Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [12]
This is Estiliano’s handwriting. Your father was very fond of him; he would have liked him more, only that Greek’s an agnostic.
He’s not Greek, he was born in Amazonia and studied in Recife.
He was born here, but he’s never prayed in our church.
Then she spoke about the orphan, an intelligent and hard-working girl. She might have been a Carmelite, a servant of the Lord. She had considered it, but had given up the idea. It’s difficult to follow these girls’ reasoning. One day they want one thing, the next they’ve forgotten it all. They pray devoutly and don’t believe a thing. But, in our lives, God chooses the best way.
Where did she come from?
From some place or other.
But not on this island.
Mother Caminal returned the sheets of paper:
Read that poem from time to time, right into old age. If my orphan wants to, she can meet you at five o’clock in the square. And only on Saturdays. Never go near the orphanage dormitory, and never come in here again. You don’t have to give anything to the Order. Your father gave a lot.
My story with Dinaura began that week. She wanted to date me. Now I’m just a carcass, but I was a good-looking young man then. And I was still well off. That counts for something, doesn’t it? That was what I thought. But money wasn’t enough. That is, it didn’t go very far. We met on Saturdays; no other afternoons were allowed for our love. The orphanage regulations were severe. The bell rang to wake the girls at five in the morning. They had prayers at six, at midday and again before bedtime. After prayers, the neighbourhood would hear a nun bellowing: Praise be to Our Lord Jesus Christ, to which the choir of orphans would respond: For ever. They ate in silence in the school refectory; when a girl wanted to go to the toilet, she slapped the table with her hand. At eight in the evening the bell rang for silence, and the head sister inspected the dormitory. I thought the orphans only prayed, sewed and studied, but they did much more than that: in the mornings they worked in the vegetable garden, dusted the altar and the statues of the saints, and helped clean the dormitory and the schoolrooms. Late afternoons, after class, they went to the chapel to give thanks and pray with the Carmelites. I also learned that they had a weekly retreat. Each orphan stayed alone in a dark room, reciting a whole rosary by candlelight in front of the Heart of Jesus. It was a silent love affair. Sometimes I heard Dinaura’s voice in my dreams. She had a gentle, somewhat singsong voice, which spoke of a better world at the bottom of the river. Suddenly she would grow silent, frightened by something the dream wouldn’t reveal.
One Saturday she would surprise me with a smile, the next with a terrible sadness, as if she were going to die. She was prettier when she was sad, her face still, the lips in their place. She was the oldest girl in the orphanage, and the only one with permission to date. That was the way it was at the beginning: the two of us sitting on the bench in the square, holding hands, like two lovers of that time, and of this town. She never said when she’d entered the orphanage. And I grew accustomed to the silence, with the voice I only heard in my dreams.
Florita told me that several orphans spoke the língua geral; they studied Portuguese and were forbidden to speak in indigenous languages. They came from villages and settlements on the Andirá and Mamuru rivers, from the Ramos branch, and other places in the middle reaches of the Amazon. Only one had come from a long way off, from the Upper Rio Negro. Two of them, from Nhamundá, had been abducted by river traders and sold to businessmen in Manaus and big shots in the government. They were taken to the orphanage by order of a judge, a friend of the headmistress. In Vila Bela, Mother Caminal was known as God’s Judge, because she forbade the exchange of children and women for merchandise, and reported men who beat their wives and servants. But never once