Prose (55 page)

She then told a story of her movie house that illustrated the national character a bit better. The forty-five thousand citizens of the Free City mostly come from the interior, the “north” or the “south”—and it is hard to realize the weight of the vast unknown, or half-known, that these ordinary terms of direction can still carry in Brasil—simple, old-fashioned, country people, a type called
condangos.
One of the films shown recently had been “And God Created Woman.” The audience, many more men than women, had watched quietly, thinking heaven knows what, until the story reached the disrobing scene. Brigitte Bardot had undone one button when the movie suddenly stopped and the lights went up. The man in the projection booth, who had obviously watched it through before, said, “Will all the
senhoras
and
senhoritas
please leave, and wait outside.” And leave they did, without demur, and stood outside in the dusty street in a little crowd. The theatre was darkened and the men watched the love scene that followed. Again the film stopped, the lights went on, and the ladies were invited back in, to see the rest of the show coeducationally.

We asked what was playing that night, with some idea of going to see it. It was a travelling show of skits, singing and dancing, and Countess Tarnowska, who had watched a rehearsal, did not recommend it.

We left the hotel and took a walk down the main street. Almost every building has its own electric generator (using more precious gasoline every minute), so there is a background music of pulsing and chugging and the lights vary from building to building, yellow, blueish, or grayish, with here and there the deep yellow of kerosene lamps or the blue-white glare of gasoline pressure lanterns. We strolled along observing barber shops and
pharmácias
(both doing rush business), grocery stores, dry good stores, and shoe-shine and shoe-repair shops—boot, rather, since all the male population of Brasília wears high boots, usually of a variety with an accordion-like section of imitation ripples above the ankle. Boarding houses, dormitories and restaurants; banks and airline offices, given a spurious city-look with ripped wall-board and a potted palm. Some furniture stores with new furniture but most crammed with second-hand Brasilian Grand Rapids, always included the lean
armoires
of closetless countries. The Butcher Shop of the Good Jesus, the suspended meat an iridescent violet under the light of hissing gasoline lamps. (And where had
it
come from?) Then small glass-fronted shops, exactly like other such shops all over Brasil: shoddy shirts and blouses and pink and blue undergarments, plastic bags and belts, and hung up in front, rows of umbrellas, black for men and brightly colored for women—because in Brasil everyone, no matter how poor, with the possible exception of the Indians we were going to see, owns an umbrella. Also baby dresses, booties and bibs, and even christening robes in glistening little piles like marshmallow sauce, because also no matter how poor, Brasilians will spend money on finery for their babies. A popular song, sung in English, blared out from a shop selling radios and victrolas.

As we went along we bought packages of cigarettes, boxes of matches, and
Salva Vidas,
Life Savers, to take to the Indians the next day. Antônio Callado, more experienced with the Indians than the rest of us, went into a shop full of boots, felt hats, machetes and guns, and came back with fish-hooks and nylon fish lines. The radio at the Indian post we were going to had been broken for over a month and there was no way of letting them know we were coming, so he also laid in a supply of sausage in case their food supply should be low.

Several of us met in a narrow bar at right angles to the streets, painted a dark sea-green. In it, alluring as a mermaid in her cave, stood a plump, sulky, pretty young woman with bleached hair and a very
décolleté
black sweater. Two small, pink-cheeked children, a boy and a girl, obviously hers, on the counter, staring at the one customer, a man drinking beer. Laura Huxley decided to get a photograph of the children with her Polaroid Land camera, using the headlights of the Volkswagen bus for light, and they posed, shy and blinking. From time to time the girl's husband stuck his head through a flowered curtain at the back of the bar, keeping his eye on us. The girl's parents had been Lebanese immigrants; she spoke a little French. We asked her how she liked living in Brasília, or in the Free City, and she replied promptly: “
Je le déteste!
—But my husband likes it all right.” They were from São Paulo and she missed the city; she was of a new, sophisticated city class, without the formal, old-fashioned manners of the
condangos.
When we left she stood languidly holding the drying photograph, almost forgetting to call “Thank you” after us. Brigitte Bardot would not have surprised
her.

