Tramp Royale (20 page)

The encounter was most casual, hardly more than mutual agreement that Primavera was a fine doggie, yes indeed! We did exchange names with them but the chat lasted no more than five minutes; there was no intention nor expectation of following up the brief encounter. We had simply patted their dog.

I had hardly noticed the son. His mother was a woman of extraordinary beauty; my choice in such circumstances is not a choice but a reflex. I had looked at the men in the party just enough to be polite-I
hope
I was polite.

But when the young man who stopped us on the street said, "Don't you remember? The little dog?" the wheels clicked and the numbers popped up. I said, "Oh! Of course!"

Maurice Nayberg took us home with him and we stayed all afternoon, being treated in the fashion expressed by the Latin saying: "This house is yours." The hospitality of the Naybergs was the more appreciated in that it was utterly unexpected; they were under no slightest obligation to be kind to us.

We had been treated with similar open-handed friendliness by the Quirogas in Chile, again under circumstances "over and above the call of duty." Was this warmth characteristic of South America as a whole? I don't know; one certainly should not attempt to fair a curve on the evidence of two data. To do so is not scientific evaluating but mere wishful thinking. Yet a thousand other lesser data all pointed in the same direction. My horseback opinion, admittedly gathered too quickly, is and remains that the vast majority of South Americans have their hands extended in welcome to all gringos who have the gumption to see it.

A more soul-searching matter is the question as to whether our own beloved country is equally open-handed? It is difficult to give a fair opinion; I am inside it, a part of it, and it is hard for a fish to see water. Would strangers and foreigners without any sort of contact or introduction be equally likely to encounter such treatment in New York? Or in Colorado Springs?

I have pondered this and tried to be fair, turning over in my mind cases in point. We as a people are lavishly hospitable to those who come with any faint sort of introduction, granted-but do we make welcome the stranger who has none of any sort?

Yes, I think we do, provided the stranger and foreigner himself is open to it-a proviso which applies just as firmly to South America. Possibly we are a shade more shy about it but not much, not enough to matter. Certainly we are more provincial, less cosmopolitan, than they are, for the same reasons that New Yorkers are so much more provincial than are people in the rest of our country.

But the willingness and friendliness is present everywhere among us. Any foreigner who finds America "cold" had better look for the coldness in his own heart.

Is this ready hospitality, then, a characteristic of all peoples everywhere? Need the frightened boy only go through the gates of the Great City to find inside the same "kind hearts and gentle people" that he left behind him in his own village? I was ready once to assert that it was so, but I was wrong. While the trait may be potential in all humans, it is a cultural trait and some cultures do not have it. Just to nail this down see Ruth Benedict's frightening description of Dobu culture in her
Patterns of Culture.
If a Dobu offered a drink to a stranger it would be only for the purpose of poisoning him. Yet the Dobus are genetically precisely the same sort of humans as are those of certain other warm and friendly cultures around them.

But I did not change my mind through reading scientific anthropology; I had it changed for me, through visiting a country later where we were not treated with ordinary civility, much less open-handed hospitality. The experience cured me of the romantic nonsense that people everywhere are just like the folks back home. Some are not.

The delightful visit with the Naybergs ended our stay in Uruguay as the ship sailed later that day. We left bearing presents and numerous cards of introduction to persons in half a dozen other countries, for Maurice himself was in the Uruguayan diplomatic service and his father was in the import-export business; the family was well acquainted abroad. Maurice walked us down to our ship.

Perhaps, having penetrated a Uruguayan home, I should describe it; actually there is no need to do so. It was a large city flat of an upper class family and would have looked equally at home in any large city in the world. I will mention Clarita instead. She was a little pigeon hen who had had the misfortune to break her wing; Mrs. Robert Nayberg found her and nursed her back to health, then set her free. But Clarita declined to leave. Oh, she joined the other pigeons that flutter around the many monuments of the city but she roosted on the Nayberg balcony at night and spent a good deal of each day inside the Nayberg flat, visiting and making occasional messes on the floor; it was her home by her own choice.

Which showed amazing good sense for a bird brain and showed still more about the sort of people the Naybergs are.

