One time when they were punishing him, and they put him in a tiny cell, which they called Kifangondo after the site of the great battle, Little Chief found a rat and adopted it. He called it Splendour, a name that was perhaps a little optimistic for a common rat, brown and shifty, with a gnawed-on ear and fur in pretty poor shape. When Little Chief reappeared in the regular cell, with Splendour nestled on his right shoulder, some of his companions teased him. Most ignored him. At that time, at the end of the seventies, the São Paulo prison brought together an extraordinary collection of personalities. American and English mercenaries, taken in combat, lived alongside dissident exiles from the ANC who had fallen into misfortune. Young intellectuals from the far left exchanged ideas with old Portuguese Salazarists. There were guys locked up for diamond trafficking, and others for not having stood to attention during the raising of the flag. Some of the prisoners had been important leaders in the party. They took pride in their friendship with the president.
‘Only yesterday, the old man and I went fishing together,’ one of them boasted to Little Chief. ‘When he finds out what’s happened he’ll get me out of here and have the morons who did this to me arrested.’
He was shot the following week.
Many didn’t even know what they’d been accused of. Some went crazy. The interrogations often seemed erratic, preposterous, as though the aim were not to extract information from the detainees, but merely to torture and confuse them.
In this context, a man with a trained rat wasn’t enough to surprise anyone. Little Chief took care of Splendour. He taught him tricks. He’d say ‘Sit!’, and the animal sat. ‘Around!’, he’d order, and the rat started walking in circles. Monte heard about this and went to the cell to visit the prisoner.
‘They tell me you’ve made a new friend.’
Little Chief didn’t answer. He’d created a rule for himself never to reply to an agent from the political police, unless the agent was shouting. In such cases he would scream an attack at him in return, accusing him of being in the service of the socio-fascist dictatorship, etc. Monte found the prisoner’s behaviour exasperating:
‘I’m talking to you, for fuck’s sake! Don’t act like I’m invisible.’
Little Chief turned his back on him. Monte lost it, and tugged on his shirt. That was the moment he saw Splendour. He grabbed hold of the animal, threw it onto the floor and stamped on it. In the midst of all those crimes, the vast crimes that were being committed in those days, right there, within the prison walls, the tiny death of Splendour affected nobody, apart from Little Chief. The young man fell into deep dejection. He spent his days lying on a mat, unspeaking, unmoving, indifferent to his cellmates. He became so thin that his ribs stuck out beneath his skin like the keys of a kisanji. Finally, they took him to the infirmary.
When he was arrested, Nasser Evangelista had been working at the Maria Pia hospital as an orderly. He took no interest in politics. All his attention was trained on a young nurse called Sueli Mirela, well known for the length of her legs, which she displayed generously in daring miniskirts, and for her round hairdo in the style of Angela Davis. The girl, who was going out with a state security agent, allowed herself to be seduced by the orderly’s sweet words. Her boyfriend, in a rage, accused his rival of being linked to the fractionists. When he was locked up, Nasser started to work in the prison infirmary. He was moved when he saw Little Chief’s condition. He conceived and organised the plan himself, a plan that was brave and yet happy, which made it possible to return the frail young man to freedom. Well, to relative freedom since, as Little Chief himself liked to repeat, no man is free as long as one other man is in prison.
Nasser Evangelista registered the death of Little Chief, alias Arnaldo Cruz, aged nineteen, student of law, and he himself put the body in the coffin. A distant cousin, who was in reality a comrade from the same small party in which he was himself an activist, received the casket. He buried it, in a discreet ceremony at the Alto das Cruzes cemetery. He did this after removing the passenger in question. Little Chief got into the habit of visiting the grave on the anniversary of his supposed death, taking flowers to himself. ‘To me, it’s a reflection on the fragility of life and a small exercise in otherness,’ he explained to his friends. ‘I go out there, and I try and think of myself as a close relative. I am, really, my own closest relative. I think about his defects, about his qualities, and whether or not he deserves my tears. I almost always cry a little.’
It was months before the police discovered the fraud. Then they arrested him again.
MYSTERIES OF LUANDA
Little Chief enjoyed talking to the handicraft sellers. He would get lost down the dusty alleyways amid the wooden stalls, studying the Congolese fabrics, the thousand and one cloths showing sunsets and drums, the Chokwe masks the craftsmen used to bury, during the rainy months, to make them look old. Sometimes he’d buy some object or other he didn’t even like, just to prolong the conversation. Moved more by a spirit of solidarity than any thought of financial gain, he set up a company to produce and trade in handicrafts. He would imagine and design pieces in dark wood, which the craftsmen then undertook to replicate. He sold the objects at Luanda airport and in small shops dedicated to so-called ‘fair trade’, in Paris, London and New York. He employed more than twenty craftsmen. One of the most successful pieces was the figure of a Thinker, a popular figure of traditional Angolan statuary, with a gag over his mouth. The people named it Don’t Think.
One afternoon, Little Chief walked across the market without paying much attention to the sellers. He just smiled, nodding at anyone who greeted him. Papy Bolingô was beginning his show. Fofo was singing an old number by Orchestra Baobab. The bar was full. Seeing him arrive, one of the staff came over to him carrying a folding chair. He opened it up and the businessman sat down. People laughed, fascinated, as Fofo moved in time with the rhythm, opening and closing his enormous mouth.
Little Chief had watched the show many times. He knew that Papy Bolingô had worked in a circus, in France, during his years of exile. It was doubtless at that time that he’d discovered and developed his extraordinary skills as a ventriloquist, from which he now earned his living.
‘Fofo talks!’ he would insist, laughing. ‘Fofo sings. It’s not me. I taught him his first words, he was very little. Then I taught him to sing.’
‘Then we want to hear him singing a long way away from you!’
‘No chance! That’s one thing this guy won’t do. He’s such a shy little creature.’
Little Chief waited till the end of the show. People were on their way out, really excited, entranced by the miracle they had just witnessed. The businessman approached the performers:
‘Congratulations! Better every time.’
‘Thanks,’ the hippo thanked him with his metallic voice, a dramatic baritone. ‘We had a nice audience.’
Little Chief stroked his back:
‘How are you getting along, over on your little farm?’
‘Very well, padrinho. I’ve got loads of water, and mud for rolling around in.’
Papy Bolingô exploded into bright laughter. His friend laughed with him. Fofo seemed to imitate them, shaking his head, stamping his thick feet on the little stage.
The owner of the establishment, an old guerilla fighter called Pedro Afonso, had lost his right leg when a landmine exploded. This had not robbed him of his love of dancing. To see him dance, you would never have guessed he wore a prosthesis. He came over, when he heard the two friends laughing, tracing out some ornate rumba steps on the beaten-earth floor: