Orphans of Eldorado

by Milton Hatoum

  Did Estiliano not know about this?

  It was Dr Cordovil’s business. Your father wouldn’t allow any one to sign insurance documents. He was going to renew it, but he died before he could.

  The manager went on: when the Eldorado went under, Adler’s lost eighty tons of rubber and Brazil nuts, and had started a lawsuit against the company; the port duties hadn’t been paid to the Manaus Harbour . . . This litany of disasters irritated me. I knew of nothing; ignorance was my weakness. The manager stopped speaking, sat down and rested his elbows on the desk and his fingers on his forehead, casting a longing look of admiration at my father’s photograph. I couldn’t face Amando, even on the wall. I murmured: The firm’s finished. I heard someone say in a low voice: Coward.

  I asked the manager what he’d just said.

  He remained silent, in the same position. The portrait of my father seemed to challenge me. Coward. You’re no good for anything. It was the voice of Amando Cordovil. The same words. Or was my memory repeating what I’d so often heard? So, that morning, I went with the manager to the English bank.

  The loan. Just thinking about it puts me in a state. I think it’s going to rain. This heat, the humidity . . . When it gets hot like this, I have to have a drink, if not I can hardly breathe. I used only to drink wine. Now I have a few sips of tarubá, good stuff I get from the sateré-maué Indians. It relieves the wheezing. And memories come without bringing despair with them. Then I quieten down and shut my eyes. I can talk with my eyes shut.

  I felt the same breathlessness when the bank manager showed me the documents Amando had signed. The debt amounted to a fortune. I left in a daze, took a tram to the house and waited for Estiliano in Manaus.

  Some ten days later he appeared. He already knew everything: I’d been naive or irresponsible. I’d been both, I thought. But I made sure I pointed out that only my father renewed the insurance.

  I came earlier because I read the news about the shipwreck in the Belém papers, he said. Then he revealed he’d been in Manaus for a week.

  I didn’t want to waste time, he went on. I’ve spoken to the judge, the bank directors and Adler’s.

  He explained that the two barges were moored in the Manaus Harbour, confiscated by the law. Those old barges weren’t worth much, but it was possible to sell them. What was really worth something was the German freighter: the Eldorado.

  I accused the manager of carelessness; he could have avoided those debts. Estiliano didn’t get worked up: the manager was my father’s shadow, and a shadow can’t think about everything.

  But did we have to sell the two barges?

  You’re going to have to sell everything: this house, the firm’s offices and the land in Flores.

  How could I allow that? I wanted to marry Dinaura, go travelling with her.

  You’re living in another world, said Estiliano. If you don’t sell everything, you could be arrested. The small river transport firms in the Amazon have all gone bust. Get out of this house and take a walk round the city. That girl’s removed your brain; she’s deprived you of your reason. You’re blind.

  Estiliano was obsessed by my father’s story, but he knew that even Amando couldn’t have avoided bankruptcy. It wasn’t fate—there’s no fate in this story. Amando’s dream and the lineage of the Cordovils were of no interest. My problem now was lack of money.

  I went round the city by tram, saw the houses on stilts and the shacks in the suburbs and along the creeks in the centre, and camps where ex-rubber-tappers slept; I saw children being shooed off as they tried to beg for food or money in front of the Alegre Bar, the Italian Food Manufactory. The prison on Seventh of September Street was full, and several houses and shops were for sale. All this only increased the longing I felt for Dinaura. I sent her a letter, telling her what had happened; I wrote that I was dying to see her, that I loved her very much, more than I could say, much more than I even knew. And that I couldn’t come back to Vila Bela just yet.

  I was defeated by the wait. I left the house to go with Estiliano to the tribunal, and avoided going by the firm’s offices. The last time I’d been there I’d insulted the manager, and wanted to sack him from the place and job which, in reality, had never belonged to me.

  Estiliano pulled me over to a corner of the room and whispered:

  In a disaster it’s best to act with your head.

  I envied that man his cool-headedness, the logic some god had given him. I never saw the manager again. They say he died at the end of the First World War, of the Spanish flu.

