Brazil is Primitive — B. Michael Rubin

Brazil was first encountered by seafaring Europeans in 1500, yet it feels older than the U.S. and a bit tattered like a leather wallet carried around for years. The colonial architecture speaks of a lost gentility. The city’s youth stumble home at dawn after a night of drunken revelry while their fathers and mothers arrive for the early shift. The fusing of day with night blends past and present like the voices in a choir.

Brazil is a worn wallet resting comfortably in new pants. People grow old in the city where they were born. Men work as waiters all their lives and strive to become better waiters; it's not a profession of unemployed actors. Sons take on the occupations of their fathers whether they are lawyers or shoemakers and inherit their father’s pride in his craft.

As in venerable Europe, no one ignores history. In the hot, lazy afternoons, young couples and old men dot benches around a cast-iron fountain in the central square. The art of brick laying and furniture making is debated to ensure the younger artisans remember who taught them how to hold a hammer. There is a respect for the elderly. Seniors have separate cashiers at the bank and the supermarket; they ride free on the bus. Finados is a national holiday, and everyone goes to the cemetery with flowers.

The Portuguese language also recognizes the beauty of nostalgia, and they've invented a word for it – saudade, which is a yearning for something so strong it's impossible to articulate the longing. The elegant sounds of Portuguese are wistful, a tumbling waterfall of lingual specters with words like alegrar, to make someone else happy.

Living without a sense of the past is to superimpose a deafness on daily life. We Americans wear it as menthol-fresh cynicism, which, like steel wool on a pan that cleans and scratches, can be both helpful and abrasive.

In Brazil, the bygone is still present. There are towns along the southern coast whose principal economic activity was once whaling. Whaling stations existed until the 1980s, the whale oil mixed with sand and ground-up seashells to make mortar for construction.

People rely on established answers to age-old questions. There are an equal number of Catholic holidays in the calendar as federal holidays. They believe in omens. People place a dish of salt behind their front door to guard against evil spirits, and they receive guidance in dreams. Brazilians embrace early deities, inheriting religious practices like Candomblé or Umbanda, which uses mediums and combines Catholicism with African traditions. Spiritism is a popular religion based on communication with the dead. (Spiritism originated in the 19th century with Frenchman Allan Kardec whose popular books inspired a fad for seances, gatherings common among the upper classes in Europe and the U.S. a hundred years ago.) Chico Xavier, a Brazilian national hero, gave daily exhibitions communicating with the dead and wrote dozens of books using automatic writing. Mick Jagger visited Brazil in 1968 with Marianne Faithfull and witnessed several Umbanda sessions. He said his visit inspired the rhythms for the song “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Mother nature earns her due respect here. Urbanites are as influenced by the weather as farmers. Rainy traffic jams are the norm in Curitiba, the large city where I live in southern Brazil, even though it gets more rain than Seattle. A tutorial I had scheduled was canceled when a rainstorm arrived. The wife of my student called him while he was driving to class and told him to come home because she was frightened.

This is how Brazilians greet each other:

“Good morning. How are you?”

“I’m fine. And you?”

“Fine, thank God.” Literally translated, this phrase is “Thanks to God” (Graças a Deus). Animated gratefulness is present as if to say, we’re lucky to be frolicking on the beach while He handles the tough stuff.

The oral tradition in Latin America provides the link between the primitive and the modern. Its vestiges are everywhere from clothesline gossip to human barkers, the common form of advertising. Cars meander the streets with loudspeakers on the roof offering advice on everything from restaurants to politicians. The spoken word is sacred. Vocal display keeps religion viable, and the churches are overflowing. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Brazil is closer to the divine.

In seasoned Europe, orality's fingerprints are also indelible. Roger Cohen describes it:

There’s still a continuous banter in the streets of Italy, as when I lived here 30 years ago. Italy has cherry-picked modernity, taking only so much. Something in it has resisted the reduction of human interaction to the transactional minimum. Something in it recognizes the human need for community and what a couple of sentences to a stranger can do. There are still innocent smiles in Italy, something you can only call humility. They don’t teach you that at marketing school. They don’t tell you how monotonous self-promotion can become, how tiresome, and finally inhuman. People return to Italy for its beauty, of course, but also for a refuge from relentlessness.

Like early civilizations, Brazil is a young country. The majority of the population is under 30 and behaves sometimes like self-conscious adolescents. They are fussy about personal hygiene. Unlike the lie I tell my dentist, Brazilians actually do brush their teeth after every meal, which is four or five times a day. This regimen requires keeping a toothbrush at work. On any given afternoon, McDonald's employees are brushing their teeth in the mall restroom. (I dare say in some North American latitudes brushing one's teeth in a public restroom is considered impolite and/or a sign of homelessness.) When I had a streak of bad luck in the dental department, my Brazilian wife told me, “It's because you only brush twice a day.”

Like the early Native Americans living in the Amazon who washed off the jungle dirt and humidity frequently in the nearby rivers, Brazilians are the cleanest folks in the world. They take twelve showers a week on average. (The U.S. averages six, Italy and France are at three.) They avoid bare feet even inside their own homes. The homeless guy in church doesn't smell. Portuguese has different words for dirty feet (chulé); unwashed armpits (sovaco cecê); and the stink of private parts (budum).

Brazil is connected by an umbilical cord to antiquity. Just sixty years ago, most people lived in homes with outhouses. To bring water into the house, they used a pump to carry it from their well into a tank on top of the roof. Nowadays, the city-supplied tap water isn't potable. Brazilian faces light up when they learn water is served free in U.S. restaurants. Small propane tanks were installed next to stoves for cooking. Not until the 1980s was propane being used for hot water. Before that, bathing was done under electric showers, and dirty dishes were washed in cold water. Even today, there are no natural gas pipelines under the streets although the country is a major oil producer.

