Pó
ONE LEG OF THE CHAIR is shorter than the other three. Rot or termites or both. Shifting my weight, I am able to balance. My body aches. The mosque is lit by a single floodlight on a pole high above its roof. From my balcony I see all the life around me. I see a mother tying her baby snuggly to her back. A teenager with a finger in his mouth leans against the Coca-Cola machine. The old man, Paolo, shuffles in his broken shoes and drags a bulging bag over rubble. There are others. They all cross the grounds and disappear into one or another of the hotel’s blocks, like ants to their anthill.
Behind me, Serafim sits in his chair, which he has moved closer to the opening leading onto my balcony. He says when I am telling my story my voice grows quiet and drifts far away. His small recorder rests on the table next to him. He looks eager in his linens. When he leaves, his clothing will look like a damp rag that has been wrung, wrinkles across his back and thighs and where the top of his belly meets with his chest.
“It was raining the morning we left Dar es Salaam.”
“Before you continue—sorry—can you tell me more about Fatima. How she got her reputation as a madwoman.” Serafim’s pencil hovers over his notebook.
“No one knew when Fatima had arrived in Dar es Salaam from Goa, or how old she’d been. No one could remember her ever being young. She smoked. It shocked the men who came to do business with her to see a woman roll her own cigarettes. Equals, she’d say. A smart businesswoman, but a terrible driver. She once borrowed a jeep and we drove up the coast at high speed with the top down. My stomach got boat sick, the way we veered from one side of the road to the other. My fingers got stiff from holding on so tight.”
“You were sixteen when you left Dar?”
“Yes. Fatima wanted to protect me. From Graça and her daughter. And the war.”
I remove my eyeglasses, rub the corners of my eyes. Pressing hard makes a wet sound in my head. Serafim becomes a blurry shape. One night, before we left Dar es Salaam, Fatima reached over to her night table and lifted a thin gold box to her lap. She opened it and showed me a small mirror. It was so close to my face that it was the first time I had seen myself clearly. I could see how the freckles were splashed across my nose, the apples of my cheeks. She lifted the small pink cushion from the box and patted my nose and cheeks. Small puffs of a powder lifted around my eyes. I took in the sweet smell and in the mirror I saw how the golden spots on my nose and cheeks had faded.
Pó, Fatima had said, dragging her forefinger down my cheek and neck. It is Portuguese for dust or powder.
Serafim crosses his legs. He settles in for a bit more information.
“Did you understand why Fatima felt so responsible for you? Why your mother knew Fatima could be trusted?” He lights another cigarette between yellowed fingers and leans back in his chair.
“When she was young, my mother used to visit Fatima. She and her family would come to the city after the rains, searching for green pastures to feed their cattle. Fatima and my mother were friends.”
Part of me is aware that I’m giving Serafim what he wants. He is directing my story in a way that I’m beginning to resent.
I put on my eyeglasses. Serafim is back in focus. From the corner of my eye I catch a flash of colour. Ophelia is walking alongside the pool. With her dyed hair and a bright pink tracksuit, she keeps looking over her shoulder. She runs by the vegetable patch, a streak of hot pink, and turns the corner, disappearing around the small mosque in the direction of Beira’s centre. The Coca-Cola machine’s red light throbs across the vacant pool. There’s nothing I can do to stop the girl from meeting with men on the beach or behind the bars. She wants to be a teenager—just one of them.
“We call it a beating heart,” I say.
“What?”
“The Coca-Cola machine. It will die soon.”
Serafim rises to stand next to me. His hands curl around the railing near mine. His arm brushes against mine and I swear I can feel every single hair. I close my eyes and take in a deep breath of his smell.
There is no breeze and the city is quiet. With Serafim by my side, I find the courage to continue—to feel we occupy the same moment in time, without time making a move.
“It’s a year since Ali Khamis Mohammed’s ship brought us here. The people who live here call it God’s Nest. The villagers who live at the bottom of the mountain refer to it as the place where the four rivers are born. We’ve made peace with the people here. I have been respectful of their ways and they have allowed us to remain. We know nothing of this man, and Machinga is concerned he will disrupt everything.”
