by Mia Couto
3. Dreams of the soul awoke me from my body
I dreamed of her. She was in the backyard, working at her pestle. Do you know what she was grinding? Water. She was grinding water. No, it wasn’t corn, or mapira,1 or anything else. It was water, grains from Heaven.
I drew near. She was singing a sad song, it seemed as if she were lulling herself to sleep. I asked the reason for her work.
—I’m grinding.
—Are those grains?
—They’re your tears, husband.
And then I realized: the origin of my suffering lay in that pestle. I asked her to stop but my voice could no longer be heard. My throat had gone blind. Just the tonk-tonk-tonk of the pestle, pounding, pounding, forever pounding. Then slowly I began to realize that the noise was coming from my chest, that it was my heart punishing me. Do you think I’m inventing this? Anyone can invent. But from this cell, all I can see are the walls of life. I can feel a dream, a passing whiff of perfume. But I can’t grab it. Now I’ve exchanged my life for dreams.
It wasn’t just tonight that I dreamed of her. The night before last, Your Honour, I even cried. It was because I witnessed my own death. I looked down the corridor and saw blood, a river of it. It was orphan blood. Without its father, which was my severed arm. Imprisoned blood like its owner. Condemned. I don’t remember how it came to be severed. I have a darkened memory because of these countless nights I’ve drunk.
And do you know who it was that saved my spilled blood in that dream? It was she. She scooped up the blood with her ancient hands. She cleaned it, lovingly extracted the dirt. She put all the bits together and showed them the way back into my body. Then she called me by that name of mine which I have already forgotten because nobody calls me by it. Here I’m a number, my name is made of digits, not letters.
You asked me to confess truths, Your Honour. It’s true I killed her. Was it a crime? Maybe, if that is what they say. But I sicken with the uncertainty. I’m not one of those widowers who buries his memories. They are rescued by oblivion. Death hasn’t taken Carlota away from me. Now I know why: the dead are all born on the same day. Only the living have separate birthdays. Did Carlota fly? That time I spilled water over her, was it over the woman or the bird? Who can tell? Can you, Your Honour?
One thing I know for sure: She survived outside her coffin.
Those who wept at the funeral were blind. I was laughing. It’s true, I was laughing. Because inside the coffin they were weeping at, there was nothing. She had fled, saved by her wings. They saw me laughing like this, but they didn’t get angry. They forgave me. They thought it was laughter of the sort which is not an enemy of sadness. Maybe it was sobbing in disguise, the sweat of suffering. And they prayed. As for me, I couldn’t. After all, it wasn’t a fully deceased dead woman lying there. Rather, it was a piece of silence in the form of a beast, that’s what it was.
4. I shall learn to be a tree
Writing has made me tired of letters. I’m going to finish in a minute. I don’t need a defence anymore, Your Honour. I don’t want one. After all, I’m guilty. I want to be punished, I have no other wish. Not because of the crime, but because of my mistake. At the end I’ll explain what this mistake was. Six years ago I gave myself up, I arrested me by myself. Now, I myself am condemning me.
I am grateful for everything, Your Honour. I took up your time, for no payment. You’ll call me an ass. I know and accept it. But begging your pardon, Your Honour, what do you know about me? I’m not like others: I think about what I can put up with, not about what I need. What I can’t manage has nothing to do with me. God’s failing, not mine. Why didn’t God create us already made? Finished, like an animal which, once it has been born, only has to grow. If God made us live, why didn’t he let us rule our lives?
As it is, even when we’re white, we’re Black. With respect, Your Honour, you’re Black too, let me tell you. It’s a defect in the race of mankind, this race of ours which is everybody’s. Our voices, blind and broken, no longer have authority. We only give orders to the weak: women and children. Even they have begun to be slow to obey. The power of a minion is to make others feel even smaller, to tread on others just as he himself is trodden on by his superiors. Crawling, that’s what the job of souls is. If they’re used to the ground, how is it that they can believe in Heaven?
Unfinished, incomplete, that’s what we are, and we come to our end when buried. It’s better to be a plant, Your Honour. I’m even going to learn to be a tree. Or perhaps a little clump of grass, for a tree wouldn’t fit in here. Why don’t those witches I was talking about try and be plants, all green and quiet? If that had happened, I wouldn’t have had to kill Carlota. All I’d have had to do would be to transplant her; there would be no crime, no guilt.
I’m only afraid of one thing: of cold. All my life I’ve suffered from cold. Ague of the soul, not the body, that’s what I get. Even when it’s hot I still get the shivers. Bartolomeu, my brother-in-law, used to say: Away from home it’s always cold. That’s true. But I, Your Honour, what home have I ever had? None. Bare earth, without a here or a where. In a place like that, with neither arrival nor departure, you need to learn to be clever. Not the cleverness they teach you at school. An all-round cleverness, a cleverness with no fixed job in mind, no contract with anybody.
You can see from this last letter, Your Honour, that I’ve given up. Why am I like this? Because Bartolomeu visited me today and told me everything just as it really happened. Afterwards I realized my mistake. Bartolomeu came to my conclusion for me: his wife, my sister-in-law, wasn’t a nóii. He got proof of this over several nights. He spied on his wife to see if she had some other nocturnal occupation. Nothing, she hadn’t. She neither crawled round on all fours nor flew off like a bird. And so Bartolomeu was able to prove that his wife was a person.
Then I began to think. If my wife’s sister wasn’t a nóii, then neither was my wife. Witchcraft is a vice of sisters, an illness they are born with. But how could I have guessed it by myself? I couldn’t have, Your Honour.
I am a son of my own world. I want to be judged by other laws, beholden to my tradition. My mistake was not that I killed Carlota. It was that I surrendered my life to this world of yours which does not rest easy with mine. There, where I come from, they know me. There they can decide what my goodnesses are. Here, no one can. How can I be defended if I can’t obtain the understanding of others? I’m sorry, Your Honour: justice can only be done where I belong. When all is said and done, only they can tell that I didn’t know Carlota Gentina didn’t have wings to fly away with.
Now it’s too late. I only notice the time when it has already passed. I’m a blind man who sees many doors. I open the nearest one. I don’t choose, my hand merely stumbles across a latch. My life isn’t a path. It is a solid stone waiting to become sand. Very slowly, I’m becoming at one with the grains of the earth. When they decide to bury me I’ll already be soil. Seeing as I had no advantage in life, this will be my privilege in death.
The Whales of Quissico
He just sat there. That’s all. Sat stock-still, just like that. Time did not lose its temper with him. It left him alone. Bento João Mussavele.
But nobody worried about him. People would pass by and see that deep down he wasn’t idle. When they asked what he was doing, the answer would always be the same:
—I’m taking a bit of fresh air.
It must have really been very fresh when, one day, he decided to get up.
—I’m off.
His friends thought he was going back home. That he had finally decided to work and start planting a machamba. The farewells began.
Some went as far as to contest him:
—But where are you going? Where you come from is full of bandits, man.
He did not pay them any attention. He had chosen his idea, and it was a secret. He confided it to his uncle.
—You know, Uncle, there’s such hunger back there in Inhambane. People are dying every day.
> And he shook his head as if commiserating. But it had nothing to do with sentiment: just respect for the dead.
—They told me something. That something is going to change my life.
He paused, and straightened himself in his chair:
—You know what a whale is … well, I don’t know how …
—A whale?
—That’s what I said.
—But what’s a whale got to do with it?
—Because one appeared at Quissico. It’s true.
—But there aren’t any whales; I’ve never seen one. And even if one did appear, how would people know what the creature was called?
—People don’t know the name. It was a journalist who started spreading this story around about it being a whale or not a whale. All we know is that it’s a big fish which comes to land on the beach. It comes from the direction of the night. It opens its mouth and, boy, if you could see what it’s got inside … It’s full of things. Listen, it’s like a store, but not the ones you see nowadays. It’s like a store from the old days. Full. I swear I’m being serious.
