I

“You, nostalgic sadness, make the past live again
You reignite extinct happiness.”

—Óscar Ribas, Culturando as Musas

 

 

 

 

 

“But Comrade António, don’t you prefer to live in a free country?”

I liked to ask this question when I came into the kitchen. I’d open the refrigerator and take out the water bottle. Before I could reach for a glass, Comrade António was passing me one. His hands left greasy prints on the sides, but I didn’t have the courage to refuse this gesture. I filled the glass, drank one swallow, two, and waited for his reply.

Comrade António breathed. Then he turned off the tap. He cleaned his hands, busied himself with the stove. Then he said: “Son, in the white man’s time things weren’t like this. . . .”

He smiled. I really wanted to understand that smile. I’d heard incredible stories of bad treatment, bad living conditions, miserable wages and all the rest. But Comrade António liked this sentence in support of the Portuguese and gave me a mysterious smile.

“António, didn’t you work for a Portuguese man?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “He was a Mr. Manager, a good boss, treated me real good . . .”

“Was that in Bié Province?”

“No. Right here in Luanda. I been here a long time, son. . . . Even way back before you were born, son.”

Sitting at the table, I waited for him to say something more. Comrade António was doing the kitchen chores. He was smiling, but he remained silent. Every day he had the same smell. Even when he’d bathed; he always seemed to have those kitchen smells. He took the water bottle, filled it with boiled water and put it back in the fridge.

“But, António, I still want more water . . .”

“No, son, that’s enough,” he said. “Otherwise there won’t be any cold water for lunch and your mother will be upset.”

When he was putting away the water bottle and cleaning the counter, Comrade António wanted to do his work without me there. I got in his way as he moved around the kitchen, besides which that space belonged to him alone. He didn’t like having people around.

“But António. . . . Don’t you think that everybody should be in charge of their own country? What were the Portuguese doing here?”

“Hey, son! Back then the city was clean. . . . It had everything you needed, nothing was missing.”

“But, António, don’t you see that it didn’t have everything? People didn’t earn a fair wage. Black people couldn’t be managers, for example. . . .”

“But there was always bread in the store, son. The buses worked perfectly.” He was just smiling.

“But nobody was free, António. . . . Don’t you see that?”

“Nobody was free like what? Sure they were free, they could walk down the street and everything . . .”

“That’s not what I mean, António.” I got up from my seat. “It wasn’t Angolans who were running the country, it was the Portuguese . . . It can’t be that way.”

Comrade António was just laughing.

He smiled at my words, and seeing me getting worked up, he said: “What a kid!” Then he opened the door to the yard, sought out Comrade João, the driver, with his eyes and told him: “This kid’s terrible!” Comrade João smiled, sitting in the shade of the mango tree.

Comrade João was the ministry driver. Since my father worked in the ministry, he also drove the family. Sometimes I took advantage of the lift and got a ride to school with him. He was thin and drank a lot. Once in a while he showed up very early in the morning, already drunk, and nobody wanted to ride with him. Comrade António said that he was used to it, but I was afraid. One day he gave me a ride to school and we started to talk.

“João, did you like it when the Portuguese were here?”

“Like what, son?”

“You know, before independence they were the ones who were in charge here. Did you like that time?”

“People say the country was different. . . . I don’t know. . . .”

“Of course it was different, João, but it’s different today, too. The comrade president is Angolan, it’s Angolans who look after the country, not the Portuguese . . .”

“That’s the way it is, son . . .” João liked to laugh too, and afterwards he whistled.

“Did you work with Portuguese people, João?”

“Yes, but I was very young . . . And I was in the bush with the guerrillas as well. . . .”

“Comrade António likes to say really great things about the Portuguese,” I said to provoke him.

“Comrade António is older,” João said. I didn’t understand what he meant.

As we passed some very ugly buildings, I waved to a comrade teacher. João asked me who she was, and I replied: “It’s Teacher María, that’s the complex where the Cuban teachers live.”

He dropped me at the school. My classmates were all laughing because I’d got a lift to school. We gave anybody who got a ride a hard time, so I knew they were going to make fun of me. But that wasn’t all they were laughing about.

“What is it?” I asked. Murtala was talking about something that had happened the previous afternoon, with Teacher María. “Teacher María, the wife of Comrade Teacher Ángel?”

“Yes, that one,” Helder said, laughing. “Then this morning, over in the classroom, everybody was making a lot of noise and she tried to give a detention point to Célio and Cláudio . . . Oh! . . . They got up in a hurry to take off and the teacher said. . . .” Helder was laughing so hard he couldn’t go on. He was all red. “The teacher said: ‘You get down here,’ or ‘there’ or something!”

“Yeah, and after that?” I was starting to laugh too, it was contagious.

“They threw themselves right down on the floor.”

We all burst out laughing. Bruno and I liked to joke with the Cuban teachers as well. Since at times they didn’t understand Portuguese very well, we took advantage by speaking quickly or talking nonsense.

“But you still don’t know the best part.” Murtala came up to my side.

“What’s that?”

“She started crying and took off home!” Murtala started laughing flat out as well. “She split just because of that.”

We had math class with Teacher Ángel. When he came in he was upset. I signalled to Murtala, but we couldn’t laugh. Before the class started the comrade teacher said that his wife was very sad because the pupils had been undisciplined, and that a country undergoing reconstruction needed a lot of discipline. He also talked about Comrade Che Guevara, he talked about discipline and about how we had to behave well so that things would go well in our country. As it happened, nobody complained about Célio or Cláudio, otherwise, with this business of the revolution they’d have got a detention point.

At recess Petra went to tell Cláudio that they should apologize to Comrade Teacher María because she was really cool, she was Cuban and she was in Angola to help us. But Cláudio didn’t want to hear what Petra was saying, and he told her that he’d just followed the teacher’s orders, that she’d told them to “get down here,” and so they threw themselves on the floor.

We liked Teacher Ángel. He was very simple, very humorous. The first day of class he saw Cláudio with a watch on his wrist and asked him if the watch belonged to him. Cláudio laughed and said yes. The Comrade Teacher said in Spanish, “Look, I’ve been working for many years and I still don’t have one,” and we were really surprised because almost everybody in our year had a watch. The physics teacher was also surprised when he saw so many calculators in the classroom.

But it wasn’t just Teacher Ángel and Teacher María. We liked all the Cuban teachers, because with them classes started to be different. The teachers chose two monitors to help with discipline, which we liked at first because it was a sort of secondary responsibility (after that of class delegate), but later we didn’t like it very much because to be a monitor “it was essential to help the less capable compañeros,” as the comrade teachers said to us in Spanish, and you had to know everything about that subject and you couldn’t get less than an A. But the worst part of all was that you had to do homework, because the monitor was the one who checked homework at the beginning of the class.

Of course going to the teacher to tell who had done their homework and who hadn’t sometimes led to fights at recess. Paulo could tell you how he got taken away to hospital with a bloody nose.

At the end of the day the comrade principal came to talk to us. We liked it when someone came into the classroom because we had to pay attention and do that little song that most of us took advantage of to shout: “Good afternooooon. . . . comraaaaade. . . . principaaaaal!”

Then she told us that we would have a surprise visit from the comrade inspector of the Ministry of Education. She knew it was going to be some day soon and we had to behave well, clean the school, the classroom, the desks, come to school looking “presentable” (I think that’s what she said), and the teachers would explain the rest later.

Nobody said anything, we didn’t even ask a question. Of course we only stood up when the comrade principal said, “All right, until tomorrow,” and that “until tomorrow” wasn’t so offhand because it would be different if she said, “Until next week.”

So we stood up and said really loudly: “Untiiiiiiil . . . tomorrooooow . . . comraaaaade . . . . principaaaaal!”

and then I saw that, in a country, the government’s one thing and the people are another.

If, when I woke up, I remembered the pleasure of an early morning breakfast, I’d wake up in a good mood. Having breakfast early in Luanda – oh yeah! There’s a freshness in the air that’s almost cold and makes you feel like drinking milk with your coffee and lying in wait for the smell of the morning. Sometimes even when my parents were at the table, we were silent. Maybe we were smelling the morning, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Comrade António had keys to the house, but sometimes I was on the balcony and I’d see him sitting out there in the greenery. My mother had already told him not to come so early, but it seems as though at times the elders don’t sleep much. So he’d stay out on the benches, just sitting there. When he heard movement in the house he’d approach slowly.

“Good morning, son.”

“Good morning, Comrade António.” I waited for him to close the front door. “You were here very early again, António.”

“Yes. . . . I was just sitting out there, son.” He was smiling. “Is the lady of the house up?”

Comrade António always asked this question, but I don’t know why. He knew that my mother was always the first to wake up. Maybe he didn’t expect an answer, but I only figured this out much later.

“Did you come on the bus today, António?”

“No, son, I walked; it’s cool at this hour.”

“From the Golf neighbourhood all the way here?”

“Twenty minutes, son . . . Twenty minutes . . .”

But it wasn’t true. Comrade António liked to say “twenty minutes” for everything. The water just boiled twenty minutes ago, my mother went out twenty minutes ago, lunch would be ready in twenty minutes.

I stayed on the balcony. In the garden there were some slugs which I figured had to be elders because they always woke up early. There were a lot of them. After breakfast, sitting on the balcony like that with the cool breeze, watching the slugs going wherever they were going, made me drowsy again. I even fell asleep.

It was always the sun that woke me. It was totally impossible on my balcony to work out where it was going. My leg was hot and asleep, I had an annoying itch. I scratched. Afterwards I heard António’s voice coming from the kitchen.

“Were you callin’ me, António?” I went into the kitchen.

“Son, your aunt telephoned, son. . . .”

“What aunt, António?”

“The aunt from Portugal.”

“Oh hell, António . . . and you didn’t even wake me up . . . I wanted to talk to her.”

“She wanted to talk to your father, son.” He was smiling.

“So . . . She wanted to talk to my father, but she would’ve talked to me. . . . And what did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything, son. She just told me to tell your father she’d called, looks like she’s going to call again around lunch time.”

“But what a time to call, António. I didn’t hear the phone . . .”

“It wasn’t even twenty minutes ago, son.”

The smell from the kitchen, the whistle of the pot, Comrade António’s movements: everything told me it must be eleven o’clock. I still hadn’t done my math and chemistry homework, and we were supposed to eat lunch at twelve-thirty. I decided I wasn’t going to take a bath because I had phys. ed. in the afternoon. The bath could wait until evening.

I went upstairs and “did my lessons,” as we used to say. My mother had taught me to study the subject first and do the assignment afterwards, but when I didn’t have time, I took a quick look at the material and solved the problems right away. Cláudio, Bruno, and especially Murtala, always did their homework like that, and they said it worked. But Petra was always studying. That girl could drive you crazy, the next day she knew the material cold. When we weren’t sure about something during a test, we always asked her.

My mother arrived. First she’d go to the kitchen to make sure that lunch was on the way, then she’d hang up the keys on the key-holder, then she’d come upstairs to ask me if I’d done my homework and she would go and have a bath. I might be wrong, but that was what she usually did.

“Was it you who spoke to Aunt Dada?” She kissed me on the cheek, went into the bathroom and turned on the tap. (I knew she’d do that!)

“No, I was doin’ my homework . . . It was Comrade António.”

“But António said you were on the balcony.”

“Yeah, I was doing my homework on the balcony.”

“But I’ve already told you kids that when the phone rings it’s your job to answer it. Don’t make Comrade António leave the kitchen to answer the phone.” The tone of her voice had changed.

“But he did it so quickly, Mum, I didn’t even have time . . .” She went into the bathroom. The sound of the water interrupted our conversation. So much the better.

The telephone rang. I ran to answer it, convinced that it was Aunt Dada. I didn’t know her, but I’d spoken to her on the phone many times, which was kind of funny because I only knew her voice. Once she had passed me over to her son, and my sisters and I spent the whole afternoon laughing at the way he talked. I was hardly even able to reply, I almost fell on the floor from laughing so hard, until my mother finally had to say that I was in the bathroom suffering from colic. My aunt didn’t make me want to laugh so much because she spoke very slowly, she had what the elders – and Cláudio could never hear me say this – called a “sweet voice.”

But it wasn’t my aunt on the telephone. It was Paula from the National Radio station, and she wanted to speak to my mother. I said she was in the bathroom, but she decided to wait. Paula was another person who had a sweet voice, I really liked listening to her voice on the radio, but I was frightened the first time I saw her because I thought someone with a voice like hers would be tiny, and she was tall. When I heard my mother say, “Yes, I’ll ask him if he wants to. . . . ,” I suspected it was something to do with me.

