No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  In April of ’73, Almeida Brito and his Fiat G.91 were blasted from the sky. Lovely Raquel returned to Lisbon a black-veiled war widow.

  João’s response to slow-motion defeat was to fight harder. His wife and child had formed a nuclear bond so tight he felt like a rogue electron buzzing in frantic orbit, the nurturing core just out of reach. He was living the sum of a man’s domestic fears, exactly what his father had warned him of, an outsider looking in. Female kindness toward men, sex, charm, warmth, all these things are merely means to her end, his father used to tell him in slightly inebriated tones: marriage, stability, family, children. Once that end is attained, affection slows to a trickle, if it doesn’t shut off altogether. The trick, the elder Dr. Gonçalves advised the younger, is to bathe in a woman’s kindness and love, then, just as she senses she has attained her goal, just as her affections begin to shift elsewhere, find another. Experience only the best in women. Maintain your illusion of the fairer sex as always warm, always generous, always giving of herself, her body, radiant in her love for you.

  Well, João was a soldier now. He’d go drinking with his comrades, whoring on occasion. He would have pangs of guilt. The excitement of transgression would draw him to the brothels around the base where the choices of skin tone, body type, and demeanor were laid out like a carnal buffet: black as coal, mocha mestiço, Algarve bronze, and Lisbon porcelain, soft and round, taut and lanky, demure, raunchy. He would make his selection and take her off in a rush, his heart pounding, but the fever of lust would break, and his conscience would return, flowing into his heart as the blood ebbed from his groin. He thought at these moments of his mother, her weeping fights with a father who in the end wasn’t so different from him.

  He had to admit that at times—too many times—he took his shame, grief, guilt, and anger out on his wife. He tried not to leave marks, and he strained not to disturb Cristina. But he was the dupe here, the victim, the cuckold, lured into marriage by a woman of once-volcanic desires, eager to please, charming, loving, grateful. That woman was gone. If he lost his temper, well, who really was to blame? He would slam the door of their flat, take a long walk down the Avenida Cinco de Outubro, maybe take in a movie at the Ruacaná, and seethe at his lot. Then, with the pyrotechnic brew of emotions burned off like a flare, he would climb the stairs to their apartment, apologize and mean it. He didn’t want to lose this family of his. He wanted to have his wife’s body to warm him in the morning. He loved waking up to his beautiful daughter, hearing her squeals of delight, feeling her hands around his neck, cold, soft, and moist all at once. Cristina was the last love they shared.

  Such concerns were blissfully forgotten as he looped north and east with a dozen men toward the Zambian border. They forded a waist-deep river, wide enough to soak them through, hands held high to keep their rifles dry, and left the open grasses for a sparsely treed woodland. Lieutenant Fernando Alonzo took the lead.

  Then he exploded. He seemed to vanish, although in truth he was very much still there, just spread with blinding velocity in great chunks. The patrol was under heavy fire. The men scattered. Some slithered on their bellies. Others dashed for the trees. João crouched down, then lunged for the cover of a pecan tree.

  “Medic! Medic!” A piercing cry went up over the gunfire. João scanned the chaotic battle scene but could see nothing. He crept toward the screams and practically fell upon the private, writhing in a patch of grass that formed a trampled ring around him, like a giant bird’s nest. Gunfire had blasted his foot off. Scraps of flesh hung livid red from bone exposed halfway up his calf. Gonçalves grabbed a preloaded syringe of morphine and stuck it in the man’s shoulder, then twisted a tourniquet below the knee to stanch the blood gushing from his leg. Sporadic fire still rang out, but the battle was subsiding.

  “It’s going to be alright, just a minor wound. Where are you from, Private? You just got a ticket home. I’ll let your mother know you’re coming. You sure know how to break up a good patrol.”

  Someone unfolded a crude canvas stretcher, bloodstained and browned, and four men converged around the fallen soldier. They set off, back in the direction they had come from, Lieutenant Alonzo left in pieces for the hyenas.

  Elizabeth was making compromises too great for a woman her age, but then again, her windfall had been a sudden one. She hadn’t worked to become a doctor’s wife, like many other women had. It just happened. She had a beautiful, olive-skinned daughter, a spacious flat in a city with lovely weather, and perks like a PX and officers’ club. She could not question the bill when it came due, steep as it was. The whores and drink, the lashing vituperation, the raised hand and occasional blows would be followed by apologies, caresses, and idyllic absences. She accepted the trade.

  Elizabeth fell into the leisurely life of an army wife, making friends not only with Portuguese women but with South Africans and Rhodesians. The white wives of southern Africa were painfully friendly, determined to prove the stereotypes of vicious racism wrong, but proving it only to the white people. They invited strangers to tea, praised their decision to visit or live in the glorious highlands of Africa, and fawned over their babies.

  Elizabeth was not one to stand on principle. She was young, without politics, and almost without guile. She was holding Cristina by the fingers, watching her toddle unsteadily around the grand fountain in the Jardim Américo Tomás, when she met Greta Vanderbroek.

  “Oh, she’s beautiful,” the woman said in Portuguese, with an accent Elizabeth knew to be Afrikaner. “How old is she?”

  “She’s just turned two,” Elizabeth replied, her Portuguese now effortless. She was used to the attention but was taken by this woman—big boned, tall and blonde, with braids swept back around a prominent head. She wore a conservative, western-style floral print dress that fell below the knees and could do only so much to hide her voluminous breasts and broad hips. She was clearly not Portuguese.

  “I have two of my own,” she continued, “in school right now. It’s so peaceful walking in the park alone.”

  Elizabeth wondered then why she would break that solo revelry by talking to a stranger. But she kept quiet and pretended to be intently focused on her daughter. The other woman hovered.

  “Meu nome é Greta,” she said, jabbing a hand out to be shaken.

  Elizabeth looked at her closely and, without taking her hand, said in English, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  The smile on Greta Vanderbroek’s face spread like a burst dam, her large mouth swallowing the lower half of her head.

  “No, I’m from Johannesburg,” she said, as if Elizabeth was the silliest woman in Angola. “South Africa.”

  “I’m English,” Elizabeth said simply.

  For perhaps an hour, the women talked, telling their stories: how they had come to be in the highlands of Angola, both dragged by husbands involved in a war that should not have been their own. Like so many other times, Elizabeth realized how little she knew about the world she lived in. Greta Vanderbroek’s husband had a bland-enough-sounding job; he worked for the South African board of armaments. What it meant was he armed combatants across the board.

  “It’s survival really, us versus the communists,” she said earnestly. “Samuel and I met at university. Stellenbosch. Have you been there? Lovely, really lovely. Ah, but I suppose my husband had a higher calling. Too bad the Portuguese are such frightful allies to have to count on. They’re weak, but what choice do we have? We can’t let Mozambique and Angola fall. Rhodesia would be next, then Botswana, and South-West Africa.”

  Greta and Elizabeth became fast friends, grateful for the ease of speaking English and the absence of their husbands. Elizabeth took great satisfaction in being with a body of such stature, a mighty Brunhilde among weaker women. She did not confide much, nothing about her marital troubles or her uncertain future with the man she married so hastily. In fact, she took it upon herself to cultivate a friend to the family. She wanted João to become friends with Greta’s husband, Samuel,
and to prepare the older Vanderbroek children to one day be Cristina’s guardians and babysitters. A domestic cocoon, why not?

  It wasn’t easy. The men both traveled or were otherwise indisposed. But they got together often enough. Elizabeth was fine with entertaining in their flat, with its two bedrooms and open, combined dining and living rooms. It wasn’t Houndsheath, but it was modishly contemporary, and how much could be expected of a twenty-four-year-old army wife? The Vanderbroeks, on the other hand, had a house near the park, small by the standards of Elizabeth’s youth but generous in Nova Lisboa, charming and comfortable, with Cape Dutch furniture dragged up from South Africa. The women would chatter in the kitchen or fuss over the children. Samuel, much older than João, beefy—thick really, not fat—with thinning blond hair and leathery dark skin, deeply furrowed, would take João to the veranda, break out cigars rolled with Angolan tobacco, and inquire about the war. João smoked his offerings and drank his scotch but was parsimonious with his war stories.

  “It’s an unpleasant business, no doubt,” Samuel would say, waving a meaty hand over his head to disperse the smoke and swat a mosquito. “South African pilots have taken to using defoliants on the cassava in the so-called liberated zones. The people may not have anything to eat—brutal work, no? But we can’t give them a haven. If they have to traverse those long corridors from Zambia and Zaire, our planes and gunships can pick them off. If they find shelter in the villages closer to Nova Lisboa, it becomes entirely too messy—burning thatch, inquests at the UN, pressure from NATO. No, my boy, we must remain vigilant.”

