The night ended and a red glow rose above the earth. Houses and trees appeared, and at the edge of town stood the wall of bush. The scouts returned and reported that they had encountered no one on the road. The tension eased slightly. Farrusco left to check the outposts. I moved along behind him. Where the sandy streets stopped at the edge of the forest, soldiers lay waiting to see if anything was moving among the trees. The bush resounded with splendid avian music; a noisy tropical hosanna was floating upward. Then the sun came up, the beams broke through as if a spotlight had come on, and everything suddenly quieted down.
We returned to the inn. The woman was making coffee and it smelled like dawn at a campground in Masuria. Only now did I notice the staff map on the wall. A tack in the middle of it represented the unit at Pereira d’Eça. There were no other tacks anywhere around it. Only higher up—a tack in Lubango, a tack in Moçâmedes, another in Matala. The higher up, the more tacks. A thick black diagonal line, slightly broken into steps, was our road. At the bottom, a row of crosses on the bank of the Cunene River was the border with Namibia. An arrow at the top showed the direction to Europe. The areas covered with little circles were bush. The areas covered with dots . . . desert. The blue area . . . the Atlantic. PN . . . a park—lions, elephants, antelope. 5 in red: five of ours dead. 7 in black: seven of theirs dead. More red and black digits in two columns at the bottom, without a line for the totals, because death’s account is always open.
Now, God help us, to drive along the thick black line, upward to Lubango—alive. We set out under a high sun at ten, hoping that the maddening heat would force the enemy out of his ambushes and drive him into a state of helpless somnolence. Soldiers befuddled by the heat drifted around the scorching plaza, wandering in circles apathetically. Others sat in the shade, leaning against the walls of houses, against fences, against trees, as immobile as victims of African sleeping sickness. I don’t know what happened to Diogenes; he and the whole crew of the convoy had disappeared. I didn’t see the woman anywhere. Carlos stood on the veranda of the inn and waved his automatic in our direction. In the immobile scenery of this plaza, Carlos’s arm swiveling in the air seemed to be the one thing alive and capable of movement.
We rode in a Toyota jeep driven by Antonio, a sixteen-year-old soldier. A dazzling brilliance, a lake of pulsing light that moved forward, settled above the pavement. At a certain moment a vehicle emerged from the depths of this lake, like a phantom. It drew nearer to us. You never know who is coming from the opposite direction and Farrusco, sitting at my right, took the safety off his Ka-2 and unhooked a grenade from his belt. The vehicles stopped. An unkempt, unshaven Portuguese stepped out of a pickup truck loaded like a gypsy wagon with bedding; he was fleeing to South Africa with his whole family. He stood on the road hunched over and resigned, as if facing a judge who would sentence him, any moment now, to life imprisonment. He said that the road was empty and nobody had stopped him. But that meant nothing because the people who set ambushes usually didn’t bother refugees.
It was an open jeep and the rush of air provided some relief. It whistled in our ears. “This year,” Farrusco shouted to me through the wind, “I’ve had a son born to me. He’s in Lubango and I want to see him.”
“Is he big?” I asked as loud as I could, so he would hear me.
“Big,” he beamed. “A big boy.” We passed Roçadas and then the deserted bridge over the Cunene. “My father didn’t have any land and there were eight of us,” the commander shouted through the wind. “‘All without shoes. I don’t know if you’re aware that we have mountains and it’s cold up there.”
I shook my head: I hadn’t known. The jeep was traveling along the road through a landscape so monotonous that we seemed to be standing still. “When I was fighting as a commando,” I heard him say through the wind, “it struck me that I was on the wrong side. That’s why,” he added after a moment, coughing because the wind had dried out his throat, “when this war started I went over to the other side.”
We had arrived at the worst place, Humbe. Here the road along which the South African units might have advanced ran off to Ruacana. Farrusco ordered the vehicle to halt. He walked along the edge of the bush toward the crossroads to assess the situation. He noticed nothing suspicious and encountered nobody. “Putting one armored vehicle there,” he said, “would be enough to paralyze the whole road. We could do nothing because we have no antitank weapons.
“In Europe,” he said, “they taught me that a front is trenches and barbed wire, which form a distinct and visible line. A front on a river, along a road, or from village to village. You can trace it on a map with a pencil or point to it on the terrain. But here the front is everywhere and nowhere. There is too much land and too few people for a front line to exist. This is a wild, unorganized world and it’s hard to come to terms with it. There is no water, because there is a lot of desert here. You can’t hold out for long where there are no springs, and it’s a long way between springs. Here where we’re standing, there is water, but the next water is a hundred kilometers away. Every unit holds on to its water, because otherwise it dies. If there are a hundred kilometers between water, that space is nobody’s and there’s nobody there. So the front doesn’t consist of a line here, but of points, and moving points at that. There are hundreds of fronts because there are hundreds of units. Every unit is a front, a potential front. If our unit runs into an enemy unit, those two potential fronts turn into real fronts. A battle occurs. We are a three-man potential front now, traveling northward. If we are ambushed, we become a real front. This is a war of ambushes. On any road, at any place, there can be a front. You can travel the whole country and come back alive, or you can die a meter from where you’re standing. There are no principles, no methods. Everything comes down to luck and happenstance. This war is a real mess. Nobody knows just where they stand.”
At exactly noon we were going full speed, lashed by the sultry wind. The bush rushed backward and disappeared behind us. We passed Cahama and Chibemba; burned houses stood by the road. “If you make it to Luanda,” Farrusco shouted through the blast of wind, “say that they should send people and arms. Say that if they move in from Namibia, we won’t be able to hold this ground.” We rode a long time in silence. Later I heard his voice again. “I think they are going to kill me,” he screamed over the wind. “I think they will spot the white commander driving this road and they will kill me. It’s very hard,” he shouted, “very hard to get out of an ambush, because it’s always too late, you walk right into their sights, but you know,” he cried, “I’m not afraid, listen, I don’t feel any fear!”
I heard a crash, a bang, hammering, a voice—”Let’s go, let’s go!” It was the voice of the restless spirit, Commissar Nelson. I got up. It was dark all around and fortunately I was sleeping in my clothes and shoes, so I could run right after him and we flew down the stairs and my head hurt. Only in the car did I start to come round. It was a new Peugeot 504, gray. Nelson was driving. Beside him sat Comandante Bota from front headquarters, drunk. He was holding a bottle of whisky between his knees. In the back with me sat Nelson’s friend and aide Manuel. Manuel had an Uzi machine pistol, an Israeli weapon handy at close quarters but of little use in ambushes, where the greater range of the Soviet Ka-2 or Belgian G-3 makes them better to fight with. I looked at my watch; it was two in the morning. Lubango lies high above sea level and the nights here are icy, Scandinavian. I trembled from cold and sleeplessness. “Where are we going?” I asked Manuel. “To Benguela.” I cheered up and was trying to get back to sleep when Manuel said there was a battle ahead. I woke up at once. “Chipenda’s force is attacking,” Manuel said, “and ahead of us is only our one unit led by Comandante Antonio, but Antonio is in Benguela, where he went to look for weapons.”
“So why are we traveling along a road where there’s a battle?” I asked Manuel.
“Because there’s no other road from Lubango to Benguela,” he replied.
“Well, you’ve got a poi
nt there,” I admitted.
Bota took a pull from his bottle and then passed it back to us, so we all got a swig. Things improved. We rode for perhaps half an hour at high speed through hilly terrain with green forests on both sides of us and we had already reached the crossing in Caculi when we heard shooting, the drawn-out thumping of machine guns and the bursting of shells to left and right just off the road. Nelson turned off the lights and slowed down, because the night was very dark; he drove on blind, feeling for the soft shoulder of the road. “Slower,” commanded Bota, who was beginning to sober up. “But perhaps it’s better to go faster,” Manuel said shyly. We drove on like that for centuries. Jesus, I thought, Jesus, a grenade has gone off in the ditch—there was a banging of tin as if someone were hammering on the roof with a club. After a moment Bota asked, “Is everybody okay?” “Yes, we’re okay.” Then, at the last instant, Nelson saw a parked truck and was about to swerve around it, when a mulatto jumped out of the ditch toward him and said, “Nelson, I’ve got twenty people here, but I can’t throw them forward to hold Chipenda, because I’m out of gasoline. Where can I get gasoline?” He was all shivers and it was terribly cold.
“Where will I get you gasoline?” Nelson said. “Go to Lubango.”
“How can I go to Lubango, man, when I don’t have any way to move?”
A series of tracers ripped above us and then a second and a third, and the man who was standing in the road and gripping the door of the car as if he didn’t want to let us go, said, “Nelson, I’m telling you, it’s bad, they’re killing us off like chickens.” Again a grenade nearby, then several at once, and Bota said “Move on” from the bottom of his soused stupefaction. Nelson put it in gear and the mulatto disappeared as suddenly as if he had been struck down, and why were we driving into that horrendous fire instead of sitting it out in the ditch? But they might have thought that the enemy would round us up like stray dogs and that it would be better to try to slip out of the trap, and in any case we turned at Quilengues and along both sides there were walls of earth and we were obviously diving into the bottom of some excavation or gorge, and suddenly running feet and two boys ran out with rifles and Bota said, “Stop them!” and Nelson cried “Halt!” and they stopped. They were just kids, beat-up and half-paralyzed with fear, and I looked at their rifles— they had old Mausers. “Where are you from?” Bota asked. “From Comandante Antonio’s regiment.” “Aha,” Bota says, “you’re running away, eh?” They stood there, humble, frightened, as if teacher had caught them copying during a quiz. Bota ordered, “Return to the battle immediately, and I’ll be there right away to see if you’re fighting, and I’ll remember your faces.” Gray with fear, the faces of these boys withdrew into the darkness and vanished. We drove on and Bota said, “Now it’ll be worse still, because what we’re trying to do is push through to Quilengues and there ought to be mercenaries there.”
Dawn begins and the shooting slowly quiets down and we leave it behind. The sky begins to resemble a meadow and then it looks like a sea and then like a snow-covered plain. “Halt!” says Bota, and Nelson stops the Peugeot on a blind curve. We walk ahead to see what is going on in Quilengues. It is a cold, gray dawn; dew, no sun. We advance on the prowl because no one can tell who is hiding in these houses and who’s around the next streetcorner or the one after that. We walk for a long time to convince ourselves that the town is empty, without a trace of life. I don’t know what happened there before we arrived. There are no people. Nor any other creatures. Not a dog, not a cat. No goats and no chickens. No birds in the trees. Perhaps not even mice.
We had returned calmer to the car when Nelson suddenly stopped, straightened his shoulders, and said, “Another day of life,” because now the road to Benguela was clear, and he began to do calisthenics and we all joined in, Bota unsteadily, staggering continually, leaning to left and right, but we were doing it energetically. Put your hands on your hips, now stand on tiptoe and do a squat, and one and two, straighten your backs, head up, deeper squats, deeper, and now thrust your arms forward and back, harder, harder to the back and exhale, inhale, arms out, don’t let those arms droop, now lean forward and to the side on a three count and one and two and three and now a duck waddle and now jumping jacks and now the sun comes out.
Telegrams
When I returned to Luanda on Saturday morning it was still dark. We had ridden from Benguela in a tanker truck sent at night to the capital to look for gasoline, because the southern front was immobilized by lack of fuel. Along the way we passed drowsy, half-conscious checkpoints and boys wrapped in tarpaulins, in horse blankets, in bedspreads and sacks, since it was drizzling unpleasantly. As usual, discussions broke out among them over whether or not to let us pass, and they wanted us to give them something to eat or smoke, but we had nothing so they waved their hands in resignation and went back to sleep. You could have driven in at night and taken Luanda without a shot. Women in the African suburbs were lighting fires in front of their houses and preparing to grind manioc. Grinding manioc into a hard, crunchy white dough consumes half the lives of African women. The other half is earmarked for carrying and giving birth to children. In some places there were already lines waiting for water at the wells; in others, for bread. The people in these lines snoozed against walls or slept, covered with sheets, on the ground. Glued to the walls were posters reading YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU with a giant black finger pointing at the eyes of passersby, which at that hour were clotted with sleep. In the European city center there was not a sign of life. Dust and cobwebs had overgrown the houses and streets.
