Woman of The Ashes

Nkokolani, August 11, 1895

Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida

I never imagined how much I would miss someone whose presence I never felt. A young idiot, silent and remote, has opened an abyss in my soul with his departure. Ever since Mwanatu returned to his parents’ home, my loneliness and despair—which were already immense—have become unbearable. I always assumed that God would be the eternal companion of any Christian, wherever he might find himself. It’s either one thing or the other: either I am not a good believer, or Nkokolani lies beyond the sphere of divine attention.

I don’t know whether I miss Mwanatu more as a person or as a messenger boy. In truth, it is the absence of mail that causes me the greatest privation. These days, I am bedeviled by mad visions of my floor covered in papers. When I open my window, the breeze causes pages to flutter through the air and fly off into the distance. I look out at the surrounding countryside, which is entirely carpeted with sheets of paper. There are thousands of letters in one continuous sheet, letters as far as the eye can see. And in the middle of it all lies a dead youth with a tattoo on his arm, which reads: “A Mother’s Love.” On closer inspection, one can see that his whole body is covered in tattoos. His body contains a whole book in minute script. The dead man comes back to life and sits up, fully awake. What he does is transcribe his writing from his skin onto paper. But then he soon realizes that a whole life is not enough to transfer all the letters, for there are more of them than there are pores in his skin.

Have I gone mad? That must surely be your judgment. And it must be mine as well. It was because of my insanity that I rejoiced, some days ago, when I received a visit from my erstwhile sentry. Had he returned to his post? My mistake. The lad hadn’t come to stay. He was merely seeking my advice over some nonsensical mission. He wanted to bury the gun he had been given. I took advantage of the situation to ask after his sister, the beautiful Imani. He replied that he knew nothing. He was lying. It is obvious that the girl does not want to see me. And I respect her wish. Just as I respected the crazy intentions of her brother Mwanatu, feigning that I was listening to him and pretending to give him advice.

It happened, however, that I ran into Imani in the village this week, when she was buying fish. She didn’t look at me. Her attitude was no different from what it had always been. That’s how women talk to me, with their eyes looking firmly at the ground. She didn’t look at me, but she spoke. And her question could not have been stranger:

Do you think I’m a bullet?

In the face of my incomprehension, she repeated the question. I invited her to come with me to visit her mother’s grave. She agreed without a word. At the back of her house, we both sat down in silence.

Elephants used to pass by here, she said, pointing to the clump of trees. Now there are none left. You’ve killed them all.

We have killed them?

Isn’t the one who kills the one who fires the gun, or who gives the order to kill? So, let me ask you, has all that ivory made you richer?

Not me, Imani. Not me.

And the girl pressed on: That’s how it will be when you’ve eviscerated the earth to steal all its minerals. You’ll order the blacks to pile themselves up, one on top of another, until they reach the moon. And then Chopi miners will begin to dig for lunar silver.

In the girl’s words, there was unconcealed rancor. I had lied, that was true. But there were other, more timeless reasons.

Is it because I’m white? Is that why you’re keeping your distance from me?

Life is like a tide.

I must confess, I have no preparation for understanding the metaphors that litter the speech of these Negroes. Imani has a soul that’s all but white, yet she still surprises me with her use of language.

Now I understand better, I said, to make peace, this bitter feeling that blacks have against whites.

And I shared with her a recollection I had from my time in Lisbon. It happened the only time I watched a bullfight, having been taken to see it by my father. At one point, when the bull had tired and lost his aggression, half a dozen blacks were introduced into the ring, decked out with feathers and mounted on ridiculous cardboard horses. These ornamentations robbed them of their mobility but reinforced the burlesque tone that thrilled the crowd. The bull hurled himself against these poor devils, and they were all badly injured, to the delight of the spectators, who until then had been complaining about the paucity of the spectacle.

I looked up at Imani to assess the effect of what I had told her. Her face remained impassive.

It wasn’t racism. Or maybe it was. The truth is that they also threw Galicians into the arena.

Are Galicians black?

No, they’re like us.

Us, who, Sergeant?

I don’t know whether I smiled, or if indeed I meant to. What I remember is that the girl got up and invited me to stand beside her, in silence, next to her mother’s grave.

Is your mother alive, Sergeant?

I told her I didn’t know. Imani stared at me aghast, and then shook her head. She told me that was the saddest reply she had ever heard.

Now, I have kept what made me rejoice most these last few days for the final part of this letter. For an unknown postman arrived at my house, a slim mulatto with slanting blue eyes like those of a fish. He had come from Inhambane, and, besides the routine items of correspondence, he was carrying—just imagine—a letter from my mother. When he held out the envelope to me, I stood there without moving, thunderstruck.

A letter from my mother?

And the lad almost had to prize open my fingers in order to give me the letter. Moreover, he apologized: the papers had been splashed with water as he crossed the river. I ran to the privacy of my bedroom in order to read the letter and enjoy it at my leisure. The moisture had caused the ink to run. But my eyes, watery from the emotion of it all, got the better of its apparent illegibility. The lines were few and the message vague: they expressed a mother’s gratitude for her son’s continuous messages of love and longing. I stopped reading, convinced of one thing: that letter was not addressed to me.

And so I went and looked for the messenger. I had offered this new courier Mwanatu’s quarters so he could rest. I interrupted his repose and returned the misdirected letter to him.

This letter isn’t for me!

The lad half opened his eyes and once again curled up on his sleeping mat. It was only then that I realized I had never visited that minute cubicle before. And I felt a kind of remorse. I made the excuse of never having done it out of a sense of restraint at invading someone else’s privacy. But deep down, I knew there was another reason.

I hurried back to my room in order to write to you. I sat down and began, as I always do, by filling the top of the page with the name of the recipient. Your name, my dear José d’Almeida. But at this point I stopped. And I pondered on the endless deceptions of this correspondence of ours.

I didn’t understand, for example, the reason why you addressed to me copies of letters that Lieutenant Ayres de Ornelas had sent to his beloved mother. I must confess that I even thought Your Excellency had surpassed the limits of decency and consideration owed to another person’s intimate feelings. But I now appreciate and thank you for your refined sensibility. Your Excellency guessed the most fundamental of my anxieties, the most hidden of my privations. And now that I have paused, my pen hesitating over your name at the top of the page, I reach the following conclusion: I cannot continue with this pretense. For I now know that it is not Your Excellency, the Counselor Almeida, who reads and replies to my letters. I should cross out the name of the recipient of this letter, and in its place insert the name of Ayres de Ornelas. For it is with you, dear Lieutenant Ornelas, that I speak, and indeed have always spoken.

I feel no offense at this deception. Quite the opposite. I ask you, dear lieutenant, to transmit my sincerest thanks to the counselor José d’Almeida. Tell him how happy I am with the trick played on me, just as I am grateful that he has been Ayres de Ornelas all along. And to you, my dear lieutenant, I say: Thank you for having pretended to be someone else. More than anything, I thank you for your kindness in having sent me letters destined for your beloved mother. You cannot imagine how much good these letters have done me, here in the depths of the interior. Imani was right when she drew my attention to there being no greater sadness than someone’s not knowing whether his mother still belongs to this world. Your letters gave me the illusion of speaking to my mother as if she were providing solace for the pains of this infernal exile of mine.

I now know for certain that I have managed to survive in these backlands of Africa only thanks to the saintly woman who gave birth to me. And everything I have done that I may take pride in was due to the inspiration she provided. It was because of her that I joined the Republican revolt of January 31. As if, by wanting to kill the king, I were taking revenge on my stern, cold father.

In Batalha Square, it was to my mother that my thoughts returned when the bullets began to fly like sudden, tiny, ferrous birds. By a strange, sad irony, the shots fired at us came from the steps of a church dedicated to Saint Ildefonso, where the Municipal Guard were positioned. Although it was very different, this church seemed to me identical to the one my mother used to disappear into, and later re-emerge from, with the lightness of an angel.

Next to me on the flight of steps, a companion from the same dormitory as me was shot dead. Along with him fell the red-and-green flag he was carrying in his arms. I leaned over the unfortunate man to try to help him. There wasn’t a drop of blood, either on his uniform or on his exposed body. He seemed to have merely stumbled, and muttered something imperceptible without ever closing his mouth, until his gaze froze, fastened by some dark ribbon. It wasn’t just a companion from my lodgings who was dying. My own life was seeping away too. At that moment, the tears I shed were only useful because they brought me back to my childhood bedroom.

And all this long journey that drew me away from my home was, after all, a slow, imperceptible return. The day I was left at the gate of the Military Academy, I took my time before entering the building. I knew that once I had done so a part of me would die forever. I lingered by the door, peering at the street to see whether my mother might yet come back, moved by a sense of remorse. But she didn’t.

Years later, when I was leaving the trial of the mutineers in chains, I still believed my mother might be there to embrace me, on the quay where the families of the accused were waiting. But my mother was not among those present.

I do not know, from this distance, whether she is still by any chance alive. Deep within me, I can still hear the sweet, hoarse lullaby with which she sang me to sleep. And I hear her in the harmony of the marimbas, and in the prolonged silence of the savanna. Maybe that’s all my mother ever was: a gentle voice, a tenuous silken thread from which the whole weight of the universe was suspended. This is what I should have given Imani by way of an answer when she asked me whether I had received news from my home in Portugal.

It was necessary for me to live among black folk and strangers to reach an understanding of myself. It was necessary for me to rot away in a dark, distant place to understand how much I still belong to the tiny village where I was born.

Maybe Imani is right that spiders and their webs can heal the world and repair the gashes in our souls. Maybe, during this time of exile, I have acquired a strange taste for inventing illnesses. But what I suffer from has nothing to do with medicine. In truth, Excellency, I haven’t succumbed to sickness in Africa, like all the others. I fell ill in Portugal. My sickness is none other than my country’s decline and putrefaction. Eça de Queiroz wrote, “Portugal is finished.” When he wrote these words, he says, tears came to his eyes. That is his and my sickness: our fatherland without a future, drained by the greed of a handful of people, bent double under the whims and willfulness of England.

This decrepit garrison isn’t fortuitous. Nor is my confinement within it fortuitous. As my grandfather aptly recalled, when we don our uniforms, we unclothe our souls. If I die now, Your Excellency will not suffer the inconvenience of having to return me to the fatherland. A naked soul bears no weight. I shall require no journey. For I shall leave no memory of me behind.

My mother said there were angels. And I, who was a child and had all the innocence of the world, didn’t believe in such celestial creatures. There was something so sad about them that stopped me from believing. It has taken me all this time to understand that sadness. It is not a question of whether angels exist or not, but of the possibility that the sky might not be big enough to accommodate even one single angel.