by Jorge Amado
The reference to the discovery of America comes from the current and omnipresent celebrations: A peaceable person can’t take the smallest step or blow the slightest fart without the Fifth Centenary landing on his head. Of the Discovery, say the descendants of the fearless men who discovered the other side of the sea; of the Conquest, exclaim the descendants of the massacred Indians; of the enslaved blacks, cultures wiped out by the passage of mercenaries and missionaries carrying the cross of Christ and the baptismal font.
The argument is all laid on, a violent polemic with no middle ground, no agreement in sight, sectarianism predominating on both sides, and anyone who wants to can get involved and leave himself open to carrying off the scraps. I’m not going to be the one to do it, no not I, a Brazilian of mixed blood, the fruit of the Discovery and of the Conquest, of the mixture. I am only recounting here what happened to Jamil Bichara, Raduan Murad, and other Arabs in full discovery of Brazil back there at the beginning of the century. The first to arrive from the Middle East carried papers issued by the Ottoman Empire, which is why right down to the present moment they’re all stamped as Turks, making up that fine Turkish nation, one of the many in the amalgamation that has composed and is still composing the Brazilian nation.
The ship that the young Jamil Bichara and the wise Raduan Murad had boarded made port in the Bay of All Saints in October 1903, 411 years after the epic of Columbus’s caravels. But this did not cause their landing not to be a discovery and a conquest, for the lands to the south in the state of Bahia, where they set themselves up to do battle, were at the time covered with virgin forest. The planting of crops and the building of houses was just beginning. Colonels and their hired guns were killing one another in disputes over land, the best in the world for growing cacao. Coming from different regions were backlanders, Sergipeans, Jews, Turks—they were called Turks, those Arabs, Syrians, and Lebanese—all of them Brazilians.
2
Begun on board, the friendship that linked Jamil Bichara and Raduan Murad continued and grew stronger when the two immigrants decided without any previous discussion to test their lives in the southern lands of Bahia, the newly discovered El Dorado of cacao.
During their dismal crossing Jamil had come to admire the wisdom and skills of Murad. Almost a child still, a youth, Jamil filled with enthusiasm as he watched his traveling companion overcome seasickness and squander his knowledge and cunning at the poker table—just a plank that went up and down with the rolling of the ship—and the backgammon board. Or as he listened to him declaim love poetry, some of it of a delightful concupiscence, about odalisques and wine, which he recited in Arabic or Persian on moonlit nights under a blanket of stars spread out over the sea. Jamil and the others who listened, a coarse rabble, didn’t know the Persian tongue, nor did the ancient name of Omar Khayyám mean anything to them, but the sonority of the stanzas of the Rubaiyat, the enveloping melody alleviated the harshness of the voyage and served to increase Raduan Murad’s prestige. He disembarked surrounded by respect, his pockets garnished with coins of copper, silver, and gold, earnings brought him by talent and manual skill.
The El Dorado of cacao! People were hurrying there from the backlands, from the northeastern states—Sergipe, the smallest of them, the closest and the poorest, saw itself become almost depopulated of men; they were abandoning wives, fiancées, lovers. The Arabs, too: No sooner did they get off the vessel of the Bahia Shipping Line at the port of Ilhéus than they made for the forests, going off in search of a sure and easy fortune. Easy fortune? Better to say an uncertain and risky fortune. If the chosen one didn’t start off by kicking the bucket in his first encounter with thugs, if he persisted, it would take a lot of heart and hard work for the courage to face death.
Jamil was well-disposed for work and was fearless by heredity. A Levantine born in the tribal lands of the Euphrates, he had inherited the valor of tribes that fought among themselves just for the fun of fighting and for the pleasure of life. Something similar might be said about Raduan Murad, in spite of all the gossip. Without even making note of his moral courage, which was questionable, how could anyone deny the boldness and lack of fear in someone who more than once had stood up to toughs in gambling dens, unarmed, too, in a land where no one went about without his shotgun or his pistol? Calm, serene, impassive, even when suspicions and threats were forthcoming (truculent people didn’t always greet the “Itabuna ploy” with laughter or applause).
As for saying, as some did, that he was a sworn enemy of work, holding it in a holy horror, as so frequently happens with educated people, it would be a matter of an obvious injustice and ill will. If, in fact, during his early youth the Professor—that was what many people respectfully called him—stubbornly avoided tasks that were not in line with his intellectual capacity, there was no more assiduous and punctual laborer at the poker table or in any other game of chance. Chance? For Raduan Murad there was no such thing as a game of chance. In a round of conversation he was unbeatable, and from time to time, as a pastime, he would write in fluent Portuguese, with a captivating Oriental accent, newspaper articles about problems of the cacao zone. The only reason he didn’t write them more frequently was that there weren’t enough newspapers to publish them and he feared they might want to make him schoolmaster or appoint him to a government position. Inclined to preserve his freedom, he loved above all else his right to make use of his time. He didn’t want it to be ruled by the hands of a clock.
Although they were different from each other in everything, the two Turks, the Syrian and the Lebanese, forged a friendship that nothing could disturb. They were like brothers, even though of enemy nationalities. Jamil had been born Syrian, while Raduan was Lebanese by birth and by conviction. Nor did they coincide in matters of religion, young Jamil swearing by Allah and Mohammed, and the skeptic Raduan, while born to a Christian family of the Maronite sect, had been converted by life’s experiences and the vice of books into a materialist (more or less immoral). And the difference in age was no obstacle to their comradeship. When all this was taking place, Jamil had yet to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, a randy stud vied for by ladies of the night. Raduan was past forty and a charmer in his fifties, the wonder of all the girls, large and small.
Nor did it matter that Itaguassu, a hamlet lost in the woods where Jamil toiled, was quite a distance from Itabuna, a growing and prosperous city to which Raduan had conceded the privilege of his living and operating. Once a month Jamil would come to Itabuna with the intention of renewing the supplies for his place of business, tiny but the only one in Itaguassu, where he sold a bit of everything to the small population of the village and the vast flow of those passing through: herdsmen, hired hands, gunmen, and the wandering nation of whores that came and went through the cacao clearings. He would also come unexpectedly to relieve his boredom and have another look at civilization—“Are you here for your bath of civilization, old chum?” Raduan would greet him when he saw him arrive without notice—to have some fun, relax (nobody’s made of iron) in the cabaret, bars, a whorehouse. It was his feast day. Jamil and Raduan, the philosopher, never separated, gabbing endlessly, lots of laughs, drinks, polkas, and mazurkas. On nights of great merriment, on the streets of Itabuna, arm in arm with Cockeye Paula or some other woman, Raduan would get the urge to declaim in Arabic love poems in which the wine flowed and sultanas danced. Holding hands with Glorinha Goldass as he listened, Jamil was moved to tears.
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Sitting and resting at the end of the day’s hustle and bustle—oh, so tired!—on the sidewalk by the Itaguassu Emporium, in front of the establishment, his living quarters in the rear, several years after the engagement ceremony, Jamil Bichara laughed loud and hard as he remembered the problems of the deal concerning the small dry-goods store and the danger he had subjected himself to when, advised by Raduan Murad, Ibrahim Jafet had offered him a partnership in the Bargain Shop as compensation for the hand in marriage of Adma, his oldest daughter. The three younger girls were marr
ied, for better or worse, but she, cherry intact, sour, crabby, undamaged, more than merely a virgin: an old maid.
Because of her (and because of the store, a good deal!) Jamil had been in danger of abandoning Itaguassu and his newly established Emporium—prestigious in name only—where he sold flour and beans, cachaça, and sandals. Later on he got to selling both wholesale and retail, supplying the plantations in the region and the inhabitants of the village with a varied stock that went from jerked beef to denim pants, from raw-leather sandals to ladies’ hats and boots, bolts of cloth, spools of linen, needles, hair oil, pictures of Catholic saints and miracle workers. Although a good Muslim of the Shiite sect, Jamil had no religious prejudices when it came to making money. Allah is great, his wisdom is infinite, he can read men’s hearts, he understands and esteems everything.
