Fio Dental - Chapter 7: Mariana

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Mariana is Ouro Prêto’s modest colonial neighbor. It most enduring quality is that it is not Ouro Prêto, nor will it ever be. A half hour bus ride for students whose studies revolve around the arts and sciences, its feel is a more agreeable marriage between old and new than the abrupt demarcation in São João del Rei. A few hundred steps above the booths and vending stands by the bus depot, continuous rows of colonial housing run up and down past ladies carrying home the morning’s groceries. Men on step ladders touch up window sills in high gloss white paint. I am the lone American visitor who occasionally pulls out his camera to take a snapshot and stands in the middle of a bumpy road. He is spellbound by the simplistic beauty that surrounds him. “Hey! Get out of the road! Cars are coming from both directions!” a traffic official hollers from the focal point of an intersection. The American is temporarily stunned from his trance, takes the scolding deservedly, darts out of the way, and wanders off past two churches whose cracked belfry towers are the source of climbing weeds.
Mariana doesn’t contain too much of any one thing. It is a recipe of all the right churches, corner stores, and open squares. Much of the center is under restoration but would not be considered special if construction were completed. People go about their business in a well-balanced setting. Sun tanned women don orange vests with the town hall’s black lettering across the back. They are municipal employees and methodically tear apart the central square footpaths to repair a water line. Loud babbling from behind a school wall smothers a teacher’s futile attempt to settle her class down. A group of pubescent boys hurriedly descends a nearby street to the soccer field, partially inflated ball in the hand of one. The proprietress of a nearby pousada approaches me about procuring a room for the night. It is an appealing notion and an inexpensive one compared to Ouro Prêto, but I am already committed.
“I could come back to Mariana, you know.”
“Make sure you stay with us!” She was not convinced of my sincerity; Yet her smile won me over. I would indeed not forget Mariana.

Just outside of Mariana, the barren and cave-like Mina de Passagem harks back to an age where the Portuguese moral compass went atrociously awry. A gold mine turned worthwhile museum, its ore was sent directly to build Portugal’s great royal palaces on the backs of slave labor in the most horrid of conditions. From its inception until its profitability was exhausted, 40,000 slaves had their freedom and many times their lives squeezed out of them for the pleasure of the Portuguese upper classes. Whizzing down a rail car of iron bars and worn timber boards, (this would not pass any OSHA regulations!) one hundred thirty meters below the surface, Alan and I came to a screeching halt five hundred meters from the surface. We disembarked with the satisfaction of content customers of an amusement park attraction. A youthful forty-one from Åarhus, Denmark, Alan grasped little Portuguese beyond ordering another round of beer for his table. Our shabbily dressed guide explained how slaves extracted the streaks of gold embedded in the ferrous rock with only hammer and chisel. They had to fight their way through layers of pyrite, oxidized copper, and quartz. There was no mechanization, including the modern lighting system that illuminated all the arches and subterranean passageways during our visit. The ore was dragged and then packed on mules. The natives of what is now Angola were not allowed to speak to each other and were mixed by tribe so as to reduce any chance of uprising or rebellion. The little Portuguese they acquired was made use of to complete their mundane and backbreaking tasks. All in all, thirty-six metric tons of gold made its way to Lisbon at the expense of thousands of lives lost. No records exists as to the exact number. An altar stands to pay tribute to Santa Bárbara, patron saint of miners. We were told visitors from Bahia state mostly leave offerings at the altar. It is into this Northeast state where most slaves were imported. At times, half the cargo did not survive the Atlantic passage.
Brazil is nothing new to Alan, as this was the seventy-second country in which he has set foot. His goal is to reach one hundred in the next few years. A successful furniture business back home finances his globetrotting. I immediately envied him. “You should go to the Pantanal! Alan pulled out his digital camera and proudly turned the screen into my face. “See? In the distance?” There it was, although hard to discern. But there was little doubt. He had come within yards of a wild jaguar. The conversation then turned to politics, the best beaches in Malaysia, and where we would meet for drinks later. We decided upon Barroco in Ouro Prêto.
All the while, the muscular Dane and I engorged ourselves on pizza in a village not far downhill from the mine. The creaking highway overpass framed the scene from outside the café’s cracked window: A powerless stream gurgled by around heaps of littler. A cluster of houses was visible beyond a tired bridge. A boy rode by on horseback. Few pedestrians passed by. Practically all the shops were shut at midday. Bricks lay in piles where they have not been moved for who knows how long. Time inched forward very slowly here. We knew that we, however momentarily, had left Ouro Prêto and entered the other Brazil representative of the daily lives of the masses.

Bus travel reveals many aspects of life in Brazil. Drivers store behind their seats a large, but soft-headed hammer and circulate around the exterior of the coach at rest stops. They constantly whack the tires with a hammer. What do they seek, a leak? A faulty suspension? It stands to reason anyway. The roadways are just like the German Autobahn except for the perfect surface, signposting and lack of craters into which a family of four could plummet, never to be heard or seen from again. It is better to prevent a breakdown in an area where services are available instead of 25 miles east of downtown Santa Maria de Where-are-we. Many stations have self-service buffets; hot food is easy to find. Several transport companies compete on the same routes. For the route between Rio and São Paulo, it is recommended to go from agent to agent in order to find the most convenient departure time and type of service. The coaches are superior to American buses. Greyhound should be ashamed. But Greyhound does not operate where most of the marketplace does not own its own vehicle, either. Long-distance travel involved three classes of travel: convencional, executivo, and leito. Convencional is a snap to understand. Think Peter Pan without toilet paper in the back toilet, but with curtains to prevent third degree sunburn on the side of your face in the summer. Executivo affords greater leg room and deeper angle of inclination on your seat, suitable for distances greater than four to five hours and let passengers almost stretch out for the long haul. Leito is the equivalent to sleeper service. I have not traveled leito yet, but am eager to give it a try.

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Photos

Into the ground
Gold mine...

Mine shafts
Gold cleared by manual slave labor. The gold decorates palaces in and near Lisbon.

Mariana
Educational spillover from Ouro Preto...

In Charge
Few cars go by, though...