“Look, Paula’s going to do a program tomorrow about May Day and she wants to collect testimonies from Young Pioneers. Do you want to go?”

“‘Testimonies’ means going there and talking?” I said, even though I knew what the word meant.

“Yes, you prepare something and tomorrow she’ll come and get you and the two of you’ll make a recording.”

“But it’s for a program?”

“More or less. I think it’s going to run on the news, it’s a message from the children to the workers.”

“So do I have to write an essay, Mum? Aw, that’s a lot of work.”

“No, you don’t have to write an essay because they’re not going to let you read an essay, only a few words. . . .”

“Can you help me?”

“Not with the writing, son. . . . You write what you want. I can correct the mistakes, but the text has to be your own work.”

“Okay. I want to go to the National Radio studio. Maybe she’ll let me see all their equipment.”

“Yes, maybe, you’ll have to ask her.”

 

It was already lunch time. My sisters arrived from school and my father arrived, too. The house got really noisy, plus the noise of the radio in the living room so we could hear the news, plus Comrade António’s radio in the kitchen, plus my younger sister who wanted to talk about everything that had happened at school that morning. She knew she had to hurry because at the stroke of one she would have to end her story to let my parents listen to the news.

We were kind of bored with the news because it was always the same thing: first, news of the war, which was almost always the same, unless there had been some important battle or UNITA¹ had blown up some pylons. That always got a laugh because everyone at the table was saying that the UNITA leader, Savimbi, was the “Robin Hood of the pylons.” Afterwards there was always a government minister, or someone from the political bureau, who said a few more things. Then came the intermission and the publicity for the FAPLAs.² Oh yeah, that’s right, sometimes they talked about the situation in South Africa, where the African National Congress was. Anyway, these were names that you started to pick up over the years. Also, you could learn a lot because, for example, on the subject of the ANC, my father explained to us who Comrade Nelson Mandela was, and I found out that there was a country named South Africa where black people had to go to their houses when a bell rang at six o’clock in the evening, that they couldn’t ride the bus with other people who weren’t also black, and I was amazed when my father told me that this Comrade Nelson Mandela had been a prisoner for I don’t know how many years. That was how I came to understand that the South Africans were our enemies, and that the fact that we were fighting against the South Africans meant that we were fighting against “some” South Africans because for sure those black people who had a special bus just for them weren’t our enemies. Then, also, I saw that, in a country, the government’s one thing and the people are another.

After the news, and these conversations, came the sports. But here, too, it was always Petro or D’Agosto who won; well, later Taag improved a little wee bit, they even beat another team 11 to 1 – poor saps! – and the next day Cláudio made fun of Murtala. I think Murtala even cried. At one-twenty, when my parents were drinking their coffee, they turned off the radio. The telephone rang and this time I was certain it was Aunt Dada.

My father spoke with her first, making note of the flight and her arrival time. Then she spoke with each of us, first with my mother, then with my sister, and I saw that she was asking whether we wanted anything. My father motioned to me not to ask for anything big because I was always asking for too many coloured pencils, or notepads, and, on top of that, for a ton of chocolate. I had time to think and I saw that each person was asking for just one thing.

“Are you well, my darling? . . .” Her voice was sweet, sweet.

“Yeah, aunty . . . Look, when are you coming?”

“I arrive tomorrow, didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn’t know. . . . That’s great. So you want to ask me what I want, right?”

“Yes, son, tell me.” She must have been really smiling.

“Well, since I can only ask for one thing. . . .” I turned around and nobody heard what I asked for.

 

After lunch the “lucky devils” – as my mother said – went to take a siesta. She and I had classes in the afternoon, she because she was a teacher and I because I was a pupil. Sometimes she gave me a lift. I sat in the front, put the car in neutral and turned the key in the ignition. Since I couldn’t do anything else, I sat there imagining what it would be like when I was able to drive – wow! I’d rip along like anything. Whenever I thought this I accelerated a little to hear the noise of the engine and to give my imagination a hand. If my mother heard, I’d say: “The car needs to warm up . . .” A pretty useless excuse because at two in the afternoon in Luanda a car’s only cold if it’s got a load of ice on top of it. “Move over,” my mother said, as she sat down in the driver’s seat.

Later, as we were driving: “Mum?”

“Yes?”

“Is Aunt Dada going to bring presents for everyone?” I asked in disbelief.

“If she can she will . . .”

“But how many people are there in her family?”

“Her and the three children. Why?”

“How’s she going to bring presents for us, when there are five of us, and she also asked what Comrade António wanted? . . . Does her ration card give her the right to that much stuff?”

But we were already at the corner where I got out, and she did-n’t have time to answer. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and told me to think about what I was going to say on National Radio on May Day because the recording session was tomorrow.

It was really hot. Some of my classmates stank, which was normal for people who’d come to school on foot. We stood talking outside the classroom, hoping that the teacher wouldn’t show up. It was incredible how we always wanted to believe that we might get a free period every day, because if it depended on us, that was what we wanted. As Teacher Sara said: “It seems that you don’t know that your duty is to study.” Perhaps that was where we got the saying that the pen was a Young Pioneer’s weapon. Or she’d say: “Don’t forget that the school is your second home.” But it was dangerous to say that to Murtala because he might feel so much at home that he’d doze off in the classroom with the excuse that he thought it was his bedroom.

The talk was good. Bruno said, with that face that only he knew how to make and that everybody believed, that there was a group of muggers who were attacking schools. I’d already heard something like this, but I’d thought it was the schools that were farther away, out by the Golf neighbourhood. But Bruno was always well informed.

“Hey, it’s the son of my maid who told me. Yesterday he didn’t even go to class, then he came to my house with his mum, and he had these awesome wounds. . . .”

“And so?” somebody said.

“Yo, it was for real, man, like there were forty of them . . .”

“Forty!?” Cláudio figured this was an exaggeration. Even the Zúa Gang didn’t have that many guys with them when they carried out a raid.

“The Zúa Gang? The Zúas??!” Bruno continued with that face that was serious only once in a while. “The Zúas are a joke stacked up against Empty Crate. . . . Look, these guys come in a truck, all dressed in black. They surround the school and wait for the pupils to come out. The people who come out get grabbed right there . . . And if you get grabbed. . . .”

“Huh . . . What happens?” Murtala was frightened, his rat-like eyes gleaming.

“What happens? Everything happens: they steal the backpacks, they cut you, they rape the girls and everything. They’re heavy duty, not even the police go near them, yeah, they’re afraid, too . . .”

 

When the class started all the guys were thinking about Empty Crate. Everyone was working out his escape route. For sure Cláudio was going to start to bring his switchblade, Murtala, who was a runner, was going to be in the clear, I was going to be trapped if my glasses fell off when I started running, Bruno too; as for the girls – poor little things! Poor little Romina, as soon as she heard the story, was going to start crying and ask her mother if she could stay home from school for the week; Petra would be afraid too, but she would always worry more about classes. I looked at Bruno: sitting at his desk, he looked restless, sweating and gearing himself up for something. At first I thought he was drawing, but then I smelled the glue. Before the end of class he asked Petra for the felt-tipped pens. It was terrifying: he’d made a black-painted crate with a ghoulish skull and had written in blood-red letters: Empty Crate Was Here!

In the second hour Teacher Sara explained that the comrade inspector was going to make his surprise visit in the next few days, that they didn’t know exactly when but it would be very soon. She explained everything to us again, how we were supposed to address him, how we weren’t supposed to make noise. She even asked us to come in with our hair combed. Of course this was mainly aimed at Gerson and Bruno, who never combed their hair (Bruno told me he’d combed his hair for the last time when he was seven years old, but I think this was a fib), and hardly ever bathed, which had to be true because they really smelled, to the point where nobody wanted to sit with them.

Later Teacher Sara bawled out Petra for asking “indiscreet questions.” What happened was that Petra wanted to ask, and even did ask, how it was that the visit of the comrade inspector was going to be a surprise if we already knew he was coming, in spite of not knowing the day, and we already knew the subjects we were going to be asked about and were completely prepared for this surprise.

Petra sometimes did things like this, and afterwards she would be sad because nobody supported her and the teacher had bawled her out. It served her right. If she didn’t try to show everyone how clever she was, she might be a little less of a troublemaker.

“But I buy what I want, provided that I have the money. Nobody tells me that I took home too much fish or too little. . . .”

“Nobody? . . . Isn’t there even a comrade in the fish market who stamps the cards when you buy fish on Wednesday?”

I woke up early and I felt great. I had two amazing things to do that day: one was going to the airport to meet Aunt Dada, and the other was going on National Radio to read my message to the workers. I thought it would be good to take advantage of some things I’d written in the composition I’d done on the worker-peasant alliance, which had got five stars on the Portuguese test.

I went to open the door for Comrade António, and of course he told me it wasn’t necessary because he had keys. I don’t know how it was that he didn’t see that I did it because I had something to tell him.

“Good morning, Comrade António.” I opened the smaller door.

“Good morning, son,” he said, reaching for his pocket to see if he was quick enough to open the door with his key before I opened it for him. “You don’t have to, son. I’ve got a key . . .”

“You know what I’m going to do today, António?” I thought he didn’t know.

“Sure, son, you’re going to the airport to get your aunt.”

“And afterwards, where am I going?”

“Then you’ll come home, son . . .”

“No, no! I’m going to the National Radio studio!”

“Really? You’re going to talk on the radio, son?” He was smiling and closing the front door with his key.

“I’m not sure yet. . . . I’m going and two more kids from other schools. I don’t know if they’ll play all the messages.”

We went into the kitchen. “Did you have breakfast, son?”

But I still wanted to talk about that radio business. I was already imagining the comrade radio host announcing my name, and my classmates might hear it too, and what if my comrade Cuban teachers heard it? Would this be part of the revolution? My head was spinning from happiness because it was also a day for receiving presents, and I was finally going to meet my sweet-voiced aunt. I just hoped she wasn’t too tall.

“Eat slowly, son, that’s bad for you.”

But how was I supposed to eat slowly when Paula might arrive at any moment and I had to be ready to go to Angolan National Radio?

I was speechless. When we got to the entrance, a comrade asked my name and made a note on a sheet and gave me a badge I had to clip to my shirt, like I was already the comrade director of the National Radio station. I really liked that kind of badge – wow, just look at the name tag, it was to die for! There was a water fountain in the entrance and there were even two live turtles taking a stroll. I asked Paula how come they stayed there all by themselves without anybody looking after them.

“Without anybody looking after them? What do you mean?” She didn’t understand.

“Yes, doesn’t anybody take off with those turtles?”

Paula laughed, but she laughed because she didn’t know Murtala, who had the trick of taking off with stuff without making a sound, even with animals. Once when we went to the zoo Cláudio bet him that he couldn’t steal anything from the garden and when Murtala saw those tiny little monkeys he decided to grab one. The monkey gave him a scratch on the lip that drew blood. Cláudio started to laugh like crazy, but when we got back to school we found out that was just a trick of Murtala’s, the dude had wanted to rip off the monkey’s snacks. He started to laugh at us on the bus when we were starving and he was scarfing those hard almonds. Poor dumb Murtala, the next day it was our turn to laugh at him, when he had one of those diarrheas that Bruno called “an every-five diarrhea,” by which he meant every five minutes.

Paula said we had to keep walking. We went down a really clean hallway. I was stunned, wow, were there really spots this pretty in Luanda? That’s the truth, the National Radio station is pretty. I was charmed. There were little interior gardens. I even wanted to ask Paula if I could play there after the recording session, while I waited for my parents. The studio was small and there was a gadget on the wall that looked like a cork in a wine bottle; it was terrific. The other two pioneers and I were lucky because they explained everything to us: how things worked, they even let us joke around and make a few mock recordings. Then the light went out and we waited for a long time for the generator to start up. To entertain us, Paula made a joke that in my opinion was a little dangerous: she said that if we wanted to, we could talk nonsense for five minutes. At first everyone was silent, then she said she meant it, that we could say what we liked. I asked if she was going to tell our parents and she promised not to. But of course the elders never know well what we know and when we started with a barrage of jokes it only lasted for a minute because there were thirty seconds of a triple fusillade and another thirty of her trying to quiet us down. I thought I was well trained. In twenty-two seconds I was able to say all the dirty jokes I knew, even the worst ones, and I took advantage of the other eight seconds to mix and combine those I knew with those I’d just heard, but to tell the truth those other kids were good, too.

