Daria

  They ordered Francisco out of the car, put handcuffs on him and a blindfold. They then dragged him to their car, which was hidden in the bushes on the side of the road. As they reached the car, they put a powerful substance on Francisco’s mouth and nose and he lost consciousness, his body falling down as an amorphous helpless mass. They then picked him up and placed him carelessly in the trunk of the car. They drove to the coast, and Francisco, still unconscious, was put on a ship that would take him to his destiny in Tarrafal on the other coast of Africa. He knew it took him many days, perhaps months, to reach Tarrafal, where Ana already was, but he did not have a precise sense of how long. He remembered spending days on the ship and being assaulted by fits of nausea; he remembered he was being fed little food, or food that seemed to taste rotten in his mouth. He remembered being interrogated by the agents who picked him up and accompanied him on the long voyage to Tarrafal. He remembered being hung from the ship with his head down for what seemed like a very long time. They would hang him like that, his head just slightly above the water surface, and they would tell him that at any moment he was going to be food for the sharks. They said they were reaching the South African coast of KwaZulu-Natal, and that there were plenty of these sharp-mouthed beasts there that would shave off his limbs and head in a matter of seconds, with the precision of giant and unforgiving razorblades. They would do this, and sometimes, to scare him even more, they would throw something in the water to make Francisco think that indeed the shark was coming to him to swallow his head. They would scream and point, saying, “There it is! There is the beast of the sea, the Adamastor monster, bigger than the world, bigger than the universe. There is it! Laughing its teeth at your bold Black head.” They did this type of macabre exercise many times throughout this long and agonizing voyage as they moved from point to point along the African coast. And, as they moved, reaching different important ports or locations, they would name the many Portuguese sailors who had travelled that same route and taken up their posts here and there, putting up their flags to claim the territories. They talked about dates, names, ships, legends, events, timely deaths and noble births, kings, kingdoms, rivers, monsters, mermaids, astronomical inventions, navigational instruments, vacuous and infernal labyrinths inhabited by heathens and naked savages, conquerors and conquered, and much more. The long, seemingly endless, speech went as far back as 1415, and even long before that, to the time of Viriato the Lusitanian. It was as if they were singing a song or writing another version of The Lusiads.

  Francisco was a well-educated man, and like any Black child who entered the formal school system at the time, he had studied Portuguese history in detail. His studies had first started when he entered primary school, or perhaps even before. His father, an assimilado from the Tsonga group, had been a powerful overseer for the colonial administration in the sugar fields in the Province of Maputo. This gave Francisco the advantage of being able to know both sides of the equation, both sides of history, to understand both the colonial master and the one being mastered. He knew well the arrogance of the colonial empire; he had known it since he was a very little boy. He had seen it everywhere—in his father’s obsequious and sad bowing, in his adulation, in his abuse of power as a man on the right side of a deeply unbalanced equation. So the proclamations of Francisco’s torturers, as he was being transported to Cape Verde—following the same route as the great Lusitanian adventurers—were nothing to him but attempts to re-establish something that in his mind, and in the minds of many people like him, was already lost, doomed to fall, sooner or later. The stories his captors told were nothing but empty and tired rhetorical schemes to make him bow, to make him spill his secrets. Though he was in extreme pain—his body exhausted and depressed by heat, seasickness, lack of food and water, not to mention the drugs in his system—and all his being ached with deep saudade for Ana and their children—he did not give in. He had made a vow many, many years ago, when he witnessed one of the most horrific incidents of his life. He was just seven years old when he saw how his father had chained a group of men working under him, his brothers in blood and skin, and made them work for an entire day on the sugar fields under the burning sun with no break, no water, no food, no shade. He did this because he wanted them to produce higher quotas. He said they were getting lazy—lazy like their entire race. Francisco remembers pleading with his father to unchain the men, to give them at least a sip of water, to allow them to rest for a few minutes under the frangipani tree. He pleaded and pleaded but it was to no avail. And then, defying his father’s authority—and feeling like the world was going to end and that God or the gods were going to kill him, his father, and his entire family for allowing such malignance to take place—little Francisco took it upon himself to bring water and bread to the working men. He tried to do it discreetly so that his father would not notice, but his father had eagle eyes, and he caught him in the act. He brought him home and he spanked him with a long belt all over his tender body, and then he chained him to the frangipani outside of their house and made him spend one night and one day there alone. He had no water, no bread, and no company except for the ancestors, who spoke to him from the ground just under the sacred tree. He knew they were there, for they could sometimes be seen and sensed everywhere above or below the earth, or in the weeping willows and ridges of the stars—one only needed to be truly awake. He would never forget how scared he felt, how alone, how powerless—how he wished he would die. His father told him that he should learn from that lesson not to disobey his father, his superior. And indeed Francisco learned; he learned how it felt to be a man with no power, no shade, no water, no father, no God. He felt what those men working under his father’s iron will felt, and he promised himself that he would do something to change this world, this way, this life. He promised to bring back to life the ancestors who were now mostly silenced because no one had eyes to see them, ears to hear them, or a voice to speak to them. They were truly dead. And ever since that day, Francisco had been reading about everything and everyone, learning and thinking about how it is that men can do things to one another that are so horrible and how it is that he, as a man, can learn how to do other things that can undo such acts.

  REMBRANDT AND OTHER METHODS. When Francisco finally arrived at Santiago Island, he had no idea how long he had spent at sea. He looked tired, his eyes were red, and his gums were almost diseased, for no one had given him fresh oranges. He was dazed and confused, but he still knew why they had taken him and why he was there. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and an athletic body. He had been trained through hard-line discipline at the Greco-Latino Wrestling Camp during his stay in Russia, a famous place where all the best Russian athletes trained before going on to win abundant gold medals in international sports competitions. This was also the place where African guerrilla fighters and the followers of a certain line of Marxist liberation ideals were sent to learn the ways of victory so that they could then go back home and start the revolution to free their beloved countries. Francisco had had the habit of shaving his head since he was very young. It was as if he had predicted the trend that would arrive much later on in America, when Black men, eventually followed by many white ones, started to boldly show their naked heads, like beautiful sparkling earth spheres, the big guiding eye for their bodies. But now, after the long voyage at sea, his hair was long, a real Afro that grew very evenly around his head in a perfect circle that made it look compact, intense, and sealed off, as if it were a vast unexplored map where all kinds of new lands could be devised, a vast endless field where dreams could be nourished. His hair was like a ring of stunning black fire where the knowledge and the passion for justice danced, hiding in the intricacies of an entangled and freshly made nest. His beard and moustache had also grown, and seen from afar, Francisco almost looked like a messiah coming from an unknown and faraway land to deliver the beautiful news to the waiting people. When he arrived at the compound, they took him to the barber and to the showers so that he could be cl
eaned up. The same two guards who had dealt with Ana took him to the showers, where they also flogged him with water, in a malicious teasing, hitting his member very hard and making him fall sprawled on the floor. He was now a naked Jesus under the hands of merciless Roman soldiers. They were following orders from a modern Pontius Pilate who had no doubt about his righteousness. They were servicemen who had forgotten their own thoughts, their own capacity to see the terror and pain in the other’s eyes.

  After the shower, and still naked, Francisco was taken to the chief’s experimental chamber, which was located at the end of the compound in a hidden corner. When he entered the chamber, he immediately recognized Arsénio de Oliveira because, like Ana, he had also seen him many times on TV or sometimes even in person delivering speeches and trying to intimidate the people with his poisonous words. Arsénio was a small man with a belly dancing in the middle of his waist. He had small eyes and fat little hands, and his hair was sparse, only a few silver threads combed to the side so that he would appear less bald. His voice was raucous, filled with hatred for his subordinates, fear of his superiors, and sometimes raging disappointment, especially when he had tried all the methods of punishment he could think of on his prisoners and nothing had worked, when he was left without the secret he was after: the classified information he was then to take to António de Oliveira Salazar, the chief of state, also known as Sr. Presidente do Conselho de Ministros and Arsénio’s own first cousin. Arsénio had gotten the position in Tarrafal because of this powerful family connection. There were rumours that Arsénio suffered from a profound jealousy of his cousin that had developed into a serious complex of inferiority or obsession. He was always trying to find ways to impress his cousin so that his aunt, Maria do Resgate Salazar, would stop comparing him to her famed son, and his father would stop making him feel he was a good-for-nothing who was not as clever or manly as his cousin. Whatever it was that was commanding Arsénio’s actions, it was something very dark, very macabre, as those who ended up at his mercy inside the chamber found out.

  This chamber, which some also referred to as a laboratory, was called the experimenter’s chamber because Arsénio was experimenting with all kinds of techniques to arrive at his devised goal. He was well versed in the psychology of the mind and had read and tried many techniques that were popular at the time, including the various subhuman behaviour modification techniques developed by Pavlov, Skinner, Watson, and several others who were less well known. He had also invented a unique method that consisted of hanging many of Rembrandt’s portraits on the walls of his chamber and then forcing his victims to decipher exactly what the portraits were communicating. He wanted the prisoners to tell him what the mysterious faces were hiding. He deeply believed that underneath Rembrandt’s enigmatic expressions was a clear line where the truth shone, a transparent soul that could not hide from anyone. This method, he thought, would eventually make the cryptic and lying faces of his prisoners lose their masks and show their true selves, and, in so doing, spill out the messages that he wanted to receive. The chamber was the most insidious place Francisco had ever known. The Russian training sessions that were meant to make him withstand the most horrible tortures fell way below Arsénio’s evil machinations. What really intrigued and puzzled Francisco, who was also an avid admirer of Rembrandt and an excellent art connoisseur, was how Arsénio had managed to obtain these original paintings from the seventeenth-century Dutch master, given that Salazar had decided to play it safe and had closed off the country to the world during the Second World War, without showing any open or obvious support for either the Allies or the Axis. And more than that: How the hell did he manage to bring those paintings all the way down to Tarrafal and then create an environment there to preserve them, considering that his nation had remained neutral during the conflict? Francisco had no answer to this question at the time. But he was interested in knowing what really happens in the world, in knowing the truths that often stay out of history books, so he planned to solve this mystery later on, when he could, when the time was right and he had access to documents that were hidden or not yet known to exist. He knew that history only truly makes sense when looked at from a certain distance, when you can hear different voices that sing their own songs, some sad, some gay, some powerful, and some wretched. And indeed, after the ordeal of Tarrafal was behind him and he was safe in Canada, enjoying the many fruits and liberties that the country had to offer—though it hadn’t always been like that, at least not for everyone and not in equal measure—he came across information about Salazar and his dealings with the Germans that would account for the presence of the famed paintings in Tarrafal.

  Most of the time, Arsénio conducted his sessions alone with his prisoners, with the chamber’s door closed. He always wanted them to be naked. It was as if he suffered from some perverted disease that forced him to stare at the beauty or fragility of the human body and do with it whatever he wished. He had no wife and had never been married, but he had frequent access to women. Not only would he use and abuse many of the female prisoners, but he would also have women brought in just to serve him whenever his appetite so required. Like the prisoners, they would always be brought to his chamber, not his bedroom. These women would be locals sometimes, but he had a preference for white women because he was a racist and believed in the superiority of his race. He would force Black or mixed women—or those who had been mixing with Blacks, as in Ana’s case—to do the most hideous and demeaning acts, including sodomy, oral sex, eating their own feces, and many other dirty things, the kind of things that are explicitly described in Le Marquis de Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir. With the white ones he would be gentler, much more prudish, much more restrained; he would barely touch them, and most of the time he would just stare at them or walk around their standing naked bodies with a long pinkish flamingo feather. He would comb their bodies up and down with it, causing them to feel ticklish and sometimes burst into incontrollable fits of laughter, which he would then stop with a slap on the face, saying, “Are you a whore or a virgin?” Sometimes he would venture a little further and would point the feather at their nipples, circling them over and over until he felt aroused, his member erecting gradually from inside his pants and vigorously pointing towards the woman. And as the thunder and rain came, he would fall on the floor, whining like a rabbit for several minutes until he recovered his strength and called his guards to remove the woman from his chamber.

  Francisco stood naked in front of Arsénio, who introduced him to his method of punishment and intimidation by using two specific Rembrandt portraits: Head of Christ and Head of a Young Man or Self-Portrait. Arsénio started his attempt at deciphering the enigmatic with Head of a Young Man or Self-Portrait, for he thought that Francisco was a young man and somewhat of an artiste himself, a poet in fact, an artiste of many abilities who was evading his government’s regime by using all kinds of metaphors and coded language to fool him and his counterparts, and he was keen on breaking him down. He told Francisco to stand directly in front of the portrait and he started asking him all kinds of questions with the intent to eliminate any obscurity that danced in that enigmatic face fully exposed in the painting. They were meticulous questions aimed at cracking the code of the secret that hid in that fluffy head full of hair falling down unevenly everywhere, on the roundish eyes, on the slightly bent posture, the white nose, the shadow covering his upper face, the light that exposed his left cheek, the brown of his jacket, the fullness of his right ear, the meagreness of his right eyebrow and the thickness of his left one. Every time the answer came from Francisco—because the answer was wrong every time, at least according to Arsénio—he would strike him with a leather belt that one of his friends had brought to him from Brazil, a long, sturdy belt made of crocodile’s skin. Francisco would control the pain most of the time and would seldom emit a cry or show a contortion on his face, resolved as he was to preserve his dignity. It was as if, like the artist, he resisted being decoded and touch
ed by the strikes of Arsénio’s violent belt, so intent was he on maintaining his persona, on protecting the sacred cryptogram. He reacted like a brave hero, a war soldier who was not afraid of dying, whose body had in fact ceased to exist. His soul, where the idea throbbed, rose to the chamber’s ceiling, up high, and looked down on the meanness of the world, composing Bach’s arias or just hearing them over and over again like a mantra. He was himself without himself, and he was no longer naked in front of Arsénio. He was no longer receiving blows from the merciless poisonous belt, a belt that was made of the skin of that powerful animal that once lived in the wetlands of the Brazilian Amazon, that had once roamed the canals and rivers, trying to find the sun and the water and the murky mud where the life of the rainforest could be tasted.

