Orphans of Eldorado. Milton Hatoum
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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. One 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