“Sure is getting chilly out there.” She smiles. Perfect teeth. “I brought you a book. It’s exotic,” she says, like it’s a dirty secret. I want to sleep. “It takes place in the jungle. Thought you’d like me to read some of it to you.” She wiggles into the chair like a hen in its nest. “It might bring back memories of home.”
I’m fearful of what my long ramblings, fits of disappointment, sparks of excitement might have revealed.
“They’re in the jungle, you see, and this man is pulling a piece of rope attached to a trolley which his wife is standing on.”
My cheek twitches.
“Imagine that!” Her eyes wide. “Crazy as loons, I know. But I can’t put it down.”
This woman sitting in front of me does not know my pain, the anxiety that digs its nails into me every day. She cradles two pills in her outstretched hand. I open my mouth, stick my tongue out like an eager boy taking communion.
I try to think of when a visitor sat there last. Three or four different nurses rotate throughout the week but there have been no visitors. Helen’s reading glasses rest on the end of her nose. I turn away to look out the rain-slicked window. The wind has kicked more leaves into a small heap that blocks precious autumn light.
“What I am about to tell,” she begins, and there is nothing I can do to stop her. I brace myself for the welcome burn of my medication. I want to return to Mount Gorongosa with a feeling of calm. I’m not certain what will soon play out in my head. Is it something I experienced or simply recreated? I don’t think I’ll ever understand.
My eyes close just enough that I can see my lashes webbing the light.
“Pó drinks the rain,” I whisper.
I can’t swallow. I gasp, struggling with the rights words.
Helen grabs hold of my hand and squeezes. “We will be giants once again.”
* * *
I ran for nine months, with nothing more in mind than to create distance between myself and the Commander. I kept safely away from the sporadic homesteads and ruined farmhouses that dotted the landscape. A few times I dared onto fields, ready to eat whatever I could find. If I was lucky I’d catch a guinea fowl or trap a rabbit.
I sailed along the shoreline on unsuspecting ships, from island to island, and when it was time to come ashore, I thought only of how far I had come, how much farther I needed to go. Sleep was not my companion. It eluded me as it had for years.
In the blueness of a November morning, I enter a stretch of fever tree blossoms as bright as their trunks. Only when I come through their shade do I see a mountain rising into mist.
A cane rat appears from behind a panga panga tree. It stops in the middle of the path and looks straight at me before scurrying up the slope. I follow.
The forest is cool. I walk on a carpet of flowering balsam plants and bamboo grass. The songs of the forest birds, some of which I have never heard before, echo in the wind. Everything on the mountain appears contained, kept from the rest of the world, as if under a glass dome. For the first time in months, perhaps in years, I feel joy.
I lean over the pool. The water moistens my lips, my chin, the cool rush of water running down my throat. I want to giggle like the boy I once was.
I curl into myself, let the birdsong drown out the sound of gunfire, always present in my mind. I catch a glimpse of scuffed boots that have snuck up beside me. They are the boots of a soldier, their toes sinking into the mud by the pond’s bank.
I close my eyes and draw in a deep breath. It’s all over.
A cloth brushes against my cheek. I remain still. A sheet is draped over a pair of bare legs, cinched at the waist. I see the face of a woman standing over me.
“Pó,” she says, the word like a puff of smoke.
She moves away when I stir. I want her to stay close.
She does not take her eyes off me. I remain quiet, careful not to move and frighten her. She is not my captor.
She climbs over mosses and ferns, never once slipping. She calls from somewhere deep in the forest, “Follow me.”
I navigate the steep hillside and clamber over a rock ledge. I climb up onto a jungle plateau halfway up from the foothills. Pó sits on a fallen log, waiting for me. She wears red sheets wrapped around her body, one over each shoulder. I have seen young Maasai men dressed like this, but never a woman. An albino. Pó crosses her leg over one knee and unlaces one boot, then the other.
“My name is Ezequiel,” I say, undoing my boots too. “What do you call this place?”
