Nkokolani, July 29, 1895
Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida
Not knowing how to console her, I told Imani that her mother would return one day. She doesn’t have to return, the girl answered promptly. She never left here. And she led me to an anthill behind the house, pointed at the mound, and said: This is where we spend our life burying stars. This is my consolation.
Then she told me things that, though they might be considered blasphemous, are the most beautiful heresies I have ever heard. She told me that the dead don’t walk the earth; it’s they who make the earth walk. With a rope fashioned from sand and wind, the deceased fasten the sun so that it won’t get lost in the heavens. And she also said that the dead open up the way for the birds and the rains. And they fall to the ground in every drop of dew, to fertilize the soil and give the bugs water to drink.
The girl said all this without pausing for breath.
Where did you learn all this? I asked apprehensively.
I didn’t have to learn, she answered. I’m made of all this. What I had to be taught were the white man’s stories.
But aren’t you a Catholic?
Yes. But I have many other gods as well.
I wasn’t shocked by such a revelation. Perhaps because, like any good Republican, I am manifestly anticlerical. My anger against the priests was the only good thing I inherited from my father. My mother, for her part, left me a very different legacy. She lived for the mass, the only occasion when she was allowed to leave the house. I almost failed to recognize her in the way she would walk to church: modest steps, her face veiled, her hair covered by a black shawl. At home, she was forbidden to be a mother; in the street, forbidden to be a woman.
I came back from Chikazi’s funeral rites with an unanswerable question: does one convey one’s condolences to someone who doesn’t believe in death? For that grieving African family, there was a dead person but no death. So what did they grieve for? These doubts, far from filling me with anguish, gave me, as I returned to the barracks, a sense of well-being that I had not felt for a long time.
It wasn’t without surprise that I saw Mariano Fragata waiting for me in the living room, waving an envelope, which he promptly handed me.
I’ve just arrived, and brought this for you, he said with an enigmatic smile.
He didn’t go so far as to get up from the mildewed sofa before warning me:
Prepare yourself, my dear Germano. You’re not going to like what’s in there.
What’s this packet?
It’s your letters, the ones you’ve been sending these last few months. They’re all there.
I shook my head. My letters? Was it José d’Almeida who was returning them? And why was he sending them back to me now?
What Fragata then revealed to me was the final stab to be thrust into my already wounded breast: None of my letters had ever reached the counselor José d’Almeida. The person who had read them and then replied was invariably Lieutenant Ayres de Ornelas.
I don’t understand anything at all, my dear Fragata. All that I wrote …
Perplexity gave way to suspicion. What had caused the lieutenant to divert my letters and, more serious still, to pose as someone else? What secrets had Ornelas appropriated? And what use had he made of confidences expressed to someone I took for my own father? Not one of these questions could provide an adequate answer. All I could do was comment with a sigh: I’m done for! This is going to be the end of me …
It may not be as bad as you think, Fragata declared, pouring oil on my troubled waters.
What do you mean, not as bad as I think? Don’t forget, Fragata, that I’m in Africa on a suspended sentence. Now that my confidences have been revealed, they’ll end up shooting me. I’ll have the same fate as Sardinha …
And I reminded the counselor’s adjunct how much I had exposed myself in that long exchange of letters. How many times had I cursed the monarchy and its government, how many times had I poured scorn on my superiors in rank? Why on earth had I not limited myself to the routine reports expected of an unknown sergeant?
Don’t dramatize things, Germano. There’s no need.
Unfortunately, I can only expect the worst. Look at this …
I showed Fragata an unusual document that had come into my hands by mistake. It was a communiqué about the diversion of telegrams that the royal commissioner had directed to the military commanders at Inhambane. Ayres de Ornelas himself had admitted responsibility for this. And I read out loud the letter in which he confessed his guilt, handwritten by Ornelas: “I ask God to forgive me if I have become the involuntary cause of some problem for the implementation of the projects of Your Excellency, the royal commissioner. And I beg Your Excellency to forgive my error…”
Fragata interrupted me in order to allay my fears. Ornelas might be arrogant and ambitious, he might suffer from a persecution complex, but he wasn’t a malicious person, capable of damaging me. And there was something else I didn’t know. Ornelas was the person who received and replied to all correspondence addressed to the counselor José d’Almeida. Moreover, he proceeded like this with the assent of José d’Almeida himself, for whom he prepared a résumé of the news communicated in the various telegrams and letters.
I accepted his words of comfort without conviction. I opened the envelope and reread the letters that I had scribbled over the previous months. While I was doing this, Fragata fell asleep, exhausted. I gave him my own bed, because I knew that I wouldn’t get any sleep that night. In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.