Then he gave details: people would come up to it and make their requests. Each one depending on what he needed, exactly so. All you had to do was ask, just like that. No formal requisitions or production of travel papers. The creature would open its mouth and out would come peanuts, meat, olive oil. Salt cod, too.
—Can you just imagine it? All a fellow would need is a van, he’d load the things, fill it up, drive it here to the city. Go back again. Just think of the money he’d make.
His uncle laughed long and loud. It seemed like a joke.
—It’s all pie in the sky. There is no whale. Do you know how the story began?
He made no reply. It was a wasted conversation, but he kept up the good-mannered pretense of listening, and his uncle continued:
—It’s those folk there who are hungry. Very hungry. They start inventing these apparitions, as if they were wizardry. But they’re just figments of the imagination, mirages …
—Whales, corrected Bento.
He was unmoved. All this doubting wasn’t enough to make him give up. He would go around asking, he would find a way of getting together some money. And he set about doing just that.
He spent the whole day wandering up and down the streets. He spoke to Aunt Justina, who had a stall in the market and with Marito, who had a van for hire. Both were skeptical. Let him go to Quissico first and bring back some proof of the whale’s existence. Let him bring back some goods, preferably some bottles of that water from Lisbon,1 and then they might give him a hand.
Then one day he decided to seek better advice. He would ask the local wise men, that white, Senhor Almeida, and the Black who went by the name of Agostinho. He began by consulting the Black. He gave a brief summary of the matter in question.
—In the first place, replied Agostinho, who was a schoolmaster, the whale is not what it seems at first sight. Whales are prone to deceive.
He felt a lump in his throat, as his hopes began to crumble.
—I’ve already been told that, Senhor Agostinho. But I believe in the whale; I have to believe in it.
—That’s not what I meant, my friend. I was trying to explain that the whale appears to be that which it isn’t. It looks like a fish but it isn’t one. It’s a mammal. Just like you and me, for we are mammals.
—So we are like the whale? Is that what you’re saying?
The schoolmaster spoke for half an hour. He made a great show of his Portuguese. Bento stood with his eyes wide open, avidly taking in the quasi-translation. But if the zoological explanation was detailed, the conversation did not satisfy Bento’s intentions.
He tried the white man’s house. He walked down the avenues lined with acacias. On the sidewalks, children played with the stamens of acacia flowers. Just look at it, everybody mixed together, white children and Black. Just like in the old days …
When he knocked at the wire mesh door of Almeida’s residence, a houseboy peeped through suspiciously. With a grimace he overcame the bright light outside, and when he saw the colour of the visitor’s skin, he decided to keep the door closed.
—I’m asking to speak to Senhor Almeida. He already knows me.
The conversation was brief, Almeida answered neither one way nor the other. He said the world was going crazy, that the earth’s axis was more and more inclined and that the poles were becoming flatter, or flatulent, he didn’t quite understand.
But that vague discourse gave him hope. It was almost like a confirmation. When he left, Bento was euphoric. He could see whales stretched out in rows as far as the eye could see, dozing on the beaches of Quissico. Hundreds of them, all loaded and he reviewing them from an MLJ station wagon.
With the little money he had saved he bought a ticket and left. Signs of war could be seen all along the road. The charred remains of buses coupled with the wretchedness of the machambas punished by drought.
Is it only the sun that rains nowadays?
The gas fumes produced by the bus in which he was travelling seeped in among the passengers, who complained, but Bento Mussavele was miles away, already visualizing the coast of Quissico. When he arrived, it all seemed familiar to him. The bay was fed by the waters from the lagoons of Massava and Maiene. That blue which melted away before one’s eyes was beautiful. In the background, beyond the lagoons, there was land again, a brown strip which held the fury of the ocean in check. The persistence of the waves was gradually creating cracks in that rampart, embellishing it with tall islands which looked like mountains emerging from the blue in order to breathe. The whale would probably turn up over there, mingling with the grey of the sky at the end of the day.
