The Tuner of Silences

THE APPARITION

We never really get to live during most of our life. We waste ourselves in a boundless lethargy that we delude and console ourselves by calling existence. For the rest, we flit around like fireflies, lit up only for brief and intermittent moments.

A whole life can be turned on its head in one day by one such moment. For me, Mwanito, it happened on that day. It began in the morning, when I left the house in the face of a windstorm that was raising spirals of dust everywhere. These whirlwinds would twist and turn in whimsical dances, only to cease as phantasmagorically as they had begun. The foliage of the huge trees swept the ground while heavy branches were torn away and fell to the earth with loud crashes.

— No one go outside. .

Those were my father’s orders, as he peered out of the window, tormented by the storm and its gusts of wind. Nothing disturbed Silvestre Vitalício more than to see trees twisting and great branches full of leaves swinging like ghostly serpents.

Disobeying my father’s orders, I ventured down the paths between our living quarters and the big house. And I regretted doing so straight away. The storm was like the upheaval of all the compass points at the same time. I felt a chill run through me: was there any basis for my old man’s fears? What was happening? Was the ground tired of being earth? Or was God announcing his arrival at Jezoosalem?

With my left hand shielding my face and my right holding the two sides of my old coat together, I walked down the path until I stopped in front of the ghostly residence. I stood there for some time without moving, listening to the whistling of the wind. I was reassured by its howling: I was an orphan and the wind was wailing mournfully, like someone seeking its lost relatives.

In spite of the discomfort, I savoured my misbehaviour as revenge against Silvestre Vitalício. Deep down, I wanted the storm to worsen so as to punish our progenitor for his wrong-doings. I felt like going back and challenging old Vitalício in front of the very window through which he watched this cosmic insubordination.

Meanwhile, the gusts of wind increased in fury. So much so that the front door of the big old house was blown open. This was a signal for me: an invisible hand was inviting me to cross the forbidden threshold. I went up the front steps and peered at the veranda where hundreds of leaves were pirouetting in a frenzied dance.

Suddenly, I saw the body. Stretched out on the ground, a human body. I was overwhelmed by an inner turmoil. I cast an anxious glance once again to confirm what I had seen. But a heaving sea of leaves blurred my vision. My legs trembled, rooting me to the spot. I must have been mistaken, it was my imagination, and nothing more. Another gust, another swirl of dead leaves and, once again the vision returned, this time more clear and real. It certainly was a body, lying there on the veranda like top soil.

I ran away, shrieking like one possessed. As I was running into the wind, it swallowed up my screams, and it was only when I got back to the house, breathless, that I was able to give vent to my distress:

— A person! A dead person!

Silvestre and Ntunzi were mending the handle of a spade and didn’t stop their task. My brother looked up, his eyes betraying no interest:

— A person?

I clumsily gave hurried details of what I had seen. My father, impassive, commented quietly:

— This fucking wind!

Then, he put his hammer down and asked:

— What did its tongue look like?

— Its tongue?

— Was it sticking out of its mouth?

— Father: it was dead, it was far away. I couldn’t see its mouth, nor its tongue.

I sought some sort of understanding in Ntunzi, but he didn’t say a word. But given my conviction, Father issued his orders:

— Call Zachary over here.

Ntunzi left in a rush. It wasn’t long before he returned with the soldier carrying, as always, his rifle. My old man got things moving with a couple of words:

— Get yourself over there and see what’s happening. .

Zachary saluted, clicked his heels, but didn’t obey immediately. He squared himself to request due permission to speak:

— May I say something?

— You may.

— Mwanito can’t have seen what was really there. It was an optical disillusion.

— That may be— Silvestre conceded. — But it may also be one of those old dead bodies in the house. Some animal may have dragged it out onto the veranda.

— That’s possible. Last night there were hyenas prowling around.

— Quite so. If that’s the case, bury it. Bury the body, but not underneath a tree.

— But won’t you want to know who it is?

— If it’s a dead body, it can’t belong to anyone. Go and see to the task, and if the wind dies down, I’ll come and join you. .

— Maybe he was living here in Jezoosalem, and we didn’t know—Ntunzi suggested, with unexpected daring.

— Are you mad? If there is a body there, it’s not that of anyone who died. It’s someone who was always dead, born lifeless, so to speak.

— Father, I’m sorry, but for me. .

— That’s enough! I don’t want to hear any more opinions. You’re going to dig a grave and that body, or whatever it is, is going to be put away in the earth.

Ntunzi, Zachary and I set off in single file, in a pre-funeral cortège. We still heard Silvestre’s voice, summing up his conclusions:

— Later, when the wind drops, I’ll go and check things.

The soldier marched along in front, a spade in each hand. We stealthily climbed the steps up to the big house, and to my relief, my previous vision was confirmed. Half-covered by leaves, perfectly clear against the light, there lay a body. Some hidden force rooted us to the doorway, until Kalash murmured:

— I’ll go and take a look!

— Don’t go in, Zaca! — Ntunzi warned.

— Why?

— I don’t like that light—and he pointed to a sunbeam that filtered through the roof planks.

Sitting on the entrance steps, Zachary sniffed the air, as if trying to detect a suspicious smell.

— It doesn’t smell of death—he said in a cavernous tone that made us shiver.

And once again, we peered towards the end of the veranda trying to see through the light that shone from the rear.

— It’s a man—he said, sure of himself.

The body lay on its back on the wooden floor, as if the floor were the suggestion of a coffin. We couldn’t see the face that was turned to the other side. A kind of cloth covered the head, tied at the back.

— It looks—Zaca said—like a foreign black.

— How do you know?

The body wasn’t embracing the ground like local corpses do. Those bones weren’t seeking another womb in the earth. There was, of course, the detail of the boots. Zachary had never seen the like of them before.

— Now I’m beginning to think it’s a white—Zaca declared, still peering from the top of the steps. — I think the fellow’s soul has already begun to leave its shell.

And he gave the order for us to dig the grave, before anything else. When it was ready, we’d go back and fetch the body. By that time, the light on the veranda would have changed and we would be protected by bad spirits.

So we began to dig, our spades opening up the stranger’s final resting place. But then a strange thing happened: the hole was never ready. The moment we got to the bottom, the windblown sand completely refilled the grave again. And that happened once, twice, and three times. The third time, Zachary hurled his spade at the ground as if he’d been stung by a wasp and exclaimed:

— I don’t like this. Children, come over here quickly.

And he pushed us towards the shade of a mafurreira tree. He took a white cloth from his pocket and tied it to the trunk. His hands were shaking so hard that it was Ntunzi who spoke:

— I know what you’re thinking, Zaca. I feel the same too.

Then, turning to me, he said:

— This is what happened at our mother’s funeral.

— It’s the same spell—Zachary confirmed.

Then they told me what had happened on the day of my mother’s burial. “Burial” is merely a term that is used. For there’s never enough earth to bury a mother.

— I don’t want a gravedigger.

That was Silvestre’s stipulation, which he yelled in order to be heard above the wind. The dust stung his eyes. But he didn’t lower his eyelids. His tears protected him from the clouds of dirt.

— I don’t want a gravedigger. My son and I are the ones who’ll dig the grave, we’re the ones who’ll do the funeral.

But the grave they started was never finished. My father and Ntunzi tried, time after time, in vain. Hardly had they opened up a hole than it filled with sand. Kalash and Aproximado joined in, but the result was the same: the dirt, blown by the wind in its fury, refilled the cavity immediately. They had to resort to the professionals to complete the job of opening and closing the burial place.

Now, eight years later, the earth was once again refusing to open its womb to receive a body.

— Quiet everyone! — ordered Zachary Kalash. — I can hear noises.

Taking every possible care, the assistant approached the veranda. He peered between the planks and then turned towards us in astonishment. Where before the corpse had lain, there was nothing whatsoever.

— The dead body isn’t there any more, it’s nowhere to be seen—Zachary repeated in an undertone.

The wind had abated. Even so, dead leaves fluttered around accentuating the emptiness.

— I’m going to get a weapon—Zaca said. And he hurried away down the path.

Gradually, a new state of mind took hold of me, transforming my fright into a haughty sense of calm. I looked at Ntunzi who was trembling like a reed, and to his astonishment, I began to advance firmly towards the big house.

— Are you crazy, Mwanito? Where are you going?

In silence, I climbed the steps to the veranda and trod on the boards carefully in case the floor were to give way, and I were to fall through it and maybe even join the missing dead body. I walked along the veranda looking for some clue, until I decided to knock on the front door. My brother, his voice shaking, asked:

— Are you waiting for the dead man to come and answer the door?

— Don’t talk so loud.

— You’re crazy, Mwanito. I’m going to call Father—Ntunzi said, turning his back and retreating hurriedly.

I was alone, facing the abyss by myself. Slowly, I opened the door and peered around the entrance hall. It was a wide, empty space, which smelled of time stood still. While I was getting used to the half-light, I began to think to myself: why was it that through all my childhood years I was never curious enough to come and explore this forbidden place? The reason was that I had never had control over my own childhood, my father had made me grow old from the time I was born.

It was then that the apparition occurred: out of the nothingness, there emerged a woman. A crack opened up by my feet and a billowing cloud of smoke misted my eyes. The vision of this creature suddenly caused the frontiers of the world I knew so well to overflow.

I faced the intruder out of the corner of my half-closed eyes. She was white, tall and dressed like a man, in trousers, a shirt and high boots. She had straight hair, half concealed under a kerchief, the same one we had seen on the head of what we had thought a dead body. The boots were also identical to the ones that the dead person was wearing. Her nose and lips were blurred, and together with the colour of her skin, gave her the appearance of an unburied creature.

I wanted to run away, but my legs were like the roots of an ancient tree. Without moving my head, I glanced at the ill-defined approach to the house, seeking help. There was nothing. Neither Ntunzi nor Zachary could be seen, and the land round about was shrouded in mist. Bewildered, I felt a tear weigh more than my whole body. That was when I heard the woman speak for the first time:

— Are you crying?

I shook my head energetically. I thought that if I owned up to my weakness, this would merely encourage the spectre in its demonic intentions.

— What are you looking for, my child?

— Me? Nothing.

Did I speak? Or were they words that came out of me without my being aware? For I was completely defenceless, barefoot on burning ground. All of a sudden, I no longer knew how to live. Life had turned into an unknown language.

— What’s the matter, are you scared of me?

The gentle, tender voice only aggravated my sense of unreality. I brushed my eyes with my hand to wipe away the tears and then slowly raised my face to assess the creature. But always out of the corner of my eye, for fear that the vision might tear my eyes out forever.

— Was it you who were digging a grave in the yard just now?

— Yes. Me and the others. There were lots of us.

— I could hear voices and took a look. Why were you digging a grave?

— It wasn’t for anyone. I mean, for anything.

I turned my gaze to the veranda once more, anxiously trying to discover what had happened to the body. There was no sign on the floor that it had been dragged away, for the leaves were scattered around without having been disturbed. The intruder passed by me, and I was aware, for the first time in my life, of the sweet smell of a woman. She moved away towards the front door. I noticed the graceful way she walked, but without the exaggerated gestures with which Ntunzi had imitated female creatures in his play-acting.

— I beg your pardon, but are you really a woman, miss?

The stranger raised her eyes, troubled by some age-old pain. There was a passing cloud, and then she shook off her sadness and asked:

— Why? Don’t I look like a woman?

— I don’t know. I’ve never seen one before.

That was my first woman and she made the ground melt away under me. Since then, years have passed, I’ve fallen for countless women, and whenever I’ve loved them, the world has always sunk from under my feet. But that first encounter etched the mysterious power of women into my consciousness.

Feeling my strength return, I rushed off like a gazelle through the bush. The white woman observed me from the doorway, intrigued. I even looked back, hoping that she might have vanished, wishing it had all been no more than a hallucination.

When I reached the safety of home, my heart was pounding, so much so that I could scarcely utter a word when I found Ntunzi:

— Ntunzi, you. . you won’t believe this.

