by Mia Couto
—Come with me, don’t be afraid. I won’t let them harm you!
And crossing the threshold, leading the miscreant by the arm, the priest raised his arm in order to calm the crowd’s fury. Silence fell. Ludmilo’s words rang out as if to discourage their frenzy:
—Brothers, remember the teachings of Christ, our redeemer!
And advancing ever further into the human shell, he continued to remind them of the lesson of Jesus, and his example of noble justice. Then, all of a sudden, he pushed the criminal into the middle of the multitude while at the same time pronouncing his summary sentence:
—Burn him!
The furious crowd threw itself upon the condemned man, beating, kicking, spitting, and splattering on him. The priest went back into the church and closed the door behind him.
The Child’s Heart and the Heart’s Child
The kid was born with all his features in the right place. It was only when he started to try and walk that they noticed a defect, his little feet turned inwards, each one distinct from the other. Grandmother gave her verdict on his squinting footprints.
—This child will walk into his own self.
Then, there was another additional inconvenience: the boy muddled and chewed his speech. The others understood little more than splutters and whistles, and even his relatives only listened to him with a dopey smile that feigned comprehension. There’s nothing scarier than when one human person doesn’t understand the human in another person’s voice.
The mother took the child to hospital. The doctor put his ear next to his chest and was deafened by his loud heartbeat. The child’s pulse was on the surface of his skin. The doctor seemed fascinated by this unusual case.
—We need him to stay for some more tests …
—No way! This child came here with me, and he’ll leave with me.
—But, Madam, you must understand … we need to find a name for his illness.
—What do you mean, a name?
—His illness: I’ve got to find a name for it!
—But this name, is a name going to cure his illness?
The doctor smiled. Ah, these simple folk, so accomplished at being thought so by others. And as his smile slowly faded from his lips, he watched mother and child walking away down the corridor. The child was carrying in his hand, drooping like a faded petal, a letter that he himself had written. He had wanted to give the doctor this little piece of paper that his inabilities had filled with writing. With careless concern, the mother took the paper from him and threw it in the trash can. The little fantasist and his obsessions! It must be one of the many letters the crazy little fellow pretended to write to his beloved girl cousin.
—Are you still writing letters to Marlisa?
The little boy was vehement in his denial. His mother shook her head. How hard she’d tried, but to no avail. Was it worth trying to teach someone things they’d never learned? It wasn’t as if Marlisa, her niece to whom the letters were addressed, had ever deigned to open them. It wasn’t even worth taking a peep at the moonstruck little chap’s handwriting. Some folks live in the moon. In his case, it was the moon that lived in him.
Then the scribbler of all that scrawling collapsed into the bottomless pit of time. The little boy died, his skin all blue, as cold as if no light wanted to shine on him. The doctors rushed to take his body and carry out an autopsy. They pulled out his heart, the universatile muscle, vast like some fleshy planet. The organ was placed behind glass, on show for science and the news agencies. Cardiologists argued, in endless colloquia, over the appropriate term for such an abnormality.
The days went by, unnoticed. It was late one afternoon when his cousin Marlisa was dusting the house and came across the pile of useless letters. She weighed them in her hand before throwing them in the fire. She hesitated for a split second: had the little boy known how to write a single line of letters? She decided to take a peep inside the first envelope. And there she sat in astonishment, a single furrow on her brow, curling her hair slowly with a finger. She sat on the step for hours. They weren’t letters but verses of a beauty that had no place in the present world. Marlisa’s sadness flooded out, blotching the handwriting. The more the cousin became absorbed in her reading the more her thoughts rhymed with those of no other woman, so removed from her daily existence had she become. Was the girl falling in posthumous love?
But sprawled there across the stairs, not even Marlisa could imagine what was happening simultaneously to her cousin’s heart that was being guarded by God and science. Indeed, behind the icy glass in the hospital, hardly had the first envelope been torn open than her cousin’s heart bounded upwards in shock. Visitors let out an ear-shattering gasp. And as Marlisa, more than a thousand walls away, gradually leafed through the verses, the heart began to unravel even more, all glittering and shimmering. Until an arm could be seen emerging from that tight red ball, and then later a foot and the roundness of a knee and even more evidence of what was clearly occurring: the heart was flagrantly giving birth! And this was confirmed when a complete newborn child emerged from that cardiac uterus.
When the birth was at last complete, one could see that the newborn child was identical to his thoracic progenitor. It was scary how one was the carbon copy of the other. They were alike in every aspect except for the shape of the foot. The newly born infant’s feet pointed outwards, as if it had come seeking people from other stories outside itself.
Bartolominha and the Pelican
She lived on a windswept island, all alone. Her name was Bartolominha, and she was my favourite grandmother. Her place was breezier than the sky, exposed to distance and oblivion. Her husband, Bounteous António, had always been the lighthouse keeper. He shone his light out into the night, while never abandoning his lofty post. Even without receiving any salary for years on end, he remained devoted to his occupation. Those at the centre of authority, where money glitters and folk rot, forgot all about him. Impassive, without complaining or whining, Grandfather Bounteous imposed his own discipline upon himself, infallible in his mission to illuminate the coast’s rocky cliffs. No ship ever foundered against the shoreline because of any lapse on his part.
