Читать книгу Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum - Страница 6

The woman’s voice attracted so many people, that I escaped from my teacher’s house and went down to the edge of the Amazon to see. An Indian woman, one of the city’s tapuias, was speaking and pointing to the river. I can’t remember what designs were painted on her face; their colour I can remember, though: red urucum juice. In the humid afternoon, there was a rainbow that looked like a serpent, embracing the sky and the water.

Florita followed after me, and began translating what the woman was saying in the indigenous language; she would interpret some phrases and then go silent, as if unsure of herself. She was having doubts about the words she was translating: or about her own voice. She was saying she’d left her husband because he spent all his time hunting and wandering here and there, leaving her alone in Aldeia. That is, until the day she was seduced by an enchanted being. Now she was going to live with her lover, deep in the river bed. She wanted to live in a better world, without so much suffering and misfortune. She spoke without looking at the porters on the Market ramp, or at the fishermen and the girls from the Carmo College. I remember the girls began to weep and ran away, and only much later did I understand why.

Suddenly the tapuia stopped talking and entered the water. Curious bystanders froze, as if spellbound. And all of them saw how she began to swim calmly in the direction of the Island of the Hoatzins. Her body sank into the shining river, and then someone shouted: The madwoman’s going to drown herself. The boatmen sailed over to the island, but they didn’t find the woman. She’d disappeared. She never came back.

Florita translated the stories I heard when I played with the little Indian children in Aldeia, right on the edge of the town. Strange legends, they were. Listen to this one: it’s the story of a man with an enormous cock, so long it crossed the Amazon, went right through Espírito Santo Island and speared a girl in the Mirror of the Moon Lake. Then the cock wound itself round the man’s throat, and while he struggled to avoid being strangled, the girl asked, laughing: Now where’s that long cock got to?

I remember too the story of a woman who was seduced by a male tapir. Her husband killed the tapir, cut the animal’s penis off and hung it up in the doorway of the hut. The woman covered the penis with mud until it was hard and dry; she spoke affectionately to the little thing and caressed it. Then the husband rubbed a lot of pepper onto the clay cock and watched from his hiding place as the woman licked the little thing and sat astride it. They say she jumped and screamed with so much pain, and that her tongue and body burned like fire. The only way out was to dive into the river and become a toad. And the husband went to live by the riverbank, sad and repentant, begging his wife to come back to him.

These were legends that Florita and I heard from the grandparents of the children in Aldeia. They spoke in the língua geral, and later Florita repeated the stories at home, in the lonely nights of my childhood.

One strange story frightened me: the one about the severed head—the divided woman. Her body keeps going in search of food in other villages, while her head takes flight and sticks to her husband’s shoulder. The man and the head are conjoined for the whole day. Then, at nightfall, when a bird sings and the first star appears in the sky, the woman’s body returns and sticks to the head. But, one night, another man robs half the body. The husband doesn’t want to live just with his wife’s head; he wants all of her. He spends his life looking for the body, sleeping and waking with his wife’s head stuck to his shoulder. The head was silent, but alive; it could feel the world with its eyes, and its eyes didn’t shrink—they saw everything. It was a head with a heart.

I was nine or ten, and never forgot. Does anyone hear those voices any more? I began to brood over this, for there is a moment when stories become a part of our lives. One of the heads ruined me. The other wounded my heart and my soul, and left me at the edge of this river, suffering, waiting for a miracle. Two women. But isn’t a woman’s story a man’s story too? Before the First World War, who hadn’t heard of Arminto Cordovil? Lots of people knew my name, everyone had heard tell of the wealth of my father, Amando, Edílio’s son.

See that lad over there riding a tricycle? He sells ice lollies. Whistling, the slyboots. He’s going to move slowly over to the shade of that jatobá. In the old days, I could have bought the whole box of lollies, and the tricycle too. Now he knows I can’t buy anything. Now, just out of spite, he’s going to look at me with owlish eyes. Then he gives a false laugh and pedals off, and over by the Carmo Church he shouts: Arminto Cordovil’s a madman. Just because I spend my afternoons looking at the river. When I look at the Amazon, my memory takes flight, a voice comes from my mouth and I only stop talking the moment the big bird sings. The tinamou will appear later, with his grey wings, the colour of the sky at dusk. It sings, saying goodbye to the daylight. Then I fall silent and let night enter my life.

