Labels and Other Stories by Louis de Bernières

Author:Louis de Bernières
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473547926
Publisher: Random House

TWO DOLPHINS

La Caboca Amadea was a connoisseur of earth; to each one of us the gods apportion talents according to caprice, and those of the gods with little intelligence (but impressively whimsical innovative genius) apportion talents of great interest but of even greater uselessness. When Exu decreed that Caboca Amadea should become a gourmandiser of soil, he did it with so little thought that he did not even remember to remind himself to keep an eye upon the consequences of his humorous gift, and so he was as surprised as everyone else when he discovered what had transpired.

From the time when Amadea was a very little black-eyed girl with tawny skin and hair perpetually wet from diving for turtles in the inundated forest, she was developing not only an infallible sense of direction amongst the tangles of trees, but was also learning to tell by taste her exact location. Beneath the water she could take a handful of the earth that was forest floor for only five months of the year, and surface with it. Shaking the water from her hair, she would first sniff the soil, appreciating its organic odours, its degree of fetidness, its proportion of sand, its perfume of submarine worms and the excrement of fishes. Then she would begin to devour it, slowly at first so that its warm tastes could mingle upon her palate, and then greedily so that she could feel it parading musically down her cormorantine gullet. This filled her with such delight that afterwards she would imitate the shriek of the hyacinth macaw, because nothing else could summarise her bliss.

Amadea learned in this way the exact taste of every barra within the range of her people, and because of this she became desired by every man, for with her in the canoe it was impossible to become lost, and one could go fishing far and wide, since even when one was beyond the limits of the known world, Amadea could tell from the savour of alluvial silt and the direction of the current the precise location of home.

At first people disapproved of her intemperate consumption of soil, because it was a sacrilege so to consume the body of a god. But Nenu declared after much thought that the Earthmother was not consumed, but transformed into a rich and valuable manure by passing through Amadea’s gut. When the cabocos accepted this opinion of such an old and indisputably wise woman, Amadea accepted it happily as well, and thought of herself as the handmaiden of the Earthmother as well as the High Navigatrix of the sodden forest.

So it was that her pride grew mightily, and she heaped with contumely the humble offerings and inducements of her forlorn suitors, who prized her even more greatly the more she scorned and insulted them. She would send them away with the haughtiness of a young queen, and the judgement that she would never marry until one day a man appeared who would give to her a soil so exquisite that she could not resist him.

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