These cafés, principally devoted to the service of the demi tasse, are everywhere in Brazil, but here particularly they are the rendezvous for the official, military, professional and more prosperous commercial classes, who drop in at all hours to talk things over to the music of the orchestra—everything from business, religion and politics to the idlest society gossip—only they sip coffee, for the most part, instead of highballs and beer. And such coffee! A North American never realizes what a perfectly delectable flavor coffee really is capable of, how deliciously rich and sirupy it is when brewed by those who know how, until he has drunk it in the Orient or down there in Brazil.
There was a time, and not so very long ago, when these crowds along the Rua do Ouvidor were all of one sex. The ladies of the upper classes—when they went shopping at all, instead of simply having samples sent to their houses to choose from—remained in their carriages while the shopkeepers brought out to them for their inspection the various qualities of such articles as were desired; but this old world idea of seclusion, like many others at the capital, has given way to more advanced ones now. Brazilian metropolitan womanhood is beginning to awaken and follow the general trend toward emancipation. In these days ladies not only appear on the streets and go from shop to shop on foot, as do the ladies of our cities, but drop in at certain unexceptionable cafés for luncheon, or perhaps at a matinée or some moving picture show, unattended by their husbands or fathers or brothers. The Avenida, Saturday afternoons when the weather is pleasant, reminds one of a Parisian boulevard, so densely is it thronged with smartly gotten up promenaders and so well patronized are the little sidewalk tables under the awnings in front of the cafés. Needless to say, on these occasions the ladies do graciously suffer the attendance of their admirers or the male members of their families.
“‘Superb’ is the word that best fits the beautiful Brazilian woman,” no less an authority than Burton Holmes enthusiastically declares. “‘Striking’ is the word that best describes her dress.” Then, referring to their appearance at the opera: “The belles of Rio seem to have taken the styles of Paris and given to them a strange, exotic something that makes the toilettes seen at the Municipal Theater far more striking and effective than those at the Paris opera,” he goes on. “Mere man cannot say in what the difference lies, but the fact remains that while the gowns may have been made, or at least designed, in Paris, they are not Parisian; they are instead pronouncedly Brazilian. The men, too, deserve a word of mention, for they are very well-dressed men, much better dressed than the men of Paris or of Lisbon—all of course in evening dress, all looking as if they were accustomed to wearing it. The women in the boxes retain their hats. The men might as well retain theirs, for they are quite invisible behind the massed millinery of their fair companions.”
Rio, of course, has all the up-to-date public utilities—electric street-car lines, lights, telephones, taxicabs and the rest; but, as Arthur Ruhl so aptly puts it, “Before the things seen and heard and vaguely felt,” in this city of such strange, peculiar charm, “the endless procession of vague, unrelated things that baffle and allure—semi-antique humans living languidly in the midst of a sun-drenched nature, which, by its very luxuriance, might seem to have overpowered them—Latin sensibility tinged with African superstition—negro coachmen in top-boots, such as Puss-in-Boots might have worn—dusky, velvet-eyed donzellas—palms, blazing walls and indigo sea—one loses interest in railroads and power plants and the things we do better at home. Brazilians must interest themselves in such things, for therein lies their salvation. If I seem to neglect them, it is because it seems absurd to visit a conservatory full of orchids and spend one’s time seeing how the steam-pipes are put in. By the same token,” he adds—
“There is a certain mellowed dignity in the Brazilian scene—the natural inheritance of the empire, and doubtless, also, a reaction of race and climate—lacking in the more energetic Argentina. It was only in 1889 that good Dom Pedro—that kindly, cultured, old-school gentleman—was dethroned and shipped off to Portugal. It is only since 1887 that the negroes ceased to be slaves. Brazil’s foremost statesman, the big, able Minister of Foreign Affairs, who, as he moved amongst his slender Caribbean brethren at the 1906 conference, looked like the senior partner of some old firm of Wall Street bankers, is still called ‘Baron’ Rio Branco. You can still see in Petropolis the house of the Princess Regent and her husband, the Conde d’Eu, overgrown somewhat with vegetation and buried in somber shades. Rio’s great public library was started by King João VI himself when the Portuguese court was transferred to Brazil in 1808.
