Captains of the Sands

by Jorge Amado

  A sound of conversation draws closer. A group of four is coming into the silence that now reigns in the warehouse night. Legless shakes himself, laughs behind the back of Lollipop who goes on praying. He shrugs his shoulders, decides to leave the working out of details of the theft of the hats for tomorrow morning. And since he’s afraid of sleep, he goes over to greet the group coming in, asking for a cigarette, joking about the adventures with women the four are telling about:

  “A bunch of squirts like you? Who’s going to believe that you’re capable of mounting a woman? It must have been some faggot dressed up as a girl.”

  The others are annoyed:

  “You like to mess around too. If you want to, all you’ve got to do is come with us tomorrow. That way you can get to know the broad, she’s stacked.”

  Legless laughs sardonically:

  “I don’t like fairies.”

  And he goes off walking through the warehouse.

  Cat still hasn’t gone to sleep. He always goes out after eleven o’clock. He’s the dandy of the group. When he arrived, pale and pink, Good-Life tried to get him. But way back then Cat already had an unbelievable agility and hadn’t come as Good-Life had thought from a family home. He came from the midst of the Street Indians, children who live under the bridges in Aracaju. He’d made the trip on the tail-end of a train. He was quite familiar with the life of abandoned children. And he was over thirteen already. So he knew right off the motives of Good-Life, a stocky, ugly mulatto, why he treated him so nicely. He offered him cigarettes and gave him part of his dinner and ran through the city with him. After they’d snatched a pair of new shoes displayed by the door of a shop on the Baixa dos Sapateiros together, Good-Life had said:

  “Let me have them, I know where we can sell them.”

  Cat looked at his own dusty shoes:

  “I was thinking of using them myself. I need a pair…”

  “You with such a good pair on you…?” Good-Life was surprised. He rarely wore shoes and was barefoot at the time.

  “I’ll pay you your share. How much do you think it is?”

  Good-Life looked at him. Cat was wearing a necktie, a patched jacket, and amazingly was wearing socks:

  “You really are a dude, aren’t you?” He smiled.

  “I wasn’t born for this life. I was born for the big world,” Cat said, repeating a phrase he’d heard from a traveling salesman once in a bar in Aracaju.

  Good-Life found him decidedly handsome. Cat had a petulant air and yet there wasn’t any effeminate beauty, he was pleasing to Good-Life, who, besides everything else, hadn’t had much luck with women, because he looked much younger than the thirteen years he was, short and squat. Cat was tall and on his fourteen-year-old lips the fuzz of a mustache he was cultivating was beginning to appear. Good-Life loved him at the start, because he said with certainty:

  “You keep them…I’ll give you my share.”

  “O.K. I owe you.”

  Good-Life tried to take advantage of the other’s thanks in order to begin his conquest. And he ran his hand down Cat’s back, who slipped away with just a body movement. Cat laughed to himself and didn’t say anything. Good-Life thought he shouldn’t insist because he might scare the boy. He knew nothing about Cat and couldn’t imagine that the latter was on to his game. They walked together for part of the night, looking at the city lights (Cat was amazed), and around eleven o’clock they went to the warehouse. Good-Life showed Cat to Pedro and then took him to the place where he slept:

  “I’ve got a sheet here. It’s big enough for two.”

  Cat lay down. Good-Life stretched out next to him. When he thought the other one was asleep he embraced him with his hand and with the other began to pull down his pants slowly. In a minute Cat was on his feet:

  “You’re fooling yourself, mulatto. I’m a man.”

  But Good-Life no longer saw anything, he only saw his desire, the urge he had for Cat’s white body, of rolling his head in Cat’s dark hair, of feeling the firm flesh of Cat’s thighs. And he leaped onto him with the intention of knocking him down and raping him. But Cat moved his body out of the way, stuck out his leg, Good-Life fell on his face. A group had already formed around them. Cat said:

  “He thought I was queer. Do your dirty things to yourself.”

  He took off with Good-Life’s sheet for another corner and went to sleep. They were enemies for a long time but finally became friends again and now when Cat is tired of a little chippy he gives her to Good-Life.