Our life never stops going round in circles. In those days I wasn’t living in this filthy ruin. The white palace of the Cordovils, now that was a real house. Once I had decided to live with my beloved in the palace, she disappeared off the face of the earth. They said she lived in an enchanted city, but I didn’t believe it. What’s more, I was in a parlous state, without a penny to my name. No love, no money and, on top of all that, at risk of losing the white palace. And I hadn’t my father’s obstinacy—nor his cunning either. Amando Cordovil could have swallowed the whole world. He was fearless: a man who laughed at death. Anyway, see here: good fortune falls in your lap, and a gust of wind blows it all away. I eagerly threw the fortune away, taking a blind pleasure in doing so. I wanted to rub out the past and the ill fame of my grandfather Edílio. I never knew that particular Cordovil. They said he never tired, didn’t know what laziness was, and worked like a horse in the humid heat of this land. In 1840, at the end of the Cabano War, he planted cocoa in the Boa Vida plantation, a property on the right bank of the Uaicurapá, a few hours from here by boat. But he died before he realised an old dream: the building of the white palace in this town. Amando moved into the house when he married my mother. Then he began to dream of ambitious destinations for his freighters. One day I’m going to compete with the Booth Line and Lloyd Brasileiro, my father would say. I’m going to carry rubber to Le Havre, Liverpool and New York. Another Brazilian who died still waiting for his day of greatness to arrive. In the end, I found out about other things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ll recount what my memory can reach, slowly and patiently.

I must have been about twenty when Amando took me to Manaus. My father didn’t say a word throughout the journey; only when we got off the boat did he utter these two sentences: You’re going to live in the Pension Saturno. And you know why.

It was a small, old pension in Instalação da Província Street. I lived in one of the rooms on the ground floor, and used the bathroom next to the basement, where some lads who’d fled from the Young Apprentices’ Institute lived. They did odd jobs, working in bakeries and the German brewery; one of them, Juvêncio, jobless and without qualifications, walked around with a machete, and no one meddled with him. When my father was in his office, Florita would escape to the pension to chat with me and do my washing. She didn’t like Juvêncio; she was afraid of being stabbed by him. She detested my room at the Saturno too. She’d say: With that prison cell window, you’re sure to die of suffocation. Florita was accustomed to the comfort of the house in the Manaus suburbs, and the white palace in Vila Bela. I asked about Amando, but she didn’t tell me everything. She said nothing about the firm’s new freighter. I had read in the paper that the vessel was in Manaus Harbour. A steamship with wheels on its sides, built by Holtz, the German shipyard. It was a real freighter; the other two were just lighters or barges. I was proud, and showed Florita the paper.

I was going to do a dinner for him, she said. Your father didn’t want me to. He’s worried about paying for the boat. Or something else.

Florita wanted me to live with her and Amando: the three of us, in the Manaus house. I wanted that too, and she knew it. Here in Vila Bela they told Florita that my father had been happy with my mother at his side. When she died, Amando didn’t know what to do with me. To this day I remember the words that destroyed me: Your mother gave birth to you and died. Florita heard these words, hugged me and took me to the bedroom.

A tapuia breastfed me. An Indian’s milk, or the milky gum of the amapá tree. I don’t remember the face of that nurse, or of any other, for that matter. It’s a dark time; I’ve no memory of it. Until the day Amando came into my room with a girl and said: She’s going to look after you. Florita never left my side, and that’s why I missed her so when I was living in the Saturno.

In Manaus I did nothing—just read in the dining room, then dozed off in the afternoon heat and woke in a sweat, thinking of my father. I was waiting for something, without knowing what it was. My greatest worry at that time was knowing if the silent hostility between my father and myself was my fault or his. I was still young, and thought the punishment for having abused Florita was deserved, and that I ought to bear the burden of the guilt. I went to the Ingleses neighbourhood and hung round the house in the hope of speaking to my father or being seen by him. I watched the dining-room windows and imagined Amando looking passionately at my mother’s portrait. I didn’t have the courage to knock at the door, and carried on down the tree-lined street, looking at the bungalows and chalets with their immense gardens. Once, at night, I saw a man very like Amando on the Boulevard Amazonas. The same gait, the same height, arms by his side and fists clenched. He was walking alongside a woman, and they stopped in front of the Castelhana water tank. I doubted it could be my father when I saw his hands stroke the woman’s hair. As I recall it, I think of the legend of the severed head. The man escaped like a rat: he ran into a dark street, pulling the girl along by her arms. The next day I went to the house. I wanted to know if it was really him I’d seen with a woman on the pavement of the Castelhana. He wouldn’t let me in or say a word about it. In the doorway, he said:

What you did to Florita was bestial.

He slowly shut the door, as if he wanted to disappear little by little, and for ever.

He spent most of his time in Manaus. He went by tram to the office and worked even when he was asleep, as he himself used to say. But he often came here. My father liked Vila Bela; he had a morbid attachment to his home town. Before I lived in the Saturno, I’d been two or three times to Manaus on holiday. I didn’t want to go back to Vila Bela. It was a journey in time, going back a century. Manaus had everything: electric light, telephones, newspapers, cinemas, theatres, opera. Amando only gave me enough change for the tram. Florita took me to the floating harbour and the aviary in the Matriz Square, then we’d walk round the city, looking at the posters for the films at the Alcazar and the Polytheama, going back to the house in the late afternoon. I waited for Amando on the piano stool. It was an anguished wait. I wanted him to hug me and chat with me, or at least look at me, but I was always greeted with the same question: Been for a walk? Then he’d go over to the wall and kiss my mother’s photograph.

I thought I was condemned for ever, guilty of my mother’s death, when the lawyer Estiliano appeared in the Rua da Instalação for a chat.

He told me I couldn’t moulder in a pension for down-and-outs. He knew it was Amando’s decision, his way of punishing his lecherous son. But why didn’t I study to get into the law faculty? My father would soon change his mind.

Estiliano was Amando’s only friend. ‘My dear Stelios’—that’s what my father called him. This old friendship had begun in places they recalled out loud, as if they were both still young: the beaches of Uaicurapá and Varre Vento, Macuricanã Lake, where they fished together for the last time, before Estiliano travelled to Recife and came back a lawyer, and Amando married my mother. The five-year separation hadn’t cooled their friendship. The two of them always met in Manaus and Vila Bela; they looked admiringly at one other, as if they were looking in a mirror; together, they gave the impression that each believed in the other more than he did in himself.

I saw the lawyer with the same white jacket, the same trousers with braces, and an emblem of Justice on his lapel. His hoarse, deep voice intimidated everyone; he was too tall and robust to be discreet, and drank whole bottles of red wine at any hour of the day or night. When he’d drunk a great deal, he’d talk about the bookshops in Paris as if he was there, though he’d never been to France. Wine and literature were Estiliano’s pleasures; I don’t know where he put, or hid, the desires of the flesh. I know he translated Greek and French poets. And he looked after the legal side of the business. Amando, an austere man, closed his eyes and covered his ears when his friend recited poems in the Avenida restaurant or the bar in Liceu Square. After Florita, Estiliano was the person nearest to me. Right till the last day.

