The Discovery of America by the Turks (7 page)

The others picked up their hats and headed for the whorehouse. Raduan Murad wondered if there was still any salvation for poor Adma. Maybe it was too late and neither young Adib, with his adolescent gawkiness, or the gigantic Jamil, with his immense tool, could rescue her from her madness, from the fires of hell, save her from the curse of her hardened virginity and teach her, in bed, the love of life.

Ibrahim stopped midsentence. He tried to get up from his chair and slipped down under the table, from where they pulled him up with the help of the waiters. The meeting was adjourned, and Jamil resolved to take his countryman to the door of his house. He would never get there by himself. His legs wouldn’t hold him up.

Sad and weepy, Ibrahim had spent most of the night thinking about the dead woman. All that love was very moving for the whores who had gathered around the table to listen to him. Some of them had known Sálua when she was behind the counter at the Bargain Shop, where they went to shop for adornments for their dresses, fine combs, fancy rings. A married and rich lady owner—and such a beauty!—Sálua had made no distinctions among her customers, treating all of them with the same courtesy, whether mothers with a family or licentious harlots.

Sharing Ibrahim’s feelings, they remembered that during his wife’s lifetime he was a model husband—a terrible example for the community in the majority opinion of the heads of families. He never frequented the cabaret, nor did he spend the night in bawdy houses, and if he did happen to do so, it was with an idea to forget it, but he never forgot. On the occasion of a festive dinner at home, so frequent when she was alive, so rare after her death, the weight of her absence became unbearable. Cockeye Paula, the sentimental reader of serialized novels that came out every Thursday, would burst into tears. A love like the one that joined Sálua
and Ibrahim could be found only in the one between Paul and Virginie, and even then!

Jamil had come to realize that the widower had very little or no wisdom at all, never going beyond being just a nice fellow. He would listen to his laments with silent sympathy as he got ready to take him home. Raduan Murad had left sometime earlier, off to his duties at the poker table, but Jamil could count on the help of Glorinha Goldass and Cockeye Paula. Among the three of them they led Ibrahim and his cross in fits and starts up to the vicinity of his store.

At the sound of footsteps, a shutter on the second floor opened. A storm of insults broke the silence of the night. Posted at the window, Adma, the mouth of hell, was spewing out imprecations, accusations, complaints, and threats at her father, the Cyrenaic, and the Magdalens. It was really something to behold. Raduan Murad had witnessed such a spectacle only once, and he’d had to have recourse to unusual terms to classify it: Catilinarian, vespine, atrabilious.

The two whores fell back, and Ibrahim sobbed on Jamil’s shoulder. Adma went on, an insatiable fury, waking up the whole neighborhood. Ibrahim made an effort to get his balance and headed off to the gates of Calvary. Before he crossed the threshold he lifted his arms and waved them about in the gesture of a drowning man. Adma was unmoved, nor did she relent. Pointing to Jamil, she thundered her last words.

Quickening his pace, the Turk caught up with his companions in fun, who were fleeing down the street. Cockeye Paula, offended, remarked, “Goddamned daughter! Ibrahim’s a softy. If he took the whip to that willful bitch, her rotten mood would stop right there.”

With her usual gentility, Glorinha Goldass offered a better alternative. “What she needs, poor thing, is a good dick.”

As he thought about it, Jamil found them both to be right. Suffering from a grave illness, a hopeless one, Adma, if she was to be cured, stood in urgent need of both remedies, the dick and the whip, in generous doses. In which, without knowing it, he was in agreement with young Adib: You tame a woman with pats and slaps.

For two months, an eternity, the Turk Jamil Bichara lived the problem at its fullest, pondering it down to its smallest details, analyzing it from all kinds of angles. At the station where he was taking the train to Mutuns, he said to Ibrahim, “I need time to think before I make any decision. When I get back I’ll have an answer for you. In the meantime, look after the store a little and take charge at home.”

In the wilds of Itaguassu, with Shaitan tempting Jamil ceaselessly night and day, Ibrahim’s proposal was looking better, ever more attractive and enticing. Allah seemed to be staying on the sidelines, indifferent. He’d abandoned Jamil at that decisive moment, leaving the responsibility entirely in his hands.

Seen from the miserable hamlet where he was hard at work, the city of Itabuna—lively and turbulent, with its businesses, church, and chapel, the Lords Hotel, cabaret, bars, houses with ladies of the night, its cobblestone streets, the hustle and bustle at the station with the daily arrival and departure of the passenger train, the intrigues of politics and landgrabs, the hired guns, the mule trains unloading cacao at the great warehouses of the export companies—was becoming a regular capital city. In Itabuna you lived; in Itaguassu you suffered.

Glorinha Goldass would work him up, as usual, disturbing his sleep, offering herself to him naked, lewd, and inaccessible. She would be joined by another demanding lure, a more delicate temptation, a married lady, Samira Jafet Esmeraldino. Her saucy knee, her loose, abundant breasts, just
right for grabbing and squeezing with your hands, her crafty look, a look that was on the make, her wet tongue over dry lips, Samira whispering, “Come here, come here right now, I’m waiting for you, a sister-in-law isn’t a blood relative, no.” Which of the two was the more desirable, the trickier? Two mistakes were leading him astray: the whore in a cathouse and the other one even more.

Most of all, however, weighing on the balance was the prospect of reviving the store in just a short time and immediately turning it into a bazaar, well furnished with merchandise, provided with everything fine and good, a business with lots of customers, fat profits. Once he was declared chief of the clan, Jamil would lay down the law benevolently. He imagined himself behind the counter, aided by his sisters-in-law Samira and Fárida. Instead of staying home sucking on a lollipop or in boobish conversation with people at the station, Samira, young and robust, would be of obvious help in the store, making her pleasant manner useful. By the same token, Fárida would be a beautiful presence, pleasing to the customers’ eyes, and the masculine clientele would increase just as soon as the Bargain Shop was changed into a bazaar. As for the agreeable Alfeu, back at his true vocation at the English Haberdashery, there he could fulfill his enviable career, advancing from apprentice to journeyman, from journeyman to master tailor, ceasing to represent any threat to the store’s finances.

It’s worth repeating what everybody knows quite well: A sister-in-law is not a blood relative, but family ties do permit an intimacy that could be called fraternal. Jamil’s horizons were expanding: a sultan with his harem. That, yes, was living.

Jamil studied minutely the clauses in the contract to be drawn up at the notary’s office. Partnership on Adma’s side from her mother’s inheritance, partner with Ibrahim on his side in his role as manager of the business. Given over to his leisure activities, Ibrahim would stay on as a kind of silent partner, with Jamil in the position of complete authority with the right to do and undo things.

He foresaw buying out the shares of Jamile and of Ranulfo, her husband, at the start. Anyone who owns a cacao farm has no other ambition in life beyond acquiring land and more land for planting, increasing his holdings and his harvests. He’s not interested in stores and businesses. Later on Jamil would study what actions could be taken with regard to the shares owned by his other sisters-in-law. It would depend on their good behavior and that of their husbands. In his idle hours the emoluments of the project kept increasing and taking over his thoughts.

Even the very ugliness of Adma, an aggressive harridan, a slab of dry cod, faded off into the distance. Shaitan the trickster couldn’t hide that reality, nor did he have the powers to do that much. But he did manage to suppress or blur the details, reducing her little mustache to just thick fuzz and transforming her sour, tight mouth into a sign of dignity. After all, Jamil had knocked off others more hideous and repulsive without getting sick, paying in coin of the realm and running the risk of catching some venereal disease, syph or the clap.

Besides, it must be kept in mind that certain ugly women are irresistible. They’ve got their own mysteries, as Raduan Murad had once said, when Jamil commented with amazement at the extravagance of Salim Hadad, a millionaire fellow countryman, a plantation owner with his twenty thousand tons between ripening and harvest. Married to a cousin, Yasmina, a fine chunk of a woman, a real dish, he was all caught up with the lowest slut on the Rua do Umbuzeiro, Silvinha, a snotty face, a filthy ass, the breasts of a hag, a streetwalker. He spent a fortune on her. How do you explain something as absurd as that?

“She had her mysteries, Jamil. A creature can look ugly, be in the worst shape, but if her lower mouth is worth a kiss, it’s like a pure diamond, something incomparable. Between you and me, I guarantee it. I know no equal to Silvinha’s downstairs mouth.…” He clicked his tongue in nostalgic affirmation.

