Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

— If that nephew of mine had died, you’d have nowhere else in the world to hide. .

— You know very well how much I care for these kids. My sons are my last hope in life.

— But you’re not helping them like this.

You don’t help a bird to fly by holding onto its wings. A bird flies when it’s quite simply allowed to be a bird. That’s what Uncle Aproximado said. Then he left, engulfed by the darkness.

M y brother Ntunzi had only one aspiration in his life: to escape from Jezoosalem. He had known the world, had lived in the city, and remembered our mother. I envied him for all this. Countless times I begged him to tell me about this universe that was unknown to me, and each time, he would linger on details, the colours and the bright lights. His eyes shone, swollen with dreams. Ntunzi was my cinema.

Incredible though this may seem, the person who had stimulated him in the art of telling stories had been our father. Silvestre thought that a good story was a more powerful weapon than a gun or a knife. But that had been before our arrival at Jezoosalem. At that time, and in the face of complaints about conflicts at school, Silvestre had encouraged Ntunzi: “If they threaten you with a beating, answer with a story.”

— Is that what Father said? — I asked, surprised.

— That’s what he said .

— And did it work? — I asked.

— I got beaten up all the time .

He smiled. But it was a sad smile because, in truth, what story was there to invent now? What story can be conceived without a tear, without song, without a book or a prayer? My brother’s expression became gloomy, and he grew old before my very eyes. On one occasion, his sorrow was expressed in a strange way:

— In this world there are the living and the dead. And then there’s us, the ones who have no journey to make .

Ntunzi suffered because he could remember, he had something to compare this with. For me, our reclusion was less painful: I had never experienced any other way of living.

I would sometimes ask him about our mother. That was his cue. Ntunzi would blaze like a fire fuelled by dry wood. And he would put on a complete performance, imitating Dordalma’s manner and voice, each time adding in one or two new revelations.

On the occasions when I forgot or neglected to ask him to revisit these memories, he would soon react:

— So aren’t you going to ask me about Mama?

And once again, he would re-kindle his memories. At the end of his performance, Ntunzi would become subdued again, just as happens with drunks and their euphoria. Knowing that the outcome would be sad, I would interrupt his theatre to ask:

— And what about the others, brother? What are other women like?

Then, his eyes would gleam anew. And he would turn on his heels, as if exiting an imaginary stage before re-emerging from the wings to imitate the ways of women. He would bunch his shirt up to simulate the bulk of a woman’s bosom, wiggle his buttocks and reel around the room like a headless chicken. And we would collapse on the bed, dying of laughter.

Once, Ntunzi told me of some old crush he’d had, a product more of his delirium than of lived experience. Not that it could have been otherwise: he had left the city when he was only eleven years old. Ntunzi dreamed his women with such ardour that they became more real than if they were flesh and blood. On one occasion, when he was in the middle of his hallucinations, he met a woman of boundless beauty.

When the apparition touched his arm and he looked at her, a cold shiver ran through him: the girl had no eyes. Instead of sockets, what he saw were two empty holes, two bottomless wells without sides.

— What’s happened to your eyes? — he asked unsteadily.

— What’s wrong with my eyes?

— Well, I can’t see them .

She smiled, astonished at his awkwardness. He must be nervous, unable to see properly.

— You can never see the eyes of the one you love .

— I understand —Ntunzi affirmed, recoiling with all due care.

— Are you scared of me, my little Ntunzi?

One more step backwards and Ntunzi lost his footing, tumbling into an abyss, and he is still falling, falling, falling, even today. As far as my brother was concerned, the lesson was clear. People who allow passion to take them by storm are destined to become blind: we stop seeing those whom we love. Instead, a lovesick man stares into his own abyss.

— Women are like islands: always distant, but quelling all the sea around them .

For me, all this was like thickening swirls of mist that merely made the mystery surrounding Woman more dense. I spent whole afternoons gazing at the queens on the playing cards, and thinking to myself that if those were true reproductions, then Ntunzi’s ravings had no basis whatsoever. They were as masculine and as arid as Zachary Kalash.

— Women sometimes bleed —my brother once told me.

I was baffled by this. Bleed? We all bleed; why did Ntunzi invoke that particular attribute?

— A woman doesn’t need to get injured, she’s born with a gash inside her .

When I addressed this question to Silvestre Vitalício, he answered: women were injured by God. And he added: she got slashed when God chose to be a man.

— Did my mother bleed too?

— No, not your mother .

— Not even when she died?

— Not even then .

The vision of a stream of blood flowing out of Silvestre’s body disturbed my dreams that night. It rained blood and the river was growing red, and my brother was drowning in the flood it caused.

And I dived into the waters to try and rescue his body, which was tiny and fragile, like that of a newborn baby, and fitted in my arms. Silvestre’s slurred speech echoed deep within me:

— I’m a male, but I bleed like women .

One time, my father came into our room and caught my brother doing one of his acts, busy imitating what he called a “showy woman.” Silvestre’s eyes grew red as if injected with hatred:

— Hey, who are you imitating? Who is it?

Whereupon he hit him so hard that my poor brother lost consciousness. I placed myself between them, offering up my body to placate our father’s fury, and I shouted:

— Father, don’t do this, my brother has almost died so many times!

And it was true: after having burned with fever, my brother continued to suffer from attacks. Ntunzi would swell up like a ball, his eyes dazed, his legs rubbery like some punch-drunk dancer. Then, all of a sudden, he would collapse on the floor. When this happened, I would hurry away for help, and Silvestre Vitalício would saunter over, repeating to himself words that were either a curse or a diagnosis:

— A burn on the soul!

Our old father had an explanation for these relapses: too much soul. An illness picked up in the city, he concluded. And raising his finger, he would growl:

— That’s where your brother caught this scourge. It was there, in that infernal city .