The light returned before the generator could start. Then we hurried to record the messages before the light could go out again. When I took out my piece of paper with the things I’d written, Paula told me it wasn’t necessary because we already had, “the editorial sheet, with a script for each of you.” This made it even easier because it was all typed out and everything.

When we finished recording, we went out into the yard. For a while we exchanged jokes and made fun of each other. Those kids couldn’t match my funny stories, but they had ways of making fun of you that could reduce you to tears. Unlike the things kids said to make fun of each other at my school, these expressions were very short, very simple, but very powerful. It was with them that I learned insults like: you swallowed a tickle, you belch when you laugh, the first person to wake up in your house is the one who puts on the underpants, you started going because you drank battery fluid, or the very famous, you took two turns with the chamber pot and yelled, “Angola is great!” They also knew tons of mugging stories. I was about to ask about Empty Crate, but Paula came to tell me that my parents were waiting for me.

“Did you behave properly?” my mother asked.

“Yes, we all behaved properly. The other kids were really cool.” I opened the car window and stuck my head out. It was hot.

“How did it go? Did you read your message?”

“It turned out it wasn’t necessary, Mum.”

“No?”

“No, they had a piece of paper there in the station, with an official stamp and everything. They already had a message for each of us. I read one and the others read the other two.”

 

There were a lot of people outside the airport. It was always like that when an international flight arrived. Next to the door where the passengers came out there was an uproar. I saw the FAPLAs come running. I thought they were going to shoot. I got up on the hood of the car and peeped over the shoulders of the people in front of me.

It was very hot, and I remember inhaling once again that all-encompassing stench. That kind of the smell often told me, too, what time of day it was. . . . But that muffled heat mixed with the smell of dry fish meant that for sure a national flight had arrived. I didn’t go to the airport very often, but there were things that everyone knew, or better yet, smelled. I pretended to be wiping the sweat from my brow with the sleeve of my T-shirt and took advantage of the gesture to smell my armpit. Well, it could be worse, I thought.

I got up on the hood of the car and peeped over the people’s heads. I smiled: a pretty little monkey was hopping up and down on the shoulder of a foreign lady while a gentleman, probably her husband, took photographs of her. The monkey was going wild, bouncing wickedly on the lady’s head, pretending to pick lice off her. Her husband – I guess it was her husband – was a very white man but now he was very red with laughter. Suddenly a FAPLA came up from behind and gave the monkey a slap. The poor sap jumped, did a couple of somersaults in the air, yelled, fell to the ground and took off running.

I couldn’t see the monkey any more. A disturbance started. The other FAPLA stepped up next to the lady’s husband and grabbed the camera from his hands. I could more or less hear the conversation. The gentleman was trying to speak Portuguese; the FAPLA was annoyed. He opened the camera with a jerk, pulled out the roll of film and threw it away. I think that was when the lady started to cry. They saw this was serious. What idiots, they should have known that in Luanda you can’t take photographs wherever you like.

The FAPLA said: “This camera is confiscated for reasons of state security!” Then he explained to them that they couldn’t take photographs at the airport. The man said he was only photographing the monkey and his wife, but the FAPLA got angry and said that the monkey and his wife were at the airport and you never knew where those photographs were going to end up. I got down off the hood. At least there wasn’t any shooting, I thought, because sometimes stray bullets killed people. Comrade António had told me many times that this happened down in the Golf neighbourhood. “Mainly on the weekend, son.” There were people who got drunk, and fired off shots in the air. A neighbour of his had even died because she was sleeping on the mat and a bullet fell on her head. “She never woke up again,” Comrade António told me.

Aunt Dada took forever to come out. My armpit was starting to stink and I sure didn’t want her to meet me when I was stinky! The wait at the luggage belt always lasted so long, at times bags disappeared and it wasn’t worth complaining to anyone. It was just a question of good luck or bad luck, as the elders said. But when she came out and approached us I saw that she was sweating a ton, too, which meant we were even.

She was one of the few older people I’d met who didn’t talk to me as if I was a dimwit kid. She greeted me with two kisses on the cheek when I was used to giving the elders a single kiss on the face, and all she said was: “It’s very hot, don’t you think?”

Now I’ll tell you: I was very happy with the fact that she wasn’t tall, but what I really liked was hearing her voice live like that, and yes, you could say it was a sweet voice. “Can you help me?” She passed me a bag which I couldn’t tear my eyes away from: there was tons of chocolate in it.

As we were walking to the car, I saw that she was looking for something in her handbag. Then she put down the bags and asked me: “Can you call that boy over there so I can take a photo of him with his little monkey?” I glanced over and I felt pleased. The little monkey was already happy again, jumping wickedly on the boy’s shoulder, pretending to pick lice off his head, or perhaps doing it for real.

“You can’t, Aunt. You can’t take photographs of that monkey!” I told her, as I set down the bag containing the chocolates in the seat where I was going to sit.

“I can’t take a photograph of that inoffensive little monkey?”

“No, Aunt, you can’t . . .”

“And why not?”

“I don’t know if you’ll understand. . . .”

“Well, tell me,” she said, her voice serious.

“You can’t take photographs of that monkey. . . . for reasons of state security, Aunt,” I said, my voice serious.

But she got the point right away because she looked at the FAPLAs over there, and held onto her camera. She sat down at my side and didn’t say a word all the way home. She just looked around, and afterwards she opened the window and it was as if she was doing what I do in the morning, smelling the air.

We found Comrade António at the smaller outer door. He came out laughing, as if he already knew my aunt from somewhere. Of course he was wrapped in the smells of the lunch that I was sure he’d just finished making. I was completely sure, because he wasn’t wearing his apron, which meant that he was about to set or had set the table. Now when he set the table it was only “twenty minutes” until lunch was ready.

It was so hot that the first thing we all did was to take off our sandals. Aunt Dada went upstairs to the room where she was going to stay, then she took a bath. She must have been reeling from the heat because she was already starting to turn red. When she came downstairs for lunch, my sisters had come home and they were smelly, too. There’s not much you can do in this heat. They went to wash quickly under the armpits before we sat down at the table.

By chance, or in fact not by chance, but because Aunt Dada had arrived and had so much to tell us, we barely heard the news broadcast. I wanted her to tell me what the flight in the airplane had been like, especially the part when the plane accelerates so fast it feels like everything’s going to break. My younger sister winked at me because she wanted to see the presents.

Shortly after lunch, because we kept asking, we went to Aunt Dada’s room to open her suitcase. It was really heavy and I thought she’d brought us a lot of stuff, but the weight was due to all the food she’d brought, and among that food was my present.

“What’s that, Dada?” my mother asked, startled.

“They’re potatoes. . . . Your son said that he missed potatoes,” she said, picking up the potatoes scattered among the clothing.

We were fortunate that Aunt Dada was very kind and brought with her, in addition to potatoes, a mountain of chocolate.

At times, I mean very rarely, chocolate appeared at home, but three bars each – it was the first time that had happened to me. I thought about the amount of things she had brought. I was thinking that she must have asked different people, each with different ration cards, to buy these presents, but she said she didn’t have any sort of card and that it wasn’t necessary. As I was late for school, I decided we’d talk about this later.

At school, at that time of day, it was always very hot. People became drowsy. This only annoyed me because instead of telling stories, some classmates slept while waiting for the teachers to arrive. But in the distance I saw Murtala arrive with Comrade Teacher Ángel and his wife. I lost hope that we’d have a spare period.

In the end we even had a pleasant afternoon. We were preparing our lessons the way we would do it if the comrade inspector appeared by surprise, although, as Petra explained to us during recess, “We can’t call it a surprise anymore.” Cláudio, who always had an answer for everyone, told Petra that it was a surprise that we already knew about it but that didn’t mean that the visit wouldn’t be a surprise. But nobody paid much attention to the disagreement because we were more worried about Empty Crate, and whether they would appear at our school. Murtala was betting that they would because last week they had been at a school at the foot of the Ajuda-Marido market that was very close to ours. Murtala drew a terrific map in the sand, with Heroines’ Square, Kiluanji Street, Kanini Street and our school. It was good that he made that map and explained to us what he thought was going to happen because right next to him Cláudio drew a map of our school and then each of us said what we thought were the best escape routes, depending on whether or not you were wearing a backpack and whether or not you were being chased, and even taking into account the possibility that the comrade Cuban teachers, with all their stories of the revolution, might want to dig a trench and challenge Empty Crate.

After explaining to us the subject matter on which we might be examined, the teachers came with us to direct us in cleaning up. Each class cleaned its classroom, but the front hall and the back yard were divided among five classes, the interior courtyard among three others. The walls were left as they were. Petra said in a voice that sounded as though she was enjoying herself that this visit of the comrade inspector was becoming a lot of work.

As we finished cleaning the school quickly, and everything was more or less presentable, the comrade principal let us leave early, but before leaving we lined up and sang the anthem. Romina invited a few classmates and the comrade teachers to come and have a snack at her house because it was her brother’s birthday and he didn’t have anybody to invite over so her mother had said that she could bring people from school. When I saw Romina talking to Murtala I figured she was making a mistake because Murtala was always starving and he didn’t have the manners to eat at someone else’s house.

Romina’s mother sent everyone to wash their hands, especially Bruno and Cláudio, who also had to wash their armpits because it was just too much.

The table was very pretty: there were meat rolls, sandwiches, soft drinks, fruit, cake and pie. We were salivating, our eyes so rivetted that we forgot to say happy birthday to the little boy. One person whose eyes were really rivetted was Comrade Teacher Ángel, the guy had never seen so much food in one place. It was fun to watch him attack the jelly rolls.

Since we were making a ruckus, and we couldn’t eat any more, because Romina’s mother kept bringing out more food, Romina put on a movie for us to watch. I wanted to watch the screen, but I couldn’t stop watching the comrade Cuban teachers because their faces, I don’t know how to explain it, they resembled my face the first time I saw colour television at Uncle Chico’s house – I liked it so much that I spent half an hour listening to the news in African languages. Comrade Teacher María was almost drooling, which she refrained from doing because she still had her mouth full of strawberry compote.

It was a spaghetti Western with Trinità. Everybody was excited, shivering even, applauding and everything, as the actor dodged bullets. Cláudio said: “Hey, I’ve got an uncle in the FAPLAs who can dodge bullets, too!” But I don’t think anybody believed him. Everybody knows that only Trinità can do that. I mean, maybe Bruce Lee knows how to do it, too.

We were all so distracted that nobody noticed that Murtala wasn’t watching the movie with us anymore. We started to hear some strange noises, which at first we thought were coming from the film. Romina turned up the sound but it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. Romina turned off the video. Everybody sat still, trying to listen to the silence

The sound was coming from the kitchen.

It made us afraid: we all got up slowly and walked past the table which no longer had any food. Cláudio said: “I warned yuh, Romina. . . .” When we got to the kitchen we saw that the extra plates no longer contained food, either. The two dishes of pudding only had leftover streaks remaining, the pie had been finished off as easy as pie and only two slices were left. But the noise continued and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Somebody called: “Murtala. . . . Murtala, where you at?” The sound was pitched a little high to break the silence. Romina’s mother put her hand over her mouth and said: “Oh my God!” We all rushed forward to look: we crossed the kitchen and went around to the other side of the fridge. Beneath the tattered yellow jersey, we could see Murtala’s huge stomach puffing right out. The dude had got stuck and couldn’t get out of his hiding place. Cláudio started to laugh like crazy.

When we dragged back the fridge, Murtala broke free and went to the bathroom where he vomited so much that it was necessary to draw five buckets of water from the bathtub to get rid of the evidence.

Since it was getting dark, the comrade teachers walked Murtala home. Cláudio just said: “Didn’t I warn yuh, Romina? You can’t say I didn’t warn you. . . .”

 

As I was approaching home, I saw a group of kids around the front door of Bruno Viola’s house and I became curious. Before going inside, I went over to see what was going on. I was met with silence. It seemed that the only person who could talk was Eunice.

“There were more than fifty, I’m telling you. . . . More than fifty. . . .” Eunice said through her tears.

“Oh Eunice, come on, you don’t have to exaggerate like that,” Caducho’s brother was saying, but he laughed nervously.

“Hey, whoever wants to believe can believe. . . . The school was completely surrounded. I escaped by sheer luck.”

“But what time did this happen?” somebody asked.

“Just a little while ago. We were in the last class and we started to hear the noise of a truck skidding . . .”

“It was Empty Crate?!” I said.