I returned to room 47 in the hotel, drove a herd of cockroaches out of the bed, and lay down to sleep. I never dream, but this time I suddenly found myself in the woods outside Warsaw, where hooligans with knives were ducking in and out from behind the bushes, drawing nearer, as if playing hide-and-seek. I opened my eyes to see Dona Cartagina, the thin and exhausted Oscar (now owner of the hotel), and the doorman Fernando—with a plastic medallion bearing the likeness of Agostinho Neto around his neck—standing over me. They were happy that I had returned and, quite pointlessly, kept asking me if I was alive—with such insistence and incredulity that in the end I couldn’t tell if I was awake, or if this was still a dream in which Cartagina, Oscar, and Fernando were suddenly prowling with knives through a grove of trees outside Warsaw. I don’t know what happened next (I probably went back to sleep), because when I got out of bed the room was empty. There was a musty dampness in the air, and the ceiling fan was out of order. I tried turning the faucet. The faucet snorted violently, then silence: no water. I ran downstairs, where Felix was dozing at the reception desk with his elbows folded on heaps of unneeded paper and a stack of valueless money, his pale face reposing motionless and expressionless in his hands. I shook him: “Give me something to drink, Felix!” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “There’s been no water for three days,” he said. “The last wells are running dry. When there’s nothing to drink, the city will have to give up.” I left him and headed for the kitchen, but when I opened the door such a macabre odor assailed my nostrils that my legs grew heavy and I couldn’t take a step. The stench emanated from a mountain of unwashed dishes and pots, but above all from a fetid pig that the black cook was quartering with a cleaver. “Camarada,” I said, leaning on the table to keep from dropping over, “give me water.” He put down the cleaver and gave me a mug of water from a tin barrel. I felt a softness and a chill inside me: I was coming back to life. “Give me some more,” I said. He consented: “Drink as much as it takes for you to feel good, camarada.”
I locked myself in my room to make a phone call. The telephone worked. The concept of totality exists in theory, but never in life. In even the best-built wall there is always a chink (or we hope there is, and that means something). Even when we have the feeling that nothing works anymore, something works and makes a minimal existence possible. Even if there’s an ocean of evil around us, green and fertile islets will poke above the water. They can be seen, t
hey are on the horizon. Even the worst situation in which we can find ourselves breaks down into elements that include something for us to grab hold of, like the branch of a bush that grows on the bank, to avoid being sucked to the bottom by the whirlpool. That chink, that island, that branch sustain us on the surface of existence.
Thus in our closed city, where thousands of things had ceased functioning, just when it seemed that everything was ruined, the telephone nevertheless worked. From the south, from the border with Namibia, I had brought news that today or perhaps tomorrow the armored columns would roll into Angola. The baker ’s son had reported that the South African army was already in Tsumeb, ready for war. They would need three hours to drive to the border, three days to drive to Benguela, and perhaps another week to drive to Luanda. No one in Luanda knew this, because the capital had no contact with the rest of the country. I wanted to pass along what the baker ’s son and Farrusco had said: that the intervention had been set in motion and that the southern front wouldn’t hold. I started phoning around, but none of the numbers answered. I tried again and again. The signal droned on and nobody anywhere picked up the telephone. I looked at the calendar, because I no longer had a feeling for time, which means that time had lost all sense of division for me, all measurability, it had fallen apart, it had oozed out like a dense tropical exhalation. Concrete time had ceased to signify anything and for a long while now the fact that it was Wednesday or Friday, the tenth or the twentieth, eight in the morning or two in the afternoon, had meant nothing to me. Life had propelled me from event to event in an undefined process directed toward an unseen goal. I knew only that I wanted to be here until the end, regardless of when it came, or how. Everything was a total puzzle that absorbed and fascinated me.
Another Day of Life Page 7