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

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.

14
    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, justright 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