Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [39]
Manaus Harbour: originally the name of the (British) company which administered the Port of Manaus; the name came to signify the whole port area of the city, with its warehouses, docks etc.
Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968): One of greatest poets of Brazilian modernism, and one of the oldest. His poems are often short and sharp, combining strong feeling (often about death—the poet suffered from tuberculosis) and ironic control.
maxixe: a common low-growing plant (Cucumis anguria) with small, green, spiny fruit, much used for cooking.
modinha: a traditional form of popular song, usually sentimental in tone and in the minor key.
paricá: a tree of the genus Anadenanthera, with white flowers. Its leaves, seeds and bark are used to produce a powerful powder or snuff, whose use in the Amazon is restricted to shamans. It is reputed to give them curing powers, and produces visions.
paulista: name given to people from the state and the city of São Paulo, the largest in Brazil, and the centre of the country’s wealth and industry.
President Getúlio Vargas (1882–1954): Vargas came to the Brazilian presidency in the ‘October Revolution’ of 1930, and kept in power by increasingly dictatorial means until 1945. His regime had fascist aspects, and he had good relations with the Axis powers. However, he eventually yielded to American pressure and joined the Allies—part of the motivation for this was the renewed importance of Brazilian (Amazonian) rubber, now that Malaya had fallen to Japan. He returned to the presidency in 1951, and after being implicated in the attempted murder of his rival Carlos Lacerda, committed suicide on 24 August 1954.
quilombo: a settlement of runaway slaves, of which there were many throughout the colonial period and the nineteenth century.
sateré-maué: an indigenous group inhabiting the middle reaches of the Amazon. They were the first group to cultivate guaraná (q.v.), a fact to which they give great importance. In their myths, they attribute their origins as a group to this discovery.
seu: an untranslatable way of referring to someone with familiarity, but also with a certain respect—seu Pedro, for example—the word is a corruption of the more formal ‘senhor’.
tapuia: a word originally applied to indigenous groups who spoke languages not belonging to the large and important Tupi group. In the novel, it is used to mean an indigenous person who, through subjection to white people, has lost part of his or her own culture.
tarubá: an alcoholic drink of indigenous origin made from fermented manioc.
tucupi: a condiment made of pepper and manioc juice purified over a fire to the consistency of molasses.
tupinambá: name given to several tribes who speak or spoke tupi-guarani, the most widely distributed indigenous language in Brazil.
urucum: a small tree (Bixa orellana) with a fruit whose red or yellow juice is used as a colourant in food, and by indigenous groups for body painting.
Acknowledgements
I have freely used a few indigenous narratives and passages about myths of the Brazilian Amazon from the books of Betty Mindlin, Candace Slater and Robin M. Wright. Although this fiction does not directly refer to the Indians or to indigenous culture, my reading of the essay A inconstância da alma selvagem (‘The inconstancy of the savage soul’), by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, was important for the understanding of the tupinambá peoples of the Amazon, and as an aid to reflecting on this novel.
My thanks to Jamie Byng, director of Canongate, who interested himself in the project for this book and included it in the Myths collection. Special thanks to Ruth Lanna, Samuel Titan Jr. and to my friends and publishers Luiz Schwarcz, Maria Emília Bender and Márcia Copola, who, as always, provided me with excellent suggestions.
Other friends who read the originals know how grateful I am for their patient, dedicated readings.
About the Author
Milton Hatoum was born in Manaus in 1952. His first novel,