Another Day of Life

Scenes From the Front

Comandante Ndozi stands in the shade of a spreading mango tree. He wipes his sweaty face. Winning a battle takes physical exertion, too. It is just like cutting down a forest. He orders a group of soldiers to bury the dead. Friend and foe can be interred together — nothing means anything after death. Besides, as our proverb has it: Enemies on earth, brothers in heaven. He asks if the truck has left for Luanda with the wounded. It hasn’t, because the driver is waiting for a shipment of gasoline. The wounded are lying in the truck, moaning and calling for help. There is no doctor on this front. If the gasoline doesn’t come, half the wounded will bleed to death. Then Ndozi sends an orderly in the direction of some gunfire. He is to see if it is a skirmish with the withdrawing enemy, or if the boys are firing salutes to celebrate the victory. He suspects they are wasting ammunition, which is also running short. The enemy will strike tomorrow and we will give up the town because there won’t be anything to defend it with. He says he has eternal problems with ammunition. Eternal — that’s stretching it. This is the beginning of the war and his unit has been in existence for only a month.

Ndozi has years of guerrilla warfare behind him, but the troops he is leading are green. A green soldier fears everything. When he is transported to the front, he thinks death is watching him on every side. Every shot is aimed at him. He doesn’t know how to judge the range or direction of fire, so he shoots anywhere, as long as he can shoot a lot without stopping. He is not hurting the enemy, he is killing his own terror. He is stifling the dread that paralyzes a man and prevents him from thinking. Or rather, the dread doesn’t let him think about what is happening around him, about how to win the battle that his unit is engaged in, because at that moment he has a more important battle to win: he must win the war with his own fear. During the attack today, says Ndozi, I ran up to one who was standing there shooting a bazooka straight up in the air. Don’t aim up, I screamed, aim in front of you at those palms, that’s where they are. But I could see that he had a gray face, that finding the enemy hadn’t crossed his mind, that nothing was getting through to him because he was fighting his own enemy, who wasn’t among the palms but inside him, in the boy himself. He was firing because he wanted to stun himself, he wanted to stupefy himself and survive the attack of fear.

Ndozi continues his account. The supply officers call: Who did you share your ammunition with? I answer that it’s been fired. How many did you kill? Two. A half ton of cartridges and only two dead? But there was no need to kill more; we were to take the town, and we’ve taken it. None of the quartermasters comes to the front to see how green soldiers, who don’t know war, fight. At night, the unit moves up close to where the enemy is. We open fire just before dawn. The inexperienced soldier thinks the main thing is to make a big racket. He fires like a man possessed, blindly, because all he cares about is noise, communicating to the enemy how much strength is approaching. This is a form of warning, a way of evoking a fear in the opponent that will be greater than ours. And there is a sort of rationale to it. Because the other side is also unfamiliar with war, unfamiliar with gunfire; surprised by volley, they withdraw and flee.

The skirmishes in the first days of the war were limited to just such actions of firepower. They rarely came to direct combat. Once, says Ndozi, I lived through such an adventure: My people shot off all their ammunition at the beginning and later they couldn’t attack because there was nothing to attack with. I sent scouts into the town that we were supposed to attack. They returned and said that there wasn’t a soul there, the enemy had fled. When we walked into our objective, nobody in my unit had a single cartridge in his clip.

We didn’t want this war, Ndozi insists. But Holden Roberto struck from the north and Jonas Savimbi from the south. This country has been at war for five hundred years, ever since the Portuguese came. They needed slaves for trade, for export to Brazil and the Caribbean and across the ocean generally. Of all Africa, Angola supplied the greatest number of slaves to those countries. That’s why they call our country the Black Mother of the New World. Half the Brazilian, Cuban, and Dominican peasants are descended from Angolans. This was once a populous, settled country and then it was emptied, as if there’d been a plague. Angola is empty to this day. Hundreds of kilometers and not a single person, like in the Sahara. The slave wars went on for three hundred years or more. It was good business for our chiefs. The strong tribes attacked the weak, took prisoners, and put them on the market. Sometimes they had to do it, to pay the Portuguese taxes. The price of a slave was fixed according to the quality of his teeth. People pulled out their teeth or ground them away with stones in order to have a lower market value. So much suffering to be free. From generation to generation, tribes lived in fear of each other, they lived in hatred. The military campaigns took place in the dry season, because it was easier to move then. When the rains ended, everyone knew that the times of misfortune and of hunting for people had begun. In the rainy season, when the country was drowning in water and mud, hostilities stopped. But the chiefs were thinking up new campaigns, marshaling new forces. This is remembered by everyone even today because, in our thinking, the past takes up more space than the future.

I began fighting ten years ago, says Ndozi, in Comandante Batalho’s unit. That was eastern Angola. We had to learn the languages of the local tribes and act in accordance with their customs. This was a condition of survival — otherwise, they would have treated us as foreigners trespassing on their land. And yet, we were all Angolans. But they don’t know that this country is called Angola. For them, the land ends at the last village where the people speak a language they understand. That’s the border of their world. But, we asked, what lies beyond that border? Beyond that border lies another planet inhabited by the Nganguela, which means nonhumans. You have to keep an eye on those Nganguelas, because there are a lot of them and they use an incomprehensible language that conceals their evil designs.

All our enemies feed on the backwardness of the people, he says, and pay handsomely to keep the tribal wars going without end. They bought Holden Roberto so he’d create the FNLA from the Bakonga. They bought Savimbi to create UNITA from the Ovimbundi. We have a hundred tribes and must build one nation out of them. How long will it take? Nobody knows. We have to wean the people from hatred. We have to introduce the custom of shaking hands.

This is an unlucky country, he continues, just as there are unlucky people whose lives just don’t want to work out. The Portuguese were constantly organizing armed expeditions to conquer all Angola over the last two hundred years. There’s been no peace. We’ve been fighting a guerrilla war for fifteen years. No country in Africa has had such a long war. None has been so devastated. There were never many of us guerrillas. Then some died and others left for headquarters or the government. Only a handful of the old cadres remained at the front. We are scattered all over the country. We are short of people.

The troops with me are boys taken straight from the streets to the front. They ought to be in school, but we closed the schools in order to have an army, since we have to defend ourselves. This war was forced on us because we are a rich country inhabited by five million poor people, benighted illiterates incapable of operating an 86-mm recoil-less rifle. The other side thinks it’ll only take twenty armored vehicles to go on having our oil and diamonds and to put us back in our place. They didn’t give us time for anything, we have green troops who have to grow up to fight. For me, it’s a waste of these boys because they ought to grow up to read and write, to build towns and make people healthy. But they have to grow up to kill. They have to grow up to having less and less blind shooting on our side and more and more death on the other side. What other way out do we have in this war that we never wanted?

I am in Caxito, over sixty kilometers north of Luanda. Comandante Ju-Ju telephoned this morning to say there had been a battle for Caxito at dawn, that Comandante Ndozi’s unit had seized the town from the FNLA and it would be possible to go there presently. Ju-Ju is the political commissar of the MPLA general staff and he reads a communiqué on the war situation over the radio at eight each evening. These communiqués sound high-flown because Ju-Ju puts his heart and soul into them. One day we were weeping over the death of the late lamented Comandante Cowboy, who fell in the assault on the town of Ngavi. The intrepid hero refused to take cover and, severely wounded, dealt out death to three bestial aggressors. The next day we are celebrating the triumph at Folgares, where our glory-bedecked army delivered a shattering blow to a band of venal mercenaries. On another occasion we learn that all Africa is following with bated breath the fate of the heroic garrison in Luso, which has resolved to yield not an inch of ground to the numberless horde surrounding it. Our spirit will never weaken, our will to fight is inflexible as steel, we do not know fear, we do not fear death, and we are perishing in the eyes of an admiring world.

Ju-Ju’s communiqués are brief and calm when things are going well. The facts speak for themselves, and you don’t have to beg people to back a winner. But when something turns rotten, when it starts going bad, the communiqués become prolix and crabbed, adjectives proliferate, and self-praise and epithets scorning the enemy multiply. Ju-Ju’s voice reaches out to me through open windows as I walk the streets of Luanda. At this distance I can’t make out the words, but the fact that he talks for only a moment tells me that it’s good, that they are holding out, that they have taken something. But yesterday I covered half the city while Ju-Ju went on and on. Something had obviously gone wrong at the front. A thousand doubts descended on me: Would they manage to stick it out? Would they win?

Ju-Ju is a white Angolan, which means that his family comes from Portugal but he was born in Angola, which is his homeland. There are hundreds like him in the MPLA. They fight at the front or work in the staff or in administration. They all wear beards. That is a mark of identity here: a white with a beard is from Angola and nobody asks for his documents or pulls him in for interrogation. The blacks call him “camarada” and treat him with respect, because if he’s a white with a beard he must be somebody, the leader of a unit or higher. Ju-Ju has a beard like a Byzantine patriarch — down to his chest, impressive. That beard is the most striking thing about him, because he is small, thin, and stooped; he wears thick glasses and resembles a lecturer in the department of classical languages at one of the older European universities.

During the conquest of Caxito, Comandante Ndozi’s unit took 120 FNLA prisoners; Ju-Ju is interrogating them. They are summoned one by one under a large chestnut tree, where the political commissar is seated on an ammunition crate (grenades, French manufacture, captured from the enemy). By nature a shy man, Ju-Ju speaks politely or even deferentially to each of them and concludes the conversation by imparting a lesson, in the hope that it will lead the prisoner into the correct road of life and endeavor. He begins by evoking feelings of shame and guilt in his subject.

“Aren’t you ashamed,” the political commissar asks, “to be fighting in the FNLA as an agent of imperialism?”

A glum, vacant-looking Bakongo with skin so black that it shades toward violet, and a mug ugly enough to make your flesh crawl, says nothing and stares at the ground. He adjusts a bloody rag tied around his head where a bullet has taken one of his ears off. He sighs and seems ready to cry, but still says nothing.

Ju-Ju encourages him to talk, insists, even offers him a cigarette, although cigarettes are a priceless treasure in Angola and you can save your life for a pack or even half.

The prisoner answers at last that in Kinshasa (in Zaïre) they make roundups of Angolan Bakongos and press-gang them into the FNLA. Mobutu’s troops conduct these roundups. Whoever has the francs can buy his way out, but he didn’t have the francs because he was unemployed, so when they caught him they press-ganged him. It was good in the FNLA because they gave you something to eat. They give you manioc and lamb. On Saturdays they give you beer. If you win a battle, you get money. But he wasn’t in any battles they got paid for. He stole nothing, because everything was already looted and empty from the Zaïrian border to Caxito. He never saw Holden Roberto. He doesn’t know how to read and write. They were surrounded this morning, so they surrendered and here they are. He didn’t kill anybody.

Ju-Ju orders the next one brought in: a Bakongo, with hair that begins right above his eyebrows, reeling in terror. The commissar asks if he isn’t ashamed, etc., then asks where the nearest FNLA troops are.

This one doesn’t know. It was so mixed up that he doesn’t know who was captured and who got away. One mercenary shouted at him, “That way, that way,” and he obeyed and ran right into the MPLA, while the mercenary took off in the other direction and escaped. Among his fellow prisoners, he knows nobody. He and four others were sent from Ambriz to Caxito. They had nothing to eat or drink, because there is nothing on that road. Three died of exhaustion. One disappeared at night. He was left alone. He arrived in Caxito last evening. He wants to drink. He thinks that if there are any FNLA nearby, they will give up tomorrow on their own because there is no water in the vicinity except in Caxito. They will hold out overnight and perhaps until noon, then they will come in because otherwise they’ll die of thirst.

The next prisoner looks twelve. He says he’s sixteen. He knows it is shameful to fight for the FNLA, but they told him that if he went to the front they would send him to school afterward. He wants to finish school because he wants to paint. If he could get paper and a pencil he could draw something right now. He could do a portrait. He also knows how to sculpt and would like to show his sculptures, which he left in Carmona. He has put his whole life into it and would like to study, and they told him that he will, if he goes to the front first. He knows how it works — in order to paint you must first kill people, but he hasn’t killed anyone.

It was dark by the time I walked out into the square. Empty houses, no lights, windows broken, smashed shops. Some dogs near the well. Nobody’s cow, with its nose in the grass.

The front.

The dark wall of bush on all sides, and in the bush perhaps those FNLA soldiers who won’t hold out long without water and will give up tomorrow if they don’t die of thirst.

A dead little town, overwhelming emptiness and night. There are voices, conversations, and even laughter in only one place, at the other end of the square. Over there, where there is a small wall surrounded by a concrete balustrade, with a clump of trees in the middle. I walked toward the yard, stumbling over stones, artillery shells, an abandoned bicycle.

The FNLA prisoners, the 120 captured this morning during the battle for Caxito, stood along the inside of the balustrade. Along the outside, in the street and the square, stood MPLA sentries. There were a dozen or so of them.

Prisoners and guards were carrying on a lively conversation, arguing over the result of yesterday’s soccer match. Yesterday, Sunday, Benfica defeated Ferroviário 2–1 at the stadium in Luanda. Ferroviário, which had not lost in two years, left the field to the boos of its own fans. The team lost because its premier striker and league-leading scorer, Chico Gordo, had left his club to play for Sporting de Braga in Portugal.

They could have won.

No way.

Chico Gordo — so what! Norberto’s just as good! But they lost anyway.

Norberto? Norberto isn’t fit to carry Chico’s shoes.

Divided into two camps, ready to leap at each other ’s throats, the boys wrangle and debate. Except that the dividing line doesn’t run along the concrete balustrade. Ferroviário has fans among both prisoners and guards. And in the other camp, the camp of the Benfica fans celebrating their splendid triumph, there are also both prisoners and guards. It is a fervent argument, full of youthful passion, like the ones you can see anywhere in the world among boys leaving the stadium after a big game. In this kind of discussion you forget about everything.

And it’s good that you can forget about everything. That you can forget about that battle, after which there were fewer of us on both sides of the balustrade. About the roundups that Mobutu’s soldiers carry out. And about how we have to grow up to war, so that there will be less and less blind shooting and more and more death.

For a long time now, I’ve been making expeditions to the general staff to secure a pass for the southern front. Moving around the country without a pass is impossible because checkpoints for the inspection of travel documents stand guard along the roads. There is usually a checkpoint on the way into each town and another one on the way out, but as you drive through villages you may also run across checkpoints thrown up by wary and vigilant peasants; at times a checkpoint spontaneously established by nomads grazing their herds nearby will appear in the middle of an open field or in the most untenanted bush.

On important routes where major checkpoints are found, the road is blocked by colorful barriers that can be seen from a distance. But since materials are scarce and improvisation is the rule, others do the best they can. Some stretch a cable at the height of a car ’s windshield, and if they don’t have cable they use a length of sisal rope. They stand empty gasoline drums in the road or erect obstacles of stones and volcanic boulders. They scatter glass and nails on the macadam. They lay down dry thorn branches. They barricade the way with wreaths of stapelia or with cycad trunks. The most inventive people, it turns out, are the ones from the checkpoint at Mulando. From a roadside inn abandoned by a Portuguese, they dragged into the middle of the road a ceiling-high wardrobe built in the form of a huge triptych with a movable crystal-glass mirror mounted on the central section. By manipulating this mirror so that it reflected the rays of the sun, they blinded drivers who, unable to proceed, stopped a good distance off and walked to the checkpoint to explain who they were and where they were going.

You have to learn how to live with the checkpoints and to respect their customs, if you want to travel without hindrance and reach your destination alive. It must be borne in mind that the fate of our expedition and even our lives are in the hands of the sentries. These are people of diverse professions and ages. Rear-guard soldiers, homegrown militia, boys caught up in the passion of war, and often simply children. The most varied armament: submachine guns, old carbines, machetes, knives, and clubs. Optional dress, because uniforms are hard to come by. Sometimes a military blouse, but usually a resplendent shirt; sometimes a helmet, but often a woman’s hat; sometimes massive boots, but as a rule sneakers or bare feet. This is an indigent war, attired in cheap calico.

Every encounter with a checkpoint consists of: (a) the explanatory section, (b) bargaining, (c) friendly conversation. You have to drive up to the checkpoint slowly and stop at a decent remove. Any violent braking or squealing of tires constitutes a bad opening; the sentries don’t appreciate such stunts. Next we get out of the car and approach the barriers, gasoline drums, heaps of stones, tree trunks, or wardrobe. If this is a zone near the front, our legs buckle with fear and our heart is in our mouth, because we can’t tell whose checkpoint it is — the MPLA’s, FNLA’s, or UNITA’s. The sun is shining and it’s hot. Air heated to whiteness vibrates above the road, as if a snowdrift were billowing across the pavement. But it’s quiet, and an unmoving world, holding its breath, surrounds us. We too, involuntarily, hold our breath.

We stop and wait. There is no one in sight.

But the sentries are there. Concealed in the bushes or in a roadside hut, they are watching us intently. We’re exposed to their gaze and, God forbid, to their fire. At such a moment you can’t show either nervousness or haste, because both will end badly. So we act normal, correct, relaxed: we just wait. Nor will it help to go to the other extreme and mask fear with an artificial casualness, or joke around, show off, or display an exaggerated self-confidence. The sentries might infer that we are treating them lightly and the results could be catastrophic. Nor do they like it when travelers put their hands in their pockets, look around, lie down in the shade of the nearby trees, or — this is generally considered a crime— themselves set about removing the obstacles from the road.

At the conclusion of the observation period, the people from the checkpoint leave their hiding places and walk in our direction in a slow, lazy step, but alert and with their weapons at the ready. They stop at a safe distance.

The strangers stay where they are.

Remember that the sun is shining and it’s hot.

Now begins the most dramatic moment of the encounter: mutual examination. To understand this scene, we must bear in mind that the armies fighting each other are dressed (or undressed) alike and that large regions of the country are no-man’s-land into which first one side and then the other penetrates and sets up checkpoints. That is why, at first, we don’t know who these people are or what they will do with us.

Now we have to summon up all our courage to say one word, which will determine our life or death: “Camarada!”

If the sentries are Agostinho Neto’s people, who salute each other with the word camarada, we will live. But if they turn out to be Holden Roberto’s or Jonas Savimbi’s people, who call each other irmão (brother), we have reached the limit of our earthly existence. In no time they will put us to work — digging our own graves. In front of the old, established checkpoints there are little cemeteries of those who had the misfortune to greet the sentries with the wrong word.

But let’s say that fortune has smiled on us this time. We have announced ourselves with camarada in a voice strangled and hoarsened by fear. The word has been enunciated in such a way that some sort of sound will reach the people at the checkpoint, but not an overly distinct, overly literal, and irrevocable sound: Our mumbling, into which we have cautiously smuggled the fragile syllables of the word camarada, will thus leave us with a loophole, a chance of reversing, of retreating into the word irmão, so that the unhappy confusion of words can be blamed on the hellish heat that dulls and addles the mind, on the exhaustion of travel, and the nervousness understandable in anyone who finds himself at the front. This is a delicate game; it demands skill, tact, and a good ear. Any taking the easy way out, any heavy-handedness, shows immediately. We can’t, for instance, shout “Camarada! Irmão!” all at once, unless we want to be regarded — and rightly so — as the kind of opportunists who are scorned in front-line situations all over the world. We will arouse their suspicion and be held for interrogation.

So we have said “Camarada!” and the faces of the people from the checkpoint brighten. They answer “Camarada!” Everybody begins repeating “Camarada! Camarada!” sportively and loudly an unending number of times as the word circulates between us and the sentries like a flock of doves.

The euphoria that sweeps over us at the thought that we will live does not last long, however. We will live, but whether we will continue our journey is still an open question. So we proceed to the first, explanatory part of the meeting. We tell who we are, where we are headed, and where we are coming from. At exactly this moment we present our pass. Troubles arise if the sentry can’t read — an epidemic problem in the case of peasant and nomad sentries. The better-organized checkpoints employ children to this end. Children know how to read more often than adults, because schools have begun to develop only in the last few years. The contents of a general staff pass are usually warm and friendly. They state that Camarada Ricardo Kapuchinsky is our friend, a man of good will, reliable, and all camaradas at the front and in the rear are therefore asked to show him hospitality and assist him.

Despite such a positive recommendation, the people from the checkpoint begin as a rule by saying that they don’t want us to go on and order us to turn back. This is understandable. True, the authority of Luanda is great — but then, doesn’t the checkpoint also constitute authority? And the essence of authority is that it must manifest its power.

But let’s not give up hope or become dispirited! Let’s reach into the arsenal of persuasion. A thousand arguments speak in our favor. We have our documents in order: There is the text, the stamp, and the signature. We know President Agostinho Neto personally. We know the front commander. We are writing dispatches, we are making Angola and its champions of right famous around the world. The bad Europeans have decamped and whoever stayed must be on their side or he wouldn’t have stuck it out. Finally: Search us — we have no weapons, we can’t harm anybody.

Slowly, stubbornly, the sentries yield. They talk it over, they confer off to one side, and sometimes a quarrel breaks out among them. They can send a message to their commander, who has driven to the city or set out for a village. Then we have to wait. Wait and wait, which we spend our whole life here doing. But this has its good side, since shared waiting leads to mutual familiarity and closeness. We have already become a particle of the checkpoint society. If there is time and interest, we can tell them something about Poland. We have a sea and mountains of our own. We have forests, but the trees are different: There isn’t a single baobab in Poland. Coffee doesn’t grow there, either. It is a smaller country than Angola, yet we have more people. We speak Polish. The Ovimbundi speak their own language, the Chokwe speak theirs, and we speak ours. We don’t eat manioc; people in Poland don’t know what manioc is. Everybody has shoes. You can go barefoot there only in the summer. In winter a barefoot person could get frostbite and die. Die from going barefoot? Ha! Ha! Is it far to Poland? Far, but close by airplane. And by sea it takes a month. A month? That’s not far. Do we have rifles? We have rifles, artillery, and tanks. We have cattle just like here. Cows and goats, not so many goats. And haven’t you ever seen a horse? Well, one of these days you’ll have to see a horse. We have a lot of horses.

The time passes in agreeable conversation, which is exactly the way the sentries like it. Because people rarely dare to travel now. The roads are empty and you can go days without seeing a new face. And yet you can’t complain of boredom. Life centers around the checkpoints these days, as in the Middle Ages it centered around the church. The local marketwomen set out their wares on scraps of linen: meaty bananas, hen’s eggs as tiny as walnuts, red pili-pili, dried corn, black beans, and tart pomegranates. Clothing-stall owners sell the cheapest garments, garish scarves, and also wooden combs, plastic stars, pocket mirrors with the likenesses of known actresses on the back, rubber elephants, and fifes with keys that move. Any children not on active duty play in homespun shirts in the neighboring fields. You can encounter village women with clay jugs on their heads on their way to get water, walking from who knows where to who knows where.

The checkpoint, if composed of friendly people, is a hospitable stopping place. Here we can drink water and, sometimes, purchase a couple of liters of gasoline. We can get roast meat. If it’s late, they let us sleep over. At times they have information about who controls the next stretch of road.

The time to leave approaches, and the sentries go to work. They open the road — they roll away the drums, push away the stones, move the wardrobe. And afterward, when we’re about to drive off, they walk up to us with the one universally repeated question: Do we have any cigarettes?

Then there is a momentary reversal of roles. Authority passes into our hands because we, not they, have cigarettes. We decide whether they get one, two, or five cigarettes. Our sentries put down their weapons and wait obediently and patiently, with humility in their eyes. Let’s be human about it and share evenly with them. They’re in a war, fighting and risking their lives. Once the cigarettes are bestowed on them, they raise their hands in the victory sign, smile — and among shouts of “Camarada! Camarada!” we set out along the road into the unknown, into the empty world, into the mad, white scorching heat, into the fear that awaits us at the next checkpoint.

Roving thus from checkpoint to checkpoint, in an alternating rhythm of dread and joy, I reached Benguela. The road from Luanda to Benguela passes through six hundred kilometers of desert terrain, flat and nondescript. A haphazard medley of stones, frumpy dry bushes, dirty sand, and broken road signs creates a gray and incoherent landscape. In the rainy season the clouds churn right above the ground here, showers drag on for hours, and there is so little light in the air that day might as well not exist, only dusk and night. Even during heat waves, despite the excess of sun, the countryside resembles deserted, burned-out ruins: It is ashy, dead, and unsettling. People who must travel through here make haste in order to get the frightening vacancy behind them and arrive with relief at their destination, the oasis, as quickly as possible. Luanda is an oasis and Benguela is an oasis in this desert that stretches all along the coast of Angola.

Benguela: a sleepy, almost depopulated city slumbering in the shade of acacias, palms, and kipersols. The villa neighborhoods are empty, the houses locked up and drowned in flowers. Indescribable residential luxury, a dizzying excess of floor space and, in the streets before the gates, orphaned cars — Chevrolets and Alfa Romeos and Jaguars, probably in running order although nobody tries to drive them. And nearby, a hundred meters away, the desert — white and glimmering like a salt spill, without a blade of grass, without a single tree, beyond redemption. In this desert lie African settlements stuck together lackadaisically with clay and dung, hammered out of plywood and tin, swarming, stuffy, and miserable. Although the two worlds — comfort and poverty — stand only steps apart and no one is guarding the rich European neighborhood, the blacks from the clay huts haven’t tried to move in. The idea hasn’t crossed their minds. This might be the best explanation of their passive attitude. Because moral scruples don’t come into play here, nor a fear that the whites will return and avenge themselves. These considerations might have been weighed, had they been tempted to take over the white quarters. But in these people’s lives, the degree of consciousness that drives one to demand justice or do something about obtaining it hasn’t yet been reached. Only those Africans who have acquired a university education, who have learned to read, got out into the world, and seen films — only they understand that decolonization has created a chance for rapid material advancement, for accumulating wealth and privileges. And taking advantage of the chance has come easily to them precisely because their less enlightened brothers — who are a dime a dozen — demand nothing for themselves, accepting their clay hut and bowl of manioc as the only world they will ever know or desire.

