At the age of 50, I came here as a visiting professor, in the last days of March of 1988. “Here” is Belo Horizonte, the capital of the State of Minas Gerais — a city surrounded by many mountains, in all directions, which make the beautiful horizon for which the city is named.
Now, after a little more than three years of trying to live in this beautiful language, and also trying to learn what it is to pass through life as a Brasilian, I am going to try to describe a few of the infinitude of experiences that flood through me daily, to give you who may not have ever had the wonderful chance to be a stranger here, as I am having, a wisp of a hint of what it is like.
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Beautiful Horizon. This name in translation already falls strangely on American ears. We do have many place names in the States which are made up of words which obviously have meanings aside from their geographic use, though the majority of them have at least one word which refers to a prominent feature of a landscape — words like river, mountain, lake, city, bay, cape: Green River. Buffalo. Cypress Grove. Palm Springs. Newport. Mexican Hat. Salt Lake City. Mountainside. Grand Rapids. Iron Mountain. Willow Springs. Double Bayou. Long Beach. Moose River. Boulder.
Sometimes, especially as we leave the more conservative Northeast, we encounter things like Converse, Indiana. Halfway, Maryland. Independence, Missouri. Inkster, North Dakota. Intake, Montana. Wounded Knee, South Dakota. And even occasionally such marvels, which strike at least my East Coast (born in Boston) ear as flamboyant, wild, delicious, as Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
But here in Brasil, there are many, many place names made up of words whose basic meanings have nothing to do with geography: Milho Verde — Green Corn. Patos de Minas — Ducks of Minas (Gerais). Juiz de Fora — Judge from the Outside. Vitória — Victory. Espirito Santo — Holy Spirit (a state). Tubarão — Shark. Cascavel — Rattlesnake. Natal — Christmas. Vassouras — Brooms. Divino — Divine. Ressaca — Hangover, with its neighboring village, Ressaquinha — Little Hangover. Tres Corações — Three Hearts, Cupim — termite, Formiga — Ant, Espera Feliz — Happy Wait. Buraco Quente —Hot Hole, Ferros — Irons, Sem Peixe — Without Fish.
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Life seems a lot cheaper here, in many ways. Walking along a sidewalk, you have to watch carefully where you are going, or you may step into a deep unmarked hole where you could hurt yourself seriously. Or driving: occasionally one sees, in the middle of a busy street, an open manhole cover, with traffic pouring around it. There is no sign to warn motorists of the danger; a thief has come to steal the cover, to melt it down and sell it. There is no instant response from whoever is responsible for replacing the cover, and there will be no warning to drivers in the interim. You have to learn to be on your toes here, as a pedestrian, as a driver.
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A popular Brasilian institution is the sacolão — the big sack. This is a fruit and vegetable stand, with one price per kilo for almost everything that is sold — potatoes, chuchu (a pale green zucchini-like vegetable), squash, tomatoes, oranges (of at least two, maybe three, different kinds), cauliflower, cocoanuts, avocados, corn. Some sacolões have a different section for fancier, more expensive items, which have individually marked prices, as they would in the supermarket: pears, grapes, apples, parsley, eggs, garlic.
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Checks. These are used for almost everything, except what we might think they would be used for, i.e., paying bills by mail. To pay bills, you have to go to the company in question, or to a designated bank, and pay there. You can pay there with a check, but you can’t mail a check to the company. Probably can’t is too strong a word. I have never heard of it being done, even for credit cards. What then strikes one as strange, in this general checklessness, is the fact that within a reasonable range of the city where your bank is, checks can be used for everything — at any store, to pay at a strange restaurant or gas station, to pay a taxi-driver, even, or at a parking lot. The only places where I have never seen checks used are at the movies and on buses.
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Buses. That is how Brasil travels. There are a number of national airlines, for the very well-off, and there are some train tracks, but I have never heard of anyone going on a train. I think the trains are largely used for carrying freight. And since cars are very expensive (they would cost more here than they would in the US), everyone goes by bus. There are dozens and dozens of bus companies, maybe even hundreds, and the bus stations are almost always packed. Most trips start at night, to avoid some of the heat of the day, so the night is a great time to see who the Brasilians are. The whole family goes to the rodoviária, either to get on a bus themselves, or to welcome someone who has just arrived.
