Father Aderbal Murta tells that the dean of
the Louvain University, in Belgium, wasn’t
at all pleased when the brazilian seminarists
that were arriving there started asking for
a bathroom, no matter how small, among the
immense group of buildings, something that
they considered to be of the maximum importance.
That’s right, a place where they could
wash from head to toe, a shower from high,
use soap, rinse their bodies and then dry
off with a fluffy towel. They insisted that
they didn’t want to do it in a basin,
splashing water all over and not getting the
job done as my friend Nó Barrão.
A real bath, at least a humble little shower.
With warm water, not scalding and not freezing,
either, because no one is made of stone. This
demand, said the administrators, was a trait
of third world students, this had to have
come from Brazilians, crazy kids. Baths, in
Belgium, until the present age, were crudely
effectuated with a sponge or cloth, and nothing
else. Just scrubbing, no running water, no
wetting the floor.
Great!
Now, I read in the Brazilian Rotary magazine
an interesting commentary of Derli Antônio
Bernardi, de Maringá, telling about
the time when taking a bath was a sin, and
one could even go to jail because of it. How
curious! They had somehow lost the Arabian
knowledge, where it was known that “water
is the most efficient of all medicines and
the best of all cosmetics.” They had
lost the Egyptian experience of when you used
to take a bath in a golden basin and of Greece
when the palace of King Minos possessed the
most spectacular bathtub in ancient history,
decorated with marble and precious stones.
They had forgotten the Roman tradition of
taking baths, when the bathrooms were so important
to the influential Romans that there were
twenty five different ways of taking a simple
bath - with oils, vapors, herbs, essences,
etc, - And there were, at their sides, art
galleries, theaters and temples dedicated
to the Gods.
The
barbarians, when they invaded Europe, poor
creatures, blamed the collective baths as
the origin of the decadence and fall of Rome.
They took advantage of war and destroyed all
of the baths, public and private as well,
sweeping for a period of one thousand years
this pleasant and hygienic custom, practically
erasing from the vocabulary the word bath.
Time goes on, never stopping, and in the middle
age Europe, the books of etiquette recommended
the washing of hands only before meals, which
really isn’t suprising, because at that
time, spoons and forks had not been invented
yet, the food, as in some countries today,
was passed from hand to mouth.
Something
strange, to be sure, The queen Elizabeth of
Castella, made no secret of how many baths
she had taked during her entire life: only
two, one, when she was born, and the other,
when she was married, to be sweet-smelling
for the royal consort on the first day of
their honeymoon. As strange as it seems, religion
also greatly contributed to the decline of
little popular habit of bath-taking. Pope
Gregory prohibited bath-taking on Saturdays,
principally if the object of the bath was
simple hygiene. A law was even passed prohibiting
baths on any other day except Tuesday. To
take a bath was considered to be sinful, luxuriously
evil materially absolutely mundane, exaggerated
zeal wasted on the body.
It
was around the year 1800 that in England appeared
a Turkish bathhouse with frequency permitted
only men and courtesans . It was hermetically
closed to women of family because it was not
dignified for serious ladies of the fair sex.
In France, at the time of Napolean, there
was more liberty for bath taking. It even
constituted a new profession, the bath givers,
that would go door to door, carrying basins
and everything else necessary to wash away
the aristocratic sweat and grime. In colonial
America, the puritans considered baths and
bathsoap to be impure things. Getting to the
point in Filedelphia who takes more than one
bath a month had to be condemned to prison
for disrespect of the hallowed customs. The
first public bath-house of New York City only
appeared around 1852, only allowed through
a special commission in 1913.
An
extensive bath, daily, more than once a day,
is really a Brazilian habit and it’s
not because of the Portuguese and African
who weren’t really that fond of immersing
themselves in water. We owe our tradition
of taking daily bath to our Tupi and Guarani
Indian ancestry, who greatly appreciated playing
in it in the abundant rivers and beaches,
principally on days of intense heat, more
fun couldn’t be found elsewhere. That
is why I believe that daily bath taking is
a purely Brazilian invention.
