The Brothers by Milton Hatoum

Author:Milton Hatoum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

6

Halim was getting old: he was well over seventy, nearly eighty—even he didn’t know what day and year he’d been born. He said: “I was born at the end of the last century, some day in January … The best thing about it is that I’m aging without knowing how old I am: that’s what happens when you’re an immigrant.” Still, the flab had to fight to take all the strength out of his muscles. He was as strong as an ox, as he opened or shut up the shop. He pulled and lifted the metal doors with real vigor, and the cylinders crashed noisily as he did it. Rânia could have done the work, but he got there first, displaying his muscles and showing off to his daughter. Right up to a little before his death, he was discreet when he was with friends, incapable of false laughter, generous without thinking twice, but with an unpredictable, masculine bravado. He could give a good left hook to a hostile chin, and hurt.

That’s what happened with one A. L. Azaz and his gang of brutes, a year after the end of the Second World War. I have no difficulty remembering the date because Domingas told me: “You were born when Halim had a fight in the public square, and was the talk of the town.”

Everybody in the city heard about this fight, and remembered it, the anecdotes still circulated years later, distorted by time and its many voices.

What happened was that Azaz, a tough guy and a layabout, spread the tale that Halim spent his life chasing Indian girls, both his own maid and others in the neighborhood. He also said, this Azaz, that there were lots of children who asked for his blessing in secret. The carefree Halim was the last one to find out about this. He heard the slanderous tales when he was relaxing with friends in the Encalhe, a bar installed in the skeleton of a wreck below the Educandos neighborhood, then settled by former rubber tappers, almost all of them very poor. There were always two or three with a machete or a sharpened knife in their pocket. But Halim liked the Encalhe, the fried manioc and fish they served at makeshift tables, and already in those days he was inseparable from his bottle of arrack and the backgammon board. Halim heard the rumors, stopped laughing, and pushed the grimy dice away.

A. L. Azaz had no fixed address: he was an idler who found shelter in big abandoned houses, where he broke in and lived for a stretch, pretending to be the owner. He picked up leftovers from rich people’s banquets, and afterwards boasted about his tawdry sexual exploits in the Encalhe. But he looked like a ruffian, and he was a famous slanderer, always to be found gossiping in the early evening, when poison creeps into the voice, and evil silences good judgment. He was stocky, with crinkly blondish hair and tight trousers, the pockets always full of sharpened bits of metal.

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