On the drive out, over what was then a dirt road dusty and potholed from continual truck traffic, what struck us most was that so many of the settlers in the dilapidated roadside shacks were blueeyed and lighthaired. Towheaded children were everywhere. Klabin explained to us that these people sprang from a Polish immigration some twenty or thirty years before. Their language was Portuguese and their customs Brazilian. Most of them had forgotten the Polish language.
Horacio Klabin was a tall, dark, disenchanted man with a somewhat abstracted manner. His education and cultural formation seemed entirely European. He was up on all the latest developments in art and literature the world over. He evidently read Russian. He was painfully conscious of every development of Soviet expansion and wellinformed on the writers of the famous “thaw” that was then threatening the rigidity of Communist dogma. Dining at his house in Monte Alegre that night, we found the conversation international; we might have been at Fontainebleau or some Parisian suburb along the Marne.
He put us up at the company hotel. From the engineers and technicians and their wives and families passing through the lobby you could hear almost every European language; a United Nations, the Brazilians called it.
In the morning after walking through the huge papermill, we crossed the river to the development Horacio Klabin was promoting on his own on the green hillside facing the plant. His idea was to furnish homes that working people and technicians could buy on the installment plan, so as to get them out of the semifeudal atmosphere of the company town. Everything in the new city was to be independent of the papermill. White walls, red tiles, green louvers. Flowering shrubs, beautiful vegetation. There was an air of modest originality about these constructions. He showed us a variety of whitewalled residences of different sizes, tailored to the salaries of the people he wanted to see buy them. Four of the most attractive villas were set on a terrace that cut into the steep riverbank. A Frenchman owned one, a Hungarian another, a German a third. The last was occupied by the Brazilian salesagent for the real estate enterprise.
When Horacio Klabin showed us his nursery on the summit of the hill, his manner took on real animation. This was his hobby. He muttered deprecatingly that his whole family was obsessed with planting trees. The trees he wanted to grow at Monte Alegre were olives.
In colonial times the Brazilians were not allowed to plant olive trees, so that olive oil should remain a Portuguese monopoly, he explained. Since independence nobody had thought to try to grow olives on a large scale in Brazil. He had imported stock and seeds from Portugal and Spain and Italy and the Near East. He had some California varieties. His young trees were thriving. Soon they would bear. If he could introduce an olive oil industry into central Paraná, he said with his reserved smile, he really would have accomplished something for his country.
Seven Year Old City
Next day he arranged for a small plane to take us further to the north and west to the new town of Maringá.
The first thing we noticed as we circled for a landing over the rawlooking airstrip was the red earth. Newly planted coffeetrees stretched in neatly checked rows in every direction, uniform deepgreen balls. From the air the plantations looked like a red checkerboard evenly set with green glassheaded pins. There is a great deal of red earth in the interior of Brazil, but this earth of Maringá was redder than red.
We had hardly a chance to stretch our legs, cramped from the plane ride, before an eager young man strode up to us with his hand out exclaiming that we were the guests of the Northwest Paraná Development Company and that he was going to show us the city of Maringá which seven years o’clock was only forest primeval. Like many things in Maringá our guide’s English was new and rather hastily put together. He had learned it out of a phrasebook. He would say “o’clock” when he meant “ago.” We got along famously all the same. His cheerful enthusiasm made up for everything. As he ushered us into his car, which was deeply stained in red, he added that he could show us the forest primeval just as it had been seven years o’clock because a few acres had been left in their natural state for a public park.
The soil was perfect for coffee he told us. These new plantations just coming into bearing were proving profitable, but already the planters had to be looking around for new crops. They were all too conscious that they had to face a world surplus of coffee. Some were setting out longstaple cotton between the rows of coffeetrees. Others were turning to corn, and the brown beans which were the national staple, and soya and cattle. Texans from the King Ranch were crossing their famous Santa Gertrudis breed with the local zebu to find a type of cattle that suited the region exactly. The pastures were unbelievably lush. This was one of the richest bands of soil in the world. “Look at this soil,” our friend scraped a little off the side of his jeep. “It will grow anything.”
Maringá made us think of Mark Twain’s and Bret Harte’s Wild West of a hundred years ago, except that the pioneers rode jeeps instead of horses and arrived by plane instead of by stage coach. Everybody we talked to was full of bluesky speculations and slaphappy confidence. Our friend drove us through billowing clouds of red dust as he explained the layout of the city to be. It was like a Florida development in one of the great booms, only with a note of fantasy exclusively Brazilian.
We were shown residences and office buildings in the most original architectural styles, freshplanted parks, a jockey club for horse racing, a handsome tiled pool at the swimming club, and a children’s playground with the most uptodate equipment.
The forest preserve was an incredibly beautiful stretch of primeval tropical woodland with a pond and a slathouse for growing orchids. A naturalist’s dream. The place was full of birds and butterflies and grotesque tropical flowers. Up in the tops of the seventy foot trees there was a rustling that we were told was monkeys, but nothing would induce our small arboreal cousins to show their faces.
At lunch in the airconditioned restaurant of the scarcely finished hotel our friend explained that Maringá hadn’t really made a start until seven years before. The city already had eight thousand inhabitants, with an estimated fifteen thousand in the environs, schools, a newspaper, a hospital, and twentytwo banks.
The development company he worked for began as a land-selling scheme. Thirty years before a British concern had obtained title to hundreds of square miles of the richest red-soil land in the world in northern Paraná and in the western part of the state of São Paulo. They had built a railroad and promoted Londrina, fifty miles nearer the city of São Paulo.
Now Londrina was a staid and established provincial city famous for its white skyscrapers, its treeshaded streets and handsome airport. The London company, in the sweeping liquidation of British holdings brought about by the second war, sold out to a Brazilian concern.
“Maringá is all Brazilian,” cried our guide. “We have settlers from everywhere, from Minas and Ceará, refugees from the droughts of the North East; from Santos and the gaucho country to the south.” There were Greeks and Spaniards and Portuguese and Italians, refugees from the ironcurtain countries of Eastern Europe, and a few Japanese gardeners.