Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [1]
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