I spent some time walking the border of the two quarters, and then I went downtown. I found the lane in which the central-front staff was quartered in a spacious two-story villa. In front of the gate sat a guard with a face monstrously swollen by periostitis, groaning and squeezing his head, obviously terrified that his skull would burst. There was no way to communicate with such an unfortunate; nothing existed for him at that point. I opened the gate. In the garden, boxes of ammunition, mortar barrels, and piles of canteens lay on the flowerbeds in the shade of flaming bougainvilleas. Farther on, soldiers were sleeping side by side on the veranda and in the hall. I went upstairs and opened a door. There was nothing but a desk inside, and at the desk sat a large, powerfully built white man: Comandante Monti, the commander of the front.

He was typing a request to Luanda for people and weapons. The only armored personnel carrier he had at the front had been knocked out the day before by a mercenary. If the enemy attacked now with their own armored personnel carrier, he would have to give ground and retreat.

Monti read the letter that I had brought him from Luanda, ordered me to sit down — on the windowsill, because there were no chairs — and went on typing. A quarter of an hour later there were footsteps on the stairs and four people came in, a television crew from Lisbon. They had come here for two days and afterward they would return to Portugal in their plane. The leader of the crew was Luis Alberto, a dynamic and restless mulatto, sharp and gusty. We immediately became friends. Monti and Alberto knew each other from way back, since they both came from Angola and perhaps even from right here in Benguela. So we didn’t have to waste any time making introductions and getting to know one another.

Alberto and I wanted to drive to the front, but the rest of the crew — Carvalho, Fernandez, and Barbosa — were against it. They said they had wives and children, they had begun building houses outside Lisbon (near Cascais, a truly beautiful spot), and they weren’t going to die in this mad, senseless war in which nobody knew anything, the opponents couldn’t tell each other apart until the last second, and you could be blown away without any fighting, simply because of the crazy screwups, the lack of information, the laziness and callousness of blacks for whom human life had no value.

In other words, they expressed a desire to live.

A discussion began, which is what Latins love most of all. Alberto tried to sell them on the argument that they would shoot a lot of tape and make a lot of the money they all needed so badly. But it was Monti who finally assuaged them by saying that at that time of day — it was almost noon — there was no fighting on the front. And he gave the most straightforward explanation in the world: “It’s too hot.”

Outside the window the air was rippling like tin in a forge; every movement demanded effort. We started getting ready to hit the road. Monti went downstairs, woke up one of the soldiers, and sent him into town where, somewhere, there were drivers and cars. A Citroën DS and a Ford Mustang turned up. Monti wanted to make it nice for us, so as our escort he designated a soldier named Carlotta.

Carlotta came with an automatic on her shoulder. Even though she was wearing a commando uniform that was too big for her, you could tell she was attractive. We all started paying court to her immediately. In fact, it was Carlotta’s presence that persuaded the crew to forget about their houses outside Lisbon and travel to the front. Only twenty years old, Carlotta was already a legend. Two months earlier, during the uprising in Huambo, she had led a small MPLA detachment that was surrounded by a thousand-strong UNITA force. She managed to break the encirclement and lead her people out. Girls generally make excellent soldiers — better than boys, who sometimes behave hysterically and irresponsibly at the front. Our girl was a mulatto with an elusive charm and, as it seemed to us then, great beauty. Later, when I developed the pictures of her, the only pictures of Carlotta that remained, I saw that she wasn’t so beautiful. Yet nobody said as much out loud, so as not to destroy our myth, our image of Carlotta from that October afternoon in Benguela. I simply looked up Alberto, Carvalho, Fernandez, and Barbosa and showed them the pictures of Carlotta taken on the way to the front. They looked at them in silence and I think we all chose silence so we wouldn’t have to comment on the subject of good looks. Did it mean anything in the end? Carlotta was gone by then. She had received an order to report to the front staff, so she put on her uniform, combed out her Afro, slung the automatic over her shoulder, and left. When Comandante Monti, four Portuguese, and a Pole saw her in front of staff headquarters, she seemed beautiful. Why? Because that was the kind of mood we were in, because we needed it, because we wanted it that way. We always create the beauty of women, and that day we created Carlotta’s beauty. I can’t explain it any other way.

The cars moved out and drove along the road to Balombo, 160 kilometers to the east. To tell the truth, we all should have died on the winding road, full of switchbacks that the drivers took like madmen; it was a miracle that we got there alive. Carlotta sat beside the driver in our car and, since she was used to that kind of driving, she kidded us a little. The force of the wind threw her head back, and Barbosa said he would hold on to Carlotta’s head so the wind wouldn’t tear it off. Carlotta laughed, and we envied Barbosa. At one of the stops, Fernandez proposed that Carlotta move to the back with us and sit on our knees, but she refused. We rejoiced out loud at his defeat. After all, Fernandez had clearly wanted Carlotta to sit on his own lap, which would have ruined everything since she didn’t belong to anyone and we were creating her together, our Carlotta.

She was born in Roçadas, not far from the border of Namibia. She received her military training a year ago in the Cabinda forest. She wants to become a nurse after the war. That’s all we know about this girl who is now riding in the car holding an automatic on her knees, and who, since we have run out of jokes and calmed down for a moment, has become serious and thoughtful. We know that Carlotta won’t be Alberto’s or Fernandez’s, but we don’t yet know that she will never again be anybody’s.

We have to stop again because a bridge is damaged and the drivers have to figure out how to get across. We have a few minutes, so I take a picture of her. I ask her to smile. She stands leaning against the bridge railing. Around us lie fields, meadows perhaps — I don’t remember.

After a while we drove on. We passed a burned-out village, an empty town, abandoned pineapple and tobacco plantations. Then a profusion of tamarisk shrubs that evolved into a forest. It got worse, because we were driving to the front on a road that had been fought over, and there were corpses of soldiers scattered on the asphalt. They aren’t in the habit of burying the fallen here, and the approach to every combat zone can be recognized by the inhuman odor of decaying bodies. Some additional fermentation must take place in the putrid humidity of the tropics, because the smell is intense, terrible — so stunning that, no matter how many times I went to the front, I always felt dizzy and ready to vomit. We had jerrycans full of extra gasoline in the lead car, so we stopped and poured some on the corpses, and covered them with a few dry branches and roadside bushes; then the driver fired his automatic into the asphalt at such an angle that sparks flew and a fire started. We marked our route to Balombo with these fires.

Balombo is a little town in the forest that keeps changing hands. Neither side can settle in for good because of the forest, which allows the enemy to sneak to within point-blank range under cover and suddenly attack the town. This morning Balombo was taken by an MPLA detachment of a hundred people. There is still shooting in the surrounding woods because the enemy has retreated, but not very far. In Balombo, which is devastated, not a single civilian remains— only these hundred soldiers. There is water, and the girls from the detachment approach us freshly bathed, with their wet hair wound around curling papers. Carlotta admonishes them: they shouldn’t behave as if preparing to go out for the evening; they ought to be ready to fight at all times. They complain that they had to attack in the first wave because the boys were not eager to advance. The boys strike their foreheads with their hands and say the girls are lying. They are all sixteen to eighteen years old, the age of our high school students or of the fighters in the Warsaw uprising. Part of the unit is joyriding up and down the main street on a captured tractor. Each group makes one circuit and hands the wheel over to the next one. Others have given up contending for the tractor and are riding around on captured bicycles. It is chilly in Balombo because it lies in the hills; there is a light breeze and the forest is rustling.

As the crew films, I walk along with them, snapping pictures. Carlotta, who is conscientious and doesn’t let herself be carried away in the euphoria of victory sweeping the detachment, knows that a counterattack could begin at any time, or that snipers lurking under cover could be taking aim at our heads. So she accompanies us all the time with her automatic at the ready. She is attentive and taciturn. We can hear the tops of her boots rubbing together as she walks. Carvalho, the cameraman, films Carlotta walking against the background of burned-out houses, and later against a background of strikingly exuberant adenias. All of this will be shown in Portugal, in a country that Carlotta will never see. In another country, Poland, her pictures will also appear. We are still walking through Balombo and talking. Barbosa asks her when she will get married. Oh, she can’t say— there’s a war on. The sun sinks behind the trees; twilight is approaching and we must leave. We return to the cars, which are waiting on the main street. We’re all satisfied because we have been to the front, we have film and pictures, we are alive. We get in as we did when we drove here: Carlotta in front, we in back. The driver starts the motor and puts the car in gear. And then — we all remember that it was exactly at that moment — Carlotta gets out of the car and says she is staying. “Carlotta,” Alberto says, “come with us. We’ll take you out to supper, and tomorrow we’ll take you to Lisbon.” Carlotta laughs, waves good-bye, and signals the driver to start.

