Chapter XV: Northward to Bahia (2)

Bahia is built on a peninsula connected with the rest of the continent by a narrow neck of land, and out this runs its railway line, soon to split into three branches which wander away into the interior of the state. My random wandering brought me out across this one morning and on along the shore of an inner arm of the bay, here endlessly lined with negro huts. I was quenching my tropical thirst with a juicy watermelon when a negro stopped to ask if I did not know that I would die if I ate watermelon in the middle of the day, and soon brought a crowd of excited blacks chattering and gesticulating about me. South America is full of such amusing superstitions, concerning the danger of eating certain foods at certain times, or of eating simultaneously two that do not “fit together.” An old dugout sailed me across the breezy neck of the inner bay from Brandão to Itapagipe, sparing me a return tramp of five miles, for at this point the electric cars pass frequently. There is a long beach in this middle-class suburb of Itapagipe, and a little wharf at which crude sailing boats from about the bay unload watermelons and mangos, bananas and big luscious pineapples, the latter selling on the spot for a mere _tostão_, or those with empty pockets may fish slightly damaged ones out of the water for nothing. On such excursions one must take care not to dress too carelessly, for there are, of course, two classes in the Philadelphia-made street-cars of Bahia and little visible sign to distinguish them, so that on almost every tour through the first-class car the conductor is forced to order men without coats, or collars, or socks, or real shoes, or a proper haircut to go back into the other. On the other hand he, too, has his rebuffs, for almost anyone wearing a frock-coat says haughtily, “I have a pass,” though never offering to show it, and the conductor sneaks obsequiously on.

A favorite recreation of foreign residents and wealthy white natives of Bahia is to visit the principal ships that anchor in the harbor. To many this is the one touch of civilization superior to that at home, as the trains in which the people come to sit for a few minutes are to the inhabitants of interior villages. But most of them come for more material purposes,—the foreign residents to imbibe “real booze” once more, the élite among the natives to defraud the country’s revenues by replenishing their wardrobes at the ship’s barber shop, buying boxes of chocolate, scented soap, perfumes, lingerie, all the smaller luxuries which can only be had at much higher price or not at all on shore, “women of the life” on professional errands or merely to catch a breath of their beloved Europe. There was a steam-laundry on the ships I visited and had I thought of it in time I might have brought my soiled “linen” on board, as did not a few residents, and had it back when the boat returned from Buenos Aires. To entrust anything to the native washerwomen of Brazil, particularly of Bahia, is to risk having it worn for a week or more by the laundress’s husband or lover, and to insure that it shall be beaten to a pulp in some mud-hole, dried among goat-dung, and returned a fortnight or so later more torn and soiled than when it departed.

About a week after we opened in Bahia, Ruben drifted around to my usual station in the course of the evening and said that he would like to lengthen our contract from twenty-five to ninety days. I declined at once, at least on a fifty per cent. basis. He next offered to pay the baggage haul in addition; then he promised to defray all our traveling expenses, and to cover all the territory from Bahia to Pernambuco. I promised to think this over.

Though I had not found Ruben “crooked as a bed-spring,” as some of his former business associates described him, I knew that he had not been designed with a T-square—and Ruben knew that I knew it. But he was a good “mixer” and an excellent manipulator of politicians, which is a great advantage in Brazil, and is acquired with great difficulty by a foreigner, no matter how well he may learn the language. Besides, Ruben had the most American ideas on advertising of any Brazilian I had ever met and though, of course, he expected to make something out of us, it was a question whether we would not get more ourselves while he was making his profit than we could make alone. Sometimes a crook, well watched, is a better business partner than an honest man, for he is likely to take a chance and is rarely as slow to see an opportunity as are more sincere individuals.

I did not, however, care to spend three months in that corner of the world. I hoped, in fact, to be well up the Amazon by that time, and after sleeping on it I agreed with the “colonel” on a sixty-day contract at the terms he had offered. By this time my practice in Portuguese made it easy to draw up an elaborate document of twelve articles that even a corporation lawyer would have had difficulty in evading. In effect, it made Ruben our advance agent, with the privilege of paying himself, and left me merely my managerial duties. Indeed, this document and what had led up to it so took the “colonel’s” eye that next day he informed me he needed a man of my “pulse,” or American energy, and that as soon as I got the Kinetophone back to the United States I must return and become manager of the big new theater he was soon going to build on the triangular vacant lot near the “São João”!

