Six months more and she had gathered around her a group of similarly inclined people, and she had written a play about a halakawuma who was constantly giving the King bad advice. It was a play that took more than seven hours to perform. Dona Esmeralda built the sets, sewed the costumes, directed the actors, and played those parts herself which she had not been able to find anyone else to fill.
On a December evening the theatre was to be re-inaugurated. She had sent invitations to the President and the Minister of Culture, who was not entirely pleased that Dona Esmeralda had refused the good advice of the Ministry's many bureaucrats about how the theatre might best be run. A strong rain storm shorted out the electrical circuits just as the performance was about to begin. The President had sent his regrets, but the corpulent former shoemaker, Adelinho Manjate, who was now the Minister of Culture by virtue of his success as a dancer during his years as a revolutionary soldier, was in attendance. The performance was delayed for several hours. The rain poured through the roof on to the festively clad but increasingly disgruntled audience.
It was past ten o'clock by the time Dona Esmeralda was able to switch on the spotlights again and the first actor, who had forgotten his lines, stepped on to the stage. The performance turned out to be a peculiar experience. It went on until dawn the following morning. None of those present, perhaps least of all the actors, fully understood what the play was about. On the other hand, none of those in attendance ever forgot what they had been part of. Dona Esmeralda, finally alone on the stage at first light, was filled with that singular sense of joy which only those who have achieved the impossible can feel. She thought nostalgically of her father, the old governor, who had not been there to witness this proud moment, and then she realised she was hungry. During the past year she had scarcely had time to eat.
She went out into the city. The rain had stopped and there was a fresh scent from the blooming acacia trees that lined the main streets. She regarded the people she met with curiosity, as if she were noticing for the first time that she was not alone in the city. And she discovered that all of the statues with which her father had adorned the plazas had disappeared. For a moment she felt old, sad that the new era clearly meant that nothing would remain as before. But her triumph was stronger than her sorrow, and she cast off her melancholy thoughts. She stopped at a café, sat down at a table, and ordered a glass of cognac and some bread. As she pondered how she was going to find the money to continue to operate the theatre, she chewed on the bread. That was when it occurred to her that the old ticket office and the abandoned café in the foyer of the theatre could be revamped as a bakery. By selling bread she could earn the money she needed. She ate the rest of the bread, stood up, and returned to the theatre to start the process of cleaning up, to make room for the dough blender and the ovens. To obtain funds for the necessary investments, she sold her car to an official at the British Embassy, and three months later she opened the doors to the bakery.
I, José Antonio Maria Vaz, came to Dona Esmeralda as soon as the rumour spread through the city that she was going to open a bakery. At that time I was working for the baker Felisberto in the harbour district, and I had no thoughts of quitting. And yet, one afternoon after work, I couldn't resist going over to see Dona Esmeralda, who was just then hiring bakers. A long queue wound its way out of the side door of the theatre. I went to the end of the line, even though I knew it was pointless. But I couldn't resist the temptation to stop and, for once in my life, come close to the strange Dona Esmeralda. When it was finally my turn, I was admitted and led into a room where the sparkling stainless-steel dough blender stood waiting to begin its work. Dona Esmeralda was sitting on a low stool in the middle of the room, wearing a long silken gown and a wide-brimmed, flower-patterned hat. She gave me a solemn look. There was something inquisitive about her glance, as if she were asking herself whether she had met me before. Then she nodded abruptly, as if she had made an important decision.
'You look like a baker,' she said. 'Do you have a name?'
'José Antonio Maria Vaz,' I told her. 'I've been baking bread since I was six years old.'
I told her where I was working, but I wasn't sure whether she heard what I said.
'How much is Felisberto paying you?' she interrupted me.
'I earn 130,000,' I said.
'I'll give you 129,000,' she replied. 'If you really want to work here, you'll make do with less than what you're getting from Felisberto.'
I nodded, and so I was hired. That was more than five years ago, but I can still vividly recall the moment. Dona Esmeralda asked me to get started at once. She wanted me to help her with the plans to buy flour and sugar and yeast and butter and eggs. During those long days and nights when we worked together before the bakery opened, she told me about her life. That's how I know all that I know about her. It was through her that I began to understand something about the city in which I live, and about the country that is mine.
Whether Dona Esmeralda was crazy or not, I can't say. On the other hand, I can certainly attest that she possessed an energy and determination that I had never before encountered. The people around her could collapse with fatigue, just from watching her at work in her theatre and bakery. Although she was then between eighty and ninety years old, she never rested. Many nights she didn't even bother to go home; she would simply curl up on some flour sacks, call goodnight to the bakers, and then get up again after half an hour, bursting with renewed energy, as if she had awakened from a long night's sleep. Sometimes, as we waited for the bread to rise, we would discuss when and what Dona Esmeralda actually ate. She was always scraping off the dough from around the edges of the dough blender with her fingers. No one had ever seen her eat anything else. On the other hand, she always had a bottle of cognac nearby. We suspected that it was from the bottle that she drew the strength she needed, but since we were simple people who had never had either the money or the opportunity to taste foreign distilled drinks, always celebrating instead with tontonto, we used to discuss whether her bottles might also contain something that kept a person young. Maybe Dona Esmeralda had a curandeiro who infused her drinks with magical powers.
