Mia Couto - Confession of the Lioness

You owe me something, Mariamar. Have you forgotten? This is a good place to pay me your debt.

He starts taking off his clothes, while crawling toward me, slithering and slobbering. Funnily enough, I’m not scared of him. To my own surprise, I advance toward Maliqueto, my hackles raised, screaming, spitting, and scratching. Between alarmed and astonished, the policeman retreats and looks with horror at the deep gashes I’ve inflicted on his arms.

You great bitch, were you trying to kill me?

He pulls his shirt up over his shoulders in order to hide his wounds and hurriedly resumes the journey back to Kulumani. As he rows, he keeps repeating under his breath:

She’s crazy, the hag’s completely crazy.

On the shore, Florindo Makwala, the administrator, and my father, Genito Mpepe, are waiting. In anticipation, I start shouting, although my voice is thickened by the tension:

I saw it, I saw it! It was the lioness, Father! And it was real. I didn’t make it up.

You’re lying. Don’t come to me with stories, because I’m going to punish you.

I saw it, Father. A lioness at the pool. I’m sure as sure can be.

Maliqueto, contradicting me for the sake of it, insists that there was nothing to see there. And even if I had seen it, how could I be sure it was a female? In this area, male lions are small and almost without a mane.

The district officer steps forward with care so as not to get his shoes wet, and, keeping himself at a distance, instructs my father:

I don’t want any contact between this girl and the delegation.

She’ll be kept at home, rest assured, Comrade Chief. I’ll tie her up in the yard.

I want her kept well away from the visitors. And what’s happened to you, Maliqueto? Are you bleeding?

I hurt myself with the ropes, Chief. And now, with your permission, can I say something, Chief?

Go ahead.

Your daughter was wrong in the head, Comrade Mpepe, but now she’s scary. How did she dare visit that sacred place all by herself?

You’re right, Maliqueto. Don’t you know what they did to Tandi, who went where she wasn’t supposed to go?

The three men busy themselves with securing the boat. Sitting on the riverbank, I realize how similar the skiff is to a coffin. The bulging belly, the same journey toward timelessness. The river didn’t take me to my destination. But the journey led me to someone who had become separated from me: the lioness, the sister I missed so much.

I’ve never liked airports. So full of people, so full of no one. I prefer train stations, where there’s enough time for tears and waving handkerchiefs. Trains set off sluggishly, with a sigh, regretting their departure. But a plane has a haste that’s inhuman. And my mother’s story loses any meaning when I watch planes hurtling into the air. Not everything, after all, is so slow in the endless firmament. I’m at Maputo International Airport, certain that I’m nowhere at all. Someone speaking in English brings me back to earth.

This is the writer. He’s going to be your travel companion.

The writer is a white man, short, with beard and glasses. He’s a well-known intellectual, and various people stop to ask him for his autograph. He gets up to shake my hand.

I’m Gustavo. Gustavo Regalo.

He seems to like his own name. He is waiting for me to show recognition. But I pretend he’s a complete stranger.

I’m going to write a report on the hunting expedition. I’m under contract to the same company as you.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. And the lions will be pleased to know that their deaths warrant a report.

This is my first hunt. I have to say, without meaning any offense, that I’m against it.

Against what?

Against hunting. All the more so when it’s hunting lions.

Your problem, my writer friend, is that you’ve never seen a lion.

What do you mean by that?

You’ve seen lions in photos of safaris, but you don’t know what a lion is. A lion only really reveals himself in territory where he’s lord and king. Join me in the bush and you’ll know what a lion is.

* * *

Four hours in a plane, seated next to the writer, are enough to gauge the abyss that separates us. With his intellectual airs, his notepad at the ready, his inability to keep quiet: In short, the writer irritates me. Judging by the way he looks at me, I realize that the reverse is also true. Something about him reminds me of Roland and the way my brother used to contemplate me. As if he were accusing me.

* * *

A feather is heavy; a bird is also heavy. The lightest knows how to fly. So goes my late mother, Dona Martina’s saying. Well, as far as I’m concerned, both lightnesses are heavy, and my sleep never turns into nocturnal flight. A constant state of alertness makes me enter and leave sleep like a drunkard, makes me come and go like a shipwrecked sailor. It’s a legacy of that fateful night when Roland shot my father. Insomnia brings back unwelcome memories; sleeping washes away memories I wanted to keep. Sleep is my illness, my madness.

* * *

During the journey, I feel an overwhelming lethargy. I pretend to be asleep in order to then pretend I’m woken up by the tearing of a sheet of paper. Gustavo apologizes, smiling timidly:

I’m going to write my girlfriend a letter. In the old style. A fake letter just to distract myself, to distract myself from missing her.

A fake letter? Is there any letter that isn’t a fake? I remember the love letters that my father would dictate to my mother. It was a late evening ritual, when one could hear the frogs croaking in the nearby ponds. We were blacks and mulattoes who had been demoted to blacks. We were restricted to the edge of the area, there where rains and illness accumulated. Martina Bullseye, my mother, would beautify herself for these writing sessions, for they were the only time when she would receive compliments from her man. It was only at such moments that he behaved in a mild, almost submissive manner, as if he were asking for forgiveness. Sitting motionless, bent over the paper, my mother looked like some aged canvas. Next to her, Roland scribbled endless pieces of homework. At that moment, he was even older than our own mother. Even today I can remember my father’s voice vividly, as he dictated, enunciating every syllable:

My darling Henry, my beloved husband, one and only love of my life … Are you writing this down, Martina?

He would dictate long letters that were always the same. In doing so, he would roll his words with slow deliberation, as if he were drunk. What a difficult relationship Father had with words! I inherited that problematic relationship with the written word, in contrast to Roland, for whom letters were a game with which to play. Maybe that’s why I’m irritated by the fluency with which my traveling companion keeps scribbling line after line. Or who knows, perhaps what perturbs me is that I don’t have anyone to write a love letter to.