Bahia was said to be the only place left in Brazil where bubonic plague and yellow fever still persisted. It could hardly be otherwise with rats running up and down every pipe, with every opening, corner, or slightly out of the way place covered with accumulated filth, and with sanitary arrangements almost everywhere in the old town quite beyond the descriptive powers of Boccaccio. In contrast, great placards and posters everywhere, bearing the heading “Directoria Geral de Saude Pública” (General Directory of Public Health) strive to carry out the bluff that the town boasts a system of sanitation. Even the highest priced hotel would be instantly condemned in any civilized city; the conditions in which the vast majority of the population live are beyond any imagination. During the preceding April thirty-five members of the foreign colony, almost one third of it and including the English pastor, had died of yellow fever, which was expected to begin again with the rains. Yet my hotel furnished no mosquito net and I awoke each morning bitten in a dozen places—and any Brazilian will tell you that only white foreigners take yellow fever. In compensation only natives, and chiefly negroes, die of the equally prevalent bubonic plague. The federal government offered to send to Bahia the man who disinfected Rio, but the state government haughtily replied that they were quite capable of cleaning up the place themselves, and meanwhile sudden death continues to flourish.
On my first Sunday in Bahia one of her innumerable festas was at its height, that of “Nosso Senhor do Bomfim,” a miracle-producing shrine of great popularity among the negroes. On Saturday night the street cars in that direction were so crowded that I could not even hang on. Bands of negroes carrying Japanese lanterns, singing, beating drums, tamborines, and tin cans, marched in almost constant procession past my window down to the lower city and on out to Bomfim, a section of town three miles away around the harbor, the electric-lighted façade of its miracle church standing forth from the night like a monument to the ignorance, squalor, and hunger of Bahia. From midnight on the throngs were even thicker, frequently waking me with their maudlin din, for the festival of Bomfim is especially an all-night affair, with much drinking and worse. On Sunday afternoon I went out to the scene of the festivities. There were thirty persons in the street-car, of whom two were white. On the climb up the hill to the church the way was flanked by two unbroken rows of beggars, lame, halt, blind, twisted, deformed, degenerate monstrosities, idiots of all degrees and every percentage of African blood, every imaginable horror in human form, and just plain nigger loafers, all holding out their hands, or whatever they had left in place of them, in constant appeal.
The church itself was so packed that I could only enter by climbing the stairs to a small side-gallery and look down upon an unbroken sea of black faces, wrapt up in what sounded like a medieval Catholic service translated into African voodooism. Among the schemes concocted by the swarming priests of Bahia is one that shows the suggestion of originality. At the huge church and monastery of São Antonio the faithful can buy, at a milreis each, special stamps designed by the priests, with which to write to St. Anthony in Heaven, and be assured of a direct answer from him—through his priestly agents on earth, of course—on any subject.
“Lots of churches in Bahia,” I remarked conversationally to the white Bahiano beside whom I stood watching the riot of gambling, drinking, and indecency about the home of “miracles.”
“Oh, not out here,” he apologized. “Here there is only Nosso Senhor do Bomfim, and São Antonio,” and Sao This and Sao That, naming a dozen or more as he pointed them out roundabout. “This is only a little corner suburb of our great city, but in Bahia itself there are churches.”
It is a popular saying in Bahia that there is one church for every day in the year, an exaggeration probably, but there are scores of massive old colonial ones, not to mention monasteries full of fat, loafing monks, on all the best commanding heights and taking up perhaps half the city’s space. While some are fallen in ruins and are melting away from the physical impossibility of keeping up so many, even now this ignorant, poverty-stricken city was building several more, the latest to cost three thousand contos—though not thirty per cent of the contributors can read. In contrast, the schools of Bahia are horrible little dens over butcher-shops and saloons and brothels, with forty or fifty children packed into rooms that would not be comfortable for ten, without any arrangements whatever for their bodily requirements. Even at that, if every school in the city were packed to suffocation from dawn until dark, not one third the children of school age could attend them. The public library in this capital of an enormous and potentially rich state, in a town of one third of a million inhabitants, reported that “632 books or works of reference were consulted during the year.” Yet fear or superstition caused every newspaper in town to print long editorials praising the “beautiful festa of Bomfim” and the honor it did to “Him whom it honored,” while the drunken debauchery was still going on.
By the Wednesday after my arrival “Colonel” Ruben, who, whatever his faults, knew the art of advertising, had the fronts of all street-cars and every blank wall in town plastered with Kinetophone posters mostly of his own concoction, announcing to his fellow-citizens that on Quarta Feria—Fourth Festival, to wit: Thursday—would open the Greatest Cinematographic Occurrence of the Ages; The Eighth Marvel! Surprising! Stupendous!! Phenomenal!!! The Discovery of the Year. Man no longer dies! Edison has immortalized him! And at Popular Prices!! Everyone to the SAO JOAO!!! When a brilliant sun woke me before seven on that epochal morning, there was no sign of a steamer in all the blue expanse of All Saints’ Bay. I shaved and was just starting for the “rain bath,” however, when I caught sight of one nearing harbor. I still had time to dress, drink the thimbleful of black coffee they call a breakfast in Brazil, and descend to the wharves before the craft tied up there, with “Tut” and Carlos hanging over the rail. I brought them up to my hotel, for as all those in Bahia were equally disreputable it was as well to be together for mutual protection, but it took us until noon to unravel the red tape necessary to get our trunks ashore, quite as if we had been landing from a foreign country.
For all his reputation, “Colonel” Ruben was an engaging fellow, and though I made it plain to him that I would not trust him out of my sight, he took it good-naturedly and assured me he welcomed all the “fiscalization” I could give him.
“I notice you don’t trust people to any great extent yourself,” I smiled, thinking to let him down easy.
“Trust!” cried Ruben, with a serio-comic gesture, “I trust my own teeth—and they bite my tongue!”