The Discovery of America by the Turks (3 page)

Because of her (and because of the store, a good deal!) Jamil had been in danger of abandoning Itaguassu and his newly established Emporium—prestigious in name only—where he sold flour and beans, cachaça, and sandals. Later on he got to selling both wholesale and retail, supplying the plantations in the region and the inhabitants of the village with a varied stock that went from jerked beef to denim pants, from raw-leather sandals to ladies’ hats and boots, bolts of cloth, spools of linen, needles, hair oil, pictures of Catholic saints and miracle workers. Although a good Muslim of the Shiite sect, Jamil had no religious prejudices when it came to making money. Allah is great, his wisdom is infinite, he can read men’s hearts, he understands and esteems everything.

The Bicharas, numerous and enterprising, were scattered all through the ports of the Mediterranean and its
adjacencies. They were established in Spain, as has already been noted, in Crete, in Egypt, and in Morocco, going from Libya to Italy, reaching Senegal. A certain Michel Bichara had headed a band of footpads in the French city of Marseilles, ending up on the guillotine. The first to discover America, heading for Brazil, was Jamil. In the annals of the family his name appears next to that of Michel, the brigand of the port city.

On the day of his departure, before sailing, he went to kneel in front of Mullah Tahar Bichara, his great-uncle, a wise and holy man, a favored disciple of the Prophet, who spoke with Allah during moments of prayer. It was predicted he would soon attain the honors and emoluments of an ayatollah. From him Jamil got a letter of recommendation addressed to their countryman Anuar, sheikh of the tribe of the Marons, who was well established with cacao plantations in the state of Bahia. A letter to the moneybags and prayers to Allah, who would not abandon his son lost in the vastness of America. The mullah would see to it that the name of Jamil would remain in the mouth and ears of Allah and of his prophet Mohammed.

The letter was indeed valuable, determining for Jamil the choice of the region of southern Bahia. There he had someone to lean on as he began life. Surely the requests of the venerable Tahar would make it possible for the new Brazilian not to feel lost, abandoned in his adopted country, which he must conquer foot by foot and day by day. It is incumbent upon Allah to assist his children at decisive moments, defend them against the temptations of Shaitan, the insidious Satan, point out the right path to them, stop them from committing a great error capable of making them suffer on earth the horrors of hell.

Allah accompanied Jamil’s steps as his wandering son for a long time when, for the Turk Anuar Maron, he covered the whole cacao region from north to south and east to west as the borders grew longer and the distances greater and greater. He saved him from multiple dangers: rattlesnakes and jararacussu vipers and their deadly fangs, the endemic
smallpox, black pox, which was certain death, ambushes, gunmen, the conflicts and battles of colonel against colonel, in which killers and henchmen left bodies on the road marked by carbine and stab wounds.

Anuar Maron—Colonel Maron, because he was a millionaire plantation owner with some eighty thousand tons—added to his harvest the meager pickings of those who owned just a small piece of cultivated land and were without means to transport their dry cacao to the warehouses of the export firms established in Ilhéus and Itabuna. Jamil gathered up the production of the small farmers for him, in an agreement with representatives of Colonel Misael Tavares, the cacao king, or Colonel Basílio de Oliveira, the master of Pirangi.

For four years, riding mules and donkeys or on foot along dangerous bypaths, Jamil swept through the forest and conquered it as he bought cacao at low prices. He learned how to dicker and to practice accounting and medicine, establishing relationships and friendships, as godfather baptizing children into the Catholic faith—may Allah understand and forgive him.

Allah understood all and forgave everything; he kept watch over him, attentive to the mullah’s prayers. Jamil had proof of this when a dispute separated him once and for all from Colonel Anuar Maron. In the village of Ferradas, where he’d been sent on an errand, he met and gathered to his bosom the capricious Jove, a wild and lusty half-breed. The affair caused talk, and news of it reached the colonel’s ears. Anuar Maron had set up a house for Jove, had taken her out of the red-light district, wanted her all for himself and wouldn’t hear of anyone else grazing in his pastures. He settled accounts with his countryman and fired him. He didn’t send a gunman who was a good shot to lie in wait for the bold fellow in an ambush and send him off to the land of the stiffs. It must have been because he remembered the mullah and had a great deal of respect for him.

On that occasion, when Jamil saw himself in a hole, out of work and with no place to turn, Colonel Noberto de Faria
made him a proposition. A plantation owner even richer than the Turk Maron, the owner of leagues of land planted haphazardly and not too great a distance from Itaguassu, he’d developed a friendship with Jamil, whom he’d come to know in the whorehouses of Itabuna, of which he was an assiduous and jolly frequenter. Desirous of seeing prosper the settlement that had sprung up near his lands, Colonel Noberto, when he heard of Jamil’s troubles, asked him if he might not be interested in going into business in Itaguassu, dealing on his own instead of working for a boss. What else could Jamil be longing for from life? It was his dream, but where was the capital to start it? Noberto de Faria, a native of Sergipe with traces of mulatto, a man of honor and vision, placed the necessary sum at Jamil’s disposal, trusting in him and swearing to the great esteem in which he held him. He called him his partner at table and in bed, because they had the same girls, ate from the same plate, and had similar tastes: small boobs, big asses, tight twats. Pleasant concordances always reinforce the bonds of friendship.

He set himself up under the protection of Allah—Allah is great—and Mohammed is his prophet, it’s worth repeating—with dough loaned by Colonel Noberto de Faria. Three years later he’d already paid back the loan and was enlarging the Emporium bit by bit. It was still a long way off from being compared with the shops and stores in the cities of Ilhéus and Itabuna or the villages of Ferradas, Olivença, Agua Preta, and Pirangi, but it wouldn’t be long (and who could doubt it?) before Itaguassu would cease to be just a settlement and the Emporium would be head and shoulders, as far as stock and clientele were concerned, over Ibrahim Jafet’s Bargain Shop. Jamil Bichara, sitting on the sidewalk in front of his business, thanked Allah for having saved him when, taken by greed, haste, and the temptation of easy money, he had almost followed the advice of Shaitan: to abandon Itaguassu, marry Adma, and ruin himself.

The events took place when Ibrahim Jafet began to see that things were in bad shape. The prospects for the store’s balance sheet were dismal: With his son-in-law Alfeu behind the counter and at the cash register, the winds of bankruptcy began to blow. Dark were the forecasts for daily life at home: Adma, condemned to spinsterhood, had assumed command of the house and family with a harsh zeal as storm clouds threatened the dwindling moments of pleasure. The economic situation and his pleasant life were in imminent danger.

The Bargain Shop, a small dry-goods store with plenty of customers, a good inventory, and credit in the marketplace, had been enough to serve for many years the family’s needs and the owner’s modest pleasures of fishing, checkers, and backgammon. The uncontested head of the tribe during her life, Sálua, Ibrahim’s wife, had taken charge and busied herself with the store: The notions counter saw prosperous times and brought in good savings. A handsome, sturdy woman with languid eyes that looked like those on a calendar print, she was the disciplinarian, stern, demanding and yet gentle, tender, and affable as well.

An expert at marking prices and finding bargains, she did a little cheating as she manipulated the yardstick and the shears, laughing and gossiping with the customers, almost all women. Esteemed, respected, with a light hand in a caress and a heavy one in punishment, Sálua ran the shop, her daughters, and her husband with fine competence.

The intellectual Raduan Murad, a persona most grata
and a good friend of the family, Ibrahim’s companion at checkers and backgammon, proclaimed her the matriarch. Strict and moral, she was no less capable of love in dealing with her daughters or restraint when in bed with her idolized husband, to whom she consented in all things—consented or commanded? She would kill herself working so that he might have a morning of fishing, an afternoon of siesta and gambling, content to have him at night: every night, starting at nine o’clock, the time for putting out the lamp and lighting up her huge sultana eyes for their unflagging nuptials in the darkness of the bedroom.

Matriarchs are like that: imposing and demanding with ordinary people, liberal and magnanimous with their favorites. Raduan Murad would explain that to his admirers gathered to listen to him at the poker table, at a bar, in a cabaret, in brothels—locales where he squandered wisdom and buffoonery. He would cite the example of Ibrahim Jafet: a unique and exclusive favorite, a regular lord!

