He pulls down his light, well-ironed shirt over his urine bag. He flicks his hat up, uncovering his eyes. He smiles. Finishes the card game. Wins. Smiles. He gets up and pays for the bottle of water. Says see you tomorrow. Smiles. He leaves the café. With his slim legs and slight swagger, he has the grace of vast landscapes. He pushes open the small gate that leads to his front yard, climbs the step to the porch and sits on a bench facing west, like in an old cowboy movie, the evening sun falling across his face. He smiles.
The woman walks out of the house, slowly, her legs swollen. She has tended to her garden and left everything ready in the kitchen so she can start cooking dinner later. She adjusts her headband on her graying hair and sits beside her husband. She doesn’t lean back, but instead rests her hands on her knees, as if poised to get up again at any moment.
They greet the passers-by. They wait. Usually, nothing special happens. They wait. Together, they watch the sun set. The next day will be like this one, which has been just like the previous one.
Nearly every time I visited Santulhão, I’d found Senhor João and Senhora Maria sitting on their front porch. Except for the first time, when they’d been in their house. A folder containing the paperwork for the farm they had once owned in Angola lay on the kitchen table, beside boxes of medicines, as if placed there by chance. Inside was a document that read: ‘Angola, Huíla province, 1965, João Manuel Fernandes, 35 years old, Originally from Santulhão, Farmer by trade, is hereby certified, having paid 300 escudos for this license, Hoque, Municipality or District of Lubango.’ And from that moment on, in my mind Santulhão became linked to Angola.
I returned time and again to Santulhão. I was intrigued by Senhor João, a man who had clearly been a hypochondriac his whole life and who now had a very real and serious illness, cancer, but who smiled as he spoke melodramatically of how he suffered, of how little time he believed he had left.
Every time I went back there, I wanted to ask Senhor João if he was afraid of dying. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be eighty years old, what it was like to reach the end of your life: if he had any regrets, if it had all been worthwhile, and, if so, what exactly had been worthwhile? But instead I always ended up asking him about Angola, about how they had made it from there, Santulhão, in the Municipality of Vimioso, in Trás-os-Montes, to Hoque, Lubango, in the Huíla Province, in Angola; when, and why? How had they come back, how had they readjusted, and what place did those particular memories occupy in their minds?
They were rusty when it came to talking about their memories and about themselves. Like many from Trás-os-Montes, Senhor João and Senhora Maria would sometimes use third-person verb tenses when speaking in the first person. Instead of ‘I have done’ they would say ‘I has done,’ which gave the impression their lives could have been lived by someone else. Their story may not have been unique, but it was long. It would have to be reassembled with some perseverance, with a willingness to merge certain decades into others and with particular attention to sowing and to harvesting, to rain and to drought. Their story, to be honest, was never complete. Last time I visited, we spoke for so long that I ended up watching the sun set with them. I didn’t know what so many hours of recorded material might be worth, but I thought of how my own grandfather always said that history is written by the rich, and I wanted to give Senhor João and Senhora Maria a right to theirs. And anyway, what sense does it make at the age of eighty to speak of death without speaking of everything you have lived? It would be like visiting your hometown without setting foot in your house.
It was clear, and did not have to be discussed at length, that their greatest fear was not death – that was for the young – but being left alone. Beyond that, it terrified them that they might lose their senses, and with them their memories, and with their memories the story of their lives. They don’t want – Senhor João repeats, still smiling – to die in poor health. Because you could end up spending years lying in a bed or, if you’re unlucky, in a bed in a home, or worse still, in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines and to tubes. Was it just their impression, or did people use to be healthier when they died?
When I visited them in August, illness was not their only company. The porch was no longer still, with children and grandchildren constantly coming in and out of the house. Their eldest son, who has since spent time in Angola trying to reclaim his parents’ farm, and the emigrant son, who lives in France and who, that year, was a mordomo – one of the organizers of the August festival – were both in Santulhão. Their granddaughters, skinny little things from the city in skin-tight clothes, would get up late, wander to the kitchen and pick at the food left in their grandmother’s pots and pans, their eyes feverish with both the doubts and the certainties of their futures. The grandchildren, more grown-up and more nostalgic by the year, wanted to talk about their childhood: about how they ran through fields, falling into ponds, then laughing into the night so they could stay awake and stretch out those long Trás-os-Montes summers.