The Bicharas, numerous and enterprising, were scattered all through the ports of the Mediterranean and its adjacencies. They were established in Spain, as has already been noted, in Crete, in Egypt, and in Morocco, going from Libya to Italy, reaching Senegal. A certain Michel Bichara had headed a band of footpads in the French city of Marseilles, ending up on the guillotine. The first to discover America, heading for Brazil, was Jamil. In the annals of the family his name appears next to that of Michel, the brigand of the port city.
On the day of his departure, before sailing, he went to kneel in front of Mullah Tahar Bichara, his great-uncle, a wise and holy man, a favored disciple of the Prophet, who spoke with Allah during moments of prayer. It was predicted he would soon attain the honors and emoluments of an ayatollah. From him Jamil got a letter of recommendation addressed to their countryman Anuar, sheikh of the tribe of the Marons, who was well established with cacao plantations in the state of Bahia. A letter to the moneybags and prayers to Allah, who would not abandon his son lost in the vastness of America. The mullah would see to it that the name of Jamil would remain in the mouth and ears of Allah and of his prophet Mohammed.
The letter was indeed valuable, determining for Jamil the choice of the region of southern Bahia. There he had someone to lean on as he began life. Surely the requests of the venerable Tahar would make it possible for the new Brazilian not to feel lost, abandoned in his adopted country, which he must conquer foot by foot and day by day. It is incumbent upon Allah to assist his children at decisive moments, defend them against the temptations of Shaitan, the insidious Satan, point out the right path to them, stop them from committing a great error capable of making them suffer on earth the horrors of hell.
Allah accompanied Jamil’s steps as his wandering son for a long time when, for the Turk Anuar Maron, he covered the whole cacao region from north to south and east to west as the borders grew longer and the distances greater and greater. He saved him from multiple dangers: rattlesnakes and jararacussu vipers and their deadly fangs, the endemic smallpox, black pox, which was certain death, ambushes, gunmen, the conflicts and battles of colonel against colonel, in which killers and henchmen left bodies on the road marked by carbine and stab wounds.
Anuar Maron—Colonel Maron, because he was a millionaire plantation owner with some eighty thousand tons—added to his harvest the meager pickings of those who owned just a small piece of cultivated land and were without means to transport their dry cacao to the warehouses of the export firms established in Ilhéus and Itabuna. Jamil gathered up the production of the small farmers for him, in an agreement with representatives of Colonel Misael Tavares, the cacao king, or Colonel Basílio de Oliveira, the master of Pirangi.
For four years, riding mules and donkeys or on foot along dangerous bypaths, Jamil swept through the forest and conquered it as he bought cacao at low prices. He learned how to dicker and to practice accounting and medicine, establishing relationships and friendships, as godfather baptizing children into the Catholic faith—may Allah understand and forgive him.
Allah understood all and forgave everything; he kept watch over him, attentive to the mullah’s prayers. Jamil had proof of this when a dispute separated him once and for all from Colonel Anuar Maron. In the village of Ferradas, where he’d been sent on an errand, he met and gathered to his bosom the capricious Jove, a wild and lusty half-breed. The affair caused talk, and news of it reached the colonel’s ears. Anuar Maron had set up a house for Jove, had taken her out of the red-light district, wanted her all for himself and wouldn’t hear of anyone else grazing in his pastures. He settled accounts with his countryman and fired him. He didn’t send a gunman who was a good shot to lie in wait for the bold fellow in an ambush and send him off to the land of the stiffs. It must have been because he remembered the mullah and had a great deal of respect for him.
On that occasion, when Jamil saw himself in a hole, out of work and with no place to turn, Colonel Noberto de Faria made him a proposition. A plantation owner even richer than the Turk Maron, the owner of leagues of land planted haphazardly and not too great a distance from Itaguassu, he’d developed a friendship with Jamil, whom he’d come to know in the whorehouses of Itabuna, of which he was an assiduous and jolly frequenter. Desirous of seeing prosper the settlement that had sprung up near his lands, Colonel Noberto, when he heard of Jamil’s troubles, asked him if he might not be interested in going into business in Itaguassu, dealing on his own instead of working for a boss. What else could Jamil be longing for from life? It was his dream, but where was the capital to start it? Noberto de Faria, a native of Sergipe with traces of mulatto, a man of honor and vision, placed the necessary sum at Jamil’s disposal, trusting in him and swearing to the great esteem in which he held him. He called him his partner at table and in bed, because they had the same girls, ate from the same plate, and had similar tastes: small boobs, big asses, tight twats. Pleasant concordances always reinforce the bonds of friendship.
