“You’re not Goan. You’re Portuguese.”
“Not at all. I’m from this land,” Amarildo would reply, passing his hand over the ground. And he would repeat: “I am this land.”
The Fernandes property was so vast that it didn’t even appear to have a boundary wall. I would fall asleep as soon as darkness fell, lulled by the cicadas that fear silence more than they do death. The drumbeats, coming from the direction of the Munhava marshlands, reminded us that the walls did exist, and that another kind of merriment was kindling on the other side of the road. Nearer, almost inside the room, frogs belched on an empty stomach. And empty was how the world became. Munhava slept weightlessly in my bed.
I would wake up in the morning when the earth was still asleep, covered only by the moisture of the dew. Amarildo Fernandes would walk through the early morning mist, carrying his shoes.
“Here in Munhava, you don’t wet your feet so much if you walk barefoot,” he said.
And I would glisten like a drop of dew. I was a kid. Who, in those days, paid any attention to someone of my age? But Amarildo made me feel like a person and would dedicate his first words of the day to me. And, within his Portuguese, he spoke another language unknown to me. For instance, he would say: in Munhava, there’s so much water that a tree even gets mixed up with its own roots.
Fernandes was right. In Beira, it was always as if it had just stopped raining. For our host, all this water was a blessing. He was the owner of extensive rice fields; rice has more gills than it has roots, and needs more water than a fish. Only my father reminded us, bitterly:
“So much water here and so many folk without water!”
It was Sunday, and it was early. The house was still asleep. Only I and Amarildo Fernandes were enjoying the first rays of sunlight. It was so light on the farm that only when night fell did I know where the inside of the house was. And there was our host, skipping across ant tracks, a finger to his lips telling us to keep quiet:
“We must let Evelina sleep. Poor soul, she’s so thin. Don’t you think?”
“Thin, Dona Evelina?”
“Yes, she’s certainly thin. She’s so thin I don’t even notice when she’s naked.”
On these morning jaunts, Amarildo Fernandes would always take me to see the rice fields, where different tones of green undulated as far as the eye could see. But on this occasion, he took me in his old truck over towards the fuel tanks. And there he started to heave rocks that were bigger than I was. I helped as much as I could. Above all, I helped when we got back to the farm, and he started digging holes in the ground to bury the stones.
Amarildo planting stones? That was the first sign of madness. By this time, my father was awake, and questioned him.
“What am I doing? I’m sowing.”
He was doing what country folk do with corn: he was planting three seeds together to bring luck.
“God wants everything in pairs,” the planter explained.
“Sorry, but why are you planting three stones then?”
“So that a fourth one will be born.”
So that’s what happened over the whole of that Sunday: the truck coming and going, Fernandes’s skinny arms carrying and then depositing the stones. We returned home in silence, scared that we would have to accept the evidence of our friend’s mental illness.
“What was all that about, that rushing around with stones?” my mother asked.
“He said he had a dream.”
“Amarildo is always dreaming.”
“He said he dreamt the river was flooding Munhava. He dreamt the water was invading his farm.”
“Amarildo isn’t like me,” my old man concluded, in defence of his former colleague. The Goan had always had the backbone of a little bird. The slightest burden left him prostrate. The weight of a dream was too much for his old friend.
“What a miserable world this is. A man like Amarildo assailed just like that by a bad dream. .”
Beira, we know, is the city of the Chiveve. But not everyone knows that chiveve means “flood tide.” And the tide that flooded Amarildo Fernandes’s dream, a week later eventually burst the banks of the Pungwe, the banks of the Chiveve, and the banks of reality. And when, on that last Sunday, we crossed the oceans that divided us from Munhava, we found the farm covered with water. The house had already detached itself from the ground. It was a boat. On the highest ground was Evelina, surrounded by servants and the possessions she had managed to salvage.
“What about Amarildo?”
He’d waded off through the water. Had he drowned? No. He’d forded the vast sea, like a reborn Christ. Evelina didn’t seem concerned. There was no need, in her view, for a rescue party. Her husband had gone to visit the submerged rice fields. And he’d gone to weep over his lost crops. He was bound to return once his tears had been shed. In a sense, he never returned. For he came back, emptied of his soul, drained of reason. Amarildo Fernandes’s sanity had drowned along with the green rice fields.
A month later, we were the only ones at the dockside, bidding the Fernandeses farewell. The two of them were so thin that I didn’t even notice them disappearing into the belly of the ship. They were leaving for Goa, for other rice fields. And as that ship set off across the waters of the Indian Ocean, it looked to me like the last bird plying the sky over Munhava.
Article published in İndico, March 2010.
About the Author
Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique in 1955. In the years after his country gained independence from Portugal, he was director of the Mozambican state news agency, and worked as a newspaper editor and journalist. Since the 1980s, he has combined the profession of environmental biologist with that of writer.
Couto is the author of more than 25 books of fiction, essays and poems that have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has won major literary prizes in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Portugal, Brazil and Italy. African critics chose his novel Sleepwalking Land as one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century. His most recent novel in English, The Tuner of Silences, was long-listed for the 2015 Dublin IMPAC Award.
In 2013 Couto was awarded the Camões Prize, given to a Portuguese-language writer for his life’s work. In 2014 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sometimes dubbed the “American Nobel.” Couto’s books have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe and South America.
Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant.
About the Translator
David Brookshaw has translated eight other books by Mia Couto, including The Tuner of Silences, Sleepwalking Land, Under the Frangipani and The Last Flight of the Flamingo. He is Professor Emeritus in Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol, with special interests in post-colonial literatures and literary translation.