No description should be entirely flattering; there should be some criticism at the very least, for contrast and to lend conviction to favorable statements. But it is very hard to find anything to criticize in Uruguay.

This will have to suffice: sometimes it is not possible to find a taxi down where the ships dock, in which case the visitor must walk almost half a mile to the nearest tram. Obviously this could be improved. Of course the weather will not be cold for walking and it is unlikely to be unpleasantly hot.

But it
might
be raining.

VI
Wakening Giant

Brazil is larger than the United States by more than 300,000 square miles, by an area equal to Texas plus the State of New York. It is the largest country outside the Iron Curtain.

This chapter should be served with a side dish of superlatives, to which you could help yourself when you pleased without risking surfeit. Almost everything about Brazil is biggest, largest, longest, or greatest. In addition, after four hundred years of progress moderate to slow, the joint is jumpin' in all directions. Steel mills, factories, hydroelectric plants, oil refineries, office buildings, superhighways, airports, railways, all are going forward everywhere despite the oppressive tropical heat which prevails in so much of the country most of the time.

Although bigger than we are in area Brazil has only about a third the population we have, around 54,000,000. Nobody knows how many people the country can support. Although discovered in 1500 the country is to a considerable extent still unexplored; some of those 54,000,000 are naked Indians who have never seen a white man. The only thing we can be sure of about Brazil is that we haven't seen anything yet; it is entirely conceivable that the Brazilians may be the New Romans of the next century, just as the British were of the nineteenth century, and as we seem to find ourselves elected in this century (if the Russians do not take from us that uncomfortable honor, of course). Brazil has enormous resources of thorium ore, the world's second largest betatron, and an extremely active nuclear research program; she does not lack any potentiality for greatness and dominance.

Brazil has been successively an unknown territory awarded by the Pope to Portugal, a colony, a kingdom, an empire, and a republic. She has suffered and still suffers from political growing pains but has been fairly stable politically for some years now; it may well be that her future will be relatively free of the internal upsets that interfere with economic and social progress. Brazil was late in getting rid of human slavery (1889) yet this is a country where no color bar can be seen and black and white mix socially without tension-or so it looks to an outsider.

Because M.S.
Ruys
spent only three days at dock in Brazil Ticky and I had only opportunity to nibble at one corner of the Colossus of the South, just enough to sample it for flavor. We liked the flavor and want to go back for a full meal someday, but, as always, we were forced to hurry on if we were to get all the way around the planet. (The man who first said, "It's a small world," certainly must never have tried it; the durn thing is
much
bigger than I had ever believed.)

The ship called first at Santos, major pott of the State of São Paulo, the booming Texas of Brazil. Brazilian police came aboard and required all passengers to surrender their passports for police cards before permitting them to go ashore. Ticky did not like this at all and I did not like it too well, nor do I see that it was necessary or useful since other countries get along all right without it. Nevertheless it seemed harmless since the passports were not removed from the ship but stayed in the custody of the cop on watch at the gangway. In any case if we were to go ashore compliance was inevitable; we turned in our passports.

Santos is not a tourist town and the docks are not laid out to accommodate tourist ships. There was an endless, uncomfortable, and somewhat hazardous walk along the piers, dodging cranes and trucks and railroad cars and rope slings loaded with cargo before we reached one of the guarded exits, where again our permission to go ashore had to be checked. This merely put us on the right side of the fence; there were no taxis nor any prospect of same, nor any public transportation near by. This is not a complaint, because so far as I know Santos does not advertise for visitors. In Rio, a city which does so advertise, ships tie up at the foot of their "Fifth Avenue," Avenida Rio Branco. Fair enough, both ways.

But the inconvenience does not add to the charm of Santos. After several blocks we came at last to a street with tram rails and presently were able to hop a street car. The trolleys in Santos are Toonerville affairs, dinky, open to the weather at the sides, old, and very crowded. They are a treat to ride, unless you are the sort of person who can't bear to share a taxi and would not think of using the subway; they put me in mind of the San Francisco cable cars and have much the same out-of-date charm. We lurched through narrow streets and swung wildly around corners while the conductor climbed over feet and reached over heads for fares. People swung aboard from either side and jumped off and clung to the sides and ends, all without caring whether the car was moving or stopped. I gathered the impression that the car came to a full stop only for cripples, babies, and sissy
norteamericanos.

