Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

— This conversation has been dragging on for too long. And I’m an old man, lady. Every second I waste, I lose a whole Life.

— So you’ve finished saying what you came to say?

— That’s all. You said you came looking for someone. Well, you can be on your way, because there’s no one here. .

— My dear Ventura, there’s one thing I can tell you: you weren’t the only one to leave the world. .

— I don’t understand. .

— What if I were to tell you that we are both here for the same reason?

It was painful to watch. She, a woman, a white woman, and she was defying my old man’s authority, showing up his weakness as a father and as a man in front of his sons.

Silvestre Vitalício excused himself and withdrew. Later, he explained that his anger was already overflowing, the magma in the crater of a volcano, when he brought the conversation to an end:

— Women are like wars: they turn men into animals.

After his confrontation with the visitor, my father couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. He tossed around in a minefield of nightmares and we listened to him, amid incomprehensible exclamations, calling, at one moment, for our mother, and at another for the donkey:

— My little Alma! Jezebel, my sweet!

The following morning, he was burning with fever. Ntunzi and I stood round his bed. Silvestre didn’t even recognize us.

— Jezebel?

— Father, it’s us, your sons. .

He looked at us with a pained expression and lay there, his smile frozen on his face, his eyes expressionless, as if he’d never seen us before. After a while, he placed his hand on his chest as if to lend support to his voice, and arraigned us:

— That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?

— We don’t understand —Ntunzi said.

— Did you want to take charge of me? Is that what you wanted, to see me struck down, to be able to bury me in my moment of weakness? Well I’m not going to give you that joy. .

— But Father, we only want to help. .

— Get out of my room, and don’t come back here, not even to get my corpse. .

For days, my father lay sick in his bed. His faithful servant, Zachary Kalash, was always by his side. Those days were propitious for us to develop our friendship with Marta. I increasingly regarded her as a mother. Ntunzi increasingly dreamed of her as a woman. My brother became more and more taken by lust: he dreamed of her naked, he would undress her with the urgency of a male, and the Portuguese woman’s most intimate items of clothing would fall to the floor of his slumber. What I liked about Marta was her gentleness. She would write, every day, she would be bowed over her papers, writing orderly lines of letters. Just like me, Marta was a foreigner in the world. She wrote memories, I tuned silences.

At night, my brother would boast of the advances he had made on her heart. He was like a general giving details of territories that had been conquered. He claimed he had got a glimpse of her breasts, had caught her at her most intimate moments, had seen her bathing naked. Soon, he would satisfy his hunger in her body. Galvanized by the proximity of that golden moment, my brother would get up in bed and proclaim:

— Either God exists, or He’s about to be born now!

Such episodes were like a hunter’s tale: their telling could only gain the seal of authenticity through a lie. Every one of his stories, however, left me unsettled, hurt, and betrayed. Even though I knew that they were more the product of his fantasies than of facts, Ntunzi’s tales filled me with rage. For the first time, there was a woman in my life. And that woman had been sent by the dead Dordalma to watch over what remained of my childhood. Little by little, this foreigner was turning into my mother, in a kind of second round of existence.

The erotic accounts of my brother may have been the product of his delirium, but three afternoons later I saw Ntunzi lying down with his head on her lap. Such intimacy made me unsure: could the rest of my little brother’s romance with the foreign woman be true?

— I’m tired —Ntunzi confessed, drooling over Marta.

The Portuguese woman stroked my brother’s forehead and said:

— It’s not tiredness. It’s sadness. You miss someone. Your illness is called yearning.

It had been so long since our mother had been alive, but she’d never died within my brother’s mind. Sometimes, he wanted to cry out in pain, but he didn’t have enough life in him for it. The Portuguese woman gave him advice at that point: Ntunzi should go into mourning in order to blunt the vicious spike of nostalgia.

— You’ve got all these wonderful surroundings to weep in. .

— What’s the use of weeping if I don’t have anyone to listen?

— Weep, my darling, and I’ll give you my shoulder.

Jealous feelings made me move away, leaving the sad spectacle of Ntunzi lying on top of the intruder with his legs spread. For the first time, I hated my brother. Back in my room, I cried because I felt betrayed by Ntunzi and by Marta.

To make matters worse, my father recovered. A week after taking to his bed, he stepped out of his room. He sat in his chair on the veranda to catch his breath, as if his illness were no more than a bout of tiredness.

— Do you feel well? — I asked.

— Today, I’ve woken up alive —he answered.

He ordered Ntunzi to come to him. He wanted to inspect our eyes to see how we were sleeping. Our faces paraded before his fanatical examination.

— You, Ntunzi, woke up late. You didn’t even greet the sun.

— I didn’t sleep well.

— I know what’s depriving you of your sleep.

I closed my eyes, and awaited the expected. I sensed a storm brewing. Either that, or I no longer knew Silvestre Vitalício.

— I’m warning you: if I see you flirting with that Portuguese woman. .

— But Father, I’m not doing anything. .

— These things are never being done: they just end up done. Don’t come to me afterwards and say I didn’t warn you.

I helped the old man back to his resting place. Then, I went to the yard where the Portuguese woman was waiting for me. She wanted me to help her climb a tree. I hesitated. I thought the girl maybe wanted to remember her childhood. But no. She just wanted to check to see whether her cellphone could catch a signal from a higher position. My brother stepped forward and helped her pull herself up through the branches. I realized he was peeping at the white woman’s legs. I left, unable to watch this degrading scene.

Later on, as we sat in silence round the table where we had had dinner, old Silvestre suddenly exclaimed:

— Today, everything went backwards for the worse.

— Are you ill again?

— And it’s the fault of the pair of you. So now you let that broad climb a tree!?

— What’s wrong, Father?

— What’s wrong? Have you forgotten that I. . that I am a tree?

— You can’t be serious, Father. .

— That woman was climbing over me, she was stamping on me with her feet, I had to bear her whole weight on my shoulders. .

And he fell silent, such was the insult he felt. Only his hands danced around emptily in despair. He got to his feet with difficulty. When I tried to help him, he raised his index finger right in front of our noses.