by Mia Couto
From the silence of his office he could hear the world’s crockery being smashed. He got home, and the same upheavals pursued him. He still managed the flicker of a smile when the speeches proclaimed Victory is certain! He would tap his wife on the shoulder and say:
—See the extent of your certainty, my dear Victoria?
If Jesuzinho was a shadow, his spouse, Victoria, was that shadow’s dusk. On the third anniversary of Independence, at the precise moment when they were declaiming their revolutionary jargon, Victoria became certain forever. The light in the Goan lady’s eyes extinguished. By the wall where the crucifix hung, he covered her with a sheet and smothered her with prayers. His one and only family had come to an end right there, Jesuzinho da Graça’s only world.
In the months that followed, the widower’s behaviour remained steady. Was Jesuzinho like the ant that never strays from its path? There was only one difference: he took longer to get from here to there. And as his solitude lingered, he began to give in to drink. His young house boy asked him apprehensively:
—Do you not have any relatives?
Jesuzinho pointed to the bottle of liquor. That was his relative from his father’s side. Then he remembered and pointed to the crucifix on the wall:
—That one there, on the wall, is on my mother’s side.
Life is as improbable as a drop dripping upwards. Little by little, the Goan began to show signs of disorganization: the hours escaped him. From being the most zealous of functionaries, ever observant of the regulations, he stopped padding his inky scripts with his blotter. Maybe he yearned for a time when the world was a gentler place, authenticated on a sheet of white paper?
But even in his discomposure he stuck to some routine. Tuesdays were when he got drunk, the only date he kept with time. He would go to the bar, and gradually drown his sorrows in the froth of his glass. He would arrive back home late, dishevelled but always taking great care with his white suit. He would sit on his settee and light a cigarette—what would his dear departed wife say?—and pull the tall ashtray towards him, his hands lingering on its smooth round ebony. Was he plaiting Victoria’s hair? Then he would snap his fingers and call:
—Piccaninny: come and loosen my tie, if you please.
The house boy rushed forwards to relieve his throat. He unbuttoned his shirt and sprinkled some talc around the top of his singlet. With his knot undone, he was already in the mood for sleep. The boy’s job was to supervise his boss’s repose.
His slumber was punctuated with fits. After only a few minutes, the caneco was shouting for his late wife. His hand shaking, he would grab the phone and call the heavens. This was when Piccaninny’s noblest function would come into play: he would play her part, imitate the dead woman’s voice and sighs.
—You must be paying for the call if you please, my dear Victoria. Up there in the sky, evereet’ing is being cheaper.
His young employee tried to make his voice sound shrill, copying Victoria’s screeching. When the conversation was over, he copied the old lady’s ways, applying brilliantine to his boss’s hair and making sure his parting was diagonal, just as it should be.
However, as time went by, the boy became terrified. He would ask himself: should I imitate the dead? Playing around with the spirits could only bring punishment. He went and consulted his father for advice. The old man agreed: leave the man, run away from all that. And he elaborated on his wise thoughts: how many sides has the earth got for a chameleon? As for the dead, do we know who they’ve got their eyes on? The other world is infinitesimally infinite: there isn’t a dead person who isn’t a member of our family.
So the lad returned, determined never again to get mixed up with apparitions. Come Tuesday, and the boss didn’t go out bar crawling that night. He looked depressed, unwell. He lay on the sofa in the living room, gazing into nothingness. He called the lad and asked him to dress up as Victoria. The boy didn’t answer. Surprised, Jesuzinho started to mutter to himself. A few moments passed, until the young servant noticed that the boss was weeping. He leaned over him and saw that he was whining the same name he always did:
—My sweet little Victoria!
The servant didn’t budge an inch. The boss could beg as much as he wanted, he wasn’t moving. The caneco, after all, was drunk. His breath left no room for doubt. But how come, if he hadn’t seen him drinking? Whether he’d been at the bottle or not, he was certainly overflowing with sighs and spittle. It was in the middle of his ranting and raving that he murmured the strangest words: he wanted to go and meet his wife with his nails duly clipped. Laying his arm across his servant’s lap, he implored him:
—Cut my nail, if you please, Piccaninny!
The following day, they found the servant, motionless, next to the boss’s seat. No one could believe what the boy said. It was like this: hardly had he begun to clip his nail than the boss vanished, like incense smoke.
—So where’s the nail, lad?
The boy bent down over the floor and lifted what looked like a faded petal. He smiled as he recalled his boss. And he showed them the very last trace of his boss’s human existence.
A Girl Without Words
(a second story for Rita)
The little girl didn’t say a word. Not a single vowel left her mouth, her lips only concerned themselves with sounds that didn’t even add up to two or four. Was her language hers alone, a personal dialect of unrelayable and unreliable quality? No matter how much they applied themselves, the parents couldn’t coax any understanding from their little daughter. When she remembered the words, she forgot the thought. When she constructed an argument, she lost her power of language. It wasn’t because she was mute. She spoke in a language that doesn’t currently exist among human beings. There were those who thought she sang. It must be said that she had an enchantingly beautiful voice. Even without understanding anything, people were gripped by her intonation. And it was so touching that some folk never failed to cry.