“It was Empty Crate, but the truck was full of men . . .” Eunice wiped her tears. In my head I imagined Murtala’s map: Ngola Kanini Street was right next to our school, the next attack could only be on Kiluanji or on Youth-in-Struggle.

“You saw the truck? It was a Ural, right?” Tiny was already filling in the details.

“I didn’t see the truck, but some of my classmates saw it. The crate is on the truck . . . it’s really a crate, painted black. They arrived, some of them started to jump out of the truck and surround the school, we started to see them out the window, then they began to yell. Four of them who were on top of the truck opened the crate . . .”

“And what was inside?” Bruno Viola asked.

“Nobody could see. . . . I just ran. When I got outside I saw tons of men, at least seventy . . .”

“It was fifty, Eunice, fifty!” Tiny made the gang laugh.

“It was tons anyway! Look, I started running and one of them grabbed me right here.” She showed off the scratch. “But I just kept running and luckily he lost his grip . . .”

“The police didn’t come?”

“The police?! What do you think? . . . The police are afraid of them. . . . They were all dressed in black, then they stole everyone’s backpacks, one girl said she heard a woman teacher shouting inside, she must have been being raped . . .”

“Really raped?” Bruno Viola, excitable as ever, wanted the details.

“Yes, they say they always rape the women teachers, then they cut off their tits and hang them from the blackboard. . . . If there’s a tit hanging from the blackboard tomorrow that means they raped her.”

Eunice fled, exhausted by her fear.

 

When I got home my aunt told me that I looked white. It was because I’d been told that they raped the women teachers and killed the male teachers, but nobody knew what they did with the pupils who never returned. At least that was the story that Bruno’s maid’s daughter always told; it had been told to her by one of her cousins. Now, of course, it was all true, if Eunice herself had seen the truck with the empty crate, and if she had a scratch and everything. . . . That meant that within a few days it would be our school. I had to telephone Cláudio and tell him to bring his switchblade.

My mood improved when I found those chocolates that Aunt Dada had brought, which were so good, so good, so good! that I had to eat the three bars one after the other before anyone could come to tell me that I was only allowed to eat four squares. Then I went to talk with Aunt Dada.

“Aunt, there’s something I don’t understand. . . .”

“What is it, dear?”

“How were you able to bring so many presents? Was your card good for all that stuff?”

“But what card?” She was pretending not to understand.

“Your ration card. You have a ration card, right?” I asked her this figuring she was going to tell me the truth.

“I don’t have any sort of ration card. In Portugal we make our purchases without a card.”

“Without a card? But how do they keep track of people? How do they keep track, for example, of the fish you take home?” I didn’t even let her respond. “How do they know you didn’t take too much fish?”

“But I make the purchases I wish to make, provided that I have the money. Nobody tells me that I took home too much fish or too little . . .”

“Nobody?” I was startled, but not overly so, because I was certain she was lying or joking. “Isn’t there even a comrade in the fish market who stamps the cards when you buy fish on Wednesday?”

 

Later my younger sister came in to ask some questions about mathematics, and I remembered that I had to go and use the telephone to pass along the rumour about Empty Crate. Of course I was already thinking of saying that there were about ninety or a hundred of them, that they’d brought three trucks full of crates and not all the crates were empty, and even that I thought that those crates were where they put the kids who disappeared.

But I was so tired that I fell asleep.

I dreamed, of course, that a Ural truck from Empty Crate arrived at our school, I dreamed that the comrade Cuban teachers showed us how to dig a trench and operate AK-47s, and that when they were about to grab us because we didn’t have bullets for our machine guns, Trinità appeared with the police and arrested them all.

The dream was so noisy and chaotic and full of gunshots that my mother had to wake me up when it was almost morning and ask me not to say so much nonsense while I was dreaming.

“But why does this beach belong to the Soviets?”

“I don’t know, I really don’t know . . . It could be that we have a beach there in the Soviet Union that’s only for Angolans!”

I woke up feeling great again because I was going to the beach with Aunt Dada. My sisters had classes and I was the only one who could go with her. This was also great because, as we were going to be alone, I’d have the chance to pull the wool over her eyes without anyone being there to contradict me.

“Good morning, son!” Comrade António said when I was finishing breakfast.

“Good morning, Comrade António, how’s it going?” I said, as he was starting to tidy up the glasses, move the plates around, open the fridge and peer inside, then open the kitchen window. He did it all out of habit, it’s not that the gestures did any good. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that elders do this a lot.

“You’re going on a trip today, son?” he said, and continued moving things around.

“Yes, I’m going to the beach with Aunt Dada. Comrade João’s taking us.”

“Did your aunt bring presents, son?” He was laughing in a way that meant he was asking if my aunt had brought presents for everyone.

“Haven’t you talked to her yet, António?”

“Your aunt was talking to your father, so I didn’t talk to her much . . .”

“Hmmm . . .” I smiled. “I bet she brought you some really sharp shoes.”

We went out with Comrade João. He didn’t turn up drunk because he respected people he didn’t know well, and it was rude to make a bad first impression. I mean, I think this was why he was acting this way because he even came out wearing a starched short-sleeved jacket. Maybe the guy wanted my aunt to give him a present, too.

We were driving down António Barroso Street.

“See that, Aunt?” I pointed out the rotunda down below.

“Yes . . .”

“That’s the Alvalade neighbourhood swimming pool!”

Comrade João started to laugh because he knew this trick.

“But I don’t see any swimming pool, dear. . . .”

“You don’t see it because we’re far away, but when we get close you’re going to feel it.”

The car approached the rotunda and had to slow down because of the potholes. There were tons of water pouring over the edge of the road and little kids were taking baths in the potholes and the spot where the water was coming out looked like the illuminated fountain on Luanda Island that never works. The car hiccuped.

“Now you see, eh Aunt?” I was laughing and laughing.

“It’s here?”

“Yes, this is swimming pool number two for the Alvalade neighbourhood.”

We passed into Maianga Square and I was just praying that the comrade traffic policeman would be there. That comrade deserved to be on a poster: he had a really pretty blue hat, white gloves fit for a wedding, a sash that started at his shoulder, crossed his chest and only ended next to his pistol – yeah, the comrade traffic cop could even take a shot! And he was right there. My aunt didn’t say anything, but I saw that she was impressed when she looked at him. I bet that in Portugal they don’t have poster-boy comrade signalmen like that.

Afterwards we went uphill and I asked Comrade João to pass by the Josina Machel Hospital, which my aunt thought was called Maria Pia Hospital. I let out a laugh. I understood that this must have been the name the Portuguese gave the hospital, but, jeez, giving a hospital such a religious name is a put-down. We went down Bishop’s Beach where the avenue had just been resurfaced because a little while ago the comrade president had passed through, and since the comrade president always zoomed past, with motorcycle outriders and everything, a lot of people like to have the comrade president drive down their street because the potholes disappear right away, and sometimes they even paint lines on the road.

“Aunt . . . Does Portugal have a moon rocket?”

“No, no it doesn’t, dear.”

“You see, we have one, and it’s not from when the Portuguese were here, don’t think that. . . .” I pointed to the left, where we could see the unfinished mausoleum of Angola’s first president. “I mean, it’s still not ready, but almost. . . .”

When we passed by the corner, Maxando was in the doorway, with his huge beard, his Rasta hairdo, and that face that always made you afraid. I don’t know how, because the poor sap was always smiling and spoke decently to Aunt Maria and my grandmother. But we were afraid of him.

“But why are you all afraid of that Maxando?” my aunt said, looking at him as he smiled.

“They say he smokes a lot of weed, Aunt.”

“But did he hurt anyone?”

“I don’t know, Aunt, but he’s also got an alligator at home. That’s not normal!” I said.

“An alligator?”

“Yes, he has an alligator in his back yard.”

“What? An alligator?”

“Yes, Aunt, an alligator, a really long one. He had a dog, but the dog was run over by a soldier, and since the soldier didn’t have a dog to give him, he got him an alligator.” This was true, everybody on Bishop’s Beach knew it.

“And where does this alligator sleep? Is it locked up?”

“Yeah, it’s always locked up. It sleeps right there in the dog house.” My aunt didn’t seem to believe this.

“My dear, have you actually seen this alligator?”

“I’ve never seen it, Aunt, but everybody knows he’s got an alligator . . . It’s just that his alligator only likes to see Maxando. . . . He’s the only person who feeds it, you know. . . .”

 

We passed the fortress and turned onto the Marginal. I saw right away that the whole area was swarming with soldiers, but I thought there must be some meeting up the hill at the presidential palace. On the Marginal there were FAPLAs with machine guns and mortars and suddenly we heard sirens.

“The comrade president must be coming,” I warned. Maybe in Portugal it was different and she didn’t know. Comrade João pulled the car over to the edge of the road, stopped, turned off the engine, put the car in neutral and got out. I got out of the car as well. Only Aunt Dada didn’t get out. In the distance I saw the Mercedes limousines hurtling towards us, and I was worried because Aunt Dada still wasn’t getting out of the car. It was too late to turn back, and you could never dash off in front of them in these situations. I spoke to her through the window: “Aunt, Aunt! You have to get out of the car right away.”

“Get out of the car? Why? I don’t need to pee!” It was amazing, she was still seated and was even starting to laugh.

“This isn’t about peeing, Aunt. You have to get out of the car and stand completely still outside. Those black cars belong to the comrade president.”

“But it’s not necessary, my dear, he’s going to pass on the other side.”

“Dona Eduarda, please, get out of the car . . .” Comrade João talked like a man in a fever.

“I’m serious, Aunt. Get out of the car right now!” I almost shouted.

It was sunny. My aunt got out of the car, leaving the door open. I felt calmer, even though she didn’t look like she was standing at attention. The worst part was that as the cars approached, she put her hand inside the car to get her hat.

“Aunt!” I shouted. “No!”

I think I startled her. She stayed absolutely still. The motorcycle outriders went by, then two cars, then another one, and I think the comrade president was travelling in the last one, with the darkened windows. Later I had to tell her to keep still because we had to wait a moment before we could return to the car. Comrade João was sweating like a pig. We got into the car.

“Oh, my dear, what a circus!”

“So, you avoided seeing the circus of shots that would have happened if some FAPLA had seen you moving around. It looked like you were dancing, then on top of that you were going to put on your hat . . .”

“But do you have to get out of the car and stand at attention whenever the president goes by?” She was completely astonished.

“It’s not at attention, but you have to get out of the car so they can see you’re not armed or you’re not going to try anything. . . .” I’d been sweating, too.

“Oh yes . . . ?”

“Yes, of course. So that’s why I was frightened when you started to get your hat, because the cars were too close and they might’ve thought you were trying to grab something else. . . .”

Comrade João couldn’t even whistle. Of course it was possible that nothing would have happened, but it was also possible that almost anything could have happened.

We continued in the direction of the beaches. The sea was choppy, just choppy enough that it had turned that colour where you can’t decide if it’s green, blue or some other colour.

“What colour is the sea, Aunt?” I wanted to see if she was going to say green or blue because my sisters always saw the sea as blue, they never managed to see the greenness of the sea.

“It’s dark . . . it’s green . . .” She understood that it was a trick question. “What do you think, João?” But Comrade João just laughed. I already knew he didn’t want to take part in the conversation.

“All right, I’m going to tell you a secret, Aunt . . .”

“Tell me, my dear.”

“The sea is blue-een!” I laughed and laughed.

We continued to the end of the road, as far as the car could go; we saw the barricades. “What’s this?” my aunt asked Comrade João.

“Barracks. . . . It’s a barracks,” he replied. Soviet soldiers were guarding the entrance. The Soviets always had ugly faces, pale in spite of all the sun they got, and often they looked like lobsters.

“We can stay right here, can’t we?” she said.

“No, not here, Aunt . . . We’ll go over there by the foot of the rotunda.”

“But can’t we stay here on this ‘blue-een’ beach?” She smiled at me.

“No, Aunt, not here. This blue-een beach belongs to the Soviets.”

“To the Soviets? This beach belongs to the Angolans!”

“Yes, that’s not what I meant to say. . . . It’s that only the Soviets can bathe on this beach. You see those soldiers out on the points?”

“Yes, I see them.”

“They’re guarding the beach while other Soviets bathe there. It’s not worth going over there because they’re really bad tempered.”

“But why does this beach belong to the Soviets?” Now she seemed really startled.

“I don’t know, I really don’t know . . . It could be that we have a beach there in the Soviet Union that’s only for Angolans!”

