1 The Encounter
In 1926, âElegant News,â a regular social column in Rio de Janeiroâs Revista da Semana, first recorded the presence in that city of a young anthropologist from the northeastern state of Pernambuco: Doctor Gilberto Freyre, as the columnist called him, making a special point of his title. The soon-to-be-famous Freyre was visiting the capital of Brazil for the first time at the age of twenty-six, after completing his university studies in the United States and after touring several European countries. In various autobiographical passages of his book Tempo morto e outros tempos, Freyre mentions this odd fact almost proudly. He first set foot in the principal city of his own country only upon returning from his travels in the âFirst World,â making plain that his intellectual training had depended not at all on Rio de Janeiro or, in general, on the Brazilian south, economically and politically the central region of the country.
In another passage of the same book, Freyre records a singular event that occurred during his stay in Rio. âSergio and Prudente,â he wrote enthusiastically, âreally do know modern English and French literature. Theyâre tops. I went out for some bohemian fun with them the other night. With Villa-Lobos and Gallet, too. We went for an evening of guitar music and a drop of cachaça [cane liquor] with three true BraziliansâPixinguinha, PatrĂcio, and Donga.â The style is a bit telegraphic, so, in order to show the historical importance of this little remembered âevening of guitar music,â we must clarify the identities of those who participated. âSĂ©rgioâ was the historian SĂ©rgio Buarque de Holanda. âPrudenteâ was the Rio district attorney Pedro Dantas Prudente de Moraes Neto, well-known as a journalist by the pen name âPedro Dantas.â âVilla-Lobos,â of course, was the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and âGallet,â Luciano Gallet, was also a classical composer and pianist. PatrĂcio, Donga, and Pixinguinha were samba players, the latter two, especially, immortalized by their nicknames in the pantheon of Brazilian popular music.1
This encounter thus brought together members of two very distinct social groups: on one hand, intellectuals and practitioners of the âfineâ arts, all sons of âgood white families,â including Prudente de Moraes Neto, the grandson of a Brazilian president, and, on the other hand, musicians of black and mixed race, belonging to the poorest class of Rio society. Here were young Gilberto Freyre and Sergio Buarque de Holanda, just beginning the research that resulted, a few years later, in their influential books Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933) and RaĂzes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil, 1936), books fundamental to the definition of modern Brazilian identity.2 And face-to-face with the anthropologist and historian stood Donga, Pixinguinha, and PatrĂcio, whose music would come to stand for what was most Brazilian in Brazil during those same years. The written testimony of the elite participants seems to indicate that they took such a gathering for granted and that both sides felt quite at ease, as well they might in a Brazil supposedly characterized (in Freyreâs influential book) by racial mixing and (in Buarque de Holandaâs interpretation) by cordial social relations. The only shortcoming, lamented one participant as the eveningâs activities drew to a close, was âthe absence of a few cabrochinhas [âwenchesâ of mixed African and European descent] to make the entertainment complete.â3
That ânight of guitar musicâ could serve as an allegory, in the carnivalesque meaning of that word, of the âinvention of a traditionâ: the traditional use of samba to represent and define Brazilâs cultural and racial âhybridity.â Too much should not be made, perhaps, of the naturalness of the episode. Its seeming triviality is obviously constructed. It has the feel of foundational myth. Still, the fact that the gathering was not transformed into myth, nor remembered as something extraordinary by the participants or their biographers, shows that they regarded the event as an everyday occurrence, unworthy of more careful record. This aspect, in fact, is what first attracted me to the event and suggested its significance. If we look behind the scenes, we can observe that many other social circumstances and actors (groups as well as individuals) collaborated to produce the sense of harmony and naturalness surrounding the event in the recollection of the participants.
Let us begin with a rapid panorama of the city where the episode took place: a burgeoning Rio de Janeiro with more than a million inhabitants. In 1926, the presidency of Artur Bernardesâundergirded practically throughout by a decree of martial lawâwas coming to a close. Bernardes hailed from the powerful state of Minas Gerais and, according to the oligarchical arrangement that governed Brazil during the period 1889-1930, the presidency was due to pass to a representative of the other most powerful state, SĂŁo Paulo. But signs of the end of the coffee-planting oligarchyâs long rule were plainly visible. Uprisings of dissenting junior army officersââthe Lieutenantsââhad shaken the cities of Rio and SĂŁo Paulo, and a similar group even then roamed through the Brazilian backlands, presaging the revolution of 1930. During the presidency of Bernardes, the city of Rio was suffering the uncomfortable sequels of the urban reforms that had been initiated by Mayor Pereira Passos during the first decade of the twentieth century and that had continued through the second, culminating in the massive leveling of a large hill close to the city center, just in time for the erection there of pavilions for an exposition commemorating the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922. In addition, it was in the decades of the urban reforms that the current north-south division in the sociocultural contours of Rio de Janeiro took definitive shape.
Until the Pereira Passos reforms, downtown Rio de Janeiro had been a heterogeneous jumble of commercial establishments, small manufacturing operations, and government offices, along with residences running the social gamut from the poorest tenements (called cortiços, âhoneycombsâ) to the palatial homes of millionaires. The opening of a wide Avenida Central through the densely packed buildings of the old city marked the destruction of the the cortiços and the shift toward a downtown dedicated exclusively to business. The Cariocas, inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, moved out of the center of town in two directions. The impoverished denizens of the vanishing cortiçes took shelter in the new hillside shantytowns called favelas scattered throughout the city on ground too steep for other constructions or else moved out along railroad lines to the North Zone. Meanwhile, the more prosperous former inhabitants of the old downtown settled increasingly in the beachfront neighborhoods of Copacabana and Ipanema in the South Zone, now connected to the city center by a recently excavated tunnel.
The Avenida Central became the cityâs showcase, the location of such modern attractions as the principal movie houses, and of the cafĂ©s so important to Rioâs social and intellectual life. Rio was âbecoming civilized,â said the newspapers, eliding the notions of civilization and modernity. And Rio was declaring itself modern just in time to offer a beachhead for the invasion of artistic modernism. When Gilberto Freyre arrived in Rio in 1926, four years after the first âuprisingâ of Brazilian modernists in SĂŁo Pauloâs epoch-making Modern Art Week, a local cinema proudly announced the Brazilian debut of yet another Paramount production, titled in Portuguese âThe Jazz Epidemicâ: âDonât be afraid. It is futurism. You may find it unhinged. But we guarantee youâll like it and discover it has a very special flavor all its own.â The newspaper ad went on to say proudly that the movie would be preceded by a live presentation featuring the actress Iracema de Alencar, star of the Casino Theater, exploring âthe absurd, the illogical, and the irreverent.â4 Carioca popular culture had not tarried long in carnivalizing the absurdist teachings of SĂŁo Pauloâs artistic vanguard.
Observing these transformations, the non-Carioca Gilberto Freyre waxed oddly nostalgic for a Rio that he never knew and directed biting criticisms at the new buildings and boulevards and at the leveling of the hills. âIn the presence of horrors like the Elixir building, one gets the impression of jokes played by the architects on the nouveaux riches that ordered up these novelties,â Freyre wrote in his diary, and went on: âThe new Chamber of Deputies is downright ridiculous. That Roman-style statue of Deodoro would make a cat smile.â5 Freyre inveighed against broad boulevards like the new Avenida Central and found virtue in narrow streets like the Rua do Ouvidor, formerly Rioâs most prestigious, because these were shady and therefore more appropriate to the tropical heat. He even approved of the ramshackle neighborhood on Favela hill (which subsequently gave its name to hillside slums throughout Brazil) as a piece of old Rio.6
But let us get back to the matter of Freyreâs âbohemian funâ in the irremediably new Rio of the 1920s and, more particularly, the matter of the nocturnal diversions involving both elite males and âtrue Braziliansâ like the samba players Donga, Pixinguinha, and PatrĂcio. To bring together people representing such different aspects of Rio de Janeiro, the young Brazilian intellectuals had called upon an extensive network of personal relationships.