He father dedicated his affection and his affliction to her. One night, he took her little hands in his and begged, certain that he was talking to himself:
—Speak to me, daughter!
His eyes started to leak. The little girl kissed his tear. She savoured that salty water and said:
—Sea …
Her father was flabbergasted, both aurally and orally. Had she spoken? He leaped up and shook his daughter’s shoulders.
—You see, you can speak, she can speak, she can speak! he shouted for all to hear.
—She said sea! She said sea! her father repeated from room to room.
The family rushed forwards and leaned over her. But she emitted no further comprehensible sound.
Her father didn’t give up. He thought and thought and came up with a plan. He took his daughter to where she could see the sea, and where there was even sea beyond the sea. If that had been the only word she had ever articulated in her life, then it was the sea that would reveal the reason for her inability.
The little girl reached that expanse of blue and her heart shrank. She sat down on the sand, her knees interfering with the vista. And tears interfering with her knees. Was the world that she had wanted infinite, after all so small? There she remained, imitating a stone, with neither sound nor tone. Her father asked her to come back, they needed to return, for the tide was coming in menacingly.
—Come on, daughter!
But the girl was so still you would never have known she was sitting there. She was like an eagle that neither rises nor falls: it merely disappears from the ground. All the land is contained in the eye of an eagle. And the bird’s retina is transformed into the vastest sky. The girl’s father stood in awe, bedazzled: why does my daughter remind me of an eagle?
—Let’s go, daughter! Otherwise the waves will swallow us up.
Her father circled her, blaming himself for the girl’s state. He danced, sang, leaped up and down. Anything to distract her. Then he decided to take direct action: putting his hands under her armpits, h
e pulled her. But he’d never felt such a weight before. Had the girl put down roots or become the tip of a rock?
He gave up, exhausted, and sat down next to her. Does he who knows stop talking while he who doesn’t know keeps quiet? The sea filled the night with silence, the waves already seemed to be breaking on the man’s shocked heart. At that point, he had an idea: the only way of saving his daughter was to tell her a story! And so, there and then he made one up:
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who asked her father to go and get the moon for her. Her father got in his boat and rowed out far away. When he reached the line of the horizon, he stood on the tips of his dreams in order to reach the sky. Very carefully, he took hold of the star with both hands. The planet was as light as a ball of air.
When he gave that fruit a tug in order to pluck it from the sky, he heard a world-shattering pop. The moon sparked into a thousand shooting stars. The sea grew choppy and the boat sank, swallowed up into the abyss. The beach was bathed in silver, the strand covered in flakes of moonlight. The little girl started walking in the opposite of all directions, over there and beyond, gathering up those lunar shards. She looked at the horizon and called:
—Father!
Then a deep crevasse opened, a wound from the very birth of the world. From the lips of this scar, blood flowed. Was the water bleeding? Or was the blood turning to water? And that’s what happened. Once upon a time.
At this point, her father lost his voice and he was silent. The story had lost its thread inside his head. Or was it the chill of the waters now covering his feet and his daughter’s legs? At that instant, he cried in despair:
—It’s now or never.
The girl suddenly got to her feet and walked into the waves. Her father followed, anxious. He saw his daughter pointing at the sea. Then he caught sight of a deep crack stretching the entire width of the ocean. Her father was alarmed at the unexpected fracture, a grotesque mirror of the story he had just invented. Fear struck him in the pit of the stomach. Were they both going to get washed into that abyss?
—Daughter, come back. Please turn back, daughter …
Instead of retreating, the girl waded further into the sea. Then she stopped and brushed her hand over the water. The liquid wound immediately closed. And the sea merged together and became one again. The girl turned and walked back, taking her father’s hand and leading him back home. Up above, the moon recomposed itself.
—See, Father? I finished your story!
And the two of them, bathed in moonlight, disappeared into the room which they had never left.
The Very Last Eclipse
Doubt gnawed at Justinho Salomão, willy-nilly, like a rat. The man was suffering for being a husband, weighed down by the icy shadows of suspicion. His wife, Dona Acera, was pretty enough to make your mouth water with night dreams. Devoured by jealousy, Justino was growing thin by leaps and bounds. Pitiably skinny and wasted away, he had to do a thorough search of the mirror just to catch a glimpse of himself. Justinho was so thin, it was he who scratched the fleas. One day, the priest warned him as he was leaving Mass:
—Be very careful, Justinho: your soul is like a puff of smoke that won’t fit anywhere.
To hell with that priest who wouldn’t talk straight. What the cleric knew was uncommon knowledge: Acera was too much of a woman to be a spouse. Justinho’s doubts were raised more by argument than fact. Could it be that his wife was more unfaithful than a secret? The answer was a shadow with neither light nor object. On the eve of a journey, her husband’s suspicions became more acute. On this occasion, a long series of visits necessitated his geographical absence. Acera was sad when he told her the news:
—How long are you going to leave me all on my own?