All his diligence was worth little: Bounteous António died as he was climbing the huge spiral staircase. His body ascended more swiftly than his heart. In one second, that flickering inner light ceased to illuminate his breast. We only received the news years afterwards, when a rare boat put in at our city.
The whole family immediately set out to sea. We had to save Bartolominha. Grandmother couldn’t be left like that, without any support, in the midst of such distant solitude. I went along with the other members of this mission to fetch our elderly relative. The one who was weeping the most was my mother, her favourite daughter. As we sailed along, she was disconsolate: who knows whether Grandmother had died in the meantime, without anyone there to bury her?
We disembarked with apprehension in our hearts, looking into every nook and cranny on the island. We breathed sighs of relief when Bartolominha came down to the rocks, wrapped in her capulana, the same one I always remembered her wearing. When we talked to her about leaving the place, she was angry. So we’d come to fetch her? Well, we should go back the same way we had come, because she wasn’t moving. My father argued that she couldn’t go on living there all on her own, in a place so devoid of folk. My uncle told her that no news reached the place from outside, nor did the outside get news of it. My mother added many a tear, her spirit stuck in her throat.
Bartolominha answered without saying a word, pointing at the burial ground next to the lighthouse. Then she walked off and turned, looking at the sea, her back to us. It was as if she were quietly summoning us. We lined up next to her, standing stiffly, facing the ocean. What was she trying to tell us, so calm and silent? Was she using the ocean to convey her side of the argument? My uncle still persisted:
—Who will get you your food?
It was then that she showed us the pelican. It was a cre
ature she had reared ever since it was a chick. The bird had grown fond of her, and was more domesticated than any family member, to the extent of coming and going every day, with a fish for her meal.
—I’ve got to stay here and water the lighthouse. It was my Bounteous who asked me not to let this lighthouse wither.
We returned home, unable to dissuade her. The thought of her gnawed away at my sleep. I couldn’t get any rest for nights on end. Should I leave things as they were? No, I mustn’t give up.
So I went back to the island. I stayed there for a few days. I developed my arguments, and lured her with an invitation. If Grandmother returned with me, I would provide her with food and shelter in my new house. To no avail. The same haughty smile came to her lips. Then I suggested she come with me to travel through beautiful places.
—I only want to travel when I am completely blind.
I was puzzled. But I didn’t answer, preferring to wait for her to give me an explanation. And sure enough, she did.
—It’s because I’ve led such a beautiful life that I only want to visit places within me.
I gave up. The old lady’s roots ran deep. To close the conversation, I told her that when I left the next day, I would also leave her a boat tied up to the trees on the beach. Just in case she needed it. She shrugged, repudiating my stubbornness once and for all.
That night, we dined in silence under the heavy shadow of an unsaid farewell. Bartolominha announced she was tired and was going to her room. She had made her living quarters inside the lighthouse. She mounted the first few steps of the spiral staircase and, before disappearing into the darkness, called the pelican. She would go to bed with the creature. They even slept in the same bed. The pelican would stretch its wings and she would fall asleep hugging the big old bird. She said that by doing this, her body would learn to fly.
—One of these nights, I’ll go with him, off into the distance.
I lay back and gazed up at the stars like holes against the black background of the ceiling. I fell asleep, but then was woken by a strange nightmare. In fact, I wasn’t dreaming of anything at all. I didn’t even understand the reason for the impulse I felt as I got up from my sleeping mat. It was as if voices from the inner darkness were guiding me. I went to the burial ground and scratched at the earth with my feet. Then I discovered that the hole was in fact flat: the grave had no depth whatsoever. When I leaned over the mortal remains, I saw bones that were turning to powder. They were the bones of a bird. And a very bulky beak.
My heart pulsated chaotically. I ascended the stairs so quickly that I was almost stolen from the world by giddiness. I didn’t get there in time. Near the lighthouse landing, I got as far as touching a fluttering white feather. I stood on the observation platform while the wind blew through my soul. At one point, I thought I glimpsed Bartolominha twirling around as if she were dancing in the lighthouse’s fleeting, intermittent flash. Ever since that night, I have been the lighthouse keeper on Grandfather Bounteous’s island. And I wave every time one of those great birds passes by.
Isaura, Forever Within Me
Isaura came into the bar as if she were entering through the very last door and we were the gods awaiting her on the other side. Outside, the sky was all blue, and the bazaar was buzzing with people.
The woman’s arrival caused my heart to miss a beat, reined in by the shock. I listened to my inner turmoil, blood to one side, veins to the other.
It was because I hadn’t seen Isaurinha for more than twenty years, more than half the time I had been accumulating existences. Suddenly, memories came to me as if images and sounds were tumbling chaotically into my heart.
It was in colonial times. Isaura and I were servants in the same house. She was a housemaid, and I worked outside. We were both kids, more of an age to be playing. At the end of the afternoon, when she stopped work, she would come and tell me all the news, the secrets of the lives of the whites. It was at the hour when I had to take the dogs for a walk. She would come with me, and we would walk around the block while she made me laugh with all her stories. She told me the boss would push her into dark corners and squeeze her up against the walls. There wasn’t a wall she hadn’t lain on while standing. All that made her sick, caused her stomach to churn. Who could she complain to? Would God listen to me? I used to dream that I plucked up courage to confront the boss. But I would fall asleep without even daring to complete the dream.
And now, here was Isaura interrupting my life, bursting into the beer hall. She had hardly changed, time hadn’t reshaped her. She was as thin as ever. Her eyes gleamed like burning embers. A cigarette between her fingers rattled my recollections. As if the centre of my memory were a puff of smoke. Yes, the smoke from the cigarette that, twenty years before, she had brought through the back door of the bosses’ house, where I was waiting for her. She would do this: she would pick up a cigarette end casually left in an ashtray in the lounge and take a few deep drags. She would fill her cheeks with smoke and then come and meet me in the yard. She had a clownish air about her, her face double its size like that of an owl.
She would come up right next to me, face to face. Then, mouth to mouth, my cupped lips would receive hers. Isaura would blow her smoke into me. I would feel my inner being warmed, my saliva at boiling point. Then, it wasn’t just my mouth: my whole body heated up. That was how we smoked, sharing our breath, the mouth of one crossing the other’s breast.
What is it that we were practising? Mouth-to-mouth fumigation? One thing was for sure: I dwelt in the heavens at those moments. Isaura exhaled eternities into me, her vaporous lips brushing my heart. And all that in the hut at the back of the house.
The procedure was a straightforward one: Isaura would clip off the ends of cigarettes, butt ends in their death throes. Isaura didn’t seem to value our exchange of lips. What she loved was tobacco, gradually becoming addicted to the smoky vapours. As for me and the unloading of it into my chest, that was just a meaningless by-product of the process.
Until there came a time when the boss caught us in the act. Insults rained down on us, accompanied by blows. I immediately excused Isaura, and took all the blame. I made up my version of events: I had assaulted her and forced her against her will. I was expelled, given the sack that very day. I didn’t even say goodbye to Isaurinha. I left with my belongings under a gloomy light. And I never heard from Isaura again.
Twenty years later, and Isaura was playing havoc with my afternoon, bursting into the bar. And what’s more, she had a lit cigarette between her fingers.
The woman sat down at my table and, without looking at me, began to talk. She indulged her memories amid puffs of smoke and mouthfuls of beer.
—I’ve got so many memories. One life wouldn’t be long enough to talk about all of them.
—That’s good, Isaura.
—But my favourite memory is you, my poor old Raimundo.
—Don’t say that.
—I’m telling you: All that smoke I blew into you, do you know all I really wanted, and nothing else? It was a kiss.
I quivered. Was that a knife blade lacerating me? But she went on, continuing what she had to say. Yes, indeed, she had once loved me. She’d never been open about it, for the sake of decency. She was so skinny that it seemed ill-mannered to reveal herself too much. But she had chosen the best aspects of her beauty for me, like someone who has gifts but doesn’t know who to give them to.
—Why, Isaura? Why didn’t you look for me?
—Because I stopped loving you. It was because of that lie you told in order to protect me. That affected me really badly.
From the moment I had defended her, her feelings had plummeted, the mere residue of a shadow. Why the offence? I shall never know. Sitting there, Isaura would never give me an explanation. As if it wasn’t just time that had passed by, but a whole life. She got up, pushed her chair in as if tidying the furniture were the most important thing in this world. And she headed for the exit, while my anguish returned as if, for
the second time, my life were draining away through that open doorway. I barely recognized my voice:
—Blow me another puff of smoke, Isaura. Just another little puff.
She looked at me, her eyes so distant they didn’t even seem to focus. She took a deep drag, fought back a cough, and came straight over to me. When she stuck her lips upon mine, the following happened: the woman turned into smoke and vanished first into the air and then, ever so slowly, inhaled into my chest. That afternoon, I smoked Isaurinha.
Dona Elisa’s Belch
We were all going to listen to Dona Elisa belch. This happened on Saturdays, late in the afternoon. Elisa’s house was on the very edge of town. Beyond that lay the highway, faraway places, the world. It was said that the universe began at the back of the grand old lady’s house. The proof of this was displayed on the patio’s stone floor—a footprint. It had been made by a human foot, but it was the subject of the most fabled stories. The owner of the footprint was the most ancient man, he who walked everywhere and still marches along inside us. That was why we would cross ourselves when we entered Elisa’s yard.
Every Saturday, the same ritual was carried out in the lady’s house. There was a long lunch with an unchanging menu: flatfish curry, soaked up with manioc and mealie flour. It was a heavy dish, enough to feed a garrison. She was given this food to stuff herself. Then they made a bit of money out of Dona Elisa’s flatulent outbursts. Whoever wanted to listen had to pay. What did they expect? Misery provides a cup, need lays a spoon.
Her nephews took the money at the entrance: no paper money was accepted. It all had to be in loose change. One of the nephews on the door kept his eyes closed, for he was forbidden to look at the payment. He would check it by the tinkling of the coins in his cupped hands. Another lad next to him would give the go-ahead: