Children of the Moon

by Anthony De Sa

  Copyright © 2019 Anthony De Sa

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  De Sa, Anthony, author

  Children of the moon / Anthony De Sa.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385685979 (hardcover). —ISBN 9780385685986 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8607.E7515C45 2019  C813’.6  C2018-906038-7

                    C2018-906039-5

  Cover and book design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: Kseniya Zvereva / Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  For Stephanie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: A Beautiful Power

  Pó

  Serafim

  Ezequiel

  Pó

  Serafim

  Ezequiel

  Pó

  Serafim

  Ezequiel

  2: In God’s Garden

  Ezequiel

  Pó

  Serafim

  Ezequiel

  Pó

  Serafim

  Ezequiel

  Pó

  Ezequiel

  Pó

  Ezequiel

  Serafim

  Pó

  Acknowledgements

  No longer forward nor behind

  I look in hope or fear;

  But, grateful, take the good I find,

  The best of now and here.

  JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, “My Psalm”

  Pó

  STANDING IN THE SHADOW of my balcony, I look beyond the hotel grounds to where the brown mouth of the Buzi River meets the Beira harbour, then out, out towards the open sea.

  “I was born near the mountain of two peaks. White men called it Kilimanjaro.”

  Serafim sits in a chair in my room and listens to my words. He is a journalist from Brazil, sent here, to Beira, to record my story for National Geographic. I know very little about him, except that I am comforted by the scritch-scratch of his pencil on paper and the crinkles around his eyes.

  “My people, the Maasai, have always called that place Oldoinyo Oibor—White Mountain. They say the snowy peak, Kibo, is the house where all gods live.”

  “Do you believe in God?” Serafim asks.

  “There are no gods left. They have been driven off the mountain. If they ever were there.”

  I turn slightly because I am curious to see his reaction. His face is down, looking at his hand move his pencil over paper. He is fifty—a solid man, his body strong and straight, his once-compact frame still visible under a layer of fat. His hair, the colour of warm sand, is parted on the side. Grease tames it into waves. His brown eyes are set close together and float above his small nose, made smaller by his bushy moustache. He needs a shave.

  Serafim adjusts himself on the chair, the same chair he has been sitting on during this past week, ever since he arrived. He sat patiently, interviewing those I had invited to speak to him. They were mostly women and children, the men unwilling to trust an outsider and reluctant to share their stories of fear with another man.

  Serafim clears his throat. He pinches the cigarette that rests in the ashtray and draws in the smoke. It comes out his nose in two streams that slow, then curl together.

  “Is that why you are here? Looking for gods?” It is too late to soften the edges of my words, but I know he does not care whether I believe in God. That’s not why he’s here.

  In the past, journalists like Serafim had travelled great distances to meet me. They talked of the bigger world and how it was hungry to hear of my work. They brought food and school supplies for the children, and so I welcomed them. They promised my story would help end the threat faced by people like me. Their letters were thin and tilted forward as if they were being pushed from behind. I call them scribblers, because I once allowed myself to love a man who scribbled down his thoughts.

  “I’ve startled you,” Serafim says, packing his things. “I guess today’s interview didn’t get off to a very good start.” I hear his satchel snap shut.

  I adjust my eyeglasses. When I turn around, to lean against the balcony railing, Serafim is already standing near the door, his bag slung across one shoulder and pressed flat against his thigh. He moves to drop his cigarette in the hallway, but catches himself, and instead bends down to douse it in a small puddle by the wall. His hands are always clean. His nails trimmed. He tucks the cigarette butt into his pocket. This man cares about the world.

  “I can come back tomorrow. Or Sunday, if you like. When you have more time. If you’ll allow me, that is.”

  I catch his scent—warm clove and curing tobacco. I close my eyes and my toes clench. I loosen my shawl. “Let me speak.”

  “Please,” Serafim says, and there is such urgency in his voice that I want to weep.

  “There is nothing worse in this world than to be silenced,” I say, and Serafim’s body relaxes against the door jamb. “Except, perhaps, being forgotten.”

  Other journalists have come before him looking for facts. I have given them what they have asked, only to never hear from them again. I was left feeling used and empty. No more. I am grateful I have hunted down words over the years so that I can begin to construct a story—a story that is my own.

  “People tell me I was born in 1956, or close to it. I do not disagree, but it means nothing to me. This is what I know. I grew up on the grasslands of Tanganyika, before the land became Tanzania. My people did not care about Europeans or the names they gave things. They drew lines wherever they wanted and claimed what wasn’t theirs. The Maasai are a proud people. We kept ourselves alive. The foreigners had all heard our story.”

  “Story?”

  “How the God, Enkai, sent the cattle to our people down a long rope between heaven and earth.”

  The ocean breeze blows through my window, a distant smell of the salty monsoon sea and charcoal fires.