A month. The woman twisted her lipstick, shook her locks. Even a tear crocodiled itself onto her eyelid. Faced by such disconsolation, her husband became even more worried. Was it genuine or was it a convenient pretense? Who so young, so wet behind the ears, is capable of keeping themselves faithful?
On the eve of his departure, her husband decided to ensure her guaranteed loyalty. First, he went to the Church and asked the Portuguese priest for help. The man of the cloth twisted his hands reticently and, as was his habit, offered some cut-price philosophy:
—Well, I don’t know. To cross legs it takes two …
—Two what?
—Two legs, of course.
And on he went, like water flowing down liquid paths. Justinho was expecting the cleric to put him at ease. To tell him, for example: go in peace, you’re well married, with more rings than Saturn. But no, the priest rippled his brow with suppositions.
—No, I don’t know. Isn’t the one who peeps most the sun itself?
—Explain yourself better, reverend Father.
—Do you want me to make myself even clearer? Answer me then: isn’t the most unsullied ground in the house of the dead?
Justinho didn’t answer. He turned his back and left the church. He was still walking away when the priest’s irate voice reached his ears.
—I know where you’re going, fellow. You’re going to see the witch doctor! But you’ll see what my powers, indeed my divine powers, are going to do to that tropical wizard!
A shudder ran through Justinho. But he didn’t slacken his pace as he headed for the witch doctor’s, and he prayed that he would put his mind at rest. Was it heresy to knock on both sides of the door? If a man has more than one divine father, can’t he have more than one belief?
—I can’t do anything about that. A woman’s will is beyond my powers. What I can do is arrange for the abusers to be punished.
—How?
—I shall have to protect your house.
And so the treatment was carried out: a small gourd at the entrance to his tin and timber abode. Anyone entering with disrespectful intentions would suffer serious consequences. The husband felt some concern:
—Are they … are they going to die?
The witch doctor laughed. Any guilty intruder would have his insides afflicted by bloating and wind. After his work had been carried out and the bill settled, the witch doctor hesitated for a moment as he took his leave:
—Did you consult the reverend Father before me? And what did he say about me?
Justinho shrugged, as if it were a matter that lay beyond his competence. The witch doctor turned his back and walked away, commenting as he went:
—That priest is going to cry like a chicken, you’ll see. Do you know the story of the chicken that ate the string of beads just so as to stop the other chicken wearing it?
A few days later, and off went Justinho. The journey lasted longer than he intended. When he returned, his wife was waiting for him at the front door. She wore the dress he liked, her hairstyle was eye-catching, her body at her husband’s disposal. Even her top button was out of a job, lying unused on her cleavage. Acera was completely at the whim of Justinho’s yearning. They plunged into each other, their legs tangling with their sighs in a confusion of lips and sweat, lives and bodies.
Having taken his fill of his long-unfulfilled love, Justinho stretched out in bed, satisfied. He closed his eyes, like a breast-fed babe. Then he looked up and was astonished by what he saw: two men were floating up under the roof. They were rotund, inflated like balloons.
—What’s that, woman?
—What’s what?
He jumped out of bed in a flash and was even more astonished when he recognized the two unfortunates. And who were they? The priest and the witch doctor. Those selfsame men to whom Justinho had entrusted his wife’s protection. There they were, pinned to the roof.
—You? You, of all people?
—Hey, husband! Who’re you talking to?
Stuttering and blustering, her husband pointed to the ceiling. His wife thought he was having a religious fit, with his sights set on getting near to Heaven. Was Justinho going insane, epilectricuted?
Acera tried to run after her crazed husband. But the man h
ad smelled a rat, and vanished into the darkness. He wasn’t long: he came back with witnesses. He ushered a number of them into the bedroom and pointed at the perpetrators of the flagrancy. The others stood there, dumbfounded, without seeing anything at all. Only Justinho was able to see his wife’s flying lovers. But they explained that it couldn’t be the priest and the witch doctor there. They had been away in the city on a short visit. Everyone had seen them leave, everyone had waved them off on the bus.
The neighbours assured him of his wife’s good behaviour. They took their leave, saying they would watch out for him, given the returning traveller’s illness. It was even bad luck to have such a madman in the place. Even the retired nurse brought him some pills to cool his blood. Justinho agreed to lie down and take things easy. He would get his head together and adjust his thoughts to the here and now.
And they were all so insistent that he stopped seeing folk hanging from the roof. Gradually, he was freed from the visions that had made him so jealous. There were nights, however, when he would waken with a jolt and get up. He could hear laughter. Were the priest and witch doctor having fun at his expense? He listened more carefully: no, it wasn’t laughter but sobbing, a cry for help. Unable to come down, the men imprisoned on the ceiling were begging him for a drop of water and a few crumbs to slake their thirst and keep their hunger at bay. By now, the poor men were no more than air and bone.
Acera’s voice brought him back to reality:
— Come to bed, husband. Calm down. Don’t you want to sleep with me? Sleep in me, then. Don’t you want to cross me? Use me as a pillow. That’s it, relax, my love.