My father would change. Right, then. I spent two years studying in the Municipal Library; at night, in my room, I read the books Estiliano had lent me. The lads in the basement laughed. The graduate from the Saturno. The man of justice. Juvêncio didn’t laugh though. He was shy and serious, a lad of few words. I left the pension when I entered the Free University of Manaus. And in the same week Juvêncio too left the Saturno. He went to live on the pavement in front of the High Life Bar, and I above the Cosmopolitan Grocery Store on the Rua Marquês de Santa Cruz. It was a spacious room with a window overlooking the customs and excise offices. In the Cosmopolitan I got to know the city. The heart and the eyes of Manaus are in its docks and along the bank of the Rio Negro. The great port area swarmed with businessmen, fishermen, colliers, dock-workers, peddlers. I got a job in a store run by a Portuguese man, studied in the morning, had my lunch in the Market and spent the afternoon carrying boxes and serving customers. Even with a tiny wage, I informed Estiliano, I was managing to pay the rent for my room.

Amando insisted on paying, said Estiliano. The separation between you is causing him to suffer, but he’s too proud to hold out his hand to his son.

I had intended to go by his house to hold out my hand to this proud man, but chance brought the meeting about sooner. One afternoon I had to go to the Escadaria Quay to carry some boxes to the store. Amando was there, with the firm’s business manager. This manager imitated everything about my father, down to his gait. He didn’t drink because his boss was a teetotaller, and bought clothes in the Mandarim, Amando’s favourite shop. But what really irritated me were his eyes—it was as if they were made of glass. The guy never looked at me. And what in my father was authentic, in him became almost comical. I showed the documents for the goods to the excise officer. I was a few yards away from Amando Cordovil. I waited for acknowledgement, but he looked at my apron and didn’t say a word to me: he went over to the kiosk in the Market, with the manager behind him like a pet dog. Two days later the storeowner told me a nephew was coming to work with him. He didn’t need me any more.

I never knew for certain if I’d been dismissed on my father’s orders, but I still hoped to talk to him. I told the owner of the Cosmopolitan that I was out of work, and that the rent would be late. As he had friends in the harbour, I began to work helping passengers embark and disembark. I spent the whole day at the port and had no time for study. I got no pay, just tips; I was given clothes, hats and second-hand books. I got to know the captain of the Atahualpa, the Re Umberto, the Anselm, the Rio Amazonas. I became friendly with Wolf Nickels, of the La Plata. These captains worked for Lamport and Holt, the Ligure Brasiliana, the Lloyd Brasileiro, the Booth Line and the Hamburg–South America. Sometimes I accompanied foreign passengers on a canoe trip to the lakes near Manaus; I took them round the centre of the city—they were mad keen to see the Opera House, and couldn’t understand how such a grand work of architecture could exist in the middle of the jungle.

I saw the German freighter close to only once, at dawn, after I’d spent the night at a cheap cabaret in the Rua da Independência. I sat on the floating quay and read the word painted in white on the prow: Eldorado. So much greed and illusion! Looking at the freighter, I remembered that Amando hated seeing his son consort with the children in Aldeia. We would catch fish with bows and arrows, bathe in the river and run on the beach. When he appeared at the top of the Fishermen’s Steps, I would return to the white palace. I remembered the contempt and the silence too. That hurt more than the stories he told me in the Boa Vida plantation.

At that time the memories came slowly, like drops of sweat. I struggled to forget, but I couldn’t. Even without knowing it, I wanted to get close to my father. Nowadays, the memories return intensely. And they’re clearer.

I was getting used to the work on the harbour. I talked to young people who were going to study in Recife, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. Others were going to Europe. People arrived from many countries, and from every corner of Brazil. The problem was the poor; the government didn’t know what to do with them. At dawn, the squares were littered with families sleeping on old newspapers, and that’s where I read news items about my father, in those crumpled, dirty pages; the most important news being the competition for a freight line from Manaus to Liverpool. If Amando won the franchise he would get assistance from the government to buy another freighter. Estiliano confirmed this, saying my father would need me. He wanted me to talk to Amando in Vila Bela.

I asked why we shouldn’t meet in Manaus.

In Vila Bela your father’s far away from his problems. He’s in his own house.

Florita’s never been back to see me, I said.

That’s my friend bearing a grudge. Jealousy. But that’ll come to an end soon.

I didn’t know if Amando had already fixed something with Estiliano. I wasn’t as young as I used to be, but I didn’t have the perspicacity or cunning to suspect a father’s trap to catch his son. What I did was to throw myself into the nightlife around the port. With the clothes I was given by the passengers, it wasn’t hard to win over women from the famous cabarets. I drank for free on board the La Plata and worked as a porter and tourist guide. In the Adolpho Lisboa Market, Zé Braseiro’s show attracted the tourists at the same time as it appalled them. He was a lad who only had arms and hands—his legs were two stumps of meat. He went around in a little cart pushed by an assistant. On Saturdays, this assistant set up a trapeze in the storehouse by the fish stalls. Zé Braseiro would climb up a rope and swing round the trapeze, put on his display up above, and was greeted with applause. The tourists wept for pity and left money on the cart. Sometimes he repeated the display in São Sebastião Square, in front of the Opera House.

I’d have lived that way for a long time, but the meeting with Amando changed my life. The city had grown unsettled. The traffic in the port had decreased. It wasn’t the war in Europe, the First World War. Not yet. I could see people were irritated, indignant. Everything seemed strange and violent. I read my father’s outburst in the papers: he complained about absurd taxes, customs dues, the inefficiency of the port, the ballyhoo of our politics.

That’s not the only reason Amando’s angry, said Estiliano. He’s found out you’ve abandoned your studies and are wandering around, sleeping in the city brothels.

How did he find out?

He knows everything. He’ll tell you about it when we meet him.

Isn’t it too late for reconciliation?

It’s the chance of a lifetime for you. He’s getting old, and you’re his only son. You must take a boat to Vila Bela before Christmas.

At the beginning of December I went to the house to see Florita. A neighbour told me she and my father had left for Vila Bela. I went into the garden and peered into the parlour through the gaps in the blinds, but I couldn’t see my mother’s picture on the wall, though the black piano was still in the same place.

While I was looking at the room, I recalled a recital at the house by the pianist Tarazibula Boanerges, to celebrate Amando Cordovil’s purchase of the company’s second barge. I was about sixteen at the time. During the dinner, Amando embraced a young guest and said: You’ve got a vocation for politics; you should be a candidate for Mayor of Vila Bela.

The young man, Leontino Byron, asked which party he should stand for.

That’s not important, my father answered. Winning’s all that matters.

That was one of the few times I saw Amando enthusiastic, and I was even happy when he introduced me to the guests at dinner. One of them, a director of the Manaus Tramway, wanted me to meet his daughter. He pointed at a young girl next to the piano. She was smiling at the keyboard: she had good teeth, beautiful eyes and features, everything was good and beautiful in fact, only she was too pale; her skin was white as paper. I was still looking at her almost transparent whiteness when Amando said to his friend:

There’s no point. My son’s crazy about little Indian girls.

He went back to talking about the barge and freight prices. I remember I left the room and went with Florita into the garden. I told her I didn’t want to live with Amando, either in the white palace or the house in Manaus.

Since your mother died, seu Amando’s never loved anyone—only his damned barges.

She kissed me on the mouth, the first kiss, and asked me to be patient. Crazy about little Indian girls. I repeated those words with the taste of Florita’s kiss on my lips.

With these memories, I came away from the empty house, and decided to leave work and travel to Vila Bela. I told the owner of the Cosmopolitan I was going to give up the room.

Working in the harbour was no job for a Cordovil. Your father’s freighters have got a future.

I had the impression everyone knew my movements, and was surprised when the owner of the grocery store gave me a ticket to Vila Bela in the La Plata, along with a typed note: Meeting at the lawyer Stelios’s house at 5 in the afternoon on 24 December. AC. Amando had everything worked out: the date of departure, the ship, the time and the meeting place. Years later I had suspicions about the authorship of the note. It might have been written by Estiliano. But the fact is I went in the expectation of talking to my father. I disembarked at Vila Bela at two in the afternoon of 24 December, and when I caught sight of the white palace, I felt the emotion and sense of oppression you feel when you return home. Here I was someone else. That is, I was myself: Arminto, the son of Amando Cordovil, grandson of Edílio Cordovil, sons of Vila Bela and the River Amazon.

