The sight of that body corroded by decay turned him into a somnambulist; he wandered away from the railings, picked up his birdcage, began walking slowly, mechanically He no longer noticed the passersby, did not seek to avoid the patrols. As vividly as one hallucinating, he pictured his mother beside that half naked man, his dark wounds buzzing with flies. And told himself that there must surely be a place somewhere on earth where his mother and that prisoner could have taken refuge to keep their sufferings at bay, if only for the duration of a sigh. There must be a being who would have offered them shelter.
At that hour, Dondo Cathedral, massive as a fortress, was empty and silent. Elias heard the echo of his own footfalls on the paved floor, and even, it seemed to him, the beating of his own heart, amplified by the height of the nave. So polished was the gilding on the statue of the Virgin that it appeared translucent. He had difficulty in making out the expression on the face amid this glitter, peered at the lowered eyelids, the tartly closed lips….
He prayed like a child who had never learned to pray. Only this vision was put into words: “I want my mother to be sitting there in the doorway of our house in the evening. I want to hide my face in the crook of her arm.” The words, haltingly whispered, sought to convey this to the statue of the woman with lowered eyelids and tart lips. He had once seen a film in a cinema in Luanda, in which a man’s prayer was granted. It happened in books, as well, he knew.
The priest’s shout was terse and harsh. Elias jumped to his feet and ran toward the exit, his head bowed to avoid a second blow from the stick. Father Anibal’s cane thumped on the paving stones with an angry clatter that accompanied the fugitive all the way to the creaking of the great door.
Father Anibal was not a hard man. He was quite simply frightened. At this hour each day he passed through the cathedral on his way to meditate in his big presbytery garden. He had already been deep in his reverie when this young black jumped up in front of him. Furthermore, even before taking fright, the priest had sensed an anguished intensity within the empty space of the building, an unaccustomed density amid that air laden with silent prayers, whether ancient or recent. He knew what people generally asked heaven for. On this occasion there was a difference in the vibration left by the unspoken words. And yet the cathedral was empty. He had taken several steps and then stumbled, knocking over a large basket. No, a birdcage! Strident trilling, wings flapping, and above all, the abrupt movements of this skinny black youth, whom he had at first taken for a lurking dog. He struck out and swore in order to conceal his fear … Once he was settled in his garden, his thoughts returned uneasily to the extraordinary tension he had sensed in the nave just now. The bond uniting the one who prays with the one who receives the prayer. And he, the priest, the confidant of both. In his youth he had truly believed in this … This evening he did not know what troubled his meditation more — the loss of his faith, eroded over the years by contact with the stupidity and cruelty of human beings, or the face of that child running away with his birdcage under his arm.
Two days later they brought his mother to the house. Elias had no time to think about his prayer being answered, for the woman they deposited on the low bed, like a thing, bore little resemblance to his mother. It was as if a blade had sliced this slender shaving of humanity off that solid mass of prisoners. Her arms, shrunk to the outline of the bones, were no longer black but gray. One of her collarbones was broken and stuck out from beneath a filthy bandage. Her mouth seemed very narrow, greatly extended, on account of the line of dried blood stretching her lips at the corners. The crook of her arm, which Elias touched with his brow, remained cold.
They had got rid of her because the authorities did not want a known opponents wife to die in prison. After months of massacres they were trying to calm things down, wipe away the blood, portray themselves to international opinion as humanitarians. The Americans, whose aircraft had been bombing insurgent camps several weeks previously, were now beginning to talk about democracy, decolonization …
At the end of the second night the bird became fren-ziedly agitated in its cage. Elias got up, held it in his hands, tried to calm it. But the creature escaped, flew toward the doorway, perched for a moment on the half that stood open, then vanished into the darkness. His mother died before sunrise while he was away drawing water from the Cuanza. As the dawn came, the river was tinged with pink, and it was almost possible to believe that the world existed for the joy of the living.
A week later Father Anibal, accompanied by two seminarists, came looking for Elias. Troubled by the memory of the young African he had driven away with blows of his stick, he decided to repair the damage. Elias listened to the priests proposals (commands, in fact, which simply had to be obeyed), but his thoughts returned to the pages of a book his mother had read to him long ago in their house in Luanda: a youth who had strayed was set back on the right path by a priest, and all at once a radiant horizon of promises opened up before him…. The next day Elias was admitted to the Mission, the boarding school where he would live and study for four years. His own horizon would be the glorious title of assimilado. Which signified, as he would very soon learn, that he, a negro, little different from a monkey, could one day gain entry to the whites world.
HE STUDIED FEROCIOUSLY, with the obstinacy of a drug addict forever obliged to increase the dose in order to shut out memories. At his age he already had a whole world of blood and death to forget.
Besides, while he had not yet acquired his title of as-similado, it was in his interests not to stray too far from the Mission, for once outside it he reverted to being “a cheeky young African strolling about in the city of the whites.” It was better not to leave the cocoon while preparing, like a pupa, for his metamorphosis into a civilized man.
By the age of fourteen he spoke French and Spanish, in addition to Portuguese, and could read Greek and Latin. He sometimes surprised Father Anibal by quoting from philosophers whom the latter had never read and, occasionally, never even heard of. One day the priest completely lost his temper. They were talking about the history of the church, and Elias alluded to Pope Célestine V, the papal monk who abjured the luxury and pomp his predecessors had surrounded themselves with, a humble man who paid for it with his life. A man who, if he had been living today, would not have tolerated the brazen wealth of some and the poverty of others … Father Anibal flew into a rage, waving his stick; Elias even thought he was about to strike him. “You ve been cramming your poor black head with too many things. You Ve got it all topsy-turvy. Célestine is a saint. And the church needed warriors to bring the word of God to tribes like yours! If we’d not converted you to Christianity, you’d still be living in trees!”
He was a hot-tempered man, Elias knew, but one who bore few grudges and quickly repented of his choleric outbursts. The next day, to make up for it, Father Anibal took him to a reception given by the city authorities. In the great hall decked out with Portuguese flags, Elias stood apart from the elegant dresses and colorful uniforms, close to the window, through which the breezes from the Cuanza wafted in. The guests who caught his eye must have wondered whether they were looking at a servant or a youth of mixed race who had come with his white progenitor. They’ve noted that I no longer have my monkey’s tail, thought Elias with a smile. And they’re telling themselves that in a few more years I may have learned how to eat with a fork….
Watching the coming and going of uniforms, he remembered the yellow room in the long building on piles. It was probably one of these military men who had gone there on a certain evening to couple with a beautiful black woman. The white women among the guests were mainly short and thin, or else extremely fat, in which case they complained noisily about the climate. Each and every one of them clasped her glass in a particular hold that amazed him: reminiscent of a raptors talons, a firm, voracious grip. He reflected that to get to where they had got to in life, they had doubtless needed to be endowed with these tough, clawlike finger-joints. There were also some people of mi
xed race in the company. They were dressed with greater care than the whites and seemed continually on the alert. They practically stood to attention when spoken to and replied in a Portuguese so correct that It lacked all savor, articulating every syllable as people do after being cured of a stammer.
“And that’s the best that could ever happen to me,” thought Elias, as he studied their smooth, rigid faces, their uneasy eyes. Yes, with superhuman application, and by means of countless acts of servility and hypocrisy, he had a fair chance of joining the envied ranks of the people of mixed race — of living in constant fear of losing his status and sinking back to the level of a negro, of having to be whiter than a white.
That evening, after the reception, Father Anibal honored him by inviting him to his garden. They sat in wicker armchairs with cups of tea in their hands. The father was in an excellent mood, that of a jovial parish priest who has drunk good wine, attended a fashionable gathering, and been appreciated for his eloquence. “You see,” he was saying to Elias, “God so loves His creatures that He even allows them to commit evil. Yes. So great is God’s love, that He even grants them this freedom. And that’s why wars, famines and crimes occur.” He doubtless regretted losing his temper the day before and now wanted to show off his doctrinal skills. As he talked about the wars and famines tolerated by God, he had a benign and dreamy air.
