I returned to room 47 in the hotel, drove a herd of cockroaches out of the bed, and lay down to sleep. I never dream, but this time I suddenly found myself in the woods outside Warsaw, where hooligans with knives were ducking in and out from behind the bushes, drawing nearer, as if playing hide-and-seek. I opened my eyes to see Dona Cartagina, the thin and exhausted Oscar (now owner of the hotel), and the doorman Fernando — with a plastic medallion bearing the likeness of Agostinho Neto around his neck — standing over me. They were happy that I had returned and, quite pointlessly, kept asking me if I was alive — with such insistence and incredulity that in the end I couldn’t tell if I was awake, or if this was still a dream in which Cartagina, Oscar, and Fernando were suddenly prowling with knives through a grove of trees outside Warsaw. I don’t know what happened next (I probably went back to sleep), because when I got out of bed the room was empty. There was a musty dampness in the air, and the ceiling fan was out of order. I tried turning the faucet. The faucet snorted violently, then silence: no water. I ran downstairs, where Felix was dozing at the reception desk with his elbows folded on heaps of unneeded paper and a stack of valueless money, his pale face reposing motionless and expressionless in his hands. I shook him: “Give me something to drink, Felix!” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “There’s been no water for three days,” he said. “The last wells are running dry. When there’s nothing to drink, the city will have to give up.” I left him and headed for the kitchen, but when I opened the door such a macabre odor assailed my nostrils that my legs grew heavy and I couldn’t take a step. The stench emanated from a mountain of unwashed dishes and pots, but above all from a fetid pig that the black cook was quartering with a cleaver. “Camarada,” I said, leaning on the table to keep from dropping over, “give me water.” He put down the cleaver and gave me a mug of water from a tin barrel. I felt a softness and a chill inside me: I was coming back to life. “Give me some more,” I said. He consented: “Drink as much as it takes for you to feel good, camarada.”
I locked myself in my room to make a phone call. The telephone worked. The concept of totality exists in theory, but never in life. In even the best-built wall there is always a chink (or we hope there is, and that means something). Even when we have the feeling that nothing works anymore, something works and makes a minimal existence possible. Even if there’s an ocean of evil around us, green and fertile islets will poke above the water. They can be seen, they are on the horizon. Even the worst situation in which we can find ourselves breaks down into elements that include something for us to grab hold of, like the branch of a bush that grows on the bank, to avoid being sucked to the bottom by the whirlpool. That chink, that island, that branch sustain us on the surface of existence.
Thus in our closed city, where thousands of things had ceased functioning, just when it seemed that everything was ruined, the telephone nevertheless worked. From the south, from the border with Namibia, I had brought news that today or perhaps tomorrow the armored columns would roll into Angola. The baker ’s son had reported that the South African army was already in Tsumeb, ready for war. They would need three hours to drive to the border, three days to drive to Benguela, and perhaps another week to drive to Luanda. No one in Luanda knew this, because the capital had no contact with the rest of the country. I wanted to pass along what the baker ’s son and Farrusco had said: that the intervention had been set in motion and that the southern front wouldn’t hold. I started phoning around, but none of the numbers answered. I tried again and again. The signal droned on and nobody anywhere picked up the telephone. I looked at the calendar, because I no longer had a feeling for time, which means that time had lost all sense of division for me, all measurability, it had fallen apart, it had oozed out like a dense tropical exhalation. Concrete time had ceased to signify anything and for a long while now the fact that it was Wednesday or Friday, the tenth or the twentieth, eight in the morning or two in the afternoon, had meant nothing to me. Life had propelled me from event to event in an undefined process directed toward an unseen goal. I knew only that I wanted to be here until the end, regardless of when it came, or how. Everything was a total puzzle that absorbed and fascinated me.
Using the calendar, I calculated that it was October 18, 1975. And, as I now remembered, Saturday. That explained the silence of the telephones. Because on Saturday and Sunday all life died away. Those two days were governed by their own inviolable laws. The guns fell silent and the war was suspended. People put down their weapons and fell asleep. Sentries left their posts and observers put away their binoculars. The roads and the streets emptied. Headquarters and offices were closed. Markets were depopulated. Radio stations went off the air. Buses stopped running. In an incomprehensible but absolute way, this vast country with its war and destruction, its aggression and poverty, came to a halt, went motionless as if someone had cast a spell, as if it were enchanted. Neither the most titanic explosion nor any heavenly apparition nor any human appeal could budge it from its weekend lethargy. Worst of all, I could never establish what happened to the people. The closest friends disappeared like stones in water. They were not at home and not in the streets. Yet they couldn’t have traveled outside the city. Clubs, restaurants, and cafés — they didn’t exist. I don’t know — I can’t explain it.
All the warring sides respected this weekend rest, and the bitterest enemies acknowledged the opponent’s right to two days of relaxation. In this matter there were no divisions; the weekend laxity swept up and united everyone. These people were constructed in such a way that their vital energy lasted from Monday to Friday, after which they passed at midnight into a state of nirvana, into nonexistence, freezing in the positions they were in at that hour. Everything was enveloped in an apathetic silence that had the effect of a sleeping potion. Even nature seemed to go to sleep. The wind died down, the palms stiffened, and the fauna disappeared into the earth.
Oscar came in the evening with a telephone number written on a piece of paper, saying that I was to call it. “Whose number is it?” I asked. He didn’t know. They had phoned the hotel and said to give me that number when I returned to Luanda. Oscar left me alone in the room. I picked up the receiver and dialed the number written on the paper. At the other end of the line, a low masculine voice answered. I said they had given me that number in the hotel and said to call. Was I named such-and-such? asked the low voice. Of course, I said. The first part of the conversation had been in Portuguese, but at that moment the other switched to Spanish and from his way of speaking and his accent I realized that I was speaking to a Cuban. Anyone who has spent some time in Latin America and knows Spanish can immediately distinguish the Cuban accent: It has a specific melody and is a slaphappy fusion of words whose endings are regularly omitted. I asked the other who he was and what he was doing, thinking that he was a reporter from Prensa Latina or someone of that order. Then he said, “Man, don’t ask too much because whoever asks too much gets too much of an answer.” I shut up, since I didn’t know what he was talking about. “We’ll see you in your room,” he said. “We’ll be there in an hour.” And he hung up.