Confession of the Lioness

Mariamar’s Version: TWO. Return from the River

The night before, the order had been issued in our house: The women would remain shut away, far from those who would be arriving. Once again, we were excluded, kept apart, extinguished.

The following morning, I got down to the household chores. I wanted to give my mother a rest, for she had been lying, ever since the early morning, at the entrance to the yard. At one point I lay down next to her, determined to share with her some of the burden of one who feels the weight of her soul. She took no notice of me at first. Then she mumbled between gritted teeth:

This village killed your sister. It killed me. Now it’s never going to kill anyone again.

Please, Mother. We’ve just buried one of our own.

We women have been buried for a long time now. Your father buried me; your grandmother, your great-grandmother, they were all entombed alive.

Hanifa Assulua was right: Without knowing it, maybe I had been buried. So ignorant was I in matters of love, that I had been consigned to the grave. Our village was a living cemetery, only visited by its own residents. I looked at the houses that stretched out along the valley. Discolored, gloomy houses, as if they regretted emerging from the ground. Poor Kulumani, which never wanted to be a village. Poor me, who never wanted to be anything.

Time and again our mother had begged for us to go to the city.

I beseech you, husband, for the sake of all that is sacred: Let us go.

If you want to leave, then go.

We can leave someone to look after the graves.

It’s the other way around, woman: If we leave, the graves will stop looking after us.

* * *

I shook off such memories. What point was there now in dwelling on past bitterness? If we clung so much to the past, how was it that Silência, so recently departed, could cause us to shed tears?

Father complains that yesterday, Mother, you ignored the requirements of those in mourning. Is it true that you offended the spirits?

Let me give you some advice, daughter: When you make love, do it in the river, in the water, as the fish do.

For God’s sake, that isn’t the kind of talk one expects from a mother!

Well, I’m telling you: Making love in the water is much better than in bed.

How do you know?

I watch our neighbor.

The neighbor? She can’t, she’s an out-and-out widow.

Smiling mischievously, she confessed: She would hide along the riverbank, and peer at the neighbor bathing all by herself. Little by little, that woman’s hands would transform themselves into the hands of other creatures, and would strew her body with shivers that she’d never felt before.

Our neighbor taught me how to get my own back on men …

Did I understand what such a confession concealed? Our neighbor only made love to the dead. That’s what Hanifa was telling me. Generation upon generation of the deceased had paraded through our neighbor’s arms. People from afar, blue-blooded people, people who’d never been anything in life: All of them had their passions lit in her liquid bed. From all these lovers, each one chosen by her, the woman only reaped reward: There was no illness, no treachery, no risk of becoming pregnant. All that remained were memories, without ash or seed. Only far from the living could the women of Kulumani have their love reciprocated: That’s what my mother taught me.

Your father’s order is justified. From now on, you’re not leaving the house.

I wasn’t surprised that my father should want me to remain confined. What did puzzle me was the alacrity with which my mother supported her husband’s decision.

That’s exactly what’s going to happen, Mariamar: You’re going to stay here under lock and key.

Then, I began to think: Perhaps I shouldn’t be perplexed by her determination to keep me away from the new arrivals. My mother had not experienced love. The neighbor was the one who’d been blessed: In her rivery bed, she had loved and been loved. Conversely, Hanifa Assulua feared the road, travel, the city. It wasn’t my departure that worried her. It was the scorn that might be leveled at her when no one wanted to take her with them. Other mothers, elsewhere, would have wanted their daughters to flourish out there in the world. But my family had been contaminated by the pettiness that ruled over our village.

Those who came from outside, such as the imminent arrivals, would assume that the inhabitants of the village were good, honest folk. This was an equally honest mistake. The people of Kulumani are welcoming to those who are strangers and come from far-off places. But among themselves, envy and malice prevail. That’s why our grandfather always reminded us:

We don’t need enemies. To be beaten, all we need is ourselves.

* * *

The emptier one’s life, the more it is peopled by those who’ve already gone: the exiled, the insane, the dead. In Kulumani, we all idolize the dead, for in them we preserve the deepest roots of our dreams. The most senior of my dead relatives is Adjiru Kapitamoro. To be precise, he is my mother’s elder brother. In our region, we use the term “grandfather” to describe all our maternal uncles. In fact, Adjiru is the only grandfather I really knew. At home, we called him anakulu, “our eldest.” No one ever knew his age, and not even he had any idea of when he had been born. The truth is that he considered himself so everlasting that he claimed to have created the river that ran through our village.

I’m the one who made this river, the Lundi Lideia, he insisted haughtily.

The list of his fabulous fabrications was a long one: Apart from the river, Grandfather had also fashioned escarpments, chasms, and rain. All thanks to his powerful mintela, the mixtures and charms of the witch doctors. He, however, denied such a grandiose status:

I’m not a witch doctor, I’m just an old man.

In colonial times, his father, the revered Muarimi, had been appointed to the position of captain-major. He collected taxes and settled local disputes in favor of the colonists. This occupation made my great-grandfather the target for blame, envy, and lasting antipathy. But our family gained the name that it now bears proudly: We were the Kapitamoros. In a land without a flag, we hoisted this borrowed insignia as if it were our natural, time-honored right.

Contrary to family tradition, my grandfather Adjiru had embarked on a different pursuit: hunting. That is what he became, by vocation and calling: a hunter. My arm is my soul, he would say. He killed a man by accident as he hunted a leopard over Quionga way. In order to cleanse himself of this blood he would have to rub himself with the ash from burnt trees. He refused to take part in the ritual: For him, who considered himself Portuguese, such humiliation was unbearable. He was banned from hunting, and was limited to working as a tracker. He accepted this demotion with regal dignity. Until the day he died, he never lost his noble bearing. While his work meant that he stayed close to the ground, he continued to cast his shadow over the whole of Kulumani. And now, as the village trembled at the threat of lions, everyone nostalgically recalled his divine protection.

My father, Genito Serafim Mpepe, could have been a hunter in his own right as well. But he preferred to remain a tracker, in a display of solidarity with his late mentor. If one had been demoted, the other had to be too. Genito’s only ambition, in the end, was to follow in the footsteps of the dethroned hunter. Even so, Grandfather’s standing proved impossible to equal. Adjiru had been more than a mweniekaya, the head of a family. His authority invariably extended to the entire neighborhood. Without pronouncements, his was a silent supremacy, that of someone who exercises power without need for words. As for me, Mariamar, I was a special person for him. Our “elder” reserved the most enigmatic of premonitions for me:

You, Mariamar, came from the river. And you will surprise everyone yet: One day you’ll go there where the river goes, he prophesied.

* * *

I’m a woman, and it could never be my destiny to travel. Yet Adjiru Kapitamoro was right. For only two days after Silência’s funeral, I’m traveling downstream in a skiff. I’m fleeing the custody imposed by my inveterate jailer, Genito Mpepe. To escape from Kulumani, there’s no road and no bush. My father’s on the road. In the bush, there are the killer lions. At each exit, an ambush awaits. The only way left to me is the river. This thread of water was baptized with the name Lideia, after the doves that visit us in the rainy season. It could perfectly well have remained an anonymous little river, but we feared that if it was left nameless, it might become extinguished forever. It was supposedly our grandfather, Adjiru Kapitamoro, who had given it its name. And we pretended we believed it.

So here we both go: the River Lideia with its bird’s name; and I, Mariamar, with my watery name. I travel against my fate, but with the flow of the river’s current. During this whole time, the skiff feigns obedience. It’s not my arms that propel it along but forces that I would rather remained unknown. November is the month when we pray for rain. And I pray for a land where I can lie down with the rain, weightless and freed from my body.

* * *

They say that farther on, this river flows through the city. I doubt it. This river of mine, which doesn’t even speak Portuguese, this river full of fish that only know their names in Shimakonde, I don’t believe it would be allowed into the city. And I’ll be stopped as well if I get as far as knocking on the door of the capital.

