Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [34]
Sleeping in the sun? I asked.
The man took his hat off and said: She died in the night.
He was a neighbour of Florita’s.
She died quite suddenly, just like Amando. The wake was in the chapel of the Carmo, out of respect for my father. I wept as if I were in front of my family’s tomb. They were the last tears I ever shed. Florita’s death broke the links with the past. I and I alone was the past and the present of the Cordovils. And I wanted no future for men of my kind. Everything will end in this old man’s body.
On Sundays, Ulisses Tupi or Joaquim Roso left a fish there at the door. I salted and dried the steaks; that was my lunch, with lots of manioc flour to fill my belly, and a banana I picked in the garden. Is that the way I ended my life? Only that there was one more twist, which left me reeling. The Second World War reached this place. And for the first time a President of the Republic visited Vila Bela. The whole town went to applaud the man in Sacred Heart Square. Even the dead were there. I, who only lived for Dinaura, and could die for her, didn’t leave this shack. President Vargas said that the allies needed our rubber, and that he and every Brazilian would do all they could to defeat the countries of the Axis. Then thousands of people from the Northeast went to work extracting rubber. Rubber soldiers. The freighters sailed the rivers of Amazonia again; they carried rubber to Manaus and Belém, and then flying boats took the cargo to the United States. The dreams and promises came back too. Paradise was here, in the Amazon region; that was what was said. What did exist, and I never forgot, was the ship Paradise. It moored just down there, at the edge of the ravine. It brought more than a hundred men from the rubber stands of the Madeira, almost all of them blinded by the smoke-curing of the rubber. There, where Aldeia was, the mayor ordered the forest to be knocked down so that shacks could be built. And another neighbourhood appeared: Cegos do Paraíso, the Blind Men of Paradise. Other rubber-tappers occupied the edge of the Francesa Lagoon and the River Macurany, and founded Palmares. And I didn’t budge from here, still living under the same roof. I thought of the orphan when the flying boats flew over Vila Bela; I thought of life with Dinaura, in another place. I talked to her, imagining her by my side. And I announced out loud that I was going to meet her, and the two of us would leave this place. My imagination ran down the river as far as the sea, and that enlivened me. You see: a body still, with the imagination running loose, ideas full of excitement . . . That body survives. I copied the Greek poem translated by Estiliano, and read that poem so many times that I even memorised some lines: ‘I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to another sea. I’ll find a city better than this one. Wherever I cast my eyes, wherever I look, I see my life in black ruins here.’ I said these words looking at the river and the forest, thinking of the request I made to my mother, Angelina. Who else did I know? Cordovil was just a name with no memory attached. The older people of the town were dead and buried. Ulisses Tupi and Joaquim Roso were merely generous hands that left fish for my sustenance and went away. In the early morning I couldn’t sleep. I heard the noise of the boats and jumped out of my hammock. They went by like ghosts in the night. I looked at the useless twinkle of the stars, drank, and sometimes slept right here, in the damp of the night air. And how many nightmares: endless shipwrecks. I awoke with images of boats colliding and crashing noises; I awoke with the image of Juvêncio’s face, swollen and disfigured, with no eyes, his hands spread out, asking for alms. I spent the day fleeing from these things—unreal, absurd, they were, but they seemed so alive they frightened me.