We’re sad.

We drive away from Balombo on a road that grows darker and darker, and we drive into the night. We arrive late in Benguela and locate the one restaurant still open; we want something to eat. Alberto, who knows everyone here, gets us a table in the open air. It’s splendid — the air is cool and there’s an ocean of stars in the sky. We sit down hungry and exhausted and talk. The food doesn’t come for a long time. Alberto calls, but it’s noisy and nobody hears us. Then lights appear at the corner and a car comes around and brakes sharply in front of the restaurant. A tired, unwashed soldier with a dirt-smeared face jumps out of the car. He says that immediately after our departure there was an attack on Balombo and they have given up the town; in the same sentence, he says that Carlotta died in the attack.

We stood up from the table and walked into the deserted street. Each of us walked separately, alone; there was nothing to talk about. Hunched over, Alberto went first, with Carvalho behind him and Fernandez on the other side of the street, with Barbosa following and me at the end. It was better for us to reach the hotel that way and disappear from each other ’s sight. We had driven out of Balombo at a crazy speed and none of us had heard the shooting begin behind us. And so we hadn’t been fleeing. But if we had heard the shots, would we have ordered the driver to turn back so we could be with Carlotta? Would we have risked our lives to protect her, as she had risked hers to protect us in Balombo? Maybe she had died covering us as we drove away, because the boys were chasing around on the tractor and the girls were doing their hair when the enemy appeared out of nowhere.

We are all culpable in Carlotta’s death, since we agreed to let her stay behind; we could have ordered her to return. But who could have foreseen it? The most guilty are Alberto and I: we are the ones who wanted to go to the front, so Monti gave us an escort — that girl. But can we change anything now, call it off, run the day backward?

Carlotta is gone.

Who would have thought that we were seeing her in the last hour of her life? And that it was all in our hands? Why didn’t Alberto stop the driver, get out, and tell her: Come with us because otherwise we’ll stay and you’ll be responsible! Why didn’t any of us do that? And is the guilt any easier to bear because it is spread among the five of us?

Of course it was a tragic accident. That’s how, lying, we will tell the story. We can also say there was an element of predestination, of fate, to it. There was no reason for her to stay there, and furthermore it had been agreed from the start that she would return with us, In the last second she was prompted by some indefinable instinct to get out of the car, and a moment later she was dead. Let’s believe it was fate. In such situations we act in a way we can’t explain afterward. And we say, Your Honor, I don’t know how it happened, how it came to that, because in fact it began from nothing.

But Carlotta knew this war better than we did; she knew that dusk, the customary time for attack, was approaching, and that it would be better if she stayed there and organized cover for our departure. That must have been the reason for her decision. We thought of this later, when it was too late. But now can’t ask her about anything.

We knock on the hotel door, which is already locked. The owner, a massive old black man, opens up and wants to hug us because we’ve made it back in one piece, he wants to ask us all about it. Then he looks at us carefully, falls silent, and walks away. Each of us takes his key, goes upstairs, and locks himself in his room.

That small point disappearing into the sky is the plane in which Alberto and his crew are flying out. The throbbing of the motors rolls up over the airport, over the town, fainter and fainter but audible all the while as, for a long time after, the small, disappearing point floats away and then becomes invisible. It is as if the echoes of an unseen, distant storm among the stars were reaching us from space. Then it falls silent. The sky becomes immobile and fills with quiet and the morning glare. After a couple of hours, at the other end of the galaxy, a small point appears and begins to grow, to expand, until it assumes the stiff shape of a plane — which will mean that Alberto and his crew are landing in Europe.

And I fly out of Benguela, but in the other direction, to the south, where the African continent begins to come to an end and, after a thousand or more kilometers, beyond Namibia and the Kalahari, plunges into two oceans. When we arrived at the airport that morning, aside from Alberto’s plane there was also a two-engine Friendship whose pilots— two unshaven, deadbeat Portuguese with red, sleepless eyes — said they were flying immediately to Lubango to pick up the last group of refugees there. Lubango, formerly Sá da Bandeira, lies 350 kilometers south of Benguela and is the headquarters of the southern front staff. I didn’t have a pass to go there because no one is admitted to the southern front, the weakest, most neglected, worst organized, and most poorly armed front. But I thought I might get away with it. So I thought, although to tell the truth I wasn’t thinking at all, because if I had really considered matters I might have lost the inclination to go. On the other hand, if I had considered the matter more carefully, I might have wanted to make the trip because, as I see it, it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through. In any case, I began asking the pilots if they would take me along. They were so exhausted from unbroken stretches of flying, so indifferent to everything, that they didn’t answer, which was probably a sign that they agreed. I was wearing jeans and a shirt, I had a pass for Benguela and a little money in my pocket, and I carried a camera. Everything else remained behind in the hotel, since there was neither time nor a car to get to town. Without waiting, therefore, I got into the empty plane and hid myself in a corner to avoid asserting my presence, just in case they thought better of it and ordered me to stay at the airport. A quarter of an hour later we took off from Benguela, flying first over the desert and then over the green hills, above a soft, enchanting piedmont landscape, and then over the great rainbow flower garden that is Lubango.

At the airport in Lubango a group of terrified, sweaty, apathetic Portuguese sat on kit bags and suitcases beside their even more terrified wives, and their children asleep in the women’s arms. They rushed for the plane before it had even shut off its motors. I went up to a mulatto who was wandering around the apron and asked him if he could take me to staff headquarters. He said he would take me, but then immediately asked how I planned to get out, since this was the last plane leaving; it seemed to him that, although the town was in the hands of the MPLA, it was surrounded, and that the road to town was either in the hands of the enemy or could be by tomorrow. To this I gave no exact answer, aside from something like: As the Lord will have it.

Everything from that moment on happened as in an incomprehensible, incoherent dream in which unknown persons and unseen powers entangle us in a succession of situations from which there is no way out, and from which we awaken every now and then drenched in sweat, more and more exhausted and devoid of will. At the front staff headquarters (a residential quarter on a hill), I was greeted by a young white Angolan, a political commissar. His name was Nelson. He greeted me with joy, as if I were a guest he had been expecting all along — and sent me at once to a near-certain death.

Nelson had a restless, violent nature, mad ideas, and an impulsive, feverish manner. The first thing I told him was that I wanted to go to the front, and that was all it took for him to write out a pass for me. Before I could figure out what was going on he was pushing me outside, where a driver was just starting the motor of a big old Mercedes truck. I barely managed to beg Nelson to give me a cup of water, because I was ready to pass out from thirst. The truck was loaded to capacity with rifles, ammunition boxes, barrels of gasoline, and sacks of flour. On top of this cargo sat six soldiers. Nelson pushed me into the cab, where the driver was already seated — a half-naked black civilian, extraordinarily thin. A moment later Diogenes, the leader of the expedition, joined us in the cab, and we started off down the road immediately.

We drove through town — in those days every town in Angola looked like a ghastly, corroding movie set built on the outskirts of Hollywood and already abandoned by the film crew — and the green suddenly ended, the flowers disappeared, and we entered a hot, dry tropical flatland, overgrown as far as the eye could see with thick, thorny, leafless gray brush. A low gray gorge cut through this bush and at the bottom of the gorge ran the asphalt road. This was the road we were driving along in the truck. The Mercedes was so old and overloaded that no matter how the driver exerted himself, it would not do better than sixty kilometers an hour.

I was in a terrible situation, because I didn’t know where we were going and couldn’t bring myself to admit that I didn’t. Diogenes might think, How come he doesn’t know? What’s he doing here, and why is he riding with us? He’s riding with us and he doesn’t know where we’re going? Yet I really didn’t know. I had accidentally come across the plane in Benguela and so found myself in Lubango. It was an accident that the mulatto I met at the airport took me to headquarters. A strange man about whom I knew nothing except that his name was Nelson, and whom I was seeing for the first time in my life, had put me in the truck. The truck had immediately driven off and now we were rolling between two walls of thorny bush toward a destination unknown to me. Everything had happened quickly and somehow so categorically that I could neither think about it nor say no.

