Page 79 of Girl in the Water
Eduardo said nothing. When the old man got into a mood like this, he just needed an audience. He didn’t require a response.
“Then logging season ended,” Raul Morais said, “and we floated the logs down the river. I stopped at the first village, went straight to a hut where I heard a woman would take care of me. I could only imagine—some old whore who could no longer hack it in the bigger towns downstream.” He gave a strangled laugh. Shook his head. But then a fond, almost affectionate look came over his face, so unusual that it made Eduardo actually pay attention.
“Instead,” the old man reminisced, “I found a beautiful young girl, a mix of some Indian, some white, some black. Large brown eyes, long dark hair down to the back of her knees, nothing but a scrap of cloth wrapped around her hips, her budding, firm breasts bare…” He sighed. “I felt a tenderness that I thought I’d buried with Maria.”
Eduardo shifted in the chair and swallowed back a groan. Would he have to sit through a listing of all the prostitutes his father had ever slept with?
“The girl told me her mother wasn’t home.” Raul Morais kept going. “I wasn’t interested in her mother.” A faint smile softened his harsh mouth. “I asked her name. Ana. She was a virgin.”
Eduardo had his doubts, but he didn’t voice them.
“I didn’t pay her before I left,” his father said. “It wasn’t like that between us. I didn’t want her to think that I made her into a whore. I was going to make her into my wife. I’d float the logs down to Manaus with the crew. Get my pay. Then I meant to go back.”
“But then you met Mother,” Eduardo said to hurry along the tale.
“In Manaus, I met the geezer who owned the logging operation. He had no sons, just one daughter, a round, bucktoothed girl who wanted me as soon as she set eyes on me. Your grandfather’s house was a revelation, let me tell you. The nicest place I’ve ever been inside, and they only let me as far as the foyer, hat in hand, waiting for my pay.”
Eduardo had a hard time picturing his father as a humble laborer. He’d never known the man as anything else but a proud, confident, heavy-handed dictator.
He seemed to be lost in the memories. “Tile floor, antique furniture, a chandelier overhead. And a whole second floor at the top of a wide staircase. Just for two people and their servants. Your grandfather had other businesses besides logging. He had two small ships that ran goods and adventurers up and down the Rio Negro.”
“And you thought, someday you’d be like that,” Eduardo said dutifully, resigned to having to hear the whole annoying story.
“I saw then what was possible.” His father’s eyes shone. “Your grandfather handed out the pay personally, magnanimously, bald and overweight, huffing just from having come down the stairs.
“Hasn’t swung an ax in decades, I thought. Yet there the man stood, having all the money, while us poor bastards who broke our backs and risked our lives would get just enough money to eat and whore through the rainy season, then be broke and desperate enough to sign up for another go when logging season started up again.”
Eduardo didn’t point out that his father paid his own workers just as little, or less.
“After we got our pay,” Raul Morais said, “we were sent around to the kitchen in the back for a meal. The daughter came in. To me, the kitchen alone seemed like a palace. And the girl, Rafaela, seemed like a princess—even if bucktoothed and plump as a stuffed pigeon. And the princess wanted me.
“I spent the rainy season seducing her, making sure that she was with child by the end. We married. When logging season started, this time, I went back up the river as crew boss. Maybe it was your grandfather’s way of trying to get rid of me.”
Not the first or last person to have that idea, Eduardo thought.
His father squared his shoulders. “I refused to die. I finally saw the light. I understood that riches don’t come from hard labor. Riches come from leaping on opportunities. A successful man moves forward by leaps and bounds. So I leapt.”
Eduardo reached nonchalantly into his pocket and fingered the small capsule there—a jungle poison that would mimic a heart attack.
If only Joaquim, that gorilla of a butler, would turn his back. Or leave for a minute.Doesn’t the damn man ever have to piss?
“By the time the next logging season came around,” Raul Morais said, “I had a son, your brother. I named him Marcos to soften up your grandfather, then convinced the man to rest and let me take over the business. I never held another ax again either.” His tone stiffened with pride.
“Then Grandfather died the next year.” A suspiciously convenientdeath.Eduardo was familiar with this part of the tale.
His grandfather had died, and Raul had another son. This one, he’d named Eduardo, after the little brother he’d left behind in the favelas in Rio. And as Raul Morais held his new son, he realized he was rich enough to have his brother found, to have his brother brought to Manaus, so he hired an investigator to do just that. And now, Uncle Eduardo might end up with Morais Timber.
The younger Eduardo hated his namesake with the heat of the equator. He squeezed the capsule in his pocket, caught himself, stopped and pulled his hand out. He didn’t want to burst the damn thing.
“Sometimes I think the happiest I’ve ever been were those years in Manaus,” his father kept blabbering. “I thought all the hardship was behind me. I’d done all the starving, thieving, killing, so my sons would never have to. I wanted you and Marcos to live like the rich I saw in Rio, people I watched passing by in fancy cars when I’d still been a child of the favelas. I wanted to raise you to be princes.” He sighed. “Have I made a mistake there?”
“Of course not, Father.” The old man had given them everything. Except his love. And now, the Morais millions.
“I’ve been soft,” Raul Morais said. “I didn’t discipline you enough.”
Eduardo swallowed back bitter anger. He was pretty sure the old man beating him and Marcos bloody with a bamboo cane a few more times would not have made them into better men. They both had plenty of scars on their backs.
Once, when he’d been ten, the old man had beaten him to the point of fainting. He could no longer remember why, but he could still remember the slicing pain. It had to be over idleness. The old man hated nothing more than any perceived sign of laziness in his offspring.
