We left Manaus in a small launch, passing through the heart of the Anavilhanas archipelago in the mid-morning. The desire to see Dinaura made me lose my bearings. The desire, and the memories of Boa Vida. The sight of the Rio Negro defeated my desire to forget the Uaicurapá. And my childhood landscape lit my memory up, so long after. Ribs of white sand and stretches of beach contrasting with the dark water; lakes fringed by dense vegetation; enormous pools formed by the retreating waters, and islands that looked like mainland. Was it possible to find a woman in such a grandiose natural setting? By midday we reached the Anum branch of the river and sighted the island of Eldorado. The pilot tied the launch ropes to the trunk of a tree; then we looked for the trail marked on the map. The two-hour trek through the forest was painful and difficult. At the end of the track, we saw the lake of Eldorado. The water was bluish-black. And the surface was smooth and still like a mirror reflecting the night. It was unimaginably beautiful. There were a few wooden houses between the riverbank and the forest. Not a voice could be heard. No children—for in the most isolated settlements of the Amazon, children cannot be heard. The sounds of the birds only increased the silence. I thought I saw a face in a house with a straw roof. I knocked on the door—nothing. I went in and searched through the two rooms separated by a partition of about my height. A dark lump was trembling in a corner. I went over to it, crouched down and saw a nest of giant cockroaches. I felt stifled: the smell and the disgusting sight of the insects made me break out in a sweat. Outside was the immensity of the lake and the forest. And silence. This place, so beautiful, Eldorado, was inhabited by solitude. At the edge of the settlement we found a hut for making manioc flour. We heard some barking; the pilot pointed to a house in the shade of the forest trees. It was the only one with tiles, with a veranda protected by a wooden trellis, and a can with bromelias in it at the side of the steps. There was a noise. In the door I saw a girl’s face and went towards her, alone. She hid her body, and I asked her if she lived there.
I live with my mother, she said, jutting out her lips in the direction of the other side of the lake.
Where are the others?
They’ve died and gone away.
Died and gone away?
She nodded. And slowly she appeared, until she showed her whole body, shrinking back with shyness and mistrust.
Do you work in this house?
I spend the day here.
Did she know a woman . . . Dinaura?
She recoiled a little, joined her hands, as if praying, and turned her head towards the inside of the house.
The room was small, with a few objects: a little table, two stools, a low shelf full of books. Two windows opened onto the Eldorado Lake. I stopped near a narrow corridor. Before I entered the room, the pilot and the girl looked at me, without understanding what was happening, or what was going to happen.
~
I returned to Vila Bela and remained hidden away here, but I was much more alive. No one else wanted to hear this story. That’s why people think I live alone here, me and my madman’s voice. Then you came in to rest in the shade of the jatobá, asked for water and had the patience to listen to an old man. It was a relief to purge this fire from my soul. Don’t we breathe through what we speak? Don’t storytelling and singing blot out our pain? So much I tried to say to Dinaura, so many things she wasn’t able to hear from me. I wait for the tinamou to sing at the end of the afternoon. Just listen to that song. Then our night begins. You’re looking at me as if I was a liar. The same look as the others. Do you think you’ve just spent hours in this shack listening to legends?
Afterword
One Sunday in 1965, before there was TV in the Amazon region, my grandfather asked me to come and have lunch at his house in Manaus. I never refused these invitations, because I knew that, after eating the delicacies prepared by my grandmother, he would ask me to come and converse in the shade of a jambeiro. In reality, it was a monologue, which I interrupted only with questions. That afternoon, my grandfather told me one of the stories he’d heard in 1958, on one of his journeys to the interior of the region.
It was a love story, with a dramatic slant, as happens almost always in literature, and, sometimes, in life. This story also evoked an Amazonian myth: the Enchanted City.
Many natives and dwellers on the banks of the Amazon believed—and still believe—that at the bottom of the river or lake there exists a rich, splendid city, a model of harmony and social justice, where people live as enchanted beings. They are seduced and taken to the bottom of the river by the inhabitants of the waters or the jungle (generally a river dolphin or an anaconda) and only return to our world with the mediation of a shaman, whose body or spirit has the power to go to the Enchanted City, talk to its inhabitants, and, perhaps, bring them back to our world.
I remember my grandfather spent some hours telling this story, and I listened entranced by his eloquence and his theatrical gestures.
Years later, when I read the accounts of the Amazon written by conquistadors and European travellers, I realised that the myth of Eldorado was one of the possible versions and variations of the Enchanted City, which in the Amazon region is also called a legend. Myths which are part of the Indo-European inheritance, but which are also part of Amerindian culture and of many others. For myths, like cultures, travel and are interlinked. They belong to history and to collective memory.
I asked my grandfather where he had heard the story of the orphans. Years later, when I was travelling in the middle reaches of the Amazon, I looked for the narrator in the town he mentioned. He lived in the same house my grandfather had described, and was so old that he didn’t know his own age. He refused to tell his story:
‘I’ve already told it once, to a river trader who came this way and had the goodness to listen to me. Now my memory is very dim, it’s lost its strength . . .’
Glossary
amapá: (Hancornia amapa) a tree with white wood and which exudes a white gum used in medicine.
beiju: a light ball made of toasted manioc flour, often sold in packets in the streets.
Booth Line: the main steamship line plying between Liverpool, Portugal, Madeira, the Azores, and up the Amazon to Belém, Manaus, and as far as Iquitos in Peru.
caboclo: a person of mixed indigenous and European descent.
