CHAPTER XII
A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL
Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable old station of the Central Railway of Brazil. Having a suitcase now and lacking time to wait for the second-class trailer in which persons so plebeian as to carry baggage may ride, the trip by taxi cost me—I mean Linton—9$600 instead of 400 reis! Nor was that the only shock I got at the station. On my journey northward from Uruguay, with my worldly possessions in a bundle under one arm, the fact that the railroads of Brazil have no free baggage allowance had scarcely caught my attention. But now I was responsible for an outfit consisting of half a dozen large trunks and an enormous phonograph horn in its special case, totaling about a thousand pounds. Hence the seriousness of the discovery that for the single day’s trip from Rio to São Paulo personal baggage paid 256 reis a kilogram and all other kinds 400! No wonder Brazilians drag into the trains with them all manner of strange and awkward bundles, for though any portable amount of hand-luggage is transported free of charge in the passenger-cars, everything else must pay almost its weight in human flesh. In fact, a fat man can travel more cheaply on Brazilian railways than can his equally heavy trunk.
There are private, state, and federal railways in Brazil, and the “Estrada de Ferro Central” belongs to the last category, being operated by the national government. I had already seen public ownership of railroads working—or failing to work—in Chile, however, and was therefore not so surprised at some of the manifestations of the system as a complete stranger might have been. One quickly learned that government railways are operated primarily for the convenience of trainmen and government officials, and that the public is privileged to fight for any space that may be left after these have been accommodated. Our cars were as sadly down at heel as any I had seen since leaving Chile, yet in the station from which we departed stood an official train of the “Administração e Inspecção” that was the last word in transportable sumptuousness, its sides almost wholly of plate-glass and its interior fitted with every luxury. In this, and others like it, government railway managers and higher officials not only flit about at will but carry a host of political friends and their relatives down to the fourteenth cousinship. The “Central” shows a firm belief, too, in the modern trade-union principle of never letting one man do what four men might pretend to be doing, so that not only do useless higher officials swarm but the actual railroad men are little less numerous than the passengers.
Notwithstanding my rule never to go over the same ground twice when it can possibly be avoided, I was returning to São Paulo because our contract with the “Companhia Brazileira” specified that we present the Kinetophone there during the month of October. The night train would have been more comfortable and a bit swifter, but I had never been overland between Brazil’s two largest cities; besides, I wished to have things prepared for our estrea when “Tut” and Carlos arrived next morning. The day train covers the 310 miles in twelve hours—at least on the time-table. For the first of them it was but one of a constant procession of trains in both directions, not only the “Central” but the private-owned and contrastingly efficient “Leopoldina” railway maintaining incessant service to the suburbs. Then we took to climbing from the coast to the great interior plateau, more or less following a small river sprawling over rocks and boulders, passing many tunnels that brought out the incompetence of the train gas-lamps, a low-wooded valley sinking below us as we rose ever higher. Once out of this and above the coastlands, we turned southwest across an almost flat plain. By no means covered with the jungle of the imagination, it was dry and bushy, sometimes wholly bare, occasionally somewhat grass-grown. Reddish trails along which wandered mules and donkeys, and now and then one of the humped sacred bulls of India between the thills of a heavy cart, climbed away across scrub-covered, mist-touched foothills or low ridges here and there punctuated with decapitated palm trees. The soft coal that Brazil imports for her railroads abetted the dustiness of the season in making the trip uncomfortable. Beyond Cruzeiro, already in the state of São Paulo, huge dome-shaped ant-hills of hard, reddish earth began to litter the brownish landscape. The low hills had been ruthlessly despoiled of their natural adornment by the systematic incendiarism of man, who for long stretches had made his destruction of the primeval forest absolute. It struck a note of sadness, this devastation of the beauties of nature for utilitarian purposes, without even the excuse of necessity, since the forest had been destroyed merely to save the trouble of cultivating more intensively and by more modern methods lands that had become weary from overwork and lack of fertilizing nourishment—and because of the native superstition that soil which does not produce forest will not grow anything else. Long lack of rain had left the whole country powder-dry and water-longing; even the palm-trees drooped as if tired and thirsty. In folds of the earth clumps of bedraggled banana plants, sometimes with a few choked coffee bushes beneath them, called attention to primitive huts before which a black colonist, squatting aimlessly on the ground, and his numerous brood offered to the sun’s caresses skins which it cannot tan. It is a nonchalant life at best where the earth gives a maximum of return for a minimum of exertion. Here and there a bit of late spring plowing was going on, giving the ground a suggestion of the same nudity as the happy-go-lucky inhabitants. Now and then, from the summit of a ridge, we caught sight of an old plantation house with a long series of walls behind which only a generation ago were herded troops of negro slaves, and about it vast coffee-fields abandoned for want of labor. Everywhere was an air of do-nothing poverty and ruination, coupled with a fatalistic surrender to circumstances. The unimportant towns along the way, little less thirsty and weary of life, seemed to be inhabited only by non-producers, ranging from priests to shopkeepers. At length the thick dust-and-heat haze of day turned purple with evening, a heavy sun went down somewhere to the west, leaving a great red blotch irregularly radiating on the horizon, the night grew almost cold and, two hours behind time, we rumbled into the glass-domed Luz station.
