LISTEN RYSIU I SENT THAT NOTE REALIZING HOW ABSURD IT ALL IS AT THIS MOMENT
DONT WORRY LISTEN TELL CZARNECKI: MICHAL IT IS GETTING VERY BAD HERE. ASSAULT ON LUANDA COULD COME ANY DAY WITH LOSS OF COMMUNICATIONS. THAT IS WHY I WANT TO SET IT UP LIKE THIS: IF YOU CANNOT GET THROUGH TO ME EVENINGS AT AGREED TIME TRY TO CONNECT MORNING OF NEXT DAY AT 7 GMT AND AGAIN AT 20 GMT AND AGAIN NEXT DAY UNTIL WE CONNECT AND GOD GRANTS WE ARE IN TOUCH OK. ARRANGE TO SUSPEND ANY POSSIBLE TRAVEL TO LUANDA UNLESS SOMEBODY IS PLANNING SUICIDE OK? HUGS RYSIEK
YES OK THANKS KEEPING OUR FINGERS CROSSED
THANKS OLD MAN BEST WISHES FROM LUANDA AND IM WAITING TO HEAR FROM YOU TOMORROW AT 20 GMT OK?
TKS GOODNIGHT
I stood up from the machine drenched in sweat but glad to have sent such fresh news, straight off the radio. After midnight I phoned Queiroz. The attack had been held off, but there were a lot of casualties.
At night I go onto the balcony, point the antenna in the direction of the bay, and search for distant stations with my transistor radio. Yes, normal life exists somewhere, and all you have to do is put your ear to the speaker and listen. One hemisphere is snoring and tossing from side to side while the other one is getting up, boiling the milk, shaving, and powdering. And then the other way around. A person wakes up and doesn’t think that the last day of his life could be beginning. A splendid feeling, but already so normal that nobody there pays any attention to it. Hundreds if not thousands of radio stations are working every second and a sea of words is surging into the air. It’s interesting to hear the way the world argues, agitates, and persuades; how it threatens, how it shams and lies; how everybody is right and doesn’t want to hear the other side. Right now the whole world is worried about Angola and here Paris, there London, Cairo, and Tokyo are talking about it. The world contemplates the great spectacle of combat and death, which is difficult for it to imagine in the end, because the image of war is not communicable — not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera. War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides. To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more. I manipulate the transistor, which goes quiet because the batteries are running down (I won’t get new ones); I listen to what the distant radio stations are saying. Various voices are scattering ideas and suggestions. What to do with Angola? Call an international conference. Send in United Nations troops and let them separate the brawlers there. But who will pay for that, with the inflation we have? So let an all-black army go and the Arabs can pay for it. The Arabs don’t know what to do with money. The best thing would be to call on the Angolans to come to an agreement. Let them sign a ceasefire, let them divvy up the seats of power, let them make it up. Warn them that if they don’t make it up, they won’t get any more money. Make love, not war. A million-strong Cuban army stands on the border of South Africa. There, in the dry bush, among barefoot tribes fleeing in panic, in that place without roads, without lights, without schools, without cities — there, the fate of contemporary civilization is being decided. Give Vorster help; give him the green light. Endow him with moral support!
Great plans, global strategies.
Overseas they don’t know that it all comes down to two people here.
One of them is Ruiz, a congenial and lively Portuguese, the pilot of an old two-engine DC-3, the only plane that the MPLA has in Luanda. The machine was built in 1943; the motors spit gobs of soot, the wings are patched, the tires are bald, the fuselage is full of holes. Only Ruiz knows how to close the door, and it’s not easy for him. He flies this plane day and night; he is in the air around the clock. Ruiz flies to Brazzaville for ammunition, and then to a besieged city in the Angolan borderlands to drop off cartridge boxes and bags of flour and take the serious casualties back to Luanda. If Ruiz doesn’t arrive on time the cities will have to surrender and the wounded will die. In a sense, the fate of the war rests on his shoulders. Ruiz flies around Angola by memory because there are no air controllers; I don’t even know if his plane’s radio works. Often he himself doesn’t know who holds the airport where he is supposed to land. Yesterday it was still in our hands, but today it could belong to the enemy. That’s why he first flies over the airport without landing. Sometimes he recognizes the silhouettes of his acquaintances, so he descends and lands peacefully. Sometimes, however, they start firing on the plane, in which case he turns back and delivers the bad news to Luanda. In this country without transport or communication, Ruiz knows what’s happening on the fronts and which cities belong to whom. He takes off at dawn, makes several trips a day, and returns at midnight. Starved soldiers in Luso, the dying garrison in Novo Redondo, and the cut-off defenders of Quibala are waiting for his plane. Now Luanda, which can’t hold out without ammunition, is waiting. The best place to find him is at the airport, when he is inspecting the motors early in the morning. Trouble with one of the motors could ground the plane and change the course of the war. There are no spare parts, no mechanics. And the plane is needed constantly. In a moment, Ruiz disappears into the cockpit. The propellers rotate, the plane is lost in thick, impenetrable clouds of black smoke and, thumping, rattling, grinding, the decrepit pile of scrap heaves toward takeoff.
The second person on whom everything depends now is Alberto Ribeiro, a short, heavyset thirty-year-old engineer. The northern front stretches near Luanda, along the Bengo River. On the banks of this river stands the pumping station that supplies water to Luanda. If the station is out of action, there is no water in the city. The enemy knows this and constantly bombards it. Sometimes they hit the pumps and they stop working. Luanda can take five days without water, no more. In the tropics people can stand the thirst no longer, and epidemics break out besides. The only person who can repair the pumps is Alberto. Thanks to him, the city has water from time to time; it can exist and defend itself. If Alberto were killed in an automobile accident on the way to the station or hit by a shell, Luanda would have to surrender after a few days.
General mobilization. Long lines of young men, mostly unemployed. Instead of holding up a wall, it’s better to do your duty — in the army, you get something to eat. They’ll soon be fighting and killing. Work at last, even glory. Packed off by their mothers and wives, a lot of women with big bellies. People will give birth and kill until the end of the world. Those who are now seeing the light of day will be twenty-five in the year 2000. Grand celebrations of the dawn of a new millennium. Meetings between youth and the veterans of the twentieth century. An interview with a spry old dame who lived through World War I. An impressive memory and dauntless coquetry to boot, the old lady mentioning how the army was marching through once and up in the hayloft she and a certain soldier, well, yes sir, I’ve got this straight, I remember it very clearly. Half of humanity will have slant eyes. Half of humanity will not understand what the other half is saying. Time to perfect methods of communicating by signs, time to begin instructions in sign language. The white race will enter the vestigial phase. Barely thirteen percent of the inhabitants of earth will have white skin. Barely two percent will have naturally blond hair. Blondes: a more and more distinctive phenomenon, a rarity of rarities. Which is better — to think or not to think about the future? Future shock: the travails of postindustrial society, luxury. For others, everyday problems: What can we find to eat today? The Bantu language has no future tense; the concept of the future doesn’t exist for the Bantu people, they are not tormented by the thought of what will happen in a month, in a year (see the Reverend Father Placide Tempels, La Philosophie bantoue). The inductees are led in groups straight to the front. So raw and green — why? To create a false crowd, more confusion? The registration center closes at 6 P.M. People drift away and disappear into the labyrinths of the musseques, the poor quarter. The day, quite ordinary, even peaceful, ends.