by Ondjaki
“Pain in food, Dona Nhéte? In Soviet Union doctor resolve problem. Gud doctor.”
“We’ve got doctors here, too. My niece is a doctor, Comrade Bilhardov.”
“Then I go sleep. Tomorrov vake up early. Gudafter-noon, kildren!”
“Gudafter-noon, Comrade Gudafterov!” We laughed again.
Granma accompanied Comrade Gudafterov to the gate. We peeped out. They always stopped for a moment to talk at the front gate. Dona Libânia always peeped out of the house next door; whatever happened in our house, Dona Libânia always knew about it, to the point where anybody who had doubts about what had happened or when, could ask Dona Libânia. Even with stuff that happened in other houses that she couldn’t see, she always knew.
Afterwards, Granma Agnette came inside, walking with difficulty. She sat down and rubbed her leg again.
“It’s a kind of burning.”
“Either you phone your daughter or you call the Cuban doctor.”
“I’ll call tomorrow. It’s late now. Children, get ready for bed.”
“Anyone who’s hungry can have a serving of the soup that Madalena’s going to warm up,” Granma Catarina said. “Leave it, Sis. Just rest there with your leg stretched out.”
The rain had just stopped. A pretty, slow sound, a sort of smothered whistling, became audible in the corner of the yard where the fig tree stood.
We only ate a bite for supper. Nobody much liked the soup, but Granma Catarina stayed right alongside us, watching us with deliberate care.
“It’s not the mouth that goes to the food,” she taught us. “It’s the food that comes all the way to the mouth.”
We practised this complicated manoeuvre of eating almost without lowering our necks and still we listened to other rules that we already knew by heart.
“No elbows on the table. The stomach does not lean against the table. We may not have much food, but we know how to eat. And one does not talk with a full mouth, that you know already.”
We went upstairs to clean our teeth and pee. Our pyjamas were an old shirt and briefs. It was hot but we had to cover our bodies, even if it was just with a sheet, because of the mosquitoes.
“I don’t know why mosquitoes have this vice of drinking blood.”
“They must be thirsty.”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
I squinted out the bathroom window. An owl sat in the highest branches of the fig tree, as though the moon were a little box for keeping photographs and the owl were its own photograph in black and white. A photograph that stirred now and then to utter an owl’s cry.
We were still eating breakfast when I heard 3.14 and Charlita shouting outside and calling us by name to go and see what was happening.
It was really early. The sun had already come up, but you could still see that glaring yellow which, in fact, you can’t look at. I like the toasted yellow that appears in the late afternoon a lot better, though not during the last few minutes before the sun dives into the sea. Then it’s more like a yellow running into an almost scarlet-orange. It’s before that. Toasted yellow is a colour that appears very suddenly and disappears too quickly for you to understand that it has passed. But here’s a secret: toasted yellow, at times, also appears in my dreams.
“Finish eating first, then you can go out. And I don’t want any rushing. Is somebody running after you, children?”
“No, Granma.”
“Then eat slowly. You’ve got the whole day to play. Your lives are just playing.”
Adults think our lives are “just playing.” It really isn’t like that. Charlita’s life wasn’t always easy, what with the chore of sharing her glasses when the soap opera came on because her sisters also wanted to use the glasses to see clearly; 3.14 had to help at home and with his grandmother’s sales work, who travelled far away to sell the bread she had bought cheaply in the bakery on our street; Gadinho’s life wasn’t always easy either, with having to endure all he couldn’t do: he couldn’t play, he couldn’t have a birthday party, nor were we allowed to give him gifts, nor could he come to our parties, nor, on account of their being Jehovah’s Witnesses, did his father accept the gift we all got together to give him. And Paulinho’s life, beyond helping at home where he always carted water because most of the time there wasn’t any, and with his father always working with heavy pieces of metal because he was a mechanic, he then still had to go to judo practice and get pounded out, because it seems that in judo that’s part of practising, and in the first year you only learn how to fall and take a pounding without snivelling in front of the master or your classmates.
“Eat slowly, you’ve got the whole day to go and play. Madalena, go see if the bakery’s opened again.”
Madalena Kamussakele would go out and sometimes one of us would accompany her.
That second outing to see if the bakery had already started to sell hot bread was more peaceful. But everyone knew that hours before, maybe even at four-thirty or five in the morning, Madalena had already woken up, and almost without washing her face or cleaning her teeth, with a heap of dreams still in her face and her body, had gone to “put a stone” in the bakery line-up. Since Madalena woke up really early and the bakery was nearby, her stone was almost always at the front of the line.
People did this on Bishop’s Beach, and afterwards they were able to go home because sometimes the Comrade Baker was also still sleeping because of his binge the night before, or some funeral that had offered hot drinks, or even because he lacked some ingredient to finish making the bread, maybe coarse salt, or maybe even that there hadn’t been any gas in the bread oven’s enormous gas canister, and everyone was familiar with the line of stones and respected it. At times the Comrade Baker himself would open the bakery and await the arrival of the owner of the first stone before he started to sell.
