Orphans of Eldorado

by Milton Hatoum

  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.

  I looked suspiciously at Florita, waiting to hear more about the dream, but she left without a word. Dreams and chance took me to a road where Dinaura always appeared. I remember having seen a woman like her at the river’s edge. It was very early, a sunless morning, with thick mist. The woman walked along the bank till she disappeared in the mist. It could have been Dinaura—or my own eyes playing tricks. I remembered the tapuia woman who’d gone to live in the enchanted city, and ran towards the bank. But there was no one to be seen.

  One Sunday afternoon Dinaura walked by the front of the white palace, smiling at me with voracious lips. She was accompanying some girls from the orphanage to the Aldeia, where the Cegos do Paraíso neighbourhood is today. I followed the group. Dinaura was reading a book in the shade of a mango tree while the girls played. She was wearing a cheap printed cotton dress, and only stopped reading to stare at the river. In the late afternoon she and the girls went down the ravine by the Fishermen’s Steps. I crossed the dirt road and sat down where she’d been reading. Dinaura left her book on the sand and went into the water alone. She swam and dived for so long I began to feel out of breath. When she appeared naked, with her dress rolled up round her neck, I felt my body tremble with desire. I’m certain she saw me, because the girls were pointing at me, laughing and pinching Dinaura’s bum and thighs. From afar, I licked that body in the late afternoon sun. I didn’t even think about the Fishermen’s Steps: I ran down the ravine, but when I got near the river, Dinaura was already dressed and walking ahead of the girls. I followed the wet dress as far as the ramp of the Ribanceira, cut down some mud steps and stopped at the top, in front of Dinaura. I said I wanted to talk to her. I saw her astonished eyes in her unearthly face, the smile on her large, moist lips; I managed to touch her shoulders before she started running to Sacred Heart Square.

  In Vila Bela’s port someone spread the tale that the orphan was an anaconda who was going to devour me and drag me off to a city at the bottom of the river—and that I should break the spell before I was transformed into a diabolical creature. As Dinaura spoke to no one, rumours went about that people who were silent had been bewitched by Jurupari, the god of Evil.

  One Saturday, Joaquim Roso and Ulisses Tupi invited me to play dominos in Salomito Benchaya’s pension. Denísio Cão, the strange boatman, pushed his way into the company and lost one game. He was a man with no luck, and went on to lose every game he played. The intruder grew irritated—he hated losing. And then, without batting an eyelid, he said:

  That mother superior, the big chief, that Spanish one, is she a virgin, is she as saintly as she looks? I’ll believe that when I see it . . .

  The players gave the boatman a stern look; Joaquim Roso disarranged the game of dominos and left. Salomito put the pieces back in the box: they’d be better playing in the Market bar.

  Denísio spat to one side and turned his face to me, laughing: Today I carried an old man and two cows to the River Ariri. The Spanish nun was there; and your orphan, too. The two of them were planting peppers in canoes filled with soil. I offered to help, but that savage Spaniard wouldn’t let me. Like I said, I’ll believe it when I see it . . .

  Ulisses Tupi took me there. It was a parish beyond the mouth of the Espírito Santo. On a beach by the Arari, Ulisses tied the prow of the launch to the trunk of a tree. A line of old canoes rested on forked branches stuck in the sand. There was no one to be seen in the doorways of the straw-roofed shacks.

  Where’s that girl, and the mother superior?

  Don’t be in such a hurry, said Ulisses, pointing at a bird. It was a hoatzin up in the sky, white in the intense light.

  I followed the heavy flight of the bird into the swampy jungle. I heard Ulisses say the bird’s name and imitate its song. I lay down on the prow and shut my eyes, dizzy with the rocking of a boat. Dinaura appeared in my dream, wearing the same cotton dress. Her spellbinding eyes were a little wide, and dark, cut out of the night sky. I began to know Dinaura’s face, and felt something I’d not felt in my love affairs when I was younger. I grabbed her arms and, as I pulled her towards me, I saw the image of Mother Caminal and heard a buzzing sound.