He climbed down the ravine, his little satchel over his shoulder, until he reached the abandoned beach houses. In times gone by, these houses had accommodated tourists. Not even the Portuguese used to go there. Only South Africans. Now, all was deserted and only he, Bento Mussavele, ruled over that unreal landscape. He settled in an old house, installing himself among the remains of furniture and the ghosts of a recent age. There he remained without being aware of the comings and goings of life. When the tide came in, no matter what the hour, Bento would walk down to the surf and stay there staring into the gloom. Sucking on an old unlit pipe, he brooded. It must come. I know it must come.
Weeks later, his friends came to visit him. They risked the journey on one of Oliveira’s buses, each bend in the road a fright to ambush the heart. They arrived at the house after descending the slope. There was Bento slumbering amid aluminum camping dishes and wooden boxes. A tatty old mattress lay decomposing on a straw mat. Waking with a start, Bento greeted his friends without any great enthusiasm. He confessed to having developed a certain fondness for the house. After the whale, he would get some furniture, of the type that can be stood up against the wall. But his most ambitious plans were reserved for the carpets. Anything that was floor, or looked like it, would be carpeted. Even the immediate vicinity of the house too, because sand is annoying and seems to move together with one’s feet. And there would be a special carpet which would extend along the sands, joining the house to the place where the selfsame whale would disgorge.
Finally, one of his friends let the cat out of the bag.
—You know, Bento: back in Maputo it’s being rumoured you’re a reactionary. You’re here like this because of this business of arms, or whatever they’re called.
—Arms?
—Yes, another visitor chipped in helpfully. You know that South Africa is supplying the bandits. They receive arms which come by way of the sea. That’s why they’re talking a lot about you.
He began to fret.
—Hey, boys, I can’t sit still anymore. I don’t know who’s receiving these arms, he kept repeating.
—I’m waiting for the whale, that’s all.
They argued. Bento remained in the forefront of the discussion. Who could be certain that the whale didn’t come from the socialist countri
es? Even the schoolmaster, Senhor Agostinho, whom they all knew, had said that all he needed now was to see pigs fly.
—Hold it there. Now you’re starting on a story about pigs before anyone’s even seen the stupid whale.
Among the visitors there was one who belonged to the cadres and who said there was an explanation. That the whale and the pigs …
—Wait, the pigs have nothing to do with …
—Okay, leave the pigs out of it, but the whale is an invention of the imperialists to stultify the people and make them always wait for food to arrive from abroad.
—But are the imperialists making up this story of the whale?
—They invented it, yes. This rumour …
—But who gave eyes to the people who saw it? Was it the imperialists?
—Okay, Bento, you can stay, but we’re going now.
And his friends left, convinced that there was sorcery at work there. Somebody had given Bento medicine to make him get lost in the sands of that idiotic expectation.
One night, with the sea roaring in endless anger, Bento awoke with a start. He was trembling as if suffering a bout of malaria. He felt his legs: they were burning. But there was some sign in the wind, some sense of foreboding emanating from the darkness, which obliged him to get up and go outside. Was it a promise? Or was it disaster? He went over to the door. The sand had come away from its resting place and seemed like a maddened whip. Suddenly, underneath the little whirlwind of sand, he saw the large mat, the same mat he had laid in his dream. If it were true, if the carpet were there, then the whale had arrived. He tried to adjust his eyes as if to discharge his emotion, but giddiness overturned his vision and his hands sought the doorpost for support. He set off through the sand, stark naked, tiny as a seagull with broken wings. He could not hear his own voice, he did not know whether it was he who was shouting. The voice came nearer and nearer. It exploded inside his head. Now he began to wade into the sea. He felt it cold, burning his tense nerves. Further ahead of him there was a dark patch which came and went like the throbbing heart of a hangover. It could only be that elusive whale.