 

Comrade João left us on the beach. He would come and pick us up later, in time for lunch. We spread our towels and went to bathe, but I always find the water off Luanda Island a bit cold. Of course my aunt said that it was marvellous. We swam, then went back to our towels.

“Aunt, in Portugal when your comrade president drives by, don’t you get out of the car?”

“Well, I’ve never seen the president drive by, but I guarantee you that nobody gets out of his car. In fact at times we don’t even realize that the president is in a car that’s passing.”

“Hmm! I don’t believe that. Doesn’t he have police outriders on motorcycles to warn people? Don’t they put soldiers on the streets?”

“No, they don’t use soldiers. Sometimes, if there’s a big entourage, they call in the police to clear the traffic, but it only takes a moment. The president goes past and that’s it. Of course the cars get out of the way, it’s compulsory there too, but it’s because people hear the sirens, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“But when, for example, the president goes out on Sunday to a friend’s house he doesn’t take the police. Sometimes he even walks.”

What amazed me was that she was speaking seriously. “Your president walks?” I burst out laughing. “Ho! Wait until I tell that to my classmates! They always want to put down African presidents . . . In Africa, Aunt, a president only goes out in a Mercedes, and it has to be bullet-proof.”

We opened the bag of sandwiches. My aunt wasn’t very hungry, but after swimming and running I was starving. I ate with pleasure. She warned me not to spoil my appetite for lunch. “Appetite is never absent, Aunt, don’t worry,” I replied in the manner of an elder. Then Aunt Dada asked me questions about Luanda, what school was like, if I liked the teachers, what we learned, what the Cuban teachers were like, etc. I got a laugh out of her horrified look when I told her that there were a lot of robbers in Luanda, but that it was a dangerous profession.

“A dangerous ‘profession,’ you say. . . . And why is that?”

“Well, Aunt, it’s really risky,” I started to explain. “If the robbery goes well and there are no makas, it’s nothing but profit the next day. But if they catch you, ay! Then your health’s at risk!”

“‘Maka’ means problem, right?”

“Yeah, a maka’s a problem, a business. It can be a rough maka or just a little maka . . .”

“And this business of the robbers, what kind of ‘maka’ is that?”

“That’s what I’m explaining to you. . . . If you get caught, it’s a really rough maka!”

“Why?”

“Well, Aunt, for example, in Cláudio’s neighbourhood they caught a thief. Poor guy, he just liked to swipe lamps, you know. I guess that must have been his business in the Roque Santeiro Market or . . . anyway. . . . They caught the guy, they beat him, they beat him up, they beat him up so much that the next day, Aunt, he came back looking for his ear!”

“His ear?” She scratched hers.

“Yeah, he’d lost his ear there. Cláudio was the one who took him to show him where his ear was because they’d already seen the ear early in the morning, but they stayed away from it because they thought it was a magic charm!”

“Oh my God . . .” She was amazed.

“Wait. . . . I’m going to tell you other stories that are even hotter . . .”

“‘Hotter’?”

That was the problem with talking to people from Portugal: there were words they didn’t understand. “Yeah, hotter, I mean . . . Look, for example, in the Martal neighbourhood, when they catch a robber he actually thinks he’s going to be treated well.”

“Why?”

“Because in Martal nobody beats up the robber. Instead, there’s a man there, I think he’s an elder gentleman, and when he appears the chaos ends. Of course when they catch the robber, right at first, he has to take a few punches, some kicks, but then this gentleman arrives and nobody else touches the robber.”

“What do they do then?”

“Just wait, you’ll see. . . . Stay tuned for scenes from the next episode.”

But she got a strange look on her face. “‘Scenes from the next episode’?! How’s that?”

“Take it easy, Aunt . . .” I pulled a soft drink out of the bag, opened it and took a gulp. “Then this dude arrives and tells everybody to go back to sleep. A few men go with him, they take the robber out into a yard and right there they give him the injection. And the robber wastes right there.”

“The injection? But this ‘dude’ is a male nurse?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “A male nurse from where, Aunt? What male nurse would that be? The injection they give him contains battery fluid. The guy wastes right there.”

“Wastes? What does he waste?”

“Wastes! They waste him, he gets it, he croaks, he kicks the bucket! He dies, Aunt!”

Aunt Dada stopped eating her sandwich. I guess she felt uncomfortable with the story or whatever.

“But is this true, my dear?” I suppose she wanted me to tell her that it wasn’t.

“I can even show you a classmate of mine who lives in that neighbourhood, Aunt!”

I picked up her sandwiches and asked her if she wanted them; she didn’t, so I ate them! But since she already seemed startled I didn’t tell her what they did in the Roque Santeiro Market when they caught robbers. The poor guys, they got tires put around them, then gasoline was poured on the tires and everybody stuck around to watch the man running all over the place asking people to put out his fire. Some people say that when they started burning thieves with tires the number of muggings went down, but I can’t be sure of this. Aunt Dada didn’t know that in Mozambique they cut off robbers’ fingers.

“Cut off all of their fingers?” She wanted to be frightened again.

“No, Aunt, they cut off one each time. One robbery, one finger, get it?”

To lighten up the conversation, I also told her some stories I knew about thieves who got away, like that one on Bishop’s Beach who was being chased by the police when somebody yelled, “Stop, thief!” and another policeman thought that policeman was the thief and shot him in the ribs and the robber ran away laughing.

“That means there are lots of different types of robbers. That was a really lucky one.”

“Sure, but there are also unlucky ones. . . . Look, in Bruno’s building. . . .”

“My dear, does this story end badly, too?”

“No, no, I think you can stand this one.” She laughed.

“In Bruno’s building a robber was breaking in on the fifth floor, and there was a dude on the sixth floor who takes care of this kind of stuff. They phoned him, he woke up, he jumped down this hole in the floor up there and landed on top of the robber, except that the guy was so frightened he took off running towards the stairs, only, guess what? There was a guard right there waiting for him. . . .”

“And what did he do? You’re not going to tell me another ‘scenes from the next episode,’ are you?”

“No, no, there’s no commercial break. . . . He hit the gas, jumped and threw himself off the fifth floor!”

“Did he die?”

“No way! He fell, he played dead, he only waited a couple of seconds, looked around, got up great, he was just limping a little, but when it comes to running, Aunt, I’m telling you: people with limps, cripples, people in wheelchairs, here in Angola they’re the ones who whip along the fastest. . . .”

“So he got away, did he?”

“Hey, no way! See what bad luck a guy can have.” I thought that expression sounded good. “A police car was going by, they caught him. Bruno said he even felt bad for him – shit, he almost got away. . . . But that’s how bad luck comes after people.”

 

By the time Comrade João came to pick us up, the heat had become unbearable. I looked at the trees. The birds were sitting still, not moving; they must have been sweating too. On the other side of the street there were stalls selling dried fish; in this case the stronger the sun, the better the fish. That nice little scent pricked my appetite. There are people who don’t like it, but I think that dried fish smells really good, like concentrated sea-juice.

On the way home we passed through Kinaxixi Square because I wanted Aunt Dada to see the tank.

“Aunt, in Portugal do you have a tank looking out over a square like that?”

“No, I don’t think so. . . .”

“Well, we do here! This is Kinaxixi Square,” I said, by way of introduction.

“But in the old days that tank wasn’t up there. You realize that?” She was looking carefully at the tank. She was going to take a photograph but I told her it was better not to because there were a lot of FAPLAs in the street.

“It was a different tank? Was it bigger or smaller?” I hadn’t been aware that this was the second tank.

“No, you don’t understand. . . .”

“What?”

“There was a statue there.”

“A statue? What statue?”

“The statue of Maria da Fonte.”³ She seemed very sure of herself.

“I don’t know, Aunt. . . . Here in Luanda we usually only have fountains, or water that comes out with enough force for a fountain, when some pipe bursts.”

Comrade João was laughing.

 

When we got home they were waiting for us before having lunch. I was so envious: my sisters still had tons of chocolate left. That always happened; I was always the first to finish things.

My aunt went to wash. I don’t know why, they say that salt water is good for the skin, so why rush off right away to bathe? In my house everybody’s got this obsession with bathing, bathing all the time. I figure it’s unnecessary, every two days or so is enough. My sisters say that guys are always like that, they don’t like to bathe, but there’s a girl in my class who bathes only once a week. That’s because the water only comes on once a week in her house. When it does they fill the bathtub and have to make the water last for the whole week.

“Did it go well, dear?” My mother came to kiss me on the cheek.

“Yes, it went well.” I gave her a kiss back. “And we saw the comrade president go by on the Marginal.”

“Oh. . . .”

“But Aunt Dada almost got shot. . . .”

“Why?” my father asked.

“Well . . . She didn’t know she had to get out of the car, then she just about put her hand into the car to get her hat right when the comrade president was going by.” I sat down. “She’s lucky the FAPLAs didn’t see anything.”

It was ten to one. My father turned on the radio, but for the moment there was only music. I closed the doors, the windows, I turned on the air conditioning, or the “air additioning,” as we called it. I smelled the scent of the food coming from the other room. Without a doubt, it was grilled fish.

“Mum?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Did you know that in Portugal the president walks out into the street without any bodyguards and goes to buy the newspaper?”

“Yes, dear. If security conditions permit it.”

“Well, they must permit it on Sunday because Aunt Dada said that the Portuguese president always goes out on Sunday on foot to buy the newspaper. . . . Is that really true, Mum?”

“Is what really true?”

“That he doesn’t have soldiers on the street when he leaves home? That he goes out alone. . . . What if people are waiting in line at the spot where he buys his paper?” I started to laugh. “Wouldn’t that be funny if he had to stand there waiting?”

 

We had lunch.

I wanted to know if there had been problems in other schools, if Empty Crate had appeared close to my older sister’s school because, according to Murtala’s map, I figured her school was next in line. She said no, they’d seen a truck and started to shout, but the teachers didn’t let anyone leave the classrooms, and everything was fine because it was just a truck on its way to the barracks. But of course, why hadn’t I thought of that, they would never go to my sister’s school in the morning. In the morning they’d have to be sleeping, that was why they had gone to Eunice’s school in the afternoon, and they had also gone to Mutu-Ya-Kevela School at night.

When I arrived at school, as soon as I saw Romina’s face I knew something was up. They were all outside with their backpacks on. Nobody wanted to go into the classroom.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There in the classroom . . .” Romina was almost crying.

“There in the classroom, what?” I was afraid, too.

“There’s a message. . . .”

Cláudio and Murtala grabbed me by the arms. Even though I didn’t want to go, they pushed me into the classroom. “Look at that!” they said, while they glanced nervously out in the direction of Kiluanji Street. Kiluanji lay close to the way out of the Ajuda-Marido Market, which, according to Murtala, was where they would come from.

“But look where?” I didn’t see anything.

“There!” They pointed again.

There were a thousand and one inscriptions on the wall, in felt-tipped pen, chalk, coloured pencil, blood, gouache, everything and then some, and they wanted me to see “there” – but then I recognized the phrase: Empty Krate wil pass bye here, twoday, at four oclock! I shuddered.

“But Bruno. . . .” Petra came forward with a theory of her own.” That ‘twoday’ doesn’t mean that it will actually be today. Nobody knows how long that’s been there!”

“It’s today and right now!” Bruno was nervous, too. “If not, how come we’ve never seen it before? Tell me that, smartypants, have you ever seen it before?”

Petra was silent.

“Well,” Cláudio said. “The problem is going to be convincing the teachers that this is true.”

“Well it is . . .” Romina didn’t have any more fingernails to chew. I warned her that she was about to draw blood.

“They never believe us, but afterwards they’re the first ones to run,” Cláudio continued. “What are we going to do?”

“By my reckoning we can still arrange for everyone to be absent. . . . If we’re all in agreement, no one goes to class,” Petra said.

“But it’s not so simple, Petra,” I said. “Even if we skip the four o’clock class, imagine if they come late, or arrive early, what’ll it be like?”

“Yeah, that’s true . . .”

“Well, so all we have is a theory . . .”

“And what is it?” Bruno, while looking at the wall, appeared to be searching for the lowest point where he could jump over it.

“We accept that we go to classes, but everybody keeps their backpacks on. . . . If anything happens, it’s everyone for himself. . . . I mean, everyone running!”

Romina had tears in her eyes. I felt sorry for her. I was almost certain I knew what she was thinking: sometimes, in dangerous situations, she couldn’t move, she just froze up. And she knew that it was going to be like Cláudio said. If something happened, everybody was going to take off running, nobody was going to want to know about the others, that was how it always was. Murtala was so nervous that he wasn’t speaking. I didn’t even tell them Eunice’s story so as not to make the gang more nervous, especially Romina.

In the first period we still took out our notebooks, wrote normally, but we were alert. Those who were seated close to the window, usually Bruno, Filomeno or Nucha, didn’t really sit down, they were always peering forward. We saw a truck that everybody found strange and we started to get up. Even Comrade Teacher Sara became afraid. She didn’t understand what was going on, but when we were about to open the door Murtala said: “There’s no maka. That truck’s from the Party office.” We all took a deep breath, but everybody kept their backpacks on.

Comrade Teacher Sara was really cool. Since she saw that nobody was in the mood to study, she took advantage of the class to explain the details of the next day’s parade. But she didn’t know a lot about it either. She’d been told at the last minute that our school would take part. She told us only to come in our uniforms, to look clean, not to forget our OPA⁴ neck scarves, and that whoever wanted to could carry a canteen. We would gather at the school at seven-thirty, then we would march to May 1st Square. This meant that we would be marching with the workers and with other students, and that we were going to see the comrade president sitting on the podium.

During recess the rumour about Empty Crate spread to other classes. A Zairean teacher in Room 3 packed up his belongings and didn’t give a class; according to Murtala, that meant that either he was smart or he knew very well when Empty Crate was coming. The corridors were full, nobody had left their backpacks in the classrooms, and there were even a few people sitting on the walls waiting for a far-off dust cloud that would indicate that the truck was on its way.

Cláudio hadn’t brought his switchblade, Murtala had come to school in sandals, which was going to make running more difficult, and Romina and Petra were wearing skirts, which would only make rapes more likely. Nucha had a strap on his glasses, which was good for running, but I, sweating, with my glasses crooked and heavy, knew that mine would fall off while I was running. So I took off the glasses and put them in my pocket. The whole world suddenly lacked definition; but it’s not bad, I thought. I focused on a colourful point that was the tree behind the wall that I’d chosen to jump over. Now, I thought, I just have to be fast and not fall when I’m running. Falling was the worst, as everyone knew. When you fall others step on you, nobody stops to take a look, nobody will save you, you get trampled by all those running kids, and if you’re conscious, it’s the man from Empty Crate you’re going to see smiling at you, maybe with a knife in his hand.

“What are you thinking about?” Romina’s voice was trembling.

“Ró . . .” I put on my glasses to see her better. “In the next period let’s sit together at that desk over by the door. If something happens, we’ll take off running . . .”

“That’s good, that’s good. . . .” She was very nervous. “And where do we run to?”

“You see that stunted tree over there?”

“Yeah, I see it. . . .”

“We run out of the class. If there are a lot of people in the corridor we jump over the wires opposite the classroom, we run towards that corner where the hole in the wall is, and if we can get across the avenue fast, we’ll get to the Party office and once we’re there nobody’ll touch us.”

“Good, good . . .”

“The only thing is, we can’t fall, Ró, we can’t fall . . .”

“And what if we do fall?”

“We can’t fall. . . . Take care because the older kids are going to push us. We just have to run towards the wall. . . .” I put away my glasses again.

The comrade chemistry teacher came into the room, and on top of everything else he had put on combat fatigues. This wasn’t a good sign because it could enrage the men from Empty Crate. Cláudio gave me a signal, laying his hands on his slacks to catch my attention, but I had already thought about this.

“But. . . . ¿qué pasa? Nobody has brought their notebooks today?” He began to write the lesson summary on the board.

“It’s not that, comrade teacher. Today we’re going to have a visit.”

“A visit? Is today the surprise visit of the comrade inspector?” He looked down at his worn combat trousers.

“No, comrade teacher,” Cláudio said. “It looks like it’s another visit.” He pointed to the wall.

“Where? Over where?” The teacher squinted to read. “And what is this ‘Empty Crate’?”

“It’s a problem, comrade teacher. A problem. . . .” Petra had fear in her voice.

“But is this why you are afraid? You are scared to death. . . . But why? ¿Por qué?”

“They’re from Empty Crate, comrade teacher. You’ve never heard of them?”

“I don’ care if they are from an empty crate or a fool crate. . . . This is a school and they will not enter!” He slammed his fist on the desk, but that didn’t impress us because this teacher didn’t really understand what Empty Crate was.

“They enter all right, and they’re even going to enter with a truck . . .”

“I don’t want you to sit there with those faces. . . . You’re pale with fear! Look, the school is also a site of resistencia . . . What do those clowns want?”

“They want everything, comrade teacher. They’re going to take some people away with them, they’re going to rape the women teachers and I don’t know what they do with the men teachers. . . .” Cláudio said all this in a tone of astonishment. But the comrade teacher wasn’t afraid.

“Look, I guarantee you that they will do nothing like this. . . . Not here in our school. We will make a trench. If necessary, we will go into combate against them. We will defend ourselves with the desks, with sticks and stones. But we will fight to the end!” He slammed his fist on the desk again. He was sweating, sweating.

“But comrade teacher, how are we going to fight against them if they have AK-47s. . . . They have Makarovs . . .”

As the comrade teacher was turning to reply, somebody next to the window shouted: “Oh, ay, Mama!” We all felt the same shiver rise from our feet, pass through the crack in our ass, heat our necks, make our hair stand on end and reach our eyes almost in the form of tears.

Cláudio, before getting up, asked: “But what are you seeing?”

And that classmate replied: “I can’t see anything, it’s just dust, but it’s coming really fast.”

It wasn’t necessary to say anything more, and if someone had said something it wouldn’t have been heard because the shouting started in my classroom, passed through Room 2, and before I had time to take off my glasses the whole school was in an incredible uproar. I’m not even sure if everyone knew why they were shouting.

Romina grabbed my hand in desperation. I thought I’d dislocated my finger bones until I looked at her and saw that she was in a Petra-like state, that’s to say, she was petrified, she couldn’t move. I glanced at her and said: “Let’s go, Ró!” And I thought that we were going to take off and run out of the classroom, but the comrade teacher placed himself in the doorway.

“Nobody leaves!” he shouted, more loudly than all the shouting in the school. “We stay here hasta la muerte! We will fight the enemy to the end! We will defend our school!”

As luck would have it, in the midst of the confusion, Isabel got to the front, and she was almost as big as the comrade teacher. Since everybody was pushing, he couldn’t hold his ground and was pushed out of the way. He was almost maimed as he hit the grating on the other side of the corridor.

A huge uproar filled the school. It was as though everything was happening in slow motion, but that wasn’t it: so many of us were trying to get out the door at once that we were obliged to walk at a measured pace. I remember seeing Luaia’s face with her mouth wide open, leaning against the blackboard, trying to retreat in the direction of the window when everyone was moving towards the door. She was always like that: something happened and she had an asthma attack.

It was much worse in the corridor: it was narrow, and the three classes were trying to leave their classrooms, so that only the oldest students succeeded in pushing past the others; they slapped, elbowed and punched to get through in a hurry. Off in the distance I saw Isabel speed up and head towards the hole in the wall I had mentioned to Romina. Others began to run towards the comrade principal’s office, as if this was going to help.

Romina shouted at me: “We’re going to find Teacher Sara.” And she tried to tug me along.

“No, Romina, we can’t. That’s the first place they’ll go, let’s just run.”

The dust in the schoolyard began to lift and the atmosphere became even stranger.

In the midst of the confusion, I heard the voices of Cláudio, Murtala and Bruno, who was unleashing enormous gulps of nervous laughter. Petra was crying, and there was a backpack that everybody was stepping on, but I don’t remember who it belonged to. In the midst of the confusion I tried to add it all up: had the truck already entered the schoolyard? Were they going to lie in wait for us outside and grab us after we jump over the wall? Were they actually going to open fire, or were the weapons just to scare us? Will we be able to run to the wall without falling? In the midst of the confusion, I looked over my shoulder: I could no longer see the comrade chemistry teacher, I could no longer see Luaia or Petra, and I just had to run, run towards the wall.

We got out of the hallway. Now all I had to worry about was not falling in the dust and the people. There was more space than I’d thought, people were jumping over the wall in different places, which was just as well because it was going to be a problem for all of us to get through the hole at the same time.

It was precisely at this moment that one of the most amazing and unbelievable things I’ll ever see in my whole life took place: we were running flat out, I didn’t run slowly over short distances, it was just that I couldn’t run for a very long time because I, too, had asthma; Romina was wearing a skirt, and she, too, was running fast. In fact I think we were both going very fast. Anyway, we expected to be running faster than the person who overtook us. It was the comrade English teacher, a short individual, who, judging by her appearance, had prepared herself for a run because she had her handbag pulled up sideways, and she no longer needed to worry about that; she had her glasses in her left hand and no longer had to worry about those either; her skirt, which must have been long, was tied up at mini-skirt length, which enabled me to see what I’m going to tell you about now, whether you wish to believe it or not: my comrade English teacher, as everyone knew, was a cripple. She had one leg that was more delicate than the other, like a cursory sketch that fails to provide an explanation. But, in the middle of the swirling dust, as Romina and I were running with all our strength, the comrade teacher burst out of nowhere and passed us so quickly that I could only observe those three things (handbag, glasses and skirt). Even so, I only noticed the skirt and the glasses, it was Romina who told me later that she had her handbag tied to her side.

Well, as I was saying, the teacher appeared on our left-hand side, moving very swiftly, staring straight ahead, and with her head twisted a little bit upward (it was Romina who said this), but her secret lay in the way she used her legs to run. My God! I hope I can explain: as soon as her good leg touched the ground at full force, but also with a force that looked as though it was coiling for a jump, the withered leg made two movements in the air, as though it was going to touch the ground but without touching it, so rapidly, so powerfully, that I think I only saw the good leg touch the ground four times before she disappeared on the other side of the wall – Romina and I almost lost the concentration we needed to keep running. This must be a secret technique for running fast in frightening situations, but which I saw because she had pulled her skirt up so high. I’ll never forget that weak leg giving two swinging, forward turns while the good leg hit the ground and made her run. People asked me if she was hopping. I don’t know how to explain it, I guess she was running, but the truth is that she overtook me, Romina and three other people, jumped the wall without placing her hands on the stone, stretching her good leg to the side and gathering up the withered leg with her arm.

I’ve seen people run fast when they were being chased by dogs; I’ve seen crippled people run when they were nervous; I heard about a thief who jumped out of a fifth-floor window; I’ve been told that there was a little shrimp who used to beat up fat older kids, but one thing is for certain: when Romina and I jumped over the wall the comrade English teacher was already out of sight. We almost got run over crossing Ho Chi Minh Avenue, and since there was still a lot, and I mean really a lot, of shouting coming from the school, we ran without speaking, and only stopped when we got to the National Radio station. Romina was smiling, I guess because Empty Crate hadn’t caught us, but I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of the teacher running at that speed, passing us and jumping the wall without touching it.

“Fuck!” was the first thing I said. “Can that teacher run!”

Since we were close to my house, I said to Romina that we could go down the street and she could phone her mother. We were already calmer. We met Eunice along the way, she saw we were sweating and asked: “You’re leaving school at this time?” I gave her a serious look.“What? Don’t tell me it was Empty Crate?” She became fearful.

“In the flesh!” I replied.

“How many of them were there?”

“I don’t know, I don’t have any idea, but everybody was running. We just had time to grab our backpacks and run, too . . .”

“So that’s why I saw a crippled woman running full tilt up the street there,” Eunice said.

“She’s our English teacher,” Romina said.

“Hey, and she runs like a gazelle?” Eunice was horrified, too.

“Do you doubt it?” Ró laughed.

 

I don’t know what time it was, but at that hour, from the terrace of my house, you could see the sunset. There wasn’t any juice, so we took a bottle of water out on the terrace. We sat there talking for a bit. Romina and I had been friends for a long time, but we never used to talk very much because in school if a guy spends all his time talking to a girl they’re going to say that he wants to hitch up with her, that he’s sweet-talking her or, what’s worse, that he’s the kind of guy who just wants to hang around with girls.

“You saw how she was running?” she said.

“I saw, Romina. . . . And I don’t think I’d ever seen. . . . If we tell people tomorrow they’re going to say we’re lying.”

“It’s possible somebody else saw her.”

“No, Romina, not with all that dust. . . . We were the ones who were right behind her. . . . Have you ever seen anyone run that fast?”

“No, I’ve never seen anything like it . . .”

