“I hear Cabral will be in New York soon, to claim the seat of an independent Guiné. He came so close to winning, but he has lost. He flooded his so-called liberated zones with schools and hospitals, but what does he have, really? Communist propaganda, some Soviet aspirin, and a Cuban volunteer or two.”
Spínola raised his glass and leaned toward João. He let his monocle fall from his eye and bounce from a light, gold chain.
“I”—he paused for effect—“I have you. Major Carvalho here has been pushing for your presence for some time now. ‘Just one more doctor,’ he’d say.” Spínola reached to give the major a friendly punch on the shoulder. Carvalho looked pleased.
“Otelo is our perfect man of the ultramar, born in Mozambique, got a touch of Goan in the blood, gives him his dark good looks. His parents were literary sorts. They named him after the Moor of Venice.”
“Really?” João spoke up. “You’ll have to tell my wife that, sir. She’s a Shakespeare scholar of sorts.”
Elizabeth had been watching her husband, his lean body, his drawn face almost pretty in the candlelight. She was bathed in sweat, excited by her husband’s prowess with power. At times, he looked flustered by what he was hearing. He would very subtly shake his head, glance away as he absently picked up his glass of wine. At times, his eyes would drift to the darkened corners of the room, the patches of mold or peeling paint. Then he would lean in to the two uniforms and slip into the river of rapid-fire Portuguese. If they were back in the Algarve, she could have at least touched his leg lightly with a toe. Here, she would wait until they were alone.
As her mind wandered, João had leaned forward to say something conspiratorial to the general, nodding to the attaché at Spínola’s side, then glancing over his shoulder at his wife.
“Ah, Senhora Gonçalves,” Spínola said, smiling, in loud, bombastic English, as if volume would help him communicate across the language barrier, “your husband tells me you’re a Shakespearean. I was just introducing my companion here, Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, named after the Moor.”
His voice was deep and resonant; his accent reminded her of the lyricism that had drawn her so powerfully to João in Albufeira.
“You’re joking.” Elizabeth couldn’t help herself. She had met him earlier that day on their arrival to the country, but he had paid her little mind.
“I’m quite serious. His parents were odd that way. He and I spent most of the sixties fighting together in Angola.”
“‘You may relish him more in the soldier than in the scholar,’” Elizabeth replied haughtily.
Spínola gave her an appraising look-over, a long, lingering examination, from her eyes down to the hands that rested, crossed, on the table, to her breasts, and back to her eyes. An involuntary twitch of his upper left lip telegraphed his opinion. Then, with an abrupt pivot, he switched back to Portuguese.
“Major Carvalho will run the operation to win the hearts and minds of Guiné,” the general said to João. “But you, Doctor Gonçalves, you will actually win them for us.
“And you, my dear, my Florence Nightingale from England,” he said to Elizabeth, again in English, “you will be my one hundredth military nurse. A nice, round number for one as soft as yourself.”
“Me?” Elizabeth chimed in, incredulous, an open hand on her chest, eyebrows raised. “I’ve never so much as changed a bedpan. What use am I?”
“Ah, you would be surprised,” the general responded. “It is rich, rewarding work, to care for our boys. The communists and the savages too. The wounds infect quickly without care. The flies in Africa are a pestilence. I hate them, carrying shit on their little legs like couriers of doom, pardon my language. You will want to be useful, Senhora Gonçalves, and unless you fancy ironing the botflies out of our men’s drawers, I think you will find nursing suits you.”
Elizabeth glanced searchingly at her husband. Their eyes met, but all he offered was an affectless nod.
Four weeks had passed since their marriage, three and a half since they reported to Caxias for João’s training, such as it was. Elizabeth and João’s few days at Caxias had been a bore but a useful one. Forte de São Bruno looked severe but romantic from the outside. Inside, it was all cold, sterile corridors and slits for windows. The Cadeia de Caxias, the prison of the secret police, loomed next door, a threat unnoticed by the Englishwoman. João busied himself learning tropical medicine, sitting in narrow classrooms under the glare of fluorescent lighting in his starched fatigues. As old military physicians yammered on about parasites and maggots, yellow fever, schistosomiasis, and kwashiorkor, he wondered what he was doing there, and whether his new wife would actually be waiting in the room he left her in, or would disappear like a dream disturbed.
