Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [17]
God is the Father.
A strange character. He got up, crossed the square, stopped in the Rua do Matadouro and let out a laugh, with no meaning or object to it. I stood in front of the Carmo School, wondering what Dinaura’s secret could be. Or the story she wanted to tell. I felt no guilt: I felt jealous of someone I might know, but I didn’t know who it was. I remembered every face I knew, I hated all the men in Vila Bela, I brooded over my anger and jealousy. As I was going back home, I saw two men drinking from bottles. I went into the Travellers’ Bar, asked for a bottle of wine and unhurriedly drank it, sitting on the pavement, defying the looks of Adel and his customers. They were looking at me, laughing, and I could hear mockery in their laughter. What were they laughing at? Old Genesino, the owner of the bar, provoked me:
Everyone’s talking about your marriage to the orphan.
Who’s talking? Your shitty customers?
He stroked his moustache and banged on the cash register:
People like your grandfather’d better keep away from here.
I left the bottle on the pavement and went into the bar. Genesino Adel came round to the front of the bar to face me, but one of his sons separated us.
Edílio Cordovil’s bad reputation was still alive in the memory of the older people. I left, still stunned with other memories: the wet skin, the scent of lavender, the body kissed and possessed so eagerly in the rainy night. I went home and slumped into the hammock in the parlour. I awoke on a Sunday of deluging rain. It rained all day and night for a whole week. The Amazon dragged everything away: remains of houses on stilts, canoes and drifting boats, rafts with cattle tied to them, bellowing in terror. Santa Clara Harbour was submerged, and the rivers Macurany and Parananema flooded the lower part of the town. The caretakers tied hammocks under the eaves and spent the night singing and praying for the rain to stop. And when it stopped, Florita and I went to the top of the ravine. The Carmelites’ school and the orphanage, near the bank, weren’t flooded. But along the edge of the rivers, Vila Bela was an amphibious town. The slaughterhouse was a sea of mud with carcasses and bits of flesh under a sky full of vultures. Limbs and entrails were floating in the dirty water, right up to the doorway of the mayor’s house. The rotting remains were buried far from the town, but the mayor still had to leave his house because of the stink. I remember the episode because at that time I tried to speak to Dinaura and, while I was waiting for news, I had to put up with the foul stench coming from the slaughterhouse. Then I found out that she was going into complete reclusion—a month without seeing anyone. It wasn’t an order from the headmistress, it was Dinaura’s own decision. But the worst news came in a telegram from the manager of the firm: Shipwreck Eldorado in Pará. Come urgently to Manaus.
The rumours in the port contradicted one another. Some said that the captain of the Eldorado had been drunk; that he’d gone out of his way to see a lover at São Francisco da Jararaca; that the rain and the excessive cargo had caused the accident. A captain from the Ligure Brasiliana fleet gave me more precise information: the Eldorado had crashed into a sandbank at the end of Caim Island, between Curralinho and Farol do Camaleão, near Breves,