Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [19]
I felt the same breathlessness when the bank manager showed me the documents Amando had signed. The debt amounted to a fortune. I left in a daze, took a tram to the house and waited for Estiliano in Manaus.
Some ten days later he appeared. He already knew everything: I’d been naive or irresponsible. I’d been both, I thought. But I made sure I pointed out that only my father renewed the insurance.
I came earlier because I read the news about the shipwreck in the Belém papers, he said. Then he revealed he’d been in Manaus for a week.
I didn’t want to waste time, he went on. I’ve spoken to the judge, the bank directors and Adler’s.
He explained that the two barges were moored in the Manaus Harbour, confiscated by the law. Those old barges weren’t worth much, but it was possible to sell them. What was really worth something was the German freighter: the Eldorado.
I accused the manager of carelessness; he could have avoided those debts. Estiliano didn’t get worked up: the manager was my father’s shadow, and a shadow can’t think about everything.
But did we have to sell the two barges?
You’re going to have to sell everything: this house, the firm’s offices and the land in Flores.
How could I allow that? I wanted to marry Dinaura, go travelling with her.
You’re living in another world, said Estiliano. If you don’t sell everything, you could be arrested. The small river transport firms in the Amazon have all gone bust. Get out of this house and take a walk round the city. That girl’s removed your brain; she’s deprived you of your reason. You’re blind.
Estiliano was obsessed by my father’s story, but he knew that even Amando couldn’t have avoided bankruptcy. It wasn’t fate—there’s no fate in this story. Amando’s dream and the lineage of the Cordovils were of no interest. My problem now was lack of money.
I went round the city by tram, saw the houses on stilts and the shacks in the suburbs and along the creeks in the centre, and camps where ex-rubber-tappers slept; I saw children being shooed off as they tried to beg for food or money in front of the Alegre Bar, the Italian Food Manufactory. The prison on Seventh of September Street was full, and several houses and shops were for sale. All this only increased the longing I felt for Dinaura. I sent her a letter, telling her what had happened; I wrote that I was dying to see her, that I loved her very much, more than I could say, much more than I even knew. And that I couldn’t come back to Vila Bela just yet.
I was defeated by the wait. I left the house to go with Estiliano to the tribunal, and avoided going by the firm’s offices. The last time I’d been there I’d insulted the manager, and wanted to sack him from the place and job which, in reality, had never belonged to me.
Estiliano pulled me over to a corner of the room and whispered:
In a disaster it’s best to act with your head.
I envied that man his cool-headedness, the logic some god had given him. I never saw the manager again. They say he died at the end of the First World War, of the Spanish flu.
A month later, Estiliano made an agreement with Adler’s and the English bank. I was lucky, he told me, they hadn’t questioned the valuation of the property.
I haven’t even enough money to go back to Vila Bela.
Let’s auction off what’s in the house and the office furniture.
He’d already bought my return ticket. I could get some money for the piano and the porcelain in the house. And there were my mother’s rings.
It’s a lot for someone who’s done nothing, he added, with calm brutality. And there’s still the house in Vila Bela. A valuable property.
And the Boa Vida plantation, I said angrily.
An Italian businessman picked up the objects that were auctioned; for the first time since my father’s death, I counted the money note by note, fearfully doing calculations. Back at Vila Bela, Florita greeted me unenthusiastically. The façade of the white palace hadn’t been whitewashed; the walls in the parlour and the