Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [0]
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