  I woke up with the noise of the launch motor. I was thinking about the dream, and sweating. I got up and took a look at the beach: the canoes hanging, the shacks boarded up, the place deserted.

  I think Denísio Cão’s told a fib, Ulisses said.

  Florita, who listened to the gossip in Vila Bela, told me that to the Carmelites I was the devil incarnate: I preyed on young girls, I was a randy bachelor with not a single drop of my father’s honour in me. They said they’d seen me disembark with whores from Manaus at the ramp up to the Market, and swim with them in utter shamelessness, there on the beach of the Ponta da Piroca.

  I never brought any women to Vila Bela. But perhaps a repeated lie is just an imitation of the truth? I asked Estiliano to help me convince Mother Caminal that I wasn’t the devil they said I was.

  The Mother Superior is responsible for the moral welfare of the orphans.

  What about my feelings?

  Don’t be cynical, Arminto.

  I insisted, feigning deference. He was a lawyer, I said, everyone listened to what he had to say.

  I saw his face glow with pride. But then his brow furrowed and his eyes fixed anxiously on my face, as if reading the pages of a tragedy. He put his hands on my shoulder: he was very concerned.

  I didn’t know if he was talking about the firm or the orphan.

  The truth is that Dinaura filled my thoughts. I put on a white linen jacket, went to the Ribanceira and looked at the windows of the orphanage. Yes, that same building. Some idiots laughed at me. A nutcase, they said. That orphan’s burnt his brains out. But when Dinaura walked through the town, men followed her round. No one spoke to the woman. Why not? Fear. Something about her inhibited anything more than a word or a gesture. They were afraid, these defeated machos. They’d meet in the Travellers’ Bar in Horadour Bonplant’s perfumery or in the Market Bar, lying effortlessly about their conquests. On the afternoon Dinaura met me for the first time on Sacred Heart Square, they all saw. This happened after several attempts. She would escape without saying a word. In fact, I don’t know if she did escape: it was the silence that gave the impression that she had. I remember that for a long time I didn’t see Dinaura in the places she usually went alone, or with the other orphan girls. Florita went to check at the school door and came back with a choked smile, full of ill-disguised malice. Only my father had ever managed to speak to Mother Caminal, she said; he was the only one the Spaniard would speak to. They understood each other.

  Forget that girl. Forget her before she brings misery.

  Misery? I asked.

  She’s not going to be your wife. Someone who belongs to nobody can never be loved.

  Florita had a curious way of being jealous; and as I was always affected by everything she said, I became speechless in the presence of this woman who’d looked after me like a mother. I thought about Estiliano, and Amando’s strong bond with the Mother Superior of the Carmo. The lawyer came to spend the month of July in Vila Bela, and I went to the Francesa Lagoon with s
ome bottles of wine for him. While we sat on the veranda, drinking together in silence, I saw he was censuring me with his eyes. It was some time since I’d set foot in Manaus, and I knew that the war in Europe was damaging rubber exports—the war, and the rubber seedlings planted in Asia. It was as if he was talking about this with his eyes, this large man drinking in silence, and me divining his thoughts, his hoarse voice just about to say: It’s absurd to ignore the business you’ve inherited from your father . . . Silently we prowled round Dinaura’s name, the two of us looking at a canoe in the water, dark, smooth and calm as a sheet of copper. I drank another glass and got my courage up.

  Do you know why I came here? The girl who came from the jungle. It’s not a whim, Estiliano. Mother Caminal controls the orphans’ lives.

  He went on drinking, looking at the canoe motionless in the dark water.

  Can’t you give a little help to your friend’s son?

