7

ON ALL SAINTS DAY we went on excursion to the Ilha de Luanda. The sand of the Ilha was white and fine, like the beach at Porto Amboim where we had holidayed when I was small. There were people picnicking but we could not go into the water because oil had spilled from an Egyptian tanker that morning creating a slick for kilometres. Susana’s little sister, Inês, did not understand the danger and kept running toward the sea. Her mother lumbered after her and tried to reason with her – but this was little use, for when we had our heads turned, she would head off again toward the water…There were so many soldiers stationed on the fort; from afar they looked like toy soldiers. One of them caught up with her and carried Inês back to where we were. When the soldier had gone, her mother struck Inês across the face. Susana looked away ashamed and so did some others nearby, yet no one protested against this act of cruelty and little Inês herself seemed well acquainted with it; she only folded up her legs, rocked and murmured quietly to herself. I turned over the insight – that those who hurt you may be the same who otherwise claimed to protect your interests and care for you – and did not fail to speak my thoughts about it to Susana at the next opportunity. We were in the perfect conspiratorial setting, collecting zimbo shells; Susana looked out over the water and said her mother was upset because their servant girl, Milagre, had run away. Then she said, We may have to go home to South Africa because of the war. Which war? I asked her. I don’t know, she shrugged. Her parents often argued about it and her father had lately threatened to sell his assets, various farms, and a thriving cotton export business; there was her uncle in Cape Town who would help them…She squinted into the sun and turned away. We walked to the jetty and sat there eating our lunch, a picnic of some frango with piripiri and bread. The other girls were turning cartwheels and writing their names in the wet sand, watching the waves crash over and erase what they had written. They would provoke the head nun by throwing handfuls of sand at each other and then feigning innocence. In the afternoon, the fishermen took us out on the water. I looked at the boards beneath my sandals; they were very worn so I could see through to the earlier layers of green and grey paint which had peeled away – and between the boards the swirling dark waters of the Atlantic…As we rounded the tip of the Cabo, I turned back to look at the façade of the São Miguel fort. There were wild rumours about it – that it was haunted, that the ghost of the poet Camões was there and that it was his cyclopean blinker that was seen encircling the sea from the fort’s high tower – but in fact there was nothing spectacular about it; it seemed to be just a tower distributing light across water. I wondered whether de Novais and the sailors of the Discoveries sometimes saw humpbacks, and how, taken from their native towns in the Alentejo, they might have trembled to be out on the sea alone with them; how at night, with the sea dark and vast and only the light of the southern stars to orient them, the sky itself different to the sky of home, they must have prayed that their own seasickness might end. I gazed at the statue of the Blessed Virgin who had from her vantage point on the Carmo looked on as so many slaves had been pressed into ships that would take them to Brazil, so that the ancient tribes of Angola were lost on another continent, to say nothing of the dispossession of the Indians and the forests of Brazil cleared for the sugar plantations that the slaves were forced to work. I wondered what home may mean and what different routes one might take to get there. I was watching the water churning, wondering what secrets that sea could disclose, how much fear and loss, and how much expectation. I was wondering whether life itself was a terrible unmooring, when I felt the bile suddenly curdle in my stomach and I retched over the boat railing…At low tide we could see the local fishermen coming back, their small boats brimming with dorado, but the rainbow-coloured fish they’d caught were now contaminated with the dark oil and the fisherman were busy discarding them. I clasped the zimbo shells we had collected like a talisman. A man was selling pé de moleque and Susana’s mother gave us money for some. When we returned from Ilha de Luanda it was dusk. My mother was in the garden. She loved to be here, with Crio curled up beside her, working quietly into the evening. Everything was in flower: the white flowers of the moringa, the fuchsia petals of the bougainvillea, the star jasmine and the frangipani whose scent entered and permeated the whole house. She wore a kaftan and an old yellow sun hat from Benguela times; its wide brim drooped over her face. For old times’ sake, I covered her eyes and bent to kiss her and she exclaimed, My little wanderer has returned! But it suddenly felt insincere, a game, something we said before company…Ifigênia passed by on her way out to collect the washing and Susana’s mother started pacing. She said she could not think why their servant girl, Milagre, had up and left; she had searched all of Luanda and even sent a telegram to her parents in Moçâmedes. Who knows, she said, perhaps Milagre had fallen pregnant to one of the workers on the construction site behind their house? Inês was playing with Crio and my mother told me to take Susana to my room. In my bedroom, I asked if she’d like to play a game, buraco or canasta, or we could play Discoveries. This last was one of our own games, and not much could be said of its rules, except that it involved my leaving Susana with one of her possessions. I was so adept at it that I had in the last months appropriated a Swiss chalet paperweight in which snow appeared to fall when it was upturned or shaken; a silver bracelet now missing one of its glossy moonstones; as well as innumerable stamps from her collection. My favourite treasure was a viewfinder: the large cards slotted in and gave three-dimensional vistas of the Seven Wonders of the World. When I had acquired the viewfinder we had been in Susana’s room, a place in which I had come to feel the full glory of my dominion over her, and now here I was, lying on my own bed, clicking forward to the picture of the Pyramids of Giza and back to that of Machu Picchu. Clicking forward and backward, I told Susana how much I loved it, but in reality this game of conquests and all that I had acquired humiliated me. She gave me almost anything I asked, ran to my defence when I was in the wrong, copied my errors and the worst of my behaviour. I would sometimes catch her with her eyes closed, whispering to herself, and when I asked her what she was doing she would tell me with an utter lack of guile that she was praying. In earnest, she now began twisting the gold cross at her neck and describing her Crisma dress. We were standing near the old armoire with the azulejo tiles whose tiny blue windmills seemed both beautiful and obscure…From the kitchen, I could hear Emissora Católica and the strains of Sergio Godinho’s popular song, ‘Falling in Love’: ‘I sent her a letter on perfumed paper and in beautiful handwriting, I said she had so bright, warm and merry a smile like the November sun…’ The singer sent many letters to his sweetheart in which he made ardent declarations of his feelings – all of which were pathetically rebuffed. ‘I paid for her sweets at the Mission causeway’, Susana began humming the song. I had a brainwave and announced that we too could be lovers. Susana countered that lovers take their clothes off and lie naked with each other. I was talking to her reflection in the mirror and my reflection in turn talked to hers. Okay, I said, and before I knew what was happening, we began removing our clothes. Now what were we to do? I asked. Make babies, she instructed. She said that I would lie on top of her and she would then lie on top of me. She said this was what her father had done to their maid, Milagre. I at first felt an aversion to Susana but then this aversion turned into an aversion to myself and to the whole world and I pulled quickly away. I pursed my lips in distaste. I scolded that either Susana was a liar or she had a fertile imagination. I told her that she had turned into a person I no longer trusted. We got dressed and she looked on bewildered as I began to gather up the paperweight, the bracelet and the viewfinder to give back to her. Just then, we heard footsteps and voices and Susana’s long-suffering mother calling her name. At the door, Susana and I brushed cheeks as though nothing had changed between us…As we went inside again my mother asked what game we had been playing. I answered, Making babies. She said that it was a silly game. She said that Susana was silly and her mother was naïve. She said, You want to know how to make a baby? It’s too simple! Then she took up the comb from the bureau; the salt and the wind of the Ilha had tangled my hair and she drew the comb through it. The zimbo shells were scattered across my bed and, each time she pulled the comb through my hair, I glanced at them. Each time I pulled away from her, I imagined my hair slowly becoming wet with the weight of dark oil. I pulled away from her, for I kept wanting to look at myself, to see if there was dark oil staining my face too. She gave up and ran my bath. Papá arrived home. Ifigênia had prepared calulu de peixe and we ate without speaking. There was news of the farm strikes on the radio and he got up in fury to turn it off. He shouted that it was too much to be surrounded by fools. Why did I come to this country of fools? he smashed his fist on the table, rattling the plates, cutlery and glasses. He said that we would not be intimidated, especially not by some so-called Marxists who could not read Das Kapital! Night was falling and Crio barked at the nightjars while my mother ate her dinner and then went to her bedroom. When I passed her later, I saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, peeling an apple. She had made one long ribbon of the peel and was humming an old Konkani mando:

Leaving all your friends this way,

To earn your daily bread you go away…