She ties her laces together and tosses the boots over her shoulder, raises the water jug to her head and stands. “Only men need names,” she says in rough Portuguese. She turns away to climb a steeper part of the mountain where a narrow, worn path of earth cuts along the slope. It is second nature to her. I struggle, hoisting myself up by grabbing the fronds of giant plants.
We arrive at a pristine pool fed by a waterfall a hundred or more feet high. A small group of warthogs are drinking by the water’s edge. They scurry away, as do the monkeys and baboons.
Pó lowers the water jug from her head to kneel on a large stone by the falls. She reaches down to splash water on her face and neck. Her skin is pale and paper-thin. Her nose and cheeks are crowded with freckles, the only marks on her translucent complexion.
She continues up the steep ascent until it gives way to a gentler slope. We walk out of the jungle onto the granite of one of the lower massifs. I stand next to Pó and look out from the mountain’s peak. The flood plains, dry and golden, spread across the horizon, teeming with movement.
“You are safe here,” she says.
I drop my head to my chest, let the rifle I had bought from a merchant slip from my shoulder to the ground. I allow my breathing to slow.
When I open my eyes, Pó is standing in front of me. “The rains are coming,” she says.
* * *
—
A dozen or so rondavels are arranged in a circle, the entrances of the mud huts facing a clearing in the middle. We move slowly, cutting between two huts, and enter the clearing. The women and children, who had been going about their business, stop. An older boy sucks in his breath as if a snatch of something was about to come out of his mouth. Some of the women secure their grips on their idle machetes. Some Ndau had worked at the mission. I recognize the jewellery one woman wears around her neck. The children gawk. Some are urged to enter the nearest hut, but they freeze and stare at me and the rifle strapped across my shoulder, almost sensing I am part of some bigger story.
I am disappointed that we are not alone.
“That is Machinga,” Pó says, pointing. “Vasco, the stone grinder, is her husband.”
The villagers who remain in the clearing veer from our path, waiting for me to pass with Pó. Some raise their machetes. An older woman, her crinkled hair piled high above her round face, does not move.
“Stay close,” Pó says, taking my hand. “Machinga. This man will stay with me,” she says. It is all I understand of her Portuguese dialect.
The woman says something in her own dialect that mixes her nasal clicks with Portuguese. She refuses to look my way, stands proudly in her bare feet.
“Yes, he is a stranger, but he will not harm us,” Pó says, releasing my hand. She looks toward the worn path. She is asking me to follow it.
Halfway up the path, I turn back and see the centre of the village, thick smoke rising from the fire. The villagers’ curiosity is focused on the conversation between Pó and Machinga. Some of the women are huddled around the fire, carving up a small antelope carcass, and have resumed their song. Naked children take up play again with sticks and what looks like a ball, poking at it rolling in the dirt. They catch me watching and turn giddy. I can’t imagine how I must look. They must think the war has brought me to their mountain. What do they know of men like me? How much contact have they had? Do I look different to them? I must represent uncertainty in their world, which in every other way knows only sameness. One woman draws her child to
her side. Another woman lifts her infant and swings him to her hip before slipping into a hut. The rest remain in a state of cautious curiosity.
A very old man, the only man I see in the village, is bent over a grinding stone. He presses the tip of a spear to the rim of the stone, grinding the metal in a rhythmic sweep across its surface. Machetes and a few spears lean against the wall of the straw hut.
Pó catches me staring, and with a gentle wave of her wrist urges me to keep walking. She walks from the clearing and winds her way to meet me. I walk ahead. At the end of the path, set apart from the village, is a small mud hut.
“Has it been settled? Is it safe here?”
“Wait,” she says, before lowering herself into the entrance and drawing the flap of skins behind her.
