Sea Loves Me

by Mia Couto

  But as time deepened, hunger set in. Salima would creep out, more punctual than the tides, picking up the husks of wretchedness, too many shells for so little food.

  Salima then announced to her husband: no matter how much it pained him, she was going to take the boat out the next day. She was going fishing, her body concealed powers unknown to him. Mazembe forbade it, in despair. Never! Where have you ever seen a woman fishing, ordering a boat about? What would the other fishermen say?

  —Even if I have to tie you to my foot, Salima: you are not going out to sea.

  With his word said and done, he shouted for his children. He walked down to the beach. All his skinniness was tautened by the bow of his body. The tide was low and the vessel was reclining lazily with its belly in the sand.

  —Come, children. Let’s haul this boat up.

  He and his children pushed the boat up on to the dunes. They took it to where the waves never reached. Mazembe wagged his finger, slandering his wife.

  —Don’t you try anything with me, Salima.

  And, turning to the boat, he declared:

  —Now you’re going to be a house.

  From that day on, Maneca Mazembe lived in the boat, a mariner of dry land. He, along with his vessel, was like a turtle, turned on its back, incapable of returning to the sea. And in that lengthy solitude, Mazembe abandoned himself to neglect.

  Until one random morning, Salima approached the boat and stood contemplating her husband. He was in a choice state of dishevelment, his face full of many a day’s beard. The woman sat down and settled a saucepan of rice in her arms. She spoke:

  —Maneca, it’s a long time since you gave me a good hiding.

  Who knows, she volunteered, maybe that bitterness of his was due to his abstinence? Perhaps he needed to feel her tears, lord and master of her sufferings.

  —Mazembe, you can beat me. I’ll help: I’ll stay still and not dodge at all.

  The fisherman silently ran along the paths of his soul. He knew women’s traps. So he let the conversation drift rudderless:

  —I don’t even know the time of day. Nowadays, I never know.

  Salima persisted, almost in supplication. Let him beat her. The man, after more than a few instants, got up. He stumbled over her, gripped her arm in an accusing clinch. Salima sat awaiting his conjugal violence. His hand came down, but it was to take hold of the saucepan. With a sudden gesture, he threw the food to the ground.

  —Never again bring me food. I don’t need anything from you. Ever again.

  The woman sat among the rice and sand, the world dissolved into grains. She watched her husband returning to the boat and noticed how alike they were growing, man and thing: he deprived of light, it yearning for the waves. As Salima was turning to leave, she was stopped short by his calls:

  —Woman, I’m asking you to bring me fire.

  She trembled. What was the fire for? A deep foreboding caused her to want to say no. In tears, she obeyed him. She brought him a stick of burning firewood.

  —Don’t do it, husband.

  The blind man held the log like a sword. Then he set fire to the boat. Salima screamed as she walked round the flames, as if it were inside her that they were burning. That madness of his was an invitation to disaster. Which was why she shook his ragged shirt, so that he would listen to her decision to leave, to take the children away with her to wherever that might be. And so the woman left, without even allowing her children to see their old father in his bewitched state as he unblessed their lives.

  The fisherman was left on his own, the stretch of sand seemed vaster. In his pitiful design he allowed his night to fall, his fumbling fingers savouring the ashes. Touching the remains gave him a feeling of greatness. At least he had the power to undo, to destroy what was forbidden him.

  The days went by without Maneca noticing. One night, however, Salima’s presentiment was confirmed: that fire had flown too high and disturbed the spirits. For in the top of the coconut palms, the wind began to howl. Mazembe became agitated, even the ground shivered. Suddenly, the sky was torn apart and fat hailstones fell all over the beach. The fisherman ran through the emptiness in search of shelter. The hail punished him relentlessly. Maneca knew of no explanation. He had never met such phenomena. The earth has risen to meet the sky, he thought. Turned upside down, the world was letting its contents fall. With an orphan’s anguish, the fisherman dropped to his knees, his arms wrapped around his head. He wouldn’t even have heard himself if he hadn’t noticed himself calling for Salima, amid his own sobs and the earth’s lamentations.

  That was when he felt a soft hand touching his shoulders. He lifted his face: someone was soothing his fever. At first, he resisted. Then he abandoned himself to it, turning childward towards a mother’s embrace. He called out:

  —Salima?

  Silence. Who was that silhouette so full of tenderness? For sure it was Salima, her woman’s body, so slender and firm. But this one’s hands were like those of someone older, wrinkled by manifold sadnesses.

  She brought him to a shelter, perhaps his old hut. There was a different silence about this place though, another fragrance. Out there, the winds were growing tired. The storm was dying down. Now, the hands were bathing his face, cooling his salt.

  —You, I don’t know who you are …

  A comb tidied his hair. In the lull, Maneca was almost falling asleep. With a movement of his shoulder, he helped her to dress him in a shirt, freshly ironed clothes.

  —Whoever you are, I beg one thing of you: never use your voice. I don’t want ever to hear your words.