“Nobody moves. This stone belongs to Dona Libânia, it’s the greenish stone.”
Or then some other kind of tip-off.
“We’re going to wait for Madalena from Granma Agnette’s house. That tiny little stone is hers.”
Rarely did Granma allow us to go with Madalena when it was time to retrieve the stone and actually buy the bread.
I liked the days when crazy Sea Foam was also in the line, wearing his trademark long slacks and shirt of faded cloth, barefoot or in simple, flat flip-flops. He stayed in the line as long as was necessary, in the sun or in the fine rain, with or without dust, whether he was hungry or thirsty, just to be able to approach the Comrade Baker and tell him: “I come only to affirm that I am not yet in possession of the necessary card to usufruct from the renowned services of this hot bakery.”
It took me some time to learn by heart this complicated sentence, and even the almost Cuban accent with which he said “hot,” prior to withdrawing before the amazement of everyone and the dropped jaw of the Comrade Baker.
“Don’t you ever get tired of always saying the same thing?”
“The world has not yet learned the simplest of truths. La luna appears every month and we still haven’t learned to draw its shape. The more we...”
Sea Foam extended his hand and the Comrade Baker was unable to reject the gesture. He gripped the stamp he used to stamp the bread ration card, and slowly stamped the lunatic’s left hand.
“So that no one may say that I did not report for the morning call. Aren’t we going to sing the national anthem today, Comrades?”
If everyone remained silent and avoided looking at him, Sea Foam, with the stamp on his left hand and very slowly fanning the whip in his right, withdrew and went to take an early morning swim on the prohibited section of Bishop’s Beach. The Soviet guards, with their skin reddened by the hot sun and their dark blue military uniforms, no longer prevented him from swimming there every morning.
“One day the Mausoleum’s gonna fly,” Sea Foam kept saying, “and it’s gonna take all the blue
ants with it...”
In their half-spitting tongue, the Soviets laughed, not understanding even a single internationalist comma or word. They became redder, they adjusted their berets and shook their blue uniforms, laughing at the crazy guy, imitating the herky-jerky gestures with which he sank into the water, without knowing that they were the blue ants and that Sea Foam wanted them to go away on a flight that took off from the Mausoleum construction site.
When Madalena returned from the bakery, she brought the bag of warm bread in one hand and the stone in the other. She hid the stone behind the flowerpot on the veranda, dusted off her hand and left the bread on the table.
“I shall always long for bread. It’s hard that coffins are such narrow places.”
“Always talking about coffins and death, Catarina. Really!” Granma Agnette didn’t like this.
“Death is our next home, Agnette.”
Seated on the veranda, I liked to play the game of looking at the white clouds dancing in the sky as the wind pushed them.
In school they taught that the wind was invisible, and in a way it is, but, without wanting to seem crazy like Sea Foam, there are times when I find that, just from how the clouds fly, it almost becomes possible to see where the wind is coming from and, above all, where it’s going. If you pay close attention, it’s obvious that the wind can’t like riding through the sky alone because it always lifts the dust, bends the trees, puffs out the leaves and drags the clouds away. The wind must have a house in the far-away, and it’s always trying to carry the clouds home with it. But this is something I keep to myself without telling anyone because other children might call me a nutcase and the elders could want to give me medicine to see whether I’m all right in my head.
When I had my eyes closed, I played another game. It was called “Guessing noises” and it was nothing more than this: keeping my eyes closed and listening to the tiny noises in Granma Agnette’s garden. The steps of Granma Maria, who was Charlita’s granma, in the yard next door, the scuffing of her sandals and the momentum of her body could tell me whether or not she had the bowl of kitaba on her head. The clinking of the keys that hung from Comrade Gudafterov’s belt could tell me whether he was going to drive a tractor, open the large front gate or go to the pantry where he had hidden a bottle of vodka. The sound of Granma Catarina’s shoes let me know how many steps she had climbed on her way to the window the first time she did this in the morning—“I’m going to see if I left the window open”—at an hour when she still had the strength to go upstairs quickly; a different sound could mean that she had turned left and entered the bathroom. The wet sound of a watery rag being swirled around meant that Granma Agnette had already tidied up the kitchen and Madalena was on her knees cleaning the floor, which she did before going outside to shake out the carpets and give corn to the chickens; or, if there was no corn, it might be leftover dried breadcrumbs. Later she might sweep the yard of the leaves that fell from the fig tree, and only at the end would she clean the parrots’ cage in a strange manner, for when Madalena Kamussekele was near, the parrots stayed peaceful and refrained from speaking nonsense. The last of the noises, the one, to tell the truth, I liked best, was the most attractive and most difficult of them all: to stay very silent, to try to breathe slowly with my eyes completely closed, in order to listen, through the tiny openings in the low wall, to the sound of the slugs that sat on the stones in the garden or climbed the large leaves that looked like enormous highways for slugs to scale.
“How many slugs?” Madalena knew my game. “Without opening your eyes, you cheater.”