São Paulo was not what I had left it ten weeks before. Not only had the drought made it dry and dusty and even more hazy than Rio, but the war had brought its industry almost to a standstill. Swarms of workmen without work competed with hungry boys for the chance to sell a few newspapers. In the poorer section a serious epidemic of typhoid had broken out; the hotels that had seemed numerous before, now, with only a guest or two each, appeared trebly so; “actresses” who had always had a native “friend” to help out, had taken to suicide because even the amigo could no longer pay their rent. The very cafés concertos in which rich fazendeiros from the coffee-growing interior had been wont to squander fortunes on blond charmers from across the sea were succumbing one by one to the “brutal crisis.” Everywhere the city had a sad air and many of those one met were too sad to speak; even the weather was gloomy, in the face of approaching summer. The sun was rarely seen; palm-trees shivered in a cold wind; disheveled banana plants huddled together as if for mutual warmth. Professionally the “industrial capital” looked unpromising indeed. The Paulista had not yet come to realize that the war was really the opportunity for a land with such vast resources, so far barely touched by commercial enterprise, to shake off borrowing and indolence and become one of the wealthy and powerful nations of the earth.
Approached from the federal capital, São Paulo showed at a glance the effect on the human race of even a slight difference in climate. Though not appreciably farther from the equator than Rio, and barely half a mile above sea-level, its atmosphere was wholly different. The negro element is conspicuously less and seems to be decreasing, so that a century hence, São Paulo will have perhaps no more of the African strain than the Portuguese have now. The average citizen one saw in the business streets, or in the palatial homes of coffee kings and captains of industry—not to mention successful politicians—out along the Avenida Paulista and in other flowery and fashionable suburbs had much less in common with the motley Carioca than with the people of southwestern Europe.
“Tut” and Carlos arrived at dawn with the outfit. I had been disgruntled, though not greatly surprised, to find that our coming had not been advertised, except with a small portrait of Edison in some of the newspapers, the ex-bootblack being a true Latin-American in never believing a promise until it has been fulfilled. This was contrary to our contract and it would have caused us to lose not one, but several days had I not obliged the distrustful Spaniard to let us open at one of his theaters the following night and to plunge at once into advertising, which I aided by a special performance to the press and “influential citizens” at six that afternoon. As we were booked for a month in the city, “Tut” and I took quarters—the scarcity of transients having brought them within our means—in a palace overlooking the stately and dignified Municipal Theater, from which we could look down upon the band-concerts in the gardens below as from a balcony—unless they coincided with our own performances. Carlos, being in his home town, joined his increasing family in one of the sections chiefly devoted to workmen of Italian antecedents.
The “Companhia Brazileira” operated eight cinemas throughout the city, and these were in the habit of changing their programs nightly, instead of twice a week. As we were to play in all of them, I set to work to shift our numbers in such a way as to give us more than twenty-five combinations of program with our fifteen films, both in the hope that those who might already have heard one number would be attracted by the other two and because Brazilians will not stand for sopa requentada (reheated soup), as they call a repetition of program. Our work in São Paulo was quite different from that in Rio. Here the cinemas ran only two, or at most three, sessions, totalling less than four hours a night, with matinées only on Sundays. One man could easily have done all that the three of us were called upon to do in those days, had he been able to split himself into triplets at the critical moments. Nor was our income cut down as much as the difference between two or three and ten performances a day would suggest, for the theaters were large, with boxes, balconies and galleries, and the public was accustomed to take its entertainment in common at reasonable hours. Theatrically, however, the Paulistas were quite like the Cariocas. Their favorite in the “movies” was a Parisian comedian whose specialty is the fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-evening-dress brand of humor, and it was difficult to unseat this king. To be sure, São Paulo audiences did show a few more signs of life than those in the national capital, an occasional snigger at least; but on the other hand, unlike Rio, with its pose for the exotic, they somewhat resented that our records were not all in the native tongue. “Tut” suggested that we take them out and have them translated.
Though the “Companhia Brazileira” was required by the terms of our contract to do all advertising, I decided to try my own hand at flim-flamming the public. The usual posters, newspaper notices, and banners were all very well, but I wanted something special, something unusual, that could not fail to impress upon everyone that “the Kinetophone, the wonderful talking-moving pictures, the marvel of the age,” and so on, was in São Paulo for a very limited time indeed, “só trez dias (only three days)”—after which it would move to another theater a few blocks away. Our enterprising partners were not so conservative in advertising as they were lacking in new ideas. But though they were always harping on the American genius for publicity and insisting on their eagerness to be shown, they invariably backed water when any unfamiliar scheme was physically laid before them, and this dread of the unusual was so often in evidence during our tour of Brazil that it is evidently a typical Brazilian characteristic. In São Paulo I hired an Italian dwarf, who had been hanging about appealing for a job, to parade the streets as a sandwich-man. That particular form of advertising apparently had never been seen in Brazil. The company highly approved of the scheme in outline, but refused to sponsor an unprecedented innovation when the time came actually to carry it out. I determined, therefore, to risk a few dollars of Linton’s money. Taking two of our large cloth-mounted portraits of Edison as a background, I had special sandwich-boards made on a design of my own—except that the painter, frightened at any suggestion of novelty, reduced my idea to the commonplace, and then told another man to complete the job. This he did eventually, under my stern supervision, and I turned the innovation loose on São Paulo. An hour later, I met my dwarf carrying the two boards above his head in the form of a banner that had been the “last cry” in Brazilian advertising for at least a decade! He had some maudlin excuse to offer for not carrying out my orders and next day he left even the banner loafing on a corner while he worked at a better job during the best hours of Saturday, leaving me no choice but to turn him back into the ranks of the disgruntled unemployed. Thanks to rain, the war, and other drawbacks, we did so poor a business on several nights that the ex-bootblack talked of breaking the contract, for though they expect “um inglez” to live strictly up to his side of an agreement, on their side a contract means nothing whatever to these people. To make things worse the milreis dropped again to five to the dollar, yet money was so scarce that we dared not raise our admission price. By moving every three days to a new theater, however, we got fair-sized audiences and did moderately well, though nothing like what we should have done before the war.
All my other troubles as a theatrical potentate, however, were nothing compared to my struggle against “deadheads.” Though our contract called for “complete suppression of the free list during this engagement,” the carrying out of that clause was quite another matter. Excuses for entering a theater in Brazil without paying an admission fee are without number. One might suppose that a Justice of the Supreme Court would be ashamed to use his office to force his way into a “movie” house, admittance to which cost barely the equivalent of a quarter. But many men of that class not only usurped free admission, but usually took their entire families with them—and the average Brazilian family can fill many seats. It is the custom in Brazil for theaters to send annual passes to all higher politicians. Thus the judge is given a richly engraved yearly pass, which claims to be non-transferable and for his personal use only. But he cannot, of course, be expected actually to show it, like a popular, or a common fellow, or to have his right questioned to bring with him such guests as he may choose. It is the business of everyone connected with the theater to know the judge and not put him to the annoyance and degradation of showing that pass, which would be an insult comparable almost to dunning him for a debt. So he thrusts the obsequious gateman haughtily aside and marches in with his whole progeny—and a little later a barefoot negro boy appears with an elaborately engraved annual pass which states that he is a Justice of the Supreme Court, and he must be let in without question, lest one have to answer next day to contempt of court!