So we drove along with the thin, anxious man clinging to the steering wheel at my left, me in the middle, and Diogenes on the right with his submachine gun pointed out the window, ready to fire. With the sun standing directly overhead, the cab was as hot as a furnace and reeked of oil and sweat. At a certain moment Diogenes, who had been looking steadily at the wall of bush on his side, asked, “Tell me, camarada, do you know where we’re going?”

I replied that I didn’t.

“And tell me, camarada,” Diogenes went on without looking at me, “do you know what it means to drive down the road that we’re on?”’

Again I answered that I didn’t.

Diogenes said nothing for a moment, because we were climbing a hill and the roar of the motor was deafening. Then he said, “Camarada, this road leads to South Africa. The border is four hundred fifty kilometers from here. The town of Pereira d’Eça is forty kilometers this side of the border. One of our units is there and that’s where we’re going. The cities, Lubango and Pereira d’Eça, are in our hands. But the enemy holds the countryside. The enemy is in this bush that we’re driving through, and this road belongs to him. None of our convoys has got through to the unit in Pereira d’Eça for a month. All the trucks have been lost in ambushes. And now we’re trying to get there. We have four hundred kilometers of road in front of us and at every meter we could fall into an ambush. Do you understand, camarada?”

I felt as if I couldn’t produce any sound, so I merely nodded that I understood what it meant to drive down the road we were on. Later I got hold of myself enough to ask why there were so few of us. If a company or even a platoon were with us there would be a better chance of getting through. Diogenes answered that there were few people on this front in general. They had to be brought from Luanda and Benguela. The land here was almost uninhabited. There were a few nomads — wild people who walked around naked. They had lost all their wars many years ago. Since then they had known they couldn’t win — their only hope was to hide in the bush. With a movement of his head, Diogenes indicated the wall of bush behind which these naked, defeated people were concealed. Next I asked why we were traveling in such a dilapidated truck. After all, the Portuguese had left so many splendid vehicles. Diogenes replied that the vehicles left by the Portuguese were the property of the Portuguese. There was no money to buy the trucks, and there wasn’t even anybody to talk to, since the owners were in Europe. But wouldn’t he agree, I pressed, that in a faster truck it would be easier to escape and harder to be hit, while by driving in a clunker like this we were rolling straight toward death? Yes, Diogenes agreed, but — he asked — what can we do? There was a gap in the conversation; the only sound was the roar of the motor and the whirr of the tires on the soft asphalt.

Time is passing, but we seem to be stuck in place. Constantly the same glimmering seam of asphalt laid on the loose red earth. Constantly the same faded, cracked wall of bush. The same blinding white sky. The same emptiness of a deserted world, an emptiness that betrays life neither by movement nor by voice. Our truck wobbles and rolls through this unmoving, dead landscape like a small tin car in the depths of a carnival shooting gallery. The owner turns the crank and the toy, stamped out of tin, bucks from side to side, and whoever wants to take a shot is welcome. In the back of the truck sit six soldiers hidden behind the ammunition boxes and sacks of flour. The sun is blazing mercilessly, so they pull the tarpaulin over themselves as if driving through a downpour. They are better off because, if we drive into an ambush, they can jump out of the truck and flee into the bush. The predicament of those in the cab is worse. Trapped in the metal box, they are like three moving targets tilting slowly forward and perfectly illuminated by the sun at the sixteenth parallel. The little tin car moves in the banal interior of the empty shooting gallery and the owner notes, with growing astonishment, that nobody wants to shoot at it. After all, it costs little to win an attractive prize. He turns the crank more and more drowsily and perfunctorily. The tin cutout moves slower, slower, until it comes to a halt.

We pull off to the side of the road. Ahead of us, on the same side, lies the wreck of a burned-out truck — the remains of a convoy that made it this far. Scattered cans, barrels, sacks, tires. In one place, scorched earth and charred bones. Whoever caught them must have killed them and then burned them, or even tied them up and burned them alive. It’s impossible to say who survived, or whether anyone survived at all. Diogenes says that if anyone escaped into the bush, they couldn’t have gone far; they would have died of thirst because there is no water here. They could survive only on the road, but on the road they could be killed. You have to keep to the road, but of course you can be ambushed. All right, there is no better way out, which means there is no perfect way out. That is what Diogenes says, and he observes that those who died in this burned-out truck must have made a mistake, they must have been traveling in the early morning or at dusk or at night. Then it’s cool and the enemy has the strength to come out onto the road and spring an ambush. At noon, on the other hand, the heat is going full blast and a deathly sleepiness and indolence seize the combatants. They retreat into the shade and drift into slumber. Martial enthusiasm sputters out and enmity grows tepid. You have to take advantage of this and travel at high noon, the safest time. I remember that Monti said the same thing. The front falls asleep when the sun stands at its zenith.

We drove until dusk under pressure, in an intent, helpless alertness, passing two more charred trucks from lost convoys. Diogenes urged the driver on, forbidding him to halt. At five in the afternoon we saw several armed people standing in the road. They stood there, pointing their automatic rifles toward us. Diogenes took his Kalashnikov off the safety and the soldiers in back got up from where they had been lying and, taking cover behind the cab, took aim at the people in the road. The driver slowed down and the distance between the truck and the people ahead decreased. Nobody fired. Then, when we were close — close enough to make out their figures and even their faces — one of the people in the road pointed his rifle upward and fired a round. Diogenes pulled his pistol out of his holster and also shot into the air. The Mercedes stopped and the people in the road came running up.

“Comandante Farrusco’s unit,” one of them said.

“Comandante Diogenes’s convoy,” Diogenes answered.

We were in Pereira d’Eça. They asked for cigarettes. I reached into my pocket and only then, when everything in me broke and subsided into loose, relaxed, calm particles, did I notice that my trousers and shirt were drenched in sweat, that I was wet all over, and that in my pocket, where there had been a pack of Polish Radomskie Extra-Strongs, I had nothing but a handful of damp hay smelling of nicotine.

The wrecked billboard on the way into town offers a chance to rest your eyes: “In Pereira d’Eça,” it says, “Stop at the Black Swan Inn. Air-Conditioning — Home Cooking — Garden— Bar — Attractive Prices.” And a clumsy drawing of a bird swimming in a lake that at this latitude could appear only in a dream. This is an inducement to those who have been around the world and grown acquainted with distant continents and unfamiliar territories. The traveler along the sterile and monotonous road from Luanda to Windhoek—2230 kilometers — can find a comfortable stopping place here. May I impart a word of advice to the weary wayfarer? Don’t stop in this town tonight. Not these days. Times have changed and the promised comfort is lacking. There may be water, indeed, but there are no lights. It’s dark. The moon doesn’t rise. There are only stars, but somehow distant ones, faint and not very helpful. It’s not a good place to sleep, because the houses have been smashed and looted. Nor is the cuisine to be recommended. On the concrete floor of the inn, in a puddle of dried blood, lies a butchered goat that has already begun to reek. Anyone who’s hungry carves out a hunk of meat with a bayonet and roasts it over the bonfire. How do these people live? Why don’t they die of poisoning from carrion virus? Nor can one count on the advertised air-conditioning. It is sweltering and not even at night does the heat lift from the earth; it crushes the languidly, viscously unmoving, flattened town.

In the glare of an oil lamp, the only light, three faces are visible, covered with sweat, shining as if smeared with olive oil. The wide, bearded face of Comandante Farrusco. The pale face, covered with adolescent pimples, of his assistant Carlos, the hero of Luso. The prematurely destroyed, uncared-for face of a woman named Esperança. We are sitting in the inn on crates and stools, but the leader has settled in an armchair. Outside the window soldiers drift around the plaza, dissolving into the gloom, black, like darkness set in motion. “Why aren’t they going to their posts?” Farrusco asks, but he falls silent and gives no orders. The rest remain quiet; it was evidently a meaningless question, although the answer is known. It is obvious that going to their posts wouldn’t improve anything, wouldn’t help. This is a unit sentenced to annihilation; there is no saving it.

