Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

— Receptionist?

— Yes, to give me a reception.

She’d got a job by walking out on herself. Deep within her, a decision had been reached. She would divide in two just as a fruit separates: her body was the flesh; the seed was her soul. She would surrender her flesh to the appetites of this boss and any others. But her seed would be preserved. At night, after being eaten, sucked and spat out, her body would return to the seed and she would eventually sleep, whole and intact like a fruit. But she could find no rest in her slumber, and this was causing her to slide into despair.

— Women-friends of mine gossip. But I ask you: now that I’m going with a man of my own race, is it no longer prostitution?

She wasn’t asking for my opinion. Noci had long been sure that it was no use pondering these afflictions. A whore hires out her body. In her case, it was the opposite: her body was hiring her out.

— I’m fine like I am, believe me.

The black girl sensed a doubt in my eyes. How can one be happy with a body that is no longer our own? Sex, she said, wasn’t done with either our body or our soul. It’s done with the body that’s under our body. Once again, her fingers trembled, causing her cigarette ash to drop. At that moment, Marcelo’s clothes passed before me eyes, floating in the waters of the river. Those clothes had been unbuttoned by those same slender fingers.

— It’s been so long since I made love — I confessed— that I can’t even remember how to undress a man.

— Is that so bad?

And we laughed, as if we were the oldest of friends. One man’s lie had brought us together. What united us was the truth of two lives.

Orlando Macara, Noci’s boss, came to fetch her at the hotel. I was introduced, and from the start, I recognized one thing: the man was the soul of congeniality. He was squat and lame, but exceedingly gracious.

— How did the two of you meet? — he asked us.

I had no idea what answer to give. But Noci improvised with surprising ease.

— We met on the internet.

And she went on about the advantages and dangers of computers.

Orlando wanted to know why I had come, and what my impressions were. When I mentioned Marcelo, he suddenly seemed to remember something.

— Have you a photograph of him? — he asked. I showed him the photo I carry in my wallet. While Orlando looked closely at the details, I addressed Noci:

— Marcelo came out well in this photo, don’t you think?

— I’ve never seen the man before in my life! — she answered abruptly.

The trader got up and went over to the window with my wallet. I followed his movements somewhat suspiciously, until he suddenly exclaimed:

— That’s him. I took your husband to the reserve.

— When was that?

— It was some time ago. He wanted to take photos of animals.

— So did you leave him there?

— Nearly.

— What do you mean nearly?

— I left him just before we got there, near the entrance to the reserve. I don’t want to worry you, but he looked ill to me. .

The illness Marcelo suffered from, I could have replied, was himself. In other words, he was a man beyond remedy.

— So you’ve never heard any more of Marcelo, whether he came back, or whether he stayed there?

— Stayed there? My dear lady: it’s not a place for anyone to stay. .

That night, alone in my room, I mulled over the motives that could have led Marcelo to want to travel to the reserve. It can’t have been just for the sake of photography. Doubts gnawed away at my sleep, so much so that, first thing in the morning, I summoned the help of Noci’s boyfriend. He turned up late, limping so heavily that his lameness didn’t seem a defect so much as an apology for his lack of punctuality. Or who knows, maybe it was just out of consideration for the ground he was treading on? Noci was with him. But this time she was so distant and quiet that I hardly recognized the girl from the previous day. I got straight to the point:

— Take me to where you left my husband.

I was waiting for his negative reaction. That it wasn’t a place for men, let alone a woman. And a white woman, with all due respect. I pressed him to take me to the reserve.

— But your husband, my dear lady, your husband is no longer there. .

— I know.

Orlando Macara didn’t make things easy. I understood that there was the matter of costs. In the end, we reached an agreement: I would go with him as far as the entrance where he had left Marcelo. After that, Orlando wouldn’t have anything more to do with it.

— Why don’t you tell her everything, Orlando?

Noci’s intervention took me by surprise. She argued on my behalf and revealed that there were relatives of Orlando living in the reserve who would welcome me.

— Relatives? Funny relatives.

— They’re a bit strange. But they’re good folk.

— Don’t talk to them, they’re all mad.

Orlando relented and then gave way. Nevertheless, he gave me a whole list of instructions: I should avoid contact with the family living in the encampment. And I should understand the idiosyncrasies of each of the four inhabitants.

— For example, there, I’m not Orlando.

— How do you mean?

— I’m Aproximado. That’s what they call me there: I’m Uncle Aproximado.

His condition for driving me there was that I should agree to lie: if they asked me how I had got to the reserve, I was to free Orlando from any responsibility. I’d come on my own.

Orlando came by my hotel early. I followed his old truck in my car. It was a long journey, the longest I’d ever made in my whole life. The old jalopy was in such a ramshackle condition that the journey would take three days.

I felt like doing something that I would certainly never have the chance to do again: to drive such a decrepit vehicle along such bewildering roads.

— Orlando, let me drive, just a bit.

— You’d better get used to calling me Aproximado.

He allowed me to drive. But only while we were still in the city. So that’s how I found myself driving along narrow suburban thoroughfares. I was rarely able to see the roads, because they surged up before me so full of people and garbage. I guessed where the road was by the two lines of people who walked along on both sides of it. People here don’t walk along the sidewalks. They walk along the road as if it were their right.

I wondered to myself: will I be able to drive in this chaos? It was only later that I realized it wasn’t me who was doing the driving. It was Marcelo’s hands that were driving me, and I had long been blind both to the outside world and to my inner self. I was like an African road: you only realize it exists because of the presence of people walking along it.

I returned the controls to Orlando and went back to my vehicle, now sure of one thing: it made little difference to me whether I drove or was being driven. There was a time when I wanted to travel the world. Now, all I wanted to do was to travel without the world.

Once we had left the city, the heavens opened: never before had I seen such a deluge. We were forced to stop because the road was unsafe. All of a sudden, I seemed to glimpse Marcelo’s clothes being carried along by the torrent of rainwater. And I thought to myself: “The Tagus has burst its banks in tropical soil and my beloved awaits me on some nearby shore.”