We were incessantly pestered by official mendicants and well-to-do beggars, by friends of the management or of the cinema employees, by “influential people” in droves. Favor to a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, the friend of a friend’s friend, to anyone with an authoritative manner, and the lack of moral courage that goes with it, is the curse of all Brazilian door-keepers. If a man had ever met a person in any way connected with the institution, he expected to get the glad hand and a smiling invitation to “go right in.” It was not so much that they were trying to save money; the milreis admission fee was not serious to the official and influential class; it was fazendo fita, showing off by stalking past the cringing ticket-collector with an air of daring him to challenge them. To march in with his whole decorated, upholstered, and perfumed family gave a man the sense of being a person of superior clay, for whom there are no barriers. This attitude ran the full gamut of government officials. One of the standing privileges of a newly appointed Minister of War is to go to the theater and ignore the ticket collector; it is his visible and final proof of office. Negro youths employed in the customhouse forced their way in without protest because some form of trouble would be sure to follow any interference with that class. My ears were constantly being importuned with, “Please, senhor, may I go in? I am an ‘artist’ or a poet, or fourteenth cousin of the delegado, or great-grandmother of the town dog-catcher, or a bag of wind, or....” When mail arrived for me at our consulate the native clerk was careful to keep that fact to himself if I called during the day, so that he could bring it to me at night and use it as a ticket for himself and his female hanger-on. In addition to all this, the short-sighted managers think it necessary to give permanent passes to many of the “influential families” in their neighborhood so that others will see that the place is fashionable and will patronize it. As a result, those who have money do not need to spend it, because they have season tickets, and those whom they are expected to imbue with the desire to go cannot do so because they do not have the money.
A woman of the comfortable class comes to the cinema with two, or even three nearly full-grown children, and though she knows perfectly well that they are expected to pay at least half-fare, she presents a single ticket for herself and starts to drag the children in after her. If the door-keeper has the courage to halt her, the woman, feigning great indignation, says:
“Why do they pay admission, little bits of children like that?”
“Yes, senhora,” replies the bowing manager, with far more courtesy than firmness.
“Oh dear,” sighs the woman, “I have just ten tostões with me for my own ticket and I’ll have to go way back home and get the rest”—whereupon the manager hastens to say, “that’s perfectly all right, senhora, go right in,” for he knows that if she turns homeward it will be in wrath and he will lose even the “dez tostões” she has paid for her own ticket. As often as she comes to the cinema the woman, and many like her, works the same trick with a most serious and innocent face.
We had to admit free the chauffeurs of private automobiles in order to keep the friendship and family influence of the patrons who came in them. Sometimes it was evident that the cinema was making use of us during our short engagement to win friends for themselves during the rest of the season. One manager went so far as to try not to include us in the program at all one Sunday afternoon, knowing he would fill the house anyway with Edison’s portrait outside and not have to share the receipts with us. Then anyone in any way connected with a newspaper, from the office-boy down to the editor’s third mistress, must be let in without question or the entertainment is forever blasted in that community. A decent and unusually good show for Brazil opened near us one evening. Being newly arrived from Europe, the manager gave two seats each to the principal newspapers, instead of allowing anyone attached to them to get in merely by mumbling that fact as they passed the door-keeper. Next day, after highly praising a salacious and worthless thing at another theater, the papers one and all announced that no decent Brazilian families should be seen at this one, and the following night the police closed the performance.
At the “Cinema High Life”—the mulatto boy operators had chalked the name on the back brick wall of the stage so that they could remember how to pronounce it, “Ai Laife,” in three syllables—which prided itself on attracting “le monde chic” of São Paulo, I counted 215 “deadheads” one night out of an audience of barely six hundred, and I missed a number when duties took me away from the door. Moreover I did not count the score or more in uniform, nor the friends of the stagehands who saw the pictures from the rear.
I soon cut off some of this dead-heading, but it was at the expense of much diligence and audacity, not to say diplomacy, for one cannot manhandle the Brazilians as one can a more straightforward people, without running the risk of being boycotted by the entire community. It meant constant vigilance, too, for the crooked are notoriously more energetic and cunning than the honest. In the beginning I lost considerable sleep over this petty form of grafting, but one soon learns in Brazil to take a new view of life, to smile and be “sympathico” and fit in as well as possible with the society about him. It is the only society he will find in any appreciable quantity as long as he remains in the country, and he may as well make the best of it.
Once in a while, though by no means often enough to make up for the “deadhead” losses, men went to the other extreme in fazendo fita. A fop now and then came in alone and bought an entire box for himself; or men well known in the community might come the first night with their families, thrusting the door-keeper aside, and take seats in the parquet, while the next night, when he came with his bejewelled mistress, the same man would take the best box available, and pay for it, less out of a sense of fairness than in order advantageously to display his prize to his envious fellow-citizens.
However, in compensation for my troubles new honors were heaped upon me. The Brazilian dearly loves an honorary title, and being unable to think of any other that would fit a man of my undoubtedly important position as “concessionary” for all Brazil of a great invention, they took to calling me “doctor.” In time I grew accustomed to being introduced with deep bows and the words, “Permita-me presental-lhe o Doutor Frawnck.” In “movie” circles I let the error pass as unimportant, but when one day even the American president of the college of São Paulo publicly addressed me by that title, I protested.