The first words from Fatima’s mouth had been stewing in her belly when I wheeled her back into our hut the day Ezequiel arrived. Fatima was right. When we arrived, Fatima, being the businesswoman she was, recognized Machinga’s stature in the village and gifted her a silk scarf and sari. Two blankets and a few of our metal pots were to be shared by the villagers. These offerings had been accepted, even though the women must have had misgivings. We did not look like them, but we did share enough words to understand each other. Machinga was married to Vasco, who had come from the bottom of the mountain. The Ndau often intermarried with the local population. They helped us build our shelter. She had become our sponsor, and Fatima shared her cooking spices with the villagers, tilled what land we could, side by side with them. Soon, I was asked to school the children, teach them the basics of language the way Fatima had taught me.
“Nothing good will come of this.”
“We will see” were the only words I said to her that night.
Over the next week, with Kwazi’s help, Ezequiel worked on a strong lean-to that could withstand the winds and the heavy rains. He remained quiet. Everything he did—the way he twisted his body to strike a post into the earth, his strong hands binding twine, his eyes turning bright when gathering supplies from Kwazi and his friends, rewarding the children with a song—all these things made me feel I was right to bring him back with me.
One night Ezequiel’s music was replaced with the scritch-scratch of writing. I closed my eyes to the sound and drifted to sleep. During these quiet moments, I would ask Kwazi to deliver comforts to Ezequiel’s shelter. A sleeping mat one day, an animal skin another. A candle so that he could write longer into the night.
I did not hear the drip-drip in the morning. Fatima snored when she slept on her back. She had been sleeping longer at night and often lay down to rest two or three times a day. Her legs could not carry her easily and she was not eating. Padre Theuns, a priest in Beira, had given us the wheelchair. He had also helped us secure passage to the foot of Gorongosa. At first, Fatima had refused, but after praying with her priest she allowed the man to load the chair on the back of a truck. Carrying Fatima up the mountain, strapped to her chair with vines, took three days with the help of some villagers. Fatima paid them well to get her to the top of Gorongosa.
When I stepped outside the next morning, an audience of six children sat waiting for me.
“Bom dia,” I said, presenting them books from behind my back.
Ezequiel rolled out from underneath his shelter. The children giggled when they saw him. The hair on his head where he’d slept stuck up like the tail of a mating bird.
The look he had when I first found him lying by the pool on the side of the mountain—the hollowed-out face of a man lost in the world—had left him.
“A story!” one child cried.
“Yes! A story,” Ezequiel said, echoing the excitement of the children.
Fatima had brought two books with us up the mountain: the Bible and Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the book her father had given to her as a girl. Both books had been translated into Portuguese. I never read Kipling’s book to the children. I only showed them the pictures of animals they recognized, elephants and snakes, and lions with zebra stripes, which Fatima called tigers.
I stop. My voice is growing hoarse. I allow myself to remember how Ezequiel looked at me. He did not gape at me like the soldiers in Dar es Salaam. They would crouch against the wall in front of Fatima’s shop, laughing and smoking. They tracked me with their eyes and whispers. I would shift and hide behind a pile of khangas. Here, I was exposed. Ezequiel did not turn away. I start again.
The days passed. The rains continued to fall and the mountain grew greener.
Every day Ezequiel busied himself in the village. The tribesmen had been away hunting for a long time. When a few of them returned, some of the women reassured the men that Ezequiel meant no harm. Others would not talk to him or meet his gaze. They watched him constantly and wanted him to leave. His lean-to was once lit on fire. They did not trust Ezequiel. By the time the men set out again for another long journey, they allowed him to stay. They knew of a rifle’s power, recognized that he could offer protection while they were away. The men decided he could stay for two months. When they returned, they would revisit their decision.
“Why must the men leave?” Ezequiel asked.
“They will not kill the animals on the mountain.”
My answer did not satisfy Ezequiel.
