by Mia Couto
This is a land of tigers and hyenas. Do I have to ask whether there’s a cat by any chance among the wild animals?
There are no tigers in Africa, Captain.
There was an armed black in the dugout. What did you want me to do?
It was a fake weapon, the priest answered, yelling. Didn’t you see his uniform?
I thought it was fake, goddammit! Round here, my friend, everything looks fake. For instance, do you look like a real priest?
He was preparing to enter the church but the priest openly blocked his way:
There are people who are unworthy of entering this house.
The captain felt for his pistol. He was indignant with the order, offended by the lack of respect. He took a deep breath and adopted a conciliatory tone:
These guys are all the same. Can you tell one from another, Father?
I can tell human from inhuman. I can tell the meek from the powerful, I can tell the poor—
What’s all this? the captain interrupted. Are we now defending the niggers like those Swiss bastards do?
I can tell those Africans who are worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven, I can tell these poor blacks—
Well, don’t tire your eyes, and take a look at these white soldiers with me here. Take a good look at them, mister priest! This poor wretch had never put his feet in a pair of shoes until recently; and that one there, just last month, was watching over a flock of goats. None of them ever parked his ass on a school bench.
With his hands on his belt, his eyes flashing in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat, the soldier looked closely at the bystanders for several long moments before turning to address the priest again:
Are you looking for purity in these savages? You can be sure that Paradise isn’t here. These folk are devils. What gets these kaffirs going isn’t the prospect of tearing the shirt off your body. It’s tearing your shirt along with your body as well.
He paused in front of the dispirited sergeant, who, more sad than tired, was leaning against the doorpost for support. He looked at the filthy trousers and ragged singlet of the young soldier. Only then did his gaze turn to Germano’s arms:
The kaffirs bound you! That’s what they do. They bind their prisoners’ hands together until they go gangrenous.
I supported the tottering sergeant while he stepped forward from the group and presented himself:
I am Sergeant Germano de Melo.
Sergeant? And in what bloody army?
Ours, Captain.
You don’t look it. Because if you were, you would already have saluted me in the proper way.
With a wince, the sergeant gave a clumsy salute. Thick drops of what looked like perspiration ran down his face. But it was soon apparent that the soldier was of no interest to Santiago. What occupied his mind was his contest with the priest:
Do you consider you can tell races and disgraces apart, mister priest? Well, let me explain how you can tell a black from a white. It’s not the color of the skin, my dear father. It’s in the eyes.
We were all enthralled by the words and gestures displayed by this histrionic captain. With the skill of a conjurer, he clicked his fingers next to the sergeant’s face and declared:
Take a good look at this man, look him in the eyes. If you look carefully, my dear father, you’ll see deep inside the eyes of this poor wretch the burning heat of smoke from the kitchen of days gone by. No matter how white his skin, this guy’s a black. He spent his whole childhood blowing into the embers of the hearth.
He knew he was right. He was a military chief, and he delved deeper and more quickly into the souls of men than any priest. Then the tone of his voice rose when he yelled: Do you hear what this Portuguese captain is saying? And he took out his pistol and fired a shot at the church tower. A whole horde of crows rose like a cloud into the sky. The shot seemed to calm the captain down. With his head held high and his back straight, he turned back to Sergeant Germano:
What did you say your name was?
Germano de Melo at your orders, sir. I was stationed at the Nkokolani military post. I was injured during an attack on the garrison.
Don’t lie, Sergeant.
It’s the truth, Germano replied, holding up his bandaged arms.
The injuries are real. But there is no garrison at Nkokolani. The military post is no more than a store.
For me it was a garrison, the only garrison in this world. And Mwanatu, the young man we are mourning here, was my sentry.
Sentry? The captain smiled disdainfully, rolling his eyes. I’m sick of this bloody charade, of soldiers who aren’t soldiers, of garrisons that are stores. I’m sick of wars that politicians plan back in Lisbon.
Then, raising his arms as if in prayer, he bemoaned:
Oh, Mouzinho, Mouzinho! Why are you taking so long?
He looked for some shade next to the wall, and, leaning his back against the stone corroded by time, he contemplated us as if we didn’t exist. Unlike his compatriots, he didn’t seem uncomfortable at the sight of other white people. Indeed, those pale faces seemed to provoke outright aversion in him. The only exception was if one of those other whites happened to be female, which was the case of the Italian woman, who was gazing at him with a mixture of fear and fascination.
I have seen you somewhere before, Santiago probed.
Maybe so, Captain. I’m Bianca …
The Italian with the hands of gold? What a pleasure, my dear lady. And he made a grotesque attempt at a bow.
You must understand, Captain, the reason why we are all so concerned here, Bianca declared. The boy traveling in that boat was the son of our friend here, and she pointed to Katini, who was hiding behind all the others.
Dona Bianca, the soldier replied, you cannot imagine how sorry I am. We are at war, what more can I say? I’m a Christian, I had the unfortunate travelers in the boat buried.
So where did you bury them? I asked.