“But you have a bachelor’s degree, haven’t you?” he asked, in some surprise.
“Yes, I believe so, if I haven’t lost it somewhere along the road, but——”
“Then you are a doctor in Brazil,” he replied, “for the bachelor’s degree carries with it that title in this country.”
“Dr.” Franck I remained, therefore, as long as I continued to manage the Kinetophone.
With matinées only on Sundays, I found plenty of time for my favorite sport of tramping the countryside. One afternoon I strolled at random out beyond the low, dry, reddish cliffs at the edge of town and struck off in the direction of São Caetano. Great banks of white clouds lay piled into the sky on all sides, and the dead-dry, almost burning stretch of rolling country was half-hidden under a haze of red dust. I passed several suburban beer-halls, each with its “Giocce di Bocce,” or Italian nine-pin earth court behind it, and wandered on along more red roads, the light-colored houses scattered over the rolling country showing up in front and disappearing behind me in the thick, dust-laden atmosphere as in a fog. Gradually I came to realize that almost a procession of men, women and children was bound in the same direction, some tramping the dusty road on weary, blistered feet, others lolling at their ease in carriages and automobiles. Not a few of the latter were expensive private cars with chauffeurs in livery.
For nearly an hour I followed the same direction. Then all at once, topping a slight ridge, I came upon all the concourse that had gone before—automobiles, carriages, and pedestrians—gathered in a broad bare space on the brow of a treeless, thirsty hill. Down below the throng was a small tile-roofed hut with two bar fences so arranged before it that only one person at a time of the crowd that was jammed up against it could enter and bend over a sort of counter across the open door to talk with a man inside. Each ended the interview by handing the man a ten, or more, milreis note and passed out through a gap between fence and hut. Though the entire assortment of Brazilian complexions was to be found in the throng, many were full whites, blond European immigrants as well as women in silks and diamonds, dandies in gloves, spats and canes—and every mother’s son and daughter of them talked with bated breath while they waited their turn to approach the counter. When this came, the men reverently raised their hats, the women gave a species of curtsey and in many cases kissed the man’s hand, then conversed with him for two or three minutes in an undertone, which could not but have been heard by those crowded nearest to the speaker. Then they paid the fee and passed on, with as contrite and sanctified a look on their faces as if they had just ended a private conference with St. Peter. Each carried away a mammoth visiting card bearing the name Vicente Rodriguez Viera, and at the exit a shaggy countryman halted each by thrusting forth photographs of the man behind the counter, which each hastened to buy with a meek and grateful countenance, as if by divine command.
Inside the hut was an electric push-button which, like the back door, connected with a rambling lot of fazenda buildings, and near at hand was a large liquor emporium and two restaurants of a crude, frontier-like variety. I was preparing to sample the attractions of the latter when the man behind the counter suddenly rose and strolled toward the farmhouse in the rear, leaving the perspiring crowd—automobiles, diamonds and all—to await his sweet will about returning. He was a big bulk of a countryman, plainly a caboclo, or copper-colored native Brazilian of considerable Indian and probably some negro blood, with a great bushy black beard. Dressed in an uncreased, broad-brimmed felt hat, a heavy, dark suit, and black riding-boots, he wore also a colored handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck, a conspicuous watch-chain and charm across his slightly prominent abdomen, and huge brass rings on seven of his fingers considerably enhancing his general air of cheap vulgarity. His face was puffy under the eyes and had a “foxy” expression that no one of a modicum of experience with the human race could have mistaken for anything than what it was,—proof of cunning rascality.
As the fellow was returning to the hut I approached the vendor of photographs and asked who the man was. His ally gave me a look of mingled astonishment and disgust for my ignorance and explained that the noble being was a curandeiro, or a “curer.”
“You mean a physician?” I suggested.
“No, senhor, not a doctor; a curandeiro.”
“Does he give medicine?”
“None whatever.”
“Does he cure by laying on hands?”
“Not at all. He merely gives them his card and they buy his picture. After nine days they come back again, and three times in the next month, and then once or twice a month, if they are still ailing, until they are cured. He is a caboclo legitimo” (a dyed-in-the-wool Brazilian) “and has been here eight years.”
The “curer” was taking in money at a rate that should have allowed him to retire in much less time than that, but no doubt pride in his work kept him at it. Formerly he had operated in São Paulo itself, but had been banished outside the city limits. An elaborate enameled sign announced that on Sundays and holidays he gave no cures, “no matter what the provocation.” As he reëntered the hut, the whole throng uncovered or curtseyed. A peculiar fact was that a large number of his clients seemed to be in the most robust of health; no doubt in these cases his cures were most effective. Several well-dressed little girls were forced in to consult him, plainly against their wills and better judgment, for they laughed at the silly fraud, and one of them shocked the sanctimonious crowd by calling him “velho barbudo” (old bewhiskered). There is a Brazilian saying that “E mais facil enganar a humanidade que desenganal-a,” which might be freely translated, “It is easier to squeeze the human head into an uncouth shape than to squeeze it back again to normal.”
We found that the Kinetophone appealed less and less as we descended the scale of wealth and education. In the workingman’s district of Barra Funda, to which we went after a week down in Santos, we were escorted by mobs of urchins until we felt like a country circus, but there was little gain in playing to such audiences. In the slang of Brazil, “brass was lacking,” and we gave matinées to scatterings of “deadheads” and half-price children and evening performances to thin, apathetic houses. The young toughs we would not let in free took revenge by mutilating our cloth-mounted posters, the managers lost our newspaper cuts, and nearly half our slight share of the receipts was paid in nickel! We were held up, too, by one of the ubiquitous national holidays. The second of November was the Dia dos Finados, a sort of Brazilian Memorial Day sacred to weeping and the laying on of flowers—not to mention flirting—in all the cemeteries, and not to be enlivened by mere theatrical performances. Those of the undress variety “got away with it” by announcing a “solemn program,” but when I protested against this forced holiday, contrary to contract, the irreverent ex-bootblack grew wrathy and insisted that on such a day our show was “too frivolous!”
But if the human audiences did not respond, we now and then got proof, sometimes in disastrous form, that our entertainment was realistic. In several of the barn-like theaters in the outskirts of São Paulo we were obliged to “shoot from the back,” that is, the projecting machine was set up at the rear of the stage and the pictures were thrown upon the back of the curtain. One evening some friend of the stage hands brought a terrier with him. Among the demonstrations of the “Portuguese Lecture” with which we opened our part of the program was a collie that rushed out barking upon the screen stage. Barely had he dashed into view this time when the terrier sprang madly upon him and all but wrecked the curtain and the performance.
It was not until the fourth of November that my real job began. Our engagement with the “Companhia Brazileira” was drawing to a close at an old theater out by the gas-works, and the hour had come for me to find out whether I was a real “movie” magnate or merely a ticket-taker; for the carrying out of a contract made by someone else is quite a different thing from faring forth into the world and making contracts. I set out for the interior of the State of São Paulo, therefore, with misgivings, not only as to my own abilities but because only “Tut” and Carlos, who did not yet speak the same language, were left to run the show.
I was bound for Campinas, third city of the state, but the town of Jundiahy looked promising and I dropped off there. It was a straggling coffee center of some sixteen thousand inhabitants, rather picturesquely strewn over a rolling hillside, at the summit of which bulked a big yellow building bearing the familiar name “Polytheama.” In the electric-light plant next door I learned the name of the manager, but I visited a dozen other buildings before I ran him down, only to find that the real owner and contract-maker was the prefect and chief mogul of the town. We found him surrounded by much ceremony and a score of cringing fellow-citizens in his inner sanctum of the prefeitura. I introduced myself with as brief formality as possible and told him that the Kinetophone was to end its engagement in São Paulo a week later and that it might be to his advantage, as well as to that of Jundiahy, to have it stop there for the night of Friday, the thirteenth, on our way to Campinas. He replied that he had made a special trip down to São Paulo to see this new “marvel of the American wizard,” but that he had never dreamed we might be induced to come to Jundiahy. He was highly flattered, but could he and his modest little town really afford so remarkable an entertainment? I offered to book the attraction for a hundred and fifty dollars. He looked up the rate of exchange in the São Paulo morning paper, smiled sadly over the figures he penciled on the margin of it, and regretted that it was impossible to pay a fixed sum, especially in such hard times.
