by Jorge Amado
“They’re quarrelling all right,” said Juca.
“This time it appears to be serious,” the woman said.
Margot was now looking around the room, endeavouring to appear indifferent. Juca leaned forward in his chair and whispered to João Magalhães: “Do you want to do me a favour, captain?”
“At your service.”
“Introduce me to her.”
João Magalhães gave the planter a deeply interested look. He was laying his plans. He would leave this land of cacao a rich man.
3
In the lyric, moon-drenched night Virgilio was walking along the railroad track. His heart was pounding but not at the memory of the violent scene with Margot in the café. When he thought of the incident for a moment, it was to shrug his shoulders with indifference. It was better that it should end this way, once and for all. He had wanted to take her home, had told her that he had a business engagement that would keep him out until very late and accordingly would be unable to spend the night with her. Margot, who was already distrustful, with a flea in her ear, would not accept his excuses: either he would accompany her home, or she would remain in the café and all would be over between them. Without knowing just why he did so, he had sought to convince her that he really had an engagement and that she ought to go home to bed. She had refused, it had ended in a quarrel, and he had left without even saying good night. Even now, perhaps, she was seated at Juca Badaró’s table, in the company of the man with whose rivalry she had threatened him.
“What difference does it make to me? I’m not hard up for a man. Just look at the eyes Juca Badaró is making at me.”
This did not trouble him. It was better that she should be with another; indeed, it was the best possible solution. When he thought of it, he smiled. How times had changed! A year ago, at the thought of Margot with another man, he would have been altogether likely to lose his head and do something foolish. Once at the American House in Bahia he had created a scandal, had got into a fight, and had ended up at the police station, all because some young fellow had made a slighting remark to Margot. Now he actually felt relieved at knowing that Juca Badaró was interested in her, that he coveted her flesh. Virgilio smiled at the memory. Juca had good reasons for hating him, Horacio’s lawyer, and yet, without knowing it, was doing him a big favour.
But as he walked along the railroad track, endeavouring to adapt his stride to the space between the sleepers, Virgilio was not thinking of Margot. Tonight his eyes were drinking in the beauty of the world: the full moon bending over the earth; the star-filled sky above the city; the crickets chirping in the underbrush nearby. A freight train whistled in the distance and he stepped off the track. He was going along the back of a row of houses with their big silent gardens. In a gateway a couple were making love. He hurried on so that they might not recognize him. At another gate, farther on, Ester would be waiting.
The house that Horacio had recently built in Ilhéos, the “mansion,” as everybody called it, was in the new town that had sprung up in the fields where cocoa trees not so long ago had stood. The rear of all of these dwellings looked out on the tracks. A company had been organized to buy up the land, which, after the trees had been felled, had been subdivided and sold as building-lots. It was here, after his marriage, that Horacio had erected his town house, one of the best in Ilhéos, being constructed of specially made brick from his own kiln at the plantation, with furniture and hangings from Rio. At the back of the house Ester would be waiting, tremulous with fear, anxious with love.
Virgilio quickened his step. He was already late, the quarrel with Margot having detained him. The freight train passed by, its powerful headlights illuminating the scene. He stopped to let it pass and then once more began walking along the ties. He had had difficulty in convincing Ester that she should wait for him at the gate, so that they might be able to have a quiet talk. She had been afraid of the servants, of the gossiping tongues in Ilhéos; she was afraid that one day Horacio would come to know of it. As yet the affair between them had not progressed beyond a distant infatuation, consisting as it did of hastily whispered words, a long and ardent letter that he had written, and a note from her in reply—two or three words only: “I love you, but it is impossible”—a clasp of hands at the door, glances filled with desire. All this to them seemed so little; it did not occur to them that, little as it was, the whole town was talking about them and, looking upon them as lovers, was laughing at Horacio. After the exchange of letters, when Horacio had gone back to the plantation, he had called upon Ester. This had truly been an act of madness, thus to defy the power of gossip. Ester had told him so, begging him to go away; and in order to persuade him to go, she had promised to meet him here, the next night, at the garden gate. He had tried to kiss her, but she had fled.
Virgilio’s pounding heart was that of a lovesick youth, as he drank in the loveliness of the night with all the intensity of youth. Here was the gate at the back of Horacio’s house. Virgilio was trembling, deeply moved, as he approached it. The gate was ajar, and laying a hand on it he pushed it open. Under a tree, wrapped in a cape, bathed in moonlight, Ester was waiting. He ran to her, took her hands in his. “My darling!” Her body was quivering as they embraced; the words of love are useless in the light of the moon.
“I want to take you with me, away from here, far away, away from everybody, to build a new life.”
She was weeping gently, her head on his bosom. From her hair came a fragrance that completed the beauty and the mystery of the night. The wind brought the murmur of the sea to mingle with her weeping.
“My darling!”
“It is impossible, Virgilio. I have my child to think of. We can’t do that.”
“We will take him with us. We will go far away, to another country, where no one knows us.”
“Horacio would come after us; he would follow us to the end of the world.”
