Later Nelson told me what happened next: “When the MPLA uprising against FNLA and UNITA broke out that summer, there was also fighting in Lubango. But a lot of whites were fighting in the enemy ranks. In our region, in the south, the fate of the uprising hung in the balance a long time. One day a stocky, bearded man walked into headquarters and said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it — how to fight.’ That was Farrusco. He organized a unit, took Lubango, and later captured Pereira d’Eça and stayed there. He lacked arms. The whole time they had only their rifles and two 82-millimeter mortars. Farrusco and Carlos fired the mortars. They held them in their hands, without using the base, so both had burned palms from the hot barrels. Their hands were all blisters and sores.”
Everyone is vigilant at the inn tonight — a dull, unarmed, expectant vigilance. The only ones asleep may well be the boys at the outposts on the edge of town and in the ditches, because the sleep of the young is stronger than fear, thirst, or even mosquitoes. The oil lamp is burning in the room; silence. Nobody wants to talk or even knows what to talk about. Everybody is waiting for the dawn, growing more enervated and sleepy. There is a sound of snoring from those asleep on the floor, and the dirge of the mosquitoes. Sweat trickles down your face and your mouth is bitter from nicotine, dry and nauseating.
I nudged Farrusco’s shoulder because he was starting to nod. I wanted to return to Lubango today and then push on to Luanda. I thought that what the Portuguese said was important. He struck me as truthful. “Sure, it’s important,” Farrusco agreed. “They’re starting their invasion.”
“From here to Luanda,” I told him, “is fifteen hundred kilometers. I don’t know when I’ll get there because there are no more planes. In Luanda I can get in touch with Poland, and I think that what the Portuguese said is world news. Do something so I can get back to Lubango today.”
“We have to wait for dawn because you can’t use that road at night,” Farrusco said. “The lights are visible too far off and you can easily be ambushed. We’ll see what happens at dawn; we’ll see whether they attack. Between the border and Pereira d’Eça we have nobody. They could also move from the dam at Ruacana and cut our road to Lubango. From here there’s no other way to go, only along that road, which may already have been cut in the night because their army is stationed in Ruacana and from there a three-hour ride brings them to our road.”
The night ended and a red glow rose above the earth. Houses and trees appeared, and at the edge of town stood the wall of bush. The scouts returned and reported that they had encountered no one on the road. The tension eased slightly. Farrusco left to check the outposts. I moved along behind him. Where the sandy streets stopped at the edge of the forest, soldiers lay waiting to see if anything was moving among the trees. The bush resounded with splendid avian music; a noisy tropical hosanna was floating upward. Then the sun came up, the beams broke through as if a spotlight had come on, and everything suddenly quieted down.
We returned to the inn. The woman was making coffee and it smelled like dawn at a campground in Masuria. Only now did I notice the staff map on the wall. A tack in the middle of it represented the unit at Pereira d’Eça. There were no other tacks anywhere around it. Only higher up — a tack in Lubango, a tack in Moçâmedes, another in Matala. The higher up, the more tacks. A thick black diagonal line, slightly broken into steps, was our road. At the bottom, a row of crosses on the bank of the Cunene River was the border with Namibia. An arrow at the top showed the direction to Europe. The areas covered with little circles were bush. The areas covered with dots. . desert. The blue area. . the Atlantic. PN. . a park — lions, elephants, antelope. 5 in red: five of ours dead. 7 in black: seven of theirs dead. More red and black digits in two columns at the bottom, without a line for the totals, because death’s account is always open.
Now, God help us, to drive along the thick black line, upward to Lubango — alive. We set out under a high sun at ten, hoping that the maddening heat would force the enemy out of his ambushes and drive him into a state of helpless somnolence. Soldiers befuddled by the heat drifted around the scorching plaza, wandering in circles apathetically. Others sat in the shade, leaning against the walls of houses, against fences, against trees, as immobile as victims of African sleeping sickness. I don’t know what happened to Diogenes; he and the whole crew of the convoy had disappeared. I didn’t see the woman anywhere. Carlos stood on the veranda of the inn and waved his automatic in our direction. In the immobile scenery of this plaza, Carlos’s arm swiveling in the air seemed to be the one thing alive and capable of movement.
We rode in a Toyota jeep driven by Antonio, a sixteen-year-old soldier. A dazzling brilliance, a lake of pulsing light that moved forward, settled above the pavement. At a certain moment a vehicle emerged from the depths of this lake, like a phantom. It drew nearer to us. You never know who is coming from the opposite direction and Farrusco, sitting at my right, took the safety off his Ka-2 and unhooked a grenade from his belt. The vehicles stopped. An unkempt, unshaven Portuguese stepped out of a pickup truck loaded like a gypsy wagon with bedding; he was fleeing to South Africa with his whole family. He stood on the road hunched over and resigned, as if facing a judge who would sentence him, any moment now, to life imprisonment. He said that the road was empty and nobody had stopped him. But that meant nothing because the people who set ambushes usually didn’t bother refugees.
It was an open jeep and the rush of air provided some relief. It whistled in our ears. “This year,” Farrusco shouted to me through the wind, “I’ve had a son born to me. He’s in Lubango and I want to see him.”
“Is he big?” I asked as loud as I could, so he would hear me.
“Big,” he beamed. “A big boy.” We passed Roçadas and then the deserted bridge over the Cunene. “My father didn’t have any land and there were eight of us,” the commander shouted through the wind. “‘All without shoes. I don’t know if you’re aware that we have mountains and it’s cold up there.”
I shook my head: I hadn’t known. The jeep was traveling along the road through a landscape so monotonous that we seemed to be standing still. “When I was fighting as a commando,” I heard him say through the wind, “it struck me that I was on the wrong side. That’s why,” he added after a moment, coughing because the wind had dried out his throat, “when this war started I went over to the other side.”
We had arrived at the worst place, Humbe. Here the road along which the South African units might have advanced ran off to Ruacana. Farrusco ordered the vehicle to halt. He walked along the edge of the bush toward the crossroads to assess the situation. He noticed nothing suspicious and encountered nobody. “Putting one armored vehicle there,” he said, “would be enough to paralyze the whole road. We could do nothing because we have no antitank weapons.
“In Europe,” he said, “they taught me that a front is trenches and barbed wire, which form a distinct and visible line. A front on a river, along a road, or from village to village. You can trace it on a map with a pencil or point to it on the terrain. But here the front is everywhere and nowhere. There is too much land and too few people for a front line to exist. This is a wild, unorganized world and it’s hard to come to terms with it. There is no water, because there is a lot of desert here. You can’t hold out for long where there are no springs, and it’s a long way between springs. Here where we’re standing, there is water, but the next water is a hundred kilometers away. Every unit holds on to its water, because otherwise it dies. If there are a hundred kilometers between water, that space is nobody’s and there’s nobody there. So the front doesn’t consist of a line here, but of points, and moving points at that. There are hundreds of fronts because there are hundreds of units. Every unit is a front, a potential front. If our unit runs into an enemy unit, those two potential fronts turn into real fronts. A battle occurs. We are a three-man potential front now, traveling northward. If we are ambushed, we become a real front. This is a war of ambushes. On any road, at any place, there can be a front. You can travel the whole country and come back alive, or you can die a meter from where you’re standing. There are no principles, no methods. Everything comes down to luck and happenstance. This war is a real mess. Nobody knows just where they stand.”