“Bring in the one who came from the south,” Farrusco orders the people standing in the doorway, or rather in the place where there had once been a door leading to the wooden veranda and the square. “Listen to what this man says, camarada,” Farrusco tells me, because it turns out they have already talked to him in the afternoon and know what he has to say. In walks an extremely tired, jittery Portuguese. He has sunken eyes, he is unshaven and dirty, and looks like the personification of helplessness and abandonment. His name is Humberto dos Anjos de Freitas Quental. He is from here, he was born here — about fifty years ago, I would guess. A week ago he escaped to Namibia with his family. He left his wife and four children in a camp for Portuguese at Windhoek and decided to return himself. He wanted to return because his mother had stayed in Pereira d’Eça. His mother is eighty-one and has been running a bakery for as long as her son Humberto, who is standing here, has been alive. She told her son that she was not leaving and that she was going to keep on baking bread, which is always needed. “And you yourselves know,” Humberto tells us, “that in Pereira d’Eça you have fresh bread.” Yes, the whole unit knows that, living as they do on the bread baked by that woman and furthermore not paying for it, because this is a volunteer liberation army without money. When he left to take his family to Namibia, the supplies of flour were running out and his mother — who is deaf and doesn’t understand that there is a war on, and who for reasons of age no longer understands anything, except that as long as the world exists people will need bread — ordered her son to return with flour. She stayed there alone, so he decided to come back and bring her the flour, which was confiscated on the border, but he knows that a truck carrying flour has arrived today from Lubango, which means that his mother will again be baking bread and there will again be something free to eat, because she doesn’t ask for money.

“We all love that woman,” Farrusco says, “even though she isn’t exactly for us, but she’s for life and bread, and that’s enough. Our people brought her the water that she needed. And they brought her wood. And she’s going to live just as long as we live, or maybe even longer. But I want you to tell these people who’ve come from Lubango what you heard in Windhoek and what they told you along the road in that place, what do you call it?”

“It’s called Tsumeb,” said the son of the baker, “and it’s perhaps two hundred fifty kilometers from here. The Portuguese who fled there said that before long the South African army would advance into Angola and chase out the MPLA. They said the same thing in Windhoek. They said the army would move today, perhaps tomorrow. They have armor and an air force and they’ll occupy Luanda.”

“How do you know?” asked Farrusco.

“That’s what all the Portuguese say,” Humberto replied, “even though it’s a secret. In Windhoek, South African army officers came to our camp and asked who had served in the army, and if anybody wanted to join the forces that were going to strike Angola. And in Tsumeb, at the gas station, one white told me that the town was full of armored vehicles that would advance into Angola tomorrow or the next day to finish off the communists.”

Farrusco told the baker ’s son he could go home. Humberto had made an honest impression. But he didn’t seem too bright and was probably illiterate. We stayed alone in the room; it was still hot and close, even though it was past midnight. Some people were sleeping on the floor, propped against the wall, while others were coming and going for no known reason, without saying a word. “Check whether they’ve gone to their posts,” Farrusco told Carlos. “Send a few along the road toward the border. Let them go some distance and see what’s happening.”

“What good will it do?” says Esperança. Her face was now darker than it had been in the evening.

“Tell them to really go,” Farrusco says, “and not to be afraid and not to hide in the ditch.”

“If they go too far,” the woman insists, “they could be cut off or ambushed. The enemy’s all around.”

“All right,” says Farrusco, “but I want to know exactly where they are.”

“Well, those patrols aren’t going to find out,” says Esperança, “because they’re going to die. Why do you want to stir up the army? We don’t have the strength to defend ourselves.”

Comandante Farrusco’s unit numbers 120. It is the only unit on the southern front between Lubango and the border (450 kilometers) and between the Atlantic and Zambia (1200 kilometers). The only unit in a region one-third the size of Poland. All around, for scores, for hundreds of kilometers, stretches the barren bush, without water, without reference points — an unappeased wilderness of millions of barbed branches woven into walls, a hostile world not to be conquered, not to be penetrated. There is only the road to Lubango, the one route through it, like a corridor lined with barbed wire along which retreat is impossible because it is too far to go on foot and there is too little transport to carry the whole unit. It’s possible that at this hour, nearly two in the morning, the enemy has seized the road on both sides of the town and we are sitting here in the shadow of a steel-jaw trap waiting for somebody to trip the spring, at which point there will be a deafening snap.

Diogenes and one other man from the convoy came in, and then Carlos returned. The leader asked if they had gone out on patrol and Carlos said yes. He sat on a crate and unbuckled his belt, to which he had clipped a whole arsenal of pistols, cartridges, and grenades. In colonial times Carlos and Farrusco had fought in Portuguese commando units. Both were farmer ’s sons from southern Portugal. After their army tours they stayed in Angola and worked as auto mechanics.

Later Nelson told me what happened next: “When the MPLA uprising against FNLA and UNITA broke out that summer, there was also fighting in Lubango. But a lot of whites were fighting in the enemy ranks. In our region, in the south, the fate of the uprising hung in the balance a long time. One day a stocky, bearded man walked into headquarters and said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it — how to fight.’ That was Farrusco. He organized a unit, took Lubango, and later captured Pereira d’Eça and stayed there. He lacked arms. The whole time they had only their rifles and two 82-millimeter mortars. Farrusco and Carlos fired the mortars. They held them in their hands, without using the base, so both had burned palms from the hot barrels. Their hands were all blisters and sores.”

Everyone is vigilant at the inn tonight — a dull, unarmed, expectant vigilance. The only ones asleep may well be the boys at the outposts on the edge of town and in the ditches, because the sleep of the young is stronger than fear, thirst, or even mosquitoes. The oil lamp is burning in the room; silence. Nobody wants to talk or even knows what to talk about. Everybody is waiting for the dawn, growing more enervated and sleepy. There is a sound of snoring from those asleep on the floor, and the dirge of the mosquitoes. Sweat trickles down your face and your mouth is bitter from nicotine, dry and nauseating.

I nudged Farrusco’s shoulder because he was starting to nod. I wanted to return to Lubango today and then push on to Luanda. I thought that what the Portuguese said was important. He struck me as truthful. “Sure, it’s important,” Farrusco agreed. “They’re starting their invasion.”

“From here to Luanda,” I told him, “is fifteen hundred kilometers. I don’t know when I’ll get there because there are no more planes. In Luanda I can get in touch with Poland, and I think that what the Portuguese said is world news. Do something so I can get back to Lubango today.”

“We have to wait for dawn because you can’t use that road at night,” Farrusco said. “The lights are visible too far off and you can easily be ambushed. We’ll see what happens at dawn; we’ll see whether they attack. Between the border and Pereira d’Eça we have nobody. They could also move from the dam at Ruacana and cut our road to Lubango. From here there’s no other way to go, only along that road, which may already have been cut in the night because their army is stationed in Ruacana and from there a three-hour ride brings them to our road.”

The night ended and a red glow rose above the earth. Houses and trees appeared, and at the edge of town stood the wall of bush. The scouts returned and reported that they had encountered no one on the road. The tension eased slightly. Farrusco left to check the outposts. I moved along behind him. Where the sandy streets stopped at the edge of the forest, soldiers lay waiting to see if anything was moving among the trees. The bush resounded with splendid avian music; a noisy tropical hosanna was floating upward. Then the sun came up, the beams broke through as if a spotlight had come on, and everything suddenly quieted down.

We returned to the inn. The woman was making coffee and it smelled like dawn at a campground in Masuria. Only now did I notice the staff map on the wall. A tack in the middle of it represented the unit at Pereira d’Eça. There were no other tacks anywhere around it. Only higher up — a tack in Lubango, a tack in Moçâmedes, another in Matala. The higher up, the more tacks. A thick black diagonal line, slightly broken into steps, was our road. At the bottom, a row of crosses on the bank of the Cunene River was the border with Namibia. An arrow at the top showed the direction to Europe. The areas covered with little circles were bush. The areas covered with dots. . desert. The blue area. . the Atlantic. PN. . a park — lions, elephants, antelope. 5 in red: five of ours dead. 7 in black: seven of theirs dead. More red and black digits in two columns at the bottom, without a line for the totals, because death’s account is always open.

Now, God help us, to drive along the thick black line, upward to Lubango — alive. We set out under a high sun at ten, hoping that the maddening heat would force the enemy out of his ambushes and drive him into a state of helpless somnolence. Soldiers befuddled by the heat drifted around the scorching plaza, wandering in circles apathetically. Others sat in the shade, leaning against the walls of houses, against fences, against trees, as immobile as victims of African sleeping sickness. I don’t know what happened to Diogenes; he and the whole crew of the convoy had disappeared. I didn’t see the woman anywhere. Carlos stood on the veranda of the inn and waved his automatic in our direction. In the immobile scenery of this plaza, Carlos’s arm swiveling in the air seemed to be the one thing alive and capable of movement.

We rode in a Toyota jeep driven by Antonio, a sixteen-year-old soldier. A dazzling brilliance, a lake of pulsing light that moved forward, settled above the pavement. At a certain moment a vehicle emerged from the depths of this lake, like a phantom. It drew nearer to us. You never know who is coming from the opposite direction and Farrusco, sitting at my right, took the safety off his Ka-2 and unhooked a grenade from his belt. The vehicles stopped. An unkempt, unshaven Portuguese stepped out of a pickup truck loaded like a gypsy wagon with bedding; he was fleeing to South Africa with his whole family. He stood on the road hunched over and resigned, as if facing a judge who would sentence him, any moment now, to life imprisonment. He said that the road was empty and nobody had stopped him. But that meant nothing because the people who set ambushes usually didn’t bother refugees.