But more than words, love’s maddening kisses proved convincing as a lovers’ moon bent over them. Stars were born in the heavens above Ilhéos, and Ester could not help thinking of Sister Angelica: the time when it still was possible to dream had come again. Dreams did come true. She closed her eyes as she felt Virgilio’s hands upon her nude body, beneath her cape. A bed of moonlight, the stars for coverlet, and the moans and sighs of love’s extremity.
“I’ll go with you, my darling, wherever you wish—” And as she felt herself dying in his arms—“even to death.”
4
Captain João Magalhães was smiling from the other table, and Margot smiled back. The captain rose, went over, and shook hands with her.
“Lonesome?”
“Well—”
“Have a quarrel?”
“It’s all over.”
“Really? Or is it like the other times?”
“I’m through this time. I’m not the woman to put up with such treatment.”
João Magalhães assumed a conspiratorial air: “Well, then, as a friend, Margot, let me tell you something. I’ve got something good for you. There’s someone here, with more money than he knows what to do with, who’s crazy over you. Right now—”
“Juca Badaró,” she interrupted him.
The captain nodded. “You’ve got him hooked.”
Margot was tired of hearing him run on. “I knew that. On the boat coming down he was all over me. The only thing was I was tagging after Virgilio then.”
“And now?”
Margot laughed. “Now it’s another story. Who knows?”
The captain then proceeded to give her some fatherly advice: “Stop being a fool, my dear; put away all the money you can in your stocking while you’re young. This business of having a poor man for a lover is all right for a woman with a rich husband.”
She was permitting herself to be persuaded. “I was a fool. In Bahia I had—I can’t tell you how many rich men running after me,” and she made
a gesture with her fingers. “You know how it is.” The captain nodded. “And there I was, like an old hag, hanging on to Virgilio. And what did he do but stick me off down here in the woods, to spend my life mending socks in Tabocas. But it’s over now, I’m through.”
“Do you want me to introduce you to Juca Badaró?”
“Did he ask you to?”
“He’s dying to meet you.” Turning in his chair, the captain beckoned, and, buttoning his coat, Juca rose and came over, a smile on his face. As he left the table where he had been sitting, Astrogildo made a comment to Manuel de Oliveira and Ferreirinha: “This is going to end in a row.”
“Everything in Ilhéos ends in a row,” was the journalist’s reply.
João was about to introduce the pair, but Margot did not give him time: “We know each other already. The colonel once gave me a pinch that left me with a black-and-blue mark.”
Juca laughed with the others: “And then you ran away and I never laid eyes on you again. I heard that you had gone to Tabocas; I was down there, but I didn’t see anything of you. They told me you were married, and so I respected—”
“They’re divorced,” João Magalhães announced.
“Have a quarrel?”
Margot did not care to go into explanations. “He left me to keep a business engagement,” she said, “and I’m not the woman to be brushed aside for a matter of business.”
Juca Badaró laughed once more. “All Ilhéos knows what his business is.”
“What do you mean?” asked Margot, puckering up her face. Juca Badaró had no reins on his tongue. “It’s Horacio’s wife, Dona Ester. The little lawyer chappie is getting mixed up with her.”
Margot bit her lip. There was a silence, of which the captain took advantage to retire to the other table.
“Is that the truth?”
“I’m not the man to lie.”
She gave a prolonged laugh. “Aren’t you offering me anything to drink?” she asked in an affected voice. Juca called Nhózinho over. “Bring some champagne.”
“Do you remember,” he said to Margot as their glasses were being filled, “I once made you a proposition—on the boat, coming down here?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, I’m making it once more. I’ll set you up in a house and give you everything you want. But you’ve got to remember that a woman of mine is mine and nobody else’s.”
She looked at the ring on his finger, took his hand. “It’s pretty.”
Juca Badaró took off the ring and placed it on Margot’s finger. “It’s yours.”
More than a little tipsy, the two of them left at dawn. With them went Manuel de Oliveira, who, the moment he had spied the champagne glasses, had come over to their table, where he had drunk more than both of them together. It was cold in the early morning along the wharves of Ilhéos, but Margot was singing and the journalist was joining in the chorus. As for Juca Badaró, he was in something of a hurry, for he had to catch the eight o’clock train. The fishermen were already returning with their deep-sea haul.
5
A municipal ordinance prohibited burro trains bearing cacao from coming into the centre of the city. The principal streets of Ilhéos were all of them paved, two of them with brick, a token of progress of which the inhabitants were inordinately proud. The burros would come to a halt in the streets next to the station, and the cacao would then be brought into town in horse-drawn carts, to be stored in the big warehouses near the harbour. However, only a small portion of the crop that was sent to Ilhéos for shipment was any longer carried on the backs of burros; mostly it came by rail or was transported in barges from Banco da Victoria by way of the Cachoeira River, which emptied into the sea at this point.
The harbour was the chief concern of the city’s residents. At that time there was only one wharf at which ships were able to moor, and when more than one came in on the same day, the other cargoes had to be unloaded in small boats. A company had accordingly been incorporated for the purpose of improving and exploiting the port, and there was talk of building more wharves and big docks and of dredging the harbour entrance, which was dangerously shallow.
Ilhéos had sprung up on a cluster of islands and stood on a point of land between two hills, known as União and Conquista; and it had also invaded the neighbouring islands, on one of which was situated the suburb of Pontal, where the wealthy had their summer homes. The population of the place had grown astonishingly since the raising of cacao had become general in the region, for practically the entire crop from the southern part of the state of Bahia was shipped to the capital from there. There was but one other port, Barra do Rio de Contas, and it was a very small one, where only sailing vessels could anchor. The citizens of Ilhéos dreamed of exporting cacao directly abroad some day, without having to ship it by way of Bahia. This provided a constant theme for editorials in the local press: the need of deepening the harbour so that ships of greater tonnage might pass. The opposition newspaper would take advantage of the topic to attack the government, while the government organ also alluded to it from time to time, printing items to the effect that “our most worthy and hard-working municipal prefect is engaged in negotiations with the state and federal governments with a view to a final solution of the harbour question.” But the fact of the matter was that nothing ever came of it, as the state government consistently put obstacles in the way, in order to protect the income of the port of Bahia. The subject none the less, phrased in almost identical words, served to fill out the platforms of both political parties and the speeches of both candidates for the prefecture. If there was any difference, it was a slight stylistic one, the platform for the Badaró candidate having been written by Lawyer Genaro, while that of Horacio’s man came from the far more brilliant pen of Lawyer Ruy.
In Ilhéos the fortune of a colonel was measured by the houses that he owned, each one seeking to put up a better one, until little by little their families became used to spending more time in town than they did at the plantation; but still these houses remained closed a good part of the year, being occupied chiefly at Church festival time. The town was without diversions. The men, it is true, had the café, and there were the wine-shops where the Englishmen connected with the railroad drowned their sorrows in whisky and shot dice, where the grapiúnas exchanged revolver bullets; but for the womenfolk there remained nothing but visiting between families, gossiping about the private lives of others, and the enthusiasm that was awakened in them by the feast-days of the Church. Then, when work on the nuns’ school had been begun, a few of the ladies had banded themselves together to raise money for the building fund by staging fairs and balls.
The Church of St. George, patron saint of the region, was a large, low structure wholly lacking in architectural beauty, but with an interior that was rich in gold-work. It overlooked a square that had been laid out as a garden. There was also the Church of St. Sebastian, next to the café and facing the sea; and on Conquista Hill, opposite the cemetery, was the Chapel of Our Lady of Victory, dominating the city from a height. In addition there was a Protestant church for the Englishmen from the railroad, which had won a few local adherents as well. And finally, in the matter of religion, there were various “spiritualistic séances” in the side-streets, becoming more numerous every day. All in all, the city of Ilhéos with its outlying boroughs and its cacao plantations was in ill repute with the Archdiocese of Bahia, where much was made of the lack of religious sentiment among the inhabitants, the absence of menfolk from Mass, the widespread prostitution—in short, it was a terrible place, a land of assassins. The number of priests that the city proper or the municipality as a whole could boast was small indeed in comparison with the number of lawyers and doctors; and as for the few padres that there were, many of these, as time went on, became cacao-planters with little interest in the salvation of souls.
A case in point was Padre Paiva, who carried a revolver
under his cassock and who was not in the least perturbed if a row was started in his presence. He was the political leader for the Badarós at Mutuns, and at election time he brought in swarms of voters—it was said that he promised them a veritable slice of heaven and many years of heavenly life on this earth if they cast their ballots the way they should. He was a councilman at Ilhéos, but was not in the least interested in the religious life of the city. The only cleric who had such an interest was Canon Freitas, who on one memorable occasion preached a sermon in which he contrasted the amount of money spent by the colonels at the café and on prostitutes with the small amount he was able to collect for the building fund of the school. It was a violent, passionate sermon, but it had no practical result whatsoever. The Church continued to live off the womenfolk, and they lived for it, for the Masses, the processions, and the feasts of Holy Week; and so, exchanging juicy morsels of gossip, they went on decorating the altars and making new tunics for the holy images.
The city lay between the river and the sea, a truly lovely site, with cocoa palms growing all around. A poet who once had come to Ilhéos to give a lecture had referred to it as “the city of palms in the wind,” a bit of imagery that the local papers were fond of quoting every so often. And in truth all the palms did was to grow and be tossed by the breeze. The shrub that really influenced Ilhéos life was the cacao tree, even though not a single one was to be seen inside the city itself. But it was there, behind all the life that went on in São Jorge dos Ilhéos. Behind every business deal that was made, behind every house that went up, behind every shot that was fired in the street—it was there. There was no conversation in which the word “cacao” did not play an essential part. Over warehouses, railway trains, ships’ holds, wagons, and citizenry there hovered, ever, the odour of chocolate, which is the odour of dried cacao.