— I saw it—he said, as startled as I was.

— What did you see?

— The white woman.

— Did you really see her?

— We mustn’t say anything to Father.

That same night, my mother visited me. In my dream, she was still faceless, but now she had a voice. Her voice was that of the apparition, with its warmth and tenderness. I woke up confused, so vivid was the dream. I heard steps in the room: Ntunzi couldn’t sleep. He had also been accosted by nocturnal visitations.

— Ntunzi, tell me something: was our mother like her?

— No.

— Why couldn’t you sleep, Ntunzi?

— I was having dreams.

— Were you dreaming of Mama as well?

— Do you remember that story of the girl who lost her face when I fell in love with her?

— Yes. But what’s that got to do with it?

— In my dream, I saw her face.

The sound of voices outside made us stop talking. We rushed to the window. It was Zachary, speaking to our father. Judging by his gestures, we guessed the soldier was reporting the apparition. So we watched Zachary gesticulating, explaining in an animated fashion what had happened at the haunted house. My father’s expression became more and more grim: we were being visited, the earth and the heavens were shaking in Jezoosalem.

All of a sudden, Silvestre got up and vanished into the darkness. We followed him from afar, keen to discover what was going on in the man’s mind as he crossed the yard like a wounded animal. Silvestre went straight to the truck and shook Aproximado, who was snoozing in the front seat. There was no warning, or even a greeting:

— What’s this white woman doing here?

— She wasn’t the only one to arrive. Why don’t you ask me what I’m doing here?

Overcome with emotion, my father signalled to Kalash to come over. Silvestre looked as if he wanted to confide something, but no word came out of his mouth. Suddenly, he started kicking Aproximado, while the soldier tried in vain to shield our Uncle. And so the three of them spun around together, like the broken blades of a windmill. Finally, my father leaned against the front of the vehicle, exhausted, and took a deep breath, as if he were trying to regain entry to his soul. His voice was like that of Christ on the cross, as he asked:

— Why did you betray me, Aproximado? Why?

— I’ve got no obligations towards you.

— Aren’t we family?

— That’s what I sometimes ask myself.

He’d said too much. Aproximado had crossed the line. My father stood there speechless, huffing like Jezebel after her trot. And then he watched, stunned, as Aproximado unloaded a whole range of odds and ends from his truck: binoculars, powerful torches capable of drilling through the night, cameras, sun hats and tripods.

— What’s all this? An invasion?

— It’s not all that much. The lady likes to take photos of herons.

— And you tell me it’s “not all that much”? Someone in this world is going round taking photos of herons?

This was just an additional reason for his discomfort. The truth was that the presence of the Portuguese woman in itself was an unbearable intrusion. One person alone — and a woman to boot — was bringing the entire nation of Jezoosalem to its knees. In just a few minutes, Silvestre Vitalício’s painstaking fabrication was falling to pieces. There was, after all, a living world out there, and an envoy from that world had installed herself at the very heart of his realm. There was no time to lose: Aproximado was to pack up everything once more and take the intruder back where she had come from.

— You, Brother-in-law, are going to take this broad away!

Aproximado smiled, sly and sardonic, which is what he did when he couldn’t think of what to say. He steadied his body inside his overalls, mustering up the courage for an argument:

— My dear Silvestre: we’re not the owners.

— We’re not what? Well, I’m the owner of all this, and I’m the only current occupant of this whole area.

— Well, I don’t know about that. . Can’t you understand that maybe it’s us who’ll have to leave?

— Why’s that?

— The houses we’re occupying are the property of the State.

— What State? I don’t see any State around here.

— One can never see the State, Brother-in-law.

— It’s for that and other reasons that I got out of that world where the State can never be seen, but it always turns up and takes our things away from us.

— You can shout, Silvestre Vitalício, but you’re here illegally. .

— Illegal is the bitch who bore you. .

He was so enraged that he lost control of his voice, which sounded like a cloth being ripped in half. We’d never seen him reach such a state. My father set off in the direction of the administrator’s house, and started yelling:

— You bitch! You great bitch!

He projected his whole body forward as if the words he was hurling were stones:

— Get out of here, you bitch!

Seeing him duelling with the void like this made me feel sorry for him. My father wanted to shut the world away. But there was no door behind which to lock himself.

It was early in the morning when my old man came to my bedside and shook me. He leaned over my pillow and whispered:

— I’ve got a mission for you, son.

— A what, Father? I asked, startled.

— A spying mission—he added.

My task was an easy one and explained to me in two brief brush strokes: I would go to the big house and rummage through whatever was in the Portuguese woman’s room. Silvestre Vitalício wanted to discover clues that might reveal the visitor’s secret intentions. Ntunzi would have the job of distracting the woman, keeping her far from the house. And I wasn’t to be afraid of shadows or ghosts. The Portuguese woman had already scared any tormented souls away. Local ghosts didn’t get on well with foreign ones, he assured me.

Later on, halfway through the morning, the Portuguese woman’s effects emerged into the light of day in my trembling hands. For hours, my eyes and fingers ranged over Marta’s papers. Each sheet was a wing with which I gained giddiness rather than height.

THE WOMAN’S PAPERS

I’m a woman, I’m Marta and all I can do is write. Maybe, after all, it’s best that you are away from here. For I could never reach you otherwise. I have long ceased to occupy my own voice. If you came to me now, Marcelo, I would be speechless. My voice has emigrated to a body that once was mine. And when I listen to my voice, I don’t even recognize myself. When it comes to love, I only know how to write. This isn’t recent, it’s always been like that, even when you were present.

I write just as birds compose their flight: without paper, without script, with only light and nostalgia. Words that, while mine, have never dwelt in me. I write without having anything to say. Because I don’t know what to say to you about what we were. And I have nothing to say to you about what we shall be. For I’m like the inhabitants of Jezoosalem. I feel no yearning, I have no memory: my belly has never borne life, my blood has never opened into another body. This is how I grow old: dispersed within me, a veil abandoned on a church pew.

I loved you, and you alone, Marcelo. My fidelity led me into the most painful of exiles: this love removed me from all possibility of loving. Now, of all the names, all I have left is your name. I can only ask that name what I used to ask of you: to beget me. For I need so much to be born! To be born another, far from me, far from my time. I am exhausted, Marcelo. Exhausted but not empty. To be empty, one must have internal substance. And I have lost my inner being.

Why did you never write? It’s not reading you that I miss. It’s the sound of the knife slitting the envelope that carries your letter. And once again feeling my soul caressed, as if somewhere an umbilical cord was being cut. But it was just an illusion: there is no knife, there is no letter. Nothing, or nobody, is being delivered into the world.

Do you see how small I become when I write to you? That’s why I could never be a poet. A poet grows when faced by absence, as if absence were his altar, and he became greater than the word. That’s not the case with me, for absence submerges me, so that I no longer have access to myself.

This is my conflict: when you’re here, I don’t exist, I’m ignored. When you’re not here, I don’t know myself, I’m ignorant. I only exist when I’m in your presence. And I am only myself in your absence. Now, I know. I’m no more than a name. A name that only comes to life when uttered by you.

This morning I watched the bushfire in the distance. On the other side of the river, vast stretches were being consumed. It wasn’t the earth that was turning to flame: it was the air itself that was burning, the whole sky was being devoured by demons.

Later, when the blaze had died down, a sea of dark ash remained. In the absence of wind, particles fluttered around like black dragonflies over the scorched grassland. It could have been a scene from the end of the world. But for me, it was the opposite: it was the earth being born. I felt like yelling your name:

— Marcelo!

My cry could have been heard far away. For here, in this place, even silence produces an echo. If there is somewhere I can be reborn, it’s here, where the briefest moment leaves me sated. I’m like the savannah: I burn to live. And I die, drowned by my own thirst.

— What’s that word?

At the last stop before we reached Jezoosalem, Orlando (who I’ve got to get into the habit of calling Aproximado) asked, pointing at my name on the cover of my diary:

— What’s that word?

— This woman—I corrected him. This is me.

I should have said: that’s my name, written on the cover of my diary. But no. I said it was me as if my whole body and my whole life were contained in a mere five letters. That’s what I am, Marcelo: I’m a word, you write me by night, and by day you erase me. Every day is a sheet you tear off, I’m the paper that awaits your hand, I’m the letter that awaits the caress of your gaze.

What struck me right from the start at Jezoosalem was the absence of electricity. Never before had I felt the night, been embraced by darkness, embraced inside me until I too became dark.

Tonight, I’m sitting on the veranda, under a star-filled sky. Under the sky, no. In fact I’m among the sky. The firmament is so close, I could sow it with seeds, and I breathe slowly for fear of disturbing constellations.

The smell of the oil lamp burning is the only thing anchoring me to the ground. All the rest are indefinable vapours, unknown odours, angels whirling around me. Nothing precedes me, for I am inaugurating the world, light, shadow. More than this: I am founding words. I’m the one who launches them, I am the creator of my own language.

All this, Marcelo, reminds me of our nights in Lisbon. You would watch me in bed, while I rubbed beauty creams over my body. You complained there were too many: a lotion for the face, another for the neck, one for the hands, still another for around the eyes. They had been invented as if each part of me were a separate body and sustained its own particular beauty. As far as the sellers of cosmetics are concerned, it’s no longer enough that each woman has her body. Each one of us has various bodies that exist in a kind of confederation of autonomous states. That’s what you said as you sought to dissuade me.

Haunted by the fear of ageing, I allowed our relationship to grow old. Busy making myself beautiful, I allowed my true beauty, that which dwells in a candid look, to escape. The bed sheet grew cold, the bed played safe. That’s the difference: the woman you met over there, in Africa, is beautiful only for you. I was beautiful for me alone, which is another way of saying for no one.

This is what these black women have that we can never have: they are always their whole body. They live in every part of their body. Their whole body is woman, their time is feminine. While we white women live in a strange state of transhumance: sometimes we are soul, other times we are body. We aspire to soar on the wings of desire, only to then crash to the ground under the weight of our guilt.

Now that I’ve got here, suddenly, I don’t want to find you anymore. For me, it was a strange sensation, I who had travelled so far in my dream of reconquering you. But on my journey to Africa, this dream faltered. Perhaps I had waited too long. During my wait, I had learned to enjoy my yearning. I remember the verses of the poet, which go like this: “I came into the world to feel yearning.” As if I could only populate my mind through absence. Following the example of those houses that can only speak to the senses when they are empty. Like this house where I now live.

The pain of a fruit that has fallen to the ground, that’s what I feel. The portent of the seed, that’s what I await. As you can see, I am learning how to be both tree and earth, time and eternity.

— You’re like the earth. That’s your beauty.

That’s what you used to say. And when we kissed and I became breathless, I would ask you, between sighs: what day were you born? You would reply, your voice shaking: I’m being born now. And as you brought your hand up between my legs, I would ask you again: where were you born? And, almost voiceless, you would reply: I’m being born in you, my love. That’s what you said. You were a poet, Marcelo. I was your poetry. And when you wrote to me, what you told me was so beautiful that I would get undressed to read your letters. I could only read you when naked. For it wasn’t through my eyes that I received you, but with my whole body, line by line, pore by pore.

When I was still in the city, Aproximado asked me who I was, and I seemed to talk for the whole night. I told him everything about us, I told him almost everything about you, Marcelo. At one stage, perhaps because I was tired, I realized how surprised I was with the story I was telling. Secrets are fascinating because they were made in order to be revealed. I revealed secrets because I can no longer bear to live without fascination.

— You know, Miss Marta: the journey to the reserve is very dangerous.

I didn’t answer, but the truth is that I was only interested in travel if it involved crossing infernos, passing my soul through conflagrations.

— Tell me about this Marcelo. Your husband.

— Husband?

I’m used to this: women explain themselves to themselves by talking about their men. While if it were you, Marcelo, explaining me to other men, your words would transform me into a simple creature to be contained in the speech of one man alone.

— Last year, Marcelo came on a journey to Africa.

He came with the illusions of those who have lived in a place: on a pilgrimage to nostalgia. He stayed here for a month and when he returned, he had changed out of all recognition. Perhaps it was his re-encounter with this land that had unsettled him. It was in Mozambique that he fought as a soldier years before. He thought he had been sent to an unfamiliar land in order to kill. But he had been sent to kill a distant country. During that fatal operation, Marcelo had ended up being born as another person. Fifteen years later, it wasn’t the country he wanted to see again, but that process of birth he had gone through. I told him not to go. I had a strange foreboding about his journey. No memory can be revisited. Even more serious: there are memories that are only re-encountered in death.

I’ve told you this, Marcelo, because the pain of it all is like that of an ingrown nail. I need to talk, to gnaw this nail right down to the skin. You don’t know, Marcelo, how many deaths you made me die. For you came back from Africa, but part of you never returned. Every day, early in the morning, you would leave the house and wander the streets as if there was nothing you recognized in your city.

— Is this city no longer mine?

That’s what you would say to me. A land is ours just as a person may belong to us: without our ever taking possession. A few days after your return, I found a photo at the bottom of your drawer. It was a picture of a black woman. She was young, pretty, her pensive eyes defying the camera. On the back of the photo, there was a note in tiny handwriting: a telephone number. The miniature writing made it look like the merest scratch. But it was an abyss I kept falling back into repeatedly, every time I emerged from it.

My first impulse was to make a phone call. But I thought twice about it. What would I say? Then my fury prevailed, uncontained. I threw the photo back, face down, like one might do with a corpse one didn’t want to see the face of.

— You cheat, I hope you die of AIDS, and with fleas along with it. .

I wanted to mistreat you, Marcelo, I wanted to throw you in jail. So you would remain shackled to my rage. I was past caring about love. I spent endless, sleepless nights, waiting. I waited for you to return so that I could talk to you, but when you arrived, you were too exhausted to listen. You’d be less tired the next day. Then, when the next day came, you phoned me from the airport to say you were leaving again for Mozambique. For the first time, I was surprised by my own tone of voice. And I told you: “Well then, sleep. .” Just that. When what I wanted to say was: “Go and fuck your black girls once and for all.” My God, how ashamed I am of my anger and of how spiteful my emotions made me.

I remained in Lisbon, dominated by the part of me that had gone with you. It was a sad irony that the person who kept me company the most during your absence was your lover. The photograph of the other woman stared at me from the bedside table. And we would contemplate each other, day and night, as if we had been forever joined by some invisible connection. I would sometimes whisper my decision to her:

— I’m going to go and find him. .

But then your black mistress would counsel me: “Don’t go!” Let him sink in the dark mud by himself. I convinced myself of the irrevocable truth: my husband had disappeared forever, a victim of cannibalism. Marcelo had been devoured, just as had happened to others who’d left for darkest Africa. He had been swallowed up by a huge mouth, a mouth the size of a continent. He had been gobbled up by ancient mysteries. There are no longer any savages, only natives. But natives can be beautiful. Above all, native women can be beautiful. And it is from that beauty that their bygone savagery emerges. It is a savage beauty. White men, in the past oppressors who were fearful of being devoured, nowadays want to be eaten, swallowed up by black beauty.

That’s what your mistress told me. How many times did I fall asleep with my rival’s photo in the margins of my slumber. Every time, I would mutter between my teeth: cursed woman! And I was never able to come to terms with the injustice of my fate. For years, I had paid considerable attention to makeup, diet, workouts in the gym. I had assumed that this was the way to continue to captivate you. It’s only now that I’ve come to understand that seduction lies elsewhere. Perhaps in a look. And I had long ago allowed my fervent gaze to fade.

As I contemplated the fire sweeping across the savannah, I missed that exchange of fire, the mirror of bedazzlement in Marcelo. To bedazzle, as the word suggests, should be to blind, to take away the light. So it was a glaring light that I now sought. That hallucination that I had once felt, I knew, was as addictive as morphine. Love is a type of morphine. It could be turned into a commercial product, packaged with the name: Amorphine.

The so-called “women’s magazines” sell recipes, secrets and techniques for how to love more and better. Little hints on how to enjoy sex. At the beginning, I was sold on this illusion. I wanted to win back Marcelo and I was open to any persuasion. Now, I don’t know: all I want to know about love is precisely not to know, to disconnect the body from the mind, and allow it uncontrolled freedom. I’m just a woman in appearance. Underneath my surface expression I’m a creature of nature, a wild beast, a lava flow.

All this sky reminds me of Marcelo. He used to tell me, “I’m going to count stars,” and then he would touch each of my freckles. He would dot my shoulders, my back, my breast with his finger. My body was Marcelo’s sky. And I never discovered how to fly, to surrender to the languorous way he counted the stars. I never felt at ease with sex. Let’s say it was a strange territory, an unknown language. My demureness was more than just shame. I was a deaf translator, incapable of turning the desire that spoke deep within me into outward expression. I was the rotten tooth in a vampire’s mouth.

And so I return to my bedside table, to look your black mistress in the face. This was the gaze, at the moment the photo was taken, that plunged into my man’s eyes. A luminous gaze, like the light at the entrance to a house. Maybe it was precisely that, a bedazzling look, maybe that’s what Marcelo had always desired. It wasn’t sex after all. But to feel desired, even if it were only a fleeting pretence.

Under an African sky, I become a woman once more. Earth, life, water are my sex. No, not the sky, for the sky is masculine. I feel the sky touching me with all its fingers. I fall asleep under Marcelo’s caress. And in the distance, I can hear the words of the Brazilian singer, Chico César: “If you look at me, I gently surrender, snow in a volcano. . ”

I want to live in a city where people dream of rain. In a world where rain is the greatest happiness of all. And where we all rain.

Tonight, I carried out the ritual: I stripped off all my clothes in order to read Marcelo’s old letters. My love wrote so profoundly that, as I read, I felt his arm brush against my body, and it was as if he were unbuttoning my dress and my clothes were falling to my feet.

— You’re a poet, Marcelo.

— Don’t say that again.

— Why?

— Poetry is a mortal illness.

Marcelo would fall asleep straight away after making love. He would fold the pillow between his legs and sink into slumber. I was left alone, awake, to ruminate over time. At first, I considered Marcelo’s attitude intolerably selfish. Then, much later on, I understood. Men don’t look at the women they’ve made love to because they’re scared. They’re scared of what they may find in the depths of women’s eyes.

EVICTION ORDER

Marta’s papers were burning my hands. I tidied them away so as no one could see that the intimacy inhabiting them had been violated. I returned home with a heavy heart. We fear God because he exists. But we fear the devil more because he doesn’t. What made me more afraid at that particular moment was neither God nor the devil. I was especially worried about Silvestre Vitalício’s reaction when I told him that all I had found in the Portuguese woman’s room was a bunch of love letters. There was my old man at the entrance to the camp, hands on hips, his voice laden with anxiety:

— A report! I want a report. What did you find in the Portagee woman’s things?

— Just papers. That’s all.

— So what did they say?

— Don’t you remember, Father, that I can’t read?

— Did you bring any papers with you?

— No. Next time. .

He didn’t let me finish. He ran out of the kitchen and returned, the next moment, pulling Ntunzi by his arm.

— You two go to the Portuguese woman’s house and give her my order.

— What order, Father? — Ntunzi asked.

— You mean to say you don’t know?

We were to tell her to go back to the city. We were to be curt, we were to be gruff. The Portagee was to get the message fairly and squarely.

— I want that woman out of here, far away, and I don’t want to see her back here again.

I looked at Ntunzi who was standing there, motionless, as if he were giving in. But within him, he must have been seething with recalcitrance. Nevertheless, he said nothing, and expressed no objection. There we stood, waiting for Silvestre to start speaking again. My father’s silence kept both of us quiet and so we set off, meek and vanquished, in the direction of the haunted house. Halfway there, I asked:

— Are you going to send the Portuguese woman away? How are you going to tell her?

Ntunzi shook his head sluggishly. The two extremes of impossibility had met within him: he couldn’t obey, but nor could he disobey. In the end, he said:

— You go and speak to her.

And he turned his back. I went on towards the big house, my steps faltering, like someone in a funeral procession. I found the intruder sitting on the steps, with a bag at her feet. She greeted me affectionately and stared up at the sky as if preparing to launch herself into flight. I expected to hear her say things in the gentle tone with which she had visited me in my dream. But she remained quiet while she took something from the bag, which I later learned was a camera. She took a photo of me, glimpsing hidden corners of my soul that I never knew existed. Then she took a small gadget made of metal from a case, and put it to her ear, only to put it away again.

— What’s that?

She explained that it was a cellphone, and told me what it was for. But right there, in Jezoosalem, she couldn’t pick up a signal for her machine.

— Without this— she said, pointing at the phone, — I feel lost. My God, how I need to talk to someone. .

A deep sadness clouded her eyes. She looked as if she was going to burst into tears. But she controlled herself, her hands stroking her cheeks. And then she became distant for a while. She seemed to be muttering Marcelo’s name. But it was so slow and quiet that it sounded more like a prayer for the dead. She slowly put everything away in her bag, and eventually asked:

— Where do herons usually gather round here?

— There are lots in the lake—I said.

— When it’s less hot, will you take me to this lake?

I nodded. I didn’t tell her about the crocodile that lived on the banks of the pond. I was afraid she might have second thoughts. At that moment, she began to rub creams into her body. Intrigued, I surprised her with a question:

— Do you want me to go and get a bucket of water?

— Water? What for?

— Aren’t you washing yourself?

Her sadness was suddenly shattered: the Portuguese woman laughed out loud, and almost offended me. Wash? What she was doing was applying creams to herself as protection against the sun. Maybe she’s got some illness, I thought. But no. The woman said that nowadays, sunlight was poisoned.

— Not here, lady, not here in Jezoosalem.

The Portuguese woman leaned on a wooden beam, closed her eyes and began to sing. Once again, the world escaped me. Never before had I heard a melody like that, flowing from human lips. I’d heard birds, the breezes and rivers, but nothing resembling her tones. Maybe in order to save myself from this lullaby, I asked:

— Pardon me, but are you a whore?

— What?

— A whore—I said slowly and deliberately.

At first astonished, and then amused, the woman lowered her head as if deep in thought, and in the end, she answered with a sigh:

— Maybe, who knows?

— My father says all women are whores. .

She seemed to smile. Then she got up and, giving me an intense look, her eyes half-closed, exclaimed:

— You’re like your mother.

A kind of flood rushed over my inner self as her gentle voice spread out and covered my entire soul. Some time was needed before I could ask myself: did this foreign woman know Dordalma? How and when had the two women met?

— Begging your pardon, but do you. .

— Call me Marta.

— Yes, lady.

— I know your family’s story, but I never met Dordalma. And you, did you ever know your mother?

I shook my head, as slowly as my sadness allowed me to control my own body.

— Do you remember her?

— I don’t know. Everyone says I don’t.

I wanted to ask her to sing once more. For there was something I was now sure of. Marta wasn’t a visitor: she was an emissary. Zachary Kalash had predicted her arrival. As for me, I had a suspicion: Marta was my second mother. She had come to take me home. And Dordalma, my first mother, was that home.

The shadows were already lengthening when I accompanied Marta to the lake where the herons could be found. I helped her carry her photographic equipment and chose the paths down the slope that were less steep. Every so often, she would pause in the middle of the path, and with both hands, gather her hair together at the nape of her neck as if she wanted to avoid its obscuring her field of vision. Then, she would once again survey the firmament. I remembered Aproximado’s words: “He who seeks eternity should look at the sky, he who seeks the moment, should look at the cloud.” The visitor wanted everything, sky and cloud, birds and infinities.

— What magnificent light—she repeated, ecstatic.

— Aren’t you scared it might be poisoned?