Sitting against a tree stump, I drift in and out of sleep. Every so often, the sun breaks through the cloud cover and beats down on me. I need water. I try to get up, move toward the jug Pó has set by the hut’s entrance, but my knees buckle. I notice a child walking up the path, his arms outstretched. I use the tree stump to get up, stagger and fall. The child now stands above me. Some of the other children and a few women have wound their way up the path behind the boy, the same boy who had wanted to speak earlier. He bends down and stabs at something on the ground. I reach for my rifle but it is not there. I see it lying in the sand a few yards away. I hold up my hands. The boy skewers the ball the other children had been playing with, and only then do I realize it is an animal’s eyeball, perhaps plucked from the butchered antelope.
“Kwazi,” the boy says, pounding his chest.
“Zeca,” I say.
Thunder roars in the distance. Kwazi looks up, surveys the sky. I dig into my pocket and draw the harmonica out. My hand cups and quivers to make the first note reverberate. Kwazi seems intrigued by the sound.
Pó emerges. I stop playing. Her arms are covered in wooden bracelets, her head topped by an Englishwoman’s hat. A massive collar of coloured beads and shells circles her neck and rests on her shoulders. Like everyone else, I remain silent.
As I slip the harmonica back into my pocket, Pó goes back into her hut and with some effort backs out with a rusted wheelchair, a strange object on a mountain. However it got here, its effect is instant. The crowd hurries down the path to take their places in the clearing. What I see next is even more surprising. Underneath a black umbrella secured with twine to the back of the chair sits a woman. She wears a lace veil over her head, but I can see her thick hair, grey-streaked and straight. I had seen many women like her in Tanzania, dressed in silks—turquoise and fuchsia—with tiny mirrors sewn around their hems. She sits proudly in her battered chair with armrests made of branches. Her toes poke out from underneath her tangle of saris. Her fingers flick the beads of her rosary. Pó pushes the woman down the path and into the middle of the village. They begin to circle the fire in the clearing. The woman cranes her neck from under the umbrella’s brim to look up to the sky. One of the chair’s wheels is crooked and with every turn makes the sound of a whining instrument.
Pó does not speak to the woman she is pushing. They both look up. At first, I think they are looking for the distant drone of warplanes and helicopters. I have grown sensitive to their droning. The sky rumbles and scythe clouds shift. Rain pours down in sheets of silver that disappear into the earth. Pó slips off her hat, and it rests on her back tethered to a string around her neck. She lifts her chin and opens her mouth to drink.
Everyone stretches out their arms and is drenched by the rain. My head stops throbbing. The noises from the children, the thanks from the women, Pó’s laughter are silenced in my mind by the way the woman in the wheelchair studies me.
Pó
ONE LEG OF THE CHAIR is shorter than the other three. Rot or termites or both. Shifting my weight, I am able to balance. My body aches. The mosque is lit by a single floodlight on a pole high above its roof. From my balcony I see all the life around me. I see a mother tying her baby snuggly to her back. A teenager with a finger in his mouth leans against the Coca-Cola machine. The old man, Paolo, shuffles in his broken shoes and drags a bulging bag over rubble. There are others. They all cross the grounds and disappear into one or another of the hotel’s blocks, like ants to their anthill.
Behind me, Serafim sits in his chair, which he has moved closer to the opening leading onto my balcony. He says when I am telling my story my voice grows quiet and drifts far away. His small recorder rests on the table next to him. He looks eager in his linens. When he leaves, his clothing will look like a damp rag that has been wrung, wrinkles across his back and thighs and where the top of his belly meets with his chest.
“It was raining the morning we left Dar es Salaam.”
“Before you continue—sorry—can you tell me more about Fatima. How she got her reputation as a madwoman.” Serafim’s pencil hovers over his notebook.
“No one knew when Fatima had arrived in Dar es Salaam from Goa, or how old she’d been. No one could remember her ever being young. She smoked. It shocked the men who came to do business with her to see a woman roll her own cigarettes. Equals, she’d say. A smart businesswoman, but a terrible driver. She once borrowed a jeep and we drove up the coast at high speed with the top down. My stomach got boat sick, the way we veered from one side of the road to the other. My fingers got stiff from holding on so tight.”
“You were sixteen when you left Dar?”
“Yes. Fatima wanted to protect me. From Graça and her daughter. And the war.”