“There is still a suggestion of the old world and grand manner. They have their Academy of Forty Immortals; their politicians are often pleased to practice the politer arts. Senhor Joahim Nabuco, who presided at the conference, has written his ‘Pensées.’ These littérateurs may be, as Senhor Bomfim suggests in ‘A America Latina,’ ‘inveterate rhetoricians whose abundant works are taken as a proof of genius.’ Yet at least they have a certain way with them. Pompous, grave, they go through the solemn motions. In spite of the vast majority who neither read nor write, Brazilians of the upper class are probably more ‘cultured,’ in the narrow literary sense of the word, than our average man of the same class at home. They speak and write French as a matter of course in addition to their own language, and most of them make fair headway with English. They enjoy and encourage music and painting and poetry. Opera not only comes to Rio each winter as it does to Buenos Aires, but they have their National Institute of Music and their native composers, one of whom especially, the late Carlos Gomez, has heard his operas successfully produced in Europe. They have their National Academy of Fine Arts and a gallery which, I am sure, is visited and appreciated more than the really excellent one tucked away upstairs in Buenos Aires’ Calle Florida.”
III
As already said, from Rio one may go to São Paulo, the second largest—and, with the exception of Rio, the most important—city in the country, by railroad, and almost as comfortably, too, as one may travel from New York to Chicago. The city of São Paulo is the capital of the State of that name, the great land of coffee, the land in fact that produces more than half of all the coffee grown in Brazil, and Brazil as a whole produces more than three-fourths of all that the world consumes. The city has a population of about 350,000, and is located in the mountains, about forty miles back from the coast and three thousand feet above the level of the sea. It is connected by railroad with Santos, its seaport, where the best docks in the country are now. These two cities, though founded in early colonial times, are not quite as interestingly characteristic as Rio and the others that have been mentioned, for they are far enough south to be in the temperate zone, and have, therefore, attracted a very much larger foreign element, particularly German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. There are not so many negroes and mixed breeds among the laboring classes, and their institutions, business methods and social life more nearly resemble our own; and, as a consequence, they have certainly not been behind the rest of Brazil in development. As in Rio, enormous sums have recently been spent for sanitation, public buildings, and improvements.
São Paulo has thus been transformed into one of the most healthful cities in the world, and one of the handsomest. Its climate, uniformly mild like that of southern Europe, has never left anything to be desired—except, perhaps, snow and ice, if there are among the residents there any homesick northerners who prefer the sharper seasonal contrasts to which they are accustomed. The site is too near the tropics and the mountains are not high enough for freezing cold, yet so high that the air has a bracing, invigorating quality. As Senator Root declared when he was visiting the country: “There is something in the air of São Paulo that makes strong and vigorous men.” Their strength and vigor are not attributable, however, to the climate alone. It is an inheritance. The early Paulistas were of the sturdiest type, men who were compelled to maintain themselves and extend and defend their possessions by fighting and the hardest kind of work—an instance, they were, of the survival of the fittest. It is small wonder that their descendants, with their rich heritage of health and vitality and traditions, and their enormously productive lands, should be distinguished for their enterprise as well as for their wealth and social and intellectual culture. In political and educational progress they have always been prominent.
A splendid monument to their patriotism and enterprise is Ypiranga, a great building of classic design, erected on the site of the proclamation of independence on a hill overlooking the city, and intended both to commemorate the event and to be used as an institution of learning. Among other interesting things, it contains a remarkable museum. They have a polytechnic school in the city that is the pride of the whole country, and the graduates of which are in demand everywhere because of the particularly efficient system of training; an institution known as the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts, devoted to the practical instruction of the artisan classes, which graduates skilled workmen by the hundreds every year; and an excellently equipped normal school that occupies a whole square, facing the Praca de Republica—these in addition to primary institutions and conventional colleges and law and medical schools, that are attended by students from all over Brazil.