I TOOK THIS UNHAPPY LOOK, which my mother continued to bear, to bode ill. Soon enough when I saw her unhappy it would make me feel bewildered and the distance between the beginning of my bewilderment and the beginning of her unhappiness became more immeasurable as I turned my head forward and back, trying to gauge its proportions. Her sadness took many forms: disgruntlement, worry and restlessness among others. She looked this way when one morning she began giving a series of instructions to Ifigênia: Could she see that Papá’s shirts were brought in by early afternoon as it looked like there would be a downpour? Could she please remember to wash the floors today? Crio had been upsetting her seedlings and dragging mud inside…In answer to each question, Ifigênia said yes but as I observed this word – yes – passing her lips, it sounded less than decisive. I was eating funje sweetened with molasses, one of my favourite things to eat, and Ifigênia was fixing my braids for school. The next day she would be going to visit her family in Cassongue. My mother had given her a suitcase; it had an old TAP sticker peeling off the canvas. I asked Ifigênia how long the train would take to get to Cas-songue and she answered, So long that it would do her better not to think about it. She said that the more she thought about it, the longer it would seem…The radio crackled, the clock ticked and the new refrigerator hummed. There were many new things we had acquired on Papá’s higher salary since coming to Luanda: a new television, a new settee, a new car…Yet these accoutrements of his success in the Administration unsettled my mother and she often said she missed Benguela and the simple life we had had there. Now she said she was worried about the railways and what the FNLA, finding Ifigênia with her Portuguese and fair complexion, might do. Ifigênia said not to worry, that the FNLA were far from Cassongue and her Portuguese was full of errors, anyway…That galled my mother and she said that I ought to find another companion than Ifigênia as she was a busy lady. Ifigênia finished tying my braids and went into the yard to collect the washed clothes. My mother was wearing a pair of old kolhapuris and the polish had begun to peel off her toenails. She absentmindedly brushed her earlobe and realised she had lost an earring. She began to rummage on the table in a quest for it. She looked under the newspaper, then retraced her steps down the hallway. She called out that the house was in such a state that it was impossible to find anything. She came into the kitchen again and put her hand to her hair and released a sharp cry, flicking something which she must have thought was an insect but in fact was the mislaid earring: it shuttled across the linoleum and she picked it up and put it on. Unblinkingly, she now told me to hurry because we would be late for our appointment at the doctor’s in Luanda. She had not said anything about going to the doctor’s before; she had merely said we were going to meet with a nun at the Sisters of St Joseph school to which I would be going after Christmas, a time that was far enough away that it seemed like an eternity to me. That my mother might conceal things was something I was beginning to learn. For so many years, I had been like a little bird, gobbling the food, words and ideas, that she put directly into my mouth, already half-masticated. Now I began to consider what was real and what was not, what pleased me and what did not; I began dividing the world this way before swallowing…My mother glanced at the clock and said to eat up; she said that we hadn’t all day. In my haste, I spilled the funje. She clicked her teeth and said that I needed to learn to be more careful and that sloppiness did not become me. Her impatience gave her face a disfiguring quality, one from which I wanted to turn my eyes – out of shame but also because there was something unsightly in it. In the same tone, she now asked Ifigênia, who had just come in with a basket of clothes, what she was standing about idling for, could she not see that the floor needed to be washed?…The head nun at the Sisters of St Joseph school showed us to the classroom which would soon be my own. She was kind, her face craggy with age. She ushered me to a nativity scene which had been made by the other children in one corner of the room; mute little clay statues of Jesus and Mary, the shepherd and three kings, as well the angels, crowded into the makeshift stable…She said if I sang her a carol, I could place the small figurine of the baby Jesus in the manger, though he would only be born at Christmas. I sang the first lines of ‘O Menino está dormindo’ and she seemed well pleased. My mother was looking out the window, distracted…Later, in the waiting room of the doctor’s surgery, there was a chilled water bottle with a dispenser of paper cups and, after pulling one out, I made the discovery that the cups were automatically replenished. I carried on performing this miracle with the cups until my mother looked daggers at me. When we were called in to see him the doctor gave me two shots – one for diphtheria and one for sleeping sickness. He told my mother that there was nothing at all wrong with me, that I would start talking soon enough – that they should only be sure that they spoke Portuguese not Konkani to me at home. Then the doctor asked my mother to lie down and began examining her; he spoke in a low voice and my mother moaned. I looked out through the window and I suddenly saw the mestiça nurse who had been sitting at reception coming out of the surgery and, after hopping onto her bicycle, cycling away. My mother was so nervous, she began talking quickly and randomly. She said how pretty the receptionist was and the doctor scratched his bald patch and said that she could do sixty words per minute, which was better than the secretary he had had from the Algarve. There was a Goan doctor, she rambled, was there not, who had found the cure for sleeping sickness? The doctor said yes, he thought it was so…The doctor now spoke to me. He had a wide, friendly face; he was balding and his shiny head reminded me of that of the clown who mimed and sold helium balloons outside the Miramar Cinema. He told me my mother would soon get big; he told me that she was going to have a baby, and I recalled the red balloon which Ifigênia had bought me and which had become full and buoyant when my parents had recently gone to see Black Orpheus. To stop myself from crying, I now concentrated on the eye chart with its fractured alphabet written in smaller and smaller letters. If I squinted I could make out even the bottommost line. There was a poster for Benadryl in which a child gleefully gulped the red elixir that his voluptuous mother, so blonde as to have been Scandinavian, spoon-fed him…Now when I looked at her again my mother had been transformed into the attractive stranger. She smiled at the doctor and, taking my hand, smiled at me. I hardly imagined that I would be able to meet her in her treachery but by contorting my lips and straining all the muscles of my face I returned the compliment, I produced my own smile. Did it distress me to smile so falsely at her? Perhaps I was a good impersonator, her very own protégée. On our way out the doctor gave me a bull’s eye; the lolly was stale and melted at once in my mouth. My mother began walking ahead of me and there was not a great distance between us to begin with, but for every one step she took I had to take two, otherwise I would be trailing her. Having made the calculation, I refused to take that second step so that the distance in time got greater and, when she called to me that I should not lag behind, I pretended I could not hear her. She had Ifigênia set up the bed in the front room and told me that I would now be sleeping there alone. She said it was high time, and besides, I would soon be a big sister. As night fell, she led me to my new bedroom and our shadows redoubled on the walls. I sat on the edge of the bed, palms upturned on my lap, watching the silhouettes duplicate; when they met, they made the outline of a lurid chimera. If the baby was a girl she would be called Madalena; if a boy, she told me that he would be called Henrique after Papá. She turned back the sheets and leant in to kiss me and her face, full as the moon may have been full, was so close that it eclipsed everything. When she left, I lay awake for some time. The bed was narrow and I turned from one side to another, unable to lie naturally in any one place. The temperature dropped and I grew cold. When I fell asleep, my dreams were strange and turbulent. I woke in the night to find my mother was not there and in the morning glimpsed my reflection in the long armoire mirror. The mirror was framed by blue and white azulejo tiles painted with tiny windmills. I saw my two eyes, dark and elongated; the shiny crown of my hair; my nose, long and with a wide bridge like Papá’s; my dark and bushy brow, and the gold sleepers that had been threaded through my earlobes in the weeks after I was born. My face, belonging to another landscape, one I did not know, gave me the thrill of unexpected discovery and for some moments I moved my mouth, I sang to myself, not in any language that had been taught me, not a lullaby for a messiah but a song of my own improvisation, maybe discordant, but a song more comforting than real words might have offered.