Orphans of Eldorado

by Milton Hatoum

  To my mother

  Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives—they explore our desires, our fears, our longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Alai, Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Michel Faber, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Klas Östergren, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Dubravka Ugresšić, Salley Vickers and Jeanette Winterson.

  The City

  You said, ‘I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to another sea.

  I’ll find a city better than this one.

  My every effort is a written indictment,

  and my heart—like someone dead—is buried.

  How long will my mind remain in this decaying state?

  Wherever I cast my eyes, wherever I look,

  I see my life in black ruins here,

  where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted them.’

  You will not find new lands, you will not find other seas.

  The city will follow you. You will roam

  the same streets. And you will grow old in the same neighbourhood,

  and your hair will turn white in the same houses.

  You will always arrive in this city. Don’t hope for elsewhere—

  there is no ship for you, there is no road.

  As you have wasted your life here,

  in this small corner, so you have ruined it on the whole earth.

  C.P. CAVAFY, 1910

  The woman’s voice attracted so many people, that I escaped from my teacher’s house and went down to the edge of the Amazon to see. An Indian woman, one of the city’s tapuias, was speaking and pointing to the river. I can’t remember what designs were painted on her face; their colour I can remember, though: red urucum juice. In the humid afternoon, there was a rainbow that looked like a serpent, embracing the sky and the water.

  Florita followed after me, and began translating what the woman was saying in the indigenous language; she would interpret some phrases and then go silent, as if unsure of herself. She was having doubts about the words she was translating: or about her own voice. She was saying she’d left her husband because he spent all his time hunting and wandering here and there, leaving her alone in Aldeia. That is, until the day she was seduced by an enchanted being. Now she was going to live with her lover, deep in the river bed. She wanted to live in a better world, without so much suffering and misfortune. She spoke without looking at the porters on the Market ramp, or at the fishermen and the girls from the Carmo College. I remember the girls began to weep and ran away, and only much later did I understand why.

  Suddenly the tapuia stopped talking and entered the water. Curious bystanders froze, as if spellbound. And all of them saw how she began to swim calmly in the direction of the Island of the Hoatzins. Her body sank into the shining river, and then someone shouted: The madwoman’s going to drown herself. The boatmen sailed over to the island, but they didn’t find the woman. She’d disappeared. She never came back.

  Florita translated the stories I heard when I played with the little Indian children in Aldeia, right on the edge of the town. Strange legends, they were. Listen to this one: it’s the story of a man with an enormous cock, so long it crossed the Amazon, went right through Espírito Santo Island and speared a girl in the Mirror of the Moon Lake. Then the cock wound itself round the man’s throat, and while he struggled to avoid being strangled, the girl asked, laughing: Now where’s that long cock got to?

  I remember too the story of a woman who was seduced by a male tapir. Her husband killed the tapir, cut the animal’s penis off and hung it up in the doorway of the hut. The woman covered the penis with mud until it was hard and dry; she spoke affectionately to the little thing and caressed it. Then the husband rubbed a lot of pepper onto the clay cock and watched from his hiding place as the woman licked the little thing and sat astride it. They say she jumped and screamed with so much pain, and that her tongue and body burned like fire. The only way out was to dive into the river and become a toad. And the husband went to live by the riverbank, sad and repentant, begging his wife to come back to him.

  These were legends that Florita and I heard from the grandparents of the children in Aldeia. They spoke in the língua geral, and later Florita repeated the stories at home, in the lonely nights of my childhood.

  One strange story frightened me: the one about the severed head—the divided woman. Her body keeps going in search of food in other villages, while her head takes flight and sticks to her husband’s shoulder. The man and the head are conjoined for the whole day. Then, at nightfall, when a bird sings and the first star appears in the sky, the woman’s body returns and sticks to the head. But, one night, another man robs half the body. The husband doesn’t want to live just with his wife’s head; he wants all of her. He spends his life looking for the body, sleeping and waking with his wife’s head stuck to his shoulder. The head was silent, but alive; it could feel the world with its eyes, and its eyes didn’t shrink—they saw everything. It was a head with a heart.