I discovered my father wasn’t at home when Florita, dressed only in a nightgown, gave me a tight, long embrace. I felt her strong hands moving over my back, lowered my head and whispered: Servants can sniff things out. Look what happened when we had fun that afternoon.

She loosened her grip and looked at me with a guiltless smile: Don’t you want some more? Was it just that afternoon?

That afternoon produced a lifetime’s jealousy. I asked if she’d known I was coming.

Neither you nor your father can live far from here, she answered.

That’s what she said; then she went to get my bath ready. I noted that Amando’s hammock was slung in the same place in the parlour. My room was cleaned and ready, with the mosquito net hung over the bed as if I’d never left home. In the back garden, I spoke to the caretaker and his wife. Almerindo and Talita came to live in the back of the white palace when Amando abandoned the Boa Vida plantation to dedicate himself to his freighters. Florita, out of spite or jealousy, treated the couple as if they were strangers. They hadn’t lost the subservient habit of calling me ‘Doctor’, as they did when I was a boy. Almerindo did repairs in the house, whitewashing the façade after the winter rains. Talita looked after the garden and cleaned the stone centrepiece of the fountain. It was in the shape of my mother’s head; Amando had had it made after she died. From a very young age, I used to look at the young face, the grey stone eyes which seemed to question me. I was on my knees in front of the head when I smelled the waft of scent from the Bonplant perfumery. Florita informed me that the bath was full. After the bath she served lunch: beans with pumpkin and maxixe, grilled fish and farofa with turtle eggs.

Your father’s completely stuffed with food. He didn’t even have a siesta.

Where is he?

In the Carmelite School. He went to see the headmistress. Then he was going to Dr Estiliano’s house.

Our meeting’s at five, I said, knowing Florita already knew. But I want to see the old man first.

Be careful not to turn Christmas sour, she warned me.

Is he in a good mood?

When he’s in Vila Bela he’s only short of hugging the moon.

I went to Ribanceira and waited in the shade of the cuiarana tree. Vila Bela was hiding from the hot sun. Everything was still in the afternoon heat. I remember the noise of a boat, the sounds of a river that never sleeps. The school gardener opened the gate and this tall, burly man appeared, in dark jacket and trousers. He wasn’t wearing a hat. I thought this might be the moment to talk. Between us there was the shadow of my mother: the suffering he’d borne since her death. For Amando, I had put a brutal end to a love story. I was afraid of the confrontation, and hesitated. He took quick steps, his hands clenched as if the fingers had been amputated, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in front of him. His well-combed hair looked like a helmet. My father was walking towards the white palace. As I emerged from the shade, he lifted his head towards the bell in the tower, swung round and walked towards Matadouro Street. I think he’d decided to go to Estiliano’s house straight away. At the end of the square he stopped, and his crossed arms grabbed his shoulders as if he was hugging his own body. He slowly bent his legs and fell to his knees. His head was shining in the corner of the square. The man was going to collapse forwards, but he twisted and sank backwards instead. I shouted out his name and ran towards him. On his back, he lay staring at me, his face contorted in pain. I was floundering, trying to massage his chest. Then there was a single embrace, for my dead father. The man I most feared was in my arms. He was still. I hadn’t the strength to carry him on my own. In a short time the town awoke and curious bystanders surrounded his body. Somebody pointlessly said that Vila Bela’s only doctor had gone to Nhamundá. Florita arrived in such a state of despair that she pushed me away, screaming, and fell weeping to her knees. Estiliano appeared a few minutes later. The bystanders moved back while the big man leant over Amando, kissed his face and delicately closed his eyes.