I took leave of him and turned back toward the station. But I felt almost superstitious at the thought of failing in my first attempt to make a contract and yielded to the entreaties of the manager beside me to return and seek some other basis of arrangement. The prefect showed more pleasure than surprise at my return and offered to rent me the “Polytheama” for one night at 80$, we to pay for orchestra, light, license, employees, and all the rest. I declined. “Tut” could scarcely be expected to handle so complicated a proposition to our advantage. It then being my move, I dug down into my portfolio and brought forth a contract which Linton by some stroke of luck or genius had made in a small town of Chile, giving him seventy per cent. of the gross receipts. I would gladly have accepted the “fifty-fifty” basis on which we were then playing, rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of the Chilean contract and my ever improving Portuguese I got the prefect to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the privilege of charging to his account the cost of our transportation from São Paulo, just in order not to seem too eager, I agreed. I drew up duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next train north.
It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling coffee-clad hills, and the siesta hour was not yet over. I took a tigre, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed myself in a big bare front room of the principal hotel, began my professional inquiries at once. The important theaters were the “Casino Carlos Gomes” and the “Theatro Rink.” The former looked rather small and dainty for our purposes; besides, it ranked as a municipal playhouse, and I did not yet feel like going into politics on so lavish a scale. The “Rink” was a great barn of a place of less aristocratic appearance, and in the course of an hour I coaxed the negro boys attached to it to rout out the manager. He was a plain, business-like young fellow with almost American ideas of advertising and management, and we were soon engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and as he grew interested we sat down at a table on the gloomy unlighted stage where a Portuguese company was stuttering and ranting through the comedy they were to perpetrate that night. The first two days we might devote to Campinas were much more important than the one I had booked in Jundiahy. For one thing they were Saturday and Sunday, and in addition the latter was November 15th, Brazil’s Second Independence day. I proposed that we play five nights at two hundred and fifty dollars a night. The manager smoked half a cigarette pensively, then said that if I had only come before the war he would readily have consented, but that now it was impossible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract on him. No, he would only split even, and there we stuck for some time. He was adaptable, however, and we finally came to an agreement. He was to double the price of admission, advertise “three days only” with much gusto, including a special street-car covered with banners and filled with musicians to parade the streets, and give us half the total receipts. On the less important days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday he was to give his customary subscription section without our assistance, we to appear about nine, which is the fashionable hour in larger Brazilian towns, with the price reduced to the normal one milreis—this concession to be kept dark, of course, until the double-priced holidays were over—and we to get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our sections.
My misgivings had largely taken flight, for before sunset of my first day “on the road,” in this new sense, I had contracted the principal theaters in two important towns at better terms than Linton himself had been able to get in Brazil, and had the show booked for two weeks ahead. It took me all that evening to draw up the contracts with the “Rink,” write the contents of them in English for “Tut” and in Portuguese for Carlos, and explain to the manager our several advertising schemes, but I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for frail humanity to be.
After so good a day’s work I decided to allow myself time to look Campinas over, instead of departing at dawn. It is a place of considerable importance, both as a coffee center and as the largest and most prominent city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Only a few years before it had been a focus of yellow fever; now that scourge had disappeared and sanitation seemed to have come to stay. Any city on earth would point with pride to the rectangle of royal palms, here growing unusually far inland, which surround the Largo Carlos Gomes. That name is widespread throughout the city, for it was here that the mulatto, Gomes, composer of the opera “O Guaraní” and generally rated Brazil’s chief musician, was born. There is a statue of him, baton in hand, bronze music-desk behind him, in a prominent little square in the center of town—a fragile fellow of typical Brazilian lack of physique, overweighed by the mass of unbarbered locks which seem to be the sign of musicians irrespective of nationality. Campinas appears to have a special trend toward music, for it is also the birthplace of the pianist, Guiomar Novaes.
The train sped away through endless rows of coffee, stretching out of sight over rolling horizons. The region seemed more fertile than that about São Paulo city, with a redder soil, though this may only have been because here it had recently rained. Unlike those elsewhere, the Brazilian coffee bushes stood out on the bare hillsides entirely unshaded, the fields often looking as if they had been combed with a gigantic comb. Within an hour I stopped at Villa Americana, a small country town with a plow factory, a cotton-and-ribbon-mill, and a fertile landscape in every direction. It is the railway station for large numbers of Americans, or ex-Americans, chiefly farmers, who are scattered for many miles roundabout. I found the first of them opposite the station, a doctor who had been practicing here for a quarter of a century, and who stepped to the telephone to call upon one of the colony to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress, looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant church which he had been mainly instrumental in building.