I remove my eyeglasses, rub the corners of my eyes. Pressing hard makes a wet sound in my head. Serafim becomes a blurry shape. One night, before we left Dar es Salaam, Fatima reached over to her night table and lifted a thin gold box to her lap. She opened it and showed me a small mirror. It was so close to my face that it was the first time I had seen myself clearly. I could see how the freckles were splashed across my nose, the apples of my cheeks. She lifted the small pink cushion from the box and patted my nose and cheeks. Small puffs of a powder lifted around my eyes. I took in the sweet smell and in the mirror I saw how the golden spots on my nose and cheeks had faded.
Pó, Fatima had said, dragging her forefinger down my cheek and neck. It is Portuguese for dust or powder.
Serafim crosses his legs. He settles in for a bit more information.
“Did you understand why Fatima felt so responsible for you? Why your mother knew Fatima could be trusted?” He lights another cigarette between yellowed fingers and leans back in his chair.
“When she was young, my mother used to visit Fatima. She and her family would come to the city after the rains, searching for green pastures to feed their cattle. Fatima and my mother were friends.”
Part of me is aware that I’m giving Serafim what he wants. He is directing my story in a way that I’m beginning to resent.
I put on my eyeglasses. Serafim is back in focus. From the corner of my eye I catch a flash of colour. Ophelia is walking alongside the pool. With her dyed hair and a bright pink tracksuit, she keeps looking over her shoulder. She runs by the vegetable patch, a streak of hot pink, and turns the corner, disappearing around the small mosque in the direction of Beira’s centre. The Coca-Cola machine’s red light throbs across the vacant pool. There’s nothing I can do to stop the girl from meeting with men on the beach or behind the bars. She wants to be a teenager—just one of them.
“We call it a beating heart,” I say.
“What?”
“The Coca-Cola machine. It will die soon.”
Serafim rises to stand next to me. His hands curl around the railing near mine. His arm brushes against mine and I swear I can feel every single hair. I close my eyes and take in a deep breath of his smell.
There is no breeze and the city is quiet. With Serafim by my side, I find the courage to continue—to feel we occupy the same moment in time, without time making a move.
* * *
“It’s a year since Ali Khamis Mohammed’s ship brought us here. The p
eople who live here call it God’s Nest. The villagers who live at the bottom of the mountain refer to it as the place where the four rivers are born. We’ve made peace with the people here. I have been respectful of their ways and they have allowed us to remain. We know nothing of this man, and Machinga is concerned he will disrupt everything.”
The first words from Fatima’s mouth had been stewing in her belly when I wheeled her back into our hut the day Ezequiel arrived. Fatima was right. When we arrived, Fatima, being the businesswoman she was, recognized Machinga’s stature in the village and gifted her a silk scarf and sari. Two blankets and a few of our metal pots were to be shared by the villagers. These offerings had been accepted, even though the women must have had misgivings. We did not look like them, but we did share enough words to understand each other. Machinga was married to Vasco, who had come from the bottom of the mountain. The Ndau often intermarried with the local population. They helped us build our shelter. She had become our sponsor, and Fatima shared her cooking spices with the villagers, tilled what land we could, side by side with them. Soon, I was asked to school the children, teach them the basics of language the way Fatima had taught me.
“Nothing good will come of this.”
“We will see” were the only words I said to her that night.
Over the next week, with Kwazi’s help, Ezequiel worked on a strong lean-to that could withstand the winds and the heavy rains. He remained quiet. Everything he did—the way he twisted his body to strike a post into the earth, his strong hands binding twine, his eyes turning bright when gathering supplies from Kwazi and his friends, rewarding the children with a song—all these things made me feel I was right to bring him back with me.
One night Ezequiel’s music was replaced with the scritch-scratch of writing. I closed my eyes to the sound and drifted to sleep. During these quiet moments, I would ask Kwazi to deliver comforts to Ezequiel’s shelter. A sleeping mat one day, an animal skin another. A candle so that he could write longer into the night.
Children of the Moon Page 10
