This is how glory ensnares: The greater the victory, the more the hero will be hunted down and besieged by his past. This past will devour the present. It does not matter how many honors he has received. The only medal he will have left in the end is his tragic, fatal solitude.
Darkness was already widespread when I left in search of my father, carrying a basket in which there swayed a bottle of wine sporting, in bold letters, this label: “Black Man’s Wine.” The full moon lit up the slumbering landscape. My feet followed the recent footprints of old Katini. Who else in the village wore boots? I became more and more surprised at how far away he’d gone. My quivering calls faded, echoless and unanswered:
Father! Father?
Eventually, I arrived at a limitless field. It looked like land for growing crops. As if to confirm the landscape’s purpose, there was my father, busy scratching away at the soil. Only VaChopi men till the land alongside their women. But, in truth, my father was less a tiller and more of a distiller.
As I drew near, I noticed that what looked like a hoe was in fact a stick with a sharpened point. He wasn’t loosening the soil, but, rather, scratching it as if he were drawing on a huge canvas.
I’m writing, he said as he sensed me approaching.
Writing?
You’re not the only one who writes …
And what is it you’re so busy writing, Father?
It’s the names of all those who’ve died in the war.
I looked at the ground and saw that the earth he had gouged extended beyond the horizon. But even in the bright moonlight, his sandy scratchings were illegible.
So who is going to read all this?
God!
He pointed his stick in no particular direction, a gesture more vague and indistinct than his own voice. He repeated with a stutter: God! God is going to read me! He spun around and sat down on the ground, as if knocked over by some invisible force.
That mother of yours …
He didn’t complete his sentence; he had become blind to words. This blindness assailed him every time he tried to talk of his wife. He chewed his silence as if it were some bitter fruit. And there he remained, vanquished and motionless.
The moon was hidden by passing clouds. The names of the dead, scrawled in the earth, had been swallowed up by the gloom when Father spoke again: Have you come to get me? Well, tell your mother I’m not coming back. She’s got to learn to have some respect. I’m her husband. And, besides, I’m the most senior member of the Nsambe family.
I’ve brought you this, Father; it was Mother who told me to give it to you. And I offered him the bottle of wine.
His eyes lit up. He uncorked the bottle with his teeth and, with deliberate ceremony, poured the first drops on the ground. Then he took a loud and joyous swig, and he continued to drink as if that were his only task in this world. His bony hands turned the bottle round and round as if he were trying to make the wine dizzy while it was still inside its glass cradle. The letters on the homemade label were gradually erased, until the only words left were “Black Man.” My father had no color, but as he went on drinking, he grew ever darker. I was scared that he too would be swallowed up by the night. I held out my hand to save him. When he felt my fingers, he asked: Are you afraid, Imani?
I nodded. Touched, he tried to allay my fears. Could it be that I was like my mother, fearful that he might drink too much?
Everyone says I’m a drunkard. What do you think it is that I drink, you who know me well?
I don’t know, Father. You drink wine, you drink nsope. You drink so many things.
So many things told only part of the story. Old Katini drank everything. Once, he even swallowed a whole bottle of eau de cologne that he stole from the sergeant’s house. We had to bring him back to life, and his breath was so perfumed that it pervaded the night air. But he seemed to have a completely different explanation: I’m a solitary, fearful man. Your mother doesn’t understand. I only drink people. I drink the dreams of others.
In our family, alcohol had the most ancient roots: we would drink to escape from a place, and we would get drunk because we didn’t know how to escape ourselves.
* * *
At long last, my poor old father gave in to sleep. I snuggled up to him, paying no attention to the smell of liquor that emanated from his body. I was seeking protection, but the opposite happened: he was the most fragile, the most vulnerable of us all.
A pack of hyenas worked up the courage to lay siege to our hiding place. The more like humans wild animals are, the more they scare us. And the hyenas seemed to be in a far greater state of drunkenness than my father.
Their brawling chorus must have rung an alarm bell deep in Katini’s subconscious domains. The truth is, he awoke with a start. He went into the bush and, with his back turned to me, took a long pee. He wasn’t just answering a physical need; he was marking the borders of his tiny empire with urine. Then he waved his arms vigorously and let out a few shouts. The hyenas moved away, cackling like witches.
* * *
Those who are familiar with nights in my country know that when the crickets fall silent another, deeper night begins. This other darkness is so thick that dreams lose their way. My father listened to this silence and said:
Now even God has fallen asleep.
Let’s go, Father. Let’s go home. I’m scared.
First, let me see to the last one.
What last one?
The last of the dead.
With painstaking care he scratched his father’s name, Grandfather Tsangatelo. A shiver ran through my soul, and in my despair, I rushed to hold his long arms: Don’t do that, Father.
Keep quiet, Imani. This is a ceremony, and you’re not old enough to be here …
Grandfather hasn’t died!
He has died. Of that, there’s no doubt.
Has anyone seen the corpse?
There aren’t any corpses in the mines. It’s all stone, earth, and people, the living and the dead: all earth within the earth.
* * *
He mumbled some kind of prayer before we set off along the path that could now be made out in the meager early-morning light. We had just reached the first clearing when we were startled by voices coming from the bush. In a matter of seconds, we were surrounded by half a dozen men shouting in Xizulu. It was clear to us—their pierced ears and the wax crowns fastened on their hair left no doubt as to their identity—they were VaNguni soldiers, and their intention was to terrify us. My father whispered to me:
Were you scared of the wild animals? Well, the real hyenas have just arrived.
Our biggest fear was that they were timbissi, the ill-famed brigades used by the emperor to carry out massacres. Timbissi is the Zulu word for “hyenas.” However, our assailants were not wearing the typical adornments of that godforsaken group: two goat horns hanging on each of their chests. Luckily for us, these brigands were no more than common soldiers. They were collecting the taxes they said they were owed. The biggest, doubtful whether we had understood, stuck his hand out next to Katini’s face and declared, Listen, you dog, we’re here to collect the animal skins.
Who are these skins for?
Who do you think they’re for? For the owner of these lands, the emperor Ngungunyane.
But we’ve already given our skins.
Who did you give them to?
To the whites.
Which whites?
The Portuguese.
The Portuguese no longer rule here.
We didn’t know. The Portuguese intendant came to collect the skins. Now we don’t have any left. Unless you want our own skin.
Get busy looking. Ngungunyane isn’t going to like it when he knows you disobeyed him. And the girl, the soldier asked, pointing at me, who does she belong to?
The soldiers surrounded me and began to nudge me and feel my thighs. To my surprise, my father intervened, his chest puffed out and his arms stretched so wide that he seemed like one of the walls that protected our village.
This young girl is my daughter!
She may be your daughter, but her body has already begun to take shape. What were you two up to in the dark?
No one touches my daughter!
Katini Nsambe’s ever more furious stance was an unacceptable insult as far as they were concerned. One of the VaNguni came at us, a look of loathing stamped on his face. The man roared as he straightened himself, preparing to give my poor old father a kick. As he was doing this, the soldier suddenly tripped and fell to the ground in a heap. He struggled on the sand for a moment, but was unable to get up. The others had to help him regain his composure. That was when I saw what had happened: the aggressor had fallen over as he had trodden on the names written in the ground. The other VaNguni also noticed there was something strange about the sand. All together, they trampled the ground as hard as they could. Then, once again, they pointed at me, declaring: Next time, we’ll take her as a gift for Ngungunyane. You know only too well that the emperor takes a virgin from each place he conquers. Or do you need reminding?
They spat on the ground and disappeared, all the while hurling their invective. Their saliva bubbled in the sand like some toxic curse. When they were far away, we could still hear the soldiers’ guffaws. There was no doubt about it: they were hyenas. Or, worse still, they were creatures who only felt alive in the excitement of the kill.