In the house that belonged to their daughter-in-law, the wife of their eldest son, there was a large yard that had once been a corral. There, they barbecued Mirandesa steak and lean cuts, and the table was very long so everyone, family and friends, could fit around it. Senhor João and Senhora Maria ate calmly and spoke little. No one asked them much, but this didn’t seem to bother them. On the contrary, they enjoyed listening to the loud muddled voices and observing the youthfulness that surrounded them, the spectacle of the different generations. At dinner they talked about the festival and about money, of which there was less and less for performances that were increasingly sophisticated; they talked about emigration: France, Angola, Brazil, the United States, Canada. After the meal, Senhor João and Senhora Maria did not go see the band play since the music would only begin after midnight, which was too late for them. Later, though only the faintest of sounds reached the porch, they could still feel the night’s euphoria in their chests.
One time, after visiting Santulhão and hearing Senhor João talk about the dreams he’d had in which he returned to Angola, to farming and to hunting, I also dreamt of Angola. I went back there with my father and brother, we walked along a beach, and in my dream I was aware we were only visiting; we would soon leave. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking of the trip I’d taken to Luanda, years earlier, without my family. The cemetery, perched above the city, had impressed me. As I read the names on the tombstones a mother’s voice cried out in the background, and I thought of how lucky we were that no one in our family had stayed behind, that none of us were buried there. ‘Mommy has to leave you now, my love. Mommy has to go.’ And as two men dragged the woman out of the cemetery, carrying her out in their arms, I finally understood how tragic it is to leave the dead behind, to leave them alone.
Now that their children have started traveling back to Angola, to try to reclaim the farm that was once theirs, in the south of the country, I wonder if Senhor João and Senhora Maria ever think of the possibility of their children moving so very far away, and then of their grandchildren leaving too; of how, after they die, the younger generations might never visit Santulhão again. The cemetery, which is just there, you can see it from their porch, to the left of the house and in front of the café – will it become a place exclusively for the dead?
It doesn’t make Senhor João and Senhora Maria unhappy to spend their old age in the place they were born, and yet they can’t but help feel that they’ve lost part of their identity to history and that there is more defeat in life than there ever will be in death.
Senhor João crosses his long, tanned hands over his belly, his urine bag pushed to one side, and turns to face the sun, the west, looking out into the distance. Senhora Maria looks out at her vegetable garden in their front yard, at the road, at her husband.
As they sit on the porch, at the end of the day, Senhor João and Senhora Maria see what the younger generations do not: bygone landscapes. In their eyes, the sun slowly bruising through long months of unbearable heat, there is still time to hope everything ends there, on that purple horizon.
HIM: I dream more than I sleep. Or maybe it’s all jumbled up. I don’t know.
HER: Sure he dreams, and sometimes he kicks me, too. I ask him what’s wrong and he says: oh, I was just hunting in Angola.
HIM: In Angola, we’d go hunting every week, sometimes even two, three times. There was wild goats, antelopes, game. Soon’s the dry season hit, they’d come searching for drinking water.
HER: Goats, they’d come in bean season. One day he asked me: what we got for lunch tomorrow? ’Cause we had so many chickens and pigs and—
HIM: One year we killed eighteen of them!
HER: He said: look, there’s a goat eating the beans. Gonna see if I can grab him. I hadn’t even finished washing the dishes and there he was bringing in two of them goats. The blacks, they knew the sound of his gun and so they’d come knocking at my door the next day, saying I’m here to help with the skinning, Senhora. And I’d say, alright then, cut here and cut there and take this here for you. They’d be so darn happy! Senhora, you give us balela today?
HIM: They called meat balela.
HIM: I’m eighty now. And here I am, fearful I might fall sick before I die. My kids, they tell me: you gotta try taking it one day at a time now.
When I got back from Angola and had this operation in Vimioso, the doctor said to me: oh, you’ll live to see eighty yet! But I felt downright bad. I don’t know if it was because of how I had to leave Angola that I felt so bad, but I asked him, me, eighty? And now I’ve made it to eighty, you know what I’m hoping for? To make it to ninety. You know what makes me really happy? It’s not doing the living myself, it’s getting to see the family, the kids, the grandkids. My oldest grandson, he’s a mechanical engineer, another one’s studying to be an architect. The daughter of our eldest, she’s a nurse. Another granddaughter, she’s finishing up school to be a scientist. And she’s already making a living at a university in France…
HER: She’s doing her PhD.
HIM: And my youngest son’s kid, he’s a police officer. I got no great-grandchildren yet. That’s why a person’s got to keep going.