I could become a priest, too, Elias said to himself. And he pictured a fine presbytery, a garden like this one, ablaze with bougainvilleas but, most of all, this serenity: nothing happens here that is not the Lord’s will. Then he suddenly knew that this God was hateful to him because he allowed his creatures to smash a woman’s collarbone. That slender broken collarbone was enough for him to reject this world and its creator!
Elias felt this so violently, choking on such a sob in his throat, that the priest, who had just fallen asleep in his armchair, woke up, as if the consistency of the air had changed. He shook himself, yawned, patted his dog, which had come to rub itself against his knees. “My old friend Boko’s been limping for the past couple of days. Take him to the vet tomorrow, all right?”
The police stopped Elias very close to the house of Antonio Carvalho, the vet. He had to explain himself. As he continued on his way Elias remarked to himself, with that sharp irony that would greatly assist him in life: “Boko s an assimilado already”
The state of the dogs health necessitated an extended course of treatment, with two weekly injections. The priest accepted this version in good faith. Elias would call on the vet, leave Boko to run about in the garden, and, with a pounding heart, settle down to listen to this strange white man, this Portuguese who wanted to change the world. Carvalho was married to an Angolan woman, not all that unusual a situation for a colonial. What was unusual was that he had not made a servant of his black wife. “You see, Elias, she’s the one who welcomes us into her country, not the other way round. One day the whites will have to understand this. Yes, we need a real revolution in people’s minds.”
It was at his house that Elias read the works of Marx for the first time, and believed he had found in them what he had grievously lacked: the certainty that the world of human beings was neither predestined nor irremediable and that it was therefore possible to transform it, make it better, root out the evil from it. One could erase from this world the room with yellow walls where an ugly, naked man hopped up and down before a woman who sold him her body for the price of a meal. In this transfigured world a man covered in dark wounds would not be left out in the middle of a prison courtyard crammed with human ghosts. And there would not be a woman’s slender, fragile collarbone, smashed by a soldiers boot… Years later he would study Marx in Moscow, arguing about it with his comrades. But his first reading would remain the most vivid, thanks to this promise of a fight against the evil that God tolerates.
Carvalho had known Elias s father, but there was a serious ideological difference between them. The vet maintained that, according to Lenin, revolution could not lead to victory without a revolutionary situation being created in advance. It was therefore necessary to wait, to prepare the ground, to raise the political consciousness of the masses. Whereas his father followed a voluntarist line advocated by Trotsky, hoping to conquer with the help of a small group of revolutionaries cut off from the people. Lenin called this strategy the “infantile disorder of leftism.”
One secret confided in him made a much greater impression on Elias than all these theoretical distinctions: Carvalho remained in touch with his fathers comrades, and from time to time was visited by his contact agents.
At the start of the following year, 1965, one of these spent several days in hiding at the vets house. Elias met him and heard an account of their struggle in the eastern Congo. During the course of two sleepless nights he made his decision: he would leave with this man to join his fathers companions. He could no longer wait for the famous “revolutionary situation.” For the revolution’s heart was already beating somewhere in the darkness of the Congolese jungle.
“The revolutions heart,” “the darkness” … He was fifteen, and it was in such terms that he pictured the world. But, most of all, he wanted his father to know how his mother had died.