  “We had been given everything. Until one of us tried to demand more from Enkai. He got angry and cut that rope. But you don’t need to know all this.”

  “Please, continue. I want to hear it.”

  Over and over I have rehearsed how I would tell this story. But this is the first time I have heard my words. I have to push past my uncertainty. “We were sent out of the garden, climbed up from a crater bounded on all sides by a steep cliff. The red dust clung to our skin. We survived the sun and dry lands for countless moons, herding our beasts along the great river they call Nile, walking by the rim of Enkai’s angry gash in the earth they also named, Great Rift Valley. You see, the white man has always wanted to tell our story—to name things. The Maasai had nothing they could take. They feared us as warriors—they could not possess us and sell us to foreign lands. And for these reasons they left us alone.”

  I look over my balcony once again, out across the hotel grounds. Small fires are everywhere. A man has caught some pigeons and is plucking them. Some child
ren are bathing in the stagnant water that has collected in the deep end of the pool. They do so under the bright red light that pulsates from the Coca-Cola machine. It was delivered to that spot, set up against what once was the cabana wall, shortly after the Africa Cup of Nations in 2013. They ran wires to connect that one machine. I have never seen anyone buy anything from it. It accepts nothing but South African rand. This building I live in was once called the Grande Hotel, but its rich guests haven’t walked these ruined halls for years. In 1974 the Portuguese soldiers who fought the last days of the War of Independence returned to Portugal and the hotel was left in ruins. As soon as we had taken back our land we entered a war amongst ourselves. Another twenty years of bloodshed, but those soldiers had no need for the hotel. It is now home to over two thousand people. There is no running water and no electricity. The city’s politicians leave us alone. They know if you poke a stick into an anthill, the ants scurry about, clean up the mess and strengthen things, as if erasing the action. With its many ghosts we share the hotel and drink leaking rainwater. Elevator shafts have become dark throats that swallow our waste, and at least once a year a child falls in and is lost to us. The war has scarred this place. Serafim can see that for himself.

  “Here we are all broken—the lame, the poor, refugees, and albinos like me. We each have found a place. People with albinism have taken over Block B of the hotel. Here in Mozambique we are misunderstood. We are attacked, killed. Our body parts are sold to men who call themselves healers for use in charms and magical potions. But you have heard this.”

  “Do you ever think of going back to the place you were born? Would you be safe there?” From the strength of his voice I know he has returned to the chair I set out for him.

  “We are called zeru zerus there. It means we are nothing. Here, the people call me a branca. Albinos who do not belong to others have come here because they have heard of this place, and of me. I have no special magic, but I cannot convince them.”

  Lulled by the sound of Serafim scratching his notes, I continue. What comes through the gate of my mouth is carefully selected.

  “If there is a god, the one my ancestors called Enkai, I have seen its face in three women. These were the strong ones who never feared my touch. Namunyak, my birth mother, gave me life and a name. She would not live long enough to see me laugh or play or take my first steps. Simu, my mother’s sister, took me in and nurtured a place of love in me so that I would not grow into a bitter root. Fatima, the last of the three women, she christened me Pó, the Portuguese word for powder. ‘A fitting name for a beautiful girl like you,’ she said.”

  Serafim looks up from his notebook. His face glows.

  “I have also seen the face of god in one man,” I say. “Ezequiel. He kept a harmonica in his pocket, an extra pair of boots over his shoulder, and a rifle across his back. He declared his love for me with a gift. And later he gave me another.” I catch my breath. “Because of Zeca, I can see things as Enkai had intended.” I remember thinking, This is the way the world is. This is the way the world was meant to be.

  Serafim

  I UNDO MY BELT and pour myself a Scotch. I should call reception to collect my laundry. It all needs to be washed for tomorrow. Everything I possess can fit in one bag. Travelling light and owning little has always given me the freedom to pick up and leave.

  I kick off my shoes and press the heels of my bare feet against the balcony’s railing. The last story I wrote was for a national magazine—“Untouched by Civilization: The Hidden Peoples of the Amazon.” I spent months in a remote part of the Brazilian jungle getting closer to what I was certain was a previously unidentified tribe. The story and photos went viral. Anthropologists were horrified that I had dared to chronicle these people they had never heard about. They wanted answers, coordinates, confirmation. I needed to get away, take some time and consider how to live with what I had done—bringing these untouched tribes to a hungry world that couldn’t get enough. I got too close, exposed them to disease, and opened unprotected lands to illegal gold mining. All for the story.

  I take off my shirt, knot one of the sleeves to the balcony railing. I light a cigarette, top off my drink, and take a swig, feel the burn.