HER: Our oldest grandkid is twenty-six, but he ain’t given any thought to marriage yet.
HIM: It ain’t easy living in the city. Here, in the village, we’ve got a house, a vegetable patch, and we just keep on.
HER: There ain’t a day goes by we don’t eat what our garden grows.
HIM: And then there’s even some left for the kids.
HER: Folk don’t go hungry here. Everyone’s growing things. There’s always enough.
HIM: But back in the day, the houses was full of people. Now everywhere’s empty. There’s some’s left, others died. There’s only five, six kids in the school now and they go to Vimioso, ’cause there ain’t no schools in Santulhão anymore.
HER: Back then, families were big, they’d have ten, twelve kids, and you needed a plentiful garden to fill the pot. Folks went hungry. There was lice, and there were ticks. We were dirt poor back then.
HIM [pointing at the houses opposite]: Over there, where them houses are now, there was mud. And you mixed it in with straw and you had yourself some fertilizer.
HER: My ma was real sick, and truly devoted to the saints. She went down to Mirandela one time to pray, and me and my brother, we went with her and we saw this bicycle. We just stared at it, ’cause we’d never seen one before. No one bought us kids bikes, there wasn’t any money for presents.
HIM: When I was about ten, we had a pair of stilts…
HER: They used to get all banged up.
HIM: …and we’d strap our feet into them and walk all over the place.
HER: We had seven kids. The first two died: one at five and a half months, the other when he was born. I cried and cried thinking that maybe none might survive… The best thing in life’s your kids. Everything else is just… We left everything we had behind in Angola. But our kids, thank the Lord, they make enough to keep themselves afloat. They’re smart and they’ve got skills enough to work. There never was much, but we sent them to school with the little we had.
HIM: There ain’t a thing I regret selling.
HER: I would’ve sold our land so the kids could go to school. If we’d gone to school ourselves, we wouldn’t’ve held onto our land like we did, we would’ve got jobs. He had to finish elementary school to get his driver’s license in Angola.
HIM: Who finished elementary school round here back then? We worked like slaves.
HIM: When I went to Angola, there was lots of folks here and almost nowhere to harvest grain. Before that, I even tried getting to France. I gave a doctor from Bragança one and a half contos (speaking in contos, which is what we used back then). The doctor said he got people across the border and he had this middleman in Vimioso. The plan was that after he got me papers, I’d give him another one and a half contos. But time passed, and then some more… He must’ve conned ’bout six hundred people. There was lots of us waiting to go to France. And then in the end not one of us did. Those days, there wasn’t any tv, but I heard this broadcaster say on the radio: come to Angola, my brothers, hardworking men of Trás-os-Montes. I had a cousin of mine in Angola and he was a sergeant in the army, and I wrote him a letter and then he wrote me back saying: cousin, you’re not going to believe it! They harvest twice a year out here! First, two guys from over here went there, then me, then three more. Then it was like a flood: more than thirty folk from here went over.
I was already sick back then. I’d say to her, I got an ulcer and she’d go, there ain’t nothing wrong with you. I’d say, yeah there is, and I need surgery. Those days, you need an operation, you gotta pay, and we didn’t have no money for that, we would’ve had to sell all we had, and that’s why I left here so fast. But there in Luanda, with that food and that weather, I hurt even more. I was lucky enough, though, ’cause I knew someone there, a lady who was the daughter of a teacher from over here, the one who’d taught me my letters, and she was a teacher, too, and married to an engineer who was in charge of the railways, and he told me to go see his friend, who worked at a clinic. He wrote a little something on a piece of paper for me to show him and they saw me right then and there. They operated and then after the operation they told me: you gotta go on a diet now. But I was never much a nagger, I never asked for nothing. I was staying in this shelter and there was six hundred and some more of us there – there was family men, sick folk, some missing a hand, others who was blind. That was where all us outcasts went. All the poor folk were there and we lived crammed into this barrack made of zinc, it went from over here to about there, to that cherry tree. The outhouse was over a cesspit, there was just a lone plank of wood and no water. There was loads of old folk, some from here, some from Angola, folk who should’ve been in a home, and they were almost always fighting like dogs. When I got there from the hospital, they all gabbed behind my back, saying: that one there, he won’t last. And I heard them, too… I got so down. I was thirty years old, I hadn’t even turned thirty-one yet, I had my operation three days before I turned thirty-one. That was forty-nine years ago.