  That woman’s identity was bound to be lost in the silence. No matter whether those were Salima’s hands, or the hut his own: in his ignorance he would acquiesce. For the rest, he was learning to take heed of women’s cleverness in taming men, converting them into children, souls with insufficient confidence.

  Maneca thus began to recapture time. He allowed himself to be succoured by the solace of that unknown woman. She respected his request and never uttered so much as a sigh.

  Every afternoon he would go out into the bush. He was carrying out some secret task, his sole devotion. Until one afternoon, he appeared before his voiceless companion and said:

  —Take these oars. Down there, on the beach, you’ll see a boat which I have made for you to go out fishing.

  And he went on: she should go out, impose her command on the boat. Nor should she worry about him. He would stay on the shore and concern himself with the jetsam washed up by the sea.

  —Just take it that I’m looking for those eyes of mine that I lost.

  From then on, each and every morning without fail, the blind fisherman could be seen wandering along the beach, stirring up the foam which the sea spells out on the sand. And with such liquid steps, he appeared to be seeking the wholeness of his face among the many generations of waves.

  ‌Woman of Me

  The man is the axe, the woman is the hoe.

  Mozambican proverb

  That night, the hours ran all round me, like sleepless clock hands. All I wanted was to forget me. Lying there like that, the only thing I seemed to lack was death. Not the definitive one that takes us away with it. The other: the season-death, the winter subverted by guerrilla blossoms.

  The December heat made me disappear, aware only of the ice melting in my glass. The cube of glass was like me, both of us were transitory, converting ourselves into the previous substance out of which we had been formed.

  During this while, she came in. She was a woman whose soft eyes cast a moist film upon the room. She wandered around, as if she did not believe in her own presence. Her fingers travelled over the furniture in distracted affection. Who knows, perhaps she was walking in her slumber, maybe that reality held more in the way of fiction for her? I wanted to warn her that she was mistaken, that that was not her correct address. But her silence alerted me to the fact that a destiny was being fulfilled right there, at the meeting point of fateful providences. Then s
he sat down on my bed, arranging herself tidily. Without looking at me, she began to cry.

  I didn’t even guide myself: my caresses were already uncoiling on her breast. She lay back, emulating the earth in a state of gestation. Her body opened itself to me. If we had gone further in the moments that followed, we would have reached the realm of concrete fact. But in the course of my advances, I shuddered. Hidden voices held me back: no, I couldn’t give in.

  But this unknown woman was provoking me with the descent of her cleavage. Her bust peeped out at me, corrupting my intentions. Ancient legends were giving me their warning: a woman will come who will light up the moon. If you resist, you will merit the name of the warrior people from whom you stem. Not that I could decipher the storybook message very well. But what was certain was that there, in that very room, I was being put to the test, to see how much my powers were worth.

  But thanks to the intruder’s arts, I was disappearing, intermittent, from existence. I was unfulfilling myself. And when I appealed to myself to return to reason, I could not even get as far as that austere judge, my brain. All because of the woman’s voice: it recalled the gentle murmur of a spring, the seduction of a return to times beyond, when there was no before. She sought to turn me into a child, to lead me back to a primitive quiescence. Birdlike, she nested in my breast. Was she seeking in me a mirror for the soft moonlight? I abandoned myself, without dignity. The dark circles of her eyes, round without end, aroused me like two sobs, it was as if they were part of my body yet gazed longingly at me.

  She told her story, the episodes of her life. Variants of truth, they fed me the sweet taste of deceit. I wanted the infinite, just like children who always ask: and then?

  But the stranger noticed an absence in herself. She had to go. She promised she would return straightaway. Presently, at the latest. From the doorway, she blew me a kiss, like a wife of many a year. She went out and blended with the shadows.

  I don’t know how long she took. Perhaps a night or two. Or a few scarce moments. I just don’t know. For I fell asleep, anxious to extinguish myself. Waking up pained me, I cursed the morning. I understood the cause of such tribulation: waking up is not merely a passage from sleep to vigil. It’s more than that, it’s a gradual process of aging, each arousal adding to the fatigue of all humanity. And I concluded: life, the whole of it, is one extended birth.

  Then I remembered the previous dream, conscious of the truth that she revealed herself only in a state of delirium. After all: the dead, the living, and those awaiting their birth make up one large canvas. The frontier between their territories can be summed up as fragile, moving. In dreams, we are all enclosed in the same space, there where time yields to total absence. Our dreams are no more than visits to these other past and future lives, conversations with the unborn and the deceased, in the language of unreason which we all speak.

  The yet-to-be-born, those who are waiting for a body, are the ones we should fear most. For we know almost nothing of them. From the dead, we still go on getting messages, we take kindly to their familiar shadows. But what we are never aware of is when our soul is made up of these other, transvisible spirits. These are the pre-born, and they don’t forgive us for inhabiting the light side of existence. They couple together the most perverse expectations, their powers pull downwards. They seek to make us return, insisting on keeping us in their company.

  What are they envious of, these yet-to-comers? Is it that they have no name, that they do not breathe clear light? Or, like me, do they fear someone may be travelling through their lives before them? Are they scared that such anticipation will make them less possible, as if they might be worn out by some prior incumbent?

  Well I, at that moment, envied both categories: the dead, because they seemed to resemble the perfection of deserts; the unborn, because they had an entire future at their disposal.

  Seated on my creased sheets, I would look at the newly risen light of day, full of its restless particles of luminous dust. The sound of traffic reached me through the window, the city smug in its bustling disorder. I felt a yearning, not for supernatural beliefs but for the other, infranatural ones, our suppressed and silent animal convictions. It wasn’t human nostalgia that afflicted me. For the longing of men is always for the present, it is born of a love that fails to fulfill its duties on time. My sadness was of another type: it came from having touched that woman. I felt burdened by the expense of remorse. What misdemeanours had I committed if desire had sprouted from my fingertips alone?

  I got up, looking for some sign of negligence. But the room left me unprotected, orphaned. For in the final analysis, we spend our lives travelling from the uterus to our house, each house being but another edition of the womb. Like a bird that is forever weaving a nest, its nest, for its future births rather than for its offspring. This woman reminded me, after all, that the house offered me no welcome.

  I glanced through the window, I saw the woman arriving. A suspicion, a certainty, came to my thought that she was no more than one of these yet-to-come creatures, dispatched in order to withdraw me from the kingdom of the living. Her temptation was as follows: to take me away into exile from the world, to migrate me to another existence. In exchange, I would feed her with bodily caresses, which only the living manage to possess.

  I needed to think quickly: she enjoyed the advantage of not needing to consult reason. I had to find, in a trice, a possible escape. It came to me through intuition: somewhere there must exist the murderers of the dead, the defenders of the unborn. What I needed to do was to summon one such killer to extinguish not the life of that woman, but rather my suspicion of her. The question was: where would I find such a killer, how to provoke his immediate apparition? For it was urgent, she was coming, her steps were already climbing the stairs.

  What to do, if I had no time left? Kill her myself, in body and in blood? That would only be of any use if we were both dreaming, something which I didn’t seem to be. She had been sent expressly to fetch me, to take me there where everything is still futurely possible.

  She came in, I shivered. This time, the intruder seemed even more beautiful to me, ever more like a goddess, demanding the total devotion of a believer. My deliverance arrived, a plank brought by a wave. I said to her:

  —I can imagine you still tiny, as you were in the yesterday of before. Do you remember?

  Startled, she became anxious. For a moment or two, her chest failed her, and she stood with bated breath. The unborn have no memory, their first cry is yet to blossom. Her fear inspired my cunning; I prepared myself while I watched her walk up to the mirror. The stranger contemplated herself as she got undressed, smiling in the petal of each gesture.

  You just pretend, you don’t even see yourself, I told her, by now more in control of myself. She abandoned her self-attentions and came over to the bed and touched me. She called my name gently. She passed her fingers over my lips.

  —You don’t understand.

  She smiled, hurt. My fragile artfulness had caused her offence. Nevertheless, I forgave myself. Her serene smile had returned.

  —Calm yourself, I haven’t come to fetch you.

  What had she come there to do in that case? For the more she took possession of herself, the more concerned I became. The emissary went on:

  —Don’t you understand? I have come to find a place in you.

  She explained her reasons: only she harboured the eternal gestation of springs. Without me being her, I was incomplete, formed only in the arrogance of halves. In her, I had found not a woman to be mine, but the woman of me, the one who, from now on, would light me in each phase of the moon.

  —Let me be born in you.

  I closed my eyes, slowly dousing myself. And so, lying there calmly, I listened to the sound of my steps as they became more distant. They weren’t advancing in solitary march, but rather next to others of a female glide, as if they were hours that ran through me like sleepless clock hands that night.

  ‌The Flagpoles of Be
yondwards

  All we want is a new world: with everything new and nothing of the world.

  Rain is a jailer, imprisoning people. Constante Bene and his children, they were prisoners of the rain, shut up inside their hut. Never before had such water been seen: the landscape had been dripping for seventeen days. Scarcely taught to swim, the water hurt the earth. Fat raindrops, pregnant with sky, pattered closely on the tin roofs. On the side of the hill, only the trees persisted, without ever interrupting each other.

  Seated in a corner of the old hut, Constante Bene measured the length of time. Ever since the beginning, he had been a guard on the estate of Tavares, the white man. He dwelt among the orange trees, in a place which had all but fled the earth. Up there, on the mountaintop, the ground behaved itself, good and proper.

  —Here, only the oranges have got a thirst.

  The thirst of birds, Constante might have been more right in saying. But he simplified life. To his two children, Chiquinha and João Respectivo, he taught the countless arts of tranquility. The children received cares from him, motherless orphans though they were. They alone looked after household matters.

  Chiquinha, her body developed, exceeded her years. Her breasts already protested at the tightness of her blouse. Her father viewed her growth with pain. The more she grew into herself, the sharper Constante’s sadness as he recalled his dead spouse.

  His son, João Respectivo, remained small, oblivious to time. All were puzzled by his name. Respectivo? But that name had happened, independent of any desire for it. He had taken the infant boy to the town in order to register him. He presented himself at the government office with civilized intent: