“Yes. They saw a power in me and called me a witch.”
“You were always different by virtue of your skin colour, but the villagers attached some sort of magic to that difference. When were you first aware that your skin colour set you apart?”
“It has always been that way.”
“I understand, but I was—”
“I have no power.” I fumble with the ointment the doctors have left for me. The balm soothes the open sores that cover my neck, where the sun damages our skin most. I reach under my shawl to rub the cream behind my neck. I notice my hand shaking.
“You seem so certain of this, and yet I have spoken to many here who tell me you have saved them,” Serafim says.
“People need to believe in something, someone. It is easier this way.”
I turn for an instant to face him. His eyes do not move away from me when he offers a cigarette. I wave it off. He adjusts his recorder on the table before lighting a cigarette, squinting in a cloud of smoke.
“Do you have family in Brazil?”
Serafim shakes his head.
“Have you left someone behind?”
“No. I am alone,” he says, and I know this is true.
“I know why you are here.”
“I have made my intentions clear from the beginning,” he says, and I hear the conviction in his voice. “I have never misled you.”
“Yes, but what exactly do you need from me?”
“Your story,” he says.
“I am telling you my story as stories should be told.”
Serafim scratches the back of his head.
“I tell you I have no power, yet you are not convinced. Are you like the others? Are you searching for an angle? Because if you are, I am not here to be used in this way.”
Serafim stands. “I need—”
I raise my hand to stop him. “I think I know what it is you need, what it is you search for. I know what power is, so let me make myself clear. I have been imprisoned in this hotel for years. Others have followed to lock themselves inside because it is safer here. If you want to tell the world why we are here, how it is we survive, then you must tell them in the words I use, not your own.”
Serafim looks to the door and then reaches for his satchel.
“Stay. But speak slowly,” I say. “Your accent is difficult for me.”
“What should I call you? Your name…for the article.”
“I have many names.” I realize this is a riddle. “You can call me what they all call me here—a branca. Or you can use the last name given to me, Pó.”
I stop by the shutters that lead out to the balcony. I need air. I hear Serafim bending the notebook binding, ruffling some pages. I turn around just as Amalia appears at the entrance of my room. She is eight years old and dark. Her grin turns sour when she sees Serafim, smoking and sitting on the chair with his pencil in hand. She jumps into my bed and pulls the covers up to her chin.
Serafim knows Amalia’s story. Like many before her, her mother found this place when she was a frightened young girl. She gave birth to Amalia here, in my room. The young mother died and her child became mine. Amalia is with me always. She tells me I am beautiful every day. Not with words, but in the way she looks at me and how she touches my face, her fingers crawling over my eyes, nose, cheeks, and throat. She hears me, but smiles to feel my voice through her fingertips. It is true that I have all my teeth, at least the ones that can be seen. I take a brush to them three times a day, sometimes four. A mix of seawater and sand is all I use. My hair remains golden, and curled tight to my head. It is difficult to catch my eyes or pin them down. I cannot control how they flick from side to side, and for this reason I cannot focus for too long. They are hard to read, and I like that.
“I was given the name Pó. It is the name I own now. Before that I was Liloe, a name my aunt Simu gave me. Amalia thinks Giz is a better name because my skin looks like chalk.” I smile at her. She lifts the covers over her head.
“What were you named at birth?” he asks.
“I will not speak that name until it is time.” Simu told me I must never call out the name I was given at birth or the spirits will think I am ready to be taken back to the place I came from, where I will be covered in darkness.
“I don’t understand.” He looks away, raking his fingers through his hair.
“When I am ready to leave this place.”
“And you will know when that is?”
“No. I will only know when I am ready.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not sure you do. If you choose to sit and record my words, you must understand only one thing.”
“What is that?”
I turn to look at the man before me, his skin warmed by the oil lamp next to his face, the other half of his face blacked out by shadow. Amalia holds her carved elephant in the air, pretending it is thundering through the brush.
“You say you come here to write of me, but all scribblers hope they will find the magic that everyone speaks of, that we albinos carry in us. You must listen to my words. You must promise to tell my story the way I have shared it with you.”
“I am only interested in your story,” he replies.
“You wrote an article over a year ago about an unknown tribe in Brazil.”
“I did.” I can hear the wooden chair creaking. The scribbler is leaning back.
“You became quite famous.”
“That was not my intent,” he says, stuffing his satchel with his notes and his recorder.
“Why do you run?” I ask.
Securing his bag over one shoulder, he places a cigarette in his mouth.
“When my questions become uncomfortable you pack your things to leave.”
He flicks his lighter, takes a drag from his cigarette.
I hug myself tighter against the breeze. “All of us who live in the Grande Hotel are like everyone else. We carry the weight of what others fear or desire or do not understand. If you are like the other scribblers who have sat in that same chair, you’ll believe my life is given value by the things I have done.”
I pause a few seconds.
“You would be wrong.”
Serafim
As PUNISHMENT FOR BRINGING the elephant to our village, Lebo and I did not eat that night. I can still see Koinet eating his bowl of ugali, the maize sticking to his fingers and sitting in the corners of his mouth, while my belly ached.