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It is hard for us to get any feel for the size of things down here. A domestic example: what is for us a flower, our nice red Christmastime poinsettias, which we buy in pots, are here trees, small trees for here, only about twenty to thirty feet high. Brasil nuts, which seem a harmless foodstuff to us, come encased in shells, roughly the size and weight and hardness of cocoanuts (you have to go at them with a hammer to break into, what we call, the Brasil nuts, which still have their difficult to remove inner shell). These smallish hairy brown bowling balls grow on trees which reach the height of two hundred feet. They stay put up there in the treetops most of the year, until they are ripe. When they are ripe, they start to fall to the ground. Brasilians do not enter the woods at this time of the year.
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The heat of the tropical sun allows Nature to make many exploratory sallies, to try out a lot of new, experimental stuff. There are said to be one million species of plants and animals living in the Amazon Basin. I was stunned to learn, from a friend who is an odonatologist, a specialist in dragonflies, that even in the US, there are three hundred species of dragonfly. But here there are a thousand.
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I have no clear idea how many species of hummingbirds there are in Brasil. I think it is at least dozens, but it may well be in the hundreds. Living in New England, I think I had only seen hummingbirds on the order of ten times in my whole life in the States, and maybe all of the same species — the ruby-throated hummingbird. Here, in our sort of outlying suburb of Pampulha, I can see every day at least two species of hummingbirds, maybe even three. The thrill has worn off a bit, I am ashamed to admit, and I haven’t even looked them up in a bird book to find out what their names are.
***
The city of Manaus is located at the junction of two rivers, one of which has clear water, and the other of which has muddier water. The force of these rivers is so great that they flow side by side, forming the Amazon, for several miles without mixing. Below Manaus, for a while, one half of the Amazon is clear, the other half muddy.
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One other river story. There is a tribe, the Pirahãs, who live deep in the jungle. They are hunters and gatherers, and live on the banks of a river which in the dry season is less than fifty feet across. They build no houses; there are trees which are forty to fifty feet tall, growing on the banks of the river. The only structures they build are made of branches and leaves, to shield little babies from the direct rays of the sun. As the rains come, the Pirahãs continue to live on the banks of their widening river, moving with it as it swells to attain its maximum width of around a hundred miles. Ocean-going ships pass over the place where the bed of the river is in the dry season, and looking down into the water, one can see the tops of the trees. The Pirahãs are lucky. No one else seems to want their land, so they have not been herded off of it, or hunted to extinction, as has happened to many other tribes whose ecological niches were more desirable.
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The power of the sun makes for kinds of hardwoods that seemed unimaginable to somebody like me, who grew up in the Northeastern US. There are many kinds of wood that are so hard that holes in them can only be made with drills with special bits, bits much harder than the ones the Brasilians use to make holes in brick or plaster walls. If you try to drill with this softer kind of steel, the wood makes the drill bits melt down. The dark, dark wood which is used to make railroad ties (dormentes) is so hard that if hot coals from the firebox of trains fall on it, it does not catch fire.
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Corruption is big here, violence is too. The previous governor of Minas Gerais, Newton Cardoso, had one farm in 1971. When he left office in 1991, he reportedly had 66, for a total acreage of almost forty million acres. In Rio and São Paulo, women do not wear necklaces or earrings on the street, because thieves may tear them off of them. I have heard of people being mugged and robbed of even their clothes in Rio, and left naked. Kidnappings of big businessmen or members of their families, for immense ransoms, are commonplace. It is rare for a week to go by without the country being plunged into the agony of waiting and hoping for the best. A serious problem is controlling gangs of vigilantes, often made up in part of off-duty policemen, who take the law into their hands and kill those who they know or suspect to be criminals.
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Poverty is big too. It is said that in the streets of São Paulo, there are seven hundred thousand abandoned children. The minimum salary here, which many people consider themselves lucky to earn, is around fifty to sixty dollars per month. Prices are not low, and rise unpredictably, in great jumps.
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Estimates of illiteracy place it at around seventy percent. Many of those who never learned to read never had a chance to go to any school. There was none where they grew up.
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Then how is democracy managed? How can candidates get votes at the polls from people who cannot read even their own names? There is no literacy test imposed on Brasilian citizens, anyone can vote. Indeed, anyone has to vote. Brasilian law requires you to go to the polls and cast your ballot, and to keep the slip that is proof that you went (even if you can’t read it). You must return to your home town to vote, and there are no absentee ballots. If you are too far away to go back, then you have to go to the Post Office to get a form to fill in (even if you can’t write) to attest to this fact. When you go to the polls, you are free to votar em branco, to “vote white” — to turn in an empty ballot. Many Brasilians are so disgusted with the venality and/or incompetence of the candidates that the number of those who vote white can rise to ten or fifteen percent of the ballots cast. But however you choose to vote, you have to have the document that says that vote you did.