3
SO HERE WAS WHERE THE REVOLUTIONS HEART was beating: in this village of the eastern Congo in the Kivu hills. Before his arrival there, Elias had pictured the clash of arms, faces etched by combat, fiery speeches, heroism and sacrifice, words whispered on the brink of death, warriors with proud, manly features. The revolution …
The first thing he saw bore no resemblance to any of that. Two women were preparing a meal in front of a hut, placidly arguing all the time, kneading the dough on the bare plank of the table. Their language was unknown to him, and this made the scene even more commonplace; it would have been the same in Angola or anywhere else, whatever the country, whatever the language. One of the women was big and mature, very fleshy. Her large, almost bare breasts, smeared with flour, swung heavily over the table, colliding with one another at each movement of her arms. The other was very young, with a smooth body and lithe buttocks. There was washing hung out on a line to dry, an almost homely mixture of mens shirts, towels, women’s underwear …
Numb with exhaustion after a long journey, Elias wandered about with the feeling that he had penetrated behind the scenes of the revolution, just where its actors were preparing to perform brave deeds, glorious feats of arms. In the alfresco canteen a soldier was asleep, seated at a table, his head resting on the thick planks where a stripped Kalashnikov lay spread out. One of the parts had tumbled onto the ground. Elias picked it up and set It down discreetly amid the rest of the military Erector Set. Another, stationed amid the bushes, was haranguing his audience. Elias drew closer to listen to him and saw that the orator had no one in front of him. He was addressing empty space, his vacuous gaze floated in a cloud of aromatic, slightly acrid smoke. The same, thought Elias, as used to swirl around the children of the streets, the little hemp smokers In Dondo’s shantytown in the evenings. A young warrior crossed the courtyard with a firmly resolute tread, adjusting a submachine gun on his shoulder, as if at any moment he were about to join battle, then stopped, began chatting with the two cooks and laughing.
Life in this backyard of the revolution seemed like a game Elias could not yet make sense of. They had told him his father was due to return the following morning, and he would doubtless be able to explain these relaxed rebels’ extraordinary way of life. Elias had already noticed a whole host of oddities: the drugged orators harangue, the young submachine gunner s unexpected laughter … And at night, in the room next door, the ponderous wrestling of copulating bodies, an utterly banal activity, so little In harmony with the passionate purity he associated with the revolution. By the full moon s phosphorescent light he could see the end of a bedframe and two pairs of feet. The movements of the soles of the feet reflected the pleasure taken. At one moment the mans right foot was waving wildly and dug a hole In the mattress. It
was ridiculous. Pleasure is ridiculous when there’s no other bond between us, thought Elias. The toes curled, as if in a fit of cramp, then relaxed. The foot expressed everything, from feverish desire to final collapse. The woman was the fat cook he had seen on arrival. He was old enough to sense that among so many men on their own, the presence of such women was inevitable. But he could not understand why the dream of revolution had not yet taught these men and women to pursue a love different in kind from this brief, breathless jiggling.
… Many years later he would recall the naïveté of the question, while telling himself that this boyish view of revolution and love had not been all that foolish. For what is the point of such liberating turmoil if it does not radically change the way we understand and love our fellow human beings? Then he would realize that ever since that night of the full moon, love had become a secret yardstick for him, a touchstone by which to judge all human activity on this earth.
At first Elias thought a thief had arrived: amid the mists of the small hours a man skirted the neighboring hut, pushed open the door discreetly, then stepped outside again and studied himself in the rectangle of mirror fixed beside the door frame. He smoothed his hair, adjusted the collar of his combat kit, turned round….
Elias recognized his father. He struck him as small (It’s because IVe grown, thought Elias) and was dressed with the lady-killer elegance affected by some military men. His uniform was too tight, overloaded with pockets and buttons. He looked like … a Portuguese officer! Elias moved away from the window, hoping his own words could sweep away this painful first impression. He had so much to tell this man.
He wanted to talk to him about his mother in the prison at Dondo. An invisible woman, impossible to make out amid the throng of prisoners. And then, snatched away from that human mass, a mute shadow lying there in their shack on the banks of the Cuanza. And beneath her ashen skin, the white gleam of the broken collarbone. He would talk, too, about Anibal, the priest whose god calmly accepted it all, this broken collarbone, a prisoners body covered in wounds crawling with insects, and the death of this woman who, a few days earlier, had held all the happiness in the world in the crook of her arm….
Human Love Page 4