When my wife was growing up in Brazil in the 1960s, her family didn't own a car, a telephone, or have garbage service, yet they were solidly middle class. They burned their garbage in the yard and had their first telephone installed in 1977 after being on a waiting list for two years. These days, when subjected to phone solicitations, my wife explains calmly to the telemarketer why she doesn’t need the product and says goodbye at the end of the call. She never hangs up on them. Some older people are confused by elevators with buttons because they used to have operators. No one realizes at the end of an escalator ride it's necessary to step off quickly to avoid collisions with those behind them.

Brazilians are not jaded. In the mall, it's pictures of their kids standing in front of cardboard cutouts of Hollywood action heroes. I admire their sense of wonder, not to mention their patriotism. Paul Goodman once wrote, “Patriotism is the culture of childhood and adolescence.” An adolescent straddles the past and the future, standing midway between childhood awe and adult rationality.

Half of the country functions without a bank account, credit card, or home internet access. Tens of millions are self-supporting, selling food or crafts by the side of the road. There was a parked car one day in front of my apartment. At the rear of the car stood a woman dishing out food from plastic containers in the trunk while her husband sat in the driver's seat collecting the money. A loudspeaker on the roof tape-looped their homemade goods. A policeman was standing at the driver's window. I assumed he was giving them a ticket for selling without a license, and in the finest oral tradition, the driver was talking his way out of it. I approached the car; the policeman was paying for his delicious snack.

Primitive peoples had significantly shorter lifespans than we do; it makes sense to enjoy life. Brazil is primitive in the finest sense. Brazilians inhabit the wide-open gaze of children before life gets in the way. There's not a sarcastic bone in their bodies, a country of bantering neophytes.

Like the U.S. of the 1950s, Brazilians are painfully polite. When entering the elevator in my apartment building, I must greet other residents even if I don’t recognize them. Inside the elevator, people face each other not the door, and it's rude not to say hello and goodbye while making eye contact. When entering a doctor’s waiting room, a general “Good morning” is launched to the strangers already there. When Americans walk, we're going somewhere. Even with a destination, Brazilian walking is a Sunday stroll.

They are masters of spontaneity and well-adjusted to low expectations. They know their elected officials aren't honest, and they're accustomed to a lack of infrastructure. Perhaps low expectations explains their sunny disposition. Basic services aren't the only absent comfort. Besides bathtubs, homes lack built-in closets. People use standing wardrobes and armoires, some passed down for generations.

The food is primitive, too. There are many reasons to visit Brazil, but food isn't one of them. It's bland (except for one region in the Northeast with a predominantly Black population descended from African slaves that favors chili peppers and red dendê oil). The food is so basic that potato sticks are considered a garnish and eating rice and beans every day for lunch is expected. They are reluctant to try new cuisines. Like Italians, they do not eat butter with bread. Until recently, mothers made their own mayonnaise.

The food might be simple, but it's healthy and homegrown. Ketchup and mustard are new additions at the supermarket. While tourists are eager to experience the primitive delights of Brazilian barbecue, the display is worthwhile only in its presentation and quantity, i.e., an all-you-can-eat meat festival with the fare delivered on sizzling spits held inches away from your face. The quality of the meat, however, is disappointing; the beef comes from oxen.

Some simple fare does get wildly creative like ever-popular hot dogs topped with corn or peas or potato sticks with mayonnaise. Also, there are half a dozen flavors of microwave popcorn including chocolate and bacon. My favorite experiment is chocolate pizza, which is served in all the pizza parlors as dessert. Brazilians are so wild about pizza there are no slices, it's a whole pie or nothing. If chocolate pizza isn't tantalizing, try the vast array of fresh fruits and vegetables. There are farmers markets every day, and even the supermarket chains boast a dozen varieties of bananas or zucchini squash the size of ukuleles. After living in Brazil for a decade, I still chuckle while food shopping thinking of the giant vegetables in the movie Sleeper. There is a refreshing humility to the culinary experience – people are grateful for the food.

The fauna and flora have an equally prehistoric display, at least how I imagine the world looked when dinosaurs roamed. Wildflowers grow everywhere, on walls, whether or not they are noticed. Grass flourishes under cobblestone streets. Lavender flowers and cotton grow on trees not bushes, and when they fall, they litter the sidewalk with fragrance and unwoven clothing.

When Curitiba built its airport, my wife’s parents would take her there on Sunday outings. They'd spend the afternoon having lunch and watching the planes. Today, most Brazilians have never been on a plane.

Brazilians enjoy slapstick humor. They are thrilled by silly jokes, lacking the patina of irony that's unavoidable in the U.S. Living in a large city in Brazil is like being in a small town in Kansas. There's a liveliness of spirit, the way children are closer to perfection – sincere, magical, embarrassingly candid. Disney World is the number one tourist destination for Brazilians.

This is a world of prelapsarian innocence, but naiveté shouldn't be mistaken for ignorance. Brazilians are aware of their backseat status. The U.S. remains their primary destination for travel abroad and college dreams. If they are fortunate enough to visit the U.S., they return with incredulous stories, the massive hope of the future that awaits them.

Years ago, my future wife was visiting me in New York. One day when I was taking a shower, I was frozen in mid-wash without hot water. When I exited the bathroom, I found her in the kitchen washing the morning dishes. Speaking to her like a child, I explained the hot water drought she was causing. She replied, “I understand. This always happens in Brazil, but I thought here it would be fixed.”