  A month later, Estiliano made an agreement with Adler’s and the English bank. I was lucky, he told me, they hadn’t questioned the valuation of the property.

  I haven’t even enough money to go back to Vila Bela.

  Let’s auction off what’s in the house and the office furniture.

  He’d already bought my return ticket. I could get some money for the piano and the porcelain in the house. And there were my mother’s rings.

  It’s a lot for someone who’s done nothing, he added, with calm brutality. And there’s still the house in Vila Bela. A valuable property.

  And the Boa Vida plantation, I said angrily.

  An Italian businessman picked up the objects that were auctioned; for the first time since my father’s death, I counted the money note by note, fearfully doing calculations. Back at Vila Bela, Florita greeted me unenthusiastically. The façade of the white palace hadn’t been whitewashed; the walls in the parlour and the bedrooms were stained with damp.

  You never sent any money for the upkeep of the house, she said.

  That’s not why you’ve got that face on you.

  She stopped, searching for words, and I didn’t feel like waiting.

  What’s happened?

  Seeing how edgy I was, she backed up to the wall. Once Florita chose to dig her heels in, she would do everything short of swallowing her own tongue. I could read nothing in her eyes. I ran to the Carmelite School, crossed the patio and ran up the stairs of the orphans’ building. The girls were sitting in a circle. They were sewing in silence. When they saw me, they got up and hid in the hammock. Only one of them stood up, stiffly, her hands gripping the scapular of the Virgin of Mount Carmel. We looked at each other as if we were crazy. I asked after Dinaura.

  She doesn’t live here. She never slept . . .

  Never slept?

  I heard whispering, muttering. Suddenly, they all went quiet. The woman gradually appeared, slowly ascending the stairs: her green, observant eyes in her dark face, the silver crucifix, her thin body covered by a brown habit. Her body was almost as tall as mine. She walked alongside Mother Caminal, the ruling sister. She was the sister who had asked me to leave the dormitory. I wanted no trouble or scandal. In the doorway, Mother Caminal gave me the news:

  Dinaura’s out there somewhere.

  In Vila Bela?

  No one knows.

  I looked at the nun and asked her in a very loud voice why she was lying to me.

  You didn’t deserve that girl. How can you be the son of Amando Cordovil?

  My father’s name threw me into confusion. His name, and the question accompanying it. The church bell seemed a shadow hidden in the yellow tower. Iro, the beggar who’d been there on that rainy night, was sitting on a bench in the square, his useless umbrella stuck under his arm. He stretched out his bony hand; I carried on walking as he threw the umbrella towards me shouting: You’re going to die of drowning.

  I turned to face him.

  Drowning, you tight-fisted son of a bitch.

  I kicked the umbrella, and on the Ribanceira I stopped under the cuiarana tree and pondered Dinaura’s destiny. I avoided looking at the bench in the square, not wanting to remember Iro’s words. But something tempted me. I went to look for him, but the bench was empty. The fear overtook the longing I felt for Dinaura. The fear of not finding her, the fear of the beggar’s words.

  At home, Florita told me I had the face of a suffering soul. Did she kn
ow that Dinaura had fled? That she no longer slept in the orphanage? She wouldn’t answer; she just gave me the envelope with the letter I’d sent to Dinaura. Still sealed. Iro left it here, Florita said. An unread love-letter is a bad omen.

  Then I told her what the beggar had said to me.

  Die of drowning? We’re going to live in misery, that’s the truth of it.

  I was still the owner of the plantation and the white palace. It wasn’t just a whim, wanting to keep the house. The white palace was where I’d spent my childhood, but I couldn’t look after the property. Almerindo and Talita planted manioc and bananas, kept pigs and chickens. That was their food; they exchanged any that was left over for fish. But I gave them rice, beans, sugar, coffee and soap. They hardly spoke to me; they came in and out of the back of the house as if they owned the garden. For them, I was a despised weakling of a son, lacking the heavy hand of the Cordovils. Almerindo let his relatives from the interior into the garden. They sang and talked in loud voices, making an insolent racket. My father, I remember, used to put up with the noise. Sometimes, he gave a guitar to the caretaker and a pair of shoes to Talita; before the elections he went to the garden to ask for votes for one of the candidates. This intimacy irritated me, because it was born of self-interest, calculated. At bottom, they were only servants. I asked Florita when I should put the couple out in the street.

  Today, this minute. Talita hates me because she thinks I’m your lover. And he hates me because I caught him stealing your old clothes.

  Why did you let him?

  Because Amando let Almerindo get his hands on his worn shirts. Your father used to say: He thinks he’s robbing them, I think I’m giving them away.

  So I told the caretakers to go and live at the plantation. But they refused; they’d only budge if I found a house and jobs for them. The solution was to talk to Leontino Byron, the politician Amando had favoured. Byron dreamed of great things. A deputy, that was what he wanted to be. I asked him to help my late father’s caretakers. The politico greeted me with effusive embraces. He said these words: My friend, who doesn’t owe favours to Amando? Then he got them a little wooden house at the edge of town. And some hard work: cleaning the cemetery. At the back of the house they had food and a basement; in the cemetery, a miserable salary. Not much of a choice, but I did get rid of the couple who worshipped Amando.

  I began to look around town for Dinaura. I went from door to door, where people still remembered Amando’s presents and favours: a job in the civil service, a wedding dress, a toy, a hammock, a ticket for the boat, even money. I was looking for my lover, and all I heard was Amando’s name. Florita swore she wasn’t in Vila Bela.

  How do you know?

  When you dream of another world, you can’t stay here. Much less if you’re a lover having second thoughts.

  She waited for my questioning look and added: Dinaura’s gone to live in the enchanted city.

  Florita wasn’t being serious, but she did manage to convince me that Dinaura wasn’t in Vila Bela. Then I called Joaquim Roso and Ulisses Tupi. And, against my will, Denísio Cão. These pilots knew out-of-the-way places, backwaters and little creeks, and having lived so long with the Indians and river dwellers, understood the língua geral. When Florita saw the three boats in the middle of the Amazon, she said: All this for a woman who’s left you?

  Florita’s jealousy wasn’t as strange as Estiliano’s silence, which was terrible. In my mind, he didn’t like Dinaura. Was it just the spite of an old bachelor? Or anger at the woman who’d kept me away from the business and from Manaus?

  I anxiously awaited news of the boatmen. The first to appear was Denísio Cão. I found him leaning on the boat-rail, smoking. Where was she?

  With his lips, Denísio gestured to a hammock on deck. I approached, peered in and saw the frightened face of a girl. He didn’t wait for my question, put out his cigarette and said the little Indian was just like my girlfriend. And she was a virgin, nobody had interfered with her, not even the river dolphins. She was a girl from the Caldeirão branch of the river, a village below the Parintins hills.

  She lost her mother, said the boatman. Her father offered her to me.

  I felt my blood rising—the bad blood of the Cordovils. I knew that Denísio didn’t carry a knife in his belt. I slapped the liar’s face.

  How much did you pay for this poor creature?

  He confessed: he’d given some odd change to the girl’s father, and on the way to Vila Bela he’d abused the unfortunate girl. Almost a child, her eyes were shut with fear and shame. I took her to the white palace and went to tell the police. But walking into the public jail, I gave up any idea of justice. The building was a pigsty; and the jailers, poor devils—they looked more like prisoners than the prisoners themselves. I contracted an old pilot I trusted and sent the girl back to the Caldeirão. The worst of it was that Denísio jumped off his boat and went round town laughing about it, full of himself, the author of so much cruelty.

  Joaquim Roso came back some days later with another nightmare: a nameless girl from a village on the Uaicurapá, the river where the Boa Vida plantation is. The girl made me dizzy: a sad angel with a dark little face, full of pain and silence. She’d lost her mother and been deflowered by her father. When Joaquim Roso found out, he decided to free the girl from her animal of a father.

  I didn’t find Dinaura, but I did perform this act of charity, he said.

  It disturbed me: this was the destiny of so many impoverished daughters in Amazonia. I asked myself why a father could feel this strange desire to possess his own child. It could only be evil thoughts, a rage sent by the devil himself. I sent Florita to the Carmelite School: she was to ask Mother Caminal to look after the girl. Then I waited for Ulisses Tupi, famous for being able to navigate the labyrinth of our rivers. He appeared unexpectedly, his beard so bushy that it hid his eyes. He looked like a different person. He swore that Dinaura was alive, but not in our world. She was living in the enchanted city and was treated like a queen, but she was an unhappy woman. He heard this in the riverside houses, in the most distant settlements; he heard it from solitary caboclos who live with their shadows and visions. Dinaura has been seduced by an enchanted being, they said. She was the prisoner of one of those terrible animals that lure women to the bottom of the river. And they described the place where she lived: a city with so much gold and light it gleamed, and with pretty streets and squares. The Enchanted City was a legendary place, the same one I’d heard about in my childhood. It rose up in almost everyone’s mind, as if happiness and justice themselves were hidden in this charmed place. Ulisses Tupi wanted me to talk to a shaman: his spirit could go to the bottom of the river to break the spell and bring Dinaura back to our world. He suggested I went to look for Dom Antelmo, the great shaman and medicine man from Maués. He knew the secrets of the bottom of the river and could talk to Uiara, the chief of all the enchanted people living in the submerged city.

  When this news spread through Vila Bela, I was persecuted by a mass of rumours. Some said Dinaura had abandoned me for a toad, a big fish, a dolphin or an anaconda; others whispered that she appeared at midnight in an illuminated boat and told the fishermen she couldn’t bear living in solitude at the bottom of the river. I remember the morning that Florita found a basket full of fish at the door of the white palace. Fish with their guts spilled, gills and bloody entrails, the smell of burst roes, pure gall. What the devil was this?

  Your beloved sent it you, said Florita. She’s tired of being half-woman half-animal.

  Was Florita provoking me? The belief in supernatural beings disappeared in the morning and returned at night. We threw the fish to the vultures at the slaughterhouse. After the smell of guts and gall had disappeared, I received letters and messages from people who’d been seduced and then pursued by beings from the bottom of the river. One pregnant woman, afraid of giving birth to a baby with a dolphin’s face, wrote that she slept at the edge of the Amazon and sang to the river as the sun rose. A ma
n who dreamed of an ancient inscription on a stone in the River Nhamundá who said he was immortal because enchanted people don’t die. One guy who thought he was Casanova, who became impotent when a woman in white appeared during the night. And several stories of men and women, all of them victims of an enchanted being who appeared in dreams, singing the same love song. They were attracted by the voice and the smell of seduction, and some went mad with these visions and asked for help from a shaman.

  I spent money on the boatmen. And what did they bring back for me? Myths and raped girls. Florita asked me to stop this madness and give up once and for all: Dinaura would never come back.

  I didn’t give up. And even afterwards, when time had drowned the yearning and the hope, and my body asked for some rest, my heart didn’t dry up. My thoughts ran after her, after my desire for her. I went on Saturdays to Sacred Heart Square with the hope of seeing her in the late afternoon. I lived for some time with this crazed illusion, and avoided the beggar sitting on the same bench, the umbrella in tatters in his lap.

  When I had no money left, I realised that a good deal of time had passed. I made a proposal to Estiliano: we could start up the Boa Vida plantation again, and export meat.

  What are we going to use for money? For the pasture, the animals, transporting the cattle when the river’s high, the employees?

  And what am I going to live off?

  You could sell one of the properties. Even Horadour Bonplant wants to sell his perfumery. In this place, only politicians can afford to go to sleep and wake in a good mood.

  Estiliano looked at me pessimistically, which was more painful than an outright insult. Was he foreseeing my future? He noticed that the pallor in my face was caused by some terrible remembrance which, unintentionally, he was excavating in my memory.