Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

— You, Brother-in-law, are going to take this broad away!

Aproximado smiled, sly and sardonic, which is what he did when he couldn’t think of what to say. He steadied his body inside his overalls, mustering up the courage for an argument:

— My dear Silvestre: we’re not the owners.

— We’re not what? Well, I’m the owner of all this, and I’m the only current occupant of this whole area.

— Well, I don’t know about that. . Can’t you understand that maybe it’s us who’ll have to leave?

— Why’s that?

— The houses we’re occupying are the property of the State.

— What State? I don’t see any State around here.

— One can never see the State, Brother-in-law.

— It’s for that and other reasons that I got out of that world where the State can never be seen, but it always turns up and takes our things away from us.

— You can shout, Silvestre Vitalício, but you’re here illegally. .

— Illegal is the bitch who bore you. .

He was so enraged that he lost control of his voice, which sounded like a cloth being ripped in half. We’d never seen him reach such a state. My father set off in the direction of the administrator’s house, and started yelling:

— You bitch! You great bitch!

He projected his whole body forward as if the words he was hurling were stones:

— Get out of here, you bitch!

Seeing him duelling with the void like this made me feel sorry for him. My father wanted to shut the world away. But there was no door behind which to lock himself.

It was early in the morning when my old man came to my bedside and shook me. He leaned over my pillow and whispered:

— I’ve got a mission for you, son.

— A what, Father? I asked, startled.

— A spying mission —he added.

My task was an easy one and explained to me in two brief brush strokes: I would go to the big house and rummage through whatever was in the Portuguese woman’s room. Silvestre Vitalício wanted to discover clues that might reveal the visitor’s secret intentions. Ntunzi would have the job of distracting the woman, keeping her far from the house. And I wasn’t to be afraid of shadows or ghosts. The Portuguese woman had already scared any tormented souls away. Local ghosts didn’t get on well with foreign ones, he assured me.

Later on, halfway through the morning, the Portuguese woman’s effects emerged into the light of day in my trembling hands. For hours, my eyes and fingers ranged over Marta’s papers. Each sheet was a wing with which I gained giddiness rather than height.

I’m a woman, I’m Marta and all I can do is write. Maybe, after all, it’s best that you are away from here. For I could never reach you otherwise. I have long ceased to occupy my own voice. If you came to me now, Marcelo, I would be speechless. My voice has emigrated to a body that once was mine. And when I listen to my voice, I don’t even recognize myself. When it comes to love, I only know how to write. This isn’t recent, it’s always been like that, even when you were present.

I write just as birds compose their flight: without paper, without script, with only light and nostalgia. Words that, while mine, have never dwelt in me. I write without having anything to say. Because I don’t know what to say to you about what we were. And I have nothing to say to you about what we shall be. For I’m like the inhabitants of Jezoosalem. I feel no yearning, I have no memory: my belly has never borne life, my blood has never opened into another body. This is how I grow old: dispersed within me, a veil abandoned on a church pew.

I loved you, and you alone, Marcelo. My fidelity led me into the most painful of exiles: this love removed me from all possibility of loving. Now, of all the names, all I have left is your name. I can only ask that name what I used to ask of you: to beget me. For I need so much to be born! To be born another, far from me, far from my time. I am exhausted, Marcelo. Exhausted but not empty. To be empty, one must have internal substance. And I have lost my inner being.

Why did you never write? It’s not reading you that I miss. It’s the sound of the knife slitting the envelope that carries your letter. And once again feeling my soul caressed, as if somewhere an umbilical cord was being cut. But it was just an illusion: there is no knife, there is no letter. Nothing, or nobody, is being delivered into the world.

Do you see how small I become when I write to you? That’s why I could never be a poet. A poet grows when faced by absence, as if absence were his altar, and he became greater than the word. That’s not the case with me, for absence submerges me, so that I no longer have access to myself.

This is my conflict: when you’re here, I don’t exist, I’m ignored. When you’re not here, I don’t know myself, I’m ignorant. I only exist when I’m in your presence. And I am only myself in your absence. Now, I know. I’m no more than a name. A name that only comes to life when uttered by you.

This morning I watched the bushfire in the distance. On the other side of the river, vast stretches were being consumed. It wasn’t the earth that was turning to flame: it was the air itself that was burning, the whole sky was being devoured by demons.

Later, when the blaze had died down, a sea of dark ash remained. In the absence of wind, particles fluttered around like black dragonflies over the scorched grassland. It could have been a scene from the end of the world. But for me, it was the opposite: it was the earth being born. I felt like yelling your name:

— Marcelo!

My cry could have been heard far away. For here, in this place, even silence produces an echo. If there is somewhere I can be reborn, it’s here, where the briefest moment leaves me sated. I’m like the savannah: I burn to live. And I die, drowned by my own thirst.

— What’s that word?

At the last stop before we reached Jezoosalem, Orlando (who I’ve got to get into the habit of calling Aproximado) asked, pointing at my name on the cover of my diary:

— What’s that word?

— This woman —I corrected him. This is me.

I should have said: that’s my name, written on the cover of my diary. But no. I said it was me as if my whole body and my whole life were contained in a mere five letters. That’s what I am, Marcelo: I’m a word, you write me by night, and by day you erase me. Every day is a sheet you tear off, I’m the paper that awaits your hand, I’m the letter that awaits the caress of your gaze.

What struck me right from the start at Jezoosalem was the absence of electricity. Never before had I felt the night, been embraced by darkness, embraced inside me until I too became dark.

Tonight, I’m sitting on the veranda, under a star-filled sky. Under the sky, no. In fact I’m among the sky. The firmament is so close, I could sow it with seeds, and I breathe slowly for fear of disturbing constellations.