“Muito obrigado,” I replied, that being Brazilian for “much obliged.”

We were to play in Bahia and about the bay until carnival time, come back to the “São João” for those festive days, and then turn northward. On the morning of January 26 we tore down the show and loaded it into the special baggage-tramcar Ruben had furnished, moving under guidance of his part-Indian mulatto sub-manager out to the suburb of Rio Vermelho. This was a sea-beach village of mainly well-to-do white residents—though no one seemed to bathe, at least in the sea, in Bahia—three miles from the center of town through densely wooded valleys of mango and alligator-pear, jack-fruit and bread-fruit trees, all heavily loaded with their products. We played to packed houses, with few “deadheads,” for here Ruben had little fear either of politicians or police. The cinema of A Barra, another seaside suburb to which we moved three days later, was an outdoor place of sandy bottom, a sheet-iron wall, and only a suggestion of roof, always comfortable with the trade wind sweeping through it. There I could go to the show and look at the brilliant moon at the same time, and our film-men could be heard talking and singing blocks away.

Having performed the extraordinary feat of sleeping seventeen consecutive nights in the same bed, I decided that I needed a change of scene. Up at the head of the bay was a town called Santo Amaro da Purificação, where Ruben had planned to take us; but a religious festival having broken out there, he changed his mind, saying that negroes celebrating church _festas_ do not spend money on cinemas. I went over to see whether he was right, and incidentally to revel in the “purification” attached to the town’s name.

One of the little steamers of the “Navegação Bahiana” that sail the bay, leaving three times a week for most of the towns around it, departed at high tide with a considerable crowd bound for the _festa_. It was hot under the lee of the land, but once out on the blue water nothing could have been more pleasant, at least in so far as weather was concerned. We stopped at three towns on as many islands and passed many smaller ones along the base of the bay shore, almost everywhere piled up in hundred-foot cliffs. The soil, even on the smallest islands, was of that deep-red color common to much of Brazil, and royal palms lifted their proud heads over a reed-and-mud negro hut on many a little island. We picked up _festa_-dressed passengers at several villages. Perhaps one out of twenty of my fellow-travelers showed no traces of negro ancestry. Bad teeth were universal among them, more unsightly still in the case of those with a smile like a flash of a brass-shop window, who could afford the ministrations of the wandering “dentists” that inflict interior Brazil.

By and by the water turned from the dense clear-blue of the bay to a grayish color. Several large time-blackened churches appeared on commanding, breezy noses of land, with a few poor houses and miserable huts tucked away in the hollows beneath them. We entered a small river that wound in S-shape through a sort of marsh, passing a three-story agricultural school that loomed up through the palm-tree jungle in apparently utter isolation, and at sunset tied up at the end of a long causeway across a swamp, where a dozen quaint little mule-cars were waiting for us. The fare on these for a two-mile ride was a milreis, which was bad enough, but the driver, singling me out as the only foreigner and person of wealth among the _festa_-bound horde, and no doubt short of cash for his own celebration, demanded that I pay double fare, and was invited to go to the devil for his pains.

He was going there anyway, it turned out, for if the manager of the more populous afterworld does not own Santo Amaro da Purificação it would be hard to get anyone else to claim it. A long, thin, one-story town, stretching out for a mile or more through low, soggy land, it is inhabited almost entirely by animal-like blacks festooned in dirty rags. Groups of loafing negroes filled every doorway, covered every shady spot, occupied the narrow remnants of dilapidated sidewalks, doing nothing for a living, not even taking in one another’s washing, and living happily ever after for all that. A cross between a ditch and a river flows—or rather, lies—through the length of the town, and in this stagnant sewage the inhabitants not only attempt to swim when the whim comes upon them, but dip up water for cooking purposes. To drink it would evidently kill even a Brazilian negro, so in various parts of the town there are public spigots shut in by iron fences, with an elaborate “office” and a turnstile that can be passed only by paying a _vintem_ for a can of water. Along the noisome canal are a few distilleries, dirty as the rest of the town, and a bit of sugar-cane is grown in the vicinity, but on its edges Saint Amaro of the Purification breaks at once into green rolling campo, which the swarming inhabitants are too indolent to cultivate. Two automobiles had come to show off at the _festa_, and were so rare a sight that whenever they appeared, jouncing and bumping down one of the so-called streets, with a dozen of the town notables clinging wide-eyed to the seats, all the children and most of the adults took to pursuing them with shouts of “Oo ah-oo-tah-mave!”

