“How can you tell if someone is a molwene?” I asked.
“You can’t—that’s the problem. There are some molwenes who wear shirts and ties. You’d never think they were molwenes. It’s the truth!” By now, Bento knows the demographic well: playboys, well dressed, a few years older than he is. Molwenes are suave, arrogant, insistent. They call you amigo, “my friend,” or John—a bit of slang that has crept over the border from South Africa. Their most common ploy is to present themselves as customers.
Bento told me the story of three molwenes he’d run into down on Maputo’s seaside promenade, the marginal. The marginal is that strange brand of urban property that seems to defy the laws of real estate. It’s the most picturesque, and also the most dangerous, stretch of land in downtown Maputo, a meandering stone-walled road by the ocean with rows of coconut palms overlooking the whitecaps. Molwenes abound. These particular molwenes beckoned Bento and ate three breads with five bajias each. They told him to sit down and insisted when he refused. When he asked to be paid, they only teased him: “Man, you’ve got some fancy clothes, kid. What do you need our money for?” They grabbed at his collar and at his pants, and then one found the thick knot of change in Bento’s second pair of pants. Your second pair of pants? I asked. “I always walk with two pairs of pants,” Bento explained, with just this sort of situation in mind. He was beginning to “open his eyes,” as the woman at the Central Market had advised. When the molwene got ahold of his cash, Bento tried to flee, only to be slapped and held back by the collar. He bit the arm that held him and received a kick in the shin, at which point a group of police officers showed up.
Police: “What’s happening here?”
Molwene: “Nothing. This is my little brother; we’re just playing around.”
Police, to Bento: “What’s happening?”
Bento: “Yeah, this is my brother. Everything’s cool.” You won’t really have trouble with a molwene until you try to get them arrested, Bento says. “It’s better to let them be, because you know you’re going to see them again. If you get a molwene arrested, the next thing your friends will hear about you is that you’re dead.” Instead, covering up for the molwene earned Bento a kind of begrudging truce, though he never got paid for those three sandwiches. Bento saw the molwene once, soon after their scuffle, and greeted him as kind of a peace offering. He got no response. The second time he saw him, he tried again. “Now he knows me,” Bento concluded, with a funny kind of pride.
Even after five years on the street, Bento still has problems with molwenes. Sometimes the ruses are complex, seemingly improvised among several different people: “You sell one muffin on the sidewalk, and a molwene says he has friends who want to buy them too. So they take you into a bar or to a stoop where a bunch of them are hanging out together. They eat their fill, a vontade”—to their satisfaction. “Then you ask for your money, and they tell you to relax. Then they get up and leave, one by one. But they always choose someone else who will pay their portion of the bill. By the end, only one is left, and he offers you 20 meticais. You say, what about all the rest? And he says ‘I only ate four.’ You get mad, and another older boy comes along, a friendly stranger. ‘Moço,’ he says. ‘Boy, what happened?’ You tell him. The stranger gets angry with the last person from the group. They argue, and maybe they’ll even start to tussle, and then the guy runs. ‘Catch him! Catch him!’ the other one says, and no one does anything. So you’re left with no money and no muffins, and the stranger still pretends he’s your friend: ‘Sorry, kid. You’ve been conned.’
“The story’s over,” Bento concluded. “That’s life here.”
One day in December 2007, Bento and a few friends in his line of work took off early and went exploring. Riding on the back of a truck, they got as far as Ressano Garcia, Mozambique’s main border crossing with South Africa, which lies 60 miles northwest of Maputo. They goofed off and ate snacks while watching cars laden with goods trickle out of customs back toward Mozambique. On the side of the road, men approached Mozambicans headed the other way: “Do you want to go South Africa? You want to go to South Africa?” Bento was intrigued.
The following week, shortly before Christmas, Bento informed his senhora that he needed to go home to Inhambane—“when in fact, no! I wanted to go to South Africa!” Perhaps Manhambane aren’t so stupid after all. He went to Ressano Garcia once more and began shopping around. “When you go without documents, it’s not expensive [to go to South Africa],” Bento says. “Five hundred meticais! I told a man that I only had two hundred. I told him that I had come with my father, but that my father had disappeared and left me behind. ‘But, the place where you are going, you know it?’ ‘Yeah, I know it,’ I told him. Pronto. From South Africa to Durban, it’s 100 mets, converted to rand.”
