Though you are so comfortable and happy in Petropolis with frequent excursions to Rio, you cannot leave Brazil without a trip to Santos and Sao Paulo. Perhaps you never heard of these places before you arrived, but now they are all-important. You recall "Santos" as a mark stuck in coffee-bags at your grocer's at home. Here you know it is the port which ships the greatest amount of coffee to Europe and North America of any in the world—millions and millions of dollars' worth. And Sao Paulo, a city of 200,000, is the capital of a great and wealthy state of the same name, lying up on the high table-land forty miles from Santos, its port.
You study the daily papers for a "vapor" (steamer) to take you these two hundred miles farther south, and find them due from every port in Europe, freighters with cabins for a few passengers. It is a rather rough voyage, but after twenty hours you round the island which lies in front of Santos, making the Santos "river" a quiet harbor.
Every flag flies in that harbor, but how the seamen hate it on account of the awful scourge of yellow fever six years ago, when forty or fifty vessels were abandoned there for lack of living crews to take them out. The sanitary conditions are improved since then, and you may safely sleep on the seashore near by, and go into town during the day. The stone quays are now fine. The narrow streets are laden with the odor of green coffee. Barefooted Portuguese and negroes are the beasts of burden. They walk rapidly up a gang-plank with two coffee-bags, each weighing one hundred and thirty-two pounds, on the two shoulders and meeting over the head; then, with a quick motion, dump the bags into the ship's hold.
The bright-colored houses and the palms are like those you love in every Brazilian town. The women mostly sit in the windows, idle, ill-clad and untidy. The mountains climb abruptly behind the half-dozen streets. When you go to Sao Paulo you will climb those mountains by an English railway, starting from a good station.
By the station stands one of the oldest churches in Brazil, dating back perhaps to 1550, the Romish church of Saint Antonio. It contains a curious chapel, wainscoted high with blue and white tiles (Delft?) forming a panoramic picture. In the center of the chapel an image of Christ, with the heart exposed, has lines of rope running taut from the heart to the images of the saints grouped about him—"Will draw all men unto me." It is very realistic, very crude, really revolting, but very illustrative also.
The island which shuts Santos from the vast Atlantic, stretching down towards the South Pole, has on its ocean side a succession of beaches each a mile or more in length separated by rocky promontories. In the most spacious of these praias a Brazilian syndicate has built a "Brazilian Monte Carlo," called Guaruja, consisting of hotel, cottages, a Catholic church with never a service in it, a theater, and a Casino where roulette was wont to be played every night and Sundays. If you stay at Santos you will find this spot safe from yellow fever, and your first twenty-four hours will convince you that you have found the climate of Paradise. You are at the edge of the south temperate zone. For weeks the temperature will not vary five degrees from seventy Fahr. day or night. The lines of nature are exquisite—the slopes of the hills, the curve of the smooth, hard, sandy beach. The air is soft to breathe.
The hotel is filled with large Brazilian families, some from the city of Sao Paulo, others from the great coffee plantations farther interior. They are typical wealthy Brazilians. Some have been sent by their doctors for sea-bathing. The number of baths is prescribed, and taken literally and seriously at six o'clock in the morning. Some have come for gaiety, relief from the monotony of life on a plantation. Some from Sao Paulo were "monarchists," do not like the new republic, go to Paris where the Brazilian Princess holds a little court, and bring back French clothes which may enable you to take to New York some fashions in advance from the remote suburb of Santos!
A good quartet plays for dancing in the hotel sala (parlor) every night, especially Sundays. The Casino is the next building, and a wail goes up because the state government, in what is considered an excess of virtue, has sent soldiers to prevent gambling there.
All the ladies speak French fluently and their piano-playing is brilliant. They use the time which we bestow upon "an all-round education" upon these accomplishments, and marry by the time they are sixteen. Some time they will go to Paris. Now they are over-run by their many little children, and usually look older than they really are.
You are puzzled to know who belongs to whom. The wife of Senhor de Couto is Dona Margarida. The mother of Senhor Antonio Prado is Dona Veridiana. The wife of the nation's president, Campos Salles, is Dona Anna Gabriella. They might all be members of a royal family, or belong to the time of the patriarchs, so far as their use of names goes. When the narrow gauge train brings the papas at night to the front of the hotel there is pleasant excitement. The sons kiss the hands of their fathers respectfully. You will select the lawyers and doctors by the distinctive gem each wears in his ring, diamond or emerald. The barons are mostly owners of coffee plantations, and the many commissarios are the coffee factors who often advance much money "up country" to perfect and bring down the coffee to the port. You meet them all easily on the verandas or in the park which borders the beach.
The park itself deserves your interest; for the neighboring forests have yielded their palms, aloes and dragon's blood to beautify it, and the little summer houses are thatched with blossoming air-plants all pink and green.
Your strong, good coffee and fresh French bread are brought to your bedroom at seven in the morning, and then, before the sun is unpleasantly strong, you have your walk on the beach after watching the little narrow gauge train start with the business men for Santos. At eleven you go to the dining-room for a four or five course breakfast. At four o'clock you will make your own tea on your spirit lamp and have some of Huntley and Palmer's biscuits. (When the "biscuits" are eaten the box is just what you want to keep your kid gloves from mold and your gluey laces from being eaten by insects. I was not surprised to read of a British Bible Society making Bibles for Central Africa of a size and shape "to fit in biscuit boxes," that they may be preserved from the ravages of ants, these biscuits being for sale in all such climates.) At five the Brazilians begin to dine. You wait till six, but some are still in the dining-room. You wonder at the parents, who give wine out of their own bottles to babies not more than two or three years old; and at the seven-year-old who invites a half dozen of her own age to dine with her on her birthday, and at the close of the meal has her health drunk in champagne by her mates with experienced clinking of glasses. You make a note of the little American boy five years old, lately arrived, who quickly learns the ways of the country. He asks his mother for a bag of marbles and some money. "What is the money for, my son?" "Why you can't play marbles here unless you play for money," says the wee man.
You watch the new arrivals and wonder what are the relationships in this big family—a father, two mothers, or aunts, or what? with those children. You soon appreciate the exalted place given to the godmother, and she it is who is neither aunt nor mother at that table—a law unto herself and them. Of course she is invited when the family comes to the seashore! I remember an Anglo-Brazilian gentleman once became very angry at this same hotel because he was not given a very good room, "and my compadre (associate father, god-father of the son) the President of this hotel company!"
You watch the keen, unprincipled-looking boy just down from the great Jesuit school with whom the hotel manager is vexed "because he is such a little liar."
You greet your neighbor on the veranda with good-day in Portuguese; then she speaks more of the same tongue but you shake your head. "Parlez-vous Franais?" but there again you are soon beyond your depth, and at length one is found who speaks "a lit-tle English." You have noticed this young woman before, a modest, bright, intelligent-looking girl, with an expression just a little different from all the others, evasive but of a more familiar type. "Where did you learn English?" you inquire. "At the Eschola Americana (American School), in Sao Paulo," she replies; and you tell her you are going to that city very soon and to visit that school. You have found a friend, though a shy one; Brazilian girls keep well in the background, and next day when a box of flowers, oranges and sugar-cane comes down from her father's fazenda, she brings you some camelias and tells you about the sugar-cane, though neither of you cares to chew it. It is for children, and "children of a larger growth."
St. John's Day comes at the end of June. It is one of the greatest of the many Romish holidays or festas. The "American schools"[4] do not close for saints' days, indeed one is puzzled to think what other schools do with such constant interruptions and the overwhelming illiteracy is partially accounted for! They do close, however, for a ten days' vacation at St. John's Day, for it is midway from Christmas to Christmas and fits the school semesters. Dr. Lane, President of the "American schools" and college, and some of the teachers come down to Guaruja to rest, and you have many a quiet time to talk over their work with them, such as they could not well afford to give were they among their five hundred pupils. You enjoy seeing them meet old friends among these Brazilian families. You sit out on the veranda in the evening, while St. John is honored with fire-works (saints always have fire-works) and talk a little with the orphaned Scotch and Italian girls who have been brought to school and are being trained for teachers. They have all been under the weather. It has been forty-five degrees Fahrenheit up in Sao Paulo morning and evening for three weeks, a little too cold for a building with no heaters fiercer than little charcoal braziers, but the Brazilian children are accustomed to such winter temperatures, even though consumption has more victims than any other disease.
[4]"American Schools" were founded many years ago by a Presbyterian missionary and have maintained a high standard.
This is a holiday for business men as well as schools and the prevailing church.
A picnic to the bay of the second praia is arranged. The islands boasts two carriages and you charter them for the ladies and the luncheon. The gentlemen go on horseback. You arrive at a rocky coast with no beach, no means of reaching the water's edge. And there in sight of your picnic party are hundreds of huge turtles in the water! The question is proposed, "How much does one of those turtles weigh?" The inexperienced guess wildly from ten to forty pounds. A knowing one says they will average from one to three hundred! A French steamer is passing the island as you watch, and soon will round the lower end and make the Santos harbor, but she is well out from shore. You never see a little boat among those breakers. No one goes for turtles. If they were on our northern shores what would their lives be worth! but here living is too indolent to spend ingenuity on capturing turtles.
I must give you some reminiscences of older Guaruja. The town was created just at the close of the Columbian Exposition. The President of the syndicate visited the United States and bought the buildings for Guaruja, all pine, ready to put together. It looked like a section of Coney Island and very in that land of red-tiled roofs and plastered sides. A narrow-gauge railracross the island and an electric light plant proved the enterprise of the company. Only three of the many sleeping-rooms in the hotel were lighted by electricity, however. They were arranged en suite with a light in each, but only one switch, in the middle room, turned the three on and off. It was our drollest fun to tease the English couple who occupied one of the side rooms about the hour at which their neighbors sent them to bed. If there was a baby there they were plunged into darkness before nine. If there was a "quiet game" going on next door these poor victims must lie in a brilliant light until late. These two rooms lacked their own switches for more than a year to my knowledge.
Two words you easily learn with their depths (or lengths) of meaning are, paciencia, patience, and amanha, to-morrow (which means some other time, probably no other time).
If you wish to hear an uproarious laugh listen to any one familiar with Brazil hearing for the first time Kipling's:
"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle
the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, and he
weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with
the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to
hustle the East.'"
Life in Santos—now at high pressure, then idle—now pitiless to one's neighbor, then tender as a brother—now mastering business knowledge of the ports and exchanges of the world as if such accuracy were all-important, then comes a whirl of speculation in exchange which seems to take all value out of special expert knowledge—life in Santos is evasive to one who would portray it faithfully. It seems difficult to express more than half the truth at one time. If one lives there a month the personal histories will all be familiar to him, and a like time on the Praa (Exchange) will acquaint him with the business characteristics of every firm. It is easy to learn things on the ground, to get a just and appreciative knowledge of excellencies and difficulties which is not readily transferrable. There are not only facts which can be stated, but a spirit of the place and people as necessary to know as the facts.
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