I had spent some four or five years without setting foot in Vila Bela, and from the moment Amando’s wake took place in the Carmo Church I saw how beloved he was. This left me confused, for the praises for the dead man contradicted my image of the living father. I knew he liked giving alms, a vice I inherited and kept up for a long time. And I remembered how much charity he dispensed at the festivals of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. But after his death I discovered he’d been a real philanthropist. He gave food and clothes to the Carmelite Orphanage, and contributed to the building of the bishop’s palace and the restoration of the town jail. He even paid the jailers’ wages, a favour he did both to the government and the locals. At the funeral, Ulisses Tupi and Joaquim Roso, river pilots Amando trusted—as well as Denísio Cão, a strange boatman from Jaguar Island—offered their condolences. Not even Amando could stand Denísio. He knelt down and crossed himself, with his long, horsy, sad face. The orphan girls from the Sacred Heart of Jesus were at the cemetery too, all wearing the same uniform: a brown skirt and a white blouse. Girls. One of them looked more grown up—like a woman with two different ages. She was wearing a white dress and was looking upwards, as if she wasn’t there, as if she wasn’t anywhere. Suddenly her look met mine, and the angular face smiled. I didn’t know the girl. I looked at her so hard that the headmistress of the Carmo School came over to me. Mother Joana Caminal came alone, offered her condolences and said dryly: Senhor Amando Cordovil was the most generous man in this town. Let us pray for his soul.

And off she went, with the girl and the other orphans in tow.

The room where he slept in the white palace was still as he had left it. All I did was move the hammock to another part of the room. During his siestas, Amando’s body used to obstruct the way to the windows. I shortened the strings and brought the hammock nearer the middle window. That way I could see the ramp up to the Market and the river, I could feel the life coming from the waters.

Florita reacted to her boss’s death with a great deal of sadness. She wore white clothes instead of full mourning, and still cooked my father’s favourite dishes. Whether because she forgot, or out of habit, sometimes she put Amando’s plate and knife and fork at the head of the table; I ate alone, not looking at the empty place.

At the beginning of the New Year, I went with Estiliano to Manaus. He gave me a box from the Mandarim with the papers Amando kept in the house. When Estiliano opened the inventory, I discovered my father had owned a plot in the Flores neighbourhood, near the asylum. He left a tidy sum to his friend, along with a house on the bank of the Francesa Lagoon. A little embarrassed, Estiliano said that the money would buy him wine for his old age. The house would be his refuge in Vila Bela.

Amando’s generosity to his beloved Stelios didn’t upset me. I asked the lawyer to be my representative in the firm; then I asked for money to live on, suggesting a monthly allowance. Estiliano spoke of a bank loan to pay Holtz, the shipbuilders: how could I ask for so much money? He couldn’t allow it.

Get another lawyer, he said firmly. There are lots in Manaus.

But only one Stelios, I said.

We reached an agreement on how much I could take out. And he himself suggested that the money should be sent by Lloyd’s internal post. I tried to insist that he should run the firm, but he refused: he wouldn’t be coming to live in Vila Bela for a few years. I was the heir, I should take over . . .

I have neither the experience nor the desire, I interrupted.

Amando trusted the manager. You could live in Vila Bela and spend a few days in Manaus. And look after the Boa Vida plantation.

I came to live here, but I couldn’t go two months without a visit to Manaus. I spent them in the office, looking at the pile of papers on the desk and getting irritated with problems of all kinds: parts for machines, the dismissal or hiring of employees, missing merchandise, customs dues, taxes. The manager responded to my doubts with few words, or with a haughty silence. I was the boss before time, which confounded him. When he cornered me to make a decision, I asked Estiliano for help. The lawyer sat in my father’s chair, looked at the documents I was to sign and questioned the price of transporting goods. With the voice of a croaking dog he would complain: If Amando was here . . . Sometimes he criticised me because I was sharp with the manager. I couldn’t divine his thoughts, and I didn’t have the serenity of Estiliano to withstand the cold look that sought out my father’s portrait on the office wall. Why did he look at his dead boss so often? In Vila Bela, I only thought about the manager and the firm when I saw the Eldorado some hundred yards from the white palace, and then I thought my life depended on that cargo-boat plying the Amazon. But I forgot the ship on the day I encountered the girl I’d seen at Amando’s funeral. The woman with two ages. Dinaura. I couldn’t remember her face in detail; her eyes, yes, the look in her eyes. To see again what memory has erased is a great happiness. Everything came back to me: the smile, the sharp look in the angular face, eyes more almond-shaped than mine. An Indian? I tried to find out where she was from, but never did. I found something else; something that depends merely on chance, on a single moment in life. And I saw it was too late to undo the work of destiny.