* * *
When we were finally alone, my old father, seized by fury, drew himself up, spun around on the tips of his toes, and screamed in Portuguese:
You may have weapons, but I’ve got all this ground here, where I’ve written the names of the dead. You’d better watch out …
He mumbled to himself, as if chewing poison, Miserable wretches, you don’t even have a word for “paper” in your language. And, leaning on his staff, he quickly set off in the direction of home. I hurried after him along paths moistened by the dew.
Don’t speak about what happened when we get home; it will only worry your mother. And it will feed Uncle Musisi’s appetite for war.
For a moment, I thought it might not be so bad if they had abducted me, and taken me to where a king might choose me as his wife. I would, at long last, be a woman. I would finally be a mother. And, as a queen and a mother, I would have power over the VaNguni. And I would bring peace to our nations. My brothers would return home; my sisters would live again; my mother would stop wandering through the darkness in her sleep.
Maybe this king whom everyone feared, having created such a vast empire, was no more than a friendless victim. Who knows, maybe love was the only empire Ngungunyane sought? Or maybe he had other motives throughout all these years of war: to find a woman like me, capable of infinite passion. That might explain his endless marriages. People said the emperor had so many wives that he believed all the children in the world were his. I asked myself this: When I was presented at his court, would he take me as a wife or as a daughter? Or would he have me killed, to give substance to the fear that kept him on his throne?
* * *
In our part of the world, we know we are near a human settlement because of the sound of children’s voices, their singing and wailing. This is what we could hear when we were still some distance away from the village: the cries of children reached our ears before we reached the dwellings.
Chikazi Makwakwa was awaiting our return at the door of our house. Even from some way off, I realized that this time she too had been drinking. Anticipating her husband’s rebuke, she came toward us, jabbing her finger: You don’t love me, Katini!
Who said so?
So why is it you’ve only got me? There are so many men around who’ve got more than one wife …
I’m not like those VaTsongas who collect wives as if they were heads of cattle … Besides, didn’t we decide we were going to be civilized?
You’re the one who did the deciding. And because of that, our children have given up on us …
We’ve still got Imani.
Imani will go away. In fact, she hasn’t been here for a long time.
She was talking as if she couldn’t see me. I ran up to her and touched her on the arm.
I’m here, Mother.
You’ve already gone, girl. You speak to us in Portuguese; you sleep with your head toward the west. And only yesterday you were talking about the date of your birthday.
Where had I learned to measure time? The years and months, she said, have names and not numbers. We give them names as if they were living beings, like those that are born and die. We call the months “fruit-picking time,” “the time when the paths are closed,” “the time of birds and ripening corn.” And many other such names.
More serious still was my growing estrangement: My dreams of love would never be expressed in our language or directed toward our folk. That’s what my mother told me. She paused for some time before addressing Katini: You know my greatest wish, husband. I want us to return to the sea. We lived in peace there, far from this war. Why don’t we go back there?
You’re asking the wrong question, wife. Your question should have been: why did we leave there? You know that answer only too well, for it fills you with fear. And this fear is greater than your wish.
Then he got up, staggered about for a few seconds, and held his wife’s arm. He looked as if he were leaning on her for support, but he was forcing her into the bedroom. I also retired to my room. I lay down and covered my face with my capulana, afraid that the thatched roof might collapse. Houses are living, ravenous creatures. At night, they devour the residents and in their place leave stumbling dreams wandering here and there, stumbling like my drunken father. More than any other house, ours had an insatiable appetite. All night long, we would see the dead entering and leaving. In the darkness, our house would swallow us up. When morning came, it would spit us out again.
* * *
My brothers were the other half of my world. But they now lived far away from our home. This was why the house had been split down the middle. Mother dreamed of the sea. I dreamed that my brothers were coming back. At night, I would wake up calling their names: Dubula and Mwanatu. As I sat there in the darkness, I would remember when they were children and shared our space.