Bento’s self-assurance was disarming. Even as he told me this story, four years later, he was barely five feet tall, with a high, raspy voice. His skin had the soft, pliant glow that we leave behind in puberty and never recover.
From Nelspruit, on the South African side of the border, Bento got on a combi (South Africa’s name for the minibus) to “Deh-bahn”—Durban—where he repeated his first day in Maputo, walking around in search of work. “I don’t have work,” a woman told him, “but come to my house and sleep, and then tomorrow you can go out looking.” “I took a bath, I had some food, and I slept there.” The house was grand: tile, carpeting, hot water, plusher beds than he’d ever slept on. He never found work. Instead, he stayed for three months, doing odd jobs around the house until the woman gave him money to come back to Maputo.
In Mafalala, Bento’s senhora took him back in without asking questions, and he returned to selling bajia and dodging the molwenes downtown. If he sold out early, Bento hung out near the Central Market until dinnertime, to avoid being given extra work at home, and to avoid being told, when business was slow, that he ought be working harder. The following Christmas, Bento again told his senhora that he needed to go home to Inhambane. This time, he did. It was the first time he’d been back since coming to Maputo.
“When I go home, I’m famous,” Bento says. “People say ‘Hey, John, we want to drink something, come on, pay a round.’ They don’t know anything about Maputo. They even ask, ‘Is there sand in Maputo?’ as if the whole city was paved with asphalt and bricks.” Bento seemed to revel in the absurdity of the question. He laughed vigorously. Outside the old colonial streets and the city’s main corridors, Maputo is filled with sand, just like Pambara. “They think things are nice like that, and when I tell them, ‘You don’t know how we suffer there,’ they say, ‘Ah, we knew you were you going to say that.’”
“I tell them, ‘You think it’s easy, but in the minibuses in Maputo, you can’t even get a seat. People are sticking their little heads out.’” Bento mimed limbs and heads coming out of minibus windows. “‘You can get in as clean as can be, and when you get out, you’re already dirty.’” Bento was aghast, and he changed the subject.
“In your country, are there people who don’t speak Portuguese?” Earlier, he had asked me if the United States spoke Portuguese or English, but here, the assumption was that if they spoke English, then perhaps they also spoke Portuguese. Very few people in my country speak Portuguese, I told him. Bento pondered this for a second, then asked a question that had been on his mind for some time. “Myfriend,” he said, pronouncing it as one word, “what does it mean, after all?”
It means meu amigo, I told Bento, and watched his eyes widen with wonder.
Bento had grown up saying “myfriend” as a matter of course. In Pambara, it was what you said to the Chinese contractors building the road, and nearby, in Vilanculos, chockablock with South African vacationers, it was what you said to the tourists walking down the beach, to ask them for money or to sell them seashells. It was also what you said to your Mozambican friends, but no one knew what it meant. “Once, I said ‘myfriend’ to a Boer”—a white South African (“they’re all big and tall,” Bento pr
omised me)—“and he answered me in my language, Tswa: ‘Who’s myfriend? Am I myfriend? I’ll beat you up!’” Bento fled the Boer’s threat without responding. “All the other English I know—‘howareyou I’m fine,’ ‘where you go’—I learned here in Maputo.”
“Knowing” other snatches of English did not mean that Bento had any idea what they meant—only, like “myfriend,” that he could mimic them convincingly. Most of his education in the capital must have occurred in a similar fashion: learning to ingratiate himself with the molwenes, to hustle after a sale, to dodge the suspicions of a mistrustful senhora. All of these skills relied on nothing so much as a knack for acting.