— You can’t imagine how much I need this light at this precise moment. .

She spoke as if in prayer. For me, the magnificent light was that which emanated from her movements. Nor had I ever seen such smooth, abundant hair. But she was talking of something that had always been there, and that I had never noticed: the light that radiates not from the sun but from places themselves.

— Back there our sun doesn’t speak.

— Where’s “there,” Miss Marta?

— Back there, in Europe. Here, it’s different. Here the sun moans, whispers, shouts.

— Surely—I commented delicately, — the sun is always the same.

— You’re wrong. There, the sun is a stone. Here, it’s a fruit.

Her words were foreign even though they were spoken in the same language. Marta’s idiom was of another race, another sex, another type of smoothness. The mere act of listening to her was, for me, a way of emigrating from Jezoosalem.

At one point, the Portuguese woman asked me to turn away: she took off her blouse and let her skirt fall to the ground. Then, she went for a swim in her underwear. With my back to the river, I noticed Ntunzi, hiding in the undergrowth. His signal suggested that I should pretend I hadn’t seen him. From his hiding place, my brother’s eyes bulged with desire as he indulged his fire. For the first time, I saw Ntunzi’s face go up in flames.

My father guessed right away that we hadn’t carried out his instructions. To our astonishment, he didn’t get angry. Was it that he understood our plausible excuses, did he condone our reticence, the clouds that blocked out the sun? He went and got changed into his best clothes, put on the same red tie he sported on his visits to Jezebel, the same dark shoes, the same felt hat. He took each of us by the hand, and dragged us along with him to the haunted house. He knocked on the door, and the moment the Portuguese woman answered it, he blurted out:

— My sons have disobeyed me for the first time. .

The woman contemplated him serenely and waited for him to continue. Silvestre lowered his voice, softening his initial harsh tone:

— I’m asking you a favour. On behalf of myself and my two legitimate offspring.

— Come in. I’m afraid I don’t have any chairs.

— We’re not going to stay long, lady.

— My name’s Marta.

— I don’t call a woman by her name.

— What do you call her by, then?

— I won’t have time to call you anything. Because you’re leaving here right now.

— My name, Mister Mateus Ventura, is like yours: a kind of illness inherited from birth. .

On hearing his former name, my father was struck by an invisible whiplash. His fingers squeezed my hand, as tense as a crossbow’s arc.

— I don’t know what you’ve been told, but you’re mistaken, my dear lady. There’s no one by the name of Ventura here.

— I shall leave, don’t worry. What brought me to Africa is now almost over.

— And may I know what brought you here?

— I came looking for my husband.

— Let me ask you something, lady: you came so far just to look for your husband?

— Yes, do you think I should be doing more?

— A woman doesn’t go looking for her husband. A woman stays and waits for him.

— Well in that case, maybe I’m not a woman.

I looked at Ntunzi in despair. The stranger was stating that she wasn’t a woman! Was she telling the truth, and therefore contradicting the maternal feelings that she had inspired?

— Before setting out on my journey, I heard your story—Marta declared.

— There is no story, I’m here enjoying a short holiday in this exclusive retreat. .

— I know your story. .

— The only story, my dear lady, is the story of your departure, back to where you came from.

— You don’t know me, a woman isn’t only motivated by a husband. In life, there are other loves. .

This time, my father was decisive in stopping her, by raising his arm. If he was allergic to anything, it was to conversations about love. Love is a territory where orders can’t be issued. And he had created a little hideaway which was governed by obedience.

— This conversation has been dragging on for too long. And I’m an old man, lady. Every second I waste, I lose a whole Life.

— So you’ve finished saying what you came to say?

— That’s all. You said you came looking for someone. Well, you can be on your way, because there’s no one here. .

— My dear Ventura, there’s one thing I can tell you: you weren’t the only one to leave the world. .

— I don’t understand. .

— What if I were to tell you that we are both here for the same reason?

It was painful to watch. She, a woman, a white woman, and she was defying my old man’s authority, showing up his weakness as a father and as a man in front of his sons.

Silvestre Vitalício excused himself and withdrew. Later, he explained that his anger was already overflowing, the magma in the crater of a volcano, when he brought the conversation to an end:

— Women are like wars: they turn men into animals.

After his confrontation with the visitor, my father couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. He tossed around in a minefield of nightmares and we listened to him, amid incomprehensible exclamations, calling, at one moment, for our mother, and at another for the donkey:

— My little Alma! Jezebel, my sweet!

The following morning, he was burning with fever. Ntunzi and I stood round his bed. Silvestre didn’t even recognize us.

— Jezebel?

— Father, it’s us, your sons. .

He looked at us with a pained expression and lay there, his smile frozen on his face, his eyes expressionless, as if he’d never seen us before. After a while, he placed his hand on his chest as if to lend support to his voice, and arraigned us:

— That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?

— We don’t understand—Ntunzi said.

— Did you want to take charge of me? Is that what you wanted, to see me struck down, to be able to bury me in my moment of weakness? Well I’m not going to give you that joy. .

— But Father, we only want to help. .

— Get out of my room, and don’t come back here, not even to get my corpse. .

For days, my father lay sick in his bed. His faithful servant, Zachary Kalash, was always by his side. Those days were propitious for us to develop our friendship with Marta. I increasingly regarded her as a mother. Ntunzi increasingly dreamed of her as a woman. My brother became more and more taken by lust: he dreamed of her naked, he would undress her with the urgency of a male, and the Portuguese woman’s most intimate items of clothing would fall to the floor of his slumber. What I liked about Marta was her gentleness. She would write, every day, she would be bowed over her papers, writing orderly lines of letters. Just like me, Marta was a foreigner in the world. She wrote memories, I tuned silences.

At night, my brother would boast of the advances he had made on her heart. He was like a general giving details of territories that had been conquered. He claimed he had got a glimpse of her breasts, had caught her at her most intimate moments, had seen her bathing naked. Soon, he would satisfy his hunger in her body. Galvanized by the proximity of that golden moment, my brother would get up in bed and proclaim:

— Either God exists, or He’s about to be born now!

Such episodes were like a hunter’s tale: their telling could only gain the seal of authenticity through a lie. Every one of his stories, however, left me unsettled, hurt, and betrayed. Even though I knew that they were more the product of his fantasies than of facts, Ntunzi’s tales filled me with rage. For the first time, there was a woman in my life. And that woman had been sent by the dead Dordalma to watch over what remained of my childhood. Little by little, this foreigner was turning into my mother, in a kind of second round of existence.

The erotic accounts of my brother may have been the product of his delirium, but three afternoons later I saw Ntunzi lying down with his head on her lap. Such intimacy made me unsure: could the rest of my little brother’s romance with the foreign woman be true?

— I’m tired—Ntunzi confessed, drooling over Marta.

The Portuguese woman stroked my brother’s forehead and said:

— It’s not tiredness. It’s sadness. You miss someone. Your illness is called yearning.

It had been so long since our mother had been alive, but she’d never died within my brother’s mind. Sometimes, he wanted to cry out in pain, but he didn’t have enough life in him for it. The Portuguese woman gave him advice at that point: Ntunzi should go into mourning in order to blunt the vicious spike of nostalgia.

— You’ve got all these wonderful surroundings to weep in. .

— What’s the use of weeping if I don’t have anyone to listen?

— Weep, my darling, and I’ll give you my shoulder.

Jealous feelings made me move away, leaving the sad spectacle of Ntunzi lying on top of the intruder with his legs spread. For the first time, I hated my brother. Back in my room, I cried because I felt betrayed by Ntunzi and by Marta.

To make matters worse, my father recovered. A week after taking to his bed, he stepped out of his room. He sat in his chair on the veranda to catch his breath, as if his illness were no more than a bout of tiredness.

— Do you feel well? — I asked.

— Today, I’ve woken up alive—he answered.

He ordered Ntunzi to come to him. He wanted to inspect our eyes to see how we were sleeping. Our faces paraded before his fanatical examination.

— You, Ntunzi, woke up late. You didn’t even greet the sun.

— I didn’t sleep well.

— I know what’s depriving you of your sleep.

I closed my eyes, and awaited the expected. I sensed a storm brewing. Either that, or I no longer knew Silvestre Vitalício.

— I’m warning you: if I see you flirting with that Portuguese woman. .

— But Father, I’m not doing anything. .

— These things are never being done: they just end up done. Don’t come to me afterwards and say I didn’t warn you.

I helped the old man back to his resting place. Then, I went to the yard where the Portuguese woman was waiting for me. She wanted me to help her climb a tree. I hesitated. I thought the girl maybe wanted to remember her childhood. But no. She just wanted to check to see whether her cellphone could catch a signal from a higher position. My brother stepped forward and helped her pull herself up through the branches. I realized he was peeping at the white woman’s legs. I left, unable to watch this degrading scene.

Later on, as we sat in silence round the table where we had had dinner, old Silvestre suddenly exclaimed:

— Today, everything went backwards for the worse.

— Are you ill again?

— And it’s the fault of the pair of you. So now you let that broad climb a tree!?

— What’s wrong, Father?

— What’s wrong? Have you forgotten that I. . that I am a tree?

— You can’t be serious, Father. .

— That woman was climbing over me, she was stamping on me with her feet, I had to bear her whole weight on my shoulders. .

And he fell silent, such was the insult he felt. Only his hands danced around emptily in despair. He got to his feet with difficulty. When I tried to help him, he raised his index finger right in front of our noses.

— Tomorrow, this is going to end.

— What’s going to end?

— Tomorrow’s the deadline for that floozy to get out of here. Tomorrow’s her last day.

The biggest flash came in the darkness of night: Ntunzi announced that he was going to run away with the foreign woman. He said everything had been arranged. Planned right down to the tiniest detail.

— Marta’s taking me to Europe. There are countries there you can enter and leave as well.

That’s what makes a place: entering and leaving. That’s why we didn’t live anywhere at all. I was frozen to the spot at the very thought of my being left alone in the immensity of Jezoosalem.

— I’ll go with you—I declared with a whine.

— No, you can’t.

— Why can’t I?

— They don’t allow children your age into Europe.

Then he told me what Uncle said. In those countries, one didn’t have to work: wealth was there for everyone, and all you had to do was to fill in the appropriate form.

— I’m going to travel round Europe, arm in arm with the white woman.

— I don’t believe you, brother. That girl has gone to your head. Do you remember telling me about your first love? Well, you’ve gone blind again.

It wasn’t the possibility that Ntunzi might end up leaving. It was the fact that he was leaving with Marta: that’s what hurt me most. I couldn’t sleep because of it. I peered out at the big house and saw that there was still a lamp shining. I went over to Marta and came straight to the point:

— I’m very angry with you!

— With me?

— Why did you choose Ntunzi?

— What are you talking about?

— I know everything, you’re going to run away with my brother. You’re going to leave me here.

Marta put her head back and smiled. She asked me to come over to her. I refused.

— I’m leaving tomorrow. Don’t you want to go for a walk with me?

— I want to go away with you once and for all. . together with Ntunzi.

— Ntunzi won’t be coming with me. You can be sure of that. Tomorrow, Aproximado arrives with fuel and we’ll leave together, just the two of us. Me and your Uncle, no one else.

— Do you promise?

— I promise.

The Portuguese woman took my hand and led me to the window. She stood there, looking out at the night as if, for her, all that sky was just one star.

— Do you see those stars? Do you know what they’re called?

— The stars don’t have names.

— They have names, it’s just that we don’t know them.

— My father says that in the city, people gave the stars names. And they did so because they were afraid. .

— Afraid?

— Afraid because they felt the sky might not belong to them. But I don’t believe that. Besides, I know who made the stars.

— It was God, wasn’t it?

— No, it was Zachary. With his rifle.

The Portuguese woman smiled. She passed her fingers through my hair and I held her hand up to my face. I had a strong urge to brush my lips over Marta’s skin. But then I realized something: I didn’t know how to kiss. And this ineptitude hurt me like a prelude to some fatal illness. Marta noticed the shadows falling over my body and said:

— It’s late already, go and sleep.

