Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

That’s what your mistress told me. How many times did I fall asleep with my rival’s photo in the margins of my slumber. Every time, I would mutter between my teeth: cursed woman! And I was never able to come to terms with the injustice of my fate. For years, I had paid considerable attention to makeup, diet, workouts in the gym. I had assumed that this was the way to continue to captivate you. It’s only now that I’ve come to understand that seduction lies elsewhere. Perhaps in a look. And I had long ago allowed my fervent gaze to fade.

As I contemplated the fire sweeping across the savannah, I missed that exchange of fire, the mirror of bedazzlement in Marcelo. To bedazzle, as the word suggests, should be to blind, to take away the light. So it was a glaring light that I now sought. That hallucination that I had once felt, I knew, was as addictive as morphine. Love is a type of morphine. It could be turned into a commercial product, packaged with the name: Amorphine.

The so-called “women’s magazines” sell recipes, secrets and techniques for how to love more and better. Little hints on how to enjoy sex. At the beginning, I was sold on this illusion. I wanted to win back Marcelo and I was open to any persuasion. Now, I don’t know: all I want to know about love is precisely not to know, to disconnect the body from the mind, and allow it uncontrolled freedom. I’m just a woman in appearance. Underneath my surface expression I’m a creature of nature, a wild beast, a lava flow.

All this sky reminds me of Marcelo. He used to tell me, “I’m going to count stars,” and then he would touch each of my freckles. He would dot my shoulders, my back, my breast with his finger. My body was Marcelo’s sky. And I never discovered how to fly, to surrender to the languorous way he counted the stars. I never felt at ease with sex. Let’s say it was a strange territory, an unknown language. My demureness was more than just shame. I was a deaf translator, incapable of turning the desire that spoke deep within me into outward expression. I was the rotten tooth in a vampire’s mouth.

And so I return to my bedside table, to look your black mistress in the face. This was the gaze, at the moment the photo was taken, that plunged into my man’s eyes. A luminous gaze, like the light at the entrance to a house. Maybe it was precisely that, a bedazzling look, maybe that’s what Marcelo had always desired. It wasn’t sex after all. But to feel desired, even if it were only a fleeting pretence.

Under an African sky, I become a woman once more. Earth, life, water are my sex. No, not the sky, for the sky is masculine. I feel the sky touching me with all its fingers. I fall asleep under Marcelo’s caress. And in the distance, I can hear the words of the Brazilian singer, Chico César: “If you look at me, I gently surrender, snow in a volcano. . ”

I want to live in a city where people dream of rain. In a world where rain is the greatest happiness of all. And where we all rain.

Tonight, I carried out the ritual: I stripped off all my clothes in order to read Marcelo’s old letters. My love wrote so profoundly that, as I read, I felt his arm brush against my body, and it was as if he were unbuttoning my dress and my clothes were falling to my feet.

— You’re a poet, Marcelo.

— Don’t say that again.

— Why?

— Poetry is a mortal illness.

Marcelo would fall asleep straight away after making love. He would fold the pillow between his legs and sink into slumber. I was left alone, awake, to ruminate over time. At first, I considered Marcelo’s attitude intolerably selfish. Then, much later on, I understood. Men don’t look at the women they’ve made love to because they’re scared. They’re scared of what they may find in the depths of women’s eyes.

Marta’s papers were burning my hands. I tidied them away so as no one could see that the intimacy inhabiting them had been violated. I returned home with a heavy heart. We fear God because he exists. But we fear the devil more because he doesn’t. What made me more afraid at that particular moment was neither God nor the devil. I was especially worried about Silvestre Vitalício’s reaction when I told him that all I had found in the Portuguese woman’s room was a bunch of love letters. There was my old man at the entrance to the camp, hands on hips, his voice laden with anxiety:

— A report! I want a report. What did you find in the Portagee woman’s things?

— Just papers. That’s all.

— So what did they say?

— Don’t you remember, Father, that I can’t read?

— Did you bring any papers with you?

— No. Next time. .

He didn’t let me finish. He ran out of the kitchen and returned, the next moment, pulling Ntunzi by his arm.

— You two go to the Portuguese woman’s house and give her my order.

— What order, Father? — Ntunzi asked.

— You mean to say you don’t know?

We were to tell her to go back to the city. We were to be curt, we were to be gruff. The Portagee was to get the message fairly and squarely.

— I want that woman out of here, far away, and I don’t want to see her back here again.

I looked at Ntunzi who was standing there, motionless, as if he were giving in. But within him, he must have been seething with recalcitrance. Nevertheless, he said nothing, and expressed no objection. There we stood, waiting for Silvestre to start speaking again. My father’s silence kept both of us quiet and so we set off, meek and vanquished, in the direction of the haunted house. Halfway there, I asked:

— Are you going to send the Portuguese woman away? How are you going to tell her?

Ntunzi shook his head sluggishly. The two extremes of impossibility had met within him: he couldn’t obey, but nor could he disobey. In the end, he said:

— You go and speak to her.

And he turned his back. I went on towards the big house, my steps faltering, like someone in a funeral procession. I found the intruder sitting on the steps, with a bag at her feet. She greeted me affectionately and stared up at the sky as if preparing to launch herself into flight. I expected to hear her say things in the gentle tone with which she had visited me in my dream. But she remained quiet while she took something from the bag, which I later learned was a camera. She took a photo of me, glimpsing hidden corners of my soul that I never knew existed. Then she took a small gadget made of metal from a case, and put it to her ear, only to put it away again.

— What’s that?

She explained that it was a cellphone, and told me what it was for. But right there, in Jezoosalem, she couldn’t pick up a signal for her machine.

— Without this — she said, pointing at the phone, — I feel lost. My God, how I need to talk to someone. .

A deep sadness clouded her eyes. She looked as if she was going to burst into tears. But she controlled herself, her hands stroking her cheeks. And then she became distant for a while. She seemed to be muttering Marcelo’s name. But it was so slow and quiet that it sounded more like a prayer for the dead. She slowly put everything away in her bag, and eventually asked:

— Where do herons usually gather round here?

— There are lots in the lake —I said.

— When it’s less hot, will you take me to this lake?