The Road to Lagoa Santa

By Henrik Stangerup

Senhor Lund, the Brazilians call him, and Wilhelm dreams of the day when he can put ´Doctor´ in front of it. Here in Rio de Janeiro that is the grandest one can be, after count or general or admiral. But will he ever achieve it? Every single day terror strikes him - the terror that he too may be afflicted by the disease. By comparison, yellow fever is a blessing because it brings instant death. Consumption is an honorable illness although it too ends in death. Leprosy is a misfortune, but a misfortune God has willed. All sorts of stomach infections, muscular atrophy, articular rheumatism, and gangrene are to be preferred because the Devil keeps a respectful distance. But the disease is his work, if anything is. It means eternal damnation and a madness that ends by twisting the convolutions of the brain the wrong way. It transforms the face of a man, the noblest of all forms, created in God´s image, to a spongy, pustular mask of evil with wildly bristling hair and bleeding eyes bulging from their sockets. Some days Wilhelm hardly dares leave the house of the merchant to whom his letter of credit is addressed and with whom he is lodging. These are the days following the nights when, sweating all over, he has tossed about on the damp sheet, haunted by nightmares because suddenly he feels that no one in Rio de Janeiro can escape the disease. They all have sores on their lips or at the base of their finger nails. Or rashes covering their faces and their arms and the backs of their hands. The rich, with straddled legs and golden slippers bobbing on their toes, have themselves carried about in sedan chairs by muscular negro slaves. With enormous diamond rings on all ten fat fingers, they sport the evil mask of old age, although they could be hardly a day over thirty. And even so they pretend that there is nothing wrong. They may even be proud of their sores and rashes and scratch themselves without restraint while they kiss and hug one another, lascivious like no other nation, without considering that they thus spread the infection. Children also have the disease, especially mulatto boys fourteen years old and more. Grinning and screeching, they run about the dusty streets of Rio de Janeiro, in and out among the sedans and the handcarts loaded with coffee sacks, showing off their sores as if they were jewels - the mark that they have become men. The blackest of the negroes do not seem to have the disease, but Wilhelm knows that this is only because their skin better conceals sores and scars, and he knows that the disease comes from them above all. Had Brazil been colonized by the sanitary North Europeans, or even by the French, and not by these depraved and unwashed Portuguese, the disease would not be nearly so widespread. Nonetheless, Wilhelm is fond of the negroes, of their humor, their gaiety, their songs, their infinite patience. He cannot bear to see them whipped in public for the pleasure of some raging obese fazenda owner, or kicked like dogs by a hysterical female. They belong to a wild offshoot of humanity, ignorant of the Fall of Man, from a remote past which makes them resistant where the civilized European succumbs - the negroes are the unknowing bearers of disease.

Wilhelm keeps his distance from the negroes. Especially in the evening when, in the cool breeze from the South Atlantic, they crowd together in plazas and squares of Baroque churches where they move in a trance around lighted candles amidst bottles of sugar-cane liquor, birds´ wings, beads, coffee beans, and small heaps of sugar; offerings to the gods from the Africa they can never forget, where, it is rumored, primeval monsters still survive in the last steaming fern forests. When the spirit roars out of the mouths of the blacks when they dance more and more wildly, the men with bare chests, the women in their white dresses with crocheted veils over their shoulders and waving glowing cigars in the air to invoke the good will of the powers, then Wilhelm is seized with wonder as, from a safe distance, his back pressed against a pink or pastel blue church wall, he wipes the perspiration from his palms or his neck with one of the perfume-sprinkled cloths he always carries. Nothing here is as it is in Europe.

Translated by Barbara Bluestone