Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [9]
Back at Vila Bela, I’d spend the night drinking wine and reading opera librettos, the latest Pathé-Journal and old newspapers. I would grow melancholy before sunrise. Then I’d go out at dawn through the dirt streets of this neglected town, as far as the Fishermen’s Steps, where I saw the shapes of heads looking out of windows in the darkness—old people unable to sleep; I don’t know if they were laughing or waving at me. Near the jungle, I saw the miserable shacks of the Aldeia, heard words in indigenous languages, murmurs, and when I went back to the river bank, I saw fishing boats moored by the ramp to the Market, boats laden with fruit, a steamer going down the Amazon to Belém. I had my breakfast in the Bar do Mercado, then I prowled round Sacred Heart Square, climbed up into the tree on the Ribanceira and thought about Dinaura until the sun lit the orphanage dormitory. If a Carmelite saw me sitting on a branch, I’d ask after Dinaura. The nun wouldn’t answer, would look as if she’d seen the devil, and I’d say: She’s going to leave the orphanage and come and live with me. Then I’d give a laugh which shocked the nun, a laugh that sounded obscene but in fact was just pure desire.
It might have been lunacy and not a caprice. I went back and forth between this idyll and my journeys to Manaus. The idyll won out. And my high life died out, along with the euphoria of an epoch. How everything changes in a short time. Some years before my father’s death, people only talked of growth. Manaus, rubber exports, jobs, business, tourism, everything was growing. Even prostitution. Only Estiliano showed signs of scepticism. And he was right, that was the worst of it. In the bars and restaurants the news in the Belém and Manaus papers was repeated with alarm: If we don’t plant rubber tree seeds, we’ll disappear . . . So much corruption in politics, and taxes are on the increase.
At home, the words were no less bitter. One day Florita came into my room to pick up the dirty washing and said:
I’ve had a bad dream. Something with your enchanted woman in it.
I looked suspiciously at Florita, waiting to hear more about the dream, but she left without a word. Dreams and chance took me to a road where Dinaura always appeared. I remember having seen a woman like her at the river’s edge. It was very early, a sunless morning, with thick mist. The woman walked along the bank till she disappeared in the mist. It could have been Dinaura—or my own eyes playing tricks. I remembered the tapuia woman who’d gone to live in the enchanted city, and ran towards the bank. But there was no one to be seen.
One Sunday afternoon Dinaura walked by the front of the white palace, smiling at me with voracious lips. She was accompanying some girls from the orphanage to the Aldeia, where the Cegos do Paraíso neighbourhood is today. I followed the group. Dinaura was reading a book in the shade of a mango tree while the girls played. She was wearing a cheap printed cotton dress, and only stopped reading to stare at the river. In the late afternoon she and the girls went down the ravine by the Fishermen’s Steps. I crossed the dirt road and sat down where she’d been reading. Dinaura left her book on the sand and went into the water alone. She swam and dived for so long I began to feel out of breath. When she appeared naked, with her dress rolled up round her neck, I felt my body tremble with desire. I’m certain she saw me, because the girls were pointing at me, laughing and pinching Dinaura’s bum and thighs. From afar, I licked that body in the late afternoon sun. I didn’t even think about the Fishermen’s Steps: I ran down the ravine, but when I got near the river, Dinaura was already dressed and walking ahead of the girls. I followed the wet dress as far as the ramp of the Ribanceira, cut down some mud steps and stopped at the top, in front of Dinaura. I said I wanted to talk to her. I saw her astonished eyes in her unearthly face, the smile on her large, moist lips; I managed to touch her shoulders before