Who knows, maybe Adma is one of those privileged
creatures, a divine pussy, worth a sucking. Jamil didn’t really believe it, but it wasn’t impossible either. Right there in Itaguassu was the example of Laurinha, nicknamed the Witch. A witch to scare the hell out of you. With the lamp out, in the dark, and with your thoughts on something else, there was no one who could compare with her, a twidget as tight as a virgin girl’s, a body’s mouth that quivered when it was tippled.

It was more difficult to soften the rough spots of Adma’s character. Jamil couldn’t forget the malignant presence of the shrew at dinner, even less Ibrahim’s martyrdom. He could see himself coming home from the cabaret in the middle of the night or from Afonsina’s house early in the morning. A husband shouldn’t have any set time for arriving home or have to give an accounting. He’d find Adma up in the window waiting for him, in a foul mood, waking up the neighbors as she repeated her scoldings, a wild uproar. If she tried to get on his back the way she did with Ibrahim, would a dick and a whip be enough? He doubted it.

Abandoned by Allah to the seductions of Shaitan, left to his own devices, he spent two months in that battle with nothing decided. But at every moment the Evil One would strengthen his hold over Jamil’s soul. Before heading out to Mutuns, where he got the train to Itabuna, Jamil considered Ibrahim’s proposal impossible to refuse: a well-established business, a fortune in sight, and a woman with excellent qualities. He was thinking of Samira, not Adma.

For Adma, not much dick and lots of whip. Unless the hag was in possession (she had her mysteries, too) of an incomparable twat, one made for sucking. “It’s quite possible; it’s almost certain,” the Devil was whispering behind him.

Could Allah and his prophet Mohammed be so little concerned with the destiny of their son Jamil Bichara that they would forget the pact of faith and assistance that existed between them and not even draw his attention to the dangers of the enterprise he was insisting on getting involved in? More likely they had attempted to do so, and the obstinate fellow had refused to lend them an ear. “I was blind and deaf,” Jamil himself confessed to Raduan Murad. “I surrendered to the temptation of gold and of the flesh. Shaitan was living in my heart.”

According to the adage, God writes clearly with crooked lines, and in order to bring his designs to completion, he makes use of strange methods, moves unexpected characters about. While Shaitan, encamped in Itaguassu, was dedicating all his time to the seduction of Jamil, Allah the great was maneuvering in Itabuna to save his soul and to defend the future of his anointed one.

As things turned out, as he reviewed with Jamil the developments in the skirmish, Raduan, who’d followed it detail by detail, eagerly when he became aware of Shaitan’s involvement—lewd dreams, foul enticements, exaggerated and dubious promises—found Allah’s strategy and tactics to be superior in all ways. Not only from having put the enemy face-to-face with a consummated fact, but also from the way in which he’d done it: Instead of any subjective study or thundering actions worthy of the best traditions of the Old Testament, he’d brought it forth in full form. He began a most beautiful performance with the romantic and heroic
episode of the stampeding herd, the first in a series of magnificent and spectacular ploys.

The string of donkeys stampeded for no apparent reason just before reaching the warehouses of Kuntz & Co., a Swiss cacao exporting firm. The animals shot off in a headlong run, befouling, befarting, and knocking down pedestrians during a time of intense activity. Sacks fell from the wooden frames of the packsaddles, cacao beans scattered into the gutters, people were fleeing madly; it was the end of the world.

At that exact moment the maiden Adma had just stepped out onto the tumultuous thoroughfare, returning from Samira’s house on the Largo da Estação, where she’d been making her sister’s life hell. She’d even talked about Jamil Bichara, calling him names, while Samira came to his defense and that of their father: One a bachelor, the other a widower, they had every right to visit whorehouses. The mood grew sour and Adma was close to having a fainting spell when the desirable one accused her of being intolerant because she hadn’t found anyone who wanted her. Nothing could have wounded her more deeply.

She was coming along the middle of the street, head down and unhappy, when she heard the shouting and the braying and saw before her the shapes of the maddened beasts, under whose hooves she was going to die, crushed. In spite of everything, Adma had no wish to die. She didn’t have the strength to flee, so she let out a wail, closed her eyes, and waited for the blow, the fall, the shoes on the hooves, the end. In a faint, she felt herself being snatched up into the air.