When I got a little bit better, I met a couple from here, from Miranda, at the shelter – they’d come up from the south of Angola to spend Christmastime in Luanda. They told me to head on down there, that the land was good and the weather, too, so I packed up all my things and off I went. I left Luanda on the last day of December, 1962, and got to Hoque on the first of January. It was sixty kilometers from Sá da Bandeira – they call it Lubango now. Hoque is a thousand kilometers from Luanda by truck, clunkclunkclunk… I got taken there by a trucker, and he said to me: look here, if you’re not doin’ so good, I’ll be back before too long to pick up some tobacco, you can hitch a ride real easy and meet me in Quilengues and I’ll take you to Luanda – that way you can head on back to Portugal. As soon as I picked up a hoe I didn’t feel so good, and I thought, I gotta get outta here.
I had five hundred escudos on me, no more than that, but I had asked my sergeant cousin for three contos – speaking in contos. He’d already sent it and I’d set it aside for the trip back. Meanwhile there was this bout of bad weather – even the telephone lines collapsed with all the wind and rain – and all communications got cut. So I stayed.
HER: Eleven months to the day after he got to Angola, that’s when I arrived with our three kids, one was six years old, the other four, and the last one still a babe in arms. I went from here to Vimioso, and from Vimioso to Duas Igrejas to take the train to Porto, and in Porto we switched trains and then we went to Lisbon to get on a boat. The only downside to the boat trip was it was so short. It only lasted eleven days, and that was the first vacation I ever took in my whole life: I didn’t cook, didn’t wash no dishes, all I did was wash the kids’ clothes. I wasn’t scared, either. The sea was smooth as a blanket. I gave the cabin attendant a fat tip, so we weren’t short of food: cheese sandwiches, milk, fruit for the kids, he’d bring me anything I asked for. The kids said: Mom, Mom, the boat’s gonna sink! And I’d just say to them: no, it won’t, darlings, no, it won’t.
HIM: Later, a man who died the day I come back here sold me some land for thirty contos, speaking in contos. I had to borrow money, even had to pawn my rifle… I lived through eighteen fierce months… And then there were even folks that said: Senhor João, he’s a good man, sure, but it’d be better if he were a bad man – meaning I should’ve been different – he’s a real good man, but he’s got a chipembe there, a bad bit o’ land where nothing will grow. We had us an irrigation ditch and a shack, but no roof. Had Zé been born yet?
HER: No, Zé were born later.
HIM: So I built us a roof. We could plant potatoes there and settle down, our kids and us.
HER: We daubed the room and got it all cleaned up real nice.
HIM [laughing]: And then it started raining, but as the cob hadn’t set, it rained inside! We were there for a whole other year. Then I said: I’m gonna build us another shack down there, where it’s proper. And we was there another one, two years before we finally started harvesting crops and making a decent living…
HER: Then we built ourselves a house, and that was that.
HIM: We built a real sturdy house. It wasn’t nothing fancy, but it was a real nice little place, in a good spot. The porch was kind of like this one, actually.
HER: The porch was just like this, yeah.
HIM: And then they started saying, Senhor João, now that there’s a lucky man. I harvested wheat when folks thought there was no wheat to harvest.
HER: We still had to dig plenty more ditches…
HIM: …I ended up irrigating some real good hectares of land. There was one year I harvested one thousand bags of corn weighing around 90 kilos each and fifteen bags of beans weighing 130 kilos each, or maybe even more. We grew potatoes, wheat, corn, and beans. I built myself up a desirable farm there, and bought myself a pick-up, a tractor – I had almost a hundred cattle, and when I was just starting to think of getting a bigger truck…
HER: …They opened up an airlift when decolonization began.
HIM: One day one of my kids came up to me and said: look, Pa, our chests aren’t made of bronze and if everyone’s leaving, we’re leaving too… There was lines and lines of cars kilometers and kilometers long and they was laden with stuff – biquátas as we used to call it – just whatever they had, ready to load onto the boat, or take through South Africa.
HER: There were folks even managed to get tractors and trucks through.
HIM: A boy from here had a pick-up and a tractor just like mine. He sold his tractor, figured a way of bringing the pick-up back, then managed to start his own business. He did alright for himself, but he’s dead now, too.