It was an open jeep and the rush of air provided some relief. It whistled in our ears. “This year,” Farrusco shouted to me through the wind, “I’ve had a son born to me. He’s in Lubango and I want to see him.”

“Is he big?” I asked as loud as I could, so he would hear me.

“Big,” he beamed. “A big boy.” We passed Roçadas and then the deserted bridge over the Cunene. “My father didn’t have any land and there were eight of us,” the commander shouted through the wind. “‘All without shoes. I don’t know if you’re aware that we have mountains and it’s cold up there.”

I shook my head: I hadn’t known. The jeep was traveling along the road through a landscape so monotonous that we seemed to be standing still. “When I was fighting as a commando,” I heard him say through the wind, “it struck me that I was on the wrong side. That’s why,” he added after a moment, coughing because the wind had dried out his throat, “when this war started I went over to the other side.”

We had arrived at the worst place, Humbe. Here the road along which the South African units might have advanced ran off to Ruacana. Farrusco ordered the vehicle to halt. He walked along the edge of the bush toward the crossroads to assess the situation. He noticed nothing suspicious and encountered nobody. “Putting one armored vehicle there,” he said, “would be enough to paralyze the whole road. We could do nothing because we have no antitank weapons.

“In Europe,” he said, “they taught me that a front is trenches and barbed wire, which form a distinct and visible line. A front on a river, along a road, or from village to village. You can trace it on a map with a pencil or point to it on the terrain. But here the front is everywhere and nowhere. There is too much land and too few people for a front line to exist. This is a wild, unorganized world and it’s hard to come to terms with it. There is no water, because there is a lot of desert here. You can’t hold out for long where there are no springs, and it’s a long way between springs. Here where we’re standing, there is water, but the next water is a hundred kilometers away. Every unit holds on to its water, because otherwise it dies. If there are a hundred kilometers between water, that space is nobody’s and there’s nobody there. So the front doesn’t consist of a line here, but of points, and moving points at that. There are hundreds of fronts because there are hundreds of units. Every unit is a front, a potential front. If our unit runs into an enemy unit, those two potential fronts turn into real fronts. A battle occurs. We are a three-man potential front now, traveling northward. If we are ambushed, we become a real front. This is a war of ambushes. On any road, at any place, there can be a front. You can travel the whole country and come back alive, or you can die a meter from where you’re standing. There are no principles, no methods. Everything comes down to luck and happenstance. This war is a real mess. Nobody knows just where they stand.”

At exactly noon we were going full speed, lashed by the sultry wind. The bush rushed backward and disappeared behind us. We passed Cahama and Chibemba; burned houses stood by the road. “If you make it to Luanda,” Farrusco shouted through the blast of wind, “say that they should send people and arms. Say that if they move in from Namibia, we won’t be able to hold this ground.” We rode a long time in silence. Later I heard his voice again. “I think they are going to kill me,” he screamed over the wind. “I think they will spot the white commander driving this road and they will kill me. It’s very hard,” he shouted, “very hard to get out of an ambush, because it’s always too late, you walk right into their sights, but you know,” he cried, “I’m not afraid, listen, I don’t feel any fear!”

I heard a crash, a bang, hammering, a voice—”Let’s go, let’s go!” It was the voice of the restless spirit, Commissar Nelson. I got up. It was dark all around and fortunately I was sleeping in my clothes and shoes, so I could run right after him and we flew down the stairs and my head hurt. Only in the car did I start to come round. It was a new Peugeot 504, gray. Nelson was driving. Beside him sat Comandante Bota from front headquarters, drunk. He was holding a bottle of whisky between his knees. In the back with me sat Nelson’s friend and aide Manuel. Manuel had an Uzi machine pistol, an Israeli weapon handy at close quarters but of little use in ambushes, where the greater range of the Soviet Ka-2 or Belgian G-3 makes them better to fight with. I looked at my watch; it was two in the morning. Lubango lies high above sea level and the nights here are icy, Scandinavian. I trembled from cold and sleeplessness. “Where are we going?” I asked Manuel. “To Benguela.” I cheered up and was trying to get back to sleep when Manuel said there was a battle ahead. I woke up at once. “Chipenda’s force is attacking,” Manuel said, “and ahead of us is only our one unit led by Comandante Antonio, but Antonio is in Benguela, where he went to look for weapons.”

“So why are we traveling along a road where there’s a battle?” I asked Manuel.

“Because there’s no other road from Lubango to Benguela,” he replied.

“Well, you’ve got a point there,” I admitted.

Bota took a pull from his bottle and then passed it back to us, so we all got a swig. Things improved. We rode for perhaps half an hour at high speed through hilly terrain with green forests on both sides of us and we had already reached the crossing in Caculi when we heard shooting, the drawn-out thumping of machine guns and the bursting of shells to left and right just off the road. Nelson turned off the lights and slowed down, because the night was very dark; he drove on blind, feeling for the soft shoulder of the road. “Slower,” commanded Bota, who was beginning to sober up. “But perhaps it’s better to go faster,” Manuel said shyly. We drove on like that for centuries. Jesus, I thought, Jesus, a grenade has gone off in the ditch — there was a banging of tin as if someone were hammering on the roof with a club. After a moment Bota asked, “Is everybody okay?” “Yes, we’re okay.” Then, at the last instant, Nelson saw a parked truck and was about to swerve around it, when a mulatto jumped out of the ditch toward him and said, “Nelson, I’ve got twenty people here, but I can’t throw them forward to hold Chipenda, because I’m out of gasoline. Where can I get gasoline?” He was all shivers and it was terribly cold.

“Where will I get you gasoline?” Nelson said. “Go to Lubango.”

“How can I go to Lubango, man, when I don’t have any way to move?”

A series of tracers ripped above us and then a second and a third, and the man who was standing in the road and gripping the door of the car as if he didn’t want to let us go, said, “Nelson, I’m telling you, it’s bad, they’re killing us off like chickens.” Again a grenade nearby, then several at once, and Bota said “Move on” from the bottom of his soused stupefaction. Nelson put it in gear and the mulatto disappeared as suddenly as if he had been struck down, and why were we driving into that horrendous fire instead of sitting it out in the ditch? But they might have thought that the enemy would round us up like stray dogs and that it would be better to try to slip out of the trap, and in any case we turned at Quilengues and along both sides there were walls of earth and we were obviously diving into the bottom of some excavation or gorge, and suddenly running feet and two boys ran out with rifles and Bota said, “Stop them!” and Nelson cried “Halt!” and they stopped. They were just kids, beat-up and half-paralyzed with fear, and I looked at their rifles— they had old Mausers. “Where are you from?” Bota asked. “From Comandante Antonio’s regiment.” “Aha,” Bota says, “you’re running away, eh?” They stood there, humble, frightened, as if teacher had caught them copying during a quiz. Bota ordered, “Return to the battle immediately, and I’ll be there right away to see if you’re fighting, and I’ll remember your faces.” Gray with fear, the faces of these boys withdrew into the darkness and vanished. We drove on and Bota said, “Now it’ll be worse still, because what we’re trying to do is push through to Quilengues and there ought to be mercenaries there.”

Dawn begins and the shooting slowly quiets down and we leave it behind. The sky begins to resemble a meadow and then it looks like a sea and then like a snow-covered plain. “Halt!” says Bota, and Nelson stops the Peugeot on a blind curve. We walk ahead to see what is going on in Quilengues. It is a cold, gray dawn; dew, no sun. We advance on the prowl because no one can tell who is hiding in these houses and who’s around the next streetcorner or the one after that. We walk for a long time to convince ourselves that the town is empty, without a trace of life. I don’t know what happened there before we arrived. There are no people. Nor any other creatures. Not a dog, not a cat. No goats and no chickens. No birds in the trees. Perhaps not even mice.

We had returned calmer to the car when Nelson suddenly stopped, straightened his shoulders, and said, “Another day of life,” because now the road to Benguela was clear, and he began to do calisthenics and we all joined in, Bota unsteadily, staggering continually, leaning to left and right, but we were doing it energetically. Put your hands on your hips, now stand on tiptoe and do a squat, and one and two, straighten your backs, head up, deeper squats, deeper, and now thrust your arms forward and back, harder, harder to the back and exhale, inhale, arms out, don’t let those arms droop, now lean forward and to the side on a three count and one and two and three and now a duck waddle and now jumping jacks and now the sun comes out.