“You did not do as I asked today,” Simu scolded us. “Instead of wood you brought an elephant, and with it, danger.” Simu’s worry forced me to turn away. I nudged closer to Lebo. Simu continued, “You must remember, it takes one day to destroy a house. To build a new house will take months, perhaps years.”
“Did I break our house, Simu?”
“Quiet now,” she said, gently laying leaves soaked in aloe and milk on my burning skin. She dragged a few leaves across my forehead. I rolled onto my back to let her continue. Everything outside was quiet, except for the insects singing and the katydids calling to one another.
“What will happen to the elephant?” I asked.
“It will grow to be big and strong.”
I can picture us sleeping in the hut as if it was yesterday. Lebo faced the wall. I drew the cowhide over his shoulder and around my waist. Koinet lay close to us under another cowhide. Simu and Majuto lay at the opposite end of the hut. There was quiet for a while, but then I heard breathing sounds that came out of Majuto’s nose. I felt Koinet creeping closer to me, trying to get warm. I wanted him to move away. My skin felt hot and sore. He pressed up against my back. I could not shake the heat of his breath warming my neck. His clenched fist hovered in front of my face. He opened his hand and I saw a ball of ugali, scraped from the sides of the pot. “You were brave, Cousin,” he whispered. I took a bite and curled my tongue around the sweet taste. I reached over to place the rest between Lebo’s lips.
* * *
I press the recorder’s Stop button.
&nb
sp; * * *
—
NOTES: Friday, Oct. 14, 2016. Grande Hotel
— Pó - bold, strong, determined.
— Even as young girl, possessed an early understood something of the way the world presented itself. “Did I break our house?” Does not want to disappoint Simu.
— Simu = cared for Pó. Loved her. Protected her. Most importantly, guided her as Liloe. How? By filling her head with song and stories all meant to calm her, shield her, make her feel safe/secure.
— Simu reassures her—your mother is always with you. How does a child understand this?
— Still not certain why she chose story of elephant?
— Many questions raised regarding credibility of story.
— Pó almost playful with me. Perhaps her way of connecting? Chose a mythical telling to draw me in? Her narrative is working, but not able to believe her story, not fully. Often difficult to separate what really happened from embellishment.
— Dropped by big game outfitter near hotel. Hunting on upswing since animals returned after civil war. Asked about elephant behaviour. Highly unlikely for a wild calf to behave in way Pó said—outfitter said “impossible.”
— Pó insistent she doesn’t have any special powers and yet the details she seems most committed to suggest she does. In her own words, she claims the power to tame a mother elephant through her song? Highly unlikely. Why so attached to telling this story in such a mythical way? Maybe wants needs to believe in the perception of her powers to understand why Simu would be so afraid for her, why Simu would send her away?
— Pó is eleven when supposed story occurred. Perhaps special power suggested in her story speaks to source of Simu’s concern and reason for her exile—that she couldn’t dissuade community from their beliefs about Pó. Or maybe it is Pó’s insistence that villagers feared what they did not understand and this is what identified her as an outsider.
— Effect = draws me in and has a power over me—makes me want to believe.
— I am committed to reporting Pó’s story as she tells it, while the journalist in me is challenged by story’s credibility.
— Must not underestimate her. Off guard when she mentioned she had read my article on tribe in Brazil.
* * *
—
My damp shirt and underwear hang from a line I’ve stretched across my balcony. They do not move in the still night air. The moon hangs low. The patches of ocean I see peeking between apartment buildings are liquid mercury. Children at the corner erupt in laughter and howls as they smash beer bottles along the sidewalk. The same sounds as those I heard as a child on the streets of Florianópolis.
I top up my drink, reach for another cigarette, but the Marlboro pack is empty. I stand at the balcony, cup my hands around my mouth, and shout out to the kids. “Hey! Up here! I’m throwing down a hundred meticais rolled in an empty pack of cigarettes. First one to get me a pack and bring it up to my room will get paid.” I throw the pack down. They elbow and claw at each other, the whites of their eyes the only thing I can barely make out. Before I can see who has been victorious, they scurry away together to the nearest store, the slap of their soles echoing through the empty street.
I was alone in the shack after my grandmother died. I would have been younger than Pó when she tamed her elephant. Only a few days after, I packed a few things in a plastic bag and made my way down the slope of the favela, a zigzag of lanes I knew well. I did so before someone claimed our shack and moved in.
At that age I did not ask questions. I didn’t think it was possible to stand my ground and fight back. I don’t think Pó ever felt that way. What made her feel bold enough to stand up to life? I can think back now as an adult and rationalize that life is random and uncertain, and there isn’t always justice. All one is left with is the attempt to try and change the odds of any given circumstance. There is always uncertainty, but every so often there is a reward. But as a child, is one capable of such self-awareness, or have Pó’s memories been gilded in a way, to protect her and the ones she loved?
“Senhor!” a boy yells up, his arm in the air holding what looks like a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“Well done! You’re the winner!”
