264
PARTISAN REVIEW
Latin word is often right, but the Spanish word, despite near-twinship,
is invariably wrong-apparently the only unforgivable solecism.
Besides Portuguese, Spanish, and excellent English, my hosts, like
other cultivated South Americans, speak literary French-the language
of their education-as well as Arabic, Hebrew, and a language I had
barely heard of: Ladino, the Latinate equivalent of Yiddish. I knew
about the marvelous food and the music, but did not expect a language
festal
The country's immensity and diversity are impossible to compre–
hend-even, I'm sure, for Brazilians. Twice the size of India, it covers half
of South America; Europe could get lost in it. It has jungle, mountains,
beaches, deserts, grasslands...and inestimable mineral wealth. The Pan–
tanal, a sparsely populated wetlands out west, is bigger than Utah. Ama–
zonia supports a third of the world's known plant and animal species and
an unknown number of "undiscovered" tribes. Bahia in the northeast is
Afro-Brazilian; the industrial south is European. North Americans are
confounded by the multitude of blond, blue-eyed Brazilians.
Sao Paulo is an international town. Or towns: the Lebanese and Ital–
ian communities each number more than a million; there are hundreds
of thousands of Germans and Eastern Europeans; the Japanese district,
Liberdade, is the largest Japanese community outside of Japan. But I
expected a U.S.A.-style melting pot, and this I did not see . Even the ser–
vants were fair. With the exception of a gorgeous
mulata
in Bahian cos–
tume serving pastries at the wedding, the few black people I saw
appeared to be tourists like myself.
Finally I asked, "Where are the black people?"
"Black people?" My query was met with puzzlement.
"You know, black people," I insisted. "I've read that over a third of
Brazil's population is of African descent."
The answers were vague. "They're in their own neighborhoods."
"They're in other parts of the country." The attitude was not hostile,
just unaware. I heard nothing that with the most politically correct of
intentions I could interpret as racist or in any other way anti-humanist.
Poor people and black people are just. ..somewhere else.
Brazil is enjoying an economic miracle. In remission from years of
hyper-inflation, military dictatorship, and punishing debt, its industrial
base is booming and its technology sector is on par with our own. But
nobody pretends the miracle is inclusive. And rising expectations invari–
ably breed discontent. Even the grimmest
favelas
(slums) have cable TV,
the Internet, cell phones.