He set himself up under the protection of Allah—Allah is great—and Mohammed is his prophet, it’s worth repeating—with dough loaned by Colonel Noberto de Faria. Three years later he’d already paid back the loan and was enlarging the Emporium bit by bit. It was still a long way off from being compared with the shops and stores in the cities of Ilhéus and Itabuna or the villages of Ferradas, Olivença, Agua Preta, and Pirangi, but it wouldn’t be long (and who could doubt it?) before Itaguassu would cease to be just a settlement and the Emporium would be head and shoulders, as far as stock and clientele were concerned, over Ibrahim Jafet’s Bargain Shop. Jamil Bichara, sitting on the sidewalk in front of his business, thanked Allah for having saved him when, taken by greed, haste, and the temptation of easy money, he had almost followed the advice of Shaitan: to abandon Itaguassu, marry Adma, and ruin himself.
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The events took place when Ibrahim Jafet began to see that things were in bad shape. The prospects for the store’s balance sheet were dismal: With his son-in-law Alfeu behind the counter and at the cash register, the winds of bankruptcy began to blow. Dark were the forecasts for daily life at home: Adma, condemned to spinsterhood, had assumed command of the house and family with a harsh zeal as storm clouds threatened the dwindling moments of pleasure. The economic situation and his pleasant life were in imminent danger.
The Bargain Shop, a small dry-goods store with plenty of customers, a good inventory, and credit in the marketplace, had been enough to serve for many years the family’s needs and the owner’s modest pleasures of fishing, checkers, and backgammon. The uncontested head of the tribe during her life, Sálua, Ibrahim’s wife, had taken charge and busied herself with the store: The notions counter saw prosperous times and brought in good savings. A handsome, sturdy woman with languid eyes that looked like those on a calendar print, she was the disciplinarian, stern, demanding and yet gentle, tender, and affable as well.
An expert at marking prices and finding bargains, she did a little cheating as she manipulated the yardstick and the shears, laughing and gossiping with the customers, almost all women. Esteemed, respected, with a light hand in a caress and a heavy one in punishment, Sálua ran the shop, her daughters, and
her husband with fine competence.
The intellectual Raduan Murad, a persona most grata and a good friend of the family, Ibrahim’s companion at checkers and backgammon, proclaimed her the matriarch. Strict and moral, she was no less capable of love in dealing with her daughters or restraint when in bed with her idolized husband, to whom she consented in all things—consented or commanded? She would kill herself working so that he might have a morning of fishing, an afternoon of siesta and gambling, content to have him at night: every night, starting at nine o’clock, the time for putting out the lamp and lighting up her huge sultana eyes for their unflagging nuptials in the darkness of the bedroom.
Matriarchs are like that: imposing and demanding with ordinary people, liberal and magnanimous with their favorites. Raduan Murad would explain that to his admirers gathered to listen to him at the poker table, at a bar, in a cabaret, in brothels—locales where he squandered wisdom and buffoonery. He would cite the example of Ibrahim Jafet: a unique and exclusive favorite, a regular lord!
Sálua’s unexpected death changed the ways at home and in the store. Disoriented, Ibrahim added the nighttime frequenting of whores to his morning fishing and his afternoon checkerboard, in search of compensation and consolation. One today, another tomorrow, the girls only served to keep him far away from the bedroom in the living quarters above the store, which had become cold and gloomy ever since his beloved had left him. Even if he could have managed to blend together with one stroke of magic the eminent partners, the ablest specialists at their trade in a medley of techniques and styles and in one single dissolute bed, not even then would it have matched the renowned mastery, the universal wisdom of Sálua. A divine gift, most certainly, Murad stated, because there was no place where she could have learned it or anyone who could have taught her. Sálua’s bed, nevermore!