The festival really did not begin until next day, but as often happens in Latin-America, the people could not wait and were already celebrating the _véspera_. About the _matrix_, or main church, surged immense throngs of leprous, unwashed negroes, hilarious with the drunken-religious orgy. Native rum flowed everywhere. There were forty-two gambling tables running full blast, with crowds of children from six to sixty—if anyone ever lives to that age in Santo Amaro—throwing their money upon them, many so poor that they had only coppers to hazard. Any negro boy who could get a table, mark a square of cloth or cardboard with numbers or colors, and produce a tin can and three dice or any kind of home-made roulette wheel, became forthwith the proprietor of a gambling establishment. The town was lighted by gas—except that most of this was now used to illuminate an “AVE MARIA” in letters ten feet high on the façade of the church. Under this a band blew itself almost brown in the face in honor of the tin Virgin inside the musty old church, before which throngs of gaudily but raggedly dressed negroes were bowing down, crossing themselves on the face, mouth, navel, and finally the body, and displaying curious intermixtures of Catholicism and African fetish worship.

All night long the hubbub lasted. My unknown Brazilian roommate in the “Pensão Universal,” a human sty which had recently opened as a public hostelry and would no doubt close again after the festival, had usurped the bed by piling his junk upon it, and left me a crippled canvas cot. I was awakened frequently by the cold coming up through this, though by no means so often as by the amorous negro swains and wenches retiring from the exciting festivities to adjoining rooms.

High noon found me struggling to get a railway-ticket back to Bahia. It was no easy feat. Eventually we had to break into the inner office and corner the befuddled agent, who replied to our excited demands with a tropically phlegmatic, “But there is no hurry; the train will not _really_ leave at twelve.” Subsequent events proved that he was a better prophet than the printed time-table. We finally dragged away about two, on a railroad built in 1881 and still retaining the same roadbed, rolling-stock, swell-headed old engines and point of view, and rambled along most of the afternoon, until we came to a derailed train and were told to get out and walk. Luckily we were only a few miles from Agoa Cumprida (Long Water), where this branch line is joined by one from up the coast—and on the whole it might be a good thing to make travelers by rail get off every little while and walk a few miles. As the first long cove of the beautiful bay came into view I dropped off and was sailed across the neck of water in one of the ferry dugouts to Itapagipe, where one engagement at the “Theatro Popular” was proving popular indeed.

Three days later all of us, including Ruben in person, took a side-wheel steamer across the bay to São Felix, planning to spend a week away from the city. Across the deck from me sat a white woman with three chain bracelets, one wrist watch, seven very large rings on four fingers of the left hand, six more on the four fingers of the right hand, a gold watch-chain some two yards long about her neck, enormous showy earrings, a gold locket and pendant, and various other gaudy odds and ends. This paragon of taste, it turned out, was one of our party. She was from Montevideo and Ruben had brought her along to do a Spanish dance _sem roupa_—no wonder she needed to be covered with jewelry—for the benefit of the _matutos_, or “country gawks,” of the interior.

A couple of hours carried us across the main bay and we entered a narrow inlet which soon swelled into another and smaller bay that gradually narrowed down until we found ourselves in an immense river, the Paraguassú, with low bushy sides and water well up to the branches of the few trees at high tide. Villages, towns, and single old _fazenda_-houses under their majestic royal palms appeared here and there, at some of which we tied up. Others sent on board or took ashore two or three of the plantation family in flimsy dugout logs paddled by more or less naked negroes. Most of the towns had names ending in “gipe” and lived on their exports of _fumo_ and _charutos_ (tobacco and cigars), that weed, as well as fruit and cacao, growing abundantly back in what looked like rather a barren and bushy land. The river narrowed, winding through low hills, and at sunset we sighted the twin towns of São Felix and Cachoeira, on opposite sides of the stream and connected by a long railway-and-foot-bridge, at the foot of a series of rapids over black jagged rocks that halt navigation and give the latter town its name.

