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By Root 114 0

why a father could feel this strange desire to possess his own child. It could only be evil thoughts, a rage sent by the devil himself. I sent Florita to the Carmelite School: she was to ask Mother Caminal to look after the girl. Then I waited for Ulisses Tupi, famous for being able to navigate the labyrinth of our rivers. He appeared unexpectedly, his beard so bushy that it hid his eyes. He looked like a different person. He swore that Dinaura was alive, but not in our world. She was living in the enchanted city and was treated like a queen, but she was an unhappy woman. He heard this in the riverside houses, in the most distant settlements; he heard it from solitary caboclos who live with their shadows and visions. Dinaura has been seduced by an enchanted being, they said. She was the prisoner of one of those terrible animals that lure women to the bottom of the river. And they described the place where she lived: a city with so much gold and light it gleamed, and with pretty streets and squares. The Enchanted City was a legendary place, the same one I’d heard about in my childhood. It rose up in almost everyone’s mind, as if happiness and justice themselves were hidden in this charmed place. Ulisses Tupi wanted me to talk to a shaman: his spirit could go to the bottom of the river to break the spell and bring Dinaura back to our world. He suggested I went to look for Dom Antelmo, the great shaman and medicine man from Maués. He knew the secrets of the bottom of the river and could talk to Uiara, the chief of all the enchanted people living in the submerged city.

When this news spread through Vila Bela, I was persecuted by a mass of rumours. Some said Dinaura had abandoned me for a toad, a big fish, a dolphin or an anaconda; others whispered that she appeared at midnight in an illuminated boat and told the fishermen she couldn’t bear living in solitude at the bottom of the river. I remember the morning that Florita found a basket full of fish at the door of the white palace. Fish with their guts spilled, gills and bloody entrails, the smell of burst roes, pure gall. What the devil was this?

Your beloved sent it you, said Florita. She’s tired of being half-woman half-animal.

Was Florita provoking me? The belief in supernatural beings disappeared in the morning and returned at night. We threw the fish to the vultures at the slaughterhouse. After the smell of guts and gall had disappeared, I received letters and messages from people who’d been seduced and then pursued by beings from the bottom of the river. One pregnant woman, afraid of giving birth to a baby with a dolphin’s face, wrote that she slept at the edge of the Amazon and sang to the river as the sun rose. A man who dreamed of an ancient inscription on a stone in the River Nhamundá who said he was immortal because enchanted people don’t die. One guy who thought he was Casanova, who became impotent when a woman in white appeared during the night. And several stories of men and women, all of them victims of an enchanted being who appeared in dreams, singing the same love song. They were attracted by the voice and the smell of seduction, and some went mad with these visions and asked for help from a shaman.

I spent money on the boatmen. And what did they bring back for me? Myths and raped girls. Florita asked me to stop this madness and give up once and for all: Dinaura would never come back.

I didn’t give up. And even afterwards, when time had drowned the yearning and the hope, and my body asked for some rest, my heart didn’t dry up. My thoughts ran after her, after my desire for her. I went on Saturdays to Sacred Heart Square with the hope of seeing her in the late afternoon. I lived for some time with this crazed illusion, and avoided the beggar sitting on the same bench, the umbrella in tatters in his lap.

When I had no money left, I realised that a good deal of time had passed. I made a proposal to Estiliano: we could start up the Boa Vida plantation again, and export meat.

What are we going to use for money? For the pasture, the animals, transporting the