ODYSSEY PART 14-II: An American family sets up housekeeping in Brazil

I’ve described the arrival of our family of four into Northeast Brazil for a year while Bel pursued political research in the outlying areas of the state of Ceará. Our initiation into this very different culture made for constant eye-opening adventures that pointed up the tragic, dangerous results of vast economic and social discrepancies. We found some things that were hard to condone, but at the same time there was much to love and savor about this beautiful, “frontier” country.

A word about the three people employed by us.

Maria, in her mid-20s, lived in and turned out to be a remarkably able, intelligent and enjoyable person to have around – my constant companion and teacher of local customs. At Christmas I upped her salary to $13 a month, almost twice what she had ever made before. I had to push her to take Sundays off. Like thousands of others, her beginnings were rough. She grew up in the interior sertão with 15 brothers and sisters. Her mother died when she was 9, and she had to start working full time in the blistering fields from then on, picking beans, rice and cotton. The almost non-existent wage she earned was turned over to her father and she even had to forage for her own clothes. Her mother had been a dressmaker, and Maria’s considerable skill was absorbed after watching her mother. Then her father sold the sewing machine and Maria would practice by cutting out paper dresses for her doll; she never had real material. None of the children were allowed to go to school; they were sent to the fields. In the year of the great drought, 1958, she traveled alone and terrified to Fortaleza (she was 15), and hired out as a maid. Her ambition all along was to buy a sewing machine and begin to earn as a seamstress. Finally, after moving in with us, she worked out a deal to get a secondhand pedal type, paying half down from what she’d saved and the rest from future salary. We planned to drive together in the jeep to get it, a momentous occasion.

Didiza, a girl of about 20, came once a week to wash and iron (on a scrub board with bars of soap). She had two small daughters and no husband. Like a large percentage of the slum dwellers, she married young, but was abandoned as soon as the children got to be a burden (i.e. as soon as they were weaned). She lived in one of many favelas – ringing the city in a tiny mud shack on land donated by the prefecture (that could be taken back for some building project). When Maria rescued some large palm fronds pruned from the general’s garden next door, Didiza was overjoyed and came to get them with a donkey cart to build a roof over the tin charcoal stove that was her kitchen.

The third member of the team was Pedro, a young man in his 20s who came every other afternoon. A near genius, he fixed everything from electrical connections to serious plumbing defects. He built tables and gates, constructed window screens (for two bedrooms), washed the car and dog, waxed the marble floors and painted the walls. He dreamed up a weird sprinkler system for the garden, watered the hibiscus and rubber plants, tended the coconut palms, papayas and mimosas – and cut the grass with a penknife on his hands and knees, blade by blade. Pedro was badly strapped with six kids, one just born. Another had died of malnutrition the year before and they all had the bulging stomachs and huge hollow eyes of hunger. Pedro had borrowed the equivalent of $2 from Maria some time back, and rather than face the overwhelming task of repaying her, was ready to quit working for us. With his talents he could earn handsomely in a trade, but he let all these possibilities slide out of sight; it was just too hard to think beyond the day, too much to muster the drive and initiative to show up for work regularly as one would have to do, for instance, in a plumbing outfit.

I had met Orlando Leite, the head of the local Conservatory of Music who told me he badly needed cellists for his symphony; there was only one cello player in the entire state. So one morning on my way to market, I dropped by to tell him I’d play with them if they could scare up an instrument (I was a middling cellist). The receptionist leaped up and said “everyone” had been waiting for me. Orlando immediately canceled his piano lesson and rushed me to the lone cellist Hiram who, in turn, dismissed his pupil. By then I was definitely leery, but they dragged me in and thrust Hiram’s cello into my hands, commanding: “Play!” Actually it wasn’t that bad; they called in the first violinist and pianist and we got through a trio that, fortunately, I knew well.

A month later the symphony was scheduled to give a command performance for the rector of the university and other city notables, and suddenly I had to procure a proper white dress. Not so easy –for a frenzied week I dashed between two dressmakers, having a terrible time between my limited vocabulary and sign language, explaining that I needed a style wide enough so I could wrap my legs around a cello and long enough to be decent (not the current ultra-mini fashion). The first dressmaker was swamped with orders for an upcoming festa and could only spare time to cut out the dress, so I had to find a second one willing to sew it. (Their total fee was $1.75.) Then came the almost impossible task of combing stores for the right fabric – with all sorts of adventures along the way, such as our ancient jeep coughing to a halt in rush-hour traffic and my having to hike in the dark to a gas station for a can of petrol. But, after several postponements due to student rioting, the concert finally happened; the orchestra managed, the singers were superb, and the bats swooped back and forth….

