The Discovery of America by the Turks (8 page)

When she opened her eyes she could see that eternal life had begun and she had deserved paradise: Before her was an archangel, bending over her and smiling, celestial, dazzling. It wasn’t paradise; it was the inside of a dry-goods store. Someone was holding a glass to her mouth as the water ran down from the corners of her lips. The echoes of the tumult and the shouts of the donkey drivers could still be heard. The archangel wasn’t wearing wings, but he kept on staring
at her. A fat man, all covered with sweat and fright, all flustered, was explaining things.

“A narrow escape. You had a narrow escape. You were born again. This young fellow here risked his life; he’s a hero.” He was pointing to the archangel, with the admiration of the people crowding at the door to get a better look.

Adma looked up at the hero. He’d lost his celestial origins, but he was still young and strong, and he kept on smiling. She still found him dazzling. He politely gave her his hand to help her up from the chair where they’d seated her and said, “Let’s go, Adma! I’m going to take you home.”

Adma felt weak and confused, not understanding immediately what was going on. She was still under the shock of it all. Where did the prince know her from? How had he learned her name? Confused, she accepted the hand he was holding out to her, but she was unsteady on her feet as she stood up, so he held her, taking her arm.

“Lean on my arm. Let’s go, sweetie.”

Sweetie, a most loving name, a most courteous one.

For the first time in her life Adma found herself walking down the street arm in arm with a man. The man in question had called her sweetie and was smiling at her with a smile full of implications.

“Don’t you remember me?”

She would have liked to answer yes, that she did remember, how could she have forgotten. Unhappily, alas, she couldn’t remember when she’d seen him. Never in her life, fatter or skinnier, it was amazing, never. Perplexed, she smiled as he refreshed her memory.

“I used to work at the Style Shop, which belongs to my brother Aziz. Don’t you remember? I’d be there spying on you, wanting you.…”

He’d been spying, wanting? She had never been aware of it.

A warmth came into her skinny breast. She hadn’t realized it, but there were men who spied on her, young men, fascinating princes, angels from heaven who wanted her. The most marvelous thing happened when they got near the house.

“I used to pass by here every day just to see you in the window, but you never noticed me.”

Adma stopped walking, wanting to hear him repeat that he’d passed by there. Just to see her? Alas, she couldn’t believe it! She would have given anything for Samira to be there now, seeing and listening, dying with envy. With difficulty she explained, “We have to go in by the street in back. I went out through the gate in the yard.”

They turned away, the key trembling in Adma’s hand. The prince, still smiling, took it and opened the ancient lovers’ portal. The old maid entered, eyes down. She didn’t have the courage to look at the one who had saved her from death, who had taken her arm and told her what she had never heard before. It could be only a vision, on the point of vanishing.

“I don’t know how to thank you; you saved my life!”

She was speaking in the yard, in a low voice. It was the end of the enchantment. There he was, going off forever. The road to happiness had been short. She’d been able to get only a glimpse of paradise. She was returning to hell again.

“You don’t know, good-looking?” Adib Barud, the archangel, the hero, the prince, the hickish dromedary, smiled wider, with openly good or bad intentions now, according to how one sees it. He winked and announced, “Well, then, I’m going to show you right now, my beauty.” He repeated, “My beauty” and added, ready for anything, “My little knockout!”

He went through the gate and gave it a shove, closing it. With one of his hands he grabbed Adma around the waist; with the other he held her head as her knot of hair came undone. She lost her voice and her movement. Adib held her in a kiss he’d learned from Procópia, the civil judge’s woman. A storm of kisses, tongues, and teeth, marking her mouth and her soul forever. She struggled, but he held her tight. Adma’s body finally softened as she fainted into Adib’s arms. It had been too much for one day. He supported her against the wall and leaned on her. He ran his hand up and down, a pleasant surprise. The ironing board had breasts, and they weren’t limp or fallen.

Neither limp nor fallen, just one more grace of God on that afternoon of miracles. No one had fallen under the hooves of the animals; the cacao had been picked up grain by grain. There was no damage worth complaining about. As for Adib’s presence at the scene of the drama, it wasn’t because of any supernatural coincidence. Ever since his chat
with Raduan Murad, the boy from the bar had been looking for the right opportunity to speak to Adma about matters of love. When he saw her pass on her way back from the station, he asked Sante’s permission to leave and followed her closely. The rest fell to God to do, and he did it with magnificence, skill, and speed, as everyone can attest.