  One night Cat was going through the red-light district, his hair all shiny with cheap grease, a necktie on, whistling as if he were one of those city hoodlums. The women looked at him and laughed:

  “Look at that spring chicken…I wonder what he wants around here?”

  Cat answered with smiles and kept on his way. He was waiting for one of them to call him and make love to him. But he didn’t want to pay for it, not just because the coins he had wouldn’t add up to fifteen hundred milreis, but because the Captains of the Sands didn’t like to pay women. They had little black girls of sixteen to fall down with on the sand.

  The women were doubtless looking at his boyish figure. They found him handsome in his vice-ridden boyhood and would have liked to have made love to him. But they didn’t call to him because it was time for waiting for the men who paid and they had to think about their rent and their next day’s meal. They contented themselves with laughing and making jokes. They knew that out of that would come one of those swindlers who take over a woman’s life, take her money, beat her, but give her a lot of loving too. A lot of them would have liked to be the first woman for such a young hoodlum. But it was ten o’clock, time for the paying customers. And Cat went uselessly back and forth. That was when he saw Dalva, who was coming down the street wrapped up in a fur coat in spite of the summer night. She went by him almost without looking. She was a woman of some thirty-five years, strong body, a face full of sensuality. Cat wanted her at once. He was after her. He watched when she went into a house and didn’t come out. He stayed on the corner waiting. Minutes later she would appear at the window. Cat went up and down the street but she didn’t even look at him. Then an old man went by, heard her call, went in. Cat kept waiting, but even after the old man had come out in a great hurry, trying not to be seen, she didn’t come back to the window.

  Night after night Cat went back to the same corner, just to watch her. Everything he got in the way of money now went to buying used clothes and to looking elegant. He had a touch of low-life elegance that was more in his way of walking, of wearing his hat, and making a casual knot in his tie rather than in the clothing itself. Cat had a desire for Dalva in the same way that he desired food when he was hungry, that he desired sleep when he was sleepy. He no longer paid any attention to the calls of the other women when after midnight they’d already taken care of the next day’s expenses and wanted some juvenile love from the little hoodlum. Once he went with one of them only to find out about Dalva’s life. That was how he found out that she had a lover, a flute player in a café who took the money she made and always had wild drinking bouts in her place, upsetting the lives of all the whores in the building.

  Cat came back every night. Dalva never even looked at him. That made him love her all the more. He would remain painfully waiting until a half hour after midnight when the flutist would arrive and, after kissing her through the window, would go in through the dimly-lighted door. Then Cat would go to the warehouse, his head full of thoughts: If the flutist didn’t come one day…If the flutist should die…He was weak, maybe he couldn’t even stand up to the weight of Cat’s fourteen years. And he squeezed the switchblade he carried in his shirt.

  And one night the flutist didn’t come. On that night Dalva had walked through the streets like a madwoman, she’d come home late, she hadn’t taken any man in and now she was there, posted at her window in spite of the fact that twelve o’clock had struck a long time ago. After a while the street was becoming deserted
. The only ones left were Cat on the corner and Dalva, who was still waiting at her window. Cat knew that this was his night and he was happy. Dalva was desperate. Cat began to stroll from one side of the street to the other until the woman noticed him and made a signal. He came right over, smiling.

  “Aren’t you the kid who hangs out on the corner all night?”

  “I’m the one who hangs out on the corner. As for the kid business…”

  She smiled sadly:

  “Will you do me a favor? I’ll give you something,” but then she thought and made a gesture. “No. You must be waiting for your little nibble and you haven’t got any time to waste.”

  “I can, sure. The one I’m waiting for isn’t coming now.”

  “Then what I want, boy, is for you to go to the Rua Rui Barbosa. Number thirty-five. Look for Gastão. He’s on the second floor. Tell him I’m waiting.”

  Cat left in humiliation. First he thought about not going and never coming back to see Dalva. But then he decided to go so he could get a close look at the flute player, who’d had the nerve to abandon such a pretty woman. He reached the building (a dark tenement with many floors), he went up the stairs, on the second floor he asked a boy sleeping in the hallway which was Mr. Gastão’s room. The boy pointed to the last apartment. Cat knocked on the door. The flutist came to open it, he was in his shorts and Cat saw a woman in the bed. They were both drunk:

  “Dalva sent me.”

  “Tell that bag to stop bothering me. I’ve had it up to here with her…” and he put his open hand onto his throat.

  From inside the room the woman spoke:

  “Who’s that little pimp?”

  “Keep out of this,” the flutist said, but then he added, “It’s a message from that bag Dalva. She’s in a tizzy because I haven’t come back.”

  The woman gave off a sottish drunken laugh:

  “But you only love your little Bebé now, don’t you? Come give me a kiss, you angel without wings.”

  The flutist also laughed:

  “See, squirt? Tell that to Dalva.”

  “I see an old whore stretched out there, yes, sir. What undertaker fixed you up with her, eh, buddy?”

  The flutist looked at him very seriously:

  “Don’t talk about my girlfriend,” and then, “Do you want a drink? It’s first-class stuff.”

  Cat went in. The woman on the bed covered herself. The flutist laughed:

  “It’s just a kid. Don’t be afraid.”

  “That old whore doesn’t tempt me,” Cat said. “Not even to jerk me off.”

  He drank the cane liquor. The flutist had already gone back to the bed and was kissing the woman. They didn’t see that Cat was leaving and was taking the prostitute’s purse, which had been left on the chair on top of her clothes. On the street Cat counted sixty-eight milreis. He threw the purse under the stairs and put the money into his pocket. And he whistled on his way to Dalva’s street.

  Dalva was waiting for him by the window. Cat looked straight at her:

  “I’m coming in…” and he went in without waiting for an answer.

  Dalva, still in the hallway, asked him:

  “What did he say?”

  Cat replied:

  “Sit here,” and he pointed to the bed.

  “This kid…” she murmured.

  “Look, sweety, he’s tied up with another woman, see? I told them both off too. Then I skinned the old whore,” he put his hand into his pocket, took out the money. “Let’s split it.”

  “So he’s with someone else, eh? But my Lord of Bonfim will cripple them both. The Lord of Bonfim is my patron saint.”

  She went over to where she had the religious picture. She made her vow and came back.

  “Keep your money. You earned it fair and square.”

  Cat repeated:

  “Sit down, here.”

  This time she sat down, he grabbed her and put her down on the bed. Then she moaned with love and from the little slaps he gave her, and murmured:

  “This kid is like a man…” He got up, smoothed his pants, went over to where the picture of Gastão the flutist was, and tore it up.

  “I’m going to get a picture taken for you to put up there.”

  The woman laughed and said:

  “Come here, my little devil. What a hoodlum you’re going to be. I’ll teach you lots of things, my little puppy.”

  She closed the door of the room. Cat took his clothes off.

  That’s why Cat leaves every midnight and doesn’t sleep in the warehouse. He only returns in the morning to go out with the others for the day’s adventures.

  Legless went over and teased him:

  “Now you’ll show me the ring, eh?”

  “What do you care about that?” Cat was smoking a cigarette. “You just wanted to come to see if you could run across a woman who’d love you, crippled the way you are, right?”

  “I don’t go to whorehouses. I know where things worth the trouble are.”

  But Cat wasn’t in a mood for chatting and Legless continued his wandering about the warehouse.

  Legless leaned up against a wall and let time pass. He watched Cat leave around eleven-thirty. He smiled because he’d washed his face, put grease on his hair, and was walking with that sway that hoodlums and sailors have. Then Legless spent a long time looking at the sleeping children. There were fifty of them, more or less, with no father, no mother, no master. All they had for themselves was the freedom to run in the streets. They didn’t always lead an easy life, getting what they needed to eat and wear by carrying baggage, stealing wallets and hats, holding up people, sometimes begging. And the gang was made up of more than a hundred children, because a lot of others didn’t sleep in the warehouse. They spread out in the doorways of the tall buildings, on the docks, in overturned boats on the sands of the Pôrto da Lenha, where the firewood came in. None of them complained. Sometimes one of them would die from an illness they couldn’t treat. When Father José Pedro dropped by at the right time, or the mãe-de-santo priestess Don’Aninha, or God’s-Love too, the patient had some relief. Never what a child would have at home, however, Legless was thinking. And he found that the joy of that freedom was slight when compared to the misfortune of that life.