Confession of the Lioness

Mariamar’s Version: SIX. A River Without Sea

On the night Archie arrived, I dreamed I was a hen languishing in Genito Mpepe’s chicken coop. The other hens were my sisters. We lived a daily life shorn of history, like all those birds that are devoid of flight. In the meantime, we began to hear about chickens elsewhere who had turned into vultures. And we prayed that we would undergo the same metamorphosis. As vultures, we would ascend into the freedom of the skies and soar aloft in dizzying flight. But the miracle was long in coming.

One day, as he was feeding us corn, Grandfather Adjiru explained: It wasn’t the mesh of the chicken coop that was separating us from freedom. The secret of our submission lay somewhere else, and dwelled deep within us: Every morning, Genito Mpepe would hypnotize us. A finger swaying like a pendulum in front of our beak was enough to plunge us into immobility, dead to the world. And when one of us seemed to awaken to life, our owner would place our head under our wing, and we would immediately sink back into our endless lethargy.

* * *

The dream recurred on the following nights. It was as if dreams were trying to warn me of something. That something, I now know, was fear. And everything has become clear: It wasn’t on some whim that Archie abandoned me. His disappearance can be explained by fear. What he suffered from was the age-old terror that underneath the lake’s surface lurked monsters. The suspicion that, concealed under my placid appearance, there dwelled a beast that would devour him. That was Archie’s fear.

The truth is that Archie hadn’t been made to share his existence. The greatness of a hunter lies in his solitude. His attacks of panic, his cowardice, bear no witnesses. Only his victim knows of his weaknesses. That’s why the hunter is in a desperate hurry to be free of his prey.

* * *

Sixteen years ago, when Archie Bullseye watched me dancing at the village festival, he was already troubled by uncertainty. The hunter was afraid of what my body seemed to be saying, he was scared of whoever was speaking through my body while the drums beat. For him, ignorant of this language, it could only be dark forces. Demons speak like that, without words, saying everything through the body’s carnality. This was his fear. But it wasn’t demons who were making my body quiver. It was gods that speak and listen within us women. Archie’s fear was the same as that of all men. That the time might return when we women were divinities. On getting entangled with me, with the gentleness of a light breeze, Archie wanted the protection and the blessing of these entities. But our gods are not the same. His slept inside books. Mine awoke with music. That’s what the hunter didn’t understand. I wasn’t dancing. I was doing something else: I was freeing myself from time and responsibility, just as a snake sheds its old skin.

* * *

What was happening to me now in this imposed confinement had already happened to me before. Sixteen years ago, when Archie Bullseye left the village, I lay on the veranda and watched the days go by. I was undergoing the same constriction that butterflies experience at a certain time. I was migrating into a chrysalis, wrapped in time and waiting for another creature to emerge from within me. Seeing me defeated and cowed, under the porch of our house, everyone assumed I’d returned to my paralysis of old. But my feeling of emptiness was only an appearance. For I knew that, though ephemeral, Archangel Bullseye’s love had borne fruit. I waited until my belly had become rotund, and on the very day of my seventeenth birthday, I appeared before my mother with an air of triumphant defiance.

So you thought I wasn’t a woman? Put your hand here, feel what I’m carrying inside me.

Her arm felt feeble in my hand and drooped even before touching my belly.

Have you heard a thunderclap and thought it’s already raining, Mariamar? Well, there’s still many a knot in the thread of time.

I don’t understand, Mother.

I was lying. I knew what she was insinuating. The women of Kulumani, in each month of pregnancy, tie a knot in a piece of string that is passed from generation to generation.

We are women, she said. We were made to overcome suffering.

Not another word after that. Only an enigmatic smile that bordered on scorn. Without saying anything, my mother was scratching at an old wound: I was barren, my aridity had no cure.

Don’t look at me like that, my daughter. You know very well whose fault it is.

There was no doubt: I was prevented from becoming a mother because of the beating I’d had from my father. Even the nurse had confirmed the grave consequences of all those kicks.

There are children who are born and die within us, Hanifa affirmed, putting an end to the conversation.

These were words written by the hand of fate. For on that very night, I was woken from sleep by a nightmare: Deep inside me, a carnivorous beast was devouring my baby. My mulatto baby, my impure child, conceived on the road, was vanishing like a dream in the darkness. I awoke with a start, my sheet was wet: Blood was visiting me, turning my thighs red. I screamed, insulting my mother, shouting that I was giving birth. That blood on the bed was a creature, a living clot of plasma, a blood-person.

This is my son, this is your grandson, I shouted, my open hands dripping, red and viscous, as Hanifa Assulua entered my room.

* * *

Today, I know: The story of my childhood is no more than a half-truth. In order to deny a half-truth one needs far more than the whole truth. That huge truth, so vast that I couldn’t capture it, was only one truth: It wasn’t the physical punishments that made me sterile. That was the more palatable version invented by my mother. The crime was another one: For years, my father, Genito Mpepe, abused his daughters. First, it happened with Silência. My sister put up with it quietly, without sharing this terrible secret. The moment my breasts began to show, I was the victim. At the end of the day, Genito would migrate away from himself by means of lipa, the palm liquor. After he’d drunk his fill, he would come into our room and the nightmare would begin. The incredible thing was that, at the moment of rape, I exiled myself, incapable of being the person lying there under my father’s sweating body. Through some strange process, I managed to forget straight afterward what I had been through. This sudden amnesia had one purpose to it: to avoid my becoming an orphan. In the end, everything that occurred never got as far as actually happening: Genito Mpepe escaped to another existence and I turned into another creature who was inaccessible and nonexistent.

My mother, Hanifa Assulua, always pretended she didn’t know anything. It was the neighbors’ invention, the frenzy of those wishing to hide their own ills. When the evidence overwhelmed her, she summoned me and asked, her voice trembling:

Is it true?

I didn’t answer, my gaze fixed on the ground. My silence, as far as she was concerned, was confirmation:

A curse on you, you hussy!

Without reacting at all, I saw her jump on me, attacking me with her fists and feet, insulting me in her mother tongue. What she said, amid all her spitting and foaming, was that it was my fault. It was all my fault. Even though Silência had warned her: It was I who provoked her man. She didn’t refer to Genito as my father. He was now “her man.”

Get out of this house. I never want to see you here again.

* * *

I never got as far as leaving. On the contrary, I shut myself away between the walls, so much so that no one had ever become so cloistered inside a house. Hanifa Assulua summoned a witch doctor and this uwavi made me drink a bitter potion. For a whole day I took it from a little clay pot. The following day, the poison had worked. I had turned into a body without a soul. Instead of blood, I had a venomous sap: That’s what remained in my veins.

My mother was getting her revenge: Before, she had transferred my illness to the tree in our yard. Now she was carrying out takatuka in reverse: She was displacing my life to the dead tree. And in an instant it was reborn, proud and verdant. I, on the other hand, turned into an inanimate creature. I only had one faculty left: I had the power of hearing. For the rest, I was surrounded by some ancient, congenital darkness.

What Hanifa Assulua intended was more than my physical elimination. Dying was the least of it. My very birth had to be erased. The dead aren’t absent: They remain alive, they speak to us in our dreams, they weigh upon our conscience. The punishment reserved for me was complete and utter exile. Not from Kulumani, but exile from my reason and from language. I was declared mad. Madness is the only perfect absence. In my insanity I was visible, but shut away; sick but without any wound; hurt but without any pain.

My grandfather Adjiru attempted to save me, and tried out his own mintela. But it was in vain. Father Amoroso was called. But this time the Portuguese priest was unable to bring about a miracle. Take her to the hospital straightaway was all he had to say. They took me to Palma and the nurse produced a diagnosis without even batting an eyelid: These things have no cause.