I went back to my room, ready to turn in, when I noticed Silvestre and Ntunzi arguing in the middle of the hall. When I arrived, my old man was decreeing:

— That’s the end of the matter!

— Father, I beg of you. .

— I’ve made up my mind!

— Please, Father. .

— I’m your father, whatever I do is for your own good.

— You’re not my father.

— What are you saying?

— You’re just a monster!

I looked aghast at Silvestre’s face: he had more wrinkles than he had face and veins bulged sinisterly along his neck. He opened and closed his mouth more times than his words required. As if speech was too unimportant for such anger. What he wanted to say was beyond any language. I awaited the explosion that always ensued when his blood was up. But no. After a moment, Silvestre calmed down. He even appeared to be conceding to Ntunzi and accepting his arguments. If he surrendered, it would be truly exceptional: my father was as obstinate as a compass needle. And in the end, it was his obstinacy that prevailed. He raised his chin in the pose of a king in a pack of cards, and concluded haughtily:

— I don’t hear anything you say.

— Well, this time, you’re going to go on not hearing. I’m going to say everything, everything that I’ve had to keep buttoned up inside me. .

— I can’t hear anything—my father complained, looking at me.

— You were the opposite of a father. Parents give their children life. You sacrificed our lives for your madness.

— Did you want to live in that loathsome world?

— I wanted to live, Father. Just live. But it’s too late for questions now. .

— I know very well who’s put these ideas in your head. But tomorrow, this is going to end. . once and for all.

— Do you know something? For a long time I thought you had killed our mother. But now I know it was the other way round: it was she who killed you.

— Shut up or I’ll smash your face.

— You’re dead, Silvestre Vitalício. You stink of rottenness. Even that simpleton Zachary can’t stand the smell any more.

Silvestre Vitalício raised his arm and in a split second brought it down with a smack onto Ntunzi’s face. Blood spattered and I threw myself against my father. The struggle was complicated by the Portuguese woman, who appeared from nowhere to intervene. A clumsy dance of bodies and legs circled the room until the three of them fell to the floor in a tangle. They each got to their feet, shook themselves and smoothed their clothes. Marta was the first to speak:

— Careful now, no one here wants to hit a woman, isn’t that so, Mister Mateus Ventura?

For some time, Silvestre stood there, his movements suspended, arm raised above his head, as if some sudden paralysis had left him comatose. The Portuguese woman went over to him with motherly concern:

— Mateus. .

— I’ve told you before not to call me by that name.

— One can’t spend so much time forgetting. No journey is that long. .

We separated, unaware of the mishap that would occur during the night. The tires of Aproximado’s truck would be cut to shreds, reduced to the elastic of a catapult. The following morning, the vehicle would wake up paralysed, shoeless on the savannah’s scalding earth.

SECOND BATCH OF PAPERS

In Lisbon, when I announced that I was going to rescue my husband lost in Africa, my family abandoned its usual indifference. In the heat of the discussion, my father even went as far as to say:

— There’s only one way to describe these ravings, my dear daughter: they’re those of a jilted lover!

I was already weeping, but only noticed my tears at that point. My mother tried to keep the peace. But she reiterated her misgivings: “No one can save a marriage, only love can.”

— And who told you there’s no love?

— That’s even more serious: love is for whoever is beyond salvation.

The next day, I consulted the newspapers and scanned the classifieds. Before leaving for Africa, I had to make Africa come to me, in what is said to be the most African city in Europe. I would look for Marcelo without having to leave Lisbon. With that conviction, and with the paper opened at the classifieds, my finger paused on Professor Bambo Malunga. Next to the photograph of the soothsayer, his magic skills were listed: “He’ll bring back loved ones, find lost friends. . ” At the end, a note was added: “credit cards accepted.” In my case, perhaps it should have been a discredit card.

The following day, I walked down the narrow streets of Amadora carrying a bag full of the stuff stipulated in the ad: “A photo of the person, seven black candles, three white candles, a bottle of wine or spirits.”

The man who opened the door was almost a giant. His coloured tunic increased his bulk even more. I was uncertain about addressing him by his title when I introduced myself:

— I’m the one who phoned you yesterday, professor.

Bambo was from a part of Africa where the Portuguese hadn’t been, but he wasn’t put out: “Africans,” he said, “are all Bantu, all similar, they use the same subterfuges, the same witchcraft.” I pretended I believed him, as I walked past wooden statuettes and printed cloth wall-hangings. The apartment was cluttered and I took care not to tread on the zebra and leopard skins that covered the floor. They might be dead, but one shouldn’t step on animals.

Once he’d shown me to a little round stool, the soothsayer checked the things I’d brought and then noticed that I’d left something out:

— There’s no item of your husband’s clothing here. I told you yesterday on the phone that I needed a piece of his intimate clothing.

— Intimate? — I repeated blankly.

I smiled to myself. All Marcelo’s clothes were intimate, they had all brushed against his body, they had all been touched by my enraptured fingers.

— Come back tomorrow, lady, with all the materials required—the soothsayer suggested delicately.

Next day, I emptied Marcelo’s wardrobe into a holdall and walked through Lisbon carrying the bundle. I didn’t get as far as Amadora. Halfway, I stopped by the river and cast the clothes into the water as if I were emptying them onto the floor of the soothsayer’s consulting room. I stood there watching them float away, and suddenly, it seemed as if it were Marcelo adrift in the waters of the Tagus.

At that moment, I felt like a witch. First, clothes are an embrace that welcomes us when we are born. Later, we dress the dead as if they were leaving on a journey. Not even Professor Bambo could imagine my magic arts: Marcelo’s clothes floated like some prediction of our re-encounter. Somewhere on the continent of Africa, there was a river that would return my sweetheart to me.

I’ve just arrived in Africa and the place seems too vast to receive me. I’ve come to find someone. But ever since I got here, I’ve done nothing but get lost. Now that I’m settled in the hotel, I realize how tenuous my connection is with this new world: seven numbers scribbled on the back of a photograph. This number is the only bridge leading me to that other bridge I have to cross in order, perhaps, to find Marcelo. There are no friends, there are no acquaintances, there aren’t even any strangers. I’m alone, I’ve never been so alone. My fingers are only too aware of this solitude as they dial the number and then give up. Then, they dial again. Until a voice on the other end answers softly:

— Speaking?

The voice left me speechless, I was incapable of saying anything at all. My rival’s question was absurd: speaking? I hadn’t uttered so much as a word. It would have been more appropriate to ask: not speaking? Seconds later, the voice insisted:

— It’s Noci here? Who is this?

Noci. So that was her name. Up until then, the other woman was just a motionless face. Now, it was a name and a voice. A shudder returned my voice to me: I revealed everything all at once, as if I could only explain myself by blurting it all out. The woman remained silent for a moment and then, unperturbed, arranged to come to the hotel. An hour later, she introduced herself at the poolside bar. She was young, wore a white dress and matching sandals. Something broke within me. I expected someone of regal bearing. Instead, I was faced with a vulnerable young girl, her fingers trembling as if her cigarette were an unbearable weight.

— Marcelo left me. .

What a strange sensation: my husband’s mistress was admitting she’d been abandoned by my husband. Suddenly. I was no longer the betrayed woman. And we two strangers were being transformed into one-time relatives, sharing a common desertion.

— Marcelo went off with a married woman.

— He was involved with a married woman before.

— Here?

— No, there. It was me. And who is this new woman?

— I never found out. But in any case, Marcelo’s no longer with her. No one knows where he is.

She cupped her cigarette ash in her hand. It was the ash falling into her palm in this way that made me understand what she wasn’t telling me. I made an excuse to go up to my room. I said I’d only be a minute. But the tears I shed in that brief moment were enough for a lifetime.

I returned, having pulled myself together. Even so, Noci noticed my tortured look.

— Let’s forget Marcelo, forget men. .

— None of them warrants a woman’s sadness.

— Much less that of two women.

And so we sat talking about those non-existent things that women know so well how to endow with expressiveness. That woman’s loneliness hurt me, for she was hardly more than a girl. She chose me as her confessor, and for some time she complained that she’d suffered for being a white man’s lover. In public places, looks condemned her: she’s a whore! But she told me how her relatives had gone to the other extreme and encouraged her to get out of the country and take advantage of the foreigner. While Noci was talking, I still wondered to myself: if I saw her going into a bar with Marcelo, what would I say, what expressions of outrage would erupt from me? In truth, all I felt for that woman now was sympathy and warmth. For every occasion she had been insulted, I had also been affronted.

— So what do you do now, Noci?

To get a job, she had surrendered to the advances of a trader, the owner of a business. His name was Orlando Macara and he was her boss by day and lover by night. At the interview for the position, Orlando arrived late. Limping along like the hand on a clock and looking her up and down with a salacious grin, he said:

— I don’t even need to see your CV. I’ll take you on as a receptionist.

— Receptionist?

— Yes, to give me a reception.

She’d got a job by walking out on herself. Deep within her, a decision had been reached. She would divide in two just as a fruit separates: her body was the flesh; the seed was her soul. She would surrender her flesh to the appetites of this boss and any others. But her seed would be preserved. At night, after being eaten, sucked and spat out, her body would return to the seed and she would eventually sleep, whole and intact like a fruit. But she could find no rest in her slumber, and this was causing her to slide into despair.

— Women-friends of mine gossip. But I ask you: now that I’m going with a man of my own race, is it no longer prostitution?

She wasn’t asking for my opinion. Noci had long been sure that it was no use pondering these afflictions. A whore hires out her body. In her case, it was the opposite: her body was hiring her out.

— I’m fine like I am, believe me.

The black girl sensed a doubt in my eyes. How can one be happy with a body that is no longer our own? Sex, she said, wasn’t done with either our body or our soul. It’s done with the body that’s under our body. Once again, her fingers trembled, causing her cigarette ash to drop. At that moment, Marcelo’s clothes passed before me eyes, floating in the waters of the river. Those clothes had been unbuttoned by those same slender fingers.

— It’s been so long since I made love— I confessed— that I can’t even remember how to undress a man.

— Is that so bad?

And we laughed, as if we were the oldest of friends. One man’s lie had brought us together. What united us was the truth of two lives.

Orlando Macara, Noci’s boss, came to fetch her at the hotel. I was introduced, and from the start, I recognized one thing: the man was the soul of congeniality. He was squat and lame, but exceedingly gracious.

— How did the two of you meet? — he asked us.

I had no idea what answer to give. But Noci improvised with surprising ease.

— We met on the internet.

And she went on about the advantages and dangers of computers.

Orlando wanted to know why I had come, and what my impressions were. When I mentioned Marcelo, he suddenly seemed to remember something.

— Have you a photograph of him? — he asked. I showed him the photo I carry in my wallet. While Orlando looked closely at the details, I addressed Noci:

— Marcelo came out well in this photo, don’t you think?

— I’ve never seen the man before in my life! — she answered abruptly.

The trader got up and went over to the window with my wallet. I followed his movements somewhat suspiciously, until he suddenly exclaimed:

— That’s him. I took your husband to the reserve.

— When was that?

— It was some time ago. He wanted to take photos of animals.

— So did you leave him there?

— Nearly.

— What do you mean nearly?

— I left him just before we got there, near the entrance to the reserve. I don’t want to worry you, but he looked ill to me. .

The illness Marcelo suffered from, I could have replied, was himself. In other words, he was a man beyond remedy.

— So you’ve never heard any more of Marcelo, whether he came back, or whether he stayed there?

— Stayed there? My dear lady: it’s not a place for anyone to stay. .

That night, alone in my room, I mulled over the motives that could have led Marcelo to want to travel to the reserve. It can’t have been just for the sake of photography. Doubts gnawed away at my sleep, so much so that, first thing in the morning, I summoned the help of Noci’s boyfriend. He turned up late, limping so heavily that his lameness didn’t seem a defect so much as an apology for his lack of punctuality. Or who knows, maybe it was just out of consideration for the ground he was treading on? Noci was with him. But this time she was so distant and quiet that I hardly recognized the girl from the previous day. I got straight to the point:

— Take me to where you left my husband.

I was waiting for his negative reaction. That it wasn’t a place for men, let alone a woman. And a white woman, with all due respect. I pressed him to take me to the reserve.

— But your husband, my dear lady, your husband is no longer there. .

— I know.

Orlando Macara didn’t make things easy. I understood that there was the matter of costs. In the end, we reached an agreement: I would go with him as far as the entrance where he had left Marcelo. After that, Orlando wouldn’t have anything more to do with it.

— Why don’t you tell her everything, Orlando?

Noci’s intervention took me by surprise. She argued on my behalf and revealed that there were relatives of Orlando living in the reserve who would welcome me.

— Relatives? Funny relatives.

— They’re a bit strange. But they’re good folk.

— Don’t talk to them, they’re all mad.

Orlando relented and then gave way. Nevertheless, he gave me a whole list of instructions: I should avoid contact with the family living in the encampment. And I should understand the idiosyncrasies of each of the four inhabitants.

— For example, there, I’m not Orlando.

— How do you mean?

— I’m Aproximado. That’s what they call me there: I’m Uncle Aproximado.

His condition for driving me there was that I should agree to lie: if they asked me how I had got to the reserve, I was to free Orlando from any responsibility. I’d come on my own.

Orlando came by my hotel early. I followed his old truck in my car. It was a long journey, the longest I’d ever made in my whole life. The old jalopy was in such a ramshackle condition that the journey would take three days.

I felt like doing something that I would certainly never have the chance to do again: to drive such a decrepit vehicle along such bewildering roads.

— Orlando, let me drive, just a bit.

— You’d better get used to calling me Aproximado.

He allowed me to drive. But only while we were still in the city. So that’s how I found myself driving along narrow suburban thoroughfares. I was rarely able to see the roads, because they surged up before me so full of people and garbage. I guessed where the road was by the two lines of people who walked along on both sides of it. People here don’t walk along the sidewalks. They walk along the road as if it were their right.

I wondered to myself: will I be able to drive in this chaos? It was only later that I realized it wasn’t me who was doing the driving. It was Marcelo’s hands that were driving me, and I had long been blind both to the outside world and to my inner self. I was like an African road: you only realize it exists because of the presence of people walking along it.

I returned the controls to Orlando and went back to my vehicle, now sure of one thing: it made little difference to me whether I drove or was being driven. There was a time when I wanted to travel the world. Now, all I wanted to do was to travel without the world.

Once we had left the city, the heavens opened: never before had I seen such a deluge. We were forced to stop because the road was unsafe. All of a sudden, I seemed to glimpse Marcelo’s clothes being carried along by the torrent of rainwater. And I thought to myself: “The Tagus has burst its banks in tropical soil and my beloved awaits me on some nearby shore.”

I thought I knew what it was to rain. But at that moment, I had to reassess the meaning of the verb, and began to fear that I should have hired a boat instead of a motor vehicle. Once the rain had stopped, however, the flood followed: a deluge of light. Intense, all powerful, capable of inducing blindness. Water and light: both billowed up before me indistinctly. Both were boundless, both confirmed my infinitesimal smallness. As if there were thousands of suns, endless sources of light both within and outside of me. Here was my solar side that had never been revealed before. All the colours lost their hues, the entire chromatic spectrum was transformed into a sheet of whiteness.

Marcelo always dresses like that, in white. Perhaps he is here, within my field of vision. I know for sure that Marcelo is here, present, within my field of words. I don’t just see him because of the reverberation of light, the random occurrence of brightness.

Farther on, I pass a group of women. They are bathing in the still waters of a pond. Others, a little farther ahead, are washing clothes. I stop the car and walk over. When they see me, they cover themselves with cloth, fastened hurriedly round their waists. Their breasts are withered, hanging lifelessly over their bellies. For sure, Marcelo hadn’t allowed himself to be smitten by this type of woman.

I linger for some time, watching them. They laugh as if they can tell my secrets. Could it be that they know of my condition as a betrayed woman? Or does our condition as women unite us, ever betrayed by an unfaithful destiny? Later, these country women take to the road again, carrying cans and bundles on their head. It’s only then that I understand how graceful they are capable of being. Their gazelle’s step cancels out the weight they carry, their hips swing as if they were ballerinas advancing across an endless stage. They are protagonists of an eternal spectacle, simply because no one ever looks at them. With their can on their head, they cross the frontier between heaven and earth. And I think to myself: that woman isn’t carrying water; she’s carrying all the rivers within her. It was that spring of water that Marcelo sought to find within his own self.

All of a sudden one of the washerwomen appears to drop some clothes that look very familiar to me. They are shirts of a whiteness that I seem to know. I am gripped by unease: those are Marcelo’s clothes. Distressed, I stumble down the slope and the women are frightened by my impetuous approach. They shout out in their language, gather the clothes from the water, and make their escape over the opposite shore.

We awake early on the second day of the journey. I contemplate the sun rising, and through the dusty haze, it’s like a piece of earth that has become separated and is emerging in levitation. Africa is the most sensuous of the continents. I hate having to admit to this cliché. I get out of the car and sit on the back of the truck. This silence isn’t like any period of quiet I have ever experienced before. This isn’t some absence that we hasten to fill out of fear of emptiness. It’s an awakening in our depths. This is what I feel: that I am possessed by silence. Nothing precedes me, I think to myself. And Marcelo is still to be born. I have come to witness his birth.

— I am the first living creature—I proclaim out loud, as I reopen my eyes, to the astonishment of Aproximado.

The lights, the shadows, the whole landscape all seem to have been created recently. And even the words: I was the one dressing them, as if they were the children who fill the main squares of small towns on Sunday.

— See here, Miss Marta. See what I’ve found—Aproximado announced, showing me a reel of camera film.

— Was it my husband’s?

— Yes, I stopped here with him so that we could have a rest.

All of a sudden, a shadow was cast over my sense that we were present at the Creation. There is, after all, no beginning. In my life, everything has been in its death throes, on the point of ending. I’m the one who has already been. I’ve come in search of my husband. If one can call someone a husband who has run off with someone else. This may well be the place where the world is beginning. But it’s where I am reaching my end.

Once again, women. These are other ones, but as far as I am concerned, they are indistinguishable from the previous ones. They cross the road, half-naked. The nakedness of Africans was once a topic of debate between myself and Marcelo. All of a sudden, black bodies emerged onto the market of desire as socially acceptable. Dark-skinned women and men took magazines, newspapers, television, fashion parades, by storm. Their bodies are beautiful, sculpted with grace, equilibrium, eroticism. And I wonder to myself: why did we never notice them before?

How is it that the African woman has changed from being a focus of ethnographic interest to feature on the covers of fashion magazines, in advertisements for cosmetics, or on the catwalks of the world of haute couture? I could see only too well that Marcelo took delight in contemplating these images. A deep anger bubbled inside me. It was clear that the invasion of black sensuality was a sign that values attributed to beauty were becoming less prejudiced. But black female nudity led me to consider my own body. Thinking about how I saw my body, I came to the following conclusion: I didn’t know how to be naked. And I realized that what covered me was not so much clothing as shame. It had been like that ever since the time of Eve, ever since the birth of sin. For me, Africa wasn’t a continent. It was the fear I had of my own sensuality. One thing seemed obvious to me: if I wanted to win back Marcelo, I would have to allow Africa to emerge within me. I needed to give birth to my own African nudity.

I take in my surroundings as I crouch down. The ground is criss-crossed by thousands of ants, parading along infinite little tracks. I’ve heard it said that women from here eat this red sand. When they die, they’re eaten by the earth. When they’re alive, they devour the very earth that will swallow them up tomorrow.

I pull up my underpants as I get to my feet. I’ve decided to hold it. My bladder will have to wait for another piece of ground. A ground that isn’t being scribbled across by famished insects.

We return to the truck. The road is a serpent undulating on the curve of the horizon. The road is alive, and its huge mouth is devouring me.

The vehicle advances slowly across the savannah, and the track’s substance dissolves as the dust cloud rises into the air like a vulture’s wings. The dust covers my face, my eyes, my clothes. I’m being turned into earth, buried outside the earth. Could it be that, without realizing it, I’m turning into the African woman who bewitched Marcelo?

MADNESS

— What are you doing here?

The papers plummeted to the floor. I thought their fall would be a gradual, fluttering descent. On the contrary, they collapsed in one solid sheaf and the noise they made caused the crickets around the house to fall silent.

— Were you reading my letters?

— I don’t know how to read, Miss Marta.

— So what were you doing with those papers in your hand?

— It’s just that I’d never seen. .

— Never seen what?

— Papers.

Marta bent down to pick up the sheets. She checked them one by one, as if each contained some incalculable fortune.

— My father’s yelling over at the camp. I think I’d better go.

The slashed tires of the Portuguese woman’s car had driven my father completely mad. On the veranda, the dishevelled Silvestre wailed:

— I’m surrounded by traitors and cowards.

His list of deserters was a long one: his eldest son didn’t respect him, his brother-in-law had joined the ones from Over There; someone had been delving around in his money box; and even Zachary Kalash was falling into disobedient ways.

— You’re the only one left, my son, you’re the only one who hasn’t abandoned me yet.

He took a step forward to touch me, but I avoided him, pretending to tie my shoes, and that’s how I stayed, my head bowed, until he moved off to his usual place of rest. My eyes didn’t leave the ground, for I knew only too well that he would read my seditious thoughts.

— Come here, Mwanito. I feel a need for a bit of silence.

Seated in his armchair, he closed his eyes and let his arms drop as if they were no longer his. I almost felt sorry for Silvestre. On the other hand, I could never forget that those same arms had repeatedly beaten my poor brother. And, who knows, those arms might have strangled Dordalma, my beloved mother.

— I’m not feeling anything, Mwanito, what’s happening?

Silence is a crossing. You need baggage to brave that journey. At that moment, Silvestre was drained. And I was brimming with bitterness and suspicion. How could I conjure up a silence with so much buzzing around in my head? I got up hurriedly, bowed my head respectfully as I passed the armchair, and moved away.

— Don’t leave me, my son, I’ve never felt so much despair before. . Mwanito, come back.

I didn’t go back. I stayed in the corner, hidden by the adjoining wall. I listened to the rattling of his chest. The old man seemed at the point of sobbing. But suddenly, what followed left me thunderstruck: my father was humming a tune! For the first time in my eleven years of life, I heard my old man sing. It was a sad piece and his voice was like a tiny trickle of water made from morning mist. I drew my knees up close to me and hugged them with my arms: my father was singing and his voice was accomplishing the divine mission of chasing away the dark clouds.

I concentrated, listening with my whole body, as if I knew that this was the first and last time I would hear Vitalício in song.

— I like what I’m hearing, brother.

I almost leapt with fright at Aproximado’s arrival. My father got an even greater fright, ashamed at having been caught red-handed singing his old favourites.

— It just came out, without my being aware.

— I often remember the choir of our church, and you, Silvestre, were the maestro, you were so good at it. .

— I’m going to confess something to you, brother. There’s nothing I miss more.

More than people, more than love and friends. It was the absence of music he found hardest. In the middle of the night, he said, under his sheets and blankets, he sang almost imperceptibly. Then the other voices would come to him, pinpointed with such clarity that only God could hear them.

— That’s why I don’t allow the kids to come near my room at night.

— So, my dear old Silvestre, you were flouting the rules after all. .

There were so many times, he admitted at that moment, so many times when he felt like asking Aproximado to bring him his old accordion from the city. All this, Silvestre Vitalício confessed, while his hands shook so much, that the other became concerned:

— Are you all right, brother?