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But to return to the politician’s problem, how can a politician make sure that some illiterate voter who does want to vote for him or her will be able to find their name on the ballot? By numbers. Politicians know that the first thing that a person will be able to read is prices. There are many Brasilians who only know how to read numbers, and to get the votes of these numerical literates, politicians all get assigned numbers, big ones for small elections (numbers like 15.310 or 36.773) and smaller ones for big elections like a governorship or a presidency (33 or 8).One of the most popular places for election advertising is painted walls. So all over Brasil, wherever there are walls, you see them covered with the first names and numbers of politicians from some past election, for some forgotten post: Jurandir — 22.587; Itamar — 7.304; Zulécio — 19.006. The walls are white, the letters big and black or red, fresh paint put on top of peeling paint, the wistful poetry of the hunger for the power and money that comes with political office. Forgetting their political pasts, these walls are beautiful found art collages of numbers and letters, past and future, the great and the small.
***
Brasil is on a first-name basis to an extent that is astonishing, to me. Everybody’s address-book is alphabetized by first names, and most people I know here I don’t know the last names of. The computer-printed lists of students in university classes are alphabetized by first names, as indeed is even the huge collection of dossiers in the Personnel Office of the university where I teach (and doubtless in all Brasilian universities).
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Dental prices are only slightly lower than they would be in the US. A majority of Brasilians could not think of paying to go to a dentist. The only cure for a painful toothache is to pull out the tooth. A dentist I know, who is also a university professor here in the school of dentistry, told me that one estimate of the number of Brasilians without teeth is 66%. Custódio, who used to help us by doing yard work on weekends, when I told him this statistic, nodded and said that his seven-year-old niece had already had all of her teeth pulled out.
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Brasilians are soccer maniacs. When Brasil is playing in the World Cup, everyone watches or listens. Banks close, universities cancel classes. Every time that Brasil scores, the long peal of joy of the sportscaster, “Goooooooooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!” (goal) is echoed by the explosions of fireworks all around the country. If Brasil wins, delirium sets in, and everyone jumps into a car to drive into the middle of the city to create the biggest traffic jam possible or conceivable, whichever comes first.
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When I was first here, in the World Cup of 1982, there was a beautiful goal scored by Brasil. In front of the opponents’ goal, the ball was passed towards Falcão (“Hawk” — his last name in this case, as it happens), who saw immediately that he had no shot — too many defenders in front of him. With the sixth sense of the great athlete, Falcão knew, without looking, that his teammate Eder was a few meters behind him, in a direct line with the direction in which the ball was being passed. So instead of doing anything with the pass, he simply opened his legs, to let the ball pass through to the explosive foot of Eder, behind him, who boomed a rocket past the goalie. The next day, the headline in the Jornal do Brasil, Brasil’s most respected and conservative newspaper, read: FALCÃO ABRIU AS PERNAS E O BRASIL INTEIRO GOZOU (Falcão opened his legs and all of Brasil came).
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Aside from soccer, coffee, and wonderful music, Brasil’s greatest product is irreverence. During the dark years of the dictatorship (1964-1976), when newspapers were censored, and pieces were cut out of stories, some newspapers would leave the pages blank, to show how much had been censored. Other newspapers would print recipes to fill in the gaps left by the censors.
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On the building of the school of dentistry at the university here, students hung up a huge poster, which ended with a pun on the word for “dictatorship” —ditadura: A BAIXO A DENTADURA! (Down with dentures!)
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One of the most admired qualities that a person can have is jogo de cintura —”play around the belt.” This refers originally to a kind of suppleness of body which makes for a good dancer, but metaphorically, it refers to a quality of looseness, flexibility, an ability to negotiate, to improvise, that anyone who wants to live in this interpenetrated happy-sadness must acquire to survive. Brasil is crippled by an immense and viscous bureaucracy, everywhere one needs documents in multiple copies, stamped, certified. Whenever one goes with one’s sheaf of papers to some agency, it is invariably found that some documents are missing. Brasil is the country for coming back tomorrow with more documents. And there are many things that are not possible, officially, even with documents — “não tem jeito” — there ís just no way. But these regulations are administered by Brasilians, many of them with lots of jogo de cintura. So when one person meets another, across a counter or a desk, very often the magic of Brasil, the magic which makes many strangers fall in love with the crazy life here, the magic of people, the art of friendship, arises, begins to weave a net of relation between the people on both sides of the counter, and many things that there is no way for them to happen, happen anyway.