HER: My father used to listen to the radio a lot and he heard what was going on in North Africa and thereabouts…
HIM: He had sent us a letter saying he didn’t want us to write him back, he just wanted us to go get him in Portugal. That there was the only time I come back to Portugal while I was living in Angola. As luck had it, when I got to Bragança it was snowing – I shook in my boots, and my teeth were all clattering…
HER: …And because my father listened to the radio so much, he got this idea in his head that they was killing folks by the dozen and he got scared, so he said: if you don’t want to go back to Portugal, I’ll go on my own and figure something out for myself. And I told him: now hold your horses, when we go, we’ll go together, and if we die, we’ll die together, and if they kill us, they’ll kill us all together.
HIM: One of my men told me: you can’t go, boss. I know a place in Quilengues, and you got flour, so take two or three bags of flour there and a sack of fish and then stay there till this here blows over. Alright, I said, and I told him I just had to take my family to Luanda and I’d be right back – I didn’t want to have my arm twisted… After independence – if things got better – I intended to come back.
HER: While we were packing our trunks to take on the boat, three blacks came up to the house…
HIM: …They were part of UNITA, and were fleeing the skirmish in Sá da Bandeira.
HER: Folk in Hoque were MPLA and those men, they were from the UNITA and they were on their way to meet the rest, who were in Cacula…
HIM: About thirty kilometers from there…
HER: …But they weren’t taking the roads, they was sticking to the bush. They’d left their uniforms and hidden their guns and then they came knocking at our door. They knocked and I said, what is it? What’s going on out there? Senhora, could you spare us some fubá?
HIM: They called cornmeal fubá.
HER: Sure I can, and I did. I gave them some fish, too. They tried paying me, tried giving me twenty-thousand réis. And I told them no, I don’t want nothing, go on, go fill your bellies, go eat in the bush, go, go fill your bellies, ’cause I don’t need nothing, not me. I don’t know how many times they must’ve said, may the Lady protect you, may Our Lord keep you, God in heaven protect these good people. My eyes filled with tears.
HIM: I couldn’t steal from them, take advantage of them. I didn’t have it in me. It ain’t right of me to say this, but I’ll say what I feel: there was folk out there who – I don’t even know how to say it…
HER: …Who were thugs.
HIM: When it was us who was on their land… It was sickening. Them folks went there to set a bad example. And they paid for it with their lives.
HER: They killed them.
HIM: …And they deserved no less, and I’m speaking against our race here. I was the first one there to start paying the men every two weeks. A man who’d been there a long time told me: you must be made o’ money to be paying them every two weeks and I said to him: I’ll live my life as I please, and you can do the same. For the folk who’d lent me money first I’d even take along my oxen and men to do the sowing, I had forty to fifty folk working for me at times, but I’d say to my men that the wheat was for me ’cause the men didn’t want to work for them…
HER: We didn’t have any enemies. In the end, they just kept saying to us: you can’t go, boss.
HIM: …And they’d tell me: even if we wanted to speak up, we can’t – we go talk to the chief, but the white man walks in and we’re left at the door.
HER: I never had no trouble while I was on that farm. The black women always came to me to sell their goods for sugar. They’d bring me half a dozen eggs, or fruit they’d picked in the bush for the boys. There was this fourteen-year-old who worked for us, he looked after the pigs and the chickens and I’d tell him, Carlos, you go on and talk to them ’cause I don’t know Umbundu. Ask them how much the eggs cost. Nothing, he’d say, it’s just breakfast for you, Senhora.
HIM: Then they all killed each other.
HER: And it still hasn’t been settled, it still ain’t really settled.
HIM: The young folk in Luanda are rebelling. The south is calm. Our youngest is there and our oldest son is going there again soon.
HER: They’re starting a business, the two brothers. My youngest son already has his Angolan citizenship. He was there for a month three years ago, and that’s when he got his citizenship.
HIM: He threw a party there in the quimbo, on our land. He got 150 folk together and spent like a king. And he even made a movie of the party and brought it here to show us. Everyone dancing, the old folk talking about me. They had this nickname for me, Berimbindo – ’cause it’s like bem-vindo, welcome, so they called me Berimbindo. Did Berimbindo uafa? Meaning, did he die? No, my sons said. Berimbindo is here in my heart, they’d say. I cried watching that movie.
HIM: She even had the smarts to bake a batch of bread before we left. We managed to fill our bellies even then.
HER: I baked a whole bag of bread.
HIM: And that was real bread. First-rate flour, made by hand…
HER: We left the key to our house with our buddy – we were his daughter’s godparents.
HIM: He was mulatto anyway.
HER: We left him the cattle, the goats, the tractor – everything!
HIM: And seeds!
