The Discovery of America by the Turks Read Online Free PDF Page A

to visit did Adma bare her breast and vent her feelings. Jamile would respond with disdain; Samira would laugh in her face and mock her.
    She was, on the other hand, able to do quite a bit in the case of Fárida, Alfeu, and Ibrahim, there at hand and with no escape. She allowed them none. She put the house in order and demanded decorum in their habits. She obliged Fárida, poor cherub, to abandon her happy life and come help with the household chores—so many and so tedious!—starting with the care of her son (bottles, dirty diapers, wet clothes, crying, doo-doo, and vomit) instead of continuing her shameless behavior with Alfeu, exchanging kisses over the counter, pinches and pats in front of customers, as though they were still courting. It hadn’t been she, Adma, who’d wiggled her body at the garden gate, so why should she have to take care of the baby’s piss and shit?
    But the main target of her challenge was Ibrahim, to rescue him from the disorder and perdition in which he had been wallowing from the beginning of his widowerhood, when he abandoned family matters completely. If Adma could bring him back to the righteous path, Sálua’s soul could finally reach paradise. It was a holy mission, and she set about bringing it off, no matter what the cost.
    From Sálua Adma had inherited her strong character, her sternness, and her talent for command. It was a pity she hadn’t inherited her facial features or her figure. In those particulars she took after her father, rawboned and without the abundant breasts or hips, the sway in her walk, the large eyes, or the silken hair of her mother and sisters. The slight fuzz they all had on their upper lip, one more mark of beauty, in Adma’s case had grown into a thick mustache. Who is to blame for the injustices of heaven?
    With age and dejection, the moral gifts she had inherited fromSálua had turned into aggressiveness and intolerance. Raduan Murad, a student of human nature and cause and effect, didn’t call her a matriarch; lowering his voice, the worthy man declared her: a virago!
    Examining the various facets of his problems during his threatened mornings of fishing, Ibrahim came to the conclusion that there was only one single outstanding solution capable of resolving the moral and financial crisis and freeing him simultaneously from the ineptitude of his son-in-law and the despotism of his oldest daughter—the others were delights, all three of them. He had to find some fellow countryman who was single and of small means to take over the management of the Bargain Shop and take Adma as his wife. The suitor’s Arab blood would be a guarantee of his vocation for business and readiness for work. His modest condition would facilitate bringing off the wedding. If it didn’t work out that way, how was he going to face up to ugliness instead of beauty and sourness in place of propriety?
    Everybody knows, and it’s stated in books, that a woman’s true beauty doesn’t lie in her physical charms, nor do they come first. The true beauty of a woman rests, before anything else, in the virtues that adorn her heart and beautify her soul. Keeping in mind her undeniable and extraordinary virtues—her status of heiress, partnership in the profits of the store, and her spotless virginity—how could anyone say that Adma wasn’t beautiful?
    Besides that, she wasn’t a show-off like her sister or crippled or weak in the head. Absolute purity, outstanding: She’d never known a suitor’s boldness, never watched the moon rise by the garden gate. With Adma decked out with lace and ribbons, and the profits from the Bargain Shop, who knows whether he might just find a candidate capable of leading her to the altar and doing him that great favor?
    A difficult task, Ibrahim concluded, but a necessary, urgent, and vital one: Adma had reached the age of sourness and evil.

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    At the bar, Ibrahim sought out Raduan Murad’s advice and opinion over the backgammon board. He found an