The Discovery of America by the Turks (2 page)

I didn’t have any more news, but I did have my suspicions upon reading in the newspapers about “Operation Clean Hands,” which had brought out into the open and put on
trial the corruption of Italian political life—corruption that could be second only to the Brazilian variety—and included in its investigations a most important government establishment, whose directors had been brought to trial along with its president, who killed himself in jail. I was left scratching my head. I showed the report to Zélia: “I don’t think those editions they planned on will ever reach the hands of passengers on the airlines; the project’s gone down the drain.”

Exactly. The agency that had drawn up the contract wrote to me immediately and told me the project had been abandoned, and they gave back to me the rights in the four languages in which they’d had the option. I phoned Carlos Fuentes to pass along the news, and he said he’d already sold the rights for publication in Spanish to a publisher in Madrid. I notified Sérgio Machado in Brazil: “The Turks have been set free. You can publish the book whenever you want.”

If the reader of this little novella perceives a certain resemblance between the Arab Jamil Bichara, a character in the story, and Fadul Abdala, a character in a previous novel; between Raduan Murad and Fuad Karam; between the village of Itaguassu and the place called Tocaia Grande, he mustn’t think it a simple coincidence. It’s just more proof of the fact that I’m a limited and repetitive novelist, according to the line of the current and express opinion of the noble gentlemen of national criticism—an opinion that is mentioned and repeated here in writing in order to comply with same.

Otherwise, everything’s just fine. I hope readers will have some fun with the events and incidents leading to Adma’s nuptials, which took place in the city of Itabuna at the beginning of cacao culture, in the early years of the century, when the Turks finally discovered America, landed in Brazil, and became Brazilians of the best kind.

JORGE AMADO

For Zélia

in the joys and sadnesses of this autumn.

For António Alçada Baptista and

Nuno Lima de Carvalho,

who discovered Brazil and

conquered the heathens with

the weapons of devotion

and friendship.

or

How the Arab Jamil Bichara,

Tamer of Forests,

On a Visit to the City of Itabuna,

Seeking Nourishment

For His Body,

Was There Offered

Fortune and Marriage;

Or Yet Again

the Nuptials of Adma

If we are to believe Iberian historians, be they Spanish or Portuguese, the discovery of the Americas by the Turks, who are not Turks at all but Arabs of good stock, came about after a long delay, in relatively recent times, during the past century and not before.

We must bear in mind that being interested parties, the Peninsular chroniclers are suspect. All they were interested in doing was praising and puffing up the deeds and figures of Spaniards and Portuguese, of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and other bigwigs; Castilians and Lusitanians of the highest order, of the noblest Christian lineage, of the purest blood; fearless, indomitable heroes. To begin our conversation it is worth noting that, armed with birth certificates and testimonials, Italian publicists have, in their woppish way, claimed for the other peninsula the glory of being the cradle of Columbus and Vespucci: the one who discovered and the one who took advantage of it and labeled the unknown lands with his name. The Spaniards parry with other papers, other testimonials, so who’ll ever know who’s right? Certificates have been falsified; testimonials have been bought with the vile metal. If the Spaniards deserve little credit, the Italians deserve even less, as is easily shown by Vespucci’s fraud. And what have they to say about the Vikings? The Discovery is all a great mélange.

In the immigrant ship bringing them from the Middle East, from the mountains of Syria and Lebanon to the virgin forests of Brazil, a difficult and stormy passage, Raduan
Murad, a fugitive from justice for vagrancy and gambling, a scholar with seductive prose, revealed to his steerage companion, the Syrian Jamil Bichara, that during sleepless nights bent over beat-up old books about Columbus’s first voyage, in the roll of sailors making up the crew of one of the three caravels on that festive excursion, he’d discovered the name of a certain Alonso Bichara. Bichara the Moor, signed on maybe, who knows, by a press gang, one of those many heroes forgotten when it was time for celebrations and rewards: The admiral is covered with glory and the crew is covered with shit (in spite of all his erudition, Raduan Murad had a foul mouth).

The truth, or a bunch of bootlegged goods? Raduan Murad was imaginative, inventive, and as far as scruples were concerned, he cultivated none at all. A few years later, settled in the virgin lands now, he would invent the “Itabuna ploy,” done with three unlike cards and something new at the poker table, something quite useful in bluffing and whose fame spread far and wide in the southern region of Bahia. Truth or trick? Of no great concern because the events to be recounted here took place with Jamil as their protagonist, and not with his purported forebear, Moorish from the Bichara, Spanish from the Alonso, of doubtful existence. It is better to concern ourselves with proven, undeniable facts, even though the truthful story does touch upon the miraculous.

The reference to the discovery of America comes from the current and omnipresent celebrations: A peaceable person can’t take the smallest step or blow the slightest fart without the Fifth Centenary landing on his head. Of the Discovery, say the descendants of the fearless men who discovered the other side of the sea; of the Conquest, exclaim the descendants of the massacred Indians; of the enslaved blacks, cultures wiped out by the passage of mercenaries and missionaries carrying the cross of Christ and the baptismal font.

The argument is all laid on, a violent polemic with no middle ground, no agreement in sight, sectarianism predominating
on both sides, and anyone who wants to can get involved and leave himself open to carrying off the scraps. I’m not going to be the one to do it, no not I, a Brazilian of mixed blood, the fruit of the Discovery and of the Conquest, of the mixture. I am only recounting here what happened to Jamil Bichara, Raduan Murad, and other Arabs in full discovery of Brazil back there at the beginning of the century. The first to arrive from the Middle East carried papers issued by the Ottoman Empire, which is why right down to the present moment they’re all stamped as Turks, making up that fine Turkish nation, one of the many in the amalgamation that has composed and is still composing the Brazilian nation.

The ship that the young Jamil Bichara and the wise Raduan Murad had boarded made port in the Bay of All Saints in October 1903, 411 years after the epic of Columbus’s caravels. But this did not cause their landing not to be a discovery and a conquest, for the lands to the south in the state of Bahia, where they set themselves up to do battle, were at the time covered with virgin forest. The planting of crops and the building of houses was just beginning. Colonels and their hired guns were killing one another in disputes over land, the best in the world for growing cacao. Coming from different regions were backlanders, Sergipeans, Jews, Turks—they were called Turks, those Arabs, Syrians, and Lebanese—all of them Brazilians.

Begun on board, the friendship that linked Jamil Bichara and Raduan Murad continued and grew stronger when the two immigrants decided without any previous discussion to test their lives in the southern lands of Bahia, the newly discovered El Dorado of cacao.

During their dismal crossing Jamil had come to admire the wisdom and skills of Murad. Almost a child still, a youth, Jamil filled with enthusiasm as he watched his traveling companion overcome seasickness and squander his knowledge and cunning at the poker table—just a plank that went up and down with the rolling of the ship—and the backgammon board. Or as he listened to him declaim love poetry, some of it of a delightful concupiscence, about odalisques and wine, which he recited in Arabic or Persian on moonlit nights under a blanket of stars spread out over the sea. Jamil and the others who listened, a coarse rabble, didn’t know the Persian tongue, nor did the ancient name of Omar Khayyám mean anything to them, but the sonority of the stanzas of the Rubaiyat, the enveloping melody alleviated the harshness of the voyage and served to increase Raduan Murad’s prestige. He disembarked surrounded by respect, his pockets garnished with coins of copper, silver, and gold, earnings brought him by talent and manual skill.

The El Dorado of cacao! People were hurrying there from the backlands, from the northeastern states—Sergipe, the smallest of them, the closest and the poorest, saw itself become almost depopulated of men; they were abandoning
wives, fiancées, lovers. The Arabs, too: No sooner did they get off the vessel of the Bahia Shipping Line at the port of Ilhéus than they made for the forests, going off in search of a sure and easy fortune. Easy fortune? Better to say an uncertain and risky fortune. If the chosen one didn’t start off by kicking the bucket in his first encounter with thugs, if he persisted, it would take a lot of heart and hard work for the courage to face death.

Jamil was well-disposed for work and was fearless by heredity. A Levantine born in the tribal lands of the Euphrates, he had inherited the valor of tribes that fought among themselves just for the fun of fighting and for the pleasure of life. Something similar might be said about Raduan Murad, in spite of all the gossip. Without even making note of his moral courage, which was questionable, how could anyone deny the boldness and lack of fear in someone who more than once had stood up to toughs in gambling dens, unarmed, too, in a land where no one went about without his shotgun or his pistol? Calm, serene, impassive, even when suspicions and threats were forthcoming (truculent people didn’t always greet the “Itabuna ploy” with laughter or applause).

As for saying, as some did, that he was a sworn enemy of work, holding it in a holy horror, as so frequently happens with educated people, it would be a matter of an obvious injustice and ill will. If, in fact, during his early youth the Professor—that was what many people respectfully called him—stubbornly avoided tasks that were not in line with his intellectual capacity, there was no more assiduous and punctual laborer at the poker table or in any other game of chance. Chance? For Raduan Murad there was no such thing as a game of chance. In a round of conversation he was unbeatable, and from time to time, as a pastime, he would write in fluent Portuguese, with a captivating Oriental accent, newspaper articles about problems of the cacao zone. The only reason he didn’t write them more frequently was that there weren’t enough newspapers to publish them and he feared they might want to make him schoolmaster or
appoint him to a government position. Inclined to preserve his freedom, he loved above all else his right to make use of his time. He didn’t want it to be ruled by the hands of a clock.

Although they were different from each other in everything, the two Turks, the Syrian and the Lebanese, forged a friendship that nothing could disturb. They were like brothers, even though of enemy nationalities. Jamil had been born Syrian, while Raduan was Lebanese by birth and by conviction. Nor did they coincide in matters of religion, young Jamil swearing by Allah and Mohammed, and the skeptic Raduan, while born to a Christian family of the Maronite sect, had been converted by life’s experiences and the vice of books into a materialist (more or less immoral). And the difference in age was no obstacle to their comradeship. When all this was taking place, Jamil had yet to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, a randy stud vied for by ladies of the night. Raduan was past forty and a charmer in his fifties, the wonder of all the girls, large and small.

Nor did it matter that Itaguassu, a hamlet lost in the woods where Jamil toiled, was quite a distance from Itabuna, a growing and prosperous city to which Raduan had conceded the privilege of his living and operating. Once a month Jamil would come to Itabuna with the intention of renewing the supplies for his place of business, tiny but the only one in Itaguassu, where he sold a bit of everything to the small population of the village and the vast flow of those passing through: herdsmen, hired hands, gunmen, and the wandering nation of whores that came and went through the cacao clearings. He would also come unexpectedly to relieve his boredom and have another look at civilization—“Are you here for your bath of civilization, old chum?” Raduan would greet him when he saw him arrive without notice—to have some fun, relax (nobody’s made of iron) in the cabaret, bars, a whorehouse. It was his feast day. Jamil and Raduan, the philosopher, never separated, gabbing endlessly, lots of laughs, drinks, polkas, and mazurkas. On nights of great
merriment, on the streets of Itabuna, arm in arm with Cockeye Paula or some other woman, Raduan would get the urge to declaim in Arabic love poems in which the wine flowed and sultanas danced. Holding hands with Glorinha Goldass as he listened, Jamil was moved to tears.

Sitting and resting at the end of the day’s hustle and bustle—oh, so tired!—on the sidewalk by the Itaguassu Emporium, in front of the establishment, his living quarters in the rear, several years after the engagement ceremony, Jamil Bichara laughed loud and hard as he remembered the problems of the deal concerning the small dry-goods store and the danger he had subjected himself to when, advised by Raduan Murad, Ibrahim Jafet had offered him a partnership in the Bargain Shop as compensation for the hand in marriage of Adma, his oldest daughter. The three younger girls were married, for better or worse, but she, cherry intact, sour, crabby, undamaged, more than merely a virgin: an old maid.