by Mia Couto
This is the story that Eulália now tells when her fellow villagers ask her to speak of the day when it rained fish. And they erupt and convulse with laughter as abundantly as those who are aware of the meagreness of their lives. It’s good to have one’s share of madmen. All next to each other on a rosary. Like beads lined up together on the thread of unbelief.
Sea Loves Me
First Chapter
God is a delicate subject of conversation, we’ve got to pretend he’s an egg: if we squeeze him too hard, he breaks, if we don’t keep a good grip on him, he falls.
One of Grandfather Celestiano’s sayings,
reinvented from an old Makua proverb
I’m only happy out of laziness. Unhappiness is harder to handle than an illness: you need to enter and leave it, sweep aside those who try to console you, accept condolences for a little bit of your soul that hasn’t even got as far as dying.
—Get up, mister lazybones.
That’s what my neighbour, the mulata Dona Luarmina, tells me to do. I reply:
—Lazy? I’m just whitening my palms.
—That’s the talk of a scalawag …
—Do you know something, Dona Luarmina? It was work that darkened the poor Black man’s skin. And apart from that, living is all I’m good at …
She laughs in that listless way of hers. The fat Luarmina smiles only so as to delude her sadness.
—You, Zeca Perpétuo, are like a woman …
—A woman? Me?
—Yes, a woman sits on a mat. You’re the only man I’ve ever seen sitting on a mat.
—What do you expect, dear neighbour? A chair is no good for sleeping.
She waddles away, heavy as a pelican, shaking her head. My neighbour complains there’s no man with as little sense as I have. She says she’s never seen a fisherman let so many tides escape him:
—You, Zeca, you just have no idea how life works.
—Life, Dona Luarmina? Life is so simple that no one understands it. It’s like my grandfather Celestiano used to say when we started thinking about whether God existed or not …
Besides, thinking produces a lot of stones and little by way of a path. So what’s left for me to do, a retiree from the sea? Freed from fishing, I’m freed from thinking. One thing I learned over many years’ fishing: time is carried along on the tide. We have to remain as sprightly as we can so we can always hitch a ride on one of those surges.
—Isn’t that so, Dona Luarmina? You know our folks’ languages. Tell me something, my good lady: what’s the word for future?
Yes, how do you say future? There’s no word for it in the language of this bit of Africa. Yes indeed, because the future, although it exists, never comes. So I’m happy to stick to the present here and now. That’s enough for me.
—All I want is to be a good man, lady.
—A good-for-nothing, that’s what you are.
The fat mulata isn’t for beating around the bush. And she’s right, as she’s been my neighbour for so many years. She arrived in the area after my parents had died and I inherited the old family house.
At that time, I still went out on long fishing trips, weeks away out on the Sofala shoals. I wasn’t even aware of Luarmina’s existence. As for her, no sooner had she stepped ashore than she was sent to the Mission School, on her way to becoming a nun. She was shut away in the duskiness where God is addressed in whispers.
She only left this seclusion after some years. And she went to live in the house destined for her by her parents, right next to my dwelling. Luarmina was a seamstress, that’s how she made her living. At first, she continued to keep herself to herself. Only the women who entered her abode had any dealings with her. As for me, all I got was the whiff of her shadow’s perfume.
One day, Father Nunes told me about Luarmina and her nebulous past. Her father was Greek, one of those fishermen who cast his net along the coasts of Mozambique, on the other side of Saint Vincent’s Bay. He had long ago gone to meet his maker. Her mother had died not long afterwards. Of grief, so folk said, not because she’d been made a widow but because of her daughter’s beauty.
Luarmina, so it seemed, drove the important gentlemen who scavenged around her house crazy. The lady cursed her daughter’s perfection. It was said that one night, in a fit of madness, she tried to strike Luarmina in the face. All in order to make her ugly and drive her suitors away.
