Brazil on the Move
Dr. Israél takes charge. He packs us into jeeps and pickup trucks that string out into a procession along the new highway. Not surfaced yet. You can hardly see it for the driving red dust as we drive over mile after mile. The road lacks bridges; but already a determined motorist, so I’m told, can make his way in good weather from Belo Horizonte to Brasília. “A road means life,” Dr. Israél cries out.
We are ushered into a neat building at the edge of a dry gulch which the highway engineers have built themselves for a messhall. Tiny glasses of cachaça are brought out on trays. Congratulations are in order. Felicidades. Toasts. Dr. Israél makes a short speech.
Down in the gully below the messhall, plank tables have been laid out under a piece of aluminum roofing set on tall poles to let the breeze blow through. It’s a churrasco, a barbeque; in Maryland we’d call it a bull roast. There’s a smell of frizzling meat. Along a shallow trench full of smoldering hardwood, chunks of beef broil on long iron spikes. At the end a suckling pig on a spit revolves slowly above the coals.
Around the fringes, forming a smiling corridor as the guests are ushered through, bronze, mustard, tobaccocolored, tan to ruddy, are the packed faces of the candongos who are gravely waiting their turn. They have on their best straw hats, their best clean Sunday shirts. Brown eyes squint in the dazzle of sun as they peer into the shadow under the aluminum roof to watch the proceedings.
Dr. Israél bustles about with an expert air making exploratory cuts with his pocketknife into the broiling beef. Ay, he complains, some of it is tough.
He shrugs and includes in one halfapologetic gesture all the countryside crowding in about the tables. “Politics,” he whispers in my ear. “How do you say in America?” he asks with his creaky laugh. “Poleetical fences?”
He straightens himself up, suddenly quite serious. The greatness of all this is the road, he is telling the candongos. Politicians come and go but the road will continue.
He leans over to cut a couple of strips of crackling off the roasting pig and hands them with a disarming grin to his guests. “Tell them back in America what a road means in Brazil.”
An attentive little man brings us heaped plates. The upland air makes for an appetite. As soon as the throngs begin to back off from the ravaged tables Dr. Israél has us on our way back to the airstrip. He is explaining that he wants us to see Paracatu, the town his wife, Dona Cora’s family came from.
The airstrip in Paracatu is too short even for the Beechcraft, so a small singlemotor job has flown in to take us there. My wife and I get to whispering and tittering together as we squeeze into seats in the tiny plane. What strikes us funny is how similar the political goings on at the churrasco were to what would be happening at a political oyster roast back in the northern neck of Virginia where we come from. The language, the costumes, the skintints are different, but the basic behavior, the jockeyings for position, the prestige of family, the playing up to local prejudices are so much the same that it’s laughable. This is the sort of country politicking we have at home. Under all the differences there are similarities between the Brazilian and the North American forms of democracy. I try to explain to Dr. Israél that we ought to get along because we have so many of the same vices but neither his English nor my Portuguese can carry the weight of my explanation. The pilot has his motor roaring so we can’t hear anything anyway. We grin and make funny faces at each other and we’re airborne again.
The plane follows the red streak of the road, blurred with dust where bulldozers are at work. Again the emptiness of eroded brown hills. Soon the little plane is circling over a green field. There’s a river. Dr. Israél points out washouts in the red clay where people years ago panned gold out of the creek beds. Canebrakes, bananatrees, a few mangoes and papayas among narrow tiled roofs faded gray with age. Hardly a sign of crops. “What on earth do they live on,” we feel like asking, “in Paracatu?”
An ancient rattletrap Chevrolet is waiting. Dr. Israél bundles us into it. The cobbled alleys of this little town weren’t built for cars. They are steep and narrow. Sunscorched ponies are tethered outside of every store. Brown countrymen ride past under broad hats. A team of four yokes of white oxen comes lounging magnificently through the dust. The place has a look of tightened belts, poverty, and nakedness. It swarms with flies. Dr. Israél is explaining that this is what all the back country is like before the highway comes.
Years and years ago they had gold. Then they had hunger. Soon they will have the highway.
With a shudder and a gasp the Chevrolet rattles to a stop in the central square opposite the church. The Franciscans operate a school there. We have a short talk with the schoolmaster, an earnest young Hollander who speaks a little English. Meanwhile Dona Cora has gone off in search of antiques: already we share her admiration for the simple elegance and the solid construction of the colonial furniture still to be picked up in these parts “for a song.”
We go along while Dr. Israél pays a call on a dreamylooking blond man who is evidently the local precinct boss for the Social Democrats. We sit in his parlor drinking cafezinhos and listening politely while he and Dr. Israél talk hurried politics in sibilant halfwhispers.
Disheveled little boys stare at us with grave gray eyes through the tall barred window that lets in the light off the square. A flock of them. They all are sandyhaired like their father. Our host looks too young to have produced so many. My Lord how many children people have in this country! “How do you ever feed them?” we feel like asking.
The two Brazilians remember their guests and make the conversation general. The road, they expain, will pass close to Paracatu. It will mean prosperity, rising land values, every house in town will be worth more. There will be buses, trucks to ship crops out, stores to buy things in, probably a bank. The eyes of the precinct boss mist with emotion as he points towards his boys who are pushing their pale faces against the bars in the window. “These,” he says, “will have a better life than I have had.”
Handicaps to Development
On the way back to the airstrip Dr. Israél begins to talk about that bank. A branch bank would be established, but what good would it do? The great roadblock to development throughout the country was the high cost of money. Suppose that fellow we’d been talking to wanted to set up some small factory that would employ people and give them much needed wages, he’d have to have funds. A bank would charge him twenty or thirty per cent interest, partly to cover inflation, but partly out of the old habits of medieval usury. Nobody could start a small enterprise under such a handicap. What impressed Dr. Israél most last time he’d visited the States was the cheap interest rates. No wonder we were so prosperous in North America.
Now he himself is a man—he gives us one of his famous grins—tolerably wellknown in the community. He ought to be what we called in America “a good credit risk,” but, not too long ago, he tried to borrow money to buy some cattle. He owns family lands out in this corner of the state that will only produce grazing every few years when the rainfall is sufficient. Well, an unusual rainfall gave abundant grass but when he’d tried to borrow money to buy cattle to eat it … impossible. There wasn’t much margin of profit in fattening cattle anyway. He found he couldn’t borrow the money to buy them at any interest rate that would make a profit possible … If he was in such a dilemma think of the poor man … and as close as Belo Horizonte there was a shortage of beef!
On the way back to the airstrip we pick up Dona Cora. “Good hunting?” Dr. Israél asks in mock despair. She nods. “Ay, ay.” Dr. Israél claps his hand to his wallet. “A pain in the pocketbook.”
Construction Site
After Paracatu the pilot follows the red streak of the new road. Where bulldozers are at work the sharp line blurs with dust. Again the emptiness of eroded hills. No trails now. We are flying over a wilderness of low shrubs and sourlooking flat lands spotted with round ponds left over from the last rains. After crossing into the state of Goiás the motors roar. The plane has begun to cli
mb. The scrambled hills of Minas Gerais straighten out into the long hogbacks of the high plateau. The air is cooler.
Suddenly the road appears again. It’s a paved road now with traffic on it. Crossroads. Roads in every stage of completion. Cars, trucks, jeeps, buses move back and forth. The plane skirts a long ridge that bristles with scaffolding, concrete construction, cranes, bulldozers, earthmoving machinery. A file of dumptrucks parades down the center.
Dr. Israél points through the window. “Brasília.” He smiles and shrugs and frowns all at once. The shanty town unfolding below is known as Cidade Livre, the free city, a straggle of frame buildings painted in a dozen colors on either side of a broad dusty road. He insists on calling it “the provisional city.” In two or three years it will have done its work. They’ll tear it down. “The real city will take its place.”
Dr. Israél makes his pilot bank steeply to show his guests the beginnings of a dam in a shallow gorge where two broad valleys come together. That, he announces, is where the main power plant will be. He points in two directions with his arms, a swimming gesture: “All this is lake.”
At the point where the foundations of the city jut out into the future lake the broad windows of Niemeyer’s presidential palace glitter in the afternoon sun. They call it the Palace of the Dawn. Its strange columns gleam like a row of white kites set upside down. Off to the right the windows of the long low tourist hotel balance airily above the shadow of its open lower story. To the left rise the boxlike shapes of apartments and crisscross blocks of small concrete residences. The little white tentlike building on the brow of the hill is a church.
Already the plane is taxiing across the surfaced runways of the airport.
“The main landing strip will be 3300 meters long,” says Dr. Israél proudly as he ushers us into the temporary passenger terminal. “Already five airlines have established commercial flights to all parts of Brazil.”
The terminal is full of men in work clothes, candongos, engineers, machine operators, a few wives and children. Clothing, faces, baggage are stained with red dust.
“Brasília will have the first airport in the world specially designed for the age of jets,” Dr. Israél continues. “It is the first city planned from the air.”
As Dr. Israél piloted us through the future city we had trouble distinguishing what was really there from what was going to be there. It was like visiting Pompeii or Monte Alban, but in reverse. Instead of imagining the life that was there two thousand years ago we found ourselves imagining the life that would be there ten years hence.
The Brasília Palace Hotel was almost complete. Comfortable beds, airy rooms. Hot and cold water, electric light. To be sure the silence of the plateau was broken at night by the sound of hammering and sawing on the annex they are building out back and by the swish of shovels of men at work spreading soil for a garden between the restaurant’s glass wall and the curving edges of the tiled swimming pool.
Niemeyer’s strange mania for underground entrances has saddled the hotel with an unnecessarily inconvenient lobby. It surprised us to find in a pupil of Le Corbusier’s functionalism so little regard for the necessary functions of a building. In case of fire, we asked each other, how would we ever get out?
The presidential palace we found to be a singularly beautiful building of glass and white concrete, built long and low to fit into the long lines of the hills on the horizon, floating as lightly as a flock of swans on broad mirroring pools of clear water that flanked the entrance. The inner partitions were glass too. We did ask each other where, amid all those glass walls, the poor President could find a spot to change his trousers or a private nook to write a letter in.
From the palace we drove on a wide highway to what was to correspond to Capitol Hill in Washington: The Triangle of the Three Powers they called it. An enormous open space. Draglines were leveling the red clay hills. Drills like gigantic corkscrews were boring for the foundation piling. Here would rise the circular halls for the Senate and House and a pair of tileshaped steel and glass buildings behind to house their offices. These would be balanced by a building for the Supreme Court and another for the executive departments. From there a broad mall with many roadways would run between rows of ministries to the downtown center where the banks and the hotels and the theaters and the department stores were to be established. From this center, “like the wings of a jet plane,” in Lucio Costa’s words, were to stretch in either direction blocks of apartment buildings and private residences. To form the tail of the plane a continuation of the mall would stretch for miles in the direction of the eventual railroad station and the industrial suburbs.
There was not to be a traffic light in the city. Every intersection was to be by overpass or underpass. Unobstructed roadways would feed the traffic into the center of each block where ample parking space was foreseen under the open understories of the buildings. Automobile traffic would come in from the rear. The front of every apartment building or private house was to open on a landscaped square. Shopping centers on the North American suburban plan were to be built within walking distance of each residential block so that the paths for pedestrians would be separate from the automobile roads.
We found ourselves imagining the buildings to be, the great paved spaces, the lawns and gardens, the serried louvers and trellises shading the windows from the sun, the gleaming walls of tile and glass.
“This is the underground bus terminal,” said Dr. Israél, patting a wall of smooth red clay affectionately with his hand. “Escalators will take people up to the great paved central platform above … To the left is the theater and restaurant district … a little Montmartre.”
He bursts into his creaky laugh.
“Of course you think we’re mad. A man has to be a little mad to get anything accomplished in Brazil.”
His quarrel with his American engineers, he began to explain, was that they were not mad enough. They were helpful and practical but they were so accustomed to perfect machinery they had forgotten how to improvise. “In the old days you Americans were the greatest improvisers in the world.” In Brazil everything had to be improvised.
He went on to tell one of his favorite stories. Once when he was running the Rio Doce Company a flood took the piers out from under a steel bridge. Traffic stopped. If the ore stopped going out, the dollars stopped coming in. His American engineers said they could repair the bridge all right but they’d have to wait for a crane to come from the States. That crane would have taken months even if he’d had the dollars to buy it. Among the work gangs he found a gigantic Negro who said he knew how to get the bridge back on its piers without a crane …
I’d seen the great oxen in the Rio Doce? I nodded. Yes, I’d seen eleven yokes hitched together. How could one forget the great teams of oxen straining forward with the pondered magnificence of a frieze on an early Greek temple?…
Well, he went on excitedly, with a hundred oxen and levers and jacks and winches that illiterate Negro had the bridge open for traffic in nineteen days … “Improvise … that is my answer when people tell me that trying to build a capital out here on the plateau is a crazy project … Central Brazil must have roads, it must have buildings … out of sheer necessity we are improvising Brasília.”
The Boomtown Feeling
We found that the contagion of Dr. Pinheiro’s enthusiasm had infected the contractors and their engineers and foremen. The place steamed with boomtown excitement. “We all feel ten years younger than when we came,” was how his middle-aged secretary, Dr. Quadros, put it.
Dr. Quadros’ niece, Leonora Quadros, invited us to dinner at her small house out beyond the great compounds of the construction companies that covered the hillside across from the Novacap administration building. She was a handsome young woman of twentyeight. To our amazement we found that she was managing her father’s building materials business.
“That’s not the American idea of a Brazilian girl, now, is it?” she asked with a teasing smile. “In a new city
everybody gets a chance.”
“It’s the need to improvise new ways of doing things that keeps us on our toes,” says the young man who was introduced as Brasília’s oldest inhabitant; he arrived even before they built Dom Bosco’s shrine.
Dom Bosco was an Italian missionary friar who prophesied a great civilization for the central uplands of Brazil. They had taken him for Brasília’s patron saint.
Asked if he intends to stay, the oldest inhabitant nods vigorously: “My life has become Brasília,” he says.
The young people around Leonora Quadros’ table seemed to have enlisted in the building of the city as you might enlist in a military campaign: for the duration. According to them the miracle was that construction had started at all. The city had advanced too far to be abandoned now, they insisted.
An American concern, Raymond Concrete and Pile, was already at work on the dam and the powerplant and the buildings for the eleven ministries. Business interests in São Paulo were vitally engaged. At least five important firms from Rio were involved. In all more than fifty Brazilian concerns were under contract for various phases of the work. A location had been chosen for an American embassy. The steel girders for the congress buildings were already arriving from the States.
Round the table they all talked at once. They showered us with statistics. Already forty thousand people at work. The hotel only took twelve months to complete; the palace, thirteen. In twenty months twelve million cubic feet of earth had been excavated. Two hundred and sixty kilometers of paved roads had been built, and more than six hundred kilometers of dirt roads.
Roads meant settlers. Already the administration of Nova-cap was at its wit’s end to find ways of keeping settlers out before housing could be found for them.