We sat there, each remembering that moment.

For me it was really good, now that everything was over, to have run together. It was just a thought, of course, but I think that in some way these things remain in people’s hearts, and if Romina and I were already good friends, the fact of having fled together from Empty Crate was one more thing that belonged to us alone. We didn’t talk about it, but on that day, on that afternoon, with the sun making the moment even more beautiful, I think that we became much better friends than we were before.

“Are you listening to me? Do you think the comrade teacher stayed there?” She gave me a shake.

“Hmm? I don’t know. Maybe he stayed there to fight with desks and chalk against Empty Crate’s AK-47s. . . . The things those Cuban comrades get up to – ”

“You know that they’re all soldiers?” she said.

“I know, I know, but a soldier won’t last against a truck full of men with AK-47s.”

“Yes, but since they’re soldiers they’re always thinking about fighting. Even so, I think they’re brave . . .”

“Sure . . .” I looked at the sun, now almost hidden.

“Just think what it’s like to come to a country that’s not theirs, to come and give classes that may or may not work out, and then there are the ones who go and fight in the front lines. . . . How many Angolans do you know who went to fight in a Cuban war?”

“I don’t know any. . . .”

“I think they’re very brave. . . . I never heard a single story about a Cuban fleeing from combat.” Romina seemed to be well informed and I didn’t want to lag behind her.

“Don’t even think about it. On the contrary – everybody knows that they’re very brave.”

 

We were told that Romina’s mother was downstairs.

I picked up the glasses, the bottle, and we went into the kitchen to wash the glasses, while Romina filled the bottle with boiled water to put in the refrigerator. “This is Comrade António’s kitchen, right?” Romina said in order for me to add something. But I didn’t feel like adding anything.

“That’s right, yeah. . . . Comrade António’s kitchen.” But her face went still, waiting for something more. “I’m the one in charge here, little girl.” I imitated Comrade António’s voice, and his almost Charlie Chaplin mannerisms, and she smiled, smiled.

“So, what was that battle like?” asked Romina’s mother, who already knew what had happened.

“It was normal,” I replied.

“But was there a battle or wasn’t there?”

“I dunno. . . . As soon as we heard the shouting, we took off . . .” Romina’s mother laughed. “We only stopped when we got to the National Radio station.”

“That was some running! I bet you didn’t even stop to look before crossing the street,” she said.

Only Ró and I laughed.

It was agreed that we would have a snack at Romina’s house, where we could all talk about what had happened. In this way we could put all the versions on the table, that of the students and even that of the teachers, because Romina always made a point of inviting the comrade teachers.

That night all we could talk about was Empty Crate. It was amazing, my older sister wasn’t the least bit afraid that they would come to her school because they had already come to mine. “You think my school is like yours, right? If they come to our school, my classmates will beat them senseless!” I wasn’t sure, she could be right, there were some big guys on Kiluanji Street, people said that some of them packed guns and everything, but even so, Empty Crate was Empty Crate! You only had to look at what they’d done at my school, even a crippled teacher had been forced to run, that just doesn’t happen. . . .

It was difficult explaining the whole Empty Crate story to Aunt Dada because since I hadn’t actually seen a lot – as a matter of fact I hadn’t actually seen anything at all – I couldn’t tell her who they were, or what they looked like, or what had happened because, and there it was, all these details would become known only the next day.

Since I was tired and had to wake up early, I went to bed.

“Till tomorrow, everybody!” I said as I left.

at times all the big things in life can be seen in one small thing. You don’t have to explain much: it’s enough to look.

I woke up feeling great again because I loved rallies and parades.

“Good morning, Comrade Father!” I said jokingly, since Comrade António hadn’t yet arrived.

“Good morning, Comrade Son!” he replied, feeling great in the morning as he always did. The milk was already warm, the table had been set the night before. I opened the window wide, and the brightness came in as if it were a stranger entering an unknown spot and looking around out of curiosity.

From my place at the table I saw the cup in front of me, the steam that rose from the cup, and I smelled the toast and the butter melting on it, I saw the right side of my father’s beard, his glasses, and I heard the sound in his mouth as he chewed his toast, crunch, crunch, but prettiest of all was seeing the avocado tree opposite. Did you know that avocado trees also stretch?

“Dad, have you noticed that in the morning, when we open this window and sit here talking, the avocado tree starts trembling?”

“Yes, son, it trembles in the wind. . . .”

“Yeah, but why doesn’t it tremble before we open the window? Now I’ve got you . . .”

“It’s shaking before you open the window, son. It’s you who can’t see it.”

“So it only shakes when I open the window . . . And it doesn’t shake, Dad, it’s not real shaking . . .”

“What is it, then?” He motioned with his finger for me to start eating my toast.

“It’s stretching. . . . The avocado tree is stretching itself.” By saying “stretching itself,” I was being refined, like the Portuguese, because usually we would just say “stretching.”

The light came in through the enormous window, the birds’ chirping came in, the sound of the water dripping into the tank came in, the smell of the morning came in, the noise of the boots of the security guards at the house next door came in, the shriek of a tomcat preparing to fight with another tomcat came in, the noise of the larder being opened by my mother came in, the sound of a car horn came in, a fat fly came in, a dragonfly that we called a draggin’-fly came in, the noise of the tomcat which after fighting jumped on the zinc roof came in, the sound of the security guard setting down his AK-47 to take a rest came in, whistling came in, much more light came in, and, above all, the smell of the avocado tree came in, the smell of the avocado tree that was waking up.

“Dad, it’s a holiday today. If you’re not going to the rally, why didn’t you get up later?” I finally bit into the toast.

“Because I like to get up early!” He lit a cigarette.

I put on my backpack and my father got up to open the door for me.

“Good morning, son.” I heard the voice coming from the creepers. I was frightened: it was Comrade António!

“Good morning, Comrade António!”

“Did I frighten you, son?” He was laughing.

“António, it’s a holiday today. What are you doing here?”

“I came for a walk, son. . . . I wake up early every morning.”

“Hey, António . . .” I said, horrified. “Instead of taking advantage of your day off to sleep . . . And today you came on foot, there aren’t any buses this early. . . .”

“It’s twenty minutes, son, twenty minutes on foot . . .”

“Okay, see you at lunch time,” I said as I left.

“Are you going to see the comrade president, son?”

“Yeah, I’m going to the rally on May 1st Square, but we’re meeting at school.”

“See you later then, son.”

“See you later, António.”

I stopped by at Bruno Viola’s house, but he wasn’t ready yet. I left.

Because of all this, I was already late. I wanted to see if I’d be able to chat for a bit with Cláudio or Murtala about the previous day’s events. It was possible that they’d seen more than I had. Murtala wasn’t to be trusted because he always exaggerated stories. I mean, everybody I know here in Luanda exaggerates, but Murtala, as Petra used to say, was too much. Once they’d caught an alligator on Luanda Island and Murtala said that a whale had run aground in Luanda Bay. If Murtala had seen a soccer match and nobody knew the result, you could be sure that Murtala would add seven goals here, twenty-two penalties there, two expulsions and an injury to the referee. Bruno gave him good advice: “When you want to fib, fib little by little – that way we might believe you!”

I was so late that the classes were already lined up when I arrived. Comrade Teacher Sara saw me arrive and put on her I-am-not-pleased face. We stood in straight lines, in order. They were inspecting the neck-scarves. Anyone who didn’t have a neck scarf could go home, this was the May 1st parade, the international day of the worker, and no child without the full dress uniform was allowed to take part. We started to sing: “Oh homeland, we will never forget/ The heroes of the fourth of February . . .” But Cláudio and I were looking for signs. How was it possible for the school to remain so intact (I’d learned this word from Petra) after the attack by Empty Crate? There weren’t even tire marks on the ground, there were no bullet holes in the walls, and all the female and male teachers were present, including the chemistry teacher, who was concentrating hard even though he didn’t know all the words of the anthem, and the speedy (I think that’s the best way to put it) comrade English teacher.

When the anthem ended, the comrade principal explained rapidly that we were going to march to May 1st Square, that she wanted the lines to remain in order and that she didn’t want any running (to avoid the smell of sweat), that afterwards we were going to join the general gathering of the schools on the square and that then we would find out our position in the parade. Oh – and if anyone needed to pee they could do so, but that it was too late to take a pooh because we didn’t have time now. In any event, nobody ever took a pooh at school because the school did-n’t have bathrooms. I don’t know why she gave us this lecture, using that word, which she shouldn’t have spoken in front of a rally.

Romina looked in my direction and gave me a sign with her eyes for me to look at the steps. There she was, the comrade English teacher, limping slowly from side to side. “Who saw you and who sees you now?” Romina said under her breath, and I grasped right away that this saying was directed at me.

Later, when we had already begun to march towards May 1st Square, I noticed that Murtala had a bandage on his ankle. That was a good sign: something had actually happened. He didn’t look in my direction, nor in Cláudio’s direction. I realized he didn’t want to talk, much less to answer questions. When Cláudio tried to talk to him he took a fit and called Comrade Teacher Sara, who bawled out Cláudio. Cláudio responded with a disparaging whistle that could even be heard at the back of the line. Good, I thought; that Murtala was making a fuss about nothing, the idiot.

In the square, a comrade from the Ministry of Education came to hand out little red and yellow flags, some national flags and others of the MPLA. I looked at the podium and thought I made out the comrade president, but we were still far away, you could see only that the podium was full and there were soldiers all around the top, and in the streets, as well. The comrade president probably hadn’t arrived yet. Everyone had little flags, the mammies from OMA⁵, the young people from “the J,”⁶ the pioneers from OPA, the comrade workers, the people who had come to take part: the square was full of colour and movement. The comrade at the microphone was warming people up.

“A single people a single. . . . ?” he said.

“. . . NATION!!!” we shouted with all our might. We always took advantage of the opportunity to shout.

“A single people a single . . . ?”

“. . . NATION!!!”

“The struggle. . . . ?”

“CONTINUES!!!”

“The struggle. . . . ?”

“CONTINUES!!!”

“But the struggle, comrades?” He was shouting, too. The guy was delighted.

“CONTINUES!!!!!!!!!!!”

“And victory . . . ?”

“IS CERTAIN!!!”

“Victory . . . ?”

“IS CERTAIN!!!”

“The MPLA is the people. . . .”

“AND THE PEOPLE ARE THE MPLA!!!”

“The MPLA is the people. . . .”

“AND THE PEOPLE ARE THE MPLA!!!”

“Down with imperialism . . .”

“DOWN!!!”

“Down with imperialism . . .”

“DOWN!!!”

“Thank you, comrades.”

Some kids were already going hoarse, but we loved to shout the slogans. We heard the sirens. The convoy of Mercedes approached in the distance, this time, yes, it was the comrade president. The people were yelling and clapping their hands. “DOS SANTOS. . . . FRIEND. . . . THE PEOPLE FOLLOW YOU TO THE END! DOS SANTOS. . . . FRIEND. . . . THE PEOPLE FOLLOW YOU TO THE END!”

Only Murtala seemed not to feel like making noise. I approached him and offered him water from my canteen. “You want a little bit?” I pulled off the cap.

“No, I’m not going to drink from your canteen. . . .”

“Why not?” I took a swallow.

“Because you’ve got asthma.”

Once, a long time ago, it had been the other way around: Petra hadn’t allowed me to drink from her canteen because of asthma. But Murtala didn’t worry about this sort of thing. He must be really pissed off. “Don’t expect me to offer it to you again,” I snapped.

The schools were starting to line up again, the shortest classes in front, the big kids at the back. “DOS SANTOS. . . . FRIEND. . . . THE OPA FOLLOWS YOU TO THE END! DOS SANTOS. . . . FRIEND. . . . THE OPA FOLLOWS YOU TO THE END!” That was what we shouted as we walked in front of the comrade president. He was on his feet, clapping his hands and laughing. There were so many people shouting that he couldn’t have heard our child-like shouts.

There were so many people that I was afraid. If something happened here, for example, if a bomb went off, or even Empty Crate. . . . a lot of people would be trampled to death by other people, which is the worst way to be trampled. It’s true, it’s sad, but a person can crush another person.

The journalists were lined up on the right-hand side. They only took photographs now and then – to save film, I think. Some of them were already breaking formation to bring their cameras or television equipment closer. We’d been told that comrades from Soviet television would also be coming to film the parade. But they must have been very well hidden because I didn’t see any Soviets.

