She looks like she’s out of a canvas by Modigliani.
ABOUT GOD AND OTHER TINY FOLLIES
I find it easier to have faith in God, notwithstanding His being something so far beyond our incredibly limited understanding, than in arrogant humanity. For many years, I called myself a believer out of sheer laziness. It would have been hard to explain my non-belief to Odete, to everyone else. I didn’t believe in men either, but that was something people accepted easily. I have understood over these last years that in order to believe in God, it is essential to have trust in humanity. There is no God without humanity.
I continue not to believe — neither in God, nor in humanity. Since Phantom died I have worshipped His spirit. I talk to Him. I believe that He hears me. I believe this not through an effort of the imagination, still less intelligence, but by engaging another faculty entirely, which we might call unreason.
Am I talking to myself?
Perhaps. Just like the saints, by the way, who boasted about talking to God. I’m less arrogant. I talk to myself, believing that I’m talking to the sweet soul of a dog. In any case, these conversations do me good.
EXORCISM
I carve out verses
short
as prayers
words are
legions
of demons
expelled
I cut adverbs
pronouns
I spare my
wrists
THE DAY LUDO SAVED LUANDA
On the living room wall there hung a watercolour depicting a group of Mucubals dancing. Ludo had met the artist, Albano Neves e Sousa, a fun, playful kind of guy, an old friend of her brother-in-law’s. She couldn’t stand the picture at first. She saw in it a distillation of everything she hated about Angola: savages celebrating something — some cause of joy, some glad omen — that was quite alien to her. Then, bit by bit, over the long months of silence and solitude, she began to feel some affection towards those figures that moved, circling around a fire, as though life really deserved such elegance.
She burned the furniture, she burned thousands of books, she burned all the paintings. It wasn’t until she was desperate that she took the Mucubals down off the wall. She was going to pull out the nail, just for aesthetic reasons, because it looked wrong there, serving no purpose, when it occurred to her that maybe this, this piece of metal, was holding up the wall. Maybe it was holding up the whole building. Who knows, if she pulled the nail out of the wall, the whole city might collapse.
She did not pull out the nail.
APPARITIONS, AND A NEARLY FATAL FALL
November passed, cloudless. December too. February arrived and the air was cracked with thirst. Ludo saw the lagoon drying out. First it darkened, then the grass turned gold, almost white, and the night-time lost the uproarious noise of the frogs. The woman counted the bottles of water. Not many left. The chickens, which she gave the muddy water from the swimming pool to drink, fell sick. They all died. There was still corn left, and beans, but to cook them used up a lot of water, and she needed to save it.
She went hungry again. One morning she got up early, shaking off her nightmares, staggered into the kitchen, and saw a bread roll on the table:
‘Bread!’
She picked it up in disbelief, with both hands.
She smelled it.
The scent of the bread carried her back to her childhood. She and her sister, on the beach, splitting some bread with butter. She bit into it. It was only when she had finished eating that she realised she was crying. She sat down, trembling.
Who could have brought her that bread?
Maybe someone had thrown it through the window. She imagined a broad-shouldered young man hurling a loaf of bread into the air. The bread tracing a slow arc, before landing on her table. The person in question might have thrown the bread up into the sky from the lagoon, which was now almost dry, as part of some mysterious ritual aimed at summoning the rain. A Quimbanda witch doctor, a real champion bread-thrower, since it was a quite considerable distance. That night she fell asleep early. She dreamed an angel had visited her.
In the morning she found, on the kitchen table, six bread rolls, a tin of guava jelly and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. Ludo sat down, her heart racing. Someone was coming in and out of her house. She got up. In recent months her eyesight had been getting worse and worse. No sooner had the light begun to fade, after a certain time of the day, than she began to move about just by instinct. She went up onto the terrace. She ran across to the building’s right-hand façade, the only one without any windows, which faced another block just a few metres away. She leaned over and saw the scaffolding, which surrounded the neighbouring building, right up against her own. That was how the invader had come in. She went down the stairs. It might have been because of her nerves, or because of the lack of light, but whatever the reason, her instinct failed her, she missed a step and tumbled, flailing. She fainted. The moment she had recovered her senses she knew she had fractured her left femur. So that’s how it’s going to be, she thought. I’m going to die not the victim of some mysterious African affliction, not through lack of appetite or exhaustion, not murdered by a thief, not because the sky has fallen on my head, but conspired against by one of the most famous laws of physics: Given two bodies of mass m1 and m2, and a distance r between them, these two bodies will be attracted to each other with a force proportional to the mass of each and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them. She had been saved by her lack of mass. Twenty kilos more and the impact would have been devastating. Pain climbed up her leg, paralysing the left side of her torso, preventing her from thinking clearly. She stayed immobile for quite some time, while night twisted about out there, like a boa constrictor, choking the harassed acacias on the streets and squares. The pain was barking, the pain was biting. Her mouth felt dry. She tried to spit out her tongue, because it was as though it didn’t belong to her, a piece of cork trapped in her throat.
She thought about the bottle of Coca-Cola. About the bottles of water she kept in the pantry. She would need to drag herself fifteen metres or so. She stretched out her arms, braced her hands against the cement, straightened her trunk. It was as if her leg were being chopped off with the blade of an axe. She yelped. Her own yelp surprised her.
‘I’ve woken the whole building,’ she muttered.
She woke up Little Chief, in the next-door apartment. The businessman had been dreaming about the Kianda. He had been having the same dream for several nights. He would go out onto the veranda in the middle of the night and see a light gleaming in the lagoon. The light increased in volume, a rainbow that was round and musical, and in the meantime the businessman felt his body losing its weight. He awoke at the moment when the light rose to meet him. This time he woke earlier, because the light screamed, or it seemed to him as though the light was screaming, in a sudden explosion of mud and frogs. He sat up in bed, feeling stifled, his heart pounding. He remembered the time he had spent shut away in that same room. Sometimes he used to hear a dog barking. He’d hear the distant voice of a woman chanting old songs.