Chronicler Of The Winds Read Online Free PDF

the dramas that Dona Esmeralda and her actors staged. And yet I think I could tell that many of the young actors were talented; at least those of us who worked in the bakery believed in their performances, believed in the people or animals they played, and we often laughed. But I think I can also say that Dona Esmeralda was not a good playwright. We would often crawl through the shaft and listen to Dona Esmeralda and the actors squabbling. The actors didn't understand what she meant in her plays, and Dona Esmeralda was angry because she hadn't managed to explain to the actors what she wanted. Terrible arguments would erupt, as if the rehearsals themselves were dramatic performances. But they always ended with Dona Esmeralda getting her way. She was the one paying the actors' wages, she was the one with the greatest stamina. Those of us who worked in the bakery felt as if we were especially privileged – which partly compensated for the wages which occasionally failed to materialise altogether or were exceedingly late – because we had this opportunity to look into the worlds that were continually being created and obliterated on the stage that Dona Esmeralda had reclaimed from the stinking sewers.
    There were moments of great magic on that small stage, illuminated by the ancient spotlights, which would sometimes go dark with a powerful bang. I can still see the way spirits hovered over the stage in the form of yellow cloth flowers that Dona Esmeralda herself scattered, hanging aloft among the treacherously rotten catwalks up in the flies. It gives me shivers to remember the slave ships with their groaning cargo, which glided across the stage with fluttering white sails stitched together from old sheets and flour sacks, and an anchor that looked as if it weighed a thousand kilos, even though it was only papier mâché stretched over a chicken-wire frame. The actors roamed through time and space with Dona Esmeralda's incomprehensible plays as their guides. We bakers, dressed in white, would crawl into the roof duct or sit on newspapers so we wouldn't get the seats dirty in the uppermost galleries, and whenever we laughed, it was a signal to Dona Esmeralda that a performance was ready and that it was now time to open the box office and announce a new premiere.
    All of us were secretly in love with the beautiful young Eliza, Dona Esmeralda's big star. She was only sixteen, but she enchanted us with her confident ease on the stage, whether she was playing a cynical, heavily made-up puta in one of Dona Esmeralda's more realistic plays or a woman poetically balancing a water jug on her head beside some imaginary river whose invisible water flowed across the stage. All of us bakers loved her, and we mourned long and deep when one day she no longer appeared on the stage. An official from a foreign embassy, who had come to the theatre one night and had in due course returned for twenty-three performances in a row, proposed to Eliza, and then they left for some country on the other side of the sea. I often wondered what Dona Esmeralda had felt at that moment, whether she felt betrayed and sad, or whether she was full of anger. She never said a word.
    Some months later she discovered Marguerida, who before long had made the memory of Eliza fade. The world of the theatre was a world which never seemed to come to an end.
    For me, José Antonio Maria Vaz, it meant a whole new life when I stepped before Dona Esmeralda's eyes and found deliverance and work. Afterwards I thought that even though my father had done nothing but talk his whole life, at least he had been right about my hands. I was truly a baker; I had landed in the right place in life, the place that everyone searches for but so few actually find. I made friends with the other bakers and the enticing girls who stood behind the counter and sold the fresh, fragrant bread. I got to know all the people who lived around the theatre, on the broad avenue which runs straight through the