I do not see how the conductor managed to collect all the fares; it would be easier to fold a newspaper in a high wind. Perhaps an honor system helped him-the South Americans we met seemed painfully honest in small matters. Or perhaps he was satisfied to collect a good percentage of the fares.

All the transportation systems we encountered in Brazil were extremely crowded. This is not a criticism; I simply note a fact that is historically an unavoidable growing pain of boom times anywhere. We have not licked this problem and I do not think it can be licked. A booming, prosperous area is always one where people pour in faster than services can be built to accommodate them, which means crowds, choked subways and highways, long waits in restaurants, poor service, high prices-and an overall feeling of excitement, hope, and nervous tension.

The quiet, leisurely places of cheap servants, low prices, and
dolce far niente
are stagnant and poor; this is a law of nature and it calls for the lobster-shelled conscience of a Bourbon not to be affected by the poverty underneath.

Brazil is both of these things at once. The older pattern of extreme wealth and peasant poverty with no middle class still exists side by side with boom times, peasants streaming into the cities to find industrial jobs, and a growing middle class. The
barrios bajos
of Rio may not be the world's worst slums but they surely win dishonorable mention. They are almost vertical shanty towns, built of trash on hillsides too steep to be useful for commercial buildings; they have not even water, not even a neighborhood faucet, and of course no other services. Here many of the penniless poor from the country wind up, a reservoir of labor, and of disease, vice, and crime . . . and riot and rebellion. The government and the better-off Brazilians are striving to cure these sores, but the problem is mammoth.

But we were still back in Santos. Santos is an old city and looks it; it is necessary to get far into the outskirts to find the twentieth century. The plazas, the venerable trees in them, and the age-encrusted buildings around them look like a set for a South-of-the-Border musical comedy. The traffic and crowds of the industrial boom swarm through the old streets, a noisy affront to their sleepy, eighteenth century charm.

We took a bus from Santos to São Paulo, a bus which was as out of place in the plaza of Santos as a spaceship in a corn field, it being at least three per cent more shiny, modern, and gadgeted than the best of Greyhound and Trailways in the States. Once outside the city streets we entered a superhighway toll road straight out of
Fortune
magazine. It is of the same sort and quality as the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but here the engineers had no railway tunnels already built to help them through the tough places, of which there are plenty.

The road ran first through miles of banana plantation; the bus ate up this stretch at about ninety, vibrationless on perfect pavement. Then the road reared up and jumped at the Serra do Mar mountains; the bus eased back to seventy and zoomed up and over them, a three-thousand-foot climb in a few minutes, piercing mountains, leaping chasms. There were no hairpin turns, no bad grades, no stretches to make the timid nervous; only on looking back was one aware of the concrete spiderwebs on which we had crossed the gorges.

But one did look back. The spanking climb right up the face of the mountains produced swiftly changing, garishly dramatic vistas, unreal and improbable. The hot, water-soaked air was not perfectly transparent; we could see the ocean but not the horizon. Instead the tropical haze produced endless stereo depth on depth, a misty Land of Oz in colors too bright and miniature modeling too perfect to be convincing.

The bus plunged on into the mountains, the skyline pulled in and things came back to their proper sizes. There were signs of intense industrial activity all along the hundred or so kilometres from Santos to São Paulo, tire factories, artificial lakes for water and power, high-tension transmission line towers marching over hill and horizon. The great double road was gardened throughout its length but beyond the dedicated expanse there were many big signboards of the sort that disfigure our own roads but are not very common elsewhere in South America. I could not read them but pictures are pictures and trade names persist; I amused myself by trying to pick out the influence of the Yankee Dollar. The majority of the foreign firms appeared to be ours, with England pushing us hard in second place, and Germany a fairly strong third. The incorporations were Brazilian but the trademarks and names usually made the parent foreign corporation obvious. "Esso" was everywhere, along with "Delco" and "International Harvester" monograms and General Motors and many other heavy-industry firms from the north.