“They fear the fighting will make its way up the mountain,” I told him. “They are looking for another place to live.” Then I asked about what had been worrying me. “Will you tell me about the fighting?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“What happened to you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
“You ran away?”
Ezequiel looked down at his hands. He considered me but could not find the words.
I am aware that Serafim is still in the room. I allowed my thoughts to carry on ahead of me. Perhaps it was that first real exchange with Ezequiel that I wanted to keep all to myself.
Ezequiel tried to reassure the women in the village. He dug for roots and picked berries with the women who allowed him to come near them. He stood by the blind man, Vasco, every day until the man gave in and taught him how to grind maize and sharpen machetes on the village stone. He stopped carrying his gun. He grew more comfortable with walking barefoot on the mountain.
I fed Fatima bits of food, whatever she could keep down, and she would fall asleep. When she began to snore, I would crawl out of our hut to stretch.
Ezequiel would build a small fire between his lean-to and our hut. He would sit on one of the two logs he had arranged around the stones he had lined for a pit. He’d scribble notes or play his harmonica. One night I found him there. He was bare-chested. His rifle leaned against the log next to him. He stopped twisting his hands and looked up.
“What do you have there?” I think I asked. I remember protecting my head from mosquitoes with one of Fatima’s saris.
Ezequiel reached over the fire to show me a piece of wood. “I like to carve things. Animals, mostly. It passes the time.”
“What will it be?”
He held the crude carving close to my face. He knew my eyesight was weak, but I didn’t feel self-conscious. “I’m not sure yet. Soon its shape will tell me what it will become.”
It seemed that every day it took Fatima longer to get up. She would lie in bed, tangled in her saris, rubbing her swollen legs to get the blood flowing. I used the ointment Machinga had made, rubbing it between my hands until they grew warm. I touched Fatima’s feet. I knew the salve only numbed the pain. Fatima swore the pain disappeared, if only briefly, and she would sink back on her sleeping mat.
“I have something to show you,” Fatima said one day. “I have only found it now, tucked in a book.” She reached into the slip that covered her pillow. She offered me a fine leather booklet. I opened it. Fatima rolled over and handed me the magnifying glass. She said, “It’s the only thing I have left of her.”
It was a small black-and-white photograph of a much thinner and younger Fatima dressed in safari gear—a linen suit and a scarf wrapped around her head. She sat in an upholstered chair. Behind her stood a young black woman, strong and beautiful. The woman was dressed in a shuka. The pattern of her beaded necklace and earrings was instantly recognizable to me. Her hand rested on Fatima’s shoulder and was greeted by Fatima’s hand over it. “When I saw you at my door that day, I recognized your mother’s hand in that collar. And then I looked at you, took a good look at your beautiful face, and I recognized Namunyak’s features in you. Behind your pale skin, your bones and your blood are your mother’s.
“When I first came to Tanganyika, I didn’t know how to be African. My feet were soft, and I couldn’t bear to go barefoot. Now I can’t even feel my feet.” Fatima stared at my boots. “And there you are, your feet always stuffed in men’s boots. Your mother was the same way. I couldn’t convince her of anything.”
I was looking at my mother for the first time. In her I recognized my oval face and long neck, the way my lips puckered into a kiss, our broad foreheads, narrow noses, the almond-shaped eyes.
“I remember the first time your mother came to my shop, a satchel slung across her back. She did not say a word, simply walked up to my counter and opened the bag. It was filled with the most exquisite jewellery. Fine and delicate. I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anyone like her. For three weeks, she stayed. I supplied the beads, and all day she’d work on her creations. She came back to me several more times. On her last visit, we went to a photographer before she left. I knew she would not return.”
Serafim switches off his recorder. “Fatima had this photograph all that time and chose to share it with you only then? Two years after you first met?”
“You do not see,” I say, reluctant to show him how disappointed I am in what he is suggesting.
“What is it I’m missing?” Serafim asks.
“Only then did I understand what Fatima was giving me permission to do.”