WE WERE SPARING WITH OIL, with sugar, with gas, and yet there was always a scarcity. Every day there was news of plantation closures and all over the neighbourhood signs of apartments being vacated. My mother would take Alka-Seltzers and go to bed early. Of a morning, she would glance at the pages of Journal de Angola then look quickly away…She quarrelled with Ifigênia about expenses, after which Ifigênia went to her people; when overnight the railway route from Lobito became a target we had no idea when she would return. My mother retreated into the past then, perhaps she had nowhere else to go, opening photo albums and taking out old letters: reminiscing. She showed me photographs of the old house in Goa, the church, the paddy fields, the hills surrounding the village and the wide river that ran through it. She taught me a dekhni about the river and crossing it and the refrain that went, ‘These anklets from my feet, do take them, do take them…’ She told me of the Carmelite convent she had schooled at when she was a girl and the nuns who had taught her – Latin, maths, how to stitch. Portuguese stitches, she said, drawing an inscrutable figure in the air. At one time she had wanted to be a nun, she now laughed. And yet, she said she did not know which was a better fate – to devote oneself to God or to a husband. The nuns were clever, capable of such practical and worldly things, yet no doubt they had their sorrows – poverty and terrible family secrets…Her father was from a well-known Brahmin family, a lawyer like Papá, but he had died of tuberculosis when my mother was just eight years old. After that, land disputes with her father’s brothers had erupted. Often enough these uncles would bring gifts of food or labourers, only to remind my mother and grandmother that the house they lived in was not theirs. Sometimes they were so desperate my mother would have to walk to her uncles’ houses to get the takings from the paddy – a humiliation which she would try to lessen by wearing her best clothes. As a teenager, she had fallen in love with a Hindu boy, Sanjay, the brother of her best friend, Meeta. They made a pact to be together whatever happened, but her mother soon discovered the relationship and determined to separate them. Still, they were hopeful: things were rapidly changing and there was talk of the Portuguese leaving. She and Sanjay schemed to run away to Bombay together, but on the eve of their departure, he joined the liberation army and eventually only his letters to her came from the border with Maharashtra…It was then that my grandmother made the approach to my father’s family, wealthy Brahmins from a neighbouring village. Papá promised to take my mother away to Angola, and to make a fortune there. The Portuguese were leaving Goa, anyway, he said…Nehru would plunder all the foreign reserves. His words carried my mother away from her own mother, from the man she really loved, from everything known and familiar. How could she have known that more than any foreign country or continent, her husband would be the region she would be least capable of understanding? When the time came, she had no choice but to take the vow by which she was handed from one family to another…Perhaps she had never left Goa, she said, turning the pages of her wedding album, in which she looked so beautiful and so sad. For many months after they had arrived and set up house in Benguela, my mother tried to forget everything. She was glad for the oceans that existed between her present and her past, she said, so vast, deep and unfathomable, nothing could wash ashore. But then she got the news of Sanjay being killed in the war in Kashmir…Now she warned me not to be vain: she said, beauty ends, and looking at her I could see how this may be true; how her face, once beautiful, with the addition of suffering had become like a mirror of that suffering. However far away you go, she said, you will always be my daughter…It was meant to be a seed sown in the garden of some maternal idyll to say that nothing could come between us. Yet secretly, I dared to think that I, with my legs that had become long and shapely, my hips that had swelled, my breasts that had grown full and firm, had taken her place in the sun. Each month, though I would prefer to forget it, blood flowed out of me with unfailing regularity, reminding me of what I would one day choose: to bear a child or not bear a child. I sweated and, from under my arms, the smell was at once vinegary and sweet. When I lay down, I felt my body stirring with the most intimate longings and associations. I had bought some earrings, little painted wooden birds, at the night bazaar on Rua do Visconde; despite the irritation they caused, I could not bear to remove them. Now as I scratched at my earlobes, my mother said I should change them back to the gold sleepers she had given me. I had applied lipstick to my lips and kohl to my eyes; she said I had smudged it and she would show me how to reapply it. I was wearing a midriff top Andrea had given me with jeans, and my mother said I would be inviting unwanted attention. I wanted to say that attention was exactly what I wanted to invite. I wanted to say that should I too have a womb whose soil was rich and fertile – if a girl should one day grow there, with small breasts like buds, with a sex soft and moist as a lily – I would feed her plentifully of the Tree of Life, since it seemed just as tempting and delicious as that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Instead I brushed past her and headed to the door. As I left, I could hear her calling out to bring back some green chillies and a few limes – she wanted to make cafreal. I crossed the garden, passing Caetano who was listening to the MPLA news broadcast from Brazzaville. I walked along the familiar streets of our neighbourhood and then further until I had reached the city. I stopped at the foot of the statue of Vasco da Gama in Largo de Pedro Alexandrino, listening to the old accordion player from Príncipe playing that fado, ‘The Boat’, which was a favourite in his repertoire. Soldiers surrounded Largo do Infante Dom Fernando; some had been sent from Lisbon to make up local cohorts. They were unused to the heat and so the Miramar Cinema was crowded