Elizabeth had imagined this at first as a honeymoon. “‘Come, let’s away to prison; we two alone will sing like birds in the cage.’” She soon came to see she was alone in that cage. “How was your day, darling?” she’d say to João in the early evening. “Fine,” he’d respond.
So, as her husband brushed up on West African parasites, trauma care, and the treatment of dysentery in rudimentary clinics, Elizabeth had not much to do but think. She still had only the clothes she had packed for a couple of weeks at most on holiday: a few pairs of jeans, a white calf-length pair of trousers, some gauzy thin shirts, a couple of sundresses made of embarrassingly heavy cotton, courtesy of Mother, and a flower-print dress, well below the knee but not to the ankle, that João had bought for her wedding day, proud of his find and satisfied with his gift.
A woman may tire of a husband, Elizabeth had to admit to herself. Even that nightly greeting, “How was your day, darling?” might grow to be too futile a gesture and too much of an effort to muster. Still, she pictured that, with age, a husband would grow into a puppy—cute, in need only of a pat on the head and a decent meal. Even the churlish ones, once housebroken, would be merely grumpy, in an endearing way. If the passion that had thrown man and woman together so violently faded, what of it? Surely it would fade for him as much as for her. But a girl’s wedding dreams are not so easily disabused, she thought frowning. A wedding ceremony, it’s true, is so fleeting it’s meaningless. The reception afterward becomes just another party, topped several times over by other, better parties. But the opportunity to wear a breathtaking gown and veil, to be the inspiring center of attention with that much flamboyance and that little shame, that comes once in a girl’s life. For her, it came not even once. A spinster could dream of what might have been had that man come along. Elizabeth was forced to rue what had actually been. She had a store-bought flower-print dress that would follow her through life like a haunting.
In those hours at Caxias, for the first time in weeks, Elizabeth began to doubt herself. In fact, the absurdity of her decisions came crashing in. João was a diminished man beyond the resort on the Algarve. That was to be expected, she told herself. He had defended his choice of bride to his parents, and she had observed that his behavior around them wasn’t exactly meek. He talked back to his mother and father in a joking, filial way, and didn’t accept judgment that was obviously off. Still, it was all less than manly. He was politely rebellious, willing to take the rope he was given but not break it. She would feel those misgivings whether she was twenty or thirty, she told herself. They were commonplace, petty, feminine. Women expected too much of men. They were only human. He still made love to her every night with the same steady intensity. She still hungered for him. She would wake him long after midnight by reaching over and stroking him stiff. He always responded, a sign, she insisted, of his love. They still bantered Shakespearean. He would come home from a training session, forgo the mess, and take her to the PX to scrounge up some rice and vegetables, maybe a little pork or sausage. They would cook dinner in a little kitchenette in the officers’ quarters. They were the only couple passing through at the time, and they had the place to themselves, such as it was. They slept on two twin beds pushed together. They tried to sleep on one, but invari
ably, in the middle of the night, after their second lovemaking, went to their separate mattresses.
“‘Unarm, Eros; the long day’s task is done,’” she’d say, nuzzling his naked neck. “‘And we must sleep.’”
Perhaps the glow of marriage had faded a tiny bit, she reasoned, but Africa’s allure remained undimmed. Though it was getting more complicated. Her visions of a young couple exploring the jungle or standing resolutely on an arid patch of land against a desert wind had to be reconciled with her new glimpse of military life, the drab mechanization, the antiromance. Her destination remained exotic, exciting. But she would not be Stanley to some Portuguese Livingstone exactly. She would be an interloper in someone else’s army, a witness to, if not a participant in, a war she had no understanding of and that no one cared to explain to her. It seemed now she would have to make her own adventure.
“What have we done, João?” she asked dreamily one afternoon, as he set off to something or other, somewhere on the base, a white lab coat resting on an arm sheathed in camouflage. She sat in a stiff, wooden chair in front of a window unadorned with molding or curtains. A glimpse of sea could be had, and even enjoyed if the tin military barracks and sterile, whitewashed concrete buildings in the foreground were overlooked. This was her purgatory. Beyond it was the unknown.
He stopped and turned to her. A rush of love and pity and resentment washed over him. What he had done was snare a partner for a journey he did not want but had no choice but to make. Whatever was coming in this war he could not avoid, wife or no wife. Seeing her, sitting uncomfortably on that frail chair, he realized what he had done to another human being—conscription. Or what did the English navy and Spanish Armada call it when young men were simply kidnapped from the bars? Impressment. He had impressed her into service. He let his lab coat slide to the floor as he approached his wife, kneeling at her feet and holding her tight and close.
“It will be a great adventure. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail,’” he murmured, stroking her hair, pressing it gently into place.
“I trust you, João,” she responded.
They held each other for a long, lonely time in silence. She breathed in the smell of industrial detergent and the faint burn of the military irons on his fatigues. What comfort she took from his embrace was diminished by those smells of war. She longed for that billowing, weathered white shirt that smelled only of him and the sea.
He kissed the top of her head, picked up his white coat, and headed out.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
The transition from her stories, from the fetid heat of Africa and the briny breezes of Portugal to the damp cold of Brighton, was always a little jarring to me. But occasionally I had to chime in, to break it up or just to put on a new pot of tea.
“Hmmm?” Elizabeth murmured, rousted from her reverie. It was very late, and she had been talking uninterrupted for a very long time.
“Scared, you know, war. You had no idea what you were getting into, right?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “I was a child. Fear is a learned response, and I had learned nothing by then. I do remember how short the flight was. The world is very small, David.”
Elizabeth knocked back a shot of vodka, and the story resumed.
Chapter Seven
After flying low over the Atlantic for only a few hours, their plane turned inland. Elizabeth looked down through the windows of the Douglas DC-9 at the brown, foreign landscape of Africa. Her grandfather had been a member of the Royal Geographical Society. Granted, he hadn’t gone to Africa, but he had funded the chaps who had, Stanley and the like. They knew how to travel to Africa, by elephant or some such, with long lines of porters and servants carrying all manner of equipment and supplies. They built decent cities like Cape Town and Mombasa, taught cabdrivers to say things like “Madam, I believe you are to alight here,” or “It is time to do what? Drink tea!”
Renato, Elizabeth, and João had set off that morning in a jeep for the military terminal at the airport in Lisbon. The morning air had begun to turn slightly crisp in October, a fitting farewell. Elizabeth carried the same cloth suitcase she had hustled onto the train a few weeks back, heading from London to Dover. João and Renato hoisted their bulging, green duffel bags into the back, chatting amiably about emergency medicine, the progression of infections in the tropics, the sterilization of medical equipment over wood fires. João liked to pretend he didn’t much care for medicine, but such conversations brought a joy to him she hadn’t seen before. Though she barely understood a word, only the slightly Latinized versions of scientific terms, Elizabeth was still seduced by the soft zh sounds, and the cool whooshes of the x’s of Portuguese.
The battered DC-9 was half-empty, emblazoned with the Portuguese cross, which resembled Germany’s iron version but was more delicate, brittle, weaker. The doctors and the doctor’s wife sat in the front, with a wide gap separating them from a few soldiers returning to Guiné from leave. To Elizabeth, there was a shocking casualness about the whole thing. Shouldn’t there be more ceremony with every deployment into a war zone? Shouldn’t a brass band be playing at the foot of the stairs, with officers saluting the heroes of Guiné smartly, young women crying for their sweethearts, children hugging the legs of their daddies for perhaps the last time? There was none of that, just a klatch of young soldiers drinking beer, laughing, and heading off to work, as if they had nine-to-five factory jobs and would be returning for supper.
The thrum of the propellers sent a dull roar through the plane, making conversation impossible. That was something of a relief. Elizabeth sat on a canvas jump seat, two rough straps crisscrossing her chest uncomfortably. This was a setup for broad, muscled male chests, not soft English breasts. For the trip, João had secured an auxiliary nurse’s uniform: a polyester-blend green skirt, brownish shirt, and cropped jacket. She was glad for it. She blended in, even looked as if she belonged. She would have to get a lot more of these costumes when she landed.
Bissau being a port, they were on the ground seconds after they banked inland. The aircraft skipped over the compacted-dirt airfield, then taxied past military transports, Portuguese choppers with their vulnerable-looking glass-bubble cockpits, and a few American helicopters like the ones Elizabeth had seen in Vietnam War footage on the telly. Mechanics were working on a couple of old biplanes that looked like they would be used for crop dusting. Coconut and oil palms ringed the airfield, but after weeks in Portugal, that seemed ordinary enough. The whole scene seemed ordinary enough, a decrepit version of southern Portugal—until she stepped onto the landing of the stairs.
The heat and humidity were searing, a physical blow. Sweat erupted from Elizabeth’s hairline. It soaked through her shirt under her arms, over her chest, down her back. As she stepped gingerly down the stairs, she moved to take off her jacket, saw the dark stains forming on her shirt, and thought better of it. By the time the three had crossed the dirt tarmac and entered the perfunctory terminal, the jacket was off anyway.
A couple of Portuguese soldiers manned the security desk but waved the whites through without stopping their conversation. An African man, his tattered shirt unbuttoned, his muscled chest glistening, carried the bags from the plane, three or four at a time, dropping them gingerly on the dirty, curling-linoleum floor. Two much lighter-skinned men, their uniforms neatly pressed, went through the manifest, checking the cargo and recording receipts. The smell was like nothing she had come across before, sweat, body odor, mildew, wood smoke, mosquito coils, and raw sewage, mingled together in a stench that nobody but she seemed to notice.
“Bem vinda a Bissau” a Portuguese officer called out, his brushy silver hair contrasting against a deep, rich complexion, a prominent chin incongruous against a thick neck, strong but a bit pudgy as well. “Welcome to Bissau,” that Elizabeth could understand. He reached to give João a swift hug, thought better of it when he saw the young doctor recoil, and instead ordered his African driver to grab the ba
gs of the three travelers and toss them into the back of the truck.
He introduced himself to João and Elizabeth as Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. “Civil affairs and army public relations,” he said in English, then shrugged. “Propaganda, more or less.
“This is the moment we have been waiting for,” Carvalho continued in Portuguese with a chuckle. “The meddling UN can’t say we haven’t made an effort. Our medical corps is the envy of West Africa. You, my friend, Major Gonçalves, yes? You are the last brick in our little Potemkin village.” He laughed heartily at that one. João looked down at his feet.
João was not an antiwar activist. Most of those had long ago fled to France. In 1967 alone, out of eighty thousand men caught in the dragnet of Portuguese conscription, fourteen thousand had failed to show up. More young Portuguese men escaped to France each year than took up their nation’s generous subsidies to settle the ultramar. He was not a surreptitious believer in the cause of independence either. He was a doctor. He believed he could put his medical training to good use here, for Portuguese and African alike. He relished the chance. But to get it, he now knew the humiliations he would have to endure, the conspiratorial jokes between the white overlords, the clique he was joining.
Bissau was tiny, a small warren of narrow streets and Portuguese houses off the Rio Geba, clustered around the port of Pijiguito. The military hospital was there, just a few blocks from the water. The country was so small that the Portuguese wounded from any battle—from the mangrove swamps of the northwest to the grasslands on the eastern border with Guiné—could be airlifted to Simão Mendes Hospital. Spínola moved into the graceful, whitewashed governor’s mansion nearby, but he favored socializing in the military barracks just out of town, with his prized officers—and their wives.
No. 4 Imperial Lane Page 10