When Estiliano heard me talk of Dinaura, he was contemptuous: That’s a good one, a Cordovil infatuated with a girl from the jungle. And Florita, without knowing the orphan, said that her look was just a spell: she looked like one of those madwomen who dream of living at the bottom of the river.

The look in Dinaura’s eyes was what most attracted me. Sometimes a look has the force of desire. Then desire grows and wants to penetrate the flesh of the beloved. I wanted to live with Dinaura, but I put off the decision for as long as vanity would allow me. I don’t know if my life was less unhappy than hers then. It was certainly more futile. Empty. Since I’d moved here, I’d waited anxiously for the ships that came from Europe up the Amazon; when one of them berthed at Vila Bela, an officer in the port gave me the ship’s menu and informed me about the passengers. His name was Arneu, a gossipy, sycophantic man, so much so you felt sorry for him. If he said he’d seen pretty girls on deck, I’d go to dine and dance in the boat’s saloon. Sometimes I embarked for Manaus and had a good time at the dances in the Ideal and the Luso, went to the matinees at the Alcazar, the Rio Branco and the Polytheama, and to the operas in the Opera House. Then I’d go to the Chalet-Jardim to meet the Italian singers. One afternoon, while I was having a beer in the High Life, I saw one of the lads from the pension in the street—Juvêncio. And the worst of it was that he recognised me and came into the bar.

The young gentleman from the Saturno, he said, stretching out his hand.

I was going to shake his hand, but Juvêncio didn’t want affection or courtesy, he wanted money. I gave him money and he laughed, revealing his toothless gums, and went right back to the street. Years later, I saw Juvêncio in a fight near the same bar. He was a grown man, and the High Life had gone bust.

Back at Vila Bela, I’d spend the night drinking wine and reading opera librettos, the latest Pathé-Journal and old newspapers. I would grow melancholy before sunrise. Then I’d go out at dawn through the dirt streets of this neglected town, as far as the Fishermen’s Steps, where I saw the shapes of heads looking out of windows in the darkness—old people unable to sleep; I don’t know if they were laughing or waving at me. Near the jungle, I saw the miserable shacks of the Aldeia, heard words in indigenous languages, murmurs, and when I went back to the river bank, I saw fishing boats moored by the ramp to the Market, boats laden with fruit, a steamer going down the Amazon to Belém. I had my breakfast in the Bar do Mercado, then I prowled round Sacred Heart Square, climbed up into the tree on the Ribanceira and thought about Dinaura until the sun lit the orphanage dormitory. If a Carmelite saw me sitting on a branch, I’d ask after Dinaura. The nun wouldn’t answer, would look as if she’d seen the devil, and I’d say: She’s going to leave the orphanage and come and live with me. Then I’d give a laugh which shocked the nun, a laugh that sounded obscene but in fact was just pure desire.

It might have been lunacy and not a caprice. I went back and forth between this idyll and my journeys to Manaus. The idyll won out. And my high life died out, along with the euphoria of an epoch. How everything changes in a short time. Some years before my father’s death, people only talked of growth. Manaus, rubber exports, jobs, business, tourism, everything was growing. Even prostitution. Only Estiliano showed signs of scepticism. And he was right, that was the worst of it. In the bars and restaurants the news in the Belém and Manaus papers was repeated with alarm: If we don’t plant rubber tree seeds, we’ll disappear . . . So much corruption in politics, and taxes are on the increase.

At home, the words were no less bitter. One day Florita came into my room to pick up the dirty washing and said:

I’ve had a bad dream. Something with your enchanted woman in it.