The Discovery of America by the Turks by Jorge Amado Read Free Book Online Page B

it to spend the night in that endless gabbing with Ibrahim? Ibrahim, another numbskull, instead of taking up all her man’s time, should have been looking for a woman to sleep with himself before the colonels grabbed all those present, leaving him without a howdy-do. She was right. Jamil gave her his arm and led her to the dance floor. Ibrahim took advantage of the break and the advice as he spotted Cockeye Paula all by herself beside the orchestra. He invited her for a polka. But both of them, Jamil and Ibrahim, were dancing without any interest in it, paying no attention, their minds set on their machinations.
    When they got back to the table Ibrahim put forth the possibility of a partnership if Adma were included in the transaction. In that way the other daughters and their respective husbands would have no grounds for complaint. Other daughters, which ones? What tune were those new sons-in-law playing? While Glorinha was taking care of her invitations from plantation owners and traveling salesmen for square dances and rejecting offers to leave the cabaret and the Turk—Colonel Raimundo Barreto threatened to carry her off by force, but she, with great skill, convinced him to take somebody else—the two fellow countrymen, between successive rounds of vermouth and cognac, wereadvancing, detail by detail, trying to untangle the thread. Ibrahim, although drunk, controlled himself and didn’t vomit up the final secrets. He made it honorably clear that his daughter Adma didn’t figure in the gallery of local beauties. About her character he revealed nothing. There’s time for everything even when you’re in a hurry.
    “If I understand it right, my friend, you want to retire—you’ve already worked too much; you feel tired. You want someone you can trust who’s able to take your place behind the counter in the store, since your son-in-law can’t cut it. On the other hand, you’ve got an unmarried daughter and you want to set her up. Putting the two ends together, whoever marries the girl becomes a partner in the busines.…”
    They left the cabaret early in the morning. Ibrahim, a lightweight when it came to drinking, was staggering along the street. Cockeye Paula hadn’t kept her promise to wait for him and had gone off with a bad-tempered plantation owner, a certain Cláudio Portugal, crazy for cross-eyed girls.
    “Promise me and don’t give me any shit! Either you come with me, or I’ll save some time and finish off those bums right now.…” He threatened to pull out his pistol.
    The owner of the Bargain Shop consoled himself with stuffy-nosed Haydée, who made up for the nasality of her voice with a range of skills. In the state capital she’d worked in a house of French and Polish women, and she could do anything, according to her whim.
    In Glorinha Goldass’s room the lamp cast its light on the mirror hanging on the wall and the print of Saint George. The sheets and pillowcases smelled of patchouli. While he waited for the angry woman to clean herself over a basin in preparation for resuming their game of bird and snare, Jamil reviewed the facts he’d collected. Before he went any further, he would have to bring out into the open the true condition of the store, the confused business of the partnership, observe the daughters and sons-in-law, and lastly, get to know the ugly one. He had been destined to have a pretty wife, but in the backwoods wilderness where he did hisbusiness, in that out-of-the-way place where he’d set himself up, small farmers were used to eating well one day and poorly the next, on vermin and weeds, without complaining or raising a fuss. In the harsh weather of the cacao farms, mules, mares, and donkeys all grazed and came out okay.

11
    Even though he was tied up all the next day with suppliers, goods, and payments, Jamil Bichara found time to have a look at the store. From the brief inventory done with the help of Ibrahim, he came away with a favorable impression, which he