In the diamond field of Brazil
Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them
Beyond the old town of Sabará, where the first of the gold that was to make Minas Geraes famous and Portugal wealthy was discovered in 1698, we turned westward and a few moments later sighted through bedraggled palm-trees the glaring new town of Bello Horizonte. No doubt it was to escape the labor of propelling themselves about the precipitous streets of Ouro Preto that led the calfless legislators of Minas Geraes to dethrone the time-honored old capital at the beginning of the present century and move the government to a hitherto uninhabited spot, justly called “Beautiful Horizon.” The site chosen on which to build to order this new capital is a broad shallow lap of rolling country, a bare, treeless landscape which abets the light-colored new buildings in producing a constant uncomfortable glare. It is strange that they did not choose a place with water, a lake or at least a river, which may be found even in the lofty State of Minas. As it is, there is only an insignificant creek creeping through town and an artificial pond in the center of an unfinished park in which the water is so red that even the swans paddling disconsolately about in it have a reddish hue. The designers have all the details of a complete city in mind; the difficulty is to carry out their well laid plans and produce one. For Bello Horizonte is visible proof that it takes more than houses, streets, and inhabitants to make a city. Its public buildings are large and plentiful. Whitewashed houses with bright new red-tile roofs lie scattered far and wide over the rolling landscape. Wide park streets with electric tramways stretch out in every direction in a wheel-shaped system evidently copied from Washington. But the broad avenues are still unpaved, unpacked stretches of red mud, resembling newly plowed potato patches, and one soon recognizes that they run nowhere, that they are an exotic, forced growth which men are still chopping farther back into the red flesh of the virgin, scrub-grown hills. A few have stretches of broad cement sidewalks lined with trees, but they are trees still in their swaddling clothes of protecting frames, or at best are half-grown and unfamiliar with their duty of giving shade and beauty and restfulness. Such grass as exists grows in scattered tufts over bare earth, in no way resembling sod. Though the houses are new, many of them are set in the beginnings of walled bush and flower gardens, with steep outside stairways leading to the real residence in the second story and having fanciful paintings of such scenes as Rio’s Beira Mar on the walls under the porches. They have an alien, unsatisfying appearance which suggests that it is better to let even towns grow up of themselves than to force them by hothouse methods. There are, of course, some advantages in a city, especially in a capital, built to order, but though modernity’s gain over medievalism is in some ways shown, Bello Horizonte lacks not only the charm of old Ouro Preto but even the air and spirit of a city. The whole place feels like a house one has moved into while it is still building over his head.
While they were about it, one wonders they did not build in stone, instead of adobe bricks and plaster. The impression that everything is built only for a temporary halt, by people who, like Arabian nomads, expect to move on again to-morrow, pervades all modern America, in sharp contrast to Europe and the ancient American Indian civilizations. But at least there are as yet no slums, unless one counts as such the large clusters of small new houses that were almost huts scattered through the several shallow valleys spreading out from the town. It is curious how a city draws houses about it like a magnet even when there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants to do but take in one another’s washing—or do one another’s governing. Though it offers free sites to any industry that will establish itself there, only the scream of a single small weaving mill is heard in Bello Horizonte. The city produces nothing except government for the state, and the man who comes into personal contact with that soon realizes that it “costs expensive” and is none too good governing at that. More fuss is made over the state president than over our own national executive. Negro soldiers in khaki and bright red caps guard his “palace” and great high-walled garden, parading back and forth day and night before all government buildings with fixed bayonets, not because there is any real danger—except to the unwary pedestrian who might run into the pointed blade of some sleepy guard—but because all Latin-America loves to make a show of deadly weapons even in time of peace. The population had the bland, sophisticated air of people already trained to city life elsewhere, like transplanted flora from other gardens of varied kind and situation. Strangers attract far less attention than in even larger interior towns, because here all are more or less strangers and the inhabitants have not lived long enough together to form that sort of closed corporation of old established towns, which not only makes a new and unfamiliar face an object of curiosity, but arouses a kind of distrust and annoyance among the native inhabitants.
The show reached Bello Horizonte before me and had done a good Saturday and Sunday business, but “Tut” reported that all records for “deadheads” were being broken. The manager was a bullet-headed mulatto—whose name, by the way, was Americo Vespuccio—and who did not have the moral courage needed to cope with the swarms of official beggars which infest a state capital. When the doors opened on Monday night I was lolling incognito nearby. The ticket-taker was a mulatto girl of about fourteen who thrust out her hand whenever anyone walked in, taking the ticket if there happened to be one to take, but paying no attention to the fact that as often as not there was none. Not only were there many people with monthly passes and permanent free tickets, but the negro management, being afraid of anyone with authority, real or pretended, had given everyone capable of manufacturing a shadow of excuse the conviction that he had the right to enter without payment. In the first few minutes I saw seventy persons enter without tickets, exclusive of the house employees and men in uniform. Then I burst into the manager’s office and informed him that he was going to pay us our percentage for every person who had not, and did not thereafter, pay an admission fee. He turned an ashy gray and begged me to take full charge at the door. I discharged the mulatto girl on the spot, made a ticket-box of my hand-grip by cutting a slot in it—hitherto ticket-takers had stuffed the tickets into their pockets or any other convenient receptacle—and proceeded to shock the good people of “Beautiful Horizon.”
An elaborately dressed man in a frock coat, accompanied by two women glittering with diamonds, pushed haughtily past.
“Your ticket, senhor?” I smiled, in my most ceremonial Portuguese.
“I never pay admission,” the man replied haughtily.
“And why don’t you?” I retorted, which wholly unprecedented question so dazed him that without a word he went back to the wicket and bought three tickets. The same incident was repeated dozens of times that evening.