with off-duty soldiers from the square. I watched people entering and leaving the cinema: couples mostly, smiling and buying cones of quitaba and ice-creams. I was standing in the queue to buy an ice-cream when an alferes, a mestiço, offered to buy me a ticket. I followed him into the cinema and I sat next to him when he tried to kiss me and put my hand on his crotch. I was shocked but throughout the film, Fiddler on the Roof, on which I could hardly concentrate, I found that I could not say whether I wanted to remove my hand or keep it there and, while weighing up both possibilities, I felt his sex grow big. I did not know what to do: keep my hand on his sex, or take it away. In this way I grew to make him look desperate, beside himself. His beret sat on his lap, concealing everything and nothing. When we came out of the cinema we parted almost immediately; the shame I felt was as strange as it was new but not altogether repugnant…I craned my neck and watched him, lighting a Definitivo and walking briskly through the archway of the cinema. In the light of day – his face pockmarked, his hair shorn in the fashion of the Portuguese Legion, his epaulets shining – he seemed so aloof and arrogant, whereas in the darkness and close to me he had seemed so vulnerable. Now I looked about for him but he had soon merged with the crowds. I went to the small black-and-white photograph booth and took a strip of portraits of myself. The photographs took some minutes to be processed and when I looked, I could hardly recognise myself, the smudged kohl and the little wooden birds looked so garish. I was crossing into the square when shots suddenly rang out – people screamed and fled then after some moments cautiously gathered round. Two soldiers tried to staunch the wound while another shouted for an ambu-lance…It was the body of another soldier – not mine, but he might have been, another alferes. Someone said he’d gone mad – that was why he’d shot himself. I could not stop staring at the blood that had pooled about his black hair…Some time passed and I remained there watching as the body was taken away on a military stretcher. Suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder: it was Andrea, with her brother Paulo and the mysterious Miguel. We drew back and in silence walked along the Marginal. The sea was a black abyss and the sky hooded in cloud. There were few ships in the harbour and we could hear someone playing the Rui Mingas song that had been banned, ‘Monagambé’: Who wakes up early? Who goes to the tonga?…It is the sweat of my face that waters the plantations.’ We walked to Bairro do Café and the others started talking about what they had seen. I was nervous, shaking, and couldn’t really speak. Andrea put her arm around me and ordered a coffee. She said she would teach me to meditate. She pulled her legs up and said, This is how sadhus do it, her mother had shown her; sometimes they levitated. Her brother rolled his eyes. Sepia photographs – of Pepetela, António Jacinto, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Viriato da Cruz – covered the wall behind the bar, great poets and writers, I thought, but for all their eloquence would they close the growing distance between words and things? Andrea started arguing with Paulo and Miguel started speaking to me but it was so loud with all the voices rising in the café. I made out, What do you think of Pessoa? I said I liked some of what I had read, which was not very much at all…He said sometimes he felt like one of Pessoa’s alter egos, a wanderer. I said there were a lot of alter egos, so that we hardly know Pessoa himself, other than as an irresponsible dreamer who escaped having to be anybody. Miguel then began to recite a poem: ‘Once more I see you, City of my horrifyingly lost childhood…Happy and sad city, once more I dream here…I? Is it one and the same I who lived here, and came back, And came back again, and again, And yet again have come back?’ I had heard it before and it was not the words of the poem so much as the sound of his voice which I suppose stirred me…I removed the earrings and lay them on the table next to me and Miguel picked them up, studied them closely and then smiled at me, complicit. The light faded outside, lights came on in the shop windows opposite and I said I had to be getting home. Miguel said he would drop me on his scooter and I looked to Andrea; she acted insouciant, as though it hardly mattered to her, and laughed in a false manner that reminded me of her mother. As we rode away from the old part of the city, I could see everything very closely, but also, as if from far away, the smaller and larger order of things. Back home, the cafreal was ready. I was going to tell my mother about the dead soldier but she had gone to lie down. I went into the bathroom and washed my face; the kohl rubbed away with warm water. Caetano came in; there was news that the South African military had been routed in Moxico and we listened to the full story before I brought out plates and served us. The lime of the cafreal was tart and the green chilli intensely hot and the flesh of the chicken fell away from the bone. While we ate I thought, here we are, across the table, orphans of Empire…yet in reality Caetano was doubly orphaned, with family on the other side of the continent, in Mozambique, which had already become independent. I remembered how in Benguela he would get apprehensive as he wrapped his hands in muslin before smoking the bees to create secondary hives. At the first scent of smoke the bees would become disoriented and subdued. I knew the procedure from the habit of watching him and, though he was barely more than a child himself, he was protective and would not let me come too close. That time now seemed once upon a time and worlds away…Now as we talked about the future, he said he would go back to Maputo to look for his mother after Independence. How confident he suddenly seemed, as he confided in me these hopes: candidly, quietly, at the end of the day, when the sun had given the illusion of having set and things appeared to be justly resolved. But of course they would never be justly resolved and even Caetano would disappear from our lives in a manner which I could not at that moment foresee.