Ryszard Kapuściński - Another Day of Life

“Bring in the one who came from the south,” Farrusco orders the people standing in the doorway, or rather in the place where there had once been a door leading to the wooden veranda and the square. “Listen to what this man says, camarada,” Farrusco tells me, because it turns out they have already talked to him in the afternoon and know what he has to say. In walks an extremely tired, jittery Portuguese. He has sunken eyes, he is unshaven and dirty, and looks like the personification of helplessness and abandonment. His name is Humberto dos Anjos de Freitas Quental. He is from here, he was born here — about fifty years ago, I would guess. A week ago he escaped to Namibia with his family. He left his wife and four children in a camp for Portuguese at Windhoek and decided to return himself. He wanted to return because his mother had stayed in Pereira d’Eça. His mother is eighty-one and has been running a bakery for as long as her son Humberto, who is standing here, has been alive. She told her son that she was not leaving and that she was going to keep on baking bread, which is always needed. “And you yourselves know,” Humberto tells us, “that in Pereira d’Eça you have fresh bread.” Yes, the whole unit knows that, living as they do on the bread baked by that woman and furthermore not paying for it, because this is a volunteer liberation army without money. When he left to take his family to Namibia, the supplies of flour were running out and his mother — who is deaf and doesn’t understand that there is a war on, and who for reasons of age no longer understands anything, except that as long as the world exists people will need bread — ordered her son to return with flour. She stayed there alone, so he decided to come back and bring her the flour, which was confiscated on the border, but he knows that a truck carrying flour has arrived today from Lubango, which means that his mother will again be baking bread and there will again be something free to eat, because she doesn’t ask for money.

“We all love that woman,” Farrusco says, “even though she isn’t exactly for us, but she’s for life and bread, and that’s enough. Our people brought her the water that she needed. And they brought her wood. And she’s going to live just as long as we live, or maybe even longer. But I want you to tell these people who’ve come from Lubango what you heard in Windhoek and what they told you along the road in that place, what do you call it?”

“It’s called Tsumeb,” said the son of the baker, “and it’s perhaps two hundred fifty kilometers from here. The Portuguese who fled there said that before long the South African army would advance into Angola and chase out the MPLA. They said the same thing in Windhoek. They said the army would move today, perhaps tomorrow. They have armor and an air force and they’ll occupy Luanda.”

“How do you know?” asked Farrusco.

“That’s what all the Portuguese say,” Humberto replied, “even though it’s a secret. In Windhoek, South African army officers came to our camp and asked who had served in the army, and if anybody wanted to join the forces that were going to strike Angola. And in Tsumeb, at the gas station, one white told me that the town was full of armored vehicles that would advance into Angola tomorrow or the next day to finish off the communists.”

Farrusco told the baker ’s son he could go home. Humberto had made an honest impression. But he didn’t seem too bright and was probably illiterate. We stayed alone in the room; it was still hot and close, even though it was past midnight. Some people were sleeping on the floor, propped against the wall, while others were coming and going for no known reason, without saying a word. “Check whether they’ve gone to their posts,” Farrusco told Carlos. “Send a few along the road toward the border. Let them go some distance and see what’s happening.”

“What good will it do?” says Esperança. Her face was now darker than it had been in the evening.

“Tell them to really go,” Farrusco says, “and not to be afraid and not to hide in the ditch.”

“If they go too far,” the woman insists, “they could be cut off or ambushed. The enemy’s all around.”

“All right,” says Farrusco, “but I want to know exactly where they are.”

“Well, those patrols aren’t going to find out,” says Esperança, “because they’re going to die. Why do you want to stir up the army? We don’t have the strength to defend ourselves.”

Comandante Farrusco’s unit numbers 120. It is the only unit on the southern front between Lubango and the border (450 kilometers) and between the Atlantic and Zambia (1200 kilometers). The only unit in a region one-third the size of Poland. All around, for scores, for hundreds of kilometers, stretches the barren bush, without water, without reference points — an unappeased wilderness of millions of barbed branches woven into walls, a hostile world not to be conquered, not to be penetrated. There is only the road to Lubango, the one route through it, like a corridor lined with barbed wire along which retreat is impossible because it is too far to go on foot and there is too little transport to carry the whole unit. It’s possible that at this hour, nearly two in the morning, the enemy has seized the road on both sides of the town and we are sitting here in the shadow of a steel-jaw trap waiting for somebody to trip the spring, at which point there will be a deafening snap.

Diogenes and one other man from the convoy came in, and then Carlos returned. The leader asked if they had gone out on patrol and Carlos said yes. He sat on a crate and unbuckled his belt, to which he had clipped a whole arsenal of pistols, cartridges, and grenades. In colonial times Carlos and Farrusco had fought in Portuguese commando units. Both were farmer ’s sons from southern Portugal. After their army tours they stayed in Angola and worked as auto mechanics.

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.”