Our mouths open in disbelief, feeling like crying again, we saw the fire suddenly fizzle without exploding eight cardinal points and a bottle of Senhor Tuarles’s whisky.
“Son of a whorovsky,” 3.14 said, and I thought he was complaining to the fire. “Couldn’t he have pissed somewhere else?”
The watchman, up above, was pissing a river on the groove of our fire, even a little bit in front of the point where the alcohol was about to meet the whisky. We saw his posture up there with his legs spread, pissing on our explosion plan.
“Soviet tupariov,” I said, just to say something and not feel like crying.
We couldn’t say a word.
The two of us watched the guard return to his post in the tower, sit down and cross his arms to sleep. He hadn’t even seen the fire.
“What’s that?” A woman’s voice filled us with supernatural fear. “Look over there!”
It was Dona Libânia, bent over behind us to point in the opposite direction, at a cardinal point that was after south and before west.
A whitish smoke was pouring out of the storage shed, where we had seen the birds and the dynamite; an enormous light that was not an explosion ignited itself like a big searchlight that hugged the ground as if trying to light up birds that fly at night.
“I don’t know that thing’s name,” I said, looking, “but I’ve seen it in the movies.”
“It’s that light you put on when you’re lost or you want the helicopter to find you.”
Another enormous light, but green this time, came on and started to slide along on its own, at high speed; we saw only the green stain casting shadows in the area around the storage shed as it headed towards the wire mesh fence on the side that faced the sea.
That was where the first concentrated noise of a chain explosion like one hundred grenades in a bag blowing up at the same time took place. The green light accelerated more quickly. Dona Libânia said in a very low voice: “Oh, my God.” I figure she didn’t even have time to say “God.” Another powerful explosion burst forth and shook the earth, the guard in the watchtower must have woken up, and we saw something that made us smile even in the midst of our fear of the warzone noises: with the dark sea behind, the fast-moving stain was a crazy pattern that not even the person who designed the Pink Panther could have made as beautiful, the dark stain of a body with a green light spewing smoke from its hand, one thousand tangled ropes lashed to that body that raced like a one-hundred-metre hurdler, one thousand ropes with imprisoned birds, seven or eight bird-cages tied to its waist, jumping like buoyant balloons, imprisoned birds at his ankles crying out that they didn’t want that forced ride of high-speed hopping and skipping across the water and the white surf of the dark sea; in his other arm more tangled ropes of parrots and I don’t know what-all other birds, even hens, all a pattern of brilliant green light and the bottom of the sea telling us — now no one could doubt it — that the stain running with bird-cages as it rode over the sea as though it were solid earth, that stain was the body of Sea Foam, laughing at having come down the beach so quickly with creatures hanging from his body as he unachieved the take-off of true-flown flight.
A few terrified voices had already begun to be heard in the distance and, far away from the storage shed, almost as he crossed the garbage dump, Foam had started to slow down, leaping higher. Dona Libânia hugged us again because the explosion was very loud, as though in imitation of a cannon. “Cardinal point south!” 3.14 shouted with a nervous laugh, looking at me, then looking straight ahead. Yes, it could only be the south. A strong light invaded the sky, turning as yellow as fire, and the ground shook; we saw blazes break out in the area around the storage shed, heard the noise of exploding bullets like popcorn forgotten in boiling oil. Dona Libânia trembled. A beautiful fire made a perfect circle around the Mausoleum; the guard from the tower dropped his weapon and fled down the alley behind commando André’s house, another very strong outburst that felt like two outbursts hurled cement into the air and made the Mausoleum tremble. “Northwest!” I shouted. The air began to fill with fine dust and the blazes roared higher as though trying to lick the very tip of the rocket; there was fire even on the side where we had not put any whisky, a beautiful symmetrical fire almost drawn with a set of school compasses, and then an even stronger explosion made all of Bishop’s Beach tremble. Even those who didn’t want to had to come out onto their verandas or onto the street to spy out whether this was, in fact, war, or a mere surprise of colours in the sky about which someone had forgotten to warn the population during the news broadcast on National Radio of Angola. The Mausoleum lighted up all at once, with the brilliant sounds of the dynamite that we had codified with our very cardinal points: huge noises on all sides with lights that seemed to accompany them, and now it wasn’t only that yellow fire that can be sparked by bullets or explosives: a mixed light of various colours grew in the middle of the dazzling disorder, with small and large explosions, which did not frighten us as much as before. It was even more beautiful to watch the reflection of the darkness igniting in the sea, which, even though dark, now had on its hide some lights that imitated the strong tones of watercolours, when Sea Foam’s green light went out, leaving him standing in the garbage dump almost still and dragged in all directions by the birds, with him laughing out loud, turned into a scarecrow from the fields which in the end became a clown who was everyone’s friend and didn’t want to frighten anyone.
3.14 released my sweating hand. We had spent the whole time kneeling, concentrating on simultaneously feeling the fear created by the enormous explosion and all the colours entering our open eyes and mouths. Even today I don’t know how to explain the fact that we didn’t even speak about how our hearts had beaten so fast when we stood up on aching legs, both of us with tears in our moist eyes as we saw, dexploded at night in that way, our beloved Bishop’s Beach covered with an ashen dust from the luminous explosion that had finally occurred.
A big explosion awoke other birds in the trees and the fish in the sea. We saw colours from a carnival of fire: yellows, reds pretending to be the colour of oranges in a green that was bluish without being aquamarine, all shining as they imitated stars that knew how to dance in a sky that was no longer dark from being so brightly lit up with our explosion, so beautiful from lingering in the noises and the pretty colours that our eyes looked upon, never to be forgotten in the passage of time — not for our whole lives.
14
The sky stayed lit up from other explosions almost without sound, a madness of brilliantly coloured patterns that I had never seen in the movies when the cowboys blew up mountains with more dynamite than we had used.
“Maybe there were other materials in the top of the cabinet.” 3.14 spoke in a very low voice. “It’s possible the other Soviet boxes had other things that shouldn’t be mixed with fire.”
“Shouldn’t be?” I smiled. “Of course they should be. Just look at how beautiful our sea is when it’s all aglow!”
Everyone looked at the lighted sky of Bishop’s Beach, that sky that gazed down at people who were still coming running from other streets to get to the square and have more space and more darkness to watch the ceiling of the city of Luanda.
People who had gone away came back. The Comrade Gas Jockey came running. From far off, he must have thought that the light of the explosion was one of his gas pumps, that someone had set down a lighted cigarette, or even that the Soviet dynamiting had already started. Others, elders, came to see up close, because from a distance they had thought that it was a fireworks show to commemorate some political date that they had forgotten about, or even something related to the Mausoleum itself; still others had said that the explosions could only be by order of the Comrade President, because fireworks shows that big and beautiful had never been seen in Luanda and had to be authorized by the political bureau of the Party.