As usual bedlam broke loose between the chaotic-minded passengers and the aggressive boatmen, _carregadores_, and touts fighting for business. Though there was an abundance of men in ragged, baggy uniforms, no one seemed to have any authority. One evil-eyed, half-baked looking fellow who drew a razor in the midst of the turmoil turned out to be the hotel-keeper who had been told to prepare rooms for “the entire Kinetophone company,” and who did not propose to be outwitted by a rival. We let them fight it out, put our light baggage into a ferry “canoe” with Carlos and the undress “artist,” and sent them across the river—our theater being in São Felix and the boat-landing in Cachoeira. Then we walked a mile or more along the rough-and-tumble stone streets of what appeared by the weak gas-lamps to be a town transported bodily from the heart of the Andes, paid sixty reis at the bridge turnstile, and brought up at the tiny “Cinema São Felix.” There Ruben and the Italian owner broke into such garrulous greetings that it was after eight before we finally dragged our guide and mentor away to the “hotel” of the belligerent seeker-after-guests, who was now grieving over the unexpected scantiness of our “company.”

Of the pseudo-meal foisted upon us after two hours of shouting, swearing, and insisting, I will say nothing, and even less of the boiler-factory din that seethed through the tiny pens divided by thin wooden partitions reaching only halfway to the un-ceiled roof, except to remark that, as soon as the show was installed next morning, “Tut” and I might have been seen moving across the river to the “Hotel das Naçoes” in Cachoeira. This second city of the State of Bahia—equal in size to Texas—was only a languid backward village, without electric-lights, without even a wheeled vehicle, unless one counts the tri-weekly side-wheel steamer or the little railway that rattles up to Feira do Sant’ Anna and straggles 165 miles west into the interior of the state. There are several moderately large tobacco and cigar warehouses, but almost the only sign of industry in either of the twin towns was our advertising,—a deluge of posters and handbills, and a parade of _taboletas_, or large movable street-signs, accompanied by negro boys beating cymbals, drums, and tin pans. We charged double prices, because the theater was too small to make anything less worthwhile—and we played to 128 paying clients and a score of “deadheads”!

Next day the Italian cinema-man begged us with tears in his voice to cut the entrance fee in two, and as some such drastic action seemed necessary to save us from bankruptcy, I agreed—and that night we had 89 paid admissions! These interior towns are so sunk in sloth that they seem to resent any attempt to shake them out of the somnolence of their ancestors, out of that apathetic indifference to the advances of civilization which makes them scorn even the few opportunities of a life-time to see something new and important, to get some hint of the world’s progress. Only the barbaric recreation of drunken church festivals appeals to them.

I took advantage of the Sunday train to visit Feira do Sant’ Anna, thirty miles up-country. This line was built back in the seventies, yet the names of Hugh Wilson and other Americans still appear on various bridges and viaducts. The train climbed for half an hour, and still we could look down upon the twin towns close below, but once up on top of the flat, rather dry and sandy, plateau it raced along at decent Brazilian speed. The slender branches of the mandioca were numerous, and here I saw my first tobacco-fields in Brazil. At one station a mile from the town it served saddle-horses were waiting for the men and enormous, bungling, two-wheeled mule-carts with wicker armchairs in them for the women. It would have been dreadful if one of the white-collar class had been forced to walk that mile along the smooth, dry, cool summer road. For it was pleasant and breezy up here, though the elevation was not great; even at summer midday one could walk comfortably in the sun bareheaded—provided one could walk anywhere comfortably. My preconceived notions of this region proved entirely false. I had expected dense jungle and forest, and humid, leaden heat; on the contrary, it was not only dry and cool, but almost bare of vegetation.

Feira do Sant’ Anna, so named for the great cattle-fairs that were held here on St. Ann’s day, is less than a century old, a one-story town sitting out unsheltered on a dry, sandy, plain. Two streets wider than Broadway cross at right angles in the center of town, and are fully paved with cobblestones and lined with small bushy shade trees. On Monday market-days these are thronged with countrymen and women from a hundred miles around. To-day a cockfight under a big tree on the outskirts seemed to be the only activity. Two roosters without artificial spurs, but with bloody heads and necks, entirely featherless in spots, pecked at each other eternally, while bullet-headed negroes and mulattoes stood around them betting—if they still had any coppers—one owner or the other occasionally picking up his bird, spraying a mouthful of rum-and-water on its head and neck, and setting them at it again, until one fell from utter exhaustion and the other, wabbling drunkenly on his bloody feet, uttered a feeble crow of victory. Wells with good American force-pumps marked the town a rare one for interior South America, where the inhabitants generally drink from some nearby creek or mud-hole; but drought had left little at the bottoms even of the wells, and this scant supply negro boys were delivering to various parts of town in casks on mule or donkey-back, a blue enameled government license on the forehead of each four-footed animal.

