No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  João’s hunger for combat evaporated. The base was seething with tension, divided between rebel sympathizers and regime loyalists, everyone convinced their comrades were either PIDE or communists. A muffle had descended over the base. João imagined plotting in dark corners, secret cells, doors being kicked open in the night, unknown brigs filling with soldiers.

  After nearly a decade of combat, after so much blood had trickled onto African soil, the action had shifted to the cobbled streets of old, stagnant Portugal. There was nothing left for João but to stay home.

  The decisive blow to Earth’s last African empire would be delivered by a man in a monocle, unarmed, in a black Peugeot.

  On April 24, 1974, just before midnight, Rádio Clube Português, a pop music station consumed at the time with John Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun,” and, if the urge hit, ABBA’s “Waterloo,” broadcast an odd mistake to the youth of Lisbon. “It is five minutes to eleven,” an unfamiliar voice said, followed by a syrupy Portuguese song, out of place among the foreign soft rock: “E Depois do Adeus.”

  The listeners of Rádio Clube Português likely would not have turned the dial to the Lisbon Catholic Church station, Rádio Renascença. If they had, they would have noticed a second airwave oddity: church radio broadcasting the Portuguese pop song “Grândola, Vila Morena” at half past midnight.

  But Portuguese men in uniform knew to change channels and listen. Otelo Carvalho had engineered a mutiny signal to be broadcast right over the public airwaves. Twelve vehicles and one hundred fifty cavalrymen, under the command of Captain Salgueiro de Maia, rolled out of the garrison at Santarém, a cavalry school sixty kilometers from the capital, as the last notes of “Grândola” sounded. In Lisbon, the Fifth Infantry Regiment and the Seventh Cavalry were waiting. The First Engineers Regiment, in the suburb of Pontinha, had already been prepared as the headquarters of the rebel government.

  By three a.m., as the city slept, Captain Maia’s troops were taking their positions in Black Horse Square. Lisbon’s commercial and military airports were seized without a shot. The studios of Portuguese television and radio, as well as the central post office, were all taken silently by rebel forces. Air traffic was halted in and out of Oporto airport in the north and Faro on the Algarve.

  At 4:20 in the morning, an anonymous voice crackled across Rádio Clube Português, apologizing for the break in music, appealing for calm, and imploring the people of Lisbon to remain in their homes. The secret police, the voice said, were to “abstain from any confrontation.”

  The message was repeated at 4:45. Then at 6:45, a spokesman from an organization no average citizen of Portugal had heard of, Movimento das Forças Armadas, declared that military units had encircled the capital.

  The sun rose over a Lisbon liberated after forty-eight years of fascist dictatorship. Joyful crowds descended on the Largo do Carmo, the headquarters of the Republican National Guard, shouting by name the members of the government they wanted handed over to the mob. As noon approached, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho—his hair grayer than it was in Guiné, the softness of his neck replaced by lean sinew—led a small group of officers through quiet residential streets to the modest home of General António de Spínola. Phone calls were made, talks ensued. And at 5:40 p.m., April 25, General Spínola drove in his black Peugeot through a throng of cheering Lisboners to the Largo do Carmo.

  Twenty minutes later, a loudspeaker announced Caetano had handed over his powers. António de Spínola was now the head of the Portuguese government. The Carnation Revolution had come and gone.

  “Your story is coming to an end, isn’t it?” I asked Elizabeth.

  She smiled.

  “‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end.’ Am I boring you, David?”

  “Not at all,” I objected, and I meant it. I was more puzzled than anything. Obviously my biggest questions had yet to be answered: Where was João now? How did she and Cristina escape Africa? Most of all, what happened to Hans? But the wars in Africa would surely be ending now. My own days in Brighton were numbered. The centrifugal force of home was growing stronger as the warmth of spring was taking hold. But then there was the gravitational pull that was Cristina.

  Elizabeth seemed to read my mind.

  “Hate to break it to you but we’ve got a ways to go.”

  My study sessions with Cristina had slowed with the crush of more pressing work as her final secondary-school year was drawing to a close. I imagined she was pulling away, that she had come to her senses. I was disappointed, but I understood. She would be starting college soon. Her uncle was moving on, and with him, her mother—somewhere, who knew where? I would be leaving as well.

  I climbed the stairs past midnight, and there she was, standing in the doorway of the parlor. She wore loose flannel pajamas and fuzzy slippers, not exactly seductive, yet she was. Her hair cascaded over the floppy collar. Her face, so delicate, so lovely, was trained on mine. Her breasts, unconfined beneath pink striped flannel, made me ache.

  “Do you still have time for my history, David?”

  I looked at her in surprise.

  “You know, just wondering. With all of Mother’s stories and that Portuguese silliness, I thought you were done with our lessons.”

  “I thought we were moving on to biology?” I rejoined with a sly smile I hoped passed for seductive.

  “We have other things to master first, don’t we?”

  Tired but buzzing, I sat down on the floor again with Cristina to hash over the significance of the Magna Carta, whether a document empowering dukes and barons had any real lessons for a democracy centuries away. My heart wasn’t in it. I was waiting for a sign from Cristina, some invitation, and it wasn’t coming.