* * *
At two p.m., when I called Bento to go passear, as we’d planned, he’d already sold all but two of the day’s muffins. I met him in front of a KFC restaurant—there are three in Maputo—at a street corner downtown known as punto final, “the last stop,” where hordes of people jostle for seats in xapas to the outskirts of the city. Bento sidled up nonchalantly amid the confusion, muffins draped over his shoulder. “Amigo! Como vai?” Bento shrugged off the last two muffins and said he’d buy them from his senhora himself. “Não faz caso,” he said—don’t worry about it. He still had outstanding debts to collect from customers he’d seen that morning, but he would come back for those later. In the meantime, Bento wanted to show me his house. His senhora’s daughter wanted to meet me. A few days earlier, Bento said he’d used me as an alibi when he came home with a suitcase to keep his clothes in. “My friend the branco bought it for me,” he told his madam. Having any savings of his own would rouse her suspicions.
As we walked, Bento asked me about my bicycle again. Most of our route was taken up with my attempt to explain to him why it is that although bicycles are just as expensive in the United States as in Maputo, most everyone has one, or could afford one if they wanted to.
“Have you ever heard the word economia?”
“No. What’s that?”
I tried to explain what an economy is: “An economy is . . . an economy is . . . when you add up all the people in the whole country working, buying, selling . . .” I had no idea whether I was making any sense at all, but he took it in eagerly.
“Ya,” he said. “É complicado.” On our way, Bento got a phone call from his older brother, who works as a logger in Inhambane. This was the first I’d heard of Bento’s immediate family.
He chattered in Tswa and laughed infectiously. His brother was calling from high up in a tree, which was the only place he could get service.
We entered his neighborhood through a narrow alley bisected by a gutter that opened up onto a ring of dirt road with houses on all sides. There is a rural aspect to most slums in Maputo, with their meandering sand alleyways and corrugated roofs separated by tiny stands of papaya and moringa trees. This may explain why Bento found it so funny that his friends in Inhambane wanted to know whether there was any sand in the capital: his living situation more closely resembles the village he’d grown up in than it does Maputo’s downtown. In the colonial era, these parts of the city were called the cidade de caniço, or the “city of reeds,” for the most common building material used by poor Mozambicans. The use of concrete and flush toilets was outlawed in the reed city. The Portuguese lived in the cidade de cimento, with piped sewage and streets laid out on a grid. Now, nearly all of Maputo is built with cimento, or cement, but the old cane city still retains the same outlines of one-story shacks and doglegged streets. Whole neighborhoods are built like improvised mazes, cut off from most car traffic and passers-through by the labyrinthine trajectories of their walls and streets. Houses are built on continually subdivided, lumpen lots, and there is so little space in each yard that people hang out directly in the street, doing their hair, playing soccer, selling vegetables and water bottles filled with soybean oil.
Bento was received with waves and warm shouts from the kids before he stopped to open a rusty gate on our right. Stepping through it, we turned three corners between high cement walls and emerged in a shabby backyard. The ground was like silt, puddled muck in some places and devoid of plant life. Against the rear wall was a spigot with an attached water meter, an avocado tree, and a large, teetering papaya plant, shooting up in a single stalk. In the middle, two enamel-wrapped steel wires crossed and sagged with incongruously clean clothing.
Bento lives with his senhora, whom he calls Vovó, or Grandma, as well as her daughter and granddaughter. None of them was there when we arrived, so Bento took me to his room. He sleeps in an alcove by the front of the house—originally intended for cases of empty beer bottles—next to a now-defunct front-yard bar that the senhora’s husband ran until he died. There was a blanket on the floor and a sheet draped over an open window. His clothes and few possessions were stashed behind the concrete bar, where Bento stood, holding court, and told me about his life there: “My senhora, she treats me well. Bem mesmo. She treats me like—like a son. There are many people in the neighborhood who don’t know that I work. They don’t know that I’m not in school. They just think I’m her grandson or something. Many people don’t know that I’m from Inhambane.”