After her mother’s death, Luarmina was sent over this way to be set straight at the Mission, given over to prayer and the crucifix. The girl had to be trimmed on the outside and given a good ironing on the inside. And so that’s how she came to devote herself to threads, needles, and thimbles. Until she moved to her present address on the fringes of my existence.
It was only after I gave up my life as a fisherman that I found myself taking a fancy to my neighbour. I began with letters, messages from a distance. Luarmina had already learned how to defend herself in a thousand ways as a result of my constant amorous approaches. She was always able to render my attentions useless by refusing me.
—Leave me alone, Zeca. Can’t you see I don’t crease my bedsheets anymore?
—What a thought, lady?! Who said that was my intention, dear neighbour?
But she was right. My visits have one purpose, which is to catch her off guard, to provoke a little tenderness. My dream is always the same: to wrap myself in her, carried away by the great wave that causes us to lose all self-awareness. She resists me, but I am always drawn back to her abode.
—Dona Luarmina, what’s the matter? It’s as if you’ve really turned into a nun. One day, when love comes to you, you won’t even recognize it …
—Let me be, Zeca. I’m old, all I need is a shoulder.
To confirm this declaration of frigidity, she rubs her knees as if they were the cause of her weakness. Her legs, the way they swell up, make it hard for her blood to circulate. Her feet become icebergs: you touch them and they are frozen blocks. She is always complaining. On one occasion, I took advantage of this to make her an offer.
—Would you like me to warm your feet up?
With an expectant shiver, she got as far as accepting. Even I was left half taken aback, my heart galloping through my chest.
—Will you warm me up, Zeca?
—Yes, I’ll give you some heat … but from the inside.
I was hoping she would drop her guard. But I got turned down. I was like the fellow who went to wash his hands and dirtied the soap. Or the one who wanted to clip his nail and cut off his finger. At my age, I should have known the correct way to proceed, the delicate tactics needed in one’s approach. My late grandfather always said: When we’re young, we only get taught what’s of no use to us. When we’re old we only learn what’s worthless.
But it’s a pity my neighbour and I can’t pair up. For we’re both semi-widowed: we’ve neither of us had a companion, but even so, that partner has disappeared. I’m younger than she, but we’re both on the far slope where life only moves if it’s in a downward direction.
Nowadays, I know how to measure someone’s true age: we grow old when we no longer make new friends. We start dying the moment we stop falling in love.
And even Dona Luarmina, also known as Albertina da Conceição Melistopolous, was once beautiful enough to dazzle the menfolk. I know this because I once witnessed her good looks for myself. It was an occasion when I wasn’t just confined to the veranda. I entered her house and sat in the big living room which looked out over the sea. That was when I saw the photograph. It was of a young girl of striking beauty, a body to bring water to the most tepid of mouths.
—Who’s that?
—It’s me when I was young. Before I came to live here …
I got to my feet and was about to touch the photo. But she abruptly blocked my vision, turning the picture over on the table. And that’s where it remained for the rest of its days, that portrait lying there with its back to the light. I certainly tried to get a peep at the image of her former bea
uty through the window. But in vain.
I was left with the current vision of Luarmina, the fat, bloated one. The woman, through anguish, had allowed herself to swell, to pile on the kilos. I can understand: a good way of concealing sadness is to cover ourselves with flesh. Suffering is deathbound when it reaches our bones. When it gets there, sadness becomes increasingly skeletal. It is wise to give our body some cover, to insert some lardy borders.
Occasionally, there is some flicker of childhood in her. At such times, she tries to tease me, to spark me with a little jealousy.
—A man once called me dolling.
—Dolling?
—Dolling or darling. It was a stranger from a foreign land.
—What’s this darling business? I’ve got a lot of names that are much better than that. Would you like to hear them, dear neighbour?
—No. I’m sorry, Zeca, but I don’t want to hear them. It’s hard enough for me to have just one name, let alone lots …
I’ve been prowling around the widow for years now. I even risk losing my plumage in my perseverance. But I’m chasing tail to no avail: my feathers brush nothing more than thin air. My strategy is to tell her about all the adventures I’ve had: I invent past deeds from my maritime endeavours. But they are not the type of adventures that bait her dreams. What Dona Luarmina asks of me are precise memories. And that’s what I desire the least. They are scattered too widely throughout my being, even in the finger I lost while fishing. My body has become a cemetery where time is entombed, it’s like one of those sacred woods where we bury our dead.
—Tell me how it happened, I want to know what happened and how. Those things that make us yearn …
As far as I’m concerned, my yearnings are never in a hurry. They take so long that they never get here. Once I start dancing I’m free of time—memories fly off and soar away from me. I should spend the whole time dancing, dancing for her, dancing with her.
—Tell me about your past.
My past is a burden for me: my childhood came to an early end, and I had to carry its effects in later life. When I was six, I took my grandfather’s place on the boat; two years after that, my father lost his mind and left home, unseeing and deranged. Before she died, my mother put me into the care of the church. The Portuguese priest, Jacinto Nunes, educated me according to the doctrine of God and his book. But I wanted to return to the sea, and I soon swapped the book for the net, always unravelling much more than I got back in return. My grandfather Celestiano blamed my father for all this bad luck.
—That son of mine, Agualberto, pig-headed as he is, went and joined the white men’s world and didn’t bother to bless his boat. He forsook his ancestors, and that was his punishment.
I press Dona Luarmina not to ask me for my memories. I want to kill the past, and that woman must let me commit the crime. If not, then the past will end up killing me.
—You, Zeca, are angry at the past, and you’re jealous of the future: are you just going to live in the here and now?
Having retired from fishing, I don’t even have a present to fit into. As long as I was sailing out on the sea, lulled in my boat, I didn’t suffer from time. For as I was rocked by the rhythm of the waves, it was just like dancing. And dancing, as I’ve already said, is the best way to escape time.
—Come and dance, dear Dona …
—Dance? Me? With this body of mine?
She laughs, ashamed. But Luarmina doesn’t know this: those who dance lose their body. The tree is clever, for it doesn’t move while its shadow dances all over the planet.
—Dona Luarmina, don’t you remember Maria Ballerina?
And I recalled the girl who had lived in the area, a hot little number if ever there was one. She danced in a way that drove folk crazy, enough to make men’s brains buzz and their eyes go askew. Her bare feet pummelled the ground like pestles, but they didn’t raise any dust at all; the earth seemed aroused and to enjoy its beating. Maria Ballerina danced on request and for money. They would toss some coins at her and she would immediately set her body ablaze. Even the priest, Jacinto Nunes, would mumble into his cassock:
—Heaven help me, even Archimedes would float!
One night, as the dancer brushed past the open fire, her capulana happened to burst into flames. Maria Ballerina didn’t stop dancing. The bystanders began to yell their warnings at her. The fire in her clothes began to blaze and grow thicker, but she didn’t stop, and what’s more, she allowed no one to get near her. She was in the grip of her own light-headedness, already dancing with death itself. Until she came to a sudden halt while still appearing whole and intact. When the first hand touched her she turned into ashes, a fine powder fluttering away, carried on the breeze.
—Do you remember Maria Ballerina?
Nothing. Luarmina doesn’t reply. Had she even heard what I said? There’s no two ways about it: my lady neighbour is suspicious of other people’s misadventures. All she is interested in are the past times in which I featured. And I, by way of subterfuge, trick her with a few memories, improvise one or two thoughts. Until one day, I asked her:
—Why only my personal memories?
My neighbour didn’t answer. Instead, she shot back:
—Look, if it’s so hard for you, tell me some of your dreams …
But I never recall dreams that come to me while I’m asleep! We operate to a different timetable, me and dreams. So I warn her:
—They’ll be fake dreams …
—That doesn’t matter.
And I stood firm. For, apart from anything else, it brings us bad luck if we recall those who visit us during our sleep. So I was bound to introduce a few flashes of invention into my accounts. When it is not we who invent a dream, it is the dream that invents us.
—It doesn’t matter, Zeca Perpétuo. I would even pay someone to tell me their dreams today.
A flicker of a smile crossed her face. But it was only moistened sadness. After that, I left my neighbour sitting where she was and crept back to my house with heavy steps. Luarmina had shut herself away in her world of fancy, as if she were unstitching some imaginary cloth:
—Sea loves me, sea loves me a lot …
This was Luarmina’s ditty, her endless mumbling and jumbling. In the late afternoon, the mulata would sit down on the steps up to her veranda and forever unpick flowers. After a while, the whole yard would be lined with petals, the ground shimmering with a thousand colours.
Second Chapter
We launch the boat, we yearn for the journey: it’s always the sea that travels.
One of my grandfather Celestiano’s sayings
Well, let me tell you something, my good lady. It’s a pity you’re going around tiring your eyes in front of everyone. What you should do, straightaway when you get up in the morning, is to wipe your face with a dream. That’s what hinders time’s advance and stops wrinkles from appearing. Do you know what to do? You lie out nice and flat on the sand, oblong fashion, stretching your mind diagonally. Then you just stay there, all quiet, right next to the ground, until you feel the soil embracing you with its love. I’m telling you, lady: when we keep still and quiet, like a stone, we start to hear the earth’s ways of talking. At one point, lady, you’ll hear a nautical voice coming from the ground, as if there were an ocean under the earth’s skin. Make the most of this restfulness, Dona Luarmina. I take full advantage of these submarine silences. It’s they that lull me to sleep even today. I’m its child, a child of the sea.
—A child, yes, for sure. You’ve long forgotten your age.
—Do you know what I’d really like? It would be for the two of us to get together, do you understand, Dona Luarmina?
—Come to your senses, Zeca.
—Just think of us as verb and subject.
—I know your sort of grammar only too well …
—My dear good lady, you have no idea how much you enrich my eyesight.
Luarmina doesn’t favour me with a reply. And rightly so. Who am I? A hunter of fish who
doesn’t even have anyone to tell his adventures to. It’s true, lady, I can’t put lustre on my lies. And are they in fact lies? If I didn’t really witness what I’m recounting but end up believing myself? It’s all the sea’s fault; all boundaries collapse there, everything is possible. At sea, there are no words, nor does anyone ask you to prove the truth. As old Celestiano used to say: where it’s always noon, everything is night.
I turn my attention to the woman, Dona Luarmina. No one has ever been such a close neighbour. For at times when I can’t see her, I dream of her. Always, without fail, that cushiony, flesh-filled woman. Her butt exceeds her buttocks. There was a time when she provoked men’s attentions. But she has faded now. Not for me, as I’m fired up in her presence and ardent in her absence.
Late every afternoon, I walk over to her house. Her little place is funny: all it has is a backside. A bit like its lady owner: you don’t have to beat around the bush in order to walk round it. You get there, and you’re at its rear straightaway. I sit down on an old tree trunk and gaze at the woman unpicking herself:
—Sea loves me …
Then I think to myself: how I’d love to stick my hand inside her endowments! One night, as I lay on my sleeping mat, I even dreamed I walked up to where she was sitting and presented the following request:
—Let me feel your buttocks; it’ll be so quick you won’t even have to put my brazenness out of your mind.
—Which one?
—What do you mean, Dona Luarmina?
—Which buttock?
—Either one, lady, they measure the same. Don’t you remember your school geometry: the sum of the factors is always the same?
While I was speaking, my hand was travelling over her lusty abundances, a crazy little train rolling over the contours of her seating area. My fingers tiptoed along her crevices.
—What’s going on? I haven’t given you permission yet.