Silvestre got to his feet to calm his nerves. He pushed his shoulders back, tightened his belt, coughed and declared:

— I’m fine, yes, it was just a momentary thing.

— That’s just as well, my dear Brother-in-law, because I’ve come to talk to you about something that certainly isn’t momentary.

— The way you put it, it can’t be something good. .

— As I already told you, I’ve been re-appointed to the Department for Fauna, but I now have new responsibilities. .

My father took his cigarette tin out of his pocket and started the long ritual of rolling tobacco. He looked up at the visitor once again:

— You’re where suits you best, Aproximado, working in a department for animals. .

— And it’s in this new role that I’ve come to give you notice of something you’re not going to like. My dear Silvestre, you’ve got to leave here.

— What do you mean leave here?

— A development project has been agreed upon for this area. The reserve has been privatized.

— I can’t speak this language. Explain it more clearly.

— The Department for Fauna has given this concession to foreign private investors. You’re going to have to leave.

— You must be joking. These private foreigners should come and talk to me when they get here.

— You’re going to have to leave before that.

— How funny: I was waiting for God to come to Jezoosalem. But in the end, it’s a bunch of private foreigners that are coming.

— That’s the way of the world. .

— Who knows, maybe the private foreigners are the new gods?

— Who knows?

— It’s strange how people change.

Silvestre reviewed developments so far: at first, Aproximado was almost his brother, all brother-in-lawish, they were all one family, full of mutual help and kindness. Then, this help began to be paid for and his comings and goings had become a business, with cash demanded up front. More recently, Aproximado had turned up with the jargon of a government functionary, to tell him that the State wanted him out of there. Now, there he was again, with a story about money, declaring that some nameless and faceless foreigners were the new owners.

— Don’t forget, Brother-in-law, there’s a world out there. And that world has changed. It’s globalization. .

— And what if I don’t leave? Will they force me out?

— No, certainly not. International donors are sensitive to human rights. There’s a resettlement plan for the local communities.

— So now I’m a local community?

— It’s much better like that, my dear Brother-in-law. It’s much better than being Silvestre Vitalício.

— In that case, if I’m a community, you’re no longer my Brother-in-law.

Silvestre rammed his point home, his finger erect, his voice abrupt: that his ex-brother-in-law, now state official, should be left in no doubt that only cattle can be re-settled. That he, Silvestre Vitalício, once known as Mateus Ventura, would die right there, next to the River Kokwana that he himself had baptized.

— Do you understand, Mister Official? And it’s my two sons here who’ll bury me. .

— Your sons? Your sons have decided they’re going with me. You’re going to be left on your own.

— Zachary won’t leave me. .

— I’ve spoken to Zachary, he’s also reached the end.

My old man raised his head, his gaze blank, brooding. I knew: he was delving into himself to find the ingredients of patience.

— Is that all the news you have, Brother-in-law?

— I have no more. Now, I’m going.

— Before you go, my friend, tell me something: what’s your name?

— What are you playing at, Silvestre?

— I’m going to show you something, my dear stranger. Don’t be offended if that’s what I call you, I’ve always preferred strangers to friends. .

While he was speaking, he got up, and thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, he pulled out a bundle of notes, which he placed in a pile at his feet.

— I’ve always preferred friends to relatives. You now have the advantage of being a stranger.

He bent down and lit a match with his right hand, cupping it with his left.

— What are you doing, Silvestre? Are you crazy?

— I’m smoking your money.

— That money, Silvestre, is to pay me for your goods. .

— It was.

Incredulity etched into his face, Aproximado walked off and almost stumbled over me as he turned the corner. I remained motionless, peering at the veranda. From where I was I could see my old man sink back into his old armchair, sighing noisily and uttering the most unexpected words:

— Not long now, my little Alma. Not long now.

My skin was covered in goosebumps when I stalked off furtively, like a shadow among the bushes. Once I was at a safe distance, I ran as fast as I could.

— Who are you running from, Mwanito?

Zachary was sitting by the door of the ammunition store, his hand gripping his pistol as if he had just fired it.

I stopped immediately and sat down next to the soldier. I sensed that he wanted to tell me something. But he sat there for some time without saying a word, while he used the barrel of his gun to make drawings in the sand. I began to pay attention to the scribbling carved in the ground and suddenly, it dawned on me that Zachary was writing. And I was struck by the letters he had written: Dordalma.

— My mother?

— Don’t forget, kid: you can’t read. How did you do it? Did you guess?

I realized it was too late: Kalash was a hunter and I had stepped on the trap he had set.

— And I know more, kid. I know where you’ve hidden the papers you’ve been writing on.

It was now obvious that he would go and tell his boss and my father, Silvestre Vitalício. It wouldn’t be long before Ntunzi and I would both join the excommunicated.

— Have no fear. I’ve also lied because of some words and a few papers.

He erased my mother’s name with the sole of his foot. The grains of sand swallowed up the letters, one by one, as if the earth were once again devouring Dordalma. Then Zachary told me what had happened to him in his days as a commando in the colonial army. The mail would arrive and he was the only one never to get a letter. Zachary was always excluded, making him feel the burden of race: not the race determined by skin colour, but the race of those who are always denied joy.

— No woman ever wrote to me. For me, Jezoosalem started even before I got here. .

Half a dozen Portuguese soldiers, none of whom could read, had chosen him to decipher the letters they got from Portugal. His moment had come. He would sit on the top bunk in their sleeping quarters, while the whites would contemplate him as if he were some powerful prophet.

But this passing cause for vanity couldn’t match the ecstasy of those receiving the letters. Zachary’s envy knew no bounds. From the other side of the world came women, romance, comfort. Even the name of the letters made him feel jealous: “aerogramme.” For him, it sounded almost like the name of a bird. Then, he got the idea of passing himself off as a Portuguese. And that was how Zachary Kalash, through an unexpected switch of identity, got himself a godmother of war.

— This is her, look. Maria Eduarda, Dadinha. .

He showed me a photo of a light-skinned woman, her hair swept over her eyes, and wearing large earrings. I smiled to myself: my warless godmother, my Marta, was certainly much whiter than that sad-eyed woman. Zachary didn’t notice how remote I had become for a moment. The soldier put the photograph back in his pocket while he explained that he never allowed himself to be separated from that paper talisman.

— It’s protection against bullets.

Zachary and his godmother had corresponded for months. When the war was over the soldier confessed that he had faked his identity. She replied immediately: she had also given a false name, age, and place. Maria Eduarda wasn’t a twenty-one year old girl, the profile of those required to sustain the morale of young men through their letters.

— Each one of us was a lie, but the two of us together, we were true. Do you understand, Mwanito?

The following morning, Jezoosalem was a hive of activity. Once again, we had been summoned to the square by Silvestre. A rather downhearted and unconvinced Zachary was the one who communicated the order and made us line up next to the crucifix. We were the usual number. But this time, there was a woman. This woman, standing straight-backed beside me, seemed both astonished and fearful. On her chest, her camera rivalled the rifle that Kalash wore across his shoulder.

— When is he going to appear? — Marta asked, with the anxiousness of a spectator.

I didn’t get as far as answering. For we heard strange sounds, similar to a flock of frightened partridges. Then Silvestre made his spectacular appearance: turning himself into a motor vehicle while emitting the intermittent wailing of sirens. His theatre sent a simple message: a person of authority was arriving. He pretended the door of the imaginary car was being opened. He climbed, haughtily, onto a non-existent podium and declared:

— Ladies and Gentlemen. I have called this meeting for reasons of the utmost gravity. I have received alarming reports from our Security and Defence Forces.

We stood there, speechless and expectant. Next to me, Marta looked agog and murmured: “Fantastic, he’s a hell of an actor!” The orator’s quizzical gaze swept slowly over those present until it came to rest on my brother. It wasn’t long before an accusing arm was raised:

— You there, young citizen!

— Me? Ntunzi asked, agape.

— I’m told you sleep there, in her house, the Portuguese woman’s house.

— It’s not true.

— Have you fucked the whore yet?

— What are you saying, Father?

— Don’t call me Father. .

His uncontrolled shriek left us baffled. I stared, aghast, at his expression: the lines on his face overspilled his frown and veins stood out from his neck malevolently. His mouth was opening and closing more than his words required. For the insane, words are always in vain. Whatever it was he wanted to say was beyond any language. Ntunzi’s alarmed eyes latched onto mine, seeking some meaning for what we were hearing.

— From now on, there’ll be no more talk of “Father this, Father that.” From today, I am the Authority. Or better still, I am the President.

He pretended he was stepping down from the podium, and then walked up the line, inspecting each one of us closely. When he got to the Portuguese woman, he excused himself and took her camera from her.

— Confiscated. It will be returned to you upon your departure from this territory, my dear lady. Without the film, of course. I shall pass it over to my Minister of the Interior here.

Whereupon, he handed the machine to Zachary. The Portuguese woman made as if to protest. But Aproximado’s look convinced her not to do anything. Silvestre returned to the podium, drank from a glass of water, and cleared his throat before continuing:

— Jezoosalem is a young, independent nation and I am the President. I am the President of the Nation.

And as he refined his terms, he became even more puffed up with pride at his own titles:

— In fact, as my name, Vitalício, suggests, I am President for Life. .

His bulging eyes alighted on me. But instead of looking at him, I focused on the fly crawling across his beard. As far as I was concerned, it was the same fly as ever, following the same route: it crossed his left cheek and ascended in the direction of his forehead awaiting the brisk slap that would send it spinning into the air. My father had indeed been transformed. Previously, I used to fear losing my father. Now, I couldn’t wait to be an orphan.

— It is a pity that our youth, lifeblood of the nation, should be so depraved, we who placed such hopes. .

Once again, I sought out Ntunzi’s gaze, hoping for some look of solidarity and understanding. But unlike Marta, my brother seemed terrified. Zachary and Aproximado exuded concern. Their apprehension reinforced my own when the new Silvestre announced his final decision:

— For reasons of security, an obligatory curfew will be imposed throughout the nation.

And martial law would be imposed in response to that which he designated, looking hard at Marta, as “interference by colonial powers.” Everything would be subject to his direct presidential supervision. And all acts would be executed with the help of his right-hand man, Minister Zachary Kalash.

As he walked off, flanked by a glorious mirage of light, he turned to us with a concluding statement:

— I have spoken. .

ORDERS TO KILL

The truth is sad when it is only one. Sadder still when its ugliness doesn’t have, like Zachary’s aerogrammes, the remedy of a lie. At that particular moment in Jezoosalem, the truth was that our father had gone mad. And it wasn’t the madness of benevolence and redemption. It was a demon that had taken up residence within him.

— I’ll talk to him—Marta said, noting the general concern.

Ntunzi didn’t think it a good idea. Aproximado, on the other hand, encouraged her to visit the old ranter in his lair. I would accompany the Portuguese woman to make sure that the situation didn’t get out of hand.

The moment we entered the half-light of the room, we were brought to a halt by Silvestre’s gruff voice:

— Did you request an audience?

— I did. I spoke to the Minister, Zachary.

Marta was playing her part to an extent that Silvestre couldn’t have anticipated. My father’s expression was tinged with surprise and suspicion. The foreign woman got to the point without more ado:

— I’ve come to tell you that I am going to comply with your instructions, Your Excellency.

— You’re going to leave Jezoosalem? How?

— I’ll walk the twenty kilometres to the entrance gate. After that, I’ll find someone to help me on the road.

— In that case, you have immediate authorization.

— The problem is the track within the reserve. It’s not safe. I would ask your Minister for the Army to arrange for an escort as far as the gate.

— I don’t know, I’ll think about it. To be honest, I wouldn’t want to leave you alone with Zachary.

— Why?

— I no longer trust him.

After a pause, he added:

— I don’t trust anyone.

The Portuguese woman approached him, almost maternally. It looked as if her hand was going to touch our old man’s shoulder, but then the visitor thought better.

— Dearest Silvestre, you know only too well what is needed here.

— Nothing is needed here. Nor anyone for that matter.

— What’s missing here is a farewell.

— Yes, your farewell.

— You never bade farewell to your late wife. That’s what is tormenting you, that lack of proper mourning doesn’t bring you any peace.

— I do not authorize you to talk about such matters, I am the President of Jezoosalem, and I don’t need advice coming from Europe.

— But I learnt this here, with you, in Africa. Dordalma needs to die in peace, to die definitively.

— Leave the Presidential Palace before my fury prevents me from being responsible for my actions.

I took the Portuguese woman by the hand and hurried her from the room, I knew my father’s limits, even when he was in his normal state. In these circumstances, his madness was making him still more unpredictable. Before we left, Marta took a step back and once again confronted the irate Silvestre.

— Just tell me one thing. She was leaving, wasn’t she?

— What do you mean?

— On the bus, Dordalma. She was running away from home. .

— Who told you?

— I know, I’m a woman.

— You can prime your rifle, my dear Zachary.

— But, Silvestre, is it to kill someone?

— To kill, and to kill stone dead.

Zachary should feel happy to receive such a major responsibility. Killing wild animals wasn’t a task worthy of a career soldier. It was when God created Man that he earned his certificate. Wild animals aren’t yet proper living creatures. It’s Man who can be patented. Only by tearing out the last page of God’s book can he defy divine power.

One couldn’t say what the soldier’s feelings were when he was given the mission to kill the Portuguese woman. To me, he looked impassive. And that’s how Zachary left, rifle over his shoulder, his expression impenetrable, his step silent, before my stupefied state. I looked at my father sitting there like a king on his new throne. There was no point in my throwing myself at his feet to appeal for clemency. It was irreversible: Marta, my recent mother, was going to be killed without my being able to do anything about it. Where could Ntunzi be? I ran across the room, the kitchen, the hall. There was no sign of my brother. And Uncle Aproximado hadn’t yet arrived from the other side of the world. I threw myself to the ground, empty and defeated, awaiting the inevitable shot. Would I know how to be an orphan all over again?

But nothing happened. The soldier couldn’t have gone far, for a few minutes later he was back, his shadow filling the doorway of our house.

— What’s happened? — my old man asked.

— I couldn’t.

— Nonsense. Go back there and do what I told you to do.

— I can’t.

— Have you stopped being a soldier?

— I’ve stopped being Zachary Kalash.

— Nonsense — insisted my father. — The order I gave you. .

— Don’t get angry, Silvestre, but not even God could give me that order.

— Get out of here, Zachary Kalash. Go out the back, and you two as well, you’re no longer my sons.

The only creature that merited his affection was Jezebel. And he, Silvestre Vitalício, was going to send us to the corral. In exchange, his sweetheart would come and live inside the house. His decision was final and irrevocable.

I accompanied Zachary to the ammunition store, while Ntunzi went to look for the foreign woman. While we were walking along, the soldier bemoaned his situation the whole way. He declared his regrets, as if he were asking us for absolution:

— I helped to kill your childhood.

And he repeated:

— Half of what I did was wrong; and the rest was a lie.

The only thing he had left of any value and integrity was his marksmanship. The sure way he saved the animals he hunted from being killed.

When we were sitting in his doorway, we asked him to forget his rancour. The man made no reply. He pulled up his trousers and showed us his legs:

— See? They can no longer contain the bullets.

And a bullet fell to the ground just like that.

— They’re talking to me.

— Who?

— The bullets. They’re telling me the war’s over and not coming back.

— Wasn’t it you who said that wars never end?

— Who knows? Maybe what went on in our country wasn’t even a war—Zachary said, as if he were lamenting the fact.

— How could I know? I’ve always lived here, far from everything. .

— That’s what I wanted too, to live far from everything, far from wars. But now, I’m leaving.

With Peace declared Over There, what was holding him back here? Even though I understood, I found it hard to accept his reasons.

— Why did you never leave before?

— Because of Silvestre.

— You always obeyed him like a son.

— It was even worse—he said.

— I’m going to tell you a story, something that really happened to me. .

It happened in the Colonial War, while on a patrol up in the North, near the frontier. The Portuguese military column with which Zachary was travelling was late getting back to its base, and had to spend the night by the river. They were taking with them women and children who had been captured in a village. In the middle of the night, a child began to cry. The officer commanding the platoon summoned Scrap and told him:

— You’re going to have to take care of that baby.

— Don’t tell me to do that, please.

— The kid won’t keep quiet.

— It must be sick.

— We can’t take any risks.

— I beg of you, don’t tell me to do it.

— Don’t you know what an order is? Or do you want me to speak to you in that lousy useless language of yours?

And the officer turned his back.

Kalash’s tale was interrupted by the arrival of Ntunzi. He hadn’t found the Portuguese woman. On the other hand, he said he had heard the engine of Aproximado’s truck. Perhaps that was the vehicle that was going to take Marta to her destination.

I looked at Zachary’s sad face. I waited for him to finish his interrupted story. But the soldier seemed to have forgotten the tale.

— So did you obey him, Zaca?

— What?

— Did you obey the officer’s order?

No, he hadn’t obeyed the order. He led the child away, and asked a family in the vicinity to take him in. Every so often, he would drop by and give them some money and combat rations.

— I was the one who gave that kid a name.

Zaca stopped at this point. He got up, and the bullets fell to the ground, tinkling on the cement.

— You can keep them, a souvenir of me. .

He slammed the door of his room and left us to ruminate on the possible outcomes of that episode from the war. There was a message in his story and I wanted Ntunzi to help me decipher its hidden meaning. But my brother was in a hurry and ran off down the path.

— Come on, little brother—he urged me.

I ran after him. Ntunzi must surely be in a hurry to know what our uncle had brought from the city this time. But that wasn’t the reason for his anxiety. We circled the house and saw Aproximado and Silvestre talking in the living room by the light of an oil lamp. Ntunzi immediately walked round the truck, opened the door and jumped up into the driver’s seat. He spoke as quietly as he could as he called me over to the window:

— The keys are here! Mwanito, get out of the way so you don’t get run over.

I didn’t wait: in a flash, I was in the passenger seat, urging him to get going. We would escape, the two of us, throwing up dust along unknown highways until we made our triumphal entrance into the city.

— Do you know how to drive, Ntunzi?

The question was totally absurd. And the moment he turned the key in the ignition, my father and uncle came through the door, with a look of astonishment on their faces. The truck gave a lurch, Ntunzi pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator and we were catapulted forward into the darkness. The headlights blinded us more than they lit up the road. The truck careered past the haunted house and we saw Marta open the door and dash after us.

— Keep your eyes on the road, Ntunzi—I implored.

My words were in vain. Ntunzi couldn’t take his eyes off the rearview mirror. That’s when we crashed into it. We were aware of a loud noise, as if the world had been split in half. We’d just obliterated the crucifix in the middle of the little square. The sign welcoming God was sent flying through the air and fell, miraculously, at Marta’s feet. The vehicle slowed down but didn’t stall. On the contrary, the old truck, like some raging buffalo, once again began to kick up dust and regain speed. Ntunzi got as far as shouting:

— The brake, the fucking brake. .

A violent collision followed almost immediately. A baobab took the old rattletrap in its arms, as if nature had swallowed up all the machinery in the world. A cloud of smoke enveloped us. The first person on the scene was the Portuguese woman. It was she who helped us out of the wrecked vehicle. My father had remained behind, next to the crushed altar, and was shouting:

— It would be better if you’d died, boys. What you’ve done here, to this sacred monument, is an offence against God. .

Overwhelmed, Aproximado paid us no attention: he inspected the damage to the chassis, opened the hood, peered in at its inner workings and shook his head:

— No one’s ever going to leave here now.

We returned to the camp after leaving Marta at the big house. My father still paused for a moment beside the destroyed altar piece. We walked along in silence, silence even dripped from my brother’s lowered eyes. Suddenly our old man emerged from the darkness and muscling his way past us, declared:

— I’m going to kill her!

He entered the house and, seconds later, re-emerged carrying an old shotgun.

— I’m going to kill her myself.

The soldier Kalash intervened, blocking our father’s path. A crooked smile deformed Silvestre’s face and voice:

— What’s this, Zachary?

— I’m not letting you pass, Silvestre.

— You, Zachary. . Ah! Of course, you’ve stopped being Zachary. . I’ll correct myself, then: you, Ernie Scrap, my old son-of-a-bitch, you have betrayed me. .

He took a step towards Kalash, prodded his shoulder with his gun and pushed him up against the wall:

— Remember that shot in the shoulder?

We were baffled: suddenly, a look of panic dominated the soldier’s face. He tried to slip away, but the barrel of the gun pinned him in place.

— Remember, don’t you?

A trickle of blood appeared: his old wound had re-opened. The soldier had been hit again by the bull1et of old. Silence reigned, and then Aproximado attempted to intervene:

— For the love of God, Silvestre!

— Shut your trap, you useless cripple. .

I’ll never quite believe what happened next, no matter how often I recall it. With astonishing serenity, my brother Ntunzi stepped forward and asserted:

— Give me the gun, Father. I’ll go.

— You?

— Give me the gun, I’ll kill the Portuguese woman.

— You?

— Didn’t you send me to learn how to kill, Father? Well, I’m going to kill.

Silvestre circled his son, venting surprise, oozing suspicion.

— Zachary!

— Yes, Silvestre?

— Go with him. I want a report. .

— Don’t involve Ernie in this, Father. I’ll go alone.

With a dreamlike slowness, my father handed the gun to his son. Ntunzi vanished into the dark. We listened to his determined footsteps fade away, swallowed by the sand. After a time, we heard a shot. My whole body was shaken by weeping. Silvestre’s threat was immediate:

— Any more tears, and I’ll kick you to pieces.

Sobs tumbled from my breast, and my arms quivered as if my inner being were being wracked by some deep schism.

— Be quiet!

— I ca. .I can’t.

— Stand up straight and sing!

I stood to attention, in readiness. But my breast was still overflowing, heaving.

— Sing!

— But Father, sing what?

— Sing the national anthem, then!

— I’m sorry, Father, but. . what nation’s anthem?

Silvestre Vitalício looked at me, shocked at my question. His chin trembled, stunned by the simple logic of what I had asked. My only nation was the one we had left far behind, the house where I was born. And that nation’s flag was blind, deaf and mute.

Ntunzi’s deranged eyes squinted at the room and his voice was unrecognizable when he blustered his confession:

— Tonight it was the broad’s turn. Tomorrow, I’m going to kill him.

— Ntunzi, please, put the gun down.

But he fell asleep hugging it to him. That night I couldn’t sleep, beset by fear. I peered out at the haunted house. There was no sign of a lamp. The job had been done. I looked up at the sky to distract myself, my fear turning into panic. Up in the heavens there were no fixed heavenly bodies: all the stars were cascading, all the lights incandescent. On the darkened wall where Ntunzi had recorded the days passing, all the stars had fallen. Now, no stars shone in Jezoosalem, either down below or in the sky above.

I closed the window abruptly. Our world was crumbling away like a dry clod of earth.

It was already late afternoon and none of us had been out of the house. A sultriness suddenly made itself felt. First came the smell: the smell of a dead body, eaten up by the heat, chewed over by the sun. My father sent me out to see. Could it be the Portuguese woman who was beginning to decompose?

— Is she already smelling, so soon? Zachary, go out and bury the Portagee woman.

She shouldn’t be left to rot thereabouts, attracting the big cats. Zachary went out and I overcame my lethargy and followed him. I was going to come face to face with death, stab myself with its cruel truth. Vultures circling in the sky led us out to the back. Ntunzi had dragged the body quite near to our house. And there we saw the corpse surrounded by voracious birds, squabbling and avoiding each other, hopping ridiculously away from their mutually traded ferocities. When Zachary got there, the flock gave way, and I saw the sight with my own eyes: the donkey, Jezebel, my old man’s faithful lover, lay torn to pieces by the vultures.