Then back the fifteen miles to the hotel (and distances seem even farther than they are, perhaps because there are so few landmarks), for a dinner that ended after eleven o'clock. News that Huxley was at the hotel had spread among the party-guests from São Paulo; before dinner the taller man from Itamarati had been taken for Huxley and another woman of the group for Mrs. Huxley, and both asked for autographs. When the mistakes were corrected, Huxley and Laura obligingly signed their names on dinner menus (
Bife Stroganoff
). Huxley didn't mind not being recognized; at dinner he told a little story of another recent experience of mistaken identity. Before starting out for Brasil he had visited his dentist in Beverly Hills, and as he walked out of the elevator he met a woman about to get in. She looked up at him and stepped back in astonishment, then inquired, “Pardon me, but aren't you Theda Bara's husband?”

After midnight, kept awake by strains of dance-music from the hotel dining-room, where the President's party was in progress, I lay in bed studying the illuminated green-blue aquarium of the Palace of the Dawn, off in the distance. It is a pity, I decided, that the kite-like pillars are not spot-lit at night. As it is, their effectiveness is lost after dark because they show up only as formless shadows on the lighted glass box. But undoubtedly they eventually will be.

*   *   *

The next day, Sunday, was the day for the Indians. At six-thirty we met outside the hotel in the damp, chilly dawn; the Volkswagen bus was supposed to be there, but, with the confusion probably incidental to founding a new city, it kept us waiting for almost an hour, and to keep warm we took brisk walks around the cement parking space. The stork-like Huxley legs went around it faster than anyone else's without any effort, and watching those giant steps our clammy little group, laden down with books, baskets, and sun hats, murmured to each other in Portuguese that he looked “young for his age.” We were a rather highbrow set. On our way to see the most primitive people left in the world, except for the African pygmies, we had, among us: Martin Buber's “The Eclipse of God,” Huxley's “The Doors of Perception” and “Heaven and Hell,” in Portuguese, and “Grey Eminence” in English. Also being taken along to fill in the time on the trip were a thick French book titled simply “Plato” and a pocket edition of “The Mill on the Floss.”

Finally the bus arrived and we retraced the long red road to the airport. A few birds were singing, but not many, and the termites were hard at work in their unsightly red nests. Red ostrich plumes of dust rose here and there, trucks moving along with their loads of cement, girders, or fill, and the nagging sound of bull-dozers came from the direction of the Esplanade of the Three Powers.

At eight we took off in a Brazilian Air Force DC-3. It was a pleasant plane, if one can use the word for a plane, new, bare of all the usual paddings and curtains, but with blue plush seats, the backs of which could be folded over. It was meant for twenty-four passengers, and although several unknown men had now joined the party there were still so many extra seats that we could turn down the backs of alternate ones and put our feet up, the way we used to do on trains as children.

The continent rolled out underneath us to the west, a full-scale, dun-colored, bas-relief map. Trees grow along the wrinkles; the smaller streams are opaque olive-green. Occasionally higher ground breaks out into crumbling, fortress-like rocks, possibly the formations, Callado told us, that had given rise to the legend of the lost city that Colonel Fawcett searched for; we were flying over Fawcett territory. After a while we saw one large blue river, the Araguaia, flowing north, as all the rivers do, to join the Amazon, over a thousand miles away. Callado, dressed today in khaki drill, went down the aisle giving us each an anti-malaria pill from an enormous bottle: “Mostly for the psychological effect,” he said, “although we may meet some malarial mosquitoes.” Until it grew warmer the Air Force men kept on their stylish reefers of gray-blue wool with long-peaked caps to match. They were friendly and hospitable and began feeding us immediately: sandwiches, then gumdrops and jelly beans, and then paper cups of sweet black coffee, at least three times, but this is
de rigueur
on any Brasilian plane, sometimes even on Brasilian buses. Later the plane filled with the smell of oranges as a helpful aviator sliced off the peels of a whole tray for us.

