Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [32]
One day, among the crowds getting off the boat, while trying to convince an English couple to take a trip with me to the Macurany, I heard a high-pitched lament: Fresh beiju . . . Florita was shouting, as if the English understood Portuguese. She sold nothing. The English couple chose another boatman, and I lost my tip. As the Hilary whistled, the passengers waved goodbye and threw coins into the Indians’ dugouts.
If I was younger, I’d leave this place, said Florita.
Where would you go?
To another world.
The ship’s engines gave a roar, the smoke clouded the sky, and the canoes disappeared. The deserted harbour, the silent quays, left me feeling low. I looked at the ground and saw Florita’s feet. Swollen, caked with dirt, her legs swollen too. I put my hands on her head and told her that my plan had been to marry Estrela only so as not to lose the white palace—a plan that wouldn’t have worked because I loved Dinaura. But I hadn’t suspected Becassis and Adel. Had she really thought they were going to trick me?
All I know is that everybody tricked me, said Florita.
She couldn’t stand another day selling snacks for a pittance. Before, she was given bits of meat with bones in the slaughterhouse, but now, not even that. She put her hands on her back and murmured: My body’s aching, Arminto.
I pushed the cart back here and we sat in the shade of the jatobá. We ate beiju, drank a bit of tarubá and recalled the nights of my childhood, when my father went round Manaus and Belém and Florita translated the stories we heard in the Aldeia. At the end of the afternoon, when we were walking along the bank of the Amazon, I thought about the woman: the tapuia who was going to live with her lover at the bottom of the river. I remembered the strange sky, with the rainbow that looked like a snake. Did Florita remember that afternoon?
She went into the water and, with her back to me, she said: That wasn’t what she said.
But she was speaking in the língua geral, and you were translating.
I translated wrong, Arminto. It was all a lie.
A lie?
Was I going to tell a child that the woman wanted to die? She said that her husband and children had died of fever, and that she was going to die in the bottom of the river because she didn’t want to suffer in the town any longer. The girls from the Carmo, the Indian girls, understood and ran away.
Only now you tell me. Why?
Now I feel what the woman was saying. That’s why.
She got out of the water, climbed the side of the ravine and went to the Ribanceira. She collected the flowers of the cuiarana and sat in the very spot where I had had my only night of love with Dinaura.
You’ve had some days of happiness, she said, without looking at me. Does someone who’s never had even that deserve to live?
Florita’s voice wasn’t recriminating, she didn’t want to blame me. Nor was it threatening. I insisted she come to live with me, stop standing on her dignity.
And do you live alone? You live with a ghost.
Before she left, Florita gave me a river dolphin’s eye.
The left eye, for your desire, she said.
I thanked her and put it in my trouser pocket.
We met every time the Hilary docked, both of us trying to get a bit of money from the European passengers. When she saw me with Oyama, she left some beijus and left. The arrival of the Japanese brought life to the town; they built a settlement with Japanese houses at the edge of the Amazon, right at the mouth of the Ramos branch of the river. They founded other colonies on the Andirá River, on the lands of the sateré-maués, accomplished farmers. They planted rice, beans and maize, and even managed the great achievement of planting jute. Oyama stopped on the corner and, with a gesture, asked the name of the tree that gave so much shade, to which