Antonio Tabucchi - Letter from Casablanca

To Don Caetano de Lancastre, who told me a story like this

The garden of the small barracks was lost in the dark mass of the forest that besieged the clearing. It was a colonial building, with a faded pink facade and yellow shutters, which must have gone back to 1885, to the time of the skirmishes with Cecil Rhodes, when it must have constituted a decorous general quarters for the commander who controlled the western border near the Zambezi. Since 1890, when our troops had withdrawn from the Niassaland region, the barracks had no longer been a garrison. It was occupied by a reserve captain who remained there the whole period of his military service and by two Negro soldiers, two “sepoys,” elderly and silent, with their wives, whose only duty, apparently, was to act as orthopedists for the occupants of the nearby village who worked for the lumber company. The day of my arrival there had been a frenetic coming and going of limping people, although the captain had reassured me that something unusual had occurred: a pile had collapsed on the piers of the Zambezi. Usually the Negroes preferred to cure themselves on their own with their tribal methods. The Sengas were a very special type — I certainly knew this better than he — and then the medical equipment of the barracks left much to be desired: it was useless to delude ourselves.

The captain was a kind, loquacious, rather clumsy man. He called me “Excellency” and must have been my age or a little older. His accent and behavior, provincial and archaic, revealed him to be a northerner, from Oporto, perhaps, or from Amarente. His thick jaw, his bluish beard, his humble, patient eyes told of generations of peasants or mountaineers, which his short duration in the army had not succeeded in erasing. He was studying law and was enrolled in the University of Coimbra. When his African term of service was over, he would enter the magistrature. He had eight examinations to go, and in that place he had ample time to study.

He had me served a cool tamarind on the little veranda invaded by climbing vines, and began a polite, very tactful conversation from which transpired his desire for a confidential, unconstrained demeanor which, however, he was unable to assume. He inquired with compunction about my trip. It had gone very well, thank you, in so far as three hundred kilometers in a truck can go very well on such a road. Joaquim was an excellent chauffeur. I had come by train as far as Tete, evidently. No, the climate of Tete was not really one of the best. From Europe I had six-day-old news, nothing particularly interesting, it seemed to me. Theoretically I would stay twelve months, if many asked for a survey with a copy of the census for the district of Kaniemba. But perhaps ten would be enough. Thanks for the generous offer of help — probably I would need it. He would be very happy to put at my disposition the “sepoy” who knew how to write. By the way, did the barracks have an archive? Very well, we would begin from there. He had a certain experience with archives? Excellent, I would never have expected such luck. Actually my surveys would be rather rough, let’s say merely oriented toward a future census the government intended to make in the Kaniemba zone.

The tamarind was followed by a very strong brandy which the “sepoys” distilled at the barracks, and we changed the subject to talk of friendlier, less relevant things. The evening that was falling was full of disquieting sounds from the forest. The mosquitoes became terrible. A very light breeze bore the acrid odor of the undergrowth. The captain had the window netting lowered, lit the oil lamp, and asked my permission to withdraw in order to give directions for supper. Would I excuse him for leaving me alone? We would continue the conversation at the table. I excused him willingly. It did not displease me to remain in silence in the moonlight, to gaze at the night. It had seemed superfluous to tell him, but that day I had completed four years in Africa. I wanted to think about them.

In 1934 Mozambique was a colony inhabited by bizarre people and by great loneliness, with disquieting, obliging shadows, rare, phantom presences, transitory, improbable, adventurous characters. It had something of Conrad’s stories, perhaps the restlessness, the degradation, and the secret melancholy.

I had disembarked at Lourenço Marques four years earlier with a new degree in political and colonial science in my pocket, a surname that prompted bows from government officials, the memory of a brief squabble with my father which still burned me to my soul and which seemed unbecoming for a family like ours, and an appointment as “District Chief’’ in an uncivilized country — in short, colonial officer. Maybe it didn’t seem suitable even for me. But Lisbon was uncomfortable for me like a suit not my own. The Chiado, the Caffe della Brasileira, the summer holidays at Cascais in the family villa, days of youthful idleness, the horses at the Club della Marinha, the dances in the embassies — all these had become suffocating. But whatever could I do, if I wanted to live my life, with a degree in colonial science? Perhaps it had been a mistake to embark on these studies, but by this time they were completed. The choice rested with me between Lisbon’s idleness and Africa. I chose Africa. I was alone, available, unattached, and composed. I was twenty-six years old.

Inhambane, after two years in Tete, seemed almost like Europe to me, even though it was a sleepy, dirty city of ravaged beauty, passed through by transitory people. Somehow the little commercial harbor sheltered behind the Punta da Barra, where every month the steamers put into port from Port Elizabeth and Durban straight from the Red Sea, gave an illusion of civilization, constituted a remote tie to the world. A walk as far as the docks, when the little English steamers or the ship from the Lisbon Line arrived, was fairly modest comfort, but it was as much as it was possible to have. And the smoke from the ship that was moving off into the horizon awoke a nostalgia for a Europe as remote as a children’s tale, already inconstant in its memories, perhaps nonexistent.

Africa, with its immensity and its lassitude, magnified distances and deadened memories. The newspapers reported that in Austria Chancellor Dollfuss had been assassinated, that in America there were seventeen million unemployed, that in Germany the Reichstag burned. My father wrote me informative, verbose letters: my brother was thinking about taking holy orders, they had installed a telephone in the villa at Cascais, the monarchists’ cause had suffered a hard blow with the loss of Don Manuel. His death left the claim to the throne to an unknown young foreigner tied to the Miguelist faction, while my family belonged to the liberal aristocracy. The new Portuguese constitution, a copy of which was wide-open in front of me, defined my country as “a cooperative, united state,” and a government dispatch ordered the photograph of a young professor from Coimbra, with a scornful and presumptuous face, who had become Cabinet Minister — Antonio de Oliveira Salazar — to be hung up in public offices. I had hung it behind my back with a vague sense of uneasiness. But on my table I kept the portrait of Don Manuel, to whom I was bound by an almost familial affection. It was a contradiction, but Africa let contradictions live with perfect tolerance.

The last English steamer had brought me a novel popular in Europe that took place on the Côte d’ Azur, but it lay uncut on the table. The nights of Inhambane were too far from the lights of Antibes of which popular novels spoke. Apparently the life was similar. There were palm trees, the moon was spectacular, there was lobster for supper at the Club, people loved with intense, voluble passion, the orchestra ventured upon jazz, the women accepted courtship with disarming ease. But everything was lived as if it were different and far away. Africa was a space in the spirit, unanticipated, hazardous. In Africa everyone had the sensation of being far away, even from himself.