  I was nine or ten, and never forgot. Does anyone hear those voices any more? I began to brood over this, for there is a moment when stories become a part of our lives. One of the heads ruined me. The other wounded my heart and my soul, and left me at the edge of this river, suffering, waiting for a miracle. Two women. But isn’t a woman’s story a man’s story too? Before the First World War, who hadn’t heard of Arminto Cordovil? Lots of people knew my name, everyone had heard tell of the wealth of my father, Amando, Edílio’s son.

  See that lad over there riding a tricycle? He sells ice lollies. Whistling, the slyboots. He’s going to move slowly over to the shade of that jatobá. In the old days, I could have bought the whole box of lollies, and the tricycle too. Now he knows I can’t buy anything. Now, just out of spite, he’s going to look at me with owlish eyes. Then he gives a false laugh and pedals off, and over by the Carmo Church he shouts: Arminto Cordovil’s a madman. Just because I spend my afternoons looking at the river. When I look at the Amazon, my memory takes flight, a voice comes from my mouth and I only stop talking the moment the big bird sings. The tinamou will appear later, with his grey wings, the colour of the sky at dusk. It sings, saying goodbye to the daylight. Then I fall silent and let night enter my life.

  Our life never stops going round in circles. In those days I wasn’t living in this filthy ruin. The white palace of the Cordovils, now that was a real house. Once I had decided to live with my beloved in the palace, she disappeared off the face of the earth. They said she lived in an enchanted city, but I didn’t believe it. What’s more, I was in a parlous state, without a penny to my name. No love, no money and, on top of all that, at risk of losing the white palace. And I hadn’t my father’s obstinacy—nor his cunning either. Amando Cordovil could have swallowed the whole world. He was fearless: a man who laughed at death. Anyway, see here: good fortune falls in your lap, and a gust of wind blows it all away. I eagerly threw the fortune away, taking a blind pleasure in doing so. I wanted to rub out the past and the ill fame of my grandfather Edílio. I never knew that particular Cordovil. They said he never tired, didn’t know what laziness was, and worked like a horse in the humid heat of this land. In 1840, at the end of the Cabano War, he planted cocoa in the Boa Vida plantation, a property on the right bank of the Uaicurapá, a few hours from here by boat. But he died before he realised an old dream: the building of the white palace in this town. Amando moved into the house when he married my mother. Then he began to dream of ambitious destinations for his freight
ers. One day I’m going to compete with the Booth Line and Lloyd Brasileiro, my father would say. I’m going to carry rubber to Le Havre, Liverpool and New York. Another Brazilian who died still waiting for his day of greatness to arrive. In the end, I found out about other things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ll recount what my memory can reach, slowly and patiently.

  I must have been about twenty when Amando took me to Manaus. My father didn’t say a word throughout the journey; only when we got off the boat did he utter these two sentences: You’re going to live in the Pension Saturno. And you know why.

  It was a small, old pension in Instalação da Província Street. I lived in one of the rooms on the ground floor, and used the bathroom next to the basement, where some lads who’d fled from the Young Apprentices’ Institute lived. They did odd jobs, working in bakeries and the German brewery; one of them, Juvêncio, jobless and without qualifications, walked around with a machete, and no one meddled with him. When my father was in his office, Florita would escape to the pension to chat with me and do my washing. She didn’t like Juvêncio; she was afraid of being stabbed by him. She detested my room at the Saturno too. She’d say: With that prison cell window, you’re sure to die of suffocation. Florita was accustomed to the comfort of the house in the Manaus suburbs, and the white palace in Vila Bela. I asked about Amando, but she didn’t tell me everything. She said nothing about the firm’s new freighter. I had read in the paper that the vessel was in Manaus Harbour. A steamship with wheels on its sides, built by Holtz, the German shipyard. It was a real freighter; the other two were just lighters or barges. I was proud, and showed Florita the paper.