  “What is Rembrandt hiding in the obscurity of his upper face? Is he concealing the secret of FRELIMO’s next attack on the empire’s troops? Does that shadowy upper face represent the darkness of evil, the darkness inhabiting the hearts of the people of this godless continent?” Arsénio would ask. And Francisco would reply, “The upper shadow, sir, represents the sacred mysteries of the night when God visits Africans and delivers the messages of the angels, these angels being the ancestors who live on the other side of the river, on the wings of the sun, on the morning dew, or on the beautiful eyes of women who only ask for love and children as if their wombs are nothing but lands of plenty where many beings and futures are waiting, waiting to see the sun directly through their irises. Or, sir, these ancestors live on the beautiful frangipani tree in its full blooming season, when it’s enveloped in those little white flowers and becomes a stunning umbrella that covers you from the rain, when it becomes the pure African bride dancing in the savannah like a translucent, transpersonal, transnational gazelle.” This answer, which was overly metaphoric for Arsénio, would only exasperate him more and make his belt strike harder and more frequently, so hard and so frequently that Francisco’s skin would sometimes give in, letting out a silent cry in the colour of red tears. “What is the meaning of the clarity that dances in his right cheek? Does it mean that Salazar’s troops are making progress in the Mayombe of Angola? Or does it mean that Amílcar Cabral has been killed? Does it mean that civilization is spreading and securely implanting itself in this disorderly continent? And does the darkness in the left cheek mean that there is still a lot of work to do to spread the light fully, to reach those people who know nothing but the tremulous and uncertain brightness of bonfires?” And the reply: “No, sir. The left bright part of Mr. Rembrandt’s visage means that he wanted to capture the ambivalence inherent in every human being, in every race, in every soul—the ambivalence within himself. It means that in painting himself, he, the artist, the man, the human, was trying to find out who he was even though, as he discovered, he was something that could never quite be unveiled. He was like a shadow moving perpetually and gradually towards the final light, even though the light could never be fully reached, never fully perceived through his own sight. He understood this after finishing the painting, when he finally looked at himself from outside of himself. There is a story, sir, about Rembrandt spending two days looking at his portrait after he finished it, as if in some meditative trance. He was trying to become acquainted with himself, to find the grounding and the peace he felt he was lacking. But then, disappointed that this feeling did not come, he went on painting face after face after face for the rest of his life. He painted the faces of everyone he found, as if everyone was a vehicle through which he would finally arrive at himself. And then, sir, when he was in his bed, ready to depart, he said to his friends and admirers, ‘No man should ever think that truth and understanding can come solely from within himself. One must look at the other, note her differences, the roughness of her hands, the longing in her eyes, the many lights and shadows that dance in her face, how the sound of her voice comes out throughout the day, how it changes when it’s sunny or rainy, hot or cold. That, my friends, is the way one truly finds oneself. Otherwise we are always alone and afraid, and because of that, we inflict pain onto others and ourselves.’ His philosophy, sir, was truly dialectical. He believed in the otherness of selfhood or in the selfhood of otherness.” “What is he hiding under his fluffy hair that seems neither black nor brown, neither blond nor reddish?” Arsénio would continue. “Again, sir, I think I already answered that question. He is, through the medium of painting, showing the art admirer that one does not, cannot, live alone on an island; that one is always made of many others; and that those others may be blond, black, brown, or something else that is not depicted in the colours of his hair, the colours he chose to paint himself with at that particular point in his life. He is using metaphor and metonymy, sir; metonymy, sir, comes from the Greek metōnymía, which means ‘a change of name.’ Both metaphor and metonymy have in them the word ‘meta,’ which means ‘beyond’ or ‘after.’ This ultimately suggests that our language is always trying to catch something beyond itself, always after some unreachable golden mean that it can never attain, making us all eternal simpletons unable to stare at the true essence of things. In some cultures, it is believed that this is a punishment from God and that the true language will only come to us when all the injustice plaguing our world has ceased. Now, I would even go so far, sir—and forgive me the many examples—as to suggest that Rembrandt is using a syllogism and that syllogism is as follows: All humans are part of me (this being the major premise); I am human (this being the minor premise); therefore, I am part of all humans (this being the conclusion). This could otherwise be stated as follows: therefore, all humans are in me, or therefore, I am in all humans.” At this point, Arsénio would become enraged. He would land his hardest strike on Francisco, not even looking where he was hitting, and he would say, “You stupid bastard, you think you can fool me with your mumbo-jumbo imitations of western philosophy, rhetoric, and literary knowledge. You stupid bastard. The correct expression is All humans are mortal (this being the major premise); I am a human (this being the minor premise); therefore, I am mortal (this being the conclusion). And obviously this syllogism does not even apply to you because you are not human. But you are mortal, as I will soon show you.”