Driving a battered Brazilian jeep had also proved fortuitous just at a time when our American confreres in the city (U.S. agronomy consultants), with their conspicuous American cars, were warned, for safety, to stay off the roads during the political upheavals aimed at “exploitative Yankees.” On the other hand, Bel (the “villain” responsible for the riots) and I could buzz around incognito.

We had a few glimpses into local institutional procedures. One day Steve was brought home from school with a fractured elbow; during a relay race on the playground he was required to carry on his back a much larger classmate, with disastrous results. For advice we tried to reach the highly recommended pediatrician who ran the children’s hospital, but he was out for siesta. So we drove to the hospital and found that everybody was out for siesta. After an hour they finally rounded up a radiologist and he spent another hour taking four X-rays, all excruciating because they had to stretch Steve’s arm in different directions. The payoff was when the technician came up from the dark room after the first two to say the photos hadn’t come out and he’d have to retake them. Eventually the chief arrived and recommended a bone man who ran another hospital. It took two more hours for him to show up, Steve wailing all the time that he couldn’t stand the pain another minute. The orthopedist held off for still another hour, saying he couldn’t set the bone right away – had to wait until the swelling stopped. At last they brought Steve into one of the waiting rooms and plopped him on a table, other patients looking on curiously. Though I protested, they insisted that it was necessary to put him to sleep, so this entailed collecting an anesthetist who set up his little portable ether apparatus. Steve breathed dutifully into the mask (reporting afterward that he went off into “another dimension”), and Bel was instructed to hold down his legs, though his own were none too stable at that point. So the cast went on, and two weeks later was off. Despite a good deal of pain, Steve was never severely handicapped; he continued playing soccer and we even wrapped the cast in plastic so he could go part way into the ocean.

These little tales serve to illustrate our days of frantic busyness filled with a million ridiculous, frustrating, but necessary errands. Of course such episodes happen in the U.S., too, but not every day. Here they were the way of life; one was so occupied with coping with the creaky machinery of existence, the process of accomplishing, that if and when the end was reached, often one was too weary to recognize or appreciate it. Or it might just be too late. Thus, if an American set up a clearly defined goal and rushed single-mindedly toward it, he’d fall on his face, die of an ulcer, or take the next plane home.

Brazil was such a land of contrasts. We were constantly aware of the omnipresent juxtaposition of appalling poverty and almost obscene luxury. We were invited to university faculty parties – lueradas (full moon celebrations) where everyone went a little mad in the balmy air, where the whiskey and coconut “water” flowed, exotic dishes were produced, the red ants bit, and by 4 a.m. most of the guests ended up in the swimming pool, “Dolce Vita” style.

We were encouraged to join one of several social clubs, mainly to take tennis lessons – Eric and Steve got their start there and later went on to become city champions in Milwaukee. But on the way to our Ideal Club, we had to drive past street after street lined with beggars, and walking downtown they pursued us, tugging at our clothes, mumbling about a sick husband. Tiny children accompanied their ragged mothers or would go it alone. Others would stand at your elbow even in the more elegant stores and, as you opened your purse to pay for a purchase, would hold out their hands. It was said that women sometimes rented sickly looking kids to attract pity. There were more deformed and crippled cases than I’d seen assembled before: hunchbacks, bowlegs, shrunken limbs, stumps of legs or no legs, the enormous feet of elephantiasis, the crumbled extremities of leprosy. One man I noted for two weeks running had a great open, raw sore swarming with flies; I wondered if he kept scraping it or pouring salt into it so it wouldn’t heal. One street was filled exclusively with blind men and women crouched on their haunches selling lottery tickets.

One weekend we were guests of Glaucia, our wealthy landlady, who led a caravan into the desert-like interior to visit her prosperous 11,000-acre plantation where she raised cattle, cotton, fruit trees and sugar cane. We were shown to our traditional sleeping quarters – a whitewashed room furnished only with hooks for the four hammocks we had brought. While the adults lolled on the wide veranda imbibing and nibbling endless varieties of meats and sweets, the kids fished and sailed rafts on a sizable private reservoir, and rode horses and donkeys. Then, on returning to the city, Bel had to face again the tension stirred up by political opponents of his university sponsors over a research project that was branded subversive – where his fearful academic colleagues had begun stashing revolvers in their glove compartments….

Thus, daily during our year in Brazil, we had ample opportunity to observe close-up the dichotomy of have-nots too desiccated to protest, and the affluent idle who chose not to help their own poor, but were expending energy protesting against their brothers north of the border.

My next report will introduce the preoccupation of much of Brazil with “the world beyond the veil,” and will detail my own frightening encounter with Macumba (the voodoo of the Northeast), and the necessity of an exorcism.