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 freighters. 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