  Shortly after I checked into the Hotel Tivoli, I dragged a chair and table out onto the fourth-floor balcony of my corner room, arranging them so that I could see bits of the ocean to my left and the fragile buildings of this poor city to my right. The shouts from shop vendors and street brawls that spilled from bars onto dirt roads, the smell of smoke from outdoor kitchen fires, all reminded me of the favela where I was raised. Like Serrinha and surrounding Florianópolis, there’s nothing beautiful about this city; nothing about its architecture inspires me, except at dusk when lights twinkle from apartments or the glow from open storefronts floods the streets, and I think of quieter times.

  The first week with Pó was filled with her graphic accounts of the many who had come to the Grande Hotel to see her, to share their stories of survival. Interviews with PWAs—persons with albinism—were granted. Pó was always in the room to interpret my questions, to offer short bursts of detail to clarify stories of fear and torture. When I interviewed Winfrida Mbiti, it was Pó who recounted her story. The young woman sat in her chair, her face turned to the side; she would not look at me. Winfrida had been lured away by an uncle and cousin. They took her into the bush to help them look for stray goats. There they hacked at her arm. Her ear had been cut off. Much later, during a church service, her cousin broke down and told the pastor everything: his role, how he held her down as his father mutilated her. They were both sent to trial, but were set free. When Winfrida healed, she ran away. When I asked Pó why Winfrida would not look at me, did I frighten her, Pó said that the only way she could hear me was by turning her good ear toward me.

  Pó provided me with the names of people who had been attacked, murdered, and even those whose graves had been robbed. But it is the unwillingness of the police or government authorities to address the atrocities that takes so much out of her. The fight is draining her and she looks frail. I am committed to reporting her story as she tells it. I have been detached, an observer who keeps one eye open and the other eye, the passionate eye, shut.

  No more. From now on, both eyes wide open.

  * * *

  —

  The small recorder rests next to my drink. I take another sip and light another cigarette. The smoke curls up toward the half-lit sky. I conjure Pó in my mind—her long frame standing on the balcony, the curve of her back turned to me, her shuka clinging to her body. I let the shape of her take form. I press Play.

  * * *

  “When did you realize you were—”

  “Different?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I think hard and close my eyes until there is only darkness, I can hear my mother’s heartbeat still. You may not believe me when I say I can remember the smell of my birth, of dried grass and earth and smoke and the sticky stench of blood.”

  “Are you sure you do remember? Might it be that these details were told to you by Simu or others in the village?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I’m sorry. Please continue.”

  “I was not meant to survive. I was born in my mother’s hut. My aunt Simu recalled how that night the roof leaked with the drip-drip of rain. She looked after my mother, soothing her with stories that the raindrops were tears of joy from the gods to greet me. My father saw it differently. He stayed nearby, with the other men, waiting. The rain under a fat moon was the sign he had been looking for. He would have a strong son, worthy of a great warrior. My mother pushed me out into a warm evening, where I took my first breath. I was told this story countless times by Simu. I never tired of it. The moment I slipped out from my mother I was greeted by the moonlight that crept into the mouth of our mud hut. My pale body dragged across my mother’s belly and to her breast. My skin, white as bone. A curse. A moon child, the men muttered, before running awa
y. Simu remained to soothe the concern in her sister’s eyes.

  “I did not cry, but my hungry breaths took up too much air. Simu poured some milk between my mother’s lips, and my mother spat it on the ground. She then pinched milk from her own breast and sprinkled it on the ground as well—a gift for Olapa, goddess of the moon and wife to Enkai, god of the sun. Simu would often recount the story of how Olapa had once wounded Enkai. To cover up his wound, he took to shining so bright that no one could look straight at him and see his shame. To punish Olapa, Enkai plucked out one of her eyes. You can still see her missing eye.”

  “And your father’s reaction?”

  “My father thrust himself into the entrance. Simu pressed her back to the mud wall. She said he was a handsome man of graceful bearing. That night, when he saw me feeding, he turned ugly. He reached down for me with one hand and with his other hand raised his warrior sticks.

  “‘You know we must rid ourselves of this curse,’ he said.

  “‘This is your child,’ my mother told him. ‘If you do not claim her then she will be mine—mine to me. She will not be killed. She will live to walk and be free.’”

  “He relented.”

  “My father knew she would fight to the death. He backed out of the hut and tore at the marriage necklace my mother had made for him. Blue-black beads showered down on us. Villagers had called on Tonkei, our oloiboni, who arrived before the sun.”

  “I’m sorry, what’s an oloiboni?”

  “Our healer. A dried twig of a man, he wrapped himself in a lion’s hide and wore a headdress of ostrich feathers that made him appear bigger and more powerful than he was. Simu did not want him there, but word had spread. Tonkei said he was a descendant of Enkai made in two forms—the black god, who was benevolent, and the red god, who was vengeful. Simu saw only the red god in Tonkei, all cunning and mischief. He told prophecies to collect money or food, sold amulets and necklaces in exchange for his protection or potions. When displeased or angered, he cursed the rains to stay away or he ordered the cows’ udders to dry and crack.