  He merely looked at me as an old man looks at a youth: a look that can be affable or aloof. No pain or compassion. He picked up the glass of wine, got up and went into the sitting room. I waited for some minutes, an hour, an absurd length of time, until the sky turned red. I looked towards the room: he was sitting in front of an open book, his face bent over a sheet of paper. He was copying words from the book. His bulky body filled the room, and the man went on writing, copying. When he finished, he blew onto the page to dry the ink and reread in silence, sipping his wine. He was breathing like an animal exhausted after a hunt. He came back to the veranda, handed me two sheets of paper and said in an irritated tone: Send this to the Mother Superior with a note saying your feelings are expressed in these lines.

  He went back into the room and left me alone on the veranda. I read the poem right there, in the semi-darkness. A mysterious poem, copied from some Spanish book.

  Florita took the poem and the note to the Carmo School. What can a poem do? For me, it performed more than a miracle. Mother Caminal asked me to come to her office to talk. The simplicity of the setting impressed me. The room looked like an improvised, poverty-stricken museum. On the floor were bits of ceramic, ritual masks and bits of the funerary urns of indigenous tribes who no longer existed. The name of the first Carmelite to preach in these parts was engraved on the wall, between oil paintings of St Teresa and St John of the Cross.

  Mother Caminal offered me a seat, took up the two sheets and read out the Spanish poem in an emphatic tone. I envied the woman’s voice. The images and the feeling grew with the sound of the words. She read the whole poem and, with her eyes on the paper, said:

  This is Estiliano’s handwriting. Your father was very fond of him; he would have liked him more, only that Greek’s an agnostic.

  He’s not Greek, he was born in Amazonia and studied in Recife.

  He was born here, but he’s never prayed in our church.

  Then she spoke about the orphan, an intelligent and hard-working girl. She might have been a Carmelite, a servant of the Lord. She had considered it, but had given up the idea. It’s difficult to follow these girls’ reasoning. One day they want one thing, the next they’ve forgotten it all. They pray devoutly and don’t believe a thing. But, in our lives, God chooses the best way.

  Where did she come from?

  From some place or other.

  But not on this island.

  Mother Caminal returned the sheets of paper:

  Read that poem from time to time, right into old age. If my orphan wants to, she can meet you at five o’clock in the square. And only on Saturdays. Never go near the orphanage dormitory, and never come in here again. You don’t have to give anything to the Order. Your father gave a lot.

  My story with Dinaura began that week. She wanted to date me. Now I’m just a carcass, but I was a good-looking young man then. And I was still well off. That counts for something, doesn’t it? That was what I thought. But money wasn’t enough. That is, it didn’t go very far. We met on Saturdays; no other afternoons were allowed for our love. The orphanage regulations were severe. The bell rang to wake the girls at five in the morning. They had prayers at six, at midday and again before bedtime. After prayers, the neighbourhood would hear a nun bellowing: Praise be to Our Lord Jesus Christ, to which the choir of orphans would respond: For ever. They ate in silence in the school refectory; when a girl wanted to go to the toilet, she slapped the table with her hand. At eight in the evening the bell rang for silence, and the head sister inspected the dormitory. I thought the orphans only prayed, sewed and studied, but they did much more than that: in the mornings they worked in the vegetable garden, dusted the altar and the statues of the saints, and helped clean the dormitory and the schoolrooms. Late afternoons, after class, they went to the chapel to give thanks and pray with the Carmelites. I also learned that they had a weekly retreat. Each orphan stayed alone in a dark room, reciting a whole rosary by candlelight in front of the Heart of Jesus. It was a silent love affair. Sometimes I heard Dinaura’s voice in my dreams. She had a gentle, somewhat singsong voice, which spoke of a better world at the bottom of the river. Suddenly she would grow silent, frightened by something the dream wouldn’t reveal.

  One Saturday she would surprise me with a smile, the next with a terrible sadness, as if she were going to die. She was prettier when she was sad, her face still, the lips in their place. She was the oldest girl in the orphanage, and the only one with permission to date. That was the way it was at the beginning: the two of us sitting on the bench in the square, holding hands, like two lovers of that time, and of this town. She never said when she’d entered the orphanage. And I grew accustomed to the silence, with the voice I only heard in my dreams.

