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 climb. 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.