We dipped into our various books and swapped them across the aisle; we changed places to talk to each other, like a dance. The young interpreter ate a large chocolate bar and devoted herself to a magazine called
Lady
(pronounced “Lah-dee”). She handed it across to show Huxley. There was a full page photograph of him at a recent press conference in Rio, shading his eyes and looking very sad. His wife was indignant about the expression: “Oh, why do they always take him looking like that! He really doesn't look like that at all!” I was bothered more by the huge caption:
THE OLD HUXLEY SAYS
—something about world peace. Although Huxley does not know Portuguese, he does know Spanish and I was afraid he might recognize the similar word for “old.” I had a brief argument with myself as to whether I should try to explain or not, then decided to hold my tongue. In this case I felt the word was meant affectionately, or “old” only in the sense of Huxley's having been famous for many years. (For two weeks Huxley had been making a deep impression in Rio; the bookshops were filled with his books, in five languages, and he had received nothing but unqualified praise and consideration from the press.)

One of the men who had joined us was an exuberant type, who couldn't sit still but kept prancing up and down the aisle with a leather gaucho hat tied under his chin. Another was old and tiny, large-eared and mournful-eyed. He, I discovered, was the man who had been supposed to meet me at the airport two days before; at that very moment, he confessed, he was supposed to be meeting a party arriving from Rio, but on the spur of the moment had decided to come along with us instead. He carried a clip-board with “Aldous Huxley” printed in capitals across the top sheet. He presented this and asked if Huxley would write a message on it—his impressions of Brasília, anything at all—for a collection of such messages from all visiting celebrities he was making, to be put in a future Brasília museum. Huxley took out his pen and set to work, and after tearing up two or three sheets of paper he produced a few phrases about the interesting experience of flying from the past (the colonial towns in Minas) to the future, the brand-new city of Brasília. Two days later this appeared in the Rio papers as a telegram Huxley had sent to President Kubitschek, giving a rather odd impression of the Huxley telegram style.

We were now flying more north than west and the scenery below had gradually changed. We flew over the River of the Dead, and then the River of the Souls. There were areas of what Callado called the “cauliflower forests.” From above, jungle trees do look like massed cauliflower, or even more, broccoli, although here not as thick nor as vivid a green as in the Amazon region. At last someone exclaimed “Look! An Indian village!” and sure enough, there in a clearing beside a muddy little river were five round roofs of palm thatch and two or three stick-like boats pulled up on the bank. Beyond them was an air-strip, an inch or two of faded red tape dropped into the jungle. It was the post of Xavantina, named for the Xavante Indians (
x
is pronounced
sh
), formerly fierce warriors, the Indians who are familiar from photographs posing on one leg, and wearing their hair in long bobs. However, we were going on farther, to the Uialapiti at Captain Vasconcelos Post, on a small tributary of the Xingu River.

Callado, who was responsible for this part of the Huxley tour, now began to have a slight attack of nerves. He began to tell us not to expect too much of the Indians we were about to see; after all, they are at a Post, they are a mixed lot, sometimes as many as five tribes will be visiting there together, and those who live there permanently are somewhat “uninteresting,” he put it, not like those who live completely isolated in their own villages. Some of them sometimes wear a shirt or a pair of trousers (but the only possible reason for wearing clothes that they can understand is that they keep off the mosquitoes), and one man had actually been taken on a trip to Rio, to see the Carnival.

At last another air strip appeared, and another clearing on another small river, this time with clear water and the thatched roofs were oval. We circled over
buriti
palms and one tall purple
îpé
in full flower, without a single leaf—one of the loveliest of Brasilian flowering trees. As we dropped down we could see Indians coming out of the houses and running along a rough road from the village to meet us, and when we stepped from the plane five or six men were already there and women with babies were bringing up the rear. They were very glad to see us, beaming with smiles, reaching eagerly for our hands, right or left, and squeezing them; two or three of the men said “Good-day, good-day” in Portuguese. More and more kept coming running, squeezing our hands or shaking them limply, smiling with delightfully open and cheerful expressions, showing square, widely spaced teeth.