We found an air of cheerful bustle about everybody we met. Everything seemed new and fresh. Most of the people had put up their houses themselves. They were full of hopes and plans. On the main street bars and groceries were springing up. One shack claimed to be a nightclub. A man who said he’d been a stonemason back in Ceará proudly showed off his stock of canned goods and dried fruits and peanuts and a few drums of kerosene. Business wasn’t too bad he said. That very day, so he told us, he’d made the first payment on his lot.
We were shown the parcel of land a French company had bought to set up a factory to make concrete culverts, the place where a brewery was about to move in, a small sawmill, a temporary laundry below the waterpump.
Beside a parked truck a priest was conducting an openair service. Little girls were waving palmfronds and singing. That’s where the church was going to be.
We were introduced to a contractor. His two daughters were schoolteachers. They were going to improvise a school.
There was even a young man from Ceres, who’d moved away because things didn’t move fast enough for him there. He owned a pickup truck. Everybody needed something hauled. He was doing a landoffice business. He was enthusiastic about his prospects. His friend was a housepainter. Everybody wanted something painted; more contracts than he’d ever imagined.
Most of the people worked in Brasília. A bus service was set up to take them back and forth. Their gripe was that the fare was too high. Otherwise they were delighted. They said they liked the upland air and the cool nights and the dry climate. Wages were better than they were accustomed to. They were convinced that by the time they took title to their lots their land would be worth a great deal more than they paid for it.
When the settlers at Taguatinga spoke about Brasília, about the expense of going back and forth from Brasília, it was as if the city actually existed. For them it was already a metropolis. These immigrants were not worried about the problems of finance and the difficulties of transportation any more than our immigrants were a hundred years ago when they settled the western states. They had sold everything they owned and moved out here in the wilderness hundreds of miles from their homes because they believed in Brasília.
Dom Bosco’s Dream
The evening before we went back to Rio we were standing beside Osorio’s jeep in front of a pointed white shrine on the brow of a hill overgrown with scraggly trees and dotted with the red clay nests of the termites. Behind us lay miles of dry silent wilderness. This shrine was the first building they put up, Osorio explained, to commemorate the missionary friar who forecast a future civilization for these central highlands. Dom Bosco’s statue looked out across a broad shadowy valley towards the streaks of dust that hung level in the evening air over the opposite ridge.
A faint roar came to us from the construction work. Draglines, bulldozers, sheepsfoot rollers, graders: earthmoving machines of every type were at work twentyfour hours a day leveling the summit of the long hogback which formed the center of Brazil’s new capital.
On the horizon beyond, the red sun set in purple behind a smooth distant ridge. Osorio pointed out the white upside down arches of the palace and the pontoon shape of the hotel and the blocks of apartments shapeless under their scaffolding.
“Soon you’ll see behind them the Triangle of the Three Powers and the downtown district. You can imagine them already,” he said, with a catch in his breath. “The neon lights will go on … You’ll see them reflected in the lake.”
He pointed out the location of the lot he had bought himself in the residential suburb across the lake from the city. The light scratches of a tractor trail around the flanks of the hills indicated where the lake level would be.
“You’ll go to your office in a rowboat?” He corrected me. “By motorboat,” he said.
A ragged grimy man with clearcut dark features stood looking intently up into Dom Bosco’s face as he listened to our conversation.
“Ask him how he got here. It’s miles from anywhere. Ours is the only car.”
“He lives here,” answered Osorio grinning. “He’s a charcoal burner from Mato Grosso. He’s cutting trees in all these valleys that will be flooded when they finish the dam.”
There was no house in sight. Night was coming on fast. The valleys were drowned in dusk. In the tricky light of the last gloaming you could swear you could see the completed city, reflected into the lake from the opposite ridge. The streaks of blue mist might be the surface of the water.
The ragged man, as pleased as if he were pointing out a mansion, pointed out a tiny leanto way down on the valley floor. “That’s my house,” he said proudly.
“But it’s at the bottom of the lake.”
The idea seemed to please the ragged man. “Of course.” He nodded delightedly. “I live at the bottom of the lake.”
IV
THE RED DUST OF MARINGÁ
Monte Alegre
When you drive northwest from Curitiba, the capital of Paraná, through that state’s beautiful midlands you come after four or five hours to a region densely forested with evergreens. What is known as the Paraná pine, a conifer which is really a kind of araucaria with a habit of growth resembling the umbrella pine of California, gives a special accent to the sharp hills and undulating valleys. In this region the piney forests cover hundreds of square miles. In the middle of them, taking advantage for water power of one of the swift green streams which flow towards the Paraná River to the westward, stands the Monte Alegre papermill.
Monte Alegre, with its guards and its gates and treeshaded streets and standardized stone houses around green lawns, looks like an oldfashioned company town in New England or eastern Canada. It is the headquarters of the Klabin Industries which furnish about a third of the newsprint used in São Paulo and Rio. This powerful group of companies constitutes a family enterprise very typical of Brazilian big business.
Three generations ago a Lithuanian immigrant opened a small stationery store in São Paulo. As his business increased he found it hard to keep his store supplied with paper. Shipments from Europe were irregular and unreliable. He started experimenting with making paper himself. Eventually he found himself operating the first successful papermill in Brazil. His sons turned out to be good businessmen. They imported European technicians, bought up vast tracts of virgin forest and built what was in its day a thoroughly uptodate papermill. So that they would be sure not to run out of pulpwood, they embarked on a treeplanting program to renew the forests of Paraná pine as fast as they cut them down. To use the byproducts they branched out into chemicals and plastics.
In Curitiba, a pleasantly literate city with a handsome public library and quite a background of publishing and historical research, I had met one of the grandsons of the original Klabin. I was there to give a talk at one of the binational centers which offer courses in the English language and library service and lectures on North American topics. While these centers were State Department enterprises, they had at that time considerable local backing, and some of them were said to be selfsupporting. In Curitiba it was amusing to discover that my audience was made up largely of German-speaking people. They came from German families that had been in Paraná for several generations. Some of them had never been in Germany. They told me that if I’d visit the neighboring state of Santa Catarina I would find the atmosphere even more Germanic. Horacio Klabin had heard I was interested in the mushrooming settlements of the hinterland, and handsomely offered to drive our little party out to visit his family enterprises around Monte Alegre. He had a new city of his own he wanted us to see.