  Florita told me that several orphans spoke the língua geral; they studied Portuguese and were forbidden to speak in indigenous languages. They came from villages and settlements on the Andirá and Mamuru rivers, from the Ramos branch, and other places in the middle reaches of the Amazon. Only one had come from a long way off, from the Upper Rio Negro. Two of them, from Nhamundá, had been abducted by river traders and sold to businessmen in Manaus and big shots in the government. They were taken to the orphanage by order of a judge, a friend of the headmistress. In Vila Bela, Mother Caminal was known as God’s Judge, because she forbade the exchange of children and women for merchandise, and reported men who beat their wives and servants. But never once did she come on a Saturday to watch us in the square.

  When the bell rang at six in the afternoon, Dinaura would kneel in the direction of the church, with her eyes shut and her hands on her chest. One time, after she’d finished praying, she sat eagerly on my lap, but when I went to embrace her she jolted and ran away. I was rigid, stiff as a board. On other Saturdays, the people walking through the Sacred Heart Square would see Dinaura melt into my legs. The most sanctimonious of the women sent messages to Florita: my father was right, I took advantage of Indians and poor girls in general. To hell with that. I’d anxiously await the next Saturday, surrendering to the look from a silent face.

  One day in July, a beggar from the square handed a note to Florita. It was from Dinaura. The festival of the Patron Saint. Shall we go? The festival was on the night of 16 July, and still lights the town every year. Pilgrims came from the interior of Amazonas and Pará. I remember my father used to bring many of the faithful from Manaus. They ate and slept in the boat; at night, they asked the Virgin to protect Amando. I heard the prayers and saw the faithful on deck with burning candles in their hands. It looked like a boat in flames, like a great anaconda lit up on the bank of the Amazon. In July, Amando really had been lavish with his money. He paid for the decoration of the square, the painting of the Carmo Church, the monasteries and parish churches, the new clothes for the lepers, the capes and ropes for the devotees of the Virgin. After the Mass he gave a huge meal of turtle meat to the people.

  I was still a child when he dragged me to the festival, twice. The second time, I ran away. He and his servant, Almerindo, searched all round the town for me, and only came across
me in the early morning, lying with Florita in the hammock in her room. When he came in, I shut my eyes. Florita got up and opened the window to quell Amando’s hatred. She said I had nausea, and an upset stomach.

  Get out of that hammock, he commanded.

  I obeyed, without opening my eyes. The first slap made my face burn and threw me back to the hammock; he bent over and slapped me again with the palm of his hand on the ear. The crack buzzed like an insect trapped inside my head. It was impossible to return the favour: my father was a heavy Cordovil, with thick fingers on his big hands. Then Florita confessed she’d lied. Amando threatened to throw her out of the house, and forced me to live with the servants for a month, eating their food and cleaning the yard. The first night I slept in the basement; that is, I couldn’t sleep because of the heat. Every night after that I slept in a hammock out of doors. The next year, Amando made me go to the Virgin’s festival again.

  I remembered all this as I read Dinaura’s invitation. I was a man now, and Amando Cordovil was dead.

  On the afternoon of 16 July the orphans and the boarders entered the Square of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in single file. Nobody wore a uniform. I saw the daughters of the wealthy families separated from the orphans, and a circle of tapuia girls shrinking back, paralysed by shyness and poverty. They all loved the Patron’s festival because it was the freest day in the year. They could sink their teeth into the food and the sweets; they could dance and sing till ten at night. The boldest of them ran down to the edge of the river and pushed themselves into the company of the boys from Manaus and Santarém. Three or four orphans, they say, got pregnant on the night of devotion to the Virgin, but I had no desire to know if it was true or not. What I wanted most was to see Dinaura. I heard the choir of the boarding girls; then the Tavares Trio played modinhas with a cavaquinho, a violin and a nhapé, an indigenous kind of maracas. As darkness fell, the bishop asked everyone to listen in silence to the penance of seven orphans.