The Tuner of Silences

by Mia Couto

  —Can you hear me?

  —Yes.

  —Well, listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you: never shame me like this again. Do you hear?

  Dordalma nodded, her eyes closed and he got up and turned away. Your mother placed her feet on the ground and sought her husband’s arm for support. Silvestre dodged and blocked her way to the hall:

  —Stay here. I don’t want the children to see you in this state.

  She was to remain in the kitchen, and get properly washed. Later, when the household was asleep, she could go to her room and stay there in peace and quiet. As for him, Silvestre Vitalício, he’d suffered enough vexations for one day.

  Your father awoke, terrified, as if an inner voice were summoning him. His chest was heaving, his sweat flowing as if he were made solely of water. He went to the window, drew back the curtains and saw his wife hanging from the tree. There was a gap between her feet and the ground. He understood immediately: that tiny space was what separated life from death.

  Before the street awoke, Silvestre, stepping swiftly, walked over to the casuarina, as if the only thing in front of him was some herbaceous creature made of leaves and branches. Your mother appeared to him like some dried fruit, the rope no more than a stem. He brushed aside the branches and silently cut the rope, only to hear the thud as the body fell to the ground. He regretted it immediately. He’d heard that sound before: it was the sound of earth falling on a coffin lid. That noise was to cling to his inner ear like moss on a sunless wall. Later on, your silence, Mwanito, was his defence against this recriminating echo.

  For the second time in quick succession, Silvestre crossed the road with your mother in his arms. But this time, it was as if she had left her weight hanging from the gallows. He placed her body on the floor of the veranda and looked: there was no trace of blood, no sign of an illness or injury from a fight. If it weren’t for the complete stillness of her breast, one would say she was alive. At this point, Silvestre burst into tears. Whoever passed that way would have thought that Silvestre had succumbed to the pain of death. But it wasn’t his widower’s state that was making him weep. Your father was crying because he felt scorned. A married woman’s suicide is the worst indignity for any husband. Wasn’t he the legitimate owner of her life? In that case, how could he accept such a humiliating act of disobedience? Dordalma hadn’t abdicated from life: having lost possession of her own life, she had cast the spectacle of her own death in your father’s face.

  You already know what happened at the funeral. The wind deranged the graves, making it impossible to carry out a burial. Others were needed, the professional gravediggers, to complete the interment. Once home, after the funeral, Ntunzi was the most solitary of all the children in the world. No amount of affection from those present could console him. Only a word from old Silvestre Vitalício could heal him. But your father remained distant. It was you who passed through the crowd and took the widower’s face in your little hands. Your hands offered Silvestre a refuge, tucked away inside a perfect silence. Maybe it was in that silence that he caught a glimpse of Jezoosalem, that place beyond all places.

  After the funeral, your father shut himself away for days in the church. He didn’t join in the choir, but he attended the service and later would lie around as if he were a beggar without a home to go to. Sometimes, he would sit down at the piano and his fingers would run up and down the keyboard dreamily. It was July, and the cold was such that one’s hands, nestling in one’s pockets, grow forgetful.

  It was during one of these retreats that Zachary entered the church. He had just got back from the front line, and was still wearing a military coat. Kalash went up to your father and greeted him with a hearty hug. It looked as if they were hugging each other affectionately, but they were fighting. What they were whispering to each other sounded like words of consolation, but they were death threats. Whoever passed by would scarcely guess that they were in mortal confrontation. And no one could claim to have heard the shot. The blood dripping from Zachary’s uniform as he left could never be taken as proof. Silvestre wiped the floor, and left no trace of the violence. There was no fight, no shot, no blood. To all appearances, the two friends had lingered in their embrace, comforting each other in their mutual grief at the disappearance of your dear mother, Dordalma.

  Now you know why Ntunzi left with Kalash. Why he’s destined to be a soldier, which has been the fate of generations in Zachary’s family. Now you know why Silvestre feared the wind and the way the trees danced phantasmally. Now you know the purpose behind Jezoosalem and the exile of the Venturas away from the world. It wasn’t just because your father was unhinged and that Jezoosalem was a chance product of his madness. For Silvestre, the past was an illness and memories a punishment. He wanted to live in oblivion. He wanted to lead his life far from guilt.

  When you read this letter, I shall no longer be in your country. To be more precise, I shall be with Zachary: shorn of a country I can call my own, but sworn to serve causes invented by others. I’m returning to Portugal without Marcelo, I return without part of myself. Wherever I go I shall never find space enough for herons to soar in flight. In Jezoosalem, the earth will always contain more earth.

  Noci once told me of the emptiness of her relationship with Aproximado. How their love had drained away over the course of time. Although our trajectories were so different, we both trod the same paths. I had left my home country to look for a man who was betraying me. She was betraying herself with someone who didn’t love her.

  —Why do we put up with so much?

  —Who?

  —We women. Why do we put up with so much, with everything?

  —Because we’re afraid.

  Our greatest fear is loneliness. A woman cannot exist on her own, for she risks stopping being a woman. Either that or, for everyone’s peace of mind, she becomes something else: a mad woman, an old hag, a witch. Or, as Silvestre would say, a whore. Anything but a woman. This is what I told Noci: in this world we are only somebody if we are a spouse. That’s what I am now, even though I’m a widow. I’m a dead man’s spouse.

  I’m leaving you the photos we took, of our days in the game reserve. One of them, my favourite, shows the moonlight reflected in the lake. That night, I fear, was the last time I saw the moon. I still have some of its diffuse light left to illuminate the long nights that await me.

  I want to thank you for everything that I experienced and learnt in this place of yours. The lesson I learnt is this: death separated me from Marcelo in the same way that we are parted from the birds by night. Just for a season of sadness.

  We re-encounter our beloved on the next moonlit night. Even without a lake, even without night, even without the moon. They return to us ever more, within the light, their clothes floating in the river’s flow.

  I don’t know whether I am happier than you: I have a house to go back to. I have my parents, I have my social circle in which I can live up to whatever expectations others have of me. Those who love me have accepted that I had to leave. But they insist that I return unchanged, recognizable, as if my journey were just a passing phase. You are a child, Mwanito. There is still a long journey, a lot of childhood, that you can live. No one can ask you to be only a keeper of silences.

  You won’t be writing back. I’m not leaving an address, or any sign of me. If you ever feel like finding out about me one day, ask Zachary. He gave me the task of regaining part of his past in Portugal. He wants his godmother back, he wants the magic of those letters to be reborn. One day, I’m sure, I’ll come back to see you again. But there will never be another Jezoosalem.

  THE BOOK

  Never again

  Will your face be pure clear and alive

  Nor your stride like a fleeting wave

  The steps of time weave.

  Never again will I yield up my life to time.

  Never more will I serve a master who may die.

  The evening light shows me the wreckage

  Of yo
ur being. Soon decay

  Will swallow up your eyes and your bones

  Taking in its hand your hand.

  Never again will I love him who cannot live

  For ever,

  For I loved as if they were eternal

  The glory, the light, the lustre of your being,

  I loved you in truth and transparency

  And am even bereaved of your absence,

  Yours is a face of repulsion and denial

  And I close my eyes so as not to see you.

  Never more will I serve a master who may die.

  Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

  Five years had passed since Marta, Ntunzi and Zachary had gone. One day, Aproximado called me to the room where Noci was, along with some kids from the neighbourhood. On the table, there was a cake with some candles stuck in the white sugar icing.

  —Count the candles— my Uncle ordered.

  —What for?

  —Count them.

  —There are sixteen.

  —That’s how old you are— Aproximado said. —Today is your birthday.

  Never before had they given me a birthday party. In fact, it had never occurred to me that there had been a day on which I was born. But here, in this austere room in our house, the table was laid with cakes and drinks, decorated with streamers and balloons. On the icing of the cake, my name was written.

  They went and got my old man, and sat him down next to me. One by one, the guests gave me their presents, which I piled clumsily on the chair by my side. All of a sudden, they started singing and clapped their hands. I realized that for a brief moment I was the centre of the universe. At Aproximado’s instruction, I blew out the candles at one go. At that moment, my father stirred, and without anyone noticing, he squeezed my arm. It was his way of showing affection.

  Hours later, after he had returned to his room, Silvestre retreated as usual into his shell. For five years, I was the one who looked after him, who guided him through the banalities of his daily routine, who helped him to eat and to wash himself. It was Uncle Aproximado who looked after me. He would often sit down in front of Silvestre, as one family member to another, and after holding his gaze for some time, would ask himself out loud:

  —Aren’t you pretending to be mad just so as not to pay me what you owe?

  One couldn’t detect so much as a hint of a reply on Vitalício’s face. I appealed to Uncle’s reason: how could play-acting be so convincing and long-lasting?

  —The thing is that they are old debts, left over from the days at Jezoosalem. Your father hadn’t paid for his supplies for years.

  —Not to mention the rest —he added.

  Aproximado never explained what this “rest” consisted of. And so his lamentations continued, always in the same tone: his brother-in-law never imagined how difficult it was to reach Jezoosalem by road. Nor how much a truck driver had to pay to avoid an ambush and escape attack. A secret of survival, he suggested, was to lunch with the devil and eat the leftovers with the angels. And he concluded, as if giving his intelligence a bit of spit and polish:

  —It serves me right. Business deals among relatives lead to . . .

  —I can pay, Uncle.

  —Pay what?

  —What you’re owed . . .

  —Don’t make me laugh, nephew.

  If there were debts, the truth is that Aproximado didn’t take it out on me. On the contrary, he protected me like the son he never had. If it hadn’t been for him, I would never have attended the local school. I’ll never forget my first day in class, the strange feeling at seeing so many children sitting in the same room together. There was something stranger still: it was a book that united us for hours on end, weaving together childhood dreams in an aging world. For years I had taken myself to be the only child in the universe. And during that life, a solitary child was forbidden to look at a book. That was why, from the first lesson onwards, while the times tables and the alphabet flowed around the room, I caressed my notebooks and recalled my pack of cards.

  My fascination for learning didn’t go unnoticed by the teacher. He was a thin, wizened man, his eyes deep-set and grown old. He spoke passionately about injustice and against the newly rich. One afternoon, he took the group to visit the place where a journalist who had denounced corruption had been murdered. There was no monument nor any sign of official recognition in the place. There was just a tree, a cashew tree, to recall for posterity the courage of someone who had risked his life to expose dishonesty.

  —Let us leave flowers on this sidewalk to clean away the blood; flowers to wash away the shame.

  These were the teacher’s words. With our master’s money we bought flowers and we strewed them over the sidewalk. On our way back, the teacher was walking in front of me and I noticed how lacking in weight he was, so much so that I feared he might take off into the sky like some paper kite.

  —Is that what he did?—Noci was astonished.—He took you to visit the people’s journalist?

  —And we left flowers, all . . .

  —Well then, tomorrow you’re going to take this teacher some papers. Plus a little letter I’m going to write . . .

  I didn’t know what was going through her head, but the girl didn’t need any encouragement. At her command, I kept watch down the hall while she rummaged through Aproximado’s drawers. She gathered together some documents, scribbled a short note and put everything in an envelope.

  It was this envelope that I delivered to the teacher the following morning. By now, it was clear how ill our gentle master was. And he grew thinner and thinner until the merest clothing seemed too big on him. Eventually, he stopped coming and it wasn’t long before we were told he had died. They later told us he had been suffering from the “sickness of the century.” That he had been the victim of the “pandemic.” But they never mentioned the name of the illness.

  Silvestre went with me to the teacher’s funeral. In the cemetery, he passed Dordalma’s grave. And he sat down with the weight of one who was never going to get up again. He remained there silent and unmoving, with only his feet brushing the sand, this way and that, like the continuous swing of a pendulum. I gave him a little time and then urged him:

  —Shall we go home, Father?

  There would be no going home. At that moment, I realized: Silvestre Vitalício had lost all contact with the world. Before, he almost never spoke. Now, he had stopped even seeing people. They were mere shadows. And he never spoke again. My old man was blind to himself. He didn’t even have a home inside his own body.

  That night, I thought about the deceased teacher. And I came to the conclusion that the “sickness of the century” was some sort of calcification of the past, an intermittent fever made of time. This illness ran in our family. The following day, I announced at school:

  —My father suffers from it too . . .

  —What?

  —The sickness of the century.

  They looked at me with pity and repulsion, as if I were the bearer of some perilous contagion. Friends avoided me, neighbours kept their distance. This exclusion by all, I have to admit, gave me a certain satisfaction, as if deep down I wanted to return to my solitude. And over time, I allowed myself to go astray. After the teacher’s death, I lost interest in school. I would leave home in the morning, all dressed up for it, but I would stick around in the yard, scribbling down memories in the notebook I kept as a diary. When everything around had become darkness, my pages still preserved the light of day. When I got home, I began to greet my father in the old way, in accordance with the rules of Jezoosalem:

  —I can go to bed now, Father. I’ve hugged the earth.

  Perhaps, deep down, I yearned for the immense hush of my sad past.

  And then there was Noci, an additional reason for skipping school. Aproximado’s girlfriend offered to help me with my homework. Even if I didn’t have any, I invented it just to have her leaning over me, her huge dark eyes spearing mine. And then there was the bead of sweat running down be
tween her breasts that I followed, doused and aroused by that drop, descending into her bosom until I sank into tremors and sighs.

  Early in the morning, Noci would go around the house almost in a state of undress. I began to have erotic dreams. It wasn’t new to me: female classmates, women teachers and neighbours had all made appearances in my daydreams. But this was the first time the gentle presence of a woman had placed the entire house under her spell. I found one thing out later: in the heat of the night, I wasn’t the only one to have such dreams.

  I don’t know how much love Noci still gave to Aproximado. The truth is that we sometimes heard groans coming from their room. My father would toss and turn in his bed. He who had closed his ears to everything still had ears for this. On one occasion, I noticed that he was crying. It then became clear: Silvestre Vitalício would weep on the nights when the house was aglow with love.

  Love is addictive even before it has happened. That’s what I learnt, just as I learnt that dreams grow more intense the more they are repeated. The more I clamoured for Noci in my nightly ravings, the more real her presence became. Until one night, I could have sworn that it was she, in the flesh, who furtively entered my room. Her figure slipped between my sheets and, during the moments that ensued, I sprawled across the intermittent frontier between our bodies. I don’t know whether it was really she who visited me. I know that after she left, my father wept in the bed next to mine.

  My uncle never tired of going on about how he hadn’t been paid for his services to the family. But from what we could see, Silvestre’s debts didn’t leave Aproximado in any state of need. Our Uncle boasted of the money he made from the business of selling hunting permits. “But isn’t that illegal?” Noci would ask. Well, what is illegal these days? One hand dirties the other and both imitate the gesture of Pontius Pilate, isn’t that so? That’s how Uncle responded. And not a day went by when he didn’t return with fresh motives for rejoicing: he cancelled fines, turned a blind eye to infringements and conjured up complications for new investors.