With some luck, she’ll walk again.

I stayed in the infirmary for some time without showing any sign of improvement. Medicine gave up on me, but that wasn’t why they left me there. I remained in the hospital at Palma, lifeless, and with even less company. It was only later that I understood why my return to Kulumani had been delayed. My grandfather Adjiru died during that time. They didn’t want me to be present. Not to save me from having to say farewell. But in order that my farewell should last a lifetime.

* * *

On the first anniversary of my grandfather’s death, they took me to visit his grave. The deceased had left an express wish that he wanted me to be present at the ceremony. I had already returned home, but my condition hadn’t altered. No one wanted to carry me along the road in such a state. I might contaminate the vehicles. They chose to take me down the river in a boat, as far as the sacred wood that was the resting place of Adjiru and my great-grandfather Muarimi.

With the strength of their arms they deposited me in the craft. At that moment, my body rolled over and I fell, helpless, into the waters of the River Lideia. They say I disappeared down to the deep riverbed and remained immersed for a long time. When they eventually pulled me out, I wore the mesmerized expression of the newly born. Gradually I appeared before the eyes of the world. I took a few staggered steps around me, shook my shoulders as if freeing myself from an invisible burden. There was no doubt, according to the family’s chorused testimony:

Mariamar has returned! Mariamar has returned!

I was the focus of their astonished looks. I was the center of the universe. Silence fell, my family waiting for what would come next.

Where are my sisters? These were my first words.

They brought forward Silência, my eldest sister, and the little twins, Uminha and Igualita. In silence, I kissed Silência and knelt down to look at my youngest sisters. In my own mind, only a few months had passed. But the girls were sadly old. I always wondered whether there were ever any children in Kulumani. Can one call a child a creature who cultivates the soil, chops firewood, carries water, and at the end of the day doesn’t have anyone to play with?

Suddenly my father broke the silence, put an end to our hugs, and declared:

We’re going to see the ocean.

The ocean? my mother answered, astonished.

The whole family’s going, Genito Mpepe exclaimed peremptorily. That’s what I promised your grandfather.

It wasn’t to the ocean that I wanted them to take me. All I wanted was to return to my mother’s arms, for her to lull me, and for me to be a little girl again. That was the only ocean I wanted. That’s when I understood why Father Amoroso spoke so often of the final deluge. That’s what I yearned for: a flood that might wipe away this world. This world that forced a woman like Hanifa to have children, but that didn’t allow her to be a mother; that forced her to have a husband, but didn’t allow her to know love.

* * *

The whole family was enraptured by the sight of the ocean in all its vastness, its living infinity, its unlimited horizon that seemed to originate in our very selves. My sisters, benumbed with astonishment, were lost for words, infatuated by such immensity. I was the only one to walk down to the shoreline. What fascinated me wasn’t this absence of limits. I was enchanted by the foam, the shreds of spume that were released from the crest of the waves. Like white birds, without weight or wings, these scraps would launch into fanciful flight only to dissolve in the air. I rolled the word “spume” on my lips and uttered it a thousand times. If one day I were to have a daughter, I would call her Spume.

The name I chose for this unimaginable child is, after all, the right one. For my descendants will be forged out of the same matter that is released from the waves and flutters away until it is no more than a void. I shall never have children, I shall never have anyone to give a name to.

And yet, every new moon I suffer spasms, and in the solitude of my bed, I give birth. Dozens of children, I’ve had dozens of children, no other woman has given birth so many times. Babies without number have been born and every one of them has become extinguished a moment later like a shooting star crossing the skies. My hopeless children have vanished away, but the true pains of those hopeless births will haunt me for the rest of my life.

My mother, Hanifa Assulua, who knows about suffering, gave me sound advice: Pains pass, but they don’t disappear. They migrate into us, come to rest somewhere in our being, submerged in the depths of a lake.