Turbulent days passed. Demonstrations, strikes, rallies. Ludo closed the windows to prevent the apartment from being filled with the laughter of the people on the streets, which burst into the air like fireworks. Orlando, the son of a trader from Minho who’d settled in Catete in the early years of the century, and a Luandan mestiza who’d died in childbirth, had never nurtured family connections. However, one of his cousins, Vitorino Gavião, showed up again around this time. He had spent five months living in Paris, occupying himself with drink, women, plotting, and writing poems on paper napkins in the bistros that were frequented by exiles from Portugal and Africa, thereby acquiring the aura of a romantic revolutionary. He entered their house like a tempest, disordering the books in the bookcase, the glasses on the dresser, and unsettling Phantom. The puppy would chase around after him at a safe distance, barking and growling.
‘The comrades want to speak to you, damn it!’ shouted Vitorino, levelling a punch at Orlando’s shoulder. ‘We’re negotiating a provisional government. We need good men.’
‘Could be,’ admitted Orlando. ‘Actually, we have plenty of good men. What we’re short of is good sense.’
Then he paused. Yes, he said, quietly now, the country could use the experience he had gathered. But he feared the more extremist currents at the heart of the movement. He understood the necessity for greater social justice, but the communists, who were threatening to nationalise everything, alarmed him. Expropriating private property. Expelling the whites. Knocking out all the petite bourgeoisie’s teeth. He, Orlando, took pride in having a perfect smile, and he had no desire for dentures. His cousin laughed, attributing their verbal excesses to the euphoria of the moment, then complimented him on the whisky and poured himself some more. This cousin with a sphere of curly hair like Jimi Hendrix, a flowery shirt open across his sweating chest, alarmed the sisters.
‘He talks like a black!’ said Odete, accusingly. ‘And besides, he stinks. Whenever he comes over, he infects the whole house.’
Orlando became enraged. He left, slamming the door behind him. He returned in the evening, drier, sharper, a man with a close kinship to a thorn bush. He went up to the terrace, Phantom with him, took a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whisky, and there he stayed. He returned when night was drawing in, bringing the darkness with him, and a strong smell of alcohol and tobacco. He stumbled over his own feet, shoving into the furniture, with harsh whispers against this whole fucking life.
The first gunshots signalled the start of the big farewell parties. Young people were dying in the streets, waving flags, and meanwhile the settlers danced. Rita, their neighbour in the apartment next door, traded Luanda for Rio de Janeiro. On her last night, she invited two hundred friends round for a dinner that went on till daybreak.
‘Whatever we can’t drink we’ll leave for you,’ she said to Orlando, pointing at the pantry stacked high with cases of the finest Portuguese wines. ‘Drink them. The important thing is that there mustn’t be anything left over for the communists to celebrate with.’
Three months later, the apartment block was almost empty. Ludo, meanwhile, didn’t know where to put so many bottles of wine, crates of beer, tins of food, hams, pieces of salt cod, and kilos of salt, sugar and flour, not to mention the endless supply of cleaning and hygiene products. Orlando had received from one friend — a collector of sports cars — a Chevrolet Corvette and an Alfa Romeo GTA. Another had given him the keys to his apartment.
‘I’ve never been a lucky man,’ Orlando complained to the two sisters, and it was not clear whether he was being ironic or speaking in earnest. ‘Just when I start collecting cars and apartments, the communists show up wanting to take everything away from me.’
Ludo would turn on the radio and the revolution would come into the house. ‘It’s the power of the people that is the cause of all this chaos,’ one of the most popular singers of the moment kept repeating. ‘Hey, brother,’ sang another, ‘love your brother / Don’t look to see what his colour is / Just see him as Angolan / With the Angolan people united / Independence will soon be here.’ Some of the tunes didn’t really go with the words. It was as though they were stolen from songs of another age, ballads that were sad like the light of an ancient dusk. Leaning out of the window, half hidden behind the curtains, Ludo could see the trucks pass by, loaded up with men. Some of them were flying flags. Others had banners with slogans:
Full Independence!
500 years of colonial oppression are enough!
We want the Future!
The demands all ended in exclamation marks. The exclamation marks got mixed up with the machetes the protesters were carrying. There were also machetes shining on the flags and the banners. Some of the men were carrying one in each hand. They were holding them up high. They were striking the blades against one another in a mournful clamour.
One night, Ludo dreamed that beneath the streets of the city, under the respectable mansions in the lower town, there stretched an endless network of tunnels. The roots of the trees wound their way, unimpeded, down through the vaults. There were thousands of people living underground, sunk deep in mud and darkness, feeding themselves on whatever the bourgeoisie tossed into the sewers. Ludo was walking amid the throng. The men were waving machetes. They were striking their blades against one another and the noise echoed down the tunnels. One of them approached, brought his dirty face right up close to the Portuguese woman’s face and smiled. He whispered in her ear, in a voice that was deep and sweet:
‘Our sky is your floor.’
LULLABY FOR A SMALL DEATH
Odete insisted that they leave Angola. Her husband responded with muttered, harsh words. The women could go if they wanted. Let the settlers set sail. Nobody wanted them here. A cycle was being completed. A new time was beginning. Come sun or storm, the Portuguese would not be lit by the light of the future, nor lashed by wild hurricanes. The more he and Odete whispered, the angrier the engineer got. He could spend hours enumerating the crimes committed against the Africans, the mistakes, the injustices, the disgraces, until his wife gave up and shut herself away in the guest bedroom in tears. It was a huge surprise when he arrived home, two days before Independence, and announced that in a week’s time they would be in Lisbon. Odete opened her eyes wide:
‘Why?’
Orlando sat down in one of the living room armchairs. He pulled off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt and, finally, in a gesture quite unlike him, took off his shoes and put his feet up on the little coffee table.
‘Because we can. We can go, now.’
The next night the couple went out for yet another farewell party. Ludo waited for them to come home — reading, knitting, till two in the morning. She went to bed worried, and she slept badly. She got up at seven, put on a dressing gown, called out to her sister. Nobody answered. She was certain some tragedy must have befallen them. She waited an hour before looking for their address book. First she called the Nuneses, the couple who had organised the previous night’s party. One of the servants answered. The family had gone off to the airport. Mr Orlando the engineer and his wife had indeed been at the party, that was right, but they hadn’t stayed long. He’d never seen Mr Orlando in such a good mood. Ludo thanked him and hung up. She opened the address book again. Odete had scratched out in red ink the names of the friends who had left Luanda. Few remained. Only three answered, and none of them knew a thing. One of them, a maths teacher at the Salvador Correia high school, promised to phone a policeman friend of his. He would call back as soon as he had any information.