Over the years various traveling companions have enriched
what for me has been a never-ending process of discovery. Ralph
Nader, who shared the 1963 odyssey with me, contributed both
style and substance. His restless curiosity prodded me to venture
beyond passive fascination and facile explanation. We threw our-
selves with youthful abandon into a quest to make some sense of
Northeast Brazil at a moment when the whole region seemed in
ferment. The search took us to settings far removed from the pre-
cincts of the Harvard Law School, which we had escaped five years
earlier. We marveled at the hilltop mansion in Apipucos, on the
outskirts of Recife, where sociologist Gilberto Freyre had re-created
with loving care the ambience of Brazil's colonial past; at a British
Club where no one spoke English, and at a Lebanese Club where
no one spoke Arabic; and at a political rally we viewed from a plat-
form on the back of a flatbed truck, where we towered over a row
of local politicians in front of us, gazed out at an audience of ex-
pressionless peasants, and dodged the swarms of oversized tropical
insects that were drawn to the lights.

Next it was the turn of a Harvard College undergraduate
named Jeff Bingaman, a fellow student in a Portuguese language
class I audited during the academic year ( 1963-64) I spent at Har-
vard in pursuit of a Master of Laws degree. Jeff, now a U.S. Sena-
tor from New Mexico, helped me view things with a fresh sense of
wonderment. Exploring the city of Salvador, capital of both the
state of Bahia and of Afro-Brazil, we saw the incomparable Master
Pastinha, seventy-four years old, blind in one eye, barely five feet
tall, displaying his skills at capoeira, a style of foot-fighting that origi-
nated in Angola and has been converted into a form of dance; the
mysterious rites of candomblé, an African religion; and the launch-
ing of balões, or cloth-covered candles resembling miniature hot-
air balloons, which then floated wistfully over the bay of Salvador
at sunset during the feast days of Saints Peter and Paul.

On our last morning in the city, we could not resist visiting
the medical school for a look at its ghoulish treasure, the heads of
the legendary outlaw Lampeão, his mistress Maria Bonita, and
other members of his gang. When the authorities finally ambushed
and gunned down the bespectacled Lampeão and his associates in
1938, they decided to decapitate the corpses and display the sev-

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