* * *

Obey everything except love, that’s what my poor sister Silência used to say. It’s for reasons of love that I’m leaving Kulumani, putting distance between me and myself, my present fears, my future nightmares. It’s not so much the desire to break my ties that has led me to disobey. I have another, more important reason: I’ve embarked on this act of madness because of the visitors’ reported arrival. In fact, because of one such arrival: Archangel Bullseye, the hunter. That man once hunted me. Ever since then, I’ve had no peace. To flee from a lover is the most complete act of obedience to him. The more I’m mistress of my fate, the more I’m a slave to that love of mine. There’s no river in this world that can free me from this trap.

* * *

Archie Bullseye came into my life sixteen years ago. I was also sixteen years old when he first met me. I was no more than a young girl, but my eyes had aged more than my body. My only ambition was to run far away from Kulumani. On Sunday afternoons I would break into the henhouse of the Catholic Mission to sell chickens out on the highway. My intention was to make a bit of money so that I could run away to the city. But the road was almost deserted, with very few travelers. It was 1992, and the war had finished that same year, but an invisible garrote continued to asphyxiate our area.

I never understood why so many vendors would crowd together on the edge of the lifeless road. Maybe they were gathered there in a type of prayer, a way of kneeling together before our fate. Or perhaps it was because the occasional furtive timber truck would appear. Such businesses belonged to powerful people, whom we called “the owners of the land.” But whoever passed by, I would hold my chickens up and their wings would flutter blindly, in momentary flight. No one ever stopped, no one ever bought anything. Clucking stupidly, the fowl would once again dangle from my hands, as if burdened by their daring effort to be birds but a few moments before.

Once, the policeman, Maliqueto Próprio — the only representative of the law in Kulumani — came up to me, all self-important, wanting to know where I’d got my merchandise. He pointed to the chickens as if they were proof of a crime. He charged me with theft, and ordered me to follow him.

To the police station? I asked, shaking.

You know very well there’s no police station in Kulumani. I’ve got my own lockup.

Maliqueto’s abuses were only too well known. At that moment, his sinister look merely confirmed his malicious intentions. My eyes failed me and my legs wobbled. The barrel of his gun sticking into my back didn’t permit any delay.

Please don’t do me any harm.

That was when Archangel Bullseye appeared, like a hero emerging from nowhere. He stopped in front of me, mounted on his motorbike, a proud emperor and a man whose orders the world respected. The policeman eyed the intruder, measuring him from head to foot. After a ponderous silence, he decided to withdraw. I don’t know whether the hunter was aware of the opportunity that his appearance had presented him with, but he smiled as he interjected:

Can I take a chicken?

It was me I wanted him to take. The man looked at me with apparent surprise. Suddenly I felt the weight of shame: I had never been looked at before. It was as if at long last my body were being born within me.

Those eyes, he sighed. Ah! Those eyes!

My face fell and I stood there confused, a bird with neither flight nor voice.

You have a lovely body, the visitor murmured.

His talk laid bare both my body and soul. To escape my unsteadiness, I retreated to some shade by the river. The man followed me, pushing his motorbike.

Would you like to come to Palma with me?

The town? I can’t.

I’ll take you there and bring you back on the bike. We can take a shortcut along the river so that no one will see us.

I can’t, I’ve already told you.

We can watch television, wouldn’t you like that?

I contemplated the surrounding countryside. How vast the world was, how infinitely vast! The universe was immense and the visitor was waiting for an answer. So many things went through my head! It occurred to me, for instance, to ask the hunter to help my mother carry water if he had a motorbike. To help the women of Kulumani to fetch firewood, dig clay, transport crops from their allotments. And above all, not to ask anything of me.

We stood in silence as my eyes lingered over the waters of the Lideia. Tired of waiting, Archie asked the name of the river. He said that he was coming to hunt a savage crocodile that was spreading terror in the area. He wasn’t going to do anything without knowing the river’s name.

I sighed. The visitor didn’t want to know my name. Only the landscape seemed to interest him.

Lundi Lideia, that’s its full name, I replied begrudgingly. But we just call it the Lideia.

So what does it mean?

Lideia is the name we give to a type of dove.

A dove? Archie pondered. Then he laughed, finding a joke where I could see none.

Fair enough! There are rivers that make us fly.

Those were the hunter’s words. We said goodbye while looking at the river, that same river that I’m now using to get away from Kulumani, to escape from my family, and break out of my own life.

* * *

When, in the early hours, I threw myself into this journey, it was my intention to warn the hunter of the ambush that was being mounted against him. My plan was straightforward: I would jump out of the skiff by the bridge and set off down the highway, where I would wait for the visitors. Sixteen years ago, Archie had saved me from the threat of a lewd policeman. This time, I’d be the one to save him. And I could see myself standing in the middle of the road, my arms waving like flags fluttering. Who knows, maybe the hunter would take me in his arms and bear me aloft in giddy flight.

But while I am carried down the river, another sentiment takes hold of me. I’m not going to meet the hunter. Rather, I’m fleeing from him. Why am I running away from the only person who might have loved me? I don’t know how to answer. My mother often says that water makes the stones round in the same way that women shape the souls of men. It could have been like that with me. But it wasn’t. There was no love, no man, no soul. What happened was that with the passing of time, I lost all hope. And when someone stops having hopes, it’s because they’ve stopped living. So that’s why I’m running away: I fear being devoured. Not by the anxiety that dwells deep within me. Devoured by the emptiness of not loving. Devoured by the desire to be loved.

* * *

The skiff arrives, at last, at a pool of clear water. This pool is considered a sacred spot, which only witch doctors dare visit. In the village, it is said that it’s here that the water makes its nest. The older folk call this place lyali wakati, the “egg of time.” The peace and quiet of this paradise ought to mollify me, but it doesn’t. Because I realize that the skiff is stuck, and despite all my efforts, I can’t move on. There’s no sign of a current, no sign of an eddy. But the skiff is stuck fast on the bed of the River Lideia. It must be fulfilling the age-old rule: Small places have a wide reach. No matter how hard we try to leave, we never get away. What a cursed land, so devoid of sky that we even have to exhume the clouds, was what Grandfather Adjiru would complain. And that’s how I now execrate my native land.

A tremor shakes me, my heart leaps up through my throat when, standing up in my unsteady skiff, I sense a hidden presence on the riverbank. Although I’m a woman, I have inherited the hunter’s instinct that runs through my family. I know of shadows that move among shadows, I know of smells and signs that no one else knows about. And now I’m certain: There’s an animal on the riverbank! There’s a creature creeping furtively through the foliage next to the water.

And suddenly, there it is: a lioness! She’s come down to drink from the calm water on that part of the riverbank. She contemplates me without fear or excitement. As if she had been waiting for me for a long time, she raises her head and pierces me with her inquisitive gaze. There is no tension in her behavior. It might be said that she recognizes me. More than this: The lioness greets me with a sisterly respect. We linger in this mutual contemplation and, gradually, a sense of spiritual harmony takes hold of me.

Having slaked her thirst, the lioness stretches as if she wanted a second body to emerge from her own. Then she slowly withdraws, her tail swaying like a furry pendulum, each step caressing the earth’s surface. I smile with uncontained pride. They are all convinced that it is male lions who are threatening the village. It’s not. It’s this lioness, delicate and feminine as a dancer, majestic and sublime as a goddess, it’s this lioness that has spread such terror through the neighborhood. Powerful men, warriors equipped with sophisticated weapons: All of them have prostrated themselves, enslaved by fear, vanquished by their own impotence.

Once again, the lioness fixes her gaze upon me, and then turns in a circle before disappearing. Something that I shall never be able to describe suddenly robs me of my good judgment and a shout bursts from my breast:

Sister! My sister!

In despair, my fists grasp the oars in an attempt to propel the skiff toward the shore:

Silência! Uminha! Igualita!

The names of my dead sisters reverberate through that mysterious setting. I shiver from head to foot: I had just challenged the sacred precepts that forbade me from uttering the names of the dead. Attracted by their summons, the deceased may reappear in the world. Perhaps that was my secret wish. A desperate urge causes me to disobey the rule once more:

It’s me, sister, it’s me, Mariamar!

