Daria

by Irene Marques

  “My dear friend Francisco Magno Motumba, you have been playing mind games with me, and you have not yet revealed anything of substance that you ought to reveal about yourself or about the activities of your comrades. Now the game will be taken to the next level. You ain’t seen nothing yet, ain’t seen nothing yet, my friend. Now it is really going to be truth or dare, truth or dare.” This was Arsénio’s prelude to the next round of punishments. This round was going to be based on what Arsénio understood about behaviour modification from reading Pavlov, Skinner, Watson, and others. He had taken Watson’s position and beliefs to the letter, and he was firmly convinced that he could, in his chamber, make anyone become what he wanted them to become. He kept Watson’s famous quotation posted in big red letters on the chamber’s wall so that he would not forget what he was there to do, and so that the prisoners would also become intimidated. He wanted them to see that statement constantly staring at them, reminding them that their beautiful idea, the one they had nourished since their birth and the one they likely were born with, was nothing when compared to the reality of the idea that had brought them to that place. But Francisco was a sophisticated, patient, and learned man, and when Arsénio used his methods on him in an attempt to modify his behaviour—to make him forget his beautiful idea, to brainwash him into accepting his ideologies, and to divulge his secret—he would not give in. Francisco was sure of himself. His resistance was unbending and his will unyielding. He had trained his mind to read Watson’s quotation, which stared at him in big red capital letters on the wall, as follows: Give me a world that is healthy, where men and women, Blacks and whites, yellows and browns can become lawyers, doctors, artists, merchant-chiefs, and yes, even presidents. Yes, we can. Instead of what it actually said: Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. When using the freezing method, Arsénio tried positive reinforcement: Francisco, who had been standing in the same position for three hours, was allowed to sit for ten minutes whenever he gave a response that seemed truthful to Arsénio, or at least the prelude to something big—the white whale Arsénio was after. Of course Francisco was just buying time and finding a way to rest his body for a few minutes. He was a man of letters, and he knew how to speak words that seemed to say something when in fact they said nothing, had no palpable substance. As the session resumed, Arsénio would quickly find out that he had been tricked, for Francisco’s previous promise or the hint of a promise would not materialize into anything. At this point, his techniques would intensify, becoming at times seemingly sloppy or dispossessed of much logic, and he would apply negative or positive punishment alternatively or indiscriminately. He would inflict on Francisco’s body electric shock after electric shock, deprive him of sleep for three days in a row, not allow him to eat for four days, and so on and so forth. During these sessions, Francisco would enter a state of semi-consciousness but would still maintain alive his idea, often mumbling it in a songlike fashion like someone who was dreaming or sleepwalking: “Give me a world that is healthy, where men and women, Blacks and whites, yellows and browns can become lawyers, doctors, artists, merchant-chiefs, and yes, even presidents. Yes, we can.” He would mumble it in Shangaan and sometimes in Maconde, so that Arsénio and his assistants would not know what he was saying. They would just think he was delirious or that he was invoking some black magic that would not be of any help when compared to their scientific methods, which were founded on reason and logic. But they were wrong, for this invocation that Francisco repeated over and over again in his worst moments was what gave him strength, strength to continue. It was a mantra that allowed him to meditate and enter transcendence, to leave his body and dwell in the magnificent zone of love, where one is all and all is one, where the eye that sees is vast, spreading like sun rays on a stunning spring day. He could see the frangipani tree in its glorious blooming state, advancing in assurance and unparalleled beauty through the wide African savannahs, giving shelter to the living and to the dead.

  In yet another attempt to make Francisco lose the idea that he carried deep within himself, to make him give up his secret, Arsénio forced Francisco to take potent magic mushrooms, which he had obtained through the same friend from Brazil who’d given him the crocodile belt. In that country, these fungi grew naturally and were often used by Indigenous people in ritualistic religious ceremonies to communicate with the vast cosmos and experience love in all forms. Arsénio believed that psilocybin, the magic ingredient in these mushrooms, would force Francisco to become less of himself and enter the vast nothingness, and that at this point Arsénio would be able to extract what he wanted, or better yet, to train Francisco to become someone else, something else. Arsénio thought that after having experienced the greatness of selfhood, Francisco would surely not want to return to the smallness of his African self.

  Of course Arsénio had little knowledge of what it meant to be African, and he was not aware that Francisco had participated in many religious ceremonies in Mozambique at which he had taken similar drugs. Those trips had allowed him to meet his ancestors and all there was in this universe, and he had always come back safe and sound, integral in his person, because he had been trained well by the elders, who knew how to encounter greatness and still be able to remain in themselves and with themselves. Moreover, Francisco had experienced the distended ego in many other ways: when making love with Ana, or Sarif, or that Russian splendid woman whose eyes were as green as the rich moist fields of May in the northern hemisphere; or when listening to Bach’s Cantata No. 202; or when writing a poem in which words became things that he could eat and smell and touch; or simply when walking outside under the dark night when he and the stars joined together in a feast of oneness and his heart beat in unison with the skies. So when Arsénio gave him the potent fungi, Francisco started to experience what he had already experienced many times. His mind knew what was happening, having already travelled to that land—and through much better routes. There was that deep voice down there that was well aware of what was sacred to him, and that voice was stronger than the venom with which Arsénio was trying to poison him. That voice was more than the voice of reason—it was the voice of the soul. It kept telling him that this moment—this moment he was in after having ingested the mushrooms given to him by Arsénio—was not a real one, not the real one. It was not the genuine sunyata of the great we, of the nothingness, of the handsome void. This moment was not a moment to experience real merging with the cosmos, like he had when he had participated in the rituals with his people. This was not the moment to speak with the ancestors who lived below the frangipani tree, that bride of the beautiful country by the Indian sea. This moment was not the moment to get lost in the emerald eyes of the Russian woman and become the grass of May. This moment was just an illusion; it was not a real translucent pearl. As he expected, first he felt happy, euphoric, and light. Then he saw the colours of Watson’s quotation on the wall more intensely than he had before: they became bleeding diamonds or sometimes rising or setting suns. Then Bach’s music, which he always kept in a corner of his mind, became louder and louder, and he no longer heard or saw anything else. He could not hear the questions Arsénio was asking him, even though his jailor was trying to pose them in different ways to see if Francisco would get distracted and let himself go. But Francisco was immersed in the protective mantle of his soul, that magnanimous sheet that served as the filter to keep out all the intrusions, all the weapons of a dirty war.

  If anything, this trip made him feel more, sense more, think more. It made him see how his brain was wired and what nerves were responsible for the protection of the idea. It was as if he could see, right in front of him, his own brain, his own grey matter fully exposed righ
t there on top of the table. Looking at it, he was able to understand the complexity of his own mental processes, like a transcendental scientist performing a thorough autopsy on himself. He stared at the left and right sides of his brain, analyzing that magnificent grey mass full of intricate neurons and little veins that connect to the rest of his being and make him walk. He started to see vividly, like never before, how he came to nourish his idea so dearly and how he came to accept that he may have to suffer a lot before he could see that very idea dance in front of him—the verbs to be and to become joined, happy to be brothers, happy to be sisters, siblings carrying the same genetic code, able to generate new life and never, never let the world die. He recalled, with the arresting sharpness and presence of today and now, that day when his father had abused the men working in the sugar fields, chaining them together and not giving them bread or water for hours on end. The bread and water that—in the old days, before the gluttony of empire took over—they had been able to gather from their fields, where they had cultivated the variety of crops they needed to feed themselves and their families. He saw and felt and tasted the painful movements of their bodies and the lack of light in their eyes. He tasted and swallowed the fear that he had felt when his father left him outside, attached to the frangipani, when he had spent the whole night alone. He smelled the lions and the hyenas as they roamed around, very close to his tiny body, trying to take a bite out of him. And he saw, with his hands and feet and eyes, how the elders had come from under the frangipani to scare the predators away and spare his life. He felt the iron slap on the face he had received when he had entered a bar in Maputo with Ana—years ago, when they were first dating—and he tasted the blood that he had had on his hands after he gave the abuser a good beating. A blood that was sour, a lifeless liquid smelling like old, moldy. He saw and tasted all the other things that he had experienced and eaten throughout all his life, in an unprecedented fashion and with a great degree of intensity. All this encouraged him to fight harder and harder for his idea, to keep it down there, guarded and sealed from the mean world at seven keys, until the world came to a point where he could let it out to walk freely in the fields of the African savannah, the fields of the entire world, like a circle of fire or a dancing wild horse. He saw with distinctiveness the nerves that are responsible for his emotions and the ones that made him compose and write beautiful classical poetry. He saw and touched the rational part of his brain that controlled the tears and the dishevelling of the self. He felt its coldness; he saw how he could use that part to compartmentalize—like many Europeans like to believe they can do, thinking they are superior because of that very capability—and he acknowledged that that part is necessary sometimes, like in that precise moment when he was trying to protect his secret and his idea. He also saw that that very part is often misused and abused, that it produces technology and ways of seeing and being and feeling that only serve to kill the innocent and annihilate the fullness of life. And then, right after, he saw Picasso’s sombre painting like he had never seen it before or would ever be able to see it again, even when he stood right in front of the original at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid years later. He saw its magnitude taking over the entire chamber, taking over himself. He put himself right inside the dark canvas. He saw the brutality of the painting like never before—everything was in disarray, everything broken down, men and women, bulls and horses mingling, disoriented, inside a closed claustrophobic room. They were trying to reach for the candle—that old gentle light that brings so much warmth to the heart and the tired limbs and helps us to have a magic sleep. And then, above the claustrophobic room, he saw, suspended and smiling, Franco, Hitler, and Salazar, arm in arm, like comrades of the same creed. As he looked at the other part of the brain, Guernica’s scene became inverted: now he could see the threesome of Franco, Hitler, and Salazar inside the claustrophobic room, cowering in terror and covering their heads with their hands to shield themselves from the meteor shower that kept on falling. They looked small, scared, and very human. And the others, men and beasts, women and children—the ones who had been kept inside the claustrophobic room in the other part of the brain—were now flying around the room, roaming the sky. They were frantically trying to stop the meteor shower from falling on their fellow beings who were still stuck in their own rooms, their own houses all over Spain. After this extraordinary trip inside and outside Picasso’s painting, Francisco looked at Rembrandt’s Head of Christ and saw himself as Jesus Christ inside the painting, as if he had gone on another trip. It was as if he had become God or allowed God to enter himself, like he had learned to do in the ceremonies with his people. He felt Jesus Christ in him, and through Jesus he felt his father, and through his father he felt the entire world weighing upon his being. He felt the cows and the zebras, the elephants and the snakes. He felt the large empty savannahs of Africa and the mountain chains of the Northern Hemisphere. He entered those very different spaces in slow, rhythmic movements like a man who can fly or like a bird who is also a man. He tasted the spring berries and the figs of August and the cassava and the mangos and the refreshing watermelon and the chicken soup for the soul. He shivered in the cold Russian winter, and his body expanded in the heat of Mozambique. He sensed the peace of the night and the tiredness of a long workday. He danced again with the many women he had met throughout his life, reliving the very first moments he had spent with each of them. He returned to the moments when their romance was new, vibrant, and sacred, and made him feel like a mystic engaged in a perpetual discovery—a discovery of the beautiful other and the self in that other. And then he felt the opposite: the tired, old lingering of that which one already knows too well, or thinks one knows, and the rising need to go out again and hunt for the beautiful. And he felt too the hypocrisy of the game and the tiredness, the fear, and the hurt that it can bring. He became a carpenter, and he travelled throughout Galilee delivering the word of his father to the people. With an incantatory word, he made Lazarus rise from the dead and walk through life, stunningly erected and healed, ready to withstand suffering again. And he made wine and bread multiply, feeding the many hungry, needy people that he had encountered in his many voyages. He became his own mother, the Virgin Mary, and he felt deep within his womb the entering, in himself, of God’s seed—experiencing a cosmic orgasm of the soul, one so grand and so vast and so absorbing that he would never forget it. And though, at that very moment, he experienced the vanishing of his self, perhaps like never before, he still kept sealed within himself the sacred idea. Arsénio was trying to force it out of him with all his barbarous and unscrupulous methods, like a robber who did not care and insisted on breaking down and stealing from the jeweller his most precious jewel—the brilliant bride that would illuminate the world, when the world was ready to receive its stunning and redeeming light. And then, after all this, when Francisco looked at himself from outside of himself, he saw again, in memorable detail, Rembrandt’s portrait: the head of Christ full of black, thick, and curly hair, just like he himself had had when he arrived in Tarrafal. He saw his own Black face in the painting, and he saw the blood trickling down from the crown of thorns that the Roman soldiers, commanded by their bosses, had put on him. Like an endless canvas of the world’s history, or like a line that never ends, Rembrandt’s painting then transmuted into a portrait of Karl Marx; that man of vision and insight stared fiercely at him and reaffirmed with steadfast conviction his creed: “Break down the empire. Create a revolution. Take arms to kill your enemy if need be, for the rich man is not going to give away his mansion easily. Learn, deconstruct the constructed, denaturalize the naturalized, shatter mansions and creeds—become a rational man. Do not allow religion or any other opium to pollute your mind. Divide the field of your country equally, and equally distribute bread, water, and salt among your people. The idea, my friend, has not yet manifested like I saw it, like I envisaged it during my long nights of meditation, when I was writing the manifesto. The idea has not yet manifested, but the id
ea is beautiful and the idea is possible. It is possible and beautiful, my friend, and one must never stop trying to make it manifest, to make it as palpable as the sores on the bodies of your fellow men or the alienation in their eyes at the end of the day. Let’s go, comrade. March ahead. No fear. No regrets.” At that moment, the trip became less intense, and he gradually returned to himself. He felt the surest he had ever felt—about his idea, his convictions, the task at hand. He felt clean and rejuvenated. He felt ready for the new battle. Ready for whatever Arsénio wanted to throw at him. He had travelled deeply into his soul, and in that process he had encountered the soul of the world, the voice of voices, which had given him more strength and clarity of mind. This trip, which he had been forced to undertake, had allowed him to see everything anew—at an angle, in a light that he had never before experienced. It had allowed him to see the world as it was, how it was, how it had become that way, and what and how it could be and become. He was reminded once again of the intertwined, beautiful dance between the verbs to be and to become. These were the most important verbs to conjugate and conjugate again until one found the golden medium that each carried, until we could finally stop to admire the great house that we built, until we could finally exhale. Exhaling and inhaling, a perfect balancing act: clean air going in and coming out. We could be the citizens of a perfect world—a world that we ourselves built with our bare hands, our naked and raw dreams finally realized. He was now able to see himself clearly and understand precisely why and how he was the way he was. Francisco was, more than ever, very conscious of himself and of the outside world, and he knew that this world was not yet ready to receive his jewel. But he was patient and he would endure, and unless Arsénio decided, as a last resort or in a fit of high rage, to cut his head off, suspending the circuits that connected body and soul, Francisco knew that he would withstand.