“Today the drinks are on me,” announced Ibrahim Jafet after ordering a round of anisette.

He took over the chair left by the druggist Napoleão Sabóia, the only native champion capable of standing up to the invincible Syrio-Lebanese at the backgammon board.

Lowering his voice, he whispered in Raduan Murad’s ear, “Yesterday I celebrated two weeks, old friend.”

“Two weeks, Ibrahim? A whole two weeks?”

Yes, two whole weeks had passed without the old maid Adma’s waiting with curses and insults for her father’s arrival in the predawn hours, without the usual uproar. Some of the neighbors sensed that something was missing. Something inexplicable was happening. Adma didn’t seem to be herself at all. Ibrahim was even capable of swearing that he’d seen her smile more than once in the past few days. Two weeks of complete tranquility, no witchcraft to disturb him in the critical moment of shooting his load, preventing him from exercising his status as a male with ardor and competence—he’d stopped going limp.

“What can you tell me, old friend? What explanation can you give me?”

Raduan couldn’t find any immediate explanation, but he went on to conceive and accumulate suspicions in proportion to the growth of unexpected actions on the part of young Adib, always hanging about his table. For no rhyme or reason, when their eyes crossed, the waiter would smile or wink, smiles and winks of complicity. On a certain occasion he whispered in his ear, rubbing his hands,“Everything’s
going fine, Professor!” The suspicions were ripening in the direction of what Adib might have to do with the mysterious transformation of Adma.

Weeks went by with no great incidents except for the shooting at the Caga-Fumo, in which two women and three men died, an ordinary fight between gunmen in a whorehouse; and the murder of Dr. Felício de Carvalho, the lawyer for parties opposed to Colonel Amílcar Teles in the Pedra Branca deal, a settling of old accounts. A mediocre balance for a period of a month and a half—could it have been that the bustle of Itabuna was going into decline? Well, on one of those late backgammon afternoons, when Raduan Murad was left all alone in the bar, sipping his last glass of the bogus anisette, counterfeited by the Mohana family and delicious, better than the imported variety, Adib came over to him.

“May I, Professor? Do you remember that talk we had the other day?”

“Talk? Which one?” Raduan was playing innocent.

“About marriage, et cetera and so forth. You told me, Professor…”

“Now I remember.”

“I’m an orphan on both sides, you know. I’d like you, Professor, to have a talk with Mr. Ibrahim as if you were my father. I want to marry his daughter.”

“You want to marry Adma?” He held back an expression of surprise. Astonished, he remained silent for a moment and looked straight at Adib with obvious wonderment.

“What about Adma? Does she know about your intentions?”

“We’ve been making love going on two months now.”

“Making love? How? She up in the window and you down in the street? Sending little billets-doux?”

“Little notes, Professor? Not with me! It’s right in the backyard. When I leave here at ten o’clock at night, she’s waiting for me. She leaves the gate open.” He clicked his tongue in an obscene sound of satisfaction, identical to the
one he gave months before when he recalled Procópia, the civil judge’s woman.

“You mean…?”

“Just what you’re thinking, Professor. You know what it’s like. People start fooling around, a touch here, a pat there; then when you realize it, it’s too late—the meeting’s already been called to order.”

An amazing individual! Trying to clarify things for him, perhaps, he only ended up leaving Raduan in the dark, all confused, as he swore he was.

“Maybe you can’t imagine it, Professor, but she’s really something.” He smiled with contentment and satisfaction. Raduan Murad was fascinated.

“Tell Mr. Ibrahim he can put the store in my hands. In my hands it’s going to be a first-class bazaar.”

From whom had Raduan heard an affirmative just like that?

“I’ll see to the matter,” he said, accepting the assignment. Conceding it its deserved importance, he added: “This request calls for a celebration, speeches. It’s not every day that an engagement like this comes along, one so…” He searched for the adjective. “Auspicious.”

He sat there thinking for a moment and then turned to Adib. “Really something! Is that what you said, Adib my boy?”

“Really something!” the young man confirmed.

Raduan Murad preserved in his memory the expression he hadn’t been familiar with. Absorbed in it all, he turned his eyes toward the sky, which was breaking into fire over the outlying parts of Itabuna.