Paula was there with a microphone in her hand, a recorder on her shoulder. She was laughing as she ran alongside a comrade teacher. I think she was trying to interview him. “Paula! Paula!” I shouted, but we were too far ahead of her and she didn’t hear me. After passing in front of the podium, we walked a little farther and then our school stopped because the comrade principal said that they were going to give us biscuits and juice, but no one came. I guess it must have been because of the lack of cash, because that was why they didn’t have floats in this year’s parade. Maybe that was why they invited so many schools: to see whether the parade could still look good without floats. But for me, to tell the truth, the May Day parade just wasn’t the same without floats. For next year, if they call me to talk on National Radio again, that’s exactly what I’m going to say. I don’t want to know anything about any sheet of paper with an official stamp and everything already written on it.

Since neither the juice nor the biscuits had appeared, the comrade principal ordered us to demobilize. We were all free to go home. But we had arranged to go to the school and bring our discussion about Empty Crate up to date, and we’d said that even if we didn’t see each other along the way, we would meet at the school after the rally.

The girls, as always, arrived together: Petra, Romina and even Luaia. Bruno and I arrived, then Cláudio with tons of biscuits and two bottles of juice. But he refused to give anything to anyone else; he was always such a selfish guy. He said: “Sorry about that, but, as my cousin said, my hunger is in a category by itself!” It must have been a pretty special category because he managed to eat everything without anyone else getting a crumb.

“But Murtala’s missing,” somebody said.

“He’s not comin’,” Cláudio warned us, his mouth full.

“What do you mean he’s not coming? We arranged to be here. . . .”

“I’m tellin’ yuh, he’s not comin’. . . . I saw him taking off the other way, up the hill . . .”

“He was weird today. . . . Didn’t you think so, Cláudio?” I asked.

“Yeah, a little. . . .”

“He didn’t even want a drink of water when I offered him one. . . .”

“Yeah.” Cláudio started laughing. “Asthma-water. . . .”

“Hey, you jerk. Have you ever heard water cough?”

“No.”

“All right, then don’t talk bullshit.”

We went to our classroom. Everything was the same. The desks were there, there were no bloodstains, no tits hung from the blackboard. We sat down outside on the low wall that closed off the yard. The air had no smell. Everything was calm even though we could hear, off in the distance, the noise of the rest of the crowd on May 1st Square.

So, what Cláudio said: “I was one of the first to leave the classroom. When Isabel threw the comrade teacher out of the way, I was the only one right behind her. I didn’t look to either side or anything. I was terrified of seeing some man with an AK-47 in his hands and becoming petrified with fear. I took off running behind her. I’m telling you, it was the best thing to do because Isabel cut through the crowd like a knife. I saw two little girls fall over after Isabel pushed them out of the way. I kept on going right behind her, I jumped the wall behind her and headed in the direction of May 1st Square. I only stopped when I got to the Atlantic Cinema. I never looked back. I remember hearing the noise of that truck, but I’d already jumped the wall. I figured I was in the clear, and those bastards would never get me. When I stopped to look in the direction of the school, I saw everybody running and shouting, and I decided it was better to go straight home.”

What Petra said: “I don’t remember how I got out of the room because there was such an uproar I couldn’t even think. Everybody was pushing me towards the door and I saw the comrade teacher pushed back against the wire, even though he kept shouting that we had to fight back, that it was useless to run from the enemy, that we must confront him with all the weapons at our disposal. I started to get annoyed when Célio came up from behind. He was pushing everyone, trying to climb over people’s shoulders, as if he was in more of a hurry than the rest of us, but I gave him a smack and he got back into the line to run away. I mean, even if you’re running away, there’s got to be some kind of organization, it can’t just be a free-for-all. But I’m telling you, that smack was my salvation because he gave me a push that made me jump over the wall. I don’t know if he did it because he was upset or if he was feeling me up, but the truth is that without his help I wouldn’t have managed to jump over that wall. I ran towards the Square as well, and that was where I met a comrade policeman. I stood at his feet and I only realized my backpack was ripped open when he asked me if I was crying because of my ripped backpack.”

What Bruno said: “I was one of the first to see the truck’s dust in the distance, but to tell the truth it wasn’t possible to see if it was a Ural or not. I remember that it approached at high speed and that I only had time to shout once because when I tried to shout a second time the whole school was shouting. I grabbed my backpack, I jumped over Filomeno, who I think fell down, and the last thing I saw before leaving the classroom was Luaia’s face. She looked like she was drowning, and she was leaning up in the corner, or, possibly it was worse than that because that was where the board brush was shaken out. When I got to the ramp in the schoolyard I wanted to run with all the speed in my legs, but I couldn’t help starting to laugh, and it wasn’t from fear or nerves: it was because I saw the comrade English teacher lift her skirt as if she was going to have a pee but without ever breaking stride, which doesn’t explain how she was able to run, because I didn’t see, I wasn’t able to see. When she took off she disappeared into the clouds of dust and when I succeeded in getting over the wall she was gone. I crossed Heroines’ Square without looking out for cars, and the guy who was behind me, a neighbour of mine, said that I just missed getting run over by a Volkswagen, but I swear I didn’t see a thing. I only stopped running when I reached the door of my building and even then my mother boxed my ears because she’d already told me not to go running around all over the place like that because it made me dirty and sweaty. And when I said that it was because of Empty Crate, I got my ears boxed again for lying; I didn’t know what to do.”

What Luaia said: “I remember very clearly seeing you pass me, Bruno, but it wasn’t because I’d fallen in the corner. You were the one who pushed me and I ended up with my nose in the chalk box, where the board brush was as well. But it doesn’t matter, I think that right from the first shouts my asthma started, and I decided it was better to stay there, so that while all of you were running, I was lying on the floor. So I can’t say that I saw something because I didn’t see anything. I heard the shouting outside and I was scared to death because after the shouting the shooting would start, or they would come and get me. I was afraid that they wouldn’t find any women teachers and that they’d want to rape me instead. Worst of all, afterwards they would tear my tit off and pin it to the blackboard. But I was so scared and so short of breath that I think I fainted, and when I came to I was already in the comrade principal’s office, and Comrade Teacher Sara and the comrade chemistry teacher were there.”

What I, Ndalu, said: “I was sitting with Romina and since there was an opening we ran out, also in the middle of the crowd. I was afraid of falling, or afraid that after running and getting over the wall, we’d find that they’d encircled the school outside the wall. I didn’t see any truck, or any dust. I think I started running right in the classroom when Bruno shouted for the second time, which may have been the same time that everybody in the school shouted at once. I just want to say one thing, you guys don’t have to believe me, but the comrade English teacher, for those of you who didn’t see I’m telling you: she could be an Angolan international Olympic champion . . . She passed me and Romina so fast that when I looked she was already jumping the wall, and you’d better believe, I swear on Christ’s wounds, and on the soul of my grandfather, may he rest in peace, she jumped the wall without touching it. She just put a leg out to the side and grabbed her crippled leg with her hand and gathered herself up as if she was scratching her thigh, and if you don’t believe me ask Romina because she saw it, too. . . .”

What Romina said: “I left the classroom with Ndalu, more or less behind Isabel, except I don’t know how we didn’t see Bruno, but I remember that laugh really well. Excuse me, Bruno, but since we’re all telling the truth here, I think you laughed because you were afraid, or at least you were nervous. Come on, admit it. There’s nothing wrong with that; it was Empty Crate itself coming to our school. . . . The truth is that in the middle of the dust we were running towards that hole in the corner of the school wall when Comrade Teacher-Rocket passed us. It’s not easy to explain. We talked about it yesterday. You had to be there. Her running combined the speed of a leopard with the jumping of a gazelle. It all happened so quickly that when we jumped the wall, the comrade teacher wasn’t there any more. . . . We crossed the avenue there, went to the Party office, still running, and we only stopped at the National Radio station, but since we had our backpacks we decided it was better not to come back here.”

After that the conversation became more jumbled. Nobody respected anyone else’s turn to talk, everybody was speaking at the same time and we each wanted to improve some detail in our own version.

I was a little disillusioned because in the final analysis none of us had seen the truck, or even a man dressed in black, or at the very least heard a single shot, or, at the absolute very least, found some trace (I learned that word on TV) today such as a bloodstain or the shell of a bullet. Nothing. Nothing.

How annoying! I thought. I couldn’t find out anything. I was going to return to my street with nothing to talk about. Some people would say that the whole thing had been made up, that Empty Crate hadn’t even been at my school. But I was still suspicious: why was Murtala pissed off, and why did he have a bandage on his ankle? Why was the comrade English teacher walking so slowly today? Why hadn’t the comrade chemistry teacher told us anything today, and why did he have such a funny smile? And why – this was the really annoying part – had only people who hadn’t seen anything come to the meeting? Even stupid Luaia had the courtesy to faint, which meant that the foolish girl didn’t even know if she’d been raped.

The group broke up, of course. There was nothing more to do. Cláudio was picked up in a military jeep and Petra took the opportunity to get a lift. Luaia went to the classroom to see if she could find the hairpins she’d been offered as a birthday present on the very day of Empty Crate, Bruno rushed home because he was already late for lunch, and Romina told him not to run or his mother would get angry.

“Are you sad?” Romina asked, as we were crossing the avenue.

“No . . .”

“But that look on your face. . . .” Her voice was sweet.

“You know I don’t like goodbyes. . . . Today we were in May 1st Square and after the rally I started thinking. . . .”

“Thinking about what?”

“That things always end, Ró.”

“But what are you talking about?”

“About everything. . . . For example, that happiness, with the shouting and the anthem and the slogans – it all ends, eh, people go home, they drift apart . . .”

“Don’t be like that.”

“No. . . . It’s not that. . . . Look, we still have some classes left, then the final exams, then everybody goes on holiday, then there are people who don’t come back or they change classes. It’s always like that, Ró. People end up drifting apart. . . .”

“Are you talking like that because of Bruno?” It turned out that she knew.

“You already knew that he’s going to Portugal?”

“Yes . . . But is that why you’re sad?”

“It’s not just that, Ró. That’s just the beginning. . . . Every year people leave our classes. It’s normal, but I can’t get used to it. . . .”

“I know what you mean. When we go away on vacation I get this weird feeling. . . .”

“It’s just. . . . You spend the whole year fighting off the teachers, waiting for holidays, but the holidays are what change people. Some of them don’t come back, the jokes are never the same, but that’s not the worst of it, Ró. . . .”

“What’s the worst of it?” she said in her sweet voice.

“When we change schools, later on, or when we finish high school, then we’ll never see each other again, we’ll never have the same classmates. . . .”

“But there are always other classmates.”

“No, Romina, ‘other’ classmates don’t exist. . . . You know very well what I’m talking about. Our class, even with people moving in and out, is ‘our’ class. You know who I’m talking about. . . . And this class is about to end, don’t you feel that?” I didn’t want to look her in the eyes. I was afraid.

“Are you sad?” She seemed to be unsure whether to give me a hug.

“I don’t know. . . . You know, when the goodbyes start they never stop again, they never stop. . . .”

“But what are you talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing. . . . You know what my grandmother says, Ró?”

“No, what does she say?”

“That we never realize when we’re living the best days of our lives. . . .” This time I looked at her. “But I figure that’s how it is. . . .”

“So?”

“I know these are the best days of our lives, Romina. . . . This running around, all the talk in the schoolyard, even if everybody exaggerates like crazy.” I smiled.

“But more things are always going to happen to us, eh?” She looked at her watch.

“Yes, of course, more things are going to happen. . . .” I looked at her.

“But you’re sad? Right?”

“A little, Ró, a little. . . .”

 

We said “bye,” each heading towards our own house. It was here that I was going to say that at times all the big things in life can be seen in one small thing. You don’t have to explain much: it’s enough to look.

The end of the school year was always painful for me because I missed my classmates, our jokes, even the comrade teachers, even the slogans, even singing the anthem, even going to write on the board, even the general cleaning of the school, even playing statues in the corridor with your hands above your head until your back was burning, or inventing insults to yell at each other until the comrade deputy principal caught us and gave us all two strokes of the ruler on each hand – all that stuff, it was all just one life, which one of these days was going to end.

These days, when I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about these things, I became sad because, even though there were still many years left before the end of my school days, one day they were going to end, and elders don’t act up in the classroom, they don’t get detention points, they don’t talk nonsense to Cuban teachers who don’t understand nonsense. Elders don’t naturally exaggerate the stories that they tell, elders don’t take forever to talk about what somebody did or would like to do. Elders don’t know how to invent a good put-down!

This business of being old must be a ton of work.