From an early age, Dubula showed himself to be intelligent and active. He was given a Zulu name, and the choice explained his strange fascination for the invading VaNguni. Dubula means “gunfire.” My father gave him this name because, when the baby was being delivered, he got tired of waiting and grabbed his old rifle and fired into the ceiling. His nerves got the better of him, he explained later. In fact, it was the crack of the gunfire that hastened the child’s birth. Dubula was the product of a fright, a spark. He was like the rain, the son of a thunderclap.
Mwanatu, the youngest, was the opposite, sluggish and inept. Since childhood, he had been fascinated by the Portuguese. This attraction had been encouraged by our father, who sent him for catechism. And so he stayed with me as a boarder at the Mission. When he returned home, he was even more of a simpleton. Under instructions from Father, Mwanatu went to work as Sergeant Germano’s adjutant, while still continuing his previous job, helping at the Portuguese store. He lived night and day in the military quarters, and no longer visited us. He occasionally took on guard duties, pretending to keep watch on the Portuguese man’s front door. He had been given an old military tunic and a sepoy’s cap. He adored his uniform, unaware that his performance was a source of amusement for passing Portuguese. Mwanatu was a mere outline of a person, a soldier in caricature. His efforts merited pity: no one had ever taken such tasks so seriously. On the other hand, no one had ever been made such a source of amusement.
More than the uniform itself, he clung to a promise made to him: one day, he would set sail for Lisbon and, once there, he would enroll at a military school. This journey was imagined for its eventual return. He would come back to live among his “people.” Mwanatu’s loyalty to the Portuguese Crown filled everyone in our family with shame except our father, who had another view: as long as we were under the protection of the Portuguese, that devotion, whether sincere or feigned, was very useful to us.
* * *
The differences between my two brothers reflected the two sides of the border that separated all our family. Times were hard and required us to choose allegiances. Dubula, the elder of the two, didn’t need to choose. Life chose for him. When he was still a boy, he obeyed the rituals of initiation, in accordance with age-old traditions. When he was six, he was taken into the forest, where he was circumcised and instructed in matters of sex and women. For weeks, he slept in the forest, covered up with sheaves of grass so as not to be recognized by the living or the dead. Every morning, our mother would take him food, but she would never enter the forest where the initiates were gathered. Everlasting misfortune would befall the woman who trespassed in this forbidden territory.
The same prohibition was being repeated now, ever since Dubula had fled home to live a wandering existence. It was said he slept each night in a different part of the forest. In the half-light of dawn, our brother would prowl around our backyard, knowing that our mother had secretly left him a plate of food on top of the anthill. The footprints that our father looked for in the sand weren’t those of wild animals. They were his own son’s.
As for Mwanatu, he was educated to read and use numbers. He went through the same rituals as a white Catholic Portuguese. Our mother would warn us: the soul he’d been given was now no longer suited to our patch of ground. The language he had learned wasn’t just a way of talking. It was a way of thinking, living, and dreaming. In this, he and I were alike. Our mother’s fears were obvious: We had consumed so much of the Portuguese language that our mouths would have no room left for any other way of speaking. And, in time, those mouths of ours would devour us.
Nowadays, I think our mother was right to have such fears. Where her son saw words, she saw ants. And she dreamed that these ants crept out of the pages and gnawed away at the eyes of the reader.
* * *
So often have I relived Dubula’s last visit home that it is as if he had never vanished into the world. I still remember that distant evening when I got home and saw my elder brother sitting there, his back to the door. The abundant sweat running over his shoulders gleamed in the rarefied light. As I drew closer, I realized that it wasn’t sweat. It was blood.
Was it Father? I asked, already in tears.
It was me, he replied.
I walked up to him and circled his statuesque body. The blood was seeping, thick and slow, from his ears.
Why did you do this, Dubula?
His torn lobes left no room for doubt: Dubula had inscribed his body with the marks of a new birth. He was no longer one of us. He was an Nguni, the same as the others who negated our existence. I hugged him as if for the last time. And I asked him to leave before our father arrived.
I watched his slender figure disappear down the path, and I slid my hands down over my breasts as if I myself were lost. Then I felt my brother’s blood on my skin.