  I was going to do a dinner for him, she said. Your father didn’t want me to. He’s worried about paying for the boat. Or something else.

  Florita wanted me to live with her and Amando: the three of us, in the Manaus house. I wanted that too, and she knew it. Here in Vila Bela they told Florita that my father had been happy with my mother at his side. When she died, Amando didn’t know what to do with me. To this day I remember the words that destroyed me: Your mother gave birth to you and died. Florita heard these words, hugged me and took me to the bedroom.

  A tapuia breastfed me. An Indian’s milk, or the milky gum of the amapá tree. I don’t remember the face of that nurse, or of any other, for that matter. It’s a dark time; I’ve no memory of it. Until the day Amando came into my room with a girl and said: She’s going to look after you. Florita never left my side, and that’s why I missed her so when I was living in the Saturno.

  In Manaus I did nothing—just read in the dining room, then dozed off in the afternoon heat and woke in a sweat, thinking of my father. I was waiting for something, without knowing what it was. My greatest worry at that time was knowing if the silent hostility between my father and myself was my fault or his. I was still young, and thought the punishment for having abused Florita was deserved, and that I ought to bear the burden of the guilt. I went to the Ingleses neighbourhood and hung round the house in the hope of speaking to my father or being seen by him. I watched the dining-room windows and imagined Amando looking passionately at my mother’s portrait. I didn’t have the courage to knock at the door, and carried on down the tree-lined street, looking at the bungalows and chalets with their immense gardens. Once, at night, I saw a man very like Amando on the Boulevard Amazonas. The same gait, the same height, arms by his side and fists clenched. He was walking alongside a woman, and they stopped in front of the Castelhana water tank. I doubted it could be my father when I saw his hands stroke the woman’s hair. As I recall it, I think of the legend of the severed head. The man escaped like a rat: he ran into a dark street, pulling the girl along by her arms. The next day I went to the house. I wanted to know if it was really him I’d seen with a woman on the pavement of the Castelhana. He wouldn’t let me in or say a word about it. In the doorway, he said:

  What you did to Florita was bestial.

  He slowly shut the door, as if he wanted to disappear little by little, and for ever.

  He spent most of his time in Manaus. He went by tram to the office and worked even when he was asleep, as he himself used to say. But he often came here. My father liked Vila Bela; he had a morbid attachment to his home town. Before I lived in the Saturno, I’d been two or three times to Manaus on holiday. I didn’t want to go back to Vila Bela. It was a journey in time, going back a century. Manaus had everything: electric light, telephones, newspapers, cinemas, theatres, opera. Amando only gave me enough change for the tram. Florita took me to the floating harbour and the aviary in the Matriz Square, then we’d walk round the city, looking at the posters for the films at the Alcazar and the Polytheama, going back to the house in the late afternoon. I waited for Amando on the piano stool. It was an anguished wait. I wanted him to hug me and chat with me, or at least look at me, but I was always greeted with the same question: Been for a walk? Then he’d go over to the wall and kiss my mother’s photograph.

  I thought I was condemned for ever, guilty of my mother’s death, when the lawyer Estiliano appeared in the Rua da Instalação for a chat.

  He told me I couldn’t moulder in a pension for down-and-outs. He knew it was Amando’s decision, his way of punishing his lecherous son. But why didn’t I study to get into the law faculty? My father would soon change his mind.

  Estiliano was Amando’s only friend. ‘My dear Stelios’—that’s what my father called him. This old friendship had begun in places they recalled out loud, as if they were both still young: the beaches of Uaicurapá and Varre Vento, Macuricanã Lake, where they fished together for the last time, before Estiliano travelled to Recife and came back a lawyer, and Amando married my mother. The five-year separation hadn’t cooled their friendship. The two of them always met in Manaus and Vila Bela; they looked admiringly at one other, as if they were looking in a mirror; together, they gave the impression that each believed in the other more than he did in himself.

