Brazil on the Move by John Dos Passos Read Free Book Online

with their sanitation. “You see,” Monty nudged me excitedly as we settled back in our seats, “you see, it’s like that all over.”
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 gentleironical 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