The Discovery of America by the Turks Read Online Free

covered the whole cacao region from north to south and east to west as the borders grew longer and the distances greater and greater. He saved him from multiple dangers: rattlesnakes and jararacussu vipers and their deadly fangs, the endemicsmallpox, black pox, which was certain death, ambushes, gunmen, the conflicts and battles of colonel against colonel, in which killers and henchmen left bodies on the road marked by carbine and stab wounds.
    Anuar Maron—Colonel Maron, because he was a millionaire plantation owner with some eighty thousand tons—added to his harvest the meager pickings of those who owned just a small piece of cultivated land and were without means to transport their dry cacao to the warehouses of the export firms established in Ilhéus and Itabuna. Jamil gathered up the production of the small farmers for him, in an agreement with representatives of Colonel Misael Tavares, the cacao king, or Colonel Basílio de Oliveira, the master of Pirangi.
    For four years, riding mules and donkeys or on foot along dangerous bypaths, Jamil swept through the forest and conquered it as he bought cacao at low prices. He learned how to dicker and to practice accounting and medicine, establishing relationships and friendships, as godfather baptizing children into the Catholic faith—may Allah understand and forgive him.
    Allah understood all and forgave everything; he kept watch over him, attentive to the mullah’s prayers. Jamil had proof of this when a dispute separated him once and for all from Colonel Anuar Maron. In the village of Ferradas, where he’d been sent on an errand, he met and gathered to his bosom the capricious Jove, a wild and lusty half-breed. The affair caused talk, and news of it reached the colonel’s ears. Anuar Maron had set up a house for Jove, had taken her out of the red-light district, wanted her all for himself and wouldn’t hear of anyone else grazing in his pastures. He settled accounts with his countryman and fired him. He didn’t send a gunman who was a good shot to lie in wait for the bold fellow in an ambush and send him off to the land of the stiffs. It must have been because he remembered the mullah and had a great deal of respect for him.
    On that occasion, when Jamil saw himself in a hole, out of work and with no place to turn, Colonel Noberto de Fariamade him a proposition. A plantation owner even richer than the Turk Maron, the owner of leagues of land planted haphazardly and not too great a distance from Itaguassu, he’d developed a friendship with Jamil, whom he’d come to know in the whorehouses of Itabuna, of which he was an assiduous and jolly frequenter. Desirous of seeing prosper the settlement that had sprung up near his lands, Colonel Noberto, when he heard of Jamil’s troubles, asked him if he might not be interested in going into business in Itaguassu, dealing on his own instead of working for a boss. What else could Jamil be longing for from life? It was his dream, but where was the capital to start it? Noberto de Faria, a native of Sergipe with traces of mulatto, a man of honor and vision, placed the necessary sum at Jamil’s disposal, trusting in him and swearing to the great esteem in which he held him. He called him his partner at table and in bed, because they had the same girls, ate from the same plate, and had similar tastes: small boobs, big asses, tight twats. Pleasant concordances always reinforce the bonds of friendship.
    He set himself up under the protection of Allah—Allah is great—and Mohammed is his prophet, it’s worth repeating—with dough loaned by Colonel Noberto de Faria. Three years later he’d already paid back the loan and was enlarging the Emporium bit by bit. It was still a long way off from being compared with the shops and stores in the cities of Ilhéus and Itabuna or the villages of Ferradas, Olivença, Agua Preta, and Pirangi, but it wouldn’t be long (and who could doubt it?) before Itaguassu would cease to be just a