The Lost Leader
My trip up the railroad ended at a raw new town named Governador Valadares. You could see the outlines of a future city plan scratched out in the red clay among the stumps and carcasses of the felled forest trees. Eight thousand people lived in a straggle of shanties among sawmills and brick kilns. The town lay on a bend of the Rio Doce opposite a great battlemented mountain with a smooth granite face that soared out of sight through the level layers of smoke and mist that roofed in the valley.
In the crowded freightyards beyond the station we found Joaquim waiting for us with his sleeper, which had come up on the passenger train. The car was still oven hot from the day’s sun, and airless because every space between the tracks was piled high with cut wood for the locomotives, but the narrow showerbath where a trickle of tepid water washed off the grimed red dust of the valley was a delight.
All the way up Dr. Penido had been promising us a good restaurant in Valadares so after everybody had bathed we straggled off along the broad main street already planted with trees, up past a new circular park at the intersection of the main streets still in the excavation stage, to a café presided over by a huge lightbrown man in a cook’s hat and apron whom the doctors explained had worked as a tailor until it had occurred to him that he’d rather be a cook. And a very good cook he turned out to be.
After a great deal of steak and rice washed down by Portuguese wine to the tune of that most ingratiating Brazilian toast: “As nossas boas qualidades que não são poucas [To our good qualities, which are not few]”—we sat a long time talking and smoking. The Brazilians were trying to explain to the Americans, still in a gentle friendly way, that they felt let down, after all the propaganda of the Good Neighbor policy and wartime cooperation, by the lack of interest the American people now showed in their problems.
“But you don’t want American capital. You want to develop your own oil industry and your own iron and steel.”
“O petróleo é nosso. That’s mostly propaganda,” said one of the doctors laughing.
“But everybody believes in it. The papers in Rio are full of it.”
“We don’t want American imperialism but we do want American interest and help, especially technical help … and dollars. We’d like more help for public health.”
“Perhaps what hurts us,” said Dr. Penido in his gentle ironical tone, “is a certain lack of comprehension … I feel it myself with Americans, not with all but with some even at this table.” It seemed to me he looked rather hard at Monty. Monty looked glum. “I was two years studying public health at Johns Hopkins … Baltimore is a very nice city. I had a very good time there, met many damn splendid guys, but I felt a certain lack of comprehension.”
He went on to talk in a dreamy voice about European culture. He had lived in Paris as a child. As he talked I could see him, short pants and bare knees, playing in the Parc Monceau. The loss of Paris was something no Brazilian could get over, the loss of that feeling of being linked to the evolving traditions of European civilization: the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the French, link by link, through the ages. The war had blacked out Europe and Brazilians missed that stimulus. The North Americans didn’t have it. It was hard to put your finger on it. It was something that made a man feel part of civilization. Perhaps that was why they were disappointed in the United States.
The town lights had gone out. Our immense host brought in an oil lamp and set it on the big Electrolux refrigerator behind the table.
“There have been a series of disappointments,” one of the other doctors burst out. “After the victory we thought that America would assume a world leadership like the Europe our fathers remembered.”
“Without imperialism? How can you do it?”
There was a polite shrugging of shoulders.
“America seems so much weaker in victory,” sighed Dr. Penido. “But,” he banged his fist on the table and went on briskly, “the important thing is that we have produced a successful experiment in international cooperation … Sespe would not exist without the cooperation of both Americans and Brazilians. We have proved that it works. We have learned a method. Now we could go on to do great things, if just at this crucial moment in the United States you did not seem to lose interest.”
“We feel,” one of the others echoed, “a certain lack of comprehension.”
Dr. Penido yawned and rose to his feet. It was late. We groped our way through unlit streets and freightyards stacked with corded wood back to our sleeping car.
The Rockcrusher That Never Gets Out of Order
In the morning a small plane came down from the mine at Itabira to pick me up. Now I was going to see where all those orecars came from. As the pilot spiraled up from the airstrip at Valadares to vault the first range of razorbacked mountains I began to note the extent of the devastation of the country. As far as I could see into the murk fires made a red marbling on the cutover slopes. The mountains under us smoldered like burnt papers in a grate.
Pastures along the winding streams showed that fine network of cattlepaths that comes from overgrazing. Houses, usually solitary on a hillock in a valley, were scarce. Near a house you could usually make out the broad bunched leaves of a few banana trees and some tiny green squares of cultivated land. It was hard to imagine how such a sparse population could so ravage the hills. The railroad’s demands for firewood, the burning of charcoal to cook with, and its use in iron furnaces, had already gutted the forests for an enormous tract of country. The logging out of lumber for export did the rest. As we climbed again to clear a new set of granite escarpments the valleys below were drowned in smoke. The plane tore into speeding clouds that packed tight like cotton wool against the windows.
There was no ceiling at all over the airfield at the mine, so we had to turn back. When we landed at Valadares again the Brazilian business man who shared the seat with me shouted in my ear. “I was anxious,” he said, “until the pilot told me he was the father of eight. The father of eight just has to be careful.”
As we walked with throbbing ears across the field to the shelter, he added that he wondered whether as a foreigner I understood the significance of what I was seeing in the Vale do Rio Doce: “It is climbing a series of steps. First the valley was so unhealthy we could hardly keep up the railroad. The malaria service and public health make sanitary the valley so that we can improve the railroad … America helps Brazil up a step. In the State of Minas Gerais we have the richest iron deposit in the world but to get it out we had only picks and shovels. The American loan buys the machinery to work it … Another step …”
“But what about the campaign against American imperialism?”
“That,” he said, “is the labor of Communists.”
He put his arm around my shoulder and offered to buy my lunch. After lunch, which, since the public health doctors were still in Valadares, turned out to be a second farewell celebration, the father of eight did manage to land us on the wet hilltop airstrip at Itabira. The mountains all around were still draped in clouds. The drenched air made us shiver after the heat of the valley.
The quiet man in khaki who came out to meet us introduced himself as Gil Whitehead, American manager of the mine for the Rio Doce Company. “It’s too bad that you can’t see the peak of Caué,” he said and looked up at the murky ceiling just overhead. “I’d like you to see the magic mountain.”
While we waited for the clouds to lift we drove round the old town that climbed up steep red ridges to a suburb of neat new houses for the skilled workmen and to the big concrete hangar which could house the new machine shops. The valleys below were full of tattered mist. The weather had settled down to a cold drizzle. The hunks of wet ore shone as they thundered down the chutes into the orecars.