UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Carpenters, Coffee and Capital
By J. STANSBY (Jesus College, Cambridge)
SOMEONE was hanging the jeep bonnet at the front of the house, and the two dogs wOke up and raced round barking. I climbed down awkwardly from the top of the water-tank tower, stopped the little engine working the pump, and, clambering over the tree-trunks and planks that littered the ground, made my way round to the verandah. It was Sebastian. Sebastian was the fazenda's carpenter, and he was looking sad; he had had all his teeth extracted a few days previously, and brooded quietly on the amount of blood he had lost and the injustice that made him work when he felt so bad.
"Much blood, senhor," was his current conversation, but not this morning. He wanted more nails and more wood. He was always wanting more wood, and as I looked around at the untidy landscape that a coffee-plantation presents in its early years—the aftermath of the clearing and burning of the matto, the tangle of tree-stumps and charred trunks, the two-year-old coffee plants hardly visible, growing secretly in their little square holes, pushing up through the slats of wood that covered them from the sun, pushing up amid such a tangle of wood—it seemed to me that things were badly organised.
"Or else," and Sebastian would shrug his shoulders, spit deftly over his left boot and look sadder still, t` no more work is possible, senor." If worked stopped it was serious, for Sebastian was building houses for the new labourers who were being signed on contract, impretarios, for the area of matto that had just been cleared northwards. The new coffee had to be planted soon before the weather became too hot, so Sebastian's wishes had to be met with more than a vague promise.
My house, the administrador's house, was quite a nice example of Sebastian's. skill—a bedroom with built-in cupboards, a bathroom with hot water that twisted from the intestines of pipes in the oven next door, with shutters on all . the windows which were a struggle to open, and real glass in the frames though the putty had never dried, a ceiling of wood that caught the few tiles an early-morning wind might dislodge from the gables, and magnificent brick fireplace. If none of the doors really shut and catches were inaccessible, there was always the fireplace to be proud of. Solid and imposing, it gave the house, our very bare and furnitureless house, a baronial touch, when the smoke cleared. Nails appeared everywhere; one could go to bed and try to count them like stars in the ceiling, and discarded planks, with only a few nicks in them or a bent nail, lay outside in piles, bending in the rain. Sometimes one paused respectfully an instant and wondered that one man had done so much.
Sebastian was still explaining, and I was visualising, a quarter of a mile away on the other side of a patch of uncleared matto and four-foot sugar-cane, life jerking to a standstill. The steady echo of hammer-blow.vould fade; the sawn-off tree-stumps buried as bases be left unlevel; a gaunt gable would miss its companions—lonely in the air. Sebastian and his mate ' Roderigo in his tatty straw hat would suck cob-leaf cigarettes, idly counting for the umpteenth time the number of tiles the last truck-driver had brought. (He had a shifty face, drove badly, cursed unimaginatively and carried a stupid little revolver which made everybody very frightened but very careful.) Around them lay a jungle of half-used planks, and the jeep's wheels churning through the mud threw up nails like a- potato- harvester.
Wood from the saw-mills was expensive; so was transport. Bricks and tiles were threepence each; everything in fact was dear. For this was Brazil, a coffee-plantation in the north of Parana State. North Parana was the new area for coffee- growing, where shambling wooden towns, with their stores and their bordellos, their Japanese vegetable-shops and radio- blaring saloons, sprout up over-month along the .untarmaced road westwards, where the cabocla will save to buy a Cadillac and run. away to the coast, to the skyscrapers of Sao Paulo or the warm beaches of Rio de Janiero. This was North Parana, the- new coffee-kingdom where only money talks and the talk is not gossip, a part of the world where the movement and spirit - must be much like those of the move West in the States in the '90s; only the call has no dangers for body and limb. The smart new world's only challenge is hard work and monetary risk.
And every month more ma/to is cleared, the smoke of the burning kilometres blotting out the sun, and another mans capital begins its long wait for returns. The square holes, covas, nursing their baby green plants, focus another four years of work and hope—hope for a rich crop and good prices. The iMpretarios and the families—the little community of naked children, dogs, pigs, chickens and grinning women—live in the houses a Sebastian built, each man responsible for a rossa of coffee-trees. They grow beans and corn-cob between the lines of covas, amongst the charred tree-trunks and stumps. They work at clearing roads to the colony and paths for collecting the crop; work building the terraros, the square brick platforms where the coffee dries; work for the administrador on his own, probably seventy kilometres from the nearcst town, counting and checking 200,000 or 300,000 coffee-trees. The jeep trips to town in the swirling red Parana dust or struggles through streams and mud.
If an owner is lucky, he may find en his land clay suitable for making bricks. It needs little capital or skill to turn out a thousand bricks a day to sell at a conta a thousand, to be bought where they stand. One must have a wooden mixing mill and trough, a donkey or two to work the mill, an oven, a shelter where the bricks can dry and a fiscal or supervisor to whom one pays a fixed sum to produce so many bricks a day— and the methods are his own. If an owner is unlucky, the covas on the slopes may be washed out by rain unless they are well banked, and in the winter a bad frost may kill the trees on low ground; but frosts are rare. The wells in the colony may get blocked or dry up, and family quarrels, drunkenness, fights and cut well-ropes demand tact and patience. But one can also be ambitious and try new seeds or nursery plants, damming the stream on one's land and making a water-wheel grind maize or work a well-pump, shake out corn-cobs or generate electricity. Sugar-cane grows quickly and easily, and a simple mill to squeeze out the syrup, gives you a coarse brown sugar when the syrup is cooked. Many plants grow well, and fruit and vegetables and rice and beans are steady small crops.
But these are the luxuries of a fazenda with six-year-old coffee-trees. When the fazenda is young, it is the carpenter like our Sebastian and the fiscal like our Sefior Francisco who really matter; it is the jeep and one's truck that are important, the promises of the saw-mill and the credit of the bank-managers.
The unasked for, unheeded and ceaseless music of the radio tannoy, singing from its mast to the red dtisty clouds that settle over Maringa eighty kilometres away, is part of the scene. Maringa has its saloon idlers and crowded banks, its hum of projects and schemes, of prospects and ideas, of capital and cash, money and money's senseless waste on whisky at one pound a nip, on flashy jewellery and Omega five-hand, guatan- teed wrist-watches, on Packard saloons with telescopic radio aerials. This, the sprawling, red-dusted, wooden-house mess of a town, all this—and the green leaves rising shiny from their covas to the-height of a man and a twilight of wood-ash blown by the wind as the neighbour is" burning "—is coffee and North Parana..
At the bottom of the track to my house I can see.a six-tonner with wood from the saw-mill jammed in the junction of track that cuts through the patch of ma/to to the new colony. The hammering beyond drifts up fitfully in echoes. The bases are being levelled, and the gables of another house being fixed. Roderigo is checking the number of tiles.
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