  Such talk had seemed ridiculous to João before his transfer to Nova Lisboa; now he understood, even if he didn’t quite sympathize. Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Salisbury in Rhodesia must be just the same, white cities built by white people who no longer thought of themselves as colonists or even settlers. They thought of themselves as at home, and they would defend their cities as such.

  “They’re patient, you know. They’re waiting us out,” João said through a cloud of smoke. “They’re closer than you think. The other day, I was inserting an IV in a soldier who had taken a bullet in the gut. We were maybe one hundred fifty kilometers southeast of here. That can be a nasty wound, infects fast. I looked up after connecting the drip and met the eyes of one of the guerrillas. Don’t ask me who he was fighting for. He was behind some brush, just watching me. He could have killed me easily, but he just watched—yellow, jaundiced eyes, a look of pure contempt.”

  “Maybe he was out of bullets, eh?” Samuel said in his singsong South African English.

  “Maybe.” João shrugged. “Maybe he just wanted to watch us take another dying Portuguese boy away.”

  “Nah, you’re too pessimistic, my friend,” Samuel said gregariously, leaning forward in his wicker chair to give João a slap on the shoulder. “We’ve got them tied up. We’re not going anywhere. Just as long as the old men in Lisbon can carry on.”

  On February 22, 1974, one of those old men, António Sebastião Ribeiro de Spínola, nailed his “Portuguese Myths” to the door of Lisbon’s Belém Palace. The effect may not have been as consequential as Martin Luther’s defiance at Castle Church in Wittenberg, but the reverberations shuddered from the western shore of the European continent to the southeastern edge of Africa.

  Myth One: Portugal’s wars in Africa were defending the West and Western civilization itself.

  Myth Two: Lusitanian history had somehow bound all overseas governance to the command of Lisbon.

  Myth Three: The provinces of the ultramar could at once be a part of Portugal and be populated with second- or even third-class citizens.

  Myth Four: The essence of the Portuguese nation was the civilizing of the wider world.

  “The populations are still favorable to us but they will cease to be so when they feel themselves held back from fulfillment of their legitimate aspirations for a better life and full participation at all levels,” Spínola wrote. With sentences like that, the old general’s masterwork, Portugal e o Futuro, could well have put the metrópole to sleep, but not even its author had guessed how dry the kindling in Iberia was. Portugal needed only a spark, and Spínola’s turgid but caustic lament was it. The streets had the joyful feel of freedom seeping in.

  Admiral Américo Tomas, the seventy-nine-year-old president of the republic, responded to Spínola’s challenge just as the near dead come to full lucidity before they succumb to the smothering pillow. The armed forces were put on high alert. Spínola was cashiered. Infuriated, loyal young officers tried to respond. On March 16, Lieutenant Colonel Almeida Bruno, who once stood sheepishly by in Bafatá as the new commanding general of Guiné rallied his bedraggled men, mustered that moment in his agitated mind.

  In jeeps and half-tracks, Bruno’s Fifth Cavalry Regiment drove from its barracks at Caldas da Rainha south toward Lisbon, convinced an uprising would follow. To their horror, the nation may have been stirring but it was not ready. Military command in Lisbon sent a far greater force to confront the rebels. Bruno was the first in chains. Hundreds followed. The prison fort of Peniche was filled. The officers who could not fit were exiled to the Azores. The first battle of the revolution ended in a rout.

  Far away, in Nova Lisboa, the soldiers of empire knew only that something odd and important was happening. For three weeks, they had been confined to barracks. The helicopters were idled on the tarmac. The fear of battle was replaced by a fear for their future. Only the angry screech of South African jets continued. They were under someone else’s command, fruitlessly trying to hold at bay the guerrilla armies rushing toward Nova Lisboa in the sudden absence of Portuguese patrols. A new world was closing in.

  On March 28, a month after Spínola’s publication date, the troops gathered around a black-and-white television set in one of the barracks to watch the prime minister deliver what their officers said was a critical address. João watched as well that night, in the living room of his flat, while Elizabeth rocked Cristina to sleep in the nursery.