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Brasil is aware of the problems that can arise with an oversized bureaucracy, and once took decisive steps to combat the danger. Legislators established a Bureau of Debureaucratization. It has since failed, due, I am told, to understaffing and its inability to get enough of the requisite forms.
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An important word in Brasil is saco, whose literal meaning is “sack,” or, when used anatomically, “scrotum.” It occurs frequently in the idiom encher o sacode alguém, to fill someone’s scrotum, i.e., to try someone’s patience, to be a pain in the ass. A related expression is ter saco — to have scrotum, or patience. Não tenho saco para isso — “I don’t have the saco for this, I’m fed up.” A handy expression to vent your exasperation, for either sex, is simply ”SACO!!!!” Someone who is a real champion at filling your saco is a pé no saco — a foot in the scrotum, or worse yet, a pela-saco, a saco-peeler. Interestingly, saco enters into another Brasilian idiom, which expresses the contempt felt for the one who curries favor, the brown-noser, the ass-licker: puxar saco — to pull someone’s saco.
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There is a jail in São Paulo that has recently had to be condemned. There have been so many tunnels dug underneath the walls that the building is imminent danger of collapse. The network of tunnels proved confusing to one prisoner, who thought he was emerging to freedom, only to find himself coming up in the courtyard again, where he was promptly recaptured.
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This was on national TV, on Brasil’s only late night show — Jo Soares 11:30. Like Johnny Carson, but much less glitzy. Fabulous music — Jo used to be a musician, still often sits in beautifully on bongo. Jo is shortish, white hair, very round, tips ‘em at 230? 250?? Laughs a lot, hugs all of his guests, who are politicians, writers, artists, funny people. A lot of old friends are guests, and it seems that even those who meet Jo for the first time are soon included in the circle of friendship. So one night, by chance, we tune in, and see that who is being interviewed is Dr. Edson (Queiroz), who is a médico mediúnico, a physician who is a medium, who is entered by the spirit of another being. Like what are called ”channels,” in the States, except that where channels tend to mostly talk or write, the physician-mediums perform cures. Doctor Edson looks like he is about 55. He is balding, gentle, humble, very soft-spoken. Jo asks him about what it is like to have the spirit doctor come into him and take over — general kind of talk. Dr. Edson’s simplicity and self-effacingness is impressive.
Now the topic shifts. Jo tries something unpredictable, like he is famous for. He says to Dr. Edson that there is a member of the production crew for the show who has an ear problem. Does Dr. Edson think that his spirit doctor, Dr. Fritz, could help this man? The man, a technician, who looks like he is in his late twenties, early thirties, comes in and sits down. Dr. Edson says he does not know, that it is not up to him to decide, but he asks everybody there to pray that Dr. Fritz will be able to help. He asks us at home to pray too. And then everything becomes still. We see on the screen how Jo and Dr. Edson and the technician have closed their eyes and are praying, then we see how the audience is praying, and then the prayer comes to us too. Maybe we aren’t very polished at praying, we are unused to prayer. We are surprised to find our inner voice asking, in simple ways, for this man, who we know nothing about, to find help for his hearing. We look back to the screen. A change has come over Dr. Edson. He begins to talk, in a different voice, a deeper voice. And his language is different too. There is a lot of Spanish in it now, but it is Spanish spoken with something that sounds like a guttural accent, maybe German. And now Dr. Fritz is standing up, and his movements are all different from the way we saw Dr. Edson move when he came in and sat down. Dr. Fritz seems almost uncoordinated, as if he is out of practice in walking. He starts sort of lurching around the stage, talking as he walks. There is this intenseness about him. And he is breaking an unwritten law of TV, a law that you have never before seen anyone contravene: the law of the camera.
The TV camera shall not be ignored.