When we got back to Bahia on February 10 a brand new hotel had been opened on the space left between Ruben’s present theater and the invisible one I had the opportunity of some day managing. It was a five-story, flat-iron _placete_ on the height of the city, the highest building in Bahia, or, indeed, in the state, and was the wonder of the region. The only elevator in the paunch of South America, except the outdoor one between the lower and higher city, ran all the way up it, but when “Tut” and I entered, it refused at first to work, whereupon I stepped out again to get something I had forgotten.

“Oh, don’t be afraid!” cried the servant, himself ashy with fear, who was attempting to manipulate it, “it won’t fall.”

On the fifth floor, spoken of with a catch of the breath in Bahia, we had a pleasant little room with a vast outlook over city and ocean—and as it was starting in to acquire a reputation, the place was strictly a hotel and not a brothel. Materially it was a great relief from what we had been enduring for weeks past, and the unwonted sensation of living in well-nigh civilized surroundings again was welcome, but a hotel, after all, takes its tone from its guests and servants, and these being _Bahianos_, it was doubtful whether so expensive an establishment would be able to keep its head above water. Speaking of water, the shower-baths were extra, as usual in Brazil, but when I confided to the manager that I would move out again next day, he hastened to assure me that no one would notice when I bathed.

Street-cars and walls were again flaunting Kinetophone advertisements inviting everyone to come and see the “marvel of the age.” But it was “reheated soup” in Bahia now, and out at Itapagipe, where we had played three nights to crowded houses only a week before, the Latin enthusiasm had effervesced and we had only a straggling audience. If only we had had some new numbers, say a couple of Caruso! The second night was worse, with our share only 36$, and the owner refused to give a show at all on the next and last night, saying the few days before carnival were the worst in the year in the theatrical business, as everyone with a _tostão_ was keeping it to buy masks, confetti, and scented water.

Carnival costumes and the silly soprano speech that goes with them were already beginning to appear in the streets, and by noon on Sunday negroes and half-negroes in fantastic make-up were everywhere. Most of the “São João” employees were drunk or excited or parading the streets by the time we opened for the matinée, and as I could watch the door as well from there, I sat down behind the wicket and became ticket-seller. Few ticket-offices in the world can compare with that of the old “São João” in situation, under the deep colonial porch, open to all the trade winds of the blue Atlantic, golden-bathed by day and silver-lighted by night, lying a few hundred feet below and stretching away unbrokenly to the coast of Africa.

Masked figures came, asking for tickets in the falsetto they hoped would disguise their voices, as well as the usual haughty, tar-brushed class in the full dress of public appearance. I quickly acquired the professional ticket-seller’s “snappy” language and could toss out a handful of change or a concise bit of information quite as scornfully as the most experienced station-agent in my native land. Not a great many spectators entered that afternoon, however, for which I did not blame them. Why pay to go inside a musty old theater when the brilliant summer day outside is full of free entertainments? Only two weeks before there had been a similar celebration, but there is a constant string of this expensive tomfoolery the year round in Bahia. The amount spent on trolley-car and automobile floats alone would have built a good school-house, to say nothing of the bands of music, costumes, and playthings. Scores of automobiles filled with fantastically garbed men and girls crawled through the streets, while thousands afoot were arrayed in wild and generally ugly and orderless fantasy, with masks or head-pieces equal to Bottom the Weaver. It was evident that the paraders were mainly from the lower classes and had little originality of ideas in designing costumes. Nearly everyone’s slight sense of humor prompted him to pose as the opposite of what he was in real life; every negro who could afford it wore a rosy-cheeked mask and white gloves; many of the few whites had blacked up or donned negro masks, and perhaps half the men were made up as women, while there was a perfect rage, particularly among the part-negro girls, to appear in male attire, their hips bursting through their otherwise loosely flapping nether garments. “Ladies of the life” took advantage of the spirit of the day and sat bare-legged in their balconies over the main streets, the police, of course, never interfering, since correction or suppression are unusual and unpopular in South America. We cancelled the third “section” that night and joined the throng parading the streets amid cloud-bursts of confetti, rivers of scented water, and maudlin uproar, and after looking in at a popular ball that had many suggestions of a witch dance in the heart of Africa I went home for my last night’s sleep in São Salvador da Bahia.