  “Foreign elements within the armed forces launched a mutiny from Caldas, determined to see Portugal lose its overseas provinces,” Caetano began, dabbing sweat from a broad forehead that swept up and back toward a receding hairline. His heavy horn-rimmed glasses seemed to weigh him down as he stared at the papers clutched in clumsy hands. “They have been repelled, their leaders dealt with severely.”

  Caetano tried to rally a nation and an empire behind a cause of such antiquity that its mere mention made mockery of it. “It is Portugal who made Angola,” he continued, his intended inspiration delivered in a drone. “It is Portugal who created Mozambique. We fight in defense of the Portuguese of all races and of all colors.”

  The screen flickered, went blank, and flashed back up to an American comedy dubbed in Portuguese, Sanford and Son, about an old black man, his hip, mustachioed son, and a junkyard.

  João shook. Angola, he knew, was remaking itself, and the home that he once knew, that he long ago left and had refused to return to, was slipping away. He walked quietly to the nursery to make sure mother and daughter were asleep, as expected, then hustled into the night, not to the base—there would be no answers there—but to Samuel Vanderbroek.

  “Your Caetano is a fool,” the South African said, seething quietly. “We have been watching this for a year, more than a year. The Armed Forces Movement has not been subtle.”

  He poured João a scotch in a cut-crystal tumbler, no ice, no water, and walked toward him with the offering. “I’d half believe you were a part of it, João, if I was not watching your face right now. They are Spínola’s men, under his spell. You know him well, no?”

  “Not well,” João said defensively.

  Samuel cut him off. “Well enough. But never mind. Our intelligence was apparently not good enough for your government. Foreign elements indeed. You know, for fascists, you Portuguese are pretty pathetic.”

  “Is it over, this rebellion?”

  “Ha! Not by a long shot. Tell m
e, João, have you been to Évora, back home?”

  “Of course, our Roman city. Every schoolchild goes to see the ruins.”

  “Yes, an appropriate place to plot empire’s end, I should think—conspiracy amid the rubble. There were a series of officers’ picnics there—wives, families, wine, bread and cheese—lovely affairs near various barracks in the countryside. Last September was the last of them, quite an outing. Officers from all over the country, perhaps all over the empire. They talked and plotted all night. We knew. How the fuck didn’t Caetano?”

  He downed his drink and poured another.

  “The Armed Forces Movement Coordinating Committee,” he said with exaggerated grandiosity. “They call it the MFA. Why is that?”

  “Armed Forces Movement, in Portuguese, would be the Movimento das Forças Armadas, MFA.”

  “I can never keep these things straight. I’ll grant you, the rebels, they were smart. They spread. I’m quite sure there’s a cell in Nova Lisboa. There’s a major, the commander of your base here. Know him?”

  João shrugged. “He got us our apartment.”

  Samuel led his friend onto the veranda, but they didn’t sit. Samuel paced, sipping scotch and looking at the stars. João stood and waited.

  “No,” Samuel said, gently placing his tumbler on a glass-topped mahogany table. “It’s not over. The real leader of the group has gone completely unnoticed, a public relations man of all things, Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho.” He chuckled, muttering under his breath, “You Portuguese with your names.”

  “Otelo?” João repeated in mild astonishment. “I knew him, in Guiné. Spínola’s hearts-and-minds man.”

  “Spínola’s man.” Vanderbroek nodded in recognition. He sighed—a long, slow exhale. “That figures.”

  Military commanders in Lisbon, eager to show they were still in charge, delivered stern orders for offensives to be mounted out of all five military districts in Angola: Cuanza Norte, Cabinda, Cuando Cubango, Lunde, and Bie. Guerrilla forces that had taken advantage of the lull were to be pushed back, and hard. The offensive was suicide. Spare parts for the helicopters and fixed-wing fighters were running low. The army’s African conscripts were abandoning their posts in the night, joining guerrilla patrols now in hailing distance of the Portuguese bases. Junior officers, looking over their shoulders for Caetano’s secret police and worried that insufficient zeal would land them in the brig, dutifully ordered their men back into the Alouettes. Three days after Caetano’s address, a helicopter was blasted from the sky. It was overloaded with troops, and nine men died. After that, no one wanted to be the last to die in a dying war.