I hardly recognized my own voice. Pushed forward by some invisible hand, I found myself confronting Santiago Mata. And I repeated the question. The man smiled and asked:
Well, now! Who is this young beauty? Don’t tell me she’s one of your girls, Dona Bianca?
Where did you bury my brother Mwanatu? I insisted in a sharp, stubborn tone.
Wow! This cat’s got sharp claws! And Santiago’s voice gained a malicious candor. Where did you learn to speak my language like that, my little dove? Could you maybe teach me yours?
I shut my eyes and remembered our late mother’s advice. Their insults aren’t directed against you, she used to say. It’s against your people, your race. Pretend you’re water, imagine you’re a river. Water, my daughter, is like ash: No one can hurt it. This was the lesson taught me by Chikazi Makwakwa, my mother, who died but a short time ago. For I, in the eyes of the world, would never be exempt from guilt. The color of my skin, the texture of my hair, the width of my nose, the thickness of my lips, I would have to carry these things forever as if they were some sin. All this would prevent me from being who I really was: Imani Nsambe.
I glanced at my father in the vain hope that in some rare display of courage he might confront the man who had openly confessed to murdering his son. But Katini Nsambe remained as he had always lived: submissively good-mannered, eyes down, his feet indistinguishable from the dust. Maybe there was an almost imperceptible tension in his pulse. Nothing more than that.
With a click of his fingers, Santiago Mata summoned his soldiers to line up in military formation. We need some order here! he declared. And he ordered the Portuguese flag to be raised over the church tower. The priest made as if to show his displeasure. In vain, Germano offered to help the soldiers, but the captain opened his arms in a magnanimous gesture and said:
You are exempt.
Lined up, we watched the blue and white flag being hoisted. Standing down from his salute, the captain felt in his pocket and, waving an envelope in his left hand, exclaimed:
Germano de Melo, is that what you said your nam
e was? Well, I’ve been carrying this letter around for ages to give you.
The sergeant received the envelope, placing his wrists together as if they were two pincers. He glanced at the seal and gave a frown that signaled either curiosity or disappointment. The only letter he expected was from Lieutenant Ornelas. But this letter was from Portugal.
We’ll spend the night here, Santiago announced. We won’t take up any room, Father. We’ll use our tents. All I ask is that you provide us with a head of cattle early tomorrow. What we don’t eat, you can share among your people.
Are you asking for one, Captain? Or are you going to threaten me with a weapon like the kaffirs do?
The captain gave a deep sigh while the soldiers romped off, their laughter confirming their takeover of what had until then been our place.
At this point, Bibliana emerged. She had waited for the right moment to make her appearance. She passed through the intense light of the churchyard with the dignity of a queen. She was wearing her customary boots and a cartridge belt around her waist. She walked with a military step and a defiant demeanor, and came to a halt in front of the Portuguese captain, who asked:
Hey! Where did you cook up this creature?
He examined every inch of the priestess. He peered suspiciously at the cartridge belt. The woman stood there impassively while the soldier emptied the contents of one of the cartridges. What he saw was tobacco, which she kept there. He trod on it with a thoroughness that bordered on anger.
And what about those boots? Where did you steal them? Did you kill a soldier? Was that how you got them?
She doesn’t speak Portuguese, the priest hastened to explain.
Bibliana guessed what was going to happen. So she anticipated the humiliation of the order she was about to receive. She took off her boots, without taking her eyes off Santiago. The Portuguese watched scornfully as the woman undid her boots. Shaking his head, he commented: Poor thing, she doesn’t know that the socks they never gave her are more important than the shoes. Without them, the boots are torture.
This was why, he added, the boots given the natives by the Portuguese were left hanging up, unused.
But there was another reason why the sorceress took off her boots. And that was what they now saw.
Taking a deep breath, Bibliana hurled the boots through the air with such force that they rose in a spectacular arc toward the top of the mango tree. They did not fall to the ground, but were caught on a branch. They remained hanging, swaying gently, until, all of a sudden, they started to spin frantically, and the captain watched in astonishment as two sinister black birds of prey emerged from them. This was when he fired blindly at those errant shadows that only he could see.
21
SERGEANT GERMANO DE MELO’S SIXTH LETTER
Beware of those defending the castle against barbarian invaders. Without knowing, they have already turned into monsters.
—THE WORDS OF FATHER RUDOLFO
Sana Benene, October 5, 1895
Dear Lieutenant Ayres de Ornelas,
The arrival of Captain Santiago Mata reminded me that there was a world out there to which I belonged. I confess that the captain is probably not the best emissary in this world. It would have been better if he had not appeared. However, his appearance in some way allowed me to see how empty and heavy-handed our arrogance is around here. Perhaps the days are passing more quickly than I think. Maybe there is another time advancing silently underneath the everyday lives we live.
In the meantime, my dear lieutenant, this is the truth of my situation: I have a whole church as my bedroom. I and the house of God both slumber in a peace and quiet that is only interrupted by the fluttering of doves and owls. I awaken to the rustling of mice hurriedly gnawing the remains of candles. I am terrified that when these meager resources have been chewed up, those big fat mice will turn to my injuries. And that I shall wake up one day without any eyes, which is how I found Sardinha the storekeeper just a few moments after he had died.