“I don’t need to cheat.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“You’re wrong! There are four of them.”
“It can’t be!”
But it was. A smaller one on the tip of the leaf and lacking the slightest trail of drool had made me get the number wrong.
“It doesn’t count, the little one didn’t move. There’s no way I could know.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re wrong.” Madalena went happily back to the yard.
3.14 was at the front gate, laughing at our craziness.
“What are you guys doin’?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? It’s ‘nothing’ when the two of you talk about a bunch of slugs climbing up a leaf?”
“Hey! Don’t shoot your mouth off. What’s happening?”
“What’s happening is that your Granma’s house has tons of light and we’re stuck and can’t even watch the soap opera. They’re sayin’ your Granma’s got pull with the Soviet tupariov. Maybe they’re even lovebirds.”
“Stop that. I’m gonna smash your face in!”
“Cool it, it’s just stuff I heard. But you guys had light yesterday, that part’s true.”
“I’d like to talk to you about that.”
“Are we gonna connect a cable from your Granma’s house? That would be awesome.”
“No. We’re going to cut the cable.”
“What do you mean?”
“If the other houses don’t have light, the best thing is not to have it. It’s just gonna cause a scrap. On top of that, the TV’s on the blink and it’s useless for watching soap operas. Do you know which cable it is?”
“I know. Aren’t you gonna catch hell from your Granma?”
“Only if she finds out. Are you a little tattletale like Charlita? Eh?”
This was the best way to do it. 3.14 hated being called a tattletale, or being compared to girls.
“We just need a pair of wire cutters.”
“I think Madalena could help us.”
“Is she gonna ask for something?”
“Like what?”
“Like something in exchange for the wire cutters.”
“Let’s go find out.”
In the yard the parrots were whistling or speaking nonsense words that Granma didn’t like at all. They could utter combinations of nonsense, some Angolan sentences mixed with Russian, and even a few words of Cuban. For example, they said, “cabrón,” a lot, “que te parió,” or another phrase that they had learned from the movies—I think it was pronounced “fak iu”—which you couldn’t even repeat.
One parrot, the one with very light ash-coloured feathers, was called Just Parrot, and the other one was called His Name, as a result of a tale that isn’t worth telling right now. This His Name was an old parrot whose age nobody knew. His wings had been clipped and his whole body singed, and he was brought to our yard by André, a commando who had picked up the parrot after some nerve-wracking battles south of Kwanza-Sul Province.
“A parrot all burned like that?” Granma Nhé laughed. “Are you sure he’s alive?”
“Yeah, Granma.”
“Look here, I don’t want any bewitched animals here in the yard. What’s his name?”
“It’s His Name.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s the name we gave him. The soldier who found him had that name, too.”
“And where is that soldier?”
“He died in the explosion that the parrot escaped from.”
His Name ate with enthusiasm. It must be because the war, since it makes you afraid, stimulates your appetite. When he arrived, for the first few days, Just Parrot started getting thin like he was almost finished. Later we had to give them food in separate cages because His Name ate with an appetite from the old days.
“What are you guys doin’?” Madalena met us near the big cage.
“I was remembering the tale of His Name. Is it true he came right out of an explosion that didn’t kill him?”
“Those are André’s lies.”
“The commando’s lying, Madalena? Don’t shoot your mouth off, or André’s gonna give you a beating that’ll last till midnight.”
“He’s gonna give it to me r
ight now? At least I’ll put up a fight…”
“Haha! You’re gonna fight with the commando? Not even a regular soldier.”
“Hush, keep it down, the hens are layin’ eggs. What did you come here to do?”
“We need a pair of wire cutters.”
“Wire cutters? What for?”
“We can’t say.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“But do you have them or don’t you?”
“I can have them.”
“Madalena, in that case we don’t even know if it’s worth telling you. Because if you don’t have them, then you’re going to squeal on us and we’ll be stuck without the wire cutters.”
All this conversation confused her. That was actually our objective: to start blabbing until she said whether or not she had a pair of wire cutters and what she was going to ask for to lend them to us without anybody finding out.
Madalena kept tabs on a whole bunch of keys. She could get into the animals’ hutches, open the parrots’ cage, the doors of the house, the pantry, and even the big garage door, behind which were a thousand objects covered with dust that made asthmatic people cough.
“You guys...You talk and talk and you don’t say anything.”
“You’re the one who’s not replying.”
“What was the question?”
“The question was about the wire cutters.”
“There must be a pair in the toolbox.”
“You can’t just lend them to us?”
“‘Just lend them’? Just how?”
“Just like that.”
“And if they catch me in Granma’s stuff? Aren’t they ‘just’ going to give me a thrashing?”
“No, Granma will only give you a kind of thrashing.”
“I can go see if they’re there.”
“Thank you, Madalena.”
“What’s this thank you stuff? Thank you is what you say to the Comrade Teacher in school. Here there’s going to have to be salt for us to eat with green mangoes.”
“But haven’t you got the key to the pantry?”