  “What’s wrong, David? Do you need to go to sleep?” she asked.

  I felt a surge of exasperation, fueled by fatigue but also genuine confusion.

  “Cristina, what’s going on here? I thought…I…I thought something was happening between us. I don’t know. I, I think I need help here.”

  Cristina looked down at her hands and was silent for a moment. The quiet enveloped us.

  “David, are you always so forward?” she finally asked, shyly. “I need to study. I thought you were helping me.”

  I tried to take her hand but she pulled it away.

  Then it just slipped out. I blurted. “Cristina, I think I’m in love with you.”

  She looked startled, as if I had slapped her. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she looked out through a window into the darkness. I stared at her in silence, waiting. When she finally turned her head to me, her face, creased with tears, was hardened slightly.

  “This seems like a load of bollocks frankly, David. You’re trying to sneak off a last thrill with me. I don’t think that sounds like love.”

  Her eyes dropped to my lap, and mine followed, as the elation over my confession, the unburdening of a rock I had carried around, seemed to flatten me now. I was drained and hurt.

  “Don’t be mean, Cristina.” I paused. “I’m sorry; what should I have said? I have very strong feelings for you. I do, OK? You don’t want me to say I’m in love. Fine, we’ll call it something else, call it X. I’m X for you.”

  She started laughing.

  “OK.”

  Another long pause, then her face softened a little.

  “Whatever X is, I swear, Cristina, it’s real. Please believe me. Please. I need you to believe me.”

  “I’m sorry, David. I was cruel. I didn’t know what to say. Give me some time to think about it, OK?”

  I nodded.

  A delicate finger touched under my chin and lifted my head. Our eyes met. She was smiling.

  “OK, Mr. X?”

  Dearest Hans,

  What was it you wrote, about the masses floating on an indifferent sea of history? I understand that all too well. My little family, Cristina, Joao and I, feel like castaways in a v
iolent ocean. I do not know what you hear in your insular world of the events rocking Lisbon and, by extension, my corner of the world. I fear my life is about to change dramatically, perhaps for the best but perhaps for the far, far worst.

  My physician of a husband has become a soldier boy, playing at combat even when he does not have to. War has become his escape from us, it would seem. “O! wither’d is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls are level now with men.” He reports for duty as often as he can, as if he has a death wish, a trained doctor masquerading as a combat medic. When he is at home, he is a bully boy, carousing, whoring, and on occasion, hitting me. It is as if the passionate young man I fell in love with was captured by guerrillas and replaced with a tormenter, determined to drive another white interloper from Africa by slow torture.

  It is not all so bad. Our latest city, Nova Lisboa, New Lisbon, is wonderful—temperate, lush, charming even. I have a dear friend here, Greta Vanderbroek, a South African Boer. Lord knows what persecutions her family has rained down on the blacks of her country, but we don’t talk politics. I’m sure you would approve of my studied indifference. Her husband appears to be some sort of secret agent or gun runner, no doubt up to nefarious acts. But they live in a lovely, tropical bungalow, and I need the reprieve. Samuel serves the finest scotch. And their children are old enough to relieve me of childcare every once in a while.

  Not that I am looking for much relief. Truly, I love motherhood, and our daughter, Cristina, is growing into a raven-haired angel, sweet and brave and loving, “prodigious birth of love it is to me.” Even you would swoon.

  I fear, though, we will soon be swept away from all this. The coup in Lisbon has brought to power my old friends, the tired generals of Guine and Angola, exhausted of war, determined to let empire go the way of our own Pax Britannica. I am no die-hard imperialist, but what is to become of us when the armies of Lisbon’s enemies have the run of this place? I only hope Joao has the sense to know when all is lost. Then, we shall say, “Now go we in content, to liberty and not to banishment.” Ah, just to write such lovely words makes me wonder if I am clinging on long past the death knell.

  Watch the newspapers for me, Hans. I fear I will not be able to keep you abreast of such tumultuous changes.

  Yours,

  Elizabeth

  Chapter Seventeen

  News of the Carnation Revolution had shocked Angola, not only the ordinary citizens and soldiers but the men who would shape or destroy its future.

  On the day of the coup, Agostinho Neto was in Canada, courting support from the American Gulf Oil Company. A protection racket really, Gulf would provide money and guns to the MPLA, and Neto would provide the muscle to protect the company’s operations from the rival guerrilla gangs, especially in the hot zone of Cabinda, where the oil was. He flew back quickly to open quiet peace talks with Lisbon. Holden Roberto issued a statement saying his forces would fight on until complete independence was won. Secretly, he too reached out to the Armed Forces Movement. Jonas Savimbi, South Africa’s stooge, declared a ceasefire even as his ragtag army, UNITA, closed in on Nova Lisboa.

  The combatants met in an Algarve beach resort in Alvor for what Spínola was determined would be a final political solution, one way or the other. They set November 11, 1975, as Angolan Independence Day. As the Portuguese washed their hands of Angola, an MPLA negotiator was asked what the Alvor accord meant. “It means we need to get more guns.”

  As their world crumbled, Elizabeth and João were finding some of their happiest times in Africa. Like a camera lens, the aperture was closing, darkness was falling, but as the focus sharpened, the Gonçalves family became only more rooted to the last patch of Angolan ground available. And that patch was seeded by an odd little man named Dr. Fernando Real e Rui Vaz Osório.

  Whether out of willful oblivion or hopeful defiance, Dr. Osório had arrived in Nova Lisboa just after the New Year, 1975, as Lisbon was cutting the cord. He was dispatched to set up the Institute of Biomedical Sciences. In isolation, it seemed logical enough. The city was already home to the Institute of Veterinary Sciences and the Institute of Agronomy. Five hundred first-year medical students from Luanda were adrift, cut off from a capital city in chaos. They needed a university to complete their training. Nova Lisboa, so long considered the most vulnerable target, was now viewed as a refuge.

  For João, Osório’s arrival was a welcome diversion—from the military, which had become pure tedium in the interregnum; from home, where the cycle of fighting and contrition was wearing him down; and from his own sense of alienation and his growing understanding that his stay here would be ending soon. He petitioned the base commander to discharge him honorably from the military.

  “João,” the commander said, smiling, “this isn’t a job you simply tender your resignation from and walk away.”

  “Sir, I have served for more than four years. Have I dishonored the Portuguese army?”

  “No, Major, but you reenlisted, and that reenlistment was not month-to-month.”

  “But…”

  The colonel held up his hand for silence from behind his military-grade desk. His hands entwined behind his back, he made a few grandiloquent paces in the small office.

  “Major Gonçalves, rules are rules. I will let you join the faculty at this strange new institute; Lord knows how long it will last. But you will remain a reservist. This war could well be over for the likes of you and me. Or it could explode in our faces tomorrow. We live in odd and unpredictable times.”

  He extended a hand, and the men shook formally.

  “Oh, and João,” the colonel called out, as João was walking out of the Quonset hut, “keep the apartment, but I wouldn’t get too comfortable.”

  The courses João taught brought him steady, challenging tasks, late nights grading papers and drafting lesson plans, and a regularity he hadn’t felt since leaving the clinic on the Algarve. He drifted away from the soldiers’ orbit. Elizabeth and he warmed to each other. They were even learning to make love in silence as their young daughter slept. She’d meet him on occasion at school with Cristina, her arm swinging a picnic basket, and the three would walk to the park for a lunch of bread, mangos or jack fruit, and expensive imported cheese. He dipped his face on occasion into her neck, under her arms, between her legs, no longer intoxicated by her smell but sufficiently aroused to forget things. War may have been closing in, but in their new domesticity, João and Elizabeth convinced themselves it was receding.

  Evidence to the contrary mounted. In the early hours of July 11, 1975, in the slums of Luanda, the body of a white cabdriver was found strangled to death. On July 22, five hundred or so white thugs marched to the governor’s palace, jeering at, kicking, and beating blacks on the way. When a black policeman was pounded nearly to death, the Ultras were beset by black Angolan defenders. The riot that followed left more than fifty dead and hundreds wounded.

  The flight from Angola began then, slowly at first, but it built up steam inexorably. Luanda, then Nova Lisboa became cities of crates and boxes. Entire factories were emptied and loaded onto ships for Lisbon and São Paulo. In the growing vacuum, the rival guerrilla armies stepped up their slaughter. Rotting corpses poisoned the water supply in Malanje, the opposing fighters throwing the dead into the wells. Artillery fire thundered into the outskirts of Luanda. Refugees packed the central city. The capital’s Craveiro Lopes Airport was overwhelmed with whites clamoring for flights to Lisbon. On the beaches of Luanda Bay, Lobito, and Benguela, Africans awaited steamers and container ships, hoping for safe harbor in ports to the north.

  The last governor of Angola flew to Portugal in mid-August for consultations about the final handover of power with a Lusitanian government that no longer cared. “Perhaps they can just mail the flag to Lisbon,” he grumbled as he looked over his shoulder at what remained of Luanda.

  João Gonçalves did not seem to care. The highlands that nestled their home in Nova Lisboa were far away.
Life was good. Lulled by her husband’s confidence and good temper, Elizabeth did nothing.

  It was early when Samuel Vanderbroek knocked on the apartment door. September had just arrived. It was still cool in the Southern Hemisphere, but temperatures were beginning to creep up. João was getting his notes ready and stuffing a satchel for school. It had been months since the two families had seen each other. João and Elizabeth read the newspapers with some trepidation but did not let even the sight of refugees from the highlands intrude too much on the rhythms of a life they were finally enjoying. Domesticity was a welcome change—the quotidian of sandwich making and laundry hanging and cigarette butts tossed absentmindedly in gutters and the faint smell of garbage that needed attending to.

  It was simple joy after so much strife. Neither was ready to disturb it, even though when they reached for each other, there was a thin sheath of indifference between them. Here they were, waiting some sort of end.

  “Samuel, what a surprise,” João said, as he opened the flat door, startled by the burly blond man in the hallway. Samuel’s hair was longer than usual, his face hastily and roughly shaven, with little patches of untended stubble.