Ezequiel
A FLUORESCENT BULB FLICKERS. I lie in bed and turn to look out the window. The grape leaves are brown, curling and dropping off.
I want to escape the tangle of bedsheets. The weight of my body won’t allow it and the strain is too much. Breathe slow, deep.
In 1973 I wanted to get as far away from Africa as possible, and Canada opened up to me then. Now all I do is flood my head with thoughts of that place long ago. The very process of thinking comes from a voice that has crept into my head, leaves a message, and then disappears.
“Ezequiel.”
I hear the clicking of plates and cutlery against the stainless sink.
“Are you awake, Ezequiel?”
My hand trembles as I reach for the glass of water on my nightstand.
“I’ll take care of that for you,” the woman says, entering my room.
I clench the sheets at my side and try to tear them off.
The woman holds out her hands. And then I see the worry in her eyes and I know she is showing me she does not carry a weapon.
“What do you want with me?”
“I’m your home-care nurse. You said it was okay to let myself in.”
Her face is beginning to come into focus.
“Magda,” she says. She steps out of the room and returns with the Post-it note from the refrigerator’s side. She holds up the yellow square. MAGDA.
I allow my head to sink back into the pillow. Magda holds the glass of water, opens her mouth and makes a sound to encourage me to do the same. She reminds me of a fish. She places the two small pills on my tongue, tips the glass so I can chase them down my throat with a gulp of water. The burning sensation will soon be replaced by a tingling in my arms. The heat will flush my insides—my chest, my neck, my head.
“I was just tidying up a bit. I’ll put on a load of laundry, and then we can talk about how you’re feeling.”
Her Polish accent is strong for such a young woman. She keeps buzzing around the small room, leaving and coming back in, doing those small household chores that I don’t care about. She talks to herself with everything she does.
“Would you like something to eat?” she asks, before sitting on my bed.
I inch away, faintly recalling doctors trying to explain memory distortions to me—the idea that a memory has already happened when it has not, thinking an old memory is a new one, combining two memories, or confusing the people in my memories.
“You won’t be seeing me for three weeks,” she says.
“You’re not coming back?”
“Only for a few weeks. My father is not well in Poland. I need to fly home.”
I cannot see Papa’s face.
“I can still fly,” I say.
“Where are you flying to?”
“Over the treetops, high above the jungle.”
“And what do you see?” Magda says.
I shut my eyes, but she leans into me and I can feel her ear hovering over my lips.
“Mother Anke is at the bottom of the well.”
It hurts to swallow my saliva.
“Papa Gilberto’s boots are dirty,” I mutter, the sobs choking my breath. “And the fire…my home is orange with fire.”
* * *
The smell of metal erupts from Macaco’s breath when he sings, God gave me the plan. I’m following through, going to build me a bridge. The whir of helicopter rotors above—chak chak chak chak. Trees in the forest bend away from the spinning blades. My head is drowning in the faint cries of last breaths. Flies thick on the impaled head of a goat. The dead lie contorted, dredged in dust. A thud booms across my chest, the world turning on its end. I taste Armando’s blood splatter. Take me home, he mumbles, legless, bleeding out. Chak chak chak chak. A ball of fire, its searing heat
consumes Macaco and his men. I’m thrown into the sky, twisting against the blue. I will be in His beautiful hands. Armando has left this place, too. Quiet. An uncomfortable quiet. Facing blackened walls and scattered paper, I play the song that I have always known. A Portuguese soldier stands over me, the muzzle of his gun pressing against my temple…
I wake up. My body has cracked open and blood is running down my face and chest. I fumble in terror for some light, but I can’t find a candle or a flashlight. I lie back down on my bed in the dark. Time has slipped by me. All that remain are fragments of memory.
It can’t be blood. It’s only a fever, the sweat squeezing out of my body, or perhaps what I feel crawling across my face and chest are insects, drawn to the beads of sweat like animals enticed by a watering hole. I try to get up. I fall to the ground and have to crawl in the dark. I don’t want to stray too far from my bed. I feel a wave of fever coming on. I’ve had malaria before. I can hear my own breathing and I feel the fever rattling inside me.
I climb back onto the bed. My fingers clutch at the wet sheets and I strain my neck, pressing the back of my head down on the pillow. The attack is more violent than the ones before. I do not want to return to that place. I cry out in the darkness for Papa. I’m certain he is sitting outside, waiting for me.
“Papa!”
It’s a new recording, he whispers, his voice tinkling like coins.
“Where are you, Papa?”
I make out the words Rusalka, Dvořák. I breathe in his day smell—tobacco and straw and horse.
The fever rolls in again like an ocean wave.
I can’t swim. I’ll drown. I grip the sheets to stay above the water.
I have to hold on, to keep thinking it’s only the fever, nothing more.
It starts to rain in the room. The rain is pouring in and it is filling the room. I feel the bed floating before it begins to swirl in the water. I hold on tight, close my eyes and retch next to my pillow. I lift my head and a clarity emerges. There is no rain in the room. My bed is firmly set on the ground. The men have been lost.
Children of the Moon Page 4