Normal people simply do not turn their backs to the camera and talk on, oblivious to its commanding presence. That is what makes Dr. Fritz’s intensity almost eerie — for him, the fact that this is part of Brasil’s television tonight is irrelevant. He has come for one reason — to help the technician to hear better. He goes over to the man now, looks at him briefly, does not look at the ear at all. He continues to walk staggeringly around the stage. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two nail-like objects, maybe an inch and a half long, maybe two inches? They have plastic knobs at one end, a bit like push pins. They are not thin like regular sewing needles, they are maybe like the kind of very heavy needle that you might use to mend something of heavy cloth. A sail, perhaps. He tosses them onto the table in front of Jo. They make a “plang” sound when they land. Nothing like the “plink” of tiny sewing needles. These are of much heavier-duty steel. We cannot take our eyes off of Dr. Fritz. He moves to Jo’s table, picks up the two heavy needles again, walks towards the technician, goes around behind him. The camera follows him, zooms in on the technician’s head.
The technician seems totally relaxed, looks as if he might be day-dreaming. He says nothing, just sits there quietly. Dr. Fritz picks up one needle, and with the camera watching, with the screen showing only the back of the technician’s head, behind his ear, and the hand of Dr. Fritz, holding the needle — and we see Dr. Fritz move the needle to a point about one inch behind the ear, at about the level of the earlobe, putting the needle point against the man’s skin. Then we see his thumb push all of the needle into the man’s head. We see the plastic top of the needle touching the short hairs behind the ear. The needle is all the way in. And the man did not move a muscle when the needle went in. Not because he was so brave, and steeled himself to bear the pain without flinching. Not like that at all. The man continues on in his dreamy state, totally relaxed.
Did we just see what we just saw? Was that possible? As if to help us, persuade our eyes to accept what has come into our house through the screen, Dr. Fritz takes the second needle. Now we watch every millimeter of his motion. And we see him do exactly the same thing. We see the other needle go all the way in, we see the two plastic tops side by side, behind the man’s ear. We see how relaxed and peaceful the man continues to be. Now Dr. Fritz is lurching around the stage again. I do not remember anymore whether it is he who speaks to the man, or maybe Jo? Anyway, the man can talk, someone asks how he is feeling. The man, sort of dreamily, not moving except to talk, incredibly makes a joke: “Um pouco furado.” A little bit punctured, he says.
Some people in the audience laugh nervously. Maybe we do too. We cannot doubt: we are seeing no pain in front of us. We see two needles all the way in in that man’s head, and see that they are not hurting him in the least.
Now Dr. Fritz walks over to the man and takes the needles out. He shows them to Jo, and us — there is no blood on them.
I don’t know exactly how, but Dr. Fritz goes over and sits down again in the chair where Dr. Edson was, and something happens, I don’t remember what it looked like, but we see: Dr. Fritz is gone. And Dr. Edson is back with us again.
Someone asks the technician how he feels, he says fine. And then to close, Dr. Edson gets a guitar, and sings a hymn-like song, with the simplest kind of music and lyrics. Maybe the words are something like “rocked in the arms of God.” Again and again. Nothing fancy, rehearsed. The opposite of all that. The most basic kind of song, sung in a sort of unsteady, untrained voice. In the voice of total faith, of truth. Of love.
Somehow the show ends, we talk about it among ourselves, we want to know: did the cure work? What happened to this man, who we don’t even know much about? We watch Jo Soares’s show on the subsequent nights, but there is no news.
Finally, after two weeks or so, there is an ear specialist being interviewed. He knows about the case. He saw the ear before the psychic surgery, as what we saw is called, and after. Before Dr. Fritz treated the technician, the man’s eardrum was punctured, now it is not. The ear specialist says that the technician told him that Dr. Fritz had come to his house in the early morning, after the show, at 5 A.M. Dr. Fritz brought medicines, and instructed the man about how to take them. The man followed the prescription and now he tells us that whereas before, he had suffered a 90% hearing loss in that ear, now his hearing is almost totally recovered.
***
We may have heard of psychic surgery before, heard of it being used in the Philipines, for example. What makes this Brasil is that we have seen psychic surgery performed live, on national television. We have learned that the surgery was successful, a fact which if we choose to accept it, will change profoundly our understanding as to what health is, and what the nature and limits of healing might be.
And we have actually prayed for this result, and in some deepest part of us we know: we were part of that cure. We may read debates about faith healing, psychic surgery, the efficacy of prayer again, now, but not with the same eyes, the same mind. We may not know what all the ingredients in the healing were, but some things we can say with absolute certainty: these were important —
the lack of pretension
humility
the depth of faith
the simplicity of that song of praise and thanks
the force, the unwavering intensity
the certainty
of Dr. Fritz’s acts and knowledge
and yes, our own caring for this
our fellow human being,
our wish for him to recover.
Our prayer.
Just these simplest, smallest, most human of qualities and acts.
***
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