As he passed by the doors of the Bargain Shop, Jamil Bichara grew indignant at the sight of bars on the doors that early in the evening, when there was a lot of commercial activity. It was absurd, something that called for urgent measures and quick action. He’d try to see to that and put an end to the mess.

He went over to the entrance to the family quarters and began to climb the stairs. He could hear the sound of voices coming from the living room. At the top he found the door wide open. He peeked inside before clapping his hands and asking permission to enter. From what he could see, a solemn ceremony was taking place, in the presence of a lot of people. Who knows, maybe it was a mournful but animated wake. Had there been a death in the family? Maybe the persecuted Ibrahim had committed suicide, unable to bear any longer the crisis that had overcome the business and the family. Only something like that could explain the closing of the store and the somber Sunday clothes of the unknown couple standing on the threshold of the foyer. He recognized Raduan Murad, who was making a speech in Arabic, probably the funeral eulogy for his friend. He was filled with sadness and remorse, but he immediately discarded the funeral theory when he heard the crystalline and licentious laughter of Samira, one of the principal reasons for his being there to say yes.

But the one who was saying yes was the master of the house, the head of the clan, Ibrahim Jafet, brimming with good health and satisfaction, euphoric. He was giving his
agreement as father to the request of Raduan Murad, who had just made it with an inspired toast. He was giving the hand of his daughter Adma to Adib Barud, who from that day forward would also be his son.

Jamil appeared in the room just at the moment of toasting by the members of the Jafet and Barud families, gathered in celebration, one that was all the more sensational for being unexpected. He was introduced to Jamile, his other almost sister-in-law, her husband, Ranulfo Pereira, and Adib’s brothers and sisters-in-law. He knew Adib from the bar, but he never would have imagined him involved with Adma. The damnedest things!

He was able to contemplate with fine impartiality the ominous maiden, and he couldn’t know how he had come to accept—even desire!—marriage with her. Seeing her so submissive on the arm of her fiancé, dripping with giggles and coquetry, was repugnant to him. He concluded that not even in exchange for the kingdom of the Thousand and One Nights would a normal citizen subject himself to such an infamous pact. That young fellow Adib Barud, besides being a base, greedy boy, was a degenerate. And yet, less than an hour before, Jamil was climbing the stairs to the living quarters with the aim of putting forth, in plain language, a request identical to the one Raduan Murad had transmitted with poetical emotion in the name of the ex-waiter. Greed just as base. A degenerate? Oh, no! Possessed by Shaitan, bewitched, blind, and deaf.

He raised his glass to drink a toast along with Sante to the health of the betrothed. The bar owner, accompanied by his wife, Lina, the one with the attractive hips, was lamenting the loss of his valuable employee, a hard worker, discreet in his thievery. He foresaw a brilliant future for him in the new business. The drinks were good and they were free, the company pleasant. Jamil Bichara took part in the general merriment. An unexpected guest, he was one of the most expansive.

Talking foolishness with Samira by a window ledge, this
time it fell to Jamil to break out suddenly in uncontrollable laughter.

“What are you laughing at so heartily?” the flirtatious girl wanted to know.

“I’m laughing at Shaitan,” Jamil Bichara answered, and it was the truth.

Jamil Bichara got out of the mess unharmed, with no great damage. The profits he had imagined back in the wilds of Itaguassu, the fortune, the sultanate, were nothing but daydreams. They would have been hard to bring off. They might easily have vanished into nothing, leaving him with obligations and the marriage on his back. The marriage: Hoo-whee! Holy shit!

He conserved his friendship with Ibrahim, a jovial companion for nights of carousing, and he continued his inconsequential flirtations with Samira. He would go visit her on the Largo da Estação every time he came to Itabuna. They would chat about foolish things, exchange smiles, hints, vague promises, tender squeezing of hands. There would be casual touching here and there, peeking into the neck of her dress, but it never went beyond that. He’d have his rewards in his dreams in Itaguassu, where Samira would relax with him on nights of debauchery—full breasts, broad belly, bushy little precipice. Allah had saved him from Adma and a horrible fate as a pack mule, killing himself in work to sustain the lazybones Jafet family. As a small compensation he was left with a partner for some flirtation. He couldn’t complain.