He leaves the house at seven o’clock each morning. “And it’s not that she tells me to leave at seven,” he added. The distinction was of great importance: “Sometimes, if I’m out late playing around I’ll get up at seven forty-five and run out the door at eight, and she doesn’t say anything; you could talk to her, if she were here, and she’d tell you, ‘That boy plays, but he doesn’t play at work. He sells.’” Bento usually finishes selling by three or four in the afternoon, then stops off at home and goes out to buy eggs, butter, or whatever else that day’s money will get the house. He returns home to dinner “with the table already set. We eat together. And then, my senhora, she washes the dishes, even as I’m seated at the table. You see? And that’s it, I don’t have to sweep or do laundry or anything.” The perks that thrilled Bento were strikingly ordinary—not to be made to wash the dishes every night, to be allowed a moment’s rest while someone else is working—but they gave a clear picture of the kind of indentured servitude he’d grown accustomed to selling eggs and bajia.
Bento found his current senhora when he returned from his Christmas trip to Inhambane, in January of 2009. He was intent on avoiding a return to his previous madams, and he found the gig selling muffins without too much trouble, which he considered a stroke of good fortune. Of his friends, Bento has by far the best situation. Others get up at four to pound the beans for the bajia they sell until ten or eleven at night, or they are expected to wash dishes and do other domestic chores as well. They have madams who scold them and dock their pay when they don’t sell out, as it had been for Bento when he sold eggs, so that some never manage to get together the cash to go home to Inhambane or Gaza.
I asked if there were girls his age who made the same trip he did, and he said they were more likely to go to Inhambane and Maxixe, or other towns closer to home, where they worked as domestic servants. Bento was sure they had it easy: “It’s a little bit easy, for girls. Everyone wants a girl to bathe their baby, to do the laundry, to sweep.” I doubted whether he was right, but I was glad that he was ignorant of the realities of prostitution and sexual abuse that likely afflicted the other half of his demographic. The thought of girls seemed to bring Bento back home.
His father, he said, is mentally ill. He has been that way long enough that Bento does not remember him another way. He is told that his father used to work in the mines in South Africa, but now he sits on the porch of Bento’s grandparents’ house and “talks about things that aren’t there.” Bento’s mother died when he was four or five. He remembers her, he says, “but her face, it doesn’t come.” Bento scanned the wall behind me, and I felt silly for having asked him. “You think I’d be here if my mother were still alive? That she would just let me get up and leave to Maputo? Ahhh! Nada.” No way. He laughed at the thought of it; kids with mothers stayed home!
The same w
as true of all his friends who made a living vending: death, mental illness, addiction, or infirmity had robbed each of them of one parent, or both, in practical terms. How clueless I must have seemed to Bento for asking about his mother. Though he hadn’t mentioned it, her death must have stood out as the defining fact of his strange, grown-up childhood. How else was it that a nine-year-old would muster up the courage and desperation to come to the capital?
“In November, I want to go home and stay a while,” Bento said, suddenly seeming like a kid again. “Go there and play, rest up. I’ve already seen the city. Ehhh pa. I’ve seen it—that’s enough.” Bento peppered his speech with the sliding onomatopoeias of distaste and exhaustion: “Ahhhhh—I’m already exhausted with the city,” he said. This time, when he goes home, he wants to see “if it makes sense to come back or stay home. Things are changing there.” I asked which things. “Many people have moved and now live close to the road. There is a project to install electricity there.” He pondered this for a moment. Though few migrants return home to stay, those who remain in Maputo often end up disenchanted: the daily grind is exhausting, and even demeaning, but it is hard to desert the material comforts of urban life like electricity and running water.
“If I manage to buy a bicycle, I’ll go home, to Inhambane,” Bento concluded. He was kneeling on a stool, hands clasped, elbows resting on the bar. “This selling life? It’s not worth a damn. I need to study, you know? Just study. That way I can become a security guard or something.” He paused. “Life here in Maputo, it costs.” Bento used the word custa, which, in Mozambique, often refers to something more than money. “It costs” may mean that something is expensive, but also that something is taxing, draining, nearly impossible—physically, emotionally, mentally. “Maputo custa,” Bento repeated. “People have cars and things, but to live here is rare. Very rare. They’ve gotta have a store or a bank or something to back it up. Here, every little tomato and onion is money. Firewood, money. You see, there, in Inhambane, if you need firewood, you go cut it. We’ve got mangos. We’ve got coconut trees. To make xima, we have corn, and we grind it. Here, it’s all money.”
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 28