Nkokolani, June 28, 1895
Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida
The feeling of guilt from which I suffer defies description, Excellency. Yesterday Nkokolani was attacked by the frightful Vátuas (I do not know why I persist in calling them by this name, for they refer to themselves as VaNgunis). These monsters killed, burned, raped. Before the attack, I sent Mwanatu to find out why the locals were digging enormous trenches. These were not defenses for combatants. They were hiding places, which the locals hoped would render them invisible. The strategy failed. Those wretched folk were taken by surprise and were helpless against the cowardly brutality of Gungunhane’s soldiers.
After the invasion, I visited the village and its agricultural lands, but I did not have the courage to do anything but glance briefly at that desolate expanse of prairie covered in ashes, which would occasionally flutter up and away in no particular direction. Then I returned to the barracks, never for a moment imagining how this ruined outpost had protected me so effectively. I sat down with Chestnut on my lap, and returned to the only task that still made any sense: writing.
I don’t know how I can step outside the house, such is my remorse. I’ve been here too long, I’ve forged ties and been lulled into a feeling of empathy; Ornelas found it in music, but I find it in the simplest details of these humble folks’ lives.
Tired of writing, I took off my army fatigues and placed them on a hanger. I sat gazing at the uniform as if it were me hanging there, crumpled, lifeless, and devoid of substance. This was a strange feeling for someone who had never really been a soldier. But the problem—permit my audacity, Your Excellency—is that I have never been anything at all. I am the empty uniform, up on its hanger, which is only ever put on and taken off by a shadow.
I confess, Excellency, that it often occurs to me to give it all up and set off through the bush toward Inhambane, and from there escape to the north, to the capital of the colony, Mozambique Island. I wouldn’t just be going to an island. I would be an island. Take me away from here, I beg you.
I have been losing my sanity over a long period here, but after what I saw yesterday of the massacres in Nkokolani, my state of mind has descended to depths from which there is no return. I awoke in the morning completely paralyzed. All I could do was move my lips. At this point, and without anyone to help me, I thought I was going to die. Even that simpleton, the boy who carries messages for me, would be of little use, for he never enters my quarters without permission. I was unable to call him. Fortunately, Imani dropped by to visit me. Alarmed by my silence, she entered the building and found me in that wretched state of torpor. I communicated with her by blinking. The girl hesitated for a moment. She seemed to want to leave me there, defenseless and on the point of death. But then she did what she always did when faced with such afflictions: she massaged my chest and arms. Slowly, I regained my strength.
I remember she told me this: Our eyelids are wings left over from a previous age, when we were birds. And our eyelashes are the surviving plumage. This is what her folk, who have survived on absurd superstitions, believe. And as I returned to my normal state, she even told me of other beliefs. She said, for example, that in the language of the Zulus, the same verb is used for “to fly” and “to dream.” I hope so, I thought to myself. I hope our bullets hit those cursed Vátuas when they are in full flight.
The young black girl’s intervention helped but didn’t cure me, for the illness from which I suffer has no bodily origin. It began before me; it began in the history of my people, doomed because of the small-mindedness of their leaders. I recall Tsangatelo asking me how big my country was. Little did he know of our small size, which comes not from our geography but from an innate spiritual state in which yearning for the past coexists with a fatalistic attitude toward the future.
All this asphyxia could be compensated for by Africa’s infinite geography. But these vast distances produce the inverse effect: Everything here becomes nearer. The horizon is at the touch of one’s fingertips. And I imagine the endless trajectory of these letters as they cross the African veld. As I think about this, I scribble these words as if they were horses, as if they were ships conquering distance. I don’t know whether this is the feeling you have. Nor do I know the reason for my confiding these confused emotions to you.
Last week, I went out to have a taste of this sense of a journey. And I went down to the banks of the Inharrime, guided only by Mwanatu. I wanted to witness the advance of our troops commanded by Colonel Eduardo Galhardo. I wanted to find a Portuguese military column moving forward, thus proving the inexorable progress of our troops coming from the north to encircle the perfidious Vátua chief. The journey, I thought, would be good for my ruminations and fevers. It would have been better if I hadn’t done it. I went in the hope of receiving some new momentum, but what I saw left me in even greater despair. No one can fully appreciate the titanic effort required to cross rivers with those wagons, guns, and people.
The colonel called me to one side and told me, It’s good that you should see the difficulties we face and that you should report all this to António Enes, so that he may know how hard we are struggling to advance over the terrain. Galhardo wanted a messenger, an ally in his quarrel with the authorities in Lourenço Marques. This was why he kept repeating, António Enes doesn’t believe me, he thinks I’m afraid, that I’m inventing excuses. The colonel was right, and unhappy in his certainty.
I walked down the slope to contemplate the entire wagon train. I watched closely the young soldiers buried in mud up to their hips, and it was as if they were being devoured by these African backlands. At this point, one of my hallucinatory episodes got the better of me. All of a sudden, what I saw weren’t crates of ammunition but coffins; instead of rifles, I saw the crosses of Christ; instead of Colonel Galhardo, I caught sight of a priest wearing a cassock. And in the blink of an eye, that whole caravan turned into a funeral cortege. I was at a funeral. And among the numerous caskets there was the coffin containing Francelino Sardinha. My blood-covered hands worked ceaselessly to open up a grave in the stony soil.
I already had reason enough not to sleep, but I now had an additional motive to remain vigilant: the noise of a shovel scraping the soil. Night, they say, is the doorway to hell. The worms that before wriggled at the bottom of the grave now seethe at the doorway itself. Huge worms, the color of flesh, fill my slumber with terror.
At this precise moment, I am gripped by a fit of nostalgia that renders me paralyzed. And that is why I am lying down while I write this, and why my much-praised calligraphy has turned into this clumsy scrawl. It is this apathy, Excellency, that has incapacitated me for a mission I did not understand at the outset and now suspect never existed. This is what I discovered: The spiders that I watched on my tabletop on that very first day had always been inside me. And inside me they spun a web that hinders not only my movement but my whole life.
The bundles of sisal, the lengths of old cloth, the walls of the house—I made my web out of all these things. And I was imprisoned in the hope that this false garrison might be mine, might be Portuguese, my home. But I was impotent. A far greater creature devoured the spider and its web. This creature’s name is Africa. No wall, no fortress could stop it. And there it was, infiltrating through the cracks in the sound of the marimbas and in the wailing of the children. There it turned into roots, which spread among the gaps in the bricks. There it was, dwelling in my dreams, invading my life in the shape of a woman. Imani.