tail of an occasional extra large mouthful an affectionate pat with his knife as it goes down.

Whatever he lacks in other ways the typical Brazilian hotel-keeper makes up for in prices. He is rarely a native, and you can scarcely expect a European to come over and set up hotels in the wilderness of South America out of mere love for his fellow-man. Usually his only interest is to make as much as possible as soon as possible and hurry back to his native land. Not merely are the rates high, but it is the almost invariable custom to manipulate the items in such a way that a stay of twenty-four hours becomes at least two days. Personally, I early adopted the habit of handing the proprietor the amount called for by his posted daily rate and assuring him that I would look on with great interest while he collected more than that; but the native Brazilian has the notion that he loses caste if he protests at any price charged him, so that the foreigner’s refusal to be fleeced is sure to make him conspicuous, even if it does not cause his fellow-guests to rate him a freak and a nuisance.

Nearly every street of Riberão Preto runs out into red earth, a tenacious soil that is tracked along the sidewalks and into every shop and dwelling, until the whole town takes on a reddish tinge. Near the center of town, at the lowest spot of the hollow in which it is built, there is a perpetual frog chorus, and from the outskirts coffee-fields stretch up out of the great shallow bowl and away over endless horizons. The Italian company announced its début on the evening after my arrival by shooting off fireworks, one advertising scheme that had not occurred to me. There were so many cinemas in town that I had to spend real money to visit several of them before I was competent to decide which one would best answer our purposes. All those of importance, it turned out, from the municipal “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” covering a whole block in the center of town, down through the inevitable “Polytheama” to the loose-mannered “Casino,” flowing with liquor and aging French adventuresses, were in the hands of a hard-headed Spaniard of long Brazilian experience, so that I considered myself fortunate to get his name at the bottom of a contract giving us fifty-five per cent. of the gross receipts during a six-day engagement.

CHAPTER XIII
ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT

We steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin of Riberão Preto on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town of any size. Coffee-fields at length gave way to brush-covered campo and grazing cattle, the train winding in great curves around slight hills, like water seeking an outlet or a lost person wholly undecided which way to go. Early in the afternoon we crossed the Rio Grande into the State of Minas Geraes, which at once showed itself less developed, more dry and sandy, with an increasing number of wooded valleys and ridges. There was some coffee here, too, but cared for in a half-hearted way compared with the great plantations of São Paulo. We passed a large gang of Japanese workmen, and many zebus or humped cattle, both in the fields and working as oxen. The ride was not only too dirty and dusty to be pleasant, but sparks from our wood-fired engine poured in at the open windows until, for all my dodging and brushing, a dozen holes were burned in my still comparatively new movie-magnate garb. One station stood 3400 feet above sea-level, and we all but shook ourselves and the cars to pieces as we rattled down again into Uberaba, at an elevation of 2500, just as day was escaping over beyond the mountains.

The place was smaller and less progressive than I had imagined, with certainly not more than ten thousand inhabitants, instead of the 25,000 credited to it by the “Handbook of Brazil.” I was not over-anxious to make a contract with the one pathetic little cinema in town, at least until I had seen what lay beyond and decided whether it would be worth while to come this far inland. The manager, a clerk in the local drugstore, was more than eager to present so extraordinary an attraction to his fellow-townsmen, but fares and baggage rates would have cut deeply into our profits and I refused to sign without a guarantee of a conto for two days’ performances. He offered 800$ and would undoubtedly have given almost any percentage, but I held out for the million reis until we finally parted good friends but not business associates.

Somehow I had always thought of Minas Geraes as rocky, arid, dry, and cold, something like upper Peru; the mere name “General Mines” had a hard and chilly sound to it. But long before noon in Uberaba, high as it was, I was reminded that it is well north of Rio and almost tropical. There was an old air about the town, partly because the humidity causes grass, bushes, and even trees to grow on and about the churches and other loose-jointed buildings of stone and porous bricks, but also because Minas is a much older state than São Paulo, overrun by miners long before the agricultural riches of its neighbor were scratched.

We were off again at one behind the same old narrow-gauge wood burner, through a rolling, bushy country, and scattered with huge ant-hills, mildly similar to the Bolivian Chaco. The only real town along the way was Uberabinha, squatting in the bottom of a sandy and shallow valley, inhabited by barefoot and red-earth smeared people whose only place of entertainment seemed to be the double-towered church bulking above the general hut level. Night was falling when we pulled into Araguary at the end of the “Mogyana” railway. The tidal wave of baggage-carriers and hotel touts was only less in size than those farther south, but for once I escaped them entirely by putting my valise on the head of a negro boy and wading through the mud with him to a pensão run by an old woman. The room was really a mud cave, the mattress filled with corn-husks, and I was reduced to candle-light for the first time in Brazil. But the special chicken supper was a great relief from the avalanche of meat, surrounded by wolfing natives, that would have been my lot at a hotel, and, best of all, the pensão was just across the way from the first station of the “Goyaz Railway,” on which I was to depart at dawn.

It was pitch dark, with frequent heavy showers, when I set out to wander incognito through the town. The weak electric-lights along its mud-and-grass streets and praças suggested fireflies or will-o’-the-wisps flitting about through the thick, black night. There was, to be sure, a dentist, who was also owner, editor and printer of the local paper, and the town undertaker—and the tombstones behind the lips of many of the inhabitants hinted that he mixed the three professions.