SĂ©rgio Buarque de Holanda and Prudente de Moraes Neto, who had so impressed Freyre with their knowledge of modern English and French literature, were editors of the literary magazine EstĂ©tica. Buarque de Holanda was from SĂŁo Paulo, epicenter of Brazilian artistic modernism, and he had introduced Prudente de Moraes Neto, a Carioca, to modern art well before Modern Art Week in 1922. The two had met at law school in Rio. Moraes Neto must have been receptive to the attractions of modern art. Another former classmate, who had known Prudente at Pedro II Secondary School (where sons of the Brazilian elite had congregated for generations), said this presidentâs grandson had a âtaste for the strange.â7 A shared taste for European literary modernism, at any rate, brought together the two young editors of EstĂ©tica and the equally young and as yet unknownâbut already extremely presumptuousâanthropologist from Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre.
Moraes Neto and Buarque de Holanda differ on how they first got wind of Freyre. Moraes Neto recalled a letter from LuĂs da CĂąmara Cascudo (later distinguished as a folklorist) containing a clipping of an article written by Freyre about James Joyce for a Pernambucan newspaper.8 Buarque de Holanda remembered receiving the clipping in a letter from the future regionalist novelist of the northeast JosĂ© Lins do Rego some time after announcing that EstĂ©tica would publish criticism of James Joyce: âThe name of the [clippingâs] author was as unknown to me, to any of us, as the name of the letter writer. I donât have the article anymore, but I clearly remember a crack about critics who, âin the shade of Carioca banana treesâ have the audacity to announce an up-coming article on so difficult a writer as Joyce.â9 Freyreâs exact words appeared in the DiÂŽrio de Pernambuco on 11 November 1926: âEven under the banana trees of Rio people are saying the easily pronounced English name Joyce. The English of his works will be more difficult to decipher.â10 Freyreâs ironic words ended up seducing these modernists-under-banana-trees. Buarque de Holanda says that he liked the article so much that he decided to republish it in EstĂ©tica and shelve the criticism that he had been planning to write himself. As things turned out, though, the magazine folded first.
Thus beganâunder the sign of James Joyceâthis Brazilian interregional modernist alliance. The Cariocas were surprised to see such an up-to-date study appear in the âprovincialâ press of the northeast, and they immediately struck up a correspondence with its author. Their friendship was not the result of a mutual interest in Brazilian popular culture and much less in the regionalist vein of that popular culture, but that interest soon became a factor. Among the curiosities that brought the northeasterner to Rio de Janeiro in 1926 was âa desire for direct contact with the composers and performers of Carioca popular music, especially the black ones.â11 At the time, black samba players from Rio de Janeiro were touring the country with great success. Freyre was away in New York when the Carioca group Oito Batutas performed in Pernambuco in 1921, but he surely heard the signal influence that performance had on the musicians of his home state.
For starters, Sergio Buarque de Holanda and Prudente de Moraes Neto took Freyre to the show called âTudo Pretoâ (âAll Blackâ), presented by the Black Revue Company, Brazilâs first theater group with exclusively black performers and staffâincluding the maestro Pixinguinha, and the director, whose artistic name was De Chocolat. Only the impresario was white. âAll Blackâ caused a furor in Rio during that yearâs theatrical season. One newspaper called the show âthe biggest theatrical news of the moment,â a show producing âmagnificent spiritual pleasureâ in the audience.12 Another paper used the adjective estrondosoââsmashingââand remarked on the throng that attended its opening night. None of the journalists or critics was shocked by the exclusive presence of black people on stage, as if that were not really extraordinary, and all applauded the initiative. But the publicity of the Revue could not contain its pride in âa victory for the black race in light theater.â It was a victory, too, for the performer called âMiss Monsâ (a âFrench eccentric,â announced Correio da manhĂŁ, tongue in cheek), who executed âan authentic African batuque,â the drumming and dancing of Brazilian slaves.
Gilberto Freyre esteemed the batuque of Miss Mons, but the music of Pixinguinha excited him most, and he wanted to meet the famous sambista, as samba players and dancers are known, in a more casual setting, without the black tie and tuxedo that Pixinguinha wore on stage in âAll Black.â Freyreâs friends drew on a tangle of personal connections to fulfill his wish. Fortunately, Prudente knew a member of Pixinguinhaâs band, Donga. Prudente and Donga had been introduced by Blaise Cendrars (an interesting foreign intervention in the elite âdiscoveryâ of Carioca popular culture), during that French vanguardist poetâs 1924 stay in Rio. Two years later, in an effort to organize an informal musical gathering for his Pernambucan friend, Prudente got back in touch with Donga. The black sambista was playing backup for a band called Carlito Jazz, part of a âgay and naughtyâ French revue company then offering spectacles entitled âCâest Paris,â âAu revoir,â and âRevue de la revue.â The gathering was to take place in a cafĂ© on Catete Street, across from the law school in a heterogeneous neighborhood just outside the city center. That night, the cafĂ© closed its doors for the privacy of its special guests. In addition to Donga, Pixinguinha, and PatrĂcio, two other outstanding sambistas were in attendance: SebastiĂŁo Cirino, whose song âChrist Was Born in Bahiaâ was the great hit of the day,13 and, apparently, Nelson Alves, another of the Oito Batutas.
Perhaps by oversight, Prudenteâs account of the evening does not mention the presence of Heitor Villa-Lobos, about which Freyreâs diary is very clear. On the other hand, it could be Freyreâs lapse, expressing his desire to identify the musical nationalism of Villa-Lobos with Rioâs Afro-Brazilian bohemia. Villa-Lobos was, in fact, a carousing night owl well liked among the cityâs sambistas. Freyreâs association of Villa-Lobos with the Carioca mystique is exemplified in another reminiscence written years later:
My friend Assis Chateaubriand initiated me into various Carioca-style Brazilianisms, and EstĂĄcio Coimbra, into others. Finally, with Prudente de Moraes Neto, SĂ©rgio Buarque de Holanda, and Jaime Ovalle I became initiated into another sort of Brazilianism, the Afro-Carioca and nocturnal Rio, so to speak. The Rio of Pixinguinha and PatrĂcio. The still almost colonial Rio of guitars, serenades, and colored wenches [mulatas] whose Brazilian authenticity lent them a grace, shared by the white âmissiesâ [iaiĂĄs] of Botafogo or the ladies [sinhĂĄs] of Santa Teresa [two traditionally fashionable Rio neighborhoods], a grace I never saw in the mulatas or the iaiĂĄs of the North. It was the Carioca grace. It was the Rio of Villa-Lobos.14
The northeastern regionalist Gilberto Freyre was being seduced by Carioca popular culture. And Freyre was not the only one: from the 1930s on, all Brazil began (or was obliged) to recognize in the samba of Rio de Janeiro an emblem of its national identity.
Another reference to the 1926 gathering in the Catete Street cafĂ© appears in an article published by Freyre in a Pernambucan newspaper later that year, an article suggestively entitled âOn the Valorization of Things Black.â Freyreâs tone differs from that of the newspaperâs ordinary journalistic articles. The polemical north-easterner missed no opportunity to advance his ideasâlater systematically developed in books like The Masters and the Slavesâon the importance of Brazilâs African heritage. His style is almost always militant, ready to raise hackles among his readers if need be. Here are his words:
Yesterday, along with some friendsâPrudente and SergioâI spent an evening-that-almost-reached-morning listening to Pixinguinha, a mulato, playing some of his carnival music accompanied by Donga, another mulato, on the guitar and by a (really black...