The Tuner of Silences

by Mia Couto

  Later, as the soldier left the hospital where he had been treated, my old man avoided Zachary’s attempt to give him a grateful hug:

  —Don’t thank me. All I did was pay you back . . .

  My brother slept in the living room. That night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I pulled up a canvas chair and sat down by the front door. It was misty and the dew made the surroundings hazy. I thought of Noci. And I missed the chasms she had opened beneath my feet. Maybe I would go and see her, if she persisted in staying away.

  I half-expected to hear the door open. My brother couldn’t sleep either. Holding the cards, he invited me:

  —Fancy a game, Mwanito?

  The game was just an excuse, of course. We played without talking, as if the result of the game were all-important. Then Ntunzi spoke:

  —On my way to the city, I passed by Jezoosalem.

  —Aproximado said it’s completely changed.

  It wasn’t true. In spite of everything, time hadn’t penetrated beyond the entrance to the game reserve. Ntunzi assured me of this as he described in detail all that he had seen of our old home. I stopped him before he began his account:

  —Wait a minute, let’s bring father here.

  —But won’t he be sleeping?

  —Sleeping is his way of living.

  We hauled old Silvestre out on our arms, and deposited him so that he was reclining on the last step.

  —Now, you can go on. Tell us what you saw, Ntunzi.

  —But can he hear anything? I think he can, isn’t that so, Silvestre Vitalício?

  In a loud voice, my brother embellished every detail, and took me through his last visit. My father remained with his eyes closed, unresponsive.

  —I spent a whole day in my past. One day in Jezoosalem.

  That’s how Ntunzi began the account of his visit. He had ferreted around for signs of our stay in the encampment, looked for the secret notes that I had scribbled over the years and buried in the garden. He visited the ruined buildings, scratched the ground as if scraping his own skin, as if his memories were some lump hidden inside his body. And he rescued the pack of cards from the hiding place where I had buried it. That was the only testimony to our presence there.

  He held the little pieces of card, and raised them up to the sky as one does with the newly born. Some of them were faded and illegible. Kings, knaves and queens had been dethroned by the worms of time.

  —And after that, Ntunzi? What did you do, what happened afterwards?

  My brother climbed up to look on top of the cupboard in our room and there was the old case where he had hidden his drawings. He shook the dust off them, so that he could see more clearly the dozens of sketches of our mother’s face. All of them were different, but they all had the same large eyes of someone who is in the world as if standing at a window: waiting for another life.

  Ntunzi interrupted his story, and suddenly knelt down to look into my father’s face.

  —What’s happened, Ntunzi?—I asked.

  —It’s Father . . .he’s crying . . .

  —No, he’s always like that . . .it’s tiredness, that’s all.

  —It looked to me as if he was crying.

  My brother had lost contact with us and no longer knew how to read our old father’s face. I gathered up the cards and placed them in Ntunzi’s hands.

  —Please, brother, read me the pack, remind me what I wrote.

  There followed moments as thick as a river in full flow. My brother pretended to be deciphering tiny letters among the beards of kings and the tunics of queens. I knew he was inventing almost everything, but for years, neither of us had been able to distinguish the frontier between memory and lying. Sitting in his chair on the veranda and swaying his body as my old father used to do, Ntunzi interrupted his reading when he saw that I was completely still.

  —Have you fallen asleep, Mwanito?

  —Do you remember how I was cold and distant yesterday, when we met?

  —I admit that I was taken aback. I’d chosen my smartest uniform . . .

  —The problem is that I suffer from the same illness as our father.

  For the first time I confessed that which had been stifling my heart for ages: I had inherited my father’s madness. For long periods of time, I was assailed by selective blindness. My inner being was invaded by the desert, which turned our neighbourhood into a community peopled by absences.

  —I have fits of blindness, Ntunzi. I suffer from Silvestre’s sickness.

  I went to the drawer in the kitchen and pulled out my school folder, which I opened out before my brother’s astonished look.

  —Look at these papers—I said, holding out a bundle of pages covered in handwriting.

  I had written all this during my moments of darkness. Assaulted by fits of blindness, I ceased seeing the world. All I could see were letters, everything else was shadows.

  —You are a shadow now.

  —I’ve got a name that means shadow.

  —Can you read the handwriting?

  —Of course, this is your handwriting. Careful and neat, like it always was . . . Wait a minute, are you saying you wrote all this without seeing?

  —My blindness lifts only when I write.

  Ntunzi chose a page at random and read out loud: “These are my last utterances, Silvestre Vitalício proclaimed. Pay attention, my sons, because no one will ever listen to my voice again. I myself am taking leave of my voice. I say this to you: you committed a grave mistake in bringing me to the city. I am in the process of dying because of that perfidious journey. The frontier between Jezoosalem and the city wasn’t based on distance. Fear and guilt were the only frontier. No government in the world is more oppressive than fear and guilt. Fear made me live, humble and withdrawn. Guilt caused me to flee myself, empty of memories. This is what Jezoosalem was: it wasn’t a place but a time of waiting for a God to be born. Only such a God would alleviate the punishment that I had imposed on myself. Yes, only now do I understand: my sons, my two sons, only they can bring me that sense of forgiveness.”

  His voice faltered and he stopped reading. My brother crouched next to Silvestre and read the last sentence again “. . .my sons, my two sons . . .”

  —Did you say that, Silvestre?

  Faced with my father’s passivity, Ntunzi turned to me and asked, his voice trembling with emotion:

  —Is this true, brother? Did Father say this?

  —These pages contain all that is our life. And when is living, Ntunzi, for real?

  I tidied the sheets and put them away in the folder. And I gave him my book as my final and only belonging.

  —Here is Jezoosalem.

  Ntunzi clutched the folder and went back into the house. I watched my brother disappear into the darkness, while the memories returned of a time when we would erase our tracks to protect our solitary refuge. And I recalled the half-light where I had deciphered my first letters. And I remembered the twinkling light of the stars over the river. And striking off the days on the blackened wall of time.

  Suddenly, I felt an immense longing for Noci. Maybe I’ll go and look for her sooner than I thought. That woman’s tenderness was confirmation for me that my father was wrong: the world hadn’t died. In fact, the world hadn’t even been born. Who knows, I may learn, in the attuned silence of Noci’s arms, to find my mother walking across an endless wasteland before reaching the last tree.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MIA COUTO was born in Beira, Mozambique in 1955. He dropped out of medical school to join the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in his country. When Mozambique became independent in 1975, Couto was named Director of Information in the revolutionary government, and served as editor of two newspapers. In the 1980s, he returned to university to study environmental biology while beginning his writing career.

  Couto is the author of more than 25 books of fiction, essays and poems. His novels and short story collections have been published in 20 languages. Two of his novels have been made into feat
ure films and his books have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe and South America. In 2002, a committee of African literary critics named his novel Sleepwalking Land one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century. His novels have been awarded major literary prizes in Mozambique, Portugal, Brazil and Italy.

  Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant and a theatre director.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  DAVID BROOKSHAW has translated six books by Mia Couto, including Sleepwalking Land, Under the Frangipani and The Last Flight of the Flamingo. He is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Lusophone literatures at the University of Bristol. His recent books include translations of Portuguese-language fiction from the Azores Islands, Macau and China, and the critical study, Perceptions of China in Modern Portuguese Literature.