I then realize how absurd my situation is: I, who had never raised my voice, was now shouting for someone who could not hear. They’re right, the people who point a finger at me: I’m mad, I’ve lost control of myself. And I burst into tears, as if I were suddenly aware of how little I cried when I was born. Adjiru was right: Sadness isn’t crying. Sadness is having no one to cry for.

Don’t leave me, please, take me with you.

The call echoes through the forest, and for a second I seem to hear other voices clamoring for Silência. But the vegetation closes in on itself, thick and unmoving. In the place where the lioness has just drunk, there’s now a red stain rapidly spreading across the surface of the water. Suddenly the whole river has turned red, and I am drifting in blood. The same blood that, every time I dreamed of giving birth, would flow out between my thighs, the same blood that is now flowing in the current. My grandfather, Adjiru Kapitamoro, was right: This river was born from his hands, just as I was born from his attachment to me. And at this point, I understand: More than the land, my prison was my grandfather Adjiru. It was he who had brought the skiff to a standstill and held me back in the Lideia’s sacred pool.

Grandfather, I plead. Please let me continue downstream.

I curl up in the bottom of the skiff, I lie there seeking the sleep of those who are not yet born. Then, all of a sudden, another skiff penetrates the silence and, to my alarm, approaches me like some furtive crocodile. It can only be Adjiru coming to rescue me. With a tight throat, I call out:

Grandfather?

The two craft are now alongside each other and a figure leans over me to tie a rope round the oarlocks of my boat. The light is behind this intruder, and all I can see is a dark silhouette. Not wanting to waste time, I point to the shore and declare:

She was there! The lioness was there. Let’s follow her, Grandfather, she can’t have got far.

Sit up, Mariamar.

I am startled: It’s not Adjiru. It’s Maliqueto Próprio, the village’s solitary hangman. Without uttering a word, he starts dragging me back toward Kulumani. Halfway, he ships his oars and stares fixedly at me until the abandoned boat begins to glide away downstream at the whim of the current.

You owe me something, Mariamar. Have you forgotten? This is a good place to pay me your debt.

He starts taking off his clothes, while crawling toward me, slithering and slobbering. Funnily enough, I’m not scared of him. To my own surprise, I advance toward Maliqueto, my hackles raised, screaming, spitting, and scratching. Between alarmed and astonished, the policeman retreats and looks with horror at the deep gashes I’ve inflicted on his arms.

You great bitch, were you trying to kill me?

He pulls his shirt up over his shoulders in order to hide his wounds and hurriedly resumes the journey back to Kulumani. As he rows, he keeps repeating under his breath:

She’s crazy, the hag’s completely crazy.

On the shore, Florindo Makwala, the administrator, and my father, Genito Mpepe, are waiting. In anticipation, I start shouting, although my voice is thickened by the tension:

I saw it, I saw it! It was the lioness, Father! And it was real. I didn’t make it up.

You’re lying. Don’t come to me with stories, because I’m going to punish you.

I saw it, Father. A lioness at the pool. I’m sure as sure can be.

Maliqueto, contradicting me for the sake of it, insists that there was nothing to see there. And even if I had seen it, how could I be sure it was a female? In this area, male lions are small and almost without a mane.

The district officer steps forward with care so as not to get his shoes wet, and, keeping himself at a distance, instructs my father:

I don’t want any contact between this girl and the delegation.

She’ll be kept at home, rest assured, Comrade Chief. I’ll tie her up in the yard.

I want her kept well away from the visitors. And what’s happened to you, Maliqueto? Are you bleeding?

I hurt myself with the ropes, Chief. And now, with your permission, can I say something, Chief?

Go ahead.

Your daughter was wrong in the head, Comrade Mpepe, but now she’s scary. How did she dare visit that sacred place all by herself?

You’re right, Maliqueto. Don’t you know what they did to Tandi, who went where she wasn’t supposed to go?

The three men busy themselves with securing the boat. Sitting on the riverbank, I realize how similar the skiff is to a coffin. The bulging belly, the same journey toward timelessness. The river didn’t take me to my destination. But the journey led me to someone who had become separated from me: the lioness, the sister I missed so much.