In 1867 bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started anew as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family during Sherman’s march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older generation in this region had fought through the war as “Johnny Rebs,” as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon after the beginning of reconstruction days “to escape carpet-baggers, free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again.” They still called Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, “them down East Yanks,” and seemed hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery, the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the resultant advantages in production when high prices prevailed. But the majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their color-line.
Most of these transplanted Americans now admit that they would probably have done better, at least economically, to have remained in the United States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as “belonging to the overseer class,” others as “right low down trash.” On the whole, the colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards of morality, though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their pronunciation had peculiar little idiosyncrasies, such as giving a Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their English. Their farm-hands they called “comrades,” though these were in almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, preferred that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on English. Among the “low down trash,” most of the second generation was said to know no English whatever. On the whole, the colony was another demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her immigrants to any such extent as does the United States.
When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all that goes with it, the son “hitched up” and drove me out through eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English vocabularies and the mountaineer’s self-reliance. Yet they were not always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely of wit, with a manner which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their way into town. When the Americans first arrived, they had planted much cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned, and they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving their attention chiefly to corn and beans.
It is a great misfortune to Brazil that nearly all her rivers run inland to the Plata or the Amazon, for lack of this natural transportation has undoubtedly retarded the development of the country, though it has probably also abetted the development of railroads. Particularly in the State of São Paulo there is perhaps as great a network of them as anywhere in the western hemisphere outside the United States. No fewer than five systems, better laid and equipped than the Brazilian average, and with many branches, connect São Paulo city with the rest of the state and with those to the north and south, while a few months after I passed that way one of these opened direct rail communication to Corumbá, far across the wilderness of Matto Grosso on the Paraguay river. One of the results is that the coffee state is surprisingly well developed, with many important towns, vastly more agriculture, and much less forest than the imagination pictures.
As far as Rio Claro, a few hours north of Villa Americana, the railroad service was excellent. Beyond that large, one-story, checkerboard, monotonous town ran a wood-burning narrow-gauge, the tenders piled high with cordwood. Though ours was a “limited” train, passing many stations without officially stopping, the British “staff” system required the engineer to exchange orders with every station master, and made it necessary to slow down to a walk at every settlement. The farther we got into the interior the more often were we entrusted to wood-burners, the smaller became the trains, the closer the engines with their deluge of smoke, sparks, and cinders, and the more we pitched and rolled along the narrow tracks, which wound incessantly among low hills. The landscape grew more and more wild, almost a wilderness in places, though no such tropical jungle as I had imagined, with sometimes no real stop for an hour or more.
São Carlos was a lively town of some 15,000 people in a hollow among rolling hills, its houses separated by masses of green trees. There were plenty of Fords at the station and swarms of carregadores, baggage-carriers with license numbers on their caps—you couldn’t sell your old shoes in Brazil unless you wore a license showing that the politicians had given you permission to do so. Here one was struck again by the fact that great competition does not necessarily mean low prices. Considering themselves lucky to get a job or two a day, these carriers growled at anything less than a milreis for the slightest exertion, and expected enough for carrying a suitcase across the street to keep their families for a week.
In the best room available at the best hotel I could scarcely turn around without barking my shins, and the window opened so directly on the sidewalk that the shoulder of every passer-by seemed to jostle me. The weather was volatile as a Brazilian, with heavy downpours for ten minutes alternating with ten minutes of sunshine. I waded down into the valley through wide streets reeking in blood-red mud and up to the “Theatro São Carlos,” the manager-owner of which I at length unearthed, in spite of the prevarications of his negro servants. As usual he was one of the pillars of the town, of that aristocratic flimsiness of the man who has never done any real work for generations back, and his air said plainly that he knew he could outwit any simpleton of a foreigner. I set my first demands high, therefore, in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he had driven a close bargain when he at length agreed to as much as I had expected and ten per cent. more than I would have accepted under compulsion. I got his name signed to duplicate contracts while he was still under the influence of my hypnotic eye and was giving him instructions, in the guise of information, on advertising and the arrangement of programs, when he remarked casually:
“Of course Edison himself comes with the show? Our people will be as anxious to see him as to get acquainted with his new invention, of which I have heard such splendid reports.”
“Why—er—it may be that he will not be able to get here,” I stammered. “You see, he has several little things on hand; besides, he is a married man and—and——”
How excellent my Portuguese and my winning salesman manner had become was proved by the fact that in the end I did not have to abrogate the contract for two days at the “Theatro São Carlos.”