We drive downhill through a broad street of low houses which are mostly stores. A crazy bamboo shack has a sign, CAFÉ CERES. We pass a billiard parlor. We cross a green river on a floating bridge supported on clusters of oil drums lashed together. The Rio das Almas. Everybody points out a small white house on top of a grassy hill. That is where Sayão lives.
We are deposited in front of a set of new brick walls which are marked GRANDE HOTEL CERES. We pick our way past the bricklayers, stepping over planking heaped with fresh mortar, and find that the diningroom and a few small alcoves have been completed. The hotel is open for business. The landlady greets us and briskly straightens up a table for our lunch. She speaks English. She comes from the northern part of Bohemia, she says. Oh yes she’d been in the colônia a long time, almost a year.
The place to wash is outside in the yard, two enameled basins on a soapy board and a gasoline can full of water. The tall unshaven man who is washing his face with a great deal of snorting and sputtering turns out to be a Syrian merchant who sells textiles. Yes business is good, good, good. When we settle down to eat I ask the landlady where Sayão is to be found. She shakes her head. He is a hard man to put your finger on. Never stays in one place. She will send a boy over with a message.
“He is not here. Dr. Sayão has gone to Rio,” says a young lighthaired woman, nicely dressed as if for shopping in the city, who walks into the diningroom speaking dogmatic English. She sits down beside us. She comes from Vienna. She has an apartment in Rio. Her husband is a Hungarian. They are settling. If she likes it she will give up her apartment in Rio. If we want to learn about the colónia we must stay many days because it is very interesting. We must come to see her new house. Eventually Dr. Sayão will return.
The rosy young couple who walked in while we were talking turned out to be Swiss. He was an agronomist under contract to the Brazilian Government. Did they know anything about the whereabouts of Dr. Sayão? Oh no they didn’t know anything yet. They had just arrived. Dr. Sayão had fixed them up with a house. They had gotten married and had come to Brazil. They both had blue eyes and light curly hair, and fresh pink and white complexions. Their clothes looked crisp and clean. They walked out hand in hand looking into the jungle with shining eyes.
After we’d eaten the usual meal of rice and beans and meat we strolled around the village of Ceres. The highway cut through the bottom of a wide valley cleared halfway up the hillsides. In every direction among the treestumps straggled clumps of unfinished brick houses. Everywhere bricklayers were working, framing was going up. You caught glimpses against the sky of the bare brown backs of men setting the tiles on the roofs. That heap of bricks was going to be a moving picture theater; that one was going to be a bank. Here and there a little house already finished in white stucco with painted shutters stood out bright and neat. On all the hills around the great scraggly trees of the ruined jungle crowded rank on rank against the edges of the clearings.
We kept asking for Sayão. “He can’t be far,” people would smile and say.
Everybody was out that afternoon. The American Franciscans who had a little house beside the unfinished church were away on a mission. The young American who ran a brick kiln beside the highway in the middle of town had gone into Anápolis. The Americans who had set up the sawmill down by the river were off in São Paulo.
At Sayão’s office, in the barracks next to the machine shop that kept his roadbuilding machinery in order, we tried to get a skinny young engineer to explain some of the workings of the colony to us but he begged off saying that Sayão would explain it so much better when he came.
Where the devil was Dr. Sayão?
One man pointed north, another pointed south. Out on the road at work. How could one tell?
A stocky little man, with long blond eartabs combed down from under a pith helmet, drove up in a jeep while we were talking. He spoke with authority. Sayão was in Amaro Leite. That meant sour milk. It was a town, a sort of a town. In the north, far in the north. He would be back this afternoon, he announced. E certo. How far was Amaro Leite? The stocky man spread out his arms. Uma infinidade de leguas … An infinity of leagues.
While we waited the judge and I went walking along the river. “This I suppose will be the principal avenida,” he was saying as we stumbled past wandering trucks through the deep dust. “They shouldn’t cut down those trees. That should be the public garden right along the river.”
All at once he was seized with a fury of cityplanning. He pointed here and there among the charred stumps, indicating parks and public buildings. I began to see columns sprouting among the trees, monuments to national heroes, bronze generals on horseback. The little judge’s chest swelled.
We started across the floating bridge. The sun had set behind forested hills. In the hurried twilight of the tropics a slight coolness rose from the swift mustardgreen water.
“Soon there’ll be a new bridge,” said the judge proudly and pointed to the unfinished cement piers on the riverbank.
At the end of the bridge we met a very tall slender young man with fine sharpcut features and almost black skin. He wore the usual ragged workclothes. He grabbed the judge’s hand and smiled with all his broken teeth. The judge asked him how he was doing, was he married yet, were there any pretty girls in the colônia? The young man talked fast and smiled some more and grabbed the lobe of his left ear with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. That gesture meant O.K. He shook our hands again.
When we walked on the judge explained that this young fellow had been janitor at the courthouse in Goiãnia. He’d been starving to death there on eight hundred cruzeiros a month. Now he was making fortyfive a day laying bricks. “The man is happy.”
By the time we get back to the Grande Hotel Ceres it is so dark we have a hard time finding it. No word from Sayão. The dining room is jammed with men eating by the light of two lanterns and a candle. There are bearded men in hunting jackets who look like prospectors, there are salesmen and surveyors and engineers working on the road and the new bridge. Everybody is eating fast and talking fast. The dim light glints in eager eyes, on sweating cheekbones. When I grope my way out to the waterbucket to wash my face by the light of the lantern I see that the man ahead of me, a bullnecked character with a strawcolored beard, wears a large pearl earring in one ear. The night is already cool. From somewhere comes a smell of cape jessamine. Down in the dark valley an accordion is playing and a voice is singing a samba.
We are up at daylight standing around outside the office beside the repairshop in the valley with the construction foreman. There are bulldozers and road patrols. The place looks like a construction camp in the States. “No, he’s not back yet.”
“Yes he is,” says the young man from São Paulo. “He got in from Amaro Leite at half past one … He’ll be along any minute.”
“Isn’t it early?”
“He never gets tired. He sleeps while he drives.”
The man with the helmet and the yellow eartabs drives up in his jeep. “He’s back,” he says in an excited tone. “His stomach is a little upset … He has a slight fever.” The men crowd around the jeep with a look of concern on their faces. “But that is nothing … For Sayão that is nothing.”
The Man Himself
A battered sedan drives up. There’s a pretty girl on the front seat. The freshfaced man in khaki shirtsleeves behind the wheel seems hardly much older. As he steps to the ground we can see that he is a broadshouldered sixfooter. He shows even white teeth in a smile as he walks towards us. His step has a vigorous spring to it. He is older than he looked at a distance. There are thoughtful crowsfeet round his eyes. In fact the pretty girl is his daughter.