I never knew for sure what happened to the man who raped me. He was a fisherman. They say he ran off to Spain. He disappeared. I became pregnant. I locked myself away in a bedroom. They locked me away in a bedroom. Outside, I heard people whispering. When it was time, a midwife came to help me. I never even saw my daughter’s face. They took her from me.
The shame. The shame is what stopped me leaving the house. My father died without ever addressing another word to me. I would go into the living room and he’d get up and leave. Years passed, he died. Some months later, my mother followed him. I moved to my sister’s house. Bit by bit I forgot myself. I thought about my child every day. Every day I taught myself not to think about her.
I was never again able to go out without feeling a profound shame.
That has passed, now. I go out and I no longer feel ashamed. I no longer feel afraid. I go out and the grocer women greet me. They give me a laugh, as though we are family.
The children play with me, they take my hand. I don’t know if it’s because I’m very old, or because I’m as much a child as they are.
LAST WORDS
I write feeling my way through the letters. An odd experience, as I cannot read what I have written. Therefore, I am not writing for myself.
For whom am I writing?
I am writing for the person I used to be. Perhaps the person I once left behind persists, standing there, still and grim, in some attic of time — on a bend, at a crossroads — and in some mysterious way she is able to read the lines I am setting out here, without seeing them.
Ludo, my dear: I am happy now.
Blind as I am, I see better than you. I weep for your blindness, for your infinite stupidity. It would have been so easy for you to open the door, so easy for you to go into the street and embrace life. I see you peering out of the window, terrified, like a child peeping under the bed expecting to find monsters.
Monsters, show me the monsters: these people out on the street.
My people.
I’m so sorry for everything you’ve missed.
So sorry.
But isn’t unhappy humanity just like you?
DREAMS ARE WHERE IT ALL BEGINS
In her dreams, Ludo was a little girl. She was sitting on a beach of white sand. Sabalu, lying on his back, his head in her lap, was looking at the sea. They were talking about the past and the future. They were exchanging recollections. They laughed over the strange way they’d met. The laugh that came from the two of them shook the air, like a dazzle of birds in the sleepy morning. Then, Sabalu got up:
‘The day is born, Ludo. Let’s go.’
And they went, the two of them, towards the light, laughing and talking, like two people about to head out to sea.
Lisbon, 5 February 2012
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
On a now distant afternoon back in 2004, the filmmaker Jorge António challenged me to write the screenplay for a feature-length film to be shot in Angola. I told him the story of a Portuguese woman who bricked herself in, just days before Independence in 1975, terrified by the way events were progressing. Thanks to Jorge’s enthusiasm, I did write the screenplay. Although the film fell by the wayside, it was from that original structure that I came to this novel. In order to write the chapters about the Kuvale, I found some inspiration in the poems of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, as well as in one of his most brilliant essays: ‘Aviso à Navegação: A brief introductory look at the Kuvale shepherds’, INALD, Luanda, 1997.
Several people have helped me in the writing of this book. I would like to thank, in particular, my parents, who have always been my first readers, as well as Patrícia Reis and Lara Longle. Finally, I would like to thank the Brazilian poet Christiana Nóvoa, who at my request wrote Ludo’s poems in the chapters ‘Haikai’ and ‘Exorcism’.