Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

— I’m like that hand.

He’d been born without wishing to be, he’d lived without desires, and he was dying without warning or alarm.

The snake decided to abandon its immobility and little by little began to coil itself sensually around me. I resisted by trying to back away slowly.

— Don’t do that, Mwanito.

And he explained: that snake was none other than Time. For years, he had resisted the snake’s incursions. On this night, he had surrendered, given up.

— Can’t you hear the bells?

It was the hammering on the metal panels of the truck. But I didn’t disabuse him. I had another concern: the snake was staring at me, but couldn’t decide whether to sink its fangs into me. It seemed hypnotized, unable to act in accordance with its own nature.

— It doesn’t even need to bite — Silvestre explained. — Its poison is passed on through its eyes.

That’s what had happened to him: while the snake had fixed his eyes with its own, his entire past had come to his mouth. The snake didn’t even need to bite him. The poison coursed through his insides in anticipation and Time began to fester inside his body. When, eventually, its slender fangs plunged into him, Silvestre could no longer see the venomous creature: it was no more than a memory, nebulous and dense, slipping away between the dew and the stones. And that was how his remaining memories paraded past him, slithering, viscous like snakes. Sluggish, almost timeless, like the heavy flow of rivers.

— Time is a poison, Mwanito. The more I remember, the less alive I become.

— Do you remember my mother, Father?

— I didn’t kill Dordalma. I swear, my son.

— I believe you, Father.

— It was she alone who killed herself.

People believe they commit suicide. And it’s never like that. Dordalma, poor soul, didn’t know. She was still convinced that someone could cancel their existence. When it comes to it, there’s only one true suicide: to stop having a name, to lose any awareness of oneself and of others. To be beyond the reach of words and the memories of others.

— I killed myself far more than Dordalma ever did.

He, Silvestre Vitalício, had certainly committed suicide. Even before reaching death, he had put an end to his life. He swept places aside, banished the living from himself, erased time. My father had even stolen names from the dead. The living aren’t, after all, mere buriers of bones: they are, before anything else, shepherds of the deceased. There isn’t an ancestor who’s not certain that, on the other side of light, there’s always someone to rouse him. In my father’s case, that wasn’t so. Time had never happened to him. The world was beginning within itself, humanity was ending within it, without precedent or antecedent.

— Father, is that snake also going to open the doors of the past to me?

Silvestre didn’t answer. Instead, he crawled forward like a hunter. Even a sleepwalker has the honour-bound duty to kill a deadly snake. Was it such a command that caused my father to rush after the snake and club it to death?

Can a snake lie down? Well that one melted away like a shadow, forever expired. Old Silvestre bemoaned his sudden gesture that had worn his joints away:

— My bones have died. .

Vitalício lamented the extinction of his own skeleton. While in my case, my bones were the only living part of me.

The following morning, they came and woke me up. I had fallen asleep exhausted, some metres from Jezebel’s grave. Next to me, Silvestre Vitalício was still asleep, all curled up. When I got to my feet, my Uncle was already prodding his brother-in-law with the tip of his foot. Silvestre’s body rolled over as if devoid of life. How could he have sunken into such a deep sleep? Why was there thick, white froth seeping from his mouth? The answer wasn’t late in coming: there were two threads of blood from a small wound on his arm.

— He’s been bitten! Silvestre has been bitten!

Alarmed, Uncle called for Zachary and Ntunzi. The soldier rushed over with a knife and in a flash cut my father’s arm and then, leaning over him like a vampire, sucked the bloody wound.

— Don’t do that! I responded heatedly. — Don’t do anything, it was all a dream!

They looked at me, puzzled, and Zachary detected some sort of mental torpor in my words that led him to inspect me in search of the pinprick that might explain my confused state. Finding nothing, they carried Silvestre away in a state of semi-consciousness. In Zachary’s arms, my father looked like a child, even younger than I was. Words tumbled from his mouth like remnants of food, grains of rice lodged in an old man’s gums.

— Dordalma, Dordalma, not even God is enough, nor are you going. .

They left me alone with Silvestre, while they prepared for the emergency.

— So here I am —he sighed.

And he slowly passed his hands up and down in his arms to show the extent of his disintegration, viscous as if he were returning to clay rather than to dust.

— Father, go and wait quietly in the shade.

— I’m going to die, Mwanito. I’ll have too much shade before long.

— Don’t say that, Father. You’re vaccinated.

— Let me ask you, my son: wouldn’t you like to die with me?

It’s solitude that we most fear in death, he continued. Solitude, no more than solitude. Silvestre Vitalício’s expression was vague and vacant. I got a sudden fright: my father no longer had a face. All he had were his eyes, pools without a shore, into which our anguished moments rushed headlong.

— My blood is what makes your blood flow, did you know that?

Those words had the weight of a sentence. His life, as Ntunzi used to say, had never allowed me to live. The strange thing was that he seemed to be dying within his own death.

— Look — he said, holding out his hand. — They’re two almost invisible holes. And yet, a whole life is draining out through them.

Could Silvestre Vitalício be dying? His face didn’t reflect such a final pronouncement, with the exception of his blank, unavailing look. Most worrying, however, was his hand: it had changed colour and swollen to double its size. Blood seeped from the slit they had made, and dripped onto the ground, to Zachary’s horror. Aproximado took charge of the situation and declared:

— Let’s take advantage of this to get him back to the city.

Zachary hoisted Silvestre in his arms, although he was no weight to carry. He was just dozy, deprived of body. He was sweating like a fountain and, every so often, was shaken by violent tremors.

— The man needs to be in hospital.

Uncle’s orders were precise and swift. We would all leave together, we’d get out of Jezoosalem before our father got his wits back.

— Mwanito, go and get your things. Run.

I entered my room, ready to rummage through every nook and cranny. But suddenly, I came to my senses: what did I have in the way of things? My only possessions were a pack of cards and a bundle of notes buried in the back garden. I decided to leave all these memories where they were. They were part of the place. The papers that I’d scribbled on were bits of me that I had stuffed into the soil. I had planted myself in words.