Working a Macumba

Cooks and maids of Rio de Janeiro were incensed. Ex-Provisional President Jose Linhares, they said, was creating unemployment. Before he handed over Guanabara Palace to incoming President Eurico Caspar Dutra last Jan. 31, he had made his colored cook Rosa an assistant postmistress. Then, being without a cook, he put up at the Copacabana Palace Hotel.

The cooks answered with a macumba, a Brazilian form of sorcery much practiced by the poor and ignorant. Black chickens were killed at street intersections in the dark of the moon, crossed chicken bones were mailed to the former President.

Rio taxi drivers, disgruntled by the troublesome regulations decreed by Linhares during a taxi strike, joined the hexing. Said one darkly: "We've chipped in to buy ten boxes of good cigars for the god Omulo to make the charm work. Linhares had better not take an airplane."

Last week Linhares was still in the Copacabana. He had stayed out of airplanes, appeared in good health, had not hired a cook. Said one taxi driver: grateful ex-Cook Rosa must be blessing Linhares' fingernail parings, sacrificing white chickens at dawn--working a countet-macumba.

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