I am delaying opening the letter that Santiago Mata brought me this afternoon. After all, everything in my life is subject to strange delays. I was supposed to stay only a few days in this place, which was to be a mere pause on my way to a hospital. I have been here for weeks now. That is why I look at the letter without haste and choose to deceive myself: It has not come from my village, and was not sent by any relative of mine. I have no other home except for this one. I have no family except for these folk here.
I know how assiduous you are, sir, in writing to your mother. You cannot imagine how much I envy you. For, nowadays, I would not know what to say to my mother. I am writing all this down while nevertheless aware that it is not true. But I shall refrain from amending or deleting anything.
Our current familiarity with each other permits me to transcribe line by line the extraordinary letter sent from my homeland. On various occasions, sir, you have asked yourself the reasons that led a country boy like me to seek to perfect a refinement in his use of language and to heighten his sensibility. Well, this letter speaks of two women who cultivated these qualities in me: my mother and my teacher, Dona Constança, a learned woman who, in order to escape political persecution, exiled herself in our village.
Without so much as a comma changed, what follows is the letter dictated by my mother, Dona Laura de Melo:
Germano, my dearest son,
This is your old mother writing to you. After so many months without hearing from you, I have sad news to bring you: Your father has just died. He died because of his heart, as all men do, according to Toneca at the pharmacy. I am dictating this letter to our neighbor, Constança, who was your teacher at primary school. She sends you her best wishes but is angry that you have never sent us any news.
I want to tell you how your old father left us. I have repeated it so many times that I seem to have put a distance between myself and that sad day. It was late afternoon and your father was sitting on the front step. It grew dark and he was still sitting there, without eating his dinner or supper, and without saying a word. Halfway through the night, I took him a blanket to cover himself. I didn’t ask him anything, because that’s how things were between us. That was when he said he was going to stay there until the sun came up. In the early morning, when I went down to let the animals out, I found him stiff and cold. Your uncle Arménio helped me pull the body into the house and confided in me that the men of the village had got hold of secret information that soldiers would be arriving from Africa. If they did, it wasn’t to our village, and your father died waiting for you to come home.
It was a very modest funeral. In attendance were the few folk we have left either in our family or in the village. The ceremony was so brief that I didn’t even have time to weep. It is a great sin, I know, but I am still waiting for a tear to come even now, just one simple tear. Instead of crying, all I do is sigh. The thing is, my dear son, I was so tired of not being a wife, tired of not being a mother, tired of not living!
And do you know why not a single tear comes to my eyes? The truth is that I have been a widow ever since I got married. How often I would rub my arms with basil in order to smell like a lady! But your father never smelled my perfume. Countless times, as soon as night came, I loosened my hair. And your father would ask me to tie it up again with my headscarf. He only ever touched me in the dark.
His jealousy wrecked our home. He was even jealous of you. Above all, of you, my son. From the moment you were born, that man only had one purpose in life. That was to punish me. First with silence. Then with words. And eventually with kicks and blows. I thought about running away, I wanted to die.
But then what happened to me was what befalls all women in our part of the world. I gave up on everything, I gave up on myself. I consoled myself with the idea that his jealousy was the only gift he was able to give me. Poor thing! What happened to him was what Father Estevão mentioned in a sermon: He who has never loved, doesn’t know how to be jealous. And even in his jealousy, your father w
as clumsy. Ever since we got married, he spread it around the village that he was going with Julinha Five Cents. He took his time coming home in the evening, just to annoy me. But I knew he was alone, sitting under the great mulberry tree that scatters its fruit all across the square. Your father’s trousers were full of sweet, dark stains. I sniffed his clothes. That was the only perfume he ever wore. Sometimes I miss the smell of mulberries.
Now I’m going to make a confession to you that only God should hear. There were times when that father of yours, may God be with him, went as far as to pray that you would die when you were a child. Not out of malice, but because of the privations we went through. And if God took you when you were still small, it wouldn’t have been you who died. When children die early, they are just little angels. And when angels die, there is no weeping, no sadness, no death. There is merely a heavenly creature that God gives us and that God takes away from us. That was why, I confess hand on heart, I said nothing when your father prayed like this. Fortunately, God never heard him. And from then on, as if by miracle, you began to belong to me more and more, blood of my blood, life of my life. And I clung to you so strongly that the scorn which your father showed you grew ever worse.
The next thing I am going to do, my son, is to go to a hairdresser’s. There is none here in the village. But I shall go to the town, where they say there is a very skilled lady, Perhaps it is vanity, and maybe it is a sin. I just want to see myself through my own eyes, because up until now I have only known myself through my husband’s eyes. When you come back, I don’t want to be taken by surprise like your father was, your father who is still waiting by the front door.
You’ll see, my son, that I’ve also done some work on the house. I’ve made it cozier. With the small amount of inheritance money I bought three chairs, to offer guests and absent ones somewhere to sit. When you get here, you’ll have a chair to sit on and do nothing, because they say chairs help one to forget the past. That’s according to my friend Constança, who spent a lot of time sitting at school. And she also says that those coming from wars have a lot to forget.