Cabanos Revolt (1835–1840): Also known as the Cabanagem, this was a violent revolt against the political elite of Pará, notable for being almost exclusively supported by the poor and the indigenous population.
cavaquinho: a small guitar, similar to a ukelele, very widespread in Brazil and used in folk ensembles.
Cesário Verde (1855–1886): One of the most important and individual Portuguese poets of the nineteenth century, the first to free himself of romantic sentimentality and move towards a realism influenced by Baudelaire.
cuiarana: large tree (Buchenaria grandis) with red flowers and inedible fruit the size and colour of olives.
farofa: a dish made of manioc flour, fried with pieces of egg, meat etc. It is often used as a stuffing.
guaraná: a climbing plant (Paullinia cupana) native to the Amazon, whose fruit is used to make a fizzy drink very popular throughout Brazil. See sateré-maué below.
jaçanã: a water bird (Jacana spinosa) similar to rails and moorhens, with long toes allowing it to walk on floating plants.
jambeiro, jambo: a tree of Asian origin (Eugenia jambos), with pink fruit (jambo), known in English as rose apple.
jambu: a herb of the Compositae (Wulffia stenoglossa), with yellow flowers. Its leaves are eaten boiled and used to flavour rice.
jatobá: a tree of the Leguminosae (Hymenaea courbaril) found throughout much of Brazil, and exploited for its wood.
língua geral: a language of indigenous, Tupi origin, though with European influence, and much used as a lingua franca in the Brazilian past, and in the Amazonian region. It is also sometimes called nheengatu.
Manaus Harbour: originally the name of the (British
) company which administered the Port of Manaus; the name came to signify the whole port area of the city, with its warehouses, docks etc.
Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968): One of greatest poets of Brazilian modernism, and one of the oldest. His poems are often short and sharp, combining strong feeling (often about death—the poet suffered from tuberculosis) and ironic control.
maxixe: a common low-growing plant (Cucumis anguria) with small, green, spiny fruit, much used for cooking.
modinha: a traditional form of popular song, usually sentimental in tone and in the minor key.
paricá: a tree of the genus Anadenanthera, with white flowers. Its leaves, seeds and bark are used to produce a powerful powder or snuff, whose use in the Amazon is restricted to shamans. It is reputed to give them curing powers, and produces visions.
paulista: name given to people from the state and the city of São Paulo, the largest in Brazil, and the centre of the country’s wealth and industry.
President Getúlio Vargas (1882–1954): Vargas came to the Brazilian presidency in the ‘October Revolution’ of 1930, and kept in power by increasingly dictatorial means until 1945. His regime had fascist aspects, and he had good relations with the Axis powers. However, he eventually yielded to American pressure and joined the Allies—part of the motivation for this was the renewed importance of Brazilian (Amazonian) rubber, now that Malaya had fallen to Japan. He returned to the presidency in 1951, and after being implicated in the attempted murder of his rival Carlos Lacerda, committed suicide on 24 August 1954.
quilombo: a settlement of runaway slaves, of which there were many throughout the colonial period and the nineteenth century.
sateré-maué: an indigenous group inhabiting the middle reaches of the Amazon. They were the first group to cultivate guaraná (q.v.), a fact to which they give great importance. In their myths, they attribute their origins as a group to this discovery.
seu: an untranslatable way of referring to someone with familiarity, but also with a certain respect—seu Pedro, for example—the word is a corruption of the more formal ‘senhor’.
tapuia: a word originally applied to indigenous groups who spoke languages not belonging to the large and important Tupi group. In the novel, it is used to mean an indigenous person who, through subjection to white people, has lost part of his or her own culture.
tarubá: an alcoholic drink of indigenous origin made from fermented manioc.
tucupi: a condiment made of pepper and manioc juice purified over a fire to the consistency of molasses.
tupinambá: name given to several tribes who speak or spoke tupi-guarani, the most widely distributed indigenous language in Brazil.
urucum: a small tree (Bixa orellana) with a fruit whose red or yellow juice is used as a colourant in food, and by indigenous groups for body painting.
Acknowledgements
I have freely used a few indigenous narratives and passages about myths of the Brazilian Amazon from the books of Betty Mindlin, Candace Slater and Robin M. Wright. Although this fiction does not directly refer to the Indians or to indigenous culture, my reading of the essay A inconstância da alma selvagem (‘The inconstancy of the savage soul’), by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, was important for the understanding of the tupinambá peoples of the Amazon, and as an aid to reflecting on this novel.
My thanks to Jamie Byng, director of Canongate, who interested himself in the project for this book and included it in the Myths collection. Special thanks to Ruth Lanna, Samuel Titan Jr. and to my friends and publishers Luiz Schwarcz, Maria Emília Bender and Márcia Copola, who, as always, provided me with excellent suggestions.
Other friends who read the originals know how grateful I am for their patient, dedicated readings.
About the Author
Milton Hatoum was born in Manaus in 1952. His first novel, Tale of a Certain Orient, was published in Brazil in 1989 – it was followed by The Brothers in 2000 and by Ashes of the Amazon in 2005. All three won the prestigious Jabuti Prize for fiction and have been translated into English. The last was awarded the Portugal Telecom Prize for Literature as well. Milton Hatoum also published a collection of short stories in 2009, A cidade ilhada (The Island City).
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Milton Hatoum, 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 832 4
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
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Orphans of Eldorado Page 9