Sálua’s unexpected death changed the ways at home and in the store. Disoriented, Ibrahim added the nighttime frequenting of whores to his morning fishing and his afternoon checkerboard, in search of compensation and consolation. One today, another tomorrow, the girls only served to keep him far away from the bedroom in the living quarters above the store, which had become cold and gloomy ever since his beloved had left him. Even if he could have managed to blend together with one stroke of magic the eminent partners, the ablest specialists at their trade in a medley of techniques and styles and in one single dissolute bed, not even then would it have matched the renowned mastery, the universal wisdom of Sálua. A divine gift, most certainly, Murad stated, because there was no place where she could have learned it or anyone who could have taught her. Sálua’s bed, nevermore!

The girls took their mother’s place behind the counter, but they were less concerned with the merchandise or the customers than with their gentleman friends. With the brakes off now they did whatever they wanted to. In Sálua’s time they would wave to boys from the upper windows of the house, that chaste mongrel type of lovemaking; with their mother gone there was smooching behind the counter, kisses and touches at the backyard gate. With the exception of Adma, who didn’t like selling and hadn’t found anyone who would court her. There was skimping on the younger daughters’ trousseaus. They married boys from the region. None of them chose a fellow countryman with a propensity or disposition for business. There were expressions of praise for the marriage of Jamile, the second in age, because Ranulfo Pereira, the groom, was well on his way, with planted fields in Mutuns and his four thousand tons of cacao already harvested. Samira, two years younger, was following a modest but worthy destiny as she received her nuptial blessings in partnership with the telegrapher Clóvis Esmeraldino. Although not a lad of many possessions, he was good with words, a riddler, a decipherer of word games, and a versifier for calendars, with funds from some dubious income, and a man of some luster and esteem. As for the youngest, Fárida, she was said to be the prettiest of the Turk girls in that store—tidbit, to use the covetous term of Alfeu Bandeira, a tailor’s apprentice who worked under the watchful eye of Master Ataliba Reis, owner of the English Haberdashery, whose doors opened across the street from the home of the
Jafets. To tell the truth, Alfeu wasn’t pleased with the way the tidbit would offer herself with a brazenness that was firmly condemned by the families in the neighborhood. All that necking and so much petting was bound to come to a bad end. It came to a good one, however, with a hasty marriage. Fine silk veils fluttered over Fárida’s intrepid little belly, four months pregnant, with orange blossoms, the symbols of purity and virginity, on her wreath. “A virgin only in her armpits,” was the comment of Master Ataliba, chosen as godfather by the groom. “In the armpits, you think?” doubted Raduan Murad, godfather of the bride, skeptical, as a learned man should be. Both of them, however, were in accord with Dona Abigail Carvalho, the seamstress responsible for the bride’s dress, as that distinguished lady compared her to a cherub.

Without any cacao or word puzzles, Alfeu struggled behind the counter of the Bargain Shop. He wasn’t lacking in goodwill, but he was in everything else. When the time came to balance the books it was pandemonium. When Ibrahim woke up to the fact, he saw his fishing, his betting on checkers and backgammon, his nights of a spree, and the solvency of his business all threatened. The blame for the calamity didn’t lie completely with Alfeu, because at that very same time Adma had gone on the warpath.

It was a holy war. She had persevered in it ever since Sálua’s soul had appeared to her in a dream, suffering in the infinite and unable to assume her deserved place in the hand of the Eternal Father because of the dissipation into which the family had fallen after they took her to the cemetery. How could she enjoy the delights of good fortune if on earth her loved ones were living in iniquity and sin? In order to save the soul of her mother, Adma had entered into battle.

She set goals for herself, established during her sleepless nights of solitude and unhappiness. There was little she could do with regard to Jamile’s arrogant behavior, however, as her sister began to take on the airs of a rich lady, quite stuck on herself. She was drinking coffee and belching up chocolate, and there was little Adma could do about it,
or with the sassy Samira, a scoffer and joker in the eyes of her husband and a shameless hussy in the mouths of everyone else. One lived in Mutuns and the other next door to the train station, both far from her immediate authority. Only on the rare occasions when the wicked girls came to visit did Adma bare her breast and vent her feelings. Jamile would respond with disdain; Samira would laugh in her face and mock her.