  I saw the lawyer with the same white jacket, the same trousers with braces, and an emblem of Justice on his lapel. His hoarse, deep voice intimidated everyone; he was too tall and robust to be discreet, and drank whole bottles of red wine at any hour of the day or night. When he’d drunk a great deal, he’d talk about the bookshops in Paris as if he was there, though he’d never been to France. Wine and literature were Estiliano’s pleasures; I don’t know where he put, or hid, the desires of the flesh. I know he translated Greek and French poets. And he looked after the legal side of the business. Amando, an austere man, closed his eyes and covered his ears when his friend recited poems in the Avenida restaurant or the bar in Liceu Square. After Florita, Estiliano was the person nearest to me. Right till the last day.

  My father would change. Right, then. I spent two years studying in the Municipal Library; at night, in my room, I read the books Estiliano had lent me. The lads in the basement laughed. The graduate from the Saturno. The man of justice. Juvêncio didn’t laugh though. He was shy and serious, a lad of few words. I left the pension when I entered the Free University of Manaus. And in the same week Juvêncio too left the Saturno. He went to live on the pavement in front of the High Life Bar, and I above the Cosmopolitan Grocery Store on the Rua Marquês de Santa Cruz. It was a spacious room with a window overlooking the customs and excise offices. In the Cosmopolitan I got to know the city. The heart and the eyes of Manaus are in its docks and along the bank of the Rio Negro. The great port area swarmed with businessmen, fishermen, colliers, dock-workers, peddlers. I got a job in a store run by a Portuguese man, studied in the morning, had my lunch in the Market and spent the afternoon carrying boxes and serving customers. Even with a tiny wage, I informed Estiliano, I was managing to pay the rent for my room.

  Amando insisted on paying, said Estiliano. The separation between you is causing him to suffer, but he’s too proud to hold out his hand to his son.

  I had intended to go by his house to hold out my hand to this proud man, but chance brought the meeting about sooner. On
e afternoon I had to go to the Escadaria Quay to carry some boxes to the store. Amando was there, with the firm’s business manager. This manager imitated everything about my father, down to his gait. He didn’t drink because his boss was a teetotaller, and bought clothes in the Mandarim, Amando’s favourite shop. But what really irritated me were his eyes—it was as if they were made of glass. The guy never looked at me. And what in my father was authentic, in him became almost comical. I showed the documents for the goods to the excise officer. I was a few yards away from Amando Cordovil. I waited for acknowledgement, but he looked at my apron and didn’t say a word to me: he went over to the kiosk in the Market, with the manager behind him like a pet dog. Two days later the storeowner told me a nephew was coming to work with him. He didn’t need me any more.

  I never knew for certain if I’d been dismissed on my father’s orders, but I still hoped to talk to him. I told the owner of the Cosmopolitan that I was out of work, and that the rent would be late. As he had friends in the harbour, I began to work helping passengers embark and disembark. I spent the whole day at the port and had no time for study. I got no pay, just tips; I was given clothes, hats and second-hand books. I got to know the captain of the Atahualpa, the Re Umberto, the Anselm, the Rio Amazonas. I became friendly with Wolf Nickels, of the La Plata. These captains worked for Lamport and Holt, the Ligure Brasiliana, the Lloyd Brasileiro, the Booth Line and the Hamburg–South America. Sometimes I accompanied foreign passengers on a canoe trip to the lakes near Manaus; I took them round the centre of the city—they were mad keen to see the Opera House, and couldn’t understand how such a grand work of architecture could exist in the middle of the jungle.

  I saw the German freighter close to only once, at dawn, after I’d spent the night at a cheap cabaret in the Rua da Independência. I sat on the floating quay and read the word painted in white on the prow: Eldorado. So much greed and illusion! Looking at the freighter, I remembered that Amando hated seeing his son consort with the children in Aldeia. We would catch fish with bows and arrows, bathe in the river and run on the beach. When he appeared at the top of the Fishermen’s Steps, I would return to the white palace. I remembered the contempt and the silence too. That hurt more than the stories he told me in the Boa Vida plantation.