HER: Yeah, seeds. We said to him: the land here’s sown, so go and harvest some for yourself and then when I come back, all you gotta do is give me the seeds so I can sow too. Everything was just right, we had worked everything out real nice, but then he didn’t write us and we never did write him…
HIM: The mail was cut off then.
HER: …They didn’t let mail get in or out and we never heard from him again.
HIM: Then a black came through and killed him, out of envy. And our goddaughter, she was eleven years old, lightning struck our house and killed her. It wrecked most of our home.
HER: And then the whole house fell down. Our kids, they took a picture of it for us and then showed it to me – the only thing that survived was the stove chimney.
HIM: It was October when we got here. Our eldest son stayed behind to load the last of the containers onto the boat. It was real little, almost nothing, really, but still my most valuable one got stolen. I even went down to Lisbon, to the Cais da Rocha… but I couldn’t find it. Folk welcomed us here, in the village. They brought us nine bags of potatoes – and that was just the potatoes. I knew what folk said about us retornados coming back from Africa, most of them.
HER: And some still say it today.
HIM: I miss looking out at my land. Sometimes I’d go outside just to look at everything I’d planted.
HER: We had a big farm. We’d look at treetops out there in the distance, and it was all ours. If I was twenty years younger, I’d be back there, sure I would. The weather was real good where we lived: none too hot, none too cold. And the land is blessed – everything we planted grew. Here, all the work I’ve got… Just today I went and checked on the beans and they’re no good, they’re falling off their stalks. The weather here spoils everything.
HIM: I don’t want to go see it now. I cared for that land – and the thought of going there and seeing how it is now… But that’s life… When good fortune finally smiles down on you… Here, I at least had a few things to my name, so I said, alright, this is where we’ll stay. Now, my sons, they say to me, we shouldn’t’ve come up here, the ones who stayed in Lisbon, they’re doing better for themselves, but my things were here, my olive trees, my vegetable gardens – I had a place to live here, where else could I have gone?
HIM: I stopped working a year and a half ago, when this trouble with my bladder started. I used to make my own wine, grow my own potatoes and olive trees. I still got some olive trees, but I don’t look after them no more. It ain’t worth it. Growing things today, no matter what you try to grow, it just don’t pay. I don’t know where this country’s heading. They’re encouraging folk not to work, not to produce…
HER: Now everyone’s got their 230 or 240 euros…
HIM: But there’s lots of poor folk, right?
HER: …I never thought they’d give me the little they do. So long as we keep getting the small pension they give us…
HIM: We’ve made our nest. It’s the bird that’s dead. Its wings won’t fly.
HER: He’s always complaining. He’s been complaining for twenty years now! I’m sicker than he is, but you don’t see me kicking up a fuss.
HIM: No one believes in old sufferings.
HER [laughing]: You’re an old man now, you can’t get no older than old. It’s a sad life for a couple of folk like us. Our kids come over for the August festival, but then they go back to their own lives. The two of us, we’re stuck here, but at least we can still talk to each other. If there was just one of us left, we’d have nothing to do but stare at the walls.
HIM: I’m scared she’ll die first. That’s what really haunts me.
HER: I’m eighty-five already, going on eighty-six. My legs grow heavier each day. They don’t want to walk. I got pain and pain and more pain. But we just gotta keep on.
HIM: If she goes first, I don’t know what I’ll…
HER: Oh, you’ll go to an old folks’ home. What else can you do? And if there ain’t a bed for you there, you can just come on here and sleep at home.
HIM: A man gets used to sleeping in a good bed, to having decent clothes and a decent towel, to sleeping next to his wife…
HER: What he don’t want is to die.
HIM: …What’s an old man to do, sick and alone?
HIM: Lazarus had been dead for four days. And Jesus said: let’s see what we can do. And He said: I am life and I am death, do you believe? And He said: move that rock. And then He said: Lazarus, rise! And Lazarus rose. And so did Jesus, and they say we all rise again. Lazarus and Jesus came back after just two or three days, but we only will after millions of years… What I learned in the cradle I’ll only forget in my grave. My parents gave me this faith, it’s the only one I know. Me, I think there’s something after death. It’s just this feeling I got. They put so much fear in us – why’d they have been fooling us? I don’t know, though. The dead don’t write, they don’t call – there’s just no way of knowing.
HIM [watching night fall]: The moon’s just the same in Angola.
HER: And the stars. Sometimes I was there and it was like I was still here, just looking up.