When I, José Antonio Maria Vaz, first came to Dona Esmeralda's bakery, which she had named the Holy Bread Bakery, I had just turned eighteen. I was a trained baker, although I was still lacking my master's certificate. But I had been baking bread since I was six years old.
It was my father who took me over to my uncle, Master Fernando, who ran a bakery in the African bairro out past the airport. My father, who all his life long was an extremely impractical man, had one day looked at my hands and decided that they were suited for shaping croissants. I would find both my future and my livelihood as a baker. Like almost all other Africans, we were poor. I grew up during the time when no one had yet heard anything of the young revolutionaries who had already gone across the northern border. No one could possibly imagine that anyone would ever question the power of the whites who ruled our country and our lives, and even less that one day the whites would have to flee head over heels, never to return. For generations we had been forced to bow our heads in submission. Even though I now know that oppression can never become a habit, and even though back then opposition did exist in the silence levelled at all the whites who ruled over our lives, there was still no one except the young revolutionaries who seriously believed that anything could be changed. On many occasions, and when he was certain that no white person could hear what he said, my father, who spent his long life talking incessantly, would curse those who had come across the sea and forced us to work on their tea plantations and in their fruit orchards. But it was a protest that tied itself into complicated knots and never led to anything but more words.
For forty years my father sat under a tree in the open area among the sheds and hovels of the bairro. He sat in the shade and talked with the other unemployed men while he waited for the food to be ready which my mother prepared over an open fire. He talked without stopping for all those years; my
mother listened with resignation and never with more than half an ear to what he said, and yet I think it was his beautiful voice that had once made her fall in love with him. They had eleven children; I was the eighth, and seven of us grew up and outlived both our parents. My father, Zeca Antonio, came originally to the city from one of the remote western provinces, and he always talked about how he would one day take his family back there. He met my mother, Graça, almost as soon as he arrived in the city. She was born here, and she was enchanted by all his words. They built their shabby hut in the bairro that had sprung up in connection with the construction of the new airport. Neither of them could read or write, and of us children, only one of my sisters and I ever learned to handle spelling and words.
It wasn't until later, after the young revolutionaries had come to the city and Dom Joaquim's equestrian statues were toppled from their pedestals, that people became truly incensed. As if they saw for the first time the centuries-old injustices to which they had been subjected; and they assumed that the liberation, the freedom that the young revolutionaries talked about, meant the freedom not to work. When they realised that freedom meant they would have to work just as hard, but now they would also have to think for themselves and plan the work that had to be carried out, there were many people who deep in their souls felt thoroughly bewildered. Several years after the whites had disappeared back across the sea, I often heard my father complain about the actions of the young revolutionaries just as quietly as he had once criticised the conditions of the colonial period. And in all seriousness he would express longings for the good old days, when there was law and order and the whites still decided what thoughts needed to be thought. It was a confusing time, when we suddenly had to stop saying patrão and call everyone camarada instead. It was a time when everything was supposed to change, but everything stayed the same, only in a different way.
That was also when the long civil war broke out. The young revolutionaries, who had become middle-aged and rode around in black Mercedes escorted by the shrill sirens of motorcycle police, called the others in the war bandidos armados. From what we could understand, it was the whites who had fled and now dreamed of returning who stood behind them. They had formed a bandit army of malcontent blacks. One day they would return and put Dom Joaquim's statues back in the plazas, they would retake power and decide what thoughts people should think, and the middle-aged revolutionaries would be forced once more to cross the northern border. In the name of these whites, the bandits committed terrifying acts, and we all harboured a great fear that they would win the war.
It wasn't until the year I met Nelio that the war ended. A peace agreement was signed, and the leader of the bandits came to the city and was embraced by the President. The whites had already returned. But they were different whites; they came from countries with peculiar names, and they did not come to chase us back to the tea plantations and fruit orchards. They came to help us rebuild everything that had been destroyed during the war. Many of them bought their bread from Dona Esmeralda. We knew that our bread was good. If anything ever went wrong with the bread, Dona Esmeralda would close up the bakery at once and refuse to open it again until the bread had regained its former quality.
I quickly learned to enjoy working for Dona Esmeralda, though she could be capricious and temperamental, and she seldom had money to pay our wages when the last day of the month came around. The proximity of the theatre was something that gave a particular substance to my life and filled it with new and unusual experiences. A short time after the legendary premiere, Dona Esmeralda had formed an ensemble that was not supposed to do anything but perform plays. That alone, in the eyes of many, was a scandalous excess on her part. Did she really think that people should be paid for standing on the stage a few evenings each week? Could a theatre be anything but a hobby? Dona Esmeralda, of course, passionately defended her efforts, and she gathered around her all those people who were regarded as the most talented actors in the country. In the daytime they rehearsed the new plays, and at night they gave their performances.
A winding staircase led from the bakery up to the theatre's roof. Right under the roofing sheets we could crawl through a duct that was once used for the huge air-conditioning machines. Through a hatchway we could then slip down into a room where an old film projector stood, like some sort of prehistoric beast. Through the peepholes in the wall we could see what was happening on the lit-up stage. Dona Esmeralda knew that when we bakers had time we used to watch the rehearsals; she encouraged us to do so and to tell her what we thought about the play we had seen. And she often told us that if we were quiet she would let us sit in the upper galleries when a new play was so near completion that they were ready to do a dress rehearsal.
As a baker who only learned to read when I was fifteen – thanks to old newspapers and Master Fernando's stubborn battle with my laziness – naturally I cannot presume to judge the dramas that Dona Esmeralda and her actors staged. And yet I think I could tell that many of the young actors were talented; at least those of us who worked in the bakery believed in their performances, believed in the people or animals they played, and we often laughed. But I think I can also say that Dona Esmeralda was not a good playwright. We would often crawl through the shaft and listen to Dona Esmeralda and the actors squabbling. The actors didn't understand what she meant in her plays, and Dona Esmeralda was angry because she hadn't managed to explain to the actors what she wanted. Terrible arguments would erupt, as if the rehearsals themselves were dramatic performances. But they always ended with Dona Esmeralda getting her way. She was the one paying the actors' wages, she was the one with the greatest stamina. Those of us who worked in the bakery felt as if we were especially privileged – which partly compensated for the wages which occasionally failed to materialise altogether or were exceedingly late – because we had this opportunity to look into the worlds that were continually being created and obliterated on the stage that Dona Esmeralda had reclaimed from the stinking sewers.
There were moments of great magic on that small stage, illuminated by the ancient spotlights, which would sometimes go dark with a powerful bang. I can still see the way spirits hovered over the stage in the form of yellow cloth flowers that Dona Esmeralda herself scattered, hanging aloft among the treacherously rotten catwalks up in the flies. It gives me shivers to remember the slave ships with their groaning cargo, which glided across the stage with fluttering white sails stitched together from old sheets and flour sacks, and an anchor that looked as if it weighed a thousand kilos, even though it was only papier mâché stretched over a chicken-wire frame. The actors roamed through time and space with Dona Esmeralda's incomprehensible plays as their guides. We bakers, dressed in white, would crawl into the roof duct or sit on newspapers so we wouldn't get the seats dirty in the uppermost galleries, and whenever we laughed, it was a signal to Dona Esmeralda that a performance was ready and that it was now time to open the box office and announce a new premiere.
All of us were secretly in love with the beautiful young Eliza, Dona Esmeralda's big star. She was only sixteen, but she enchanted us with her confident ease on the stage, whether she was playing a cynical, heavily made-up puta in one of Dona Esmeralda's more realistic plays or a woman poetically balancing a water jug on her head beside some imaginary river whose invisible water flowed across the stage. All of us bakers loved her, and we mourned long and deep when one day she no longer appeared on the stage. An official from a foreign embassy, who had come to the theatre one night and had in due course returned for twenty-three performances in a row, proposed to Eliza, and then they left for some country on the other side of the sea. I often wondered what Dona Esmeralda had felt at that moment, whether she felt betrayed and sad, or whether she was full of anger. She never said a word.
Some months later she discovered Marguerida, who before long had made the memory of Eliza fade. The world of the theatre was a world which never seemed to come to an end.
For me, José Antonio Maria Vaz, i
t meant a whole new life when I stepped before Dona Esmeralda's eyes and found deliverance and work. Afterwards I thought that even though my father had done nothing but talk his whole life, at least he had been right about my hands. I was truly a baker; I had landed in the right place in life, the place that everyone searches for but so few actually find. I made friends with the other bakers and the enticing girls who stood behind the counter and sold the fresh, fragrant bread. I got to know all the people who lived around the theatre, on the broad avenue which runs straight through the city up to the old fortress where Dom Joaquim's equestrian statues stood abandoned. And I became especially good friends with the street kids who lived in cardboard boxes and rusting cars, surviving on whatever they could find in the rubbish bins, whatever they could manage to steal and then sell, or sell and then steal back.
That was also the first time I heard about Nelio.
I can no longer remember who first mentioned his name. Maybe it was Sebastião, the old soldier missing one leg who lived in the stairwell of the studio belonging to the invariably mournful Indian photographer Abu Cassamo. The café next door was owned by the perpetually drunk Senhor Leopoldo – one of the whites who did not take part in the great exodus to return to his homeland on the other side of the sea. He entertained the few customers who sought out his dingy café with incessant curses about the way everything had gone to the dogs since the young revolutionaries had entered the city and seized power.
Chronicler Of The Winds Page 3