Ondjaki - Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret

Granma smiled that hesitant smile of hers, of somebody who may not understand.

“Your daughter, la doctora Víctoria, asked me to come and see you. May I touch your leg?”

“Yes.”

Granma Catarina did not come downstairs. Since Madalena was keeping Granma Agnette company, I went slowly upstairs as well.

The bathroom window was open and I felt a tiny breeze of the sort that the elders say gives you a cough and that can also be called a “whiff.” I liked that word “whiff” a lot. Later I also learned that a room where the windows had been open for a long time could be said to have been “aired out.”

“Except that you have to be careful, Granma.”

“Why?”

“Because it can also be said to be ‘mosquitoed out.’”

Granma Catarina laughed at the words I invented during our conversations.

I opened the door to her room. Her rocking chair bobbed slowly with the black shawl draped over the armrests.

“It’s time to close the windows.” Her very low voice frightened me.

“You gave me a start, Granma Catarina.”

“Sorry, son.”

“Granma, aren’t you going downstairs to hear the Cuban conversations of Comrade Doctor KnockKnock?”

“I don’t like to appear in front of strangers, my dear.” Granma Catarina’s voice was sad. She closed the windows of the room, which was very dark. “Go downstairs, my dear. They might need you to understand the Cuban language.”

“You’re staying here all by yourself, Granma, without any light?”

“I’m not afraid of the dark any more.”

Many years had passed since the Soviets had ceased to prohibit Sea Foam’s swims on the prohibited beach, and the fishermen who had already been living there so many years before — before the Soviets, even before present-day Angolans and before the Portuguese — were also allowed to enter and leave as they wished without anyone telling them that beach was “closed to the public.”

We, the children of Bishop’s Beach, normally went on undercover missions to spy or to swim.

Madalena, though Granma Agnette never knew about it, also went there from time to time to go swimming with her boyfriends, and stayed in the water for a long time doing I-don’t-know-what, even if the water was cold or the sea was rough.

“When she shows up with a belly, everybody’s going to say it was the sea that did it,” the Old Fisherman used to say.

One day we went there early in the morning.

3.14 came to call me to run and see the sea with him. Thinking our mission was to dive in search of pretty seashells and conches, I started to look for my swimsuit.

“You don’t need it, just come. We’re not going to dive. This is a spying mission.”

At that hour Madalena still would have been in the bread line-up or even, if it were a fishing day, waiting for a shipment that might come in only after ten o’clock.

“Just come. I’m going to show you something.”

I didn’t hear voices in the house. Granma Agnette must have gone out with someone. I called twice more, but Granma Catarina didn’t answer. Maybe it was too early for her to appear.

The Luanda sun starts to get hot very early, and it usually comes up before six in the morning. Half an hour later, it’s already hot enough to burn skin; the body discreetly begins to sweat, and when the Soviets laugh they turn red like lobsters emerging from boiling salted water. That’s how they prepare lobsters: I’ve seen it at Aunt Rosa’s house. They boil the stupid lobsters, they put in coarse salt and, before serving them, Aunt Rosa makes a sauce of lemon, hot spices and a little more salt; she also puts in olive oil or even, if Uncle Chico asks for it, sugar-cane rum.

“The Soviets are strange people,” Granma Catarina used to say. “They catch the sun but they don’t like to swim.”

The Soviets wear blue uniforms of heavy fabric that’s good for making rags for wiping the floor, so Madalena told me, a fabric that’s absorbent and dries quickly in the sun; it’s true, it makes wiping-up cloths that last a long time or even, if properly cut and stitched, good doormats for the kitchen. The Soviets from the Mausoleum construction site never let go of their AK-47s and only when it’s very hot do they take off their uniform tops. That’s when we see just how strange those blue lobsters are: underneath, they still have that tight green shirt that soldiers like to wear. They patrol the construction site and the beach, but, even when it’s hot, I figure they can’t have authorization to dive in because they stand close to the water, they chat with the fishermen, at times they make fun of Sea Foam and laugh at him, but they don’t go in.

“The place for lobsters is in the sea, compañero ,” Foam tells them, but they don’t lift a finger. They break off to speak, spitting Soviet, and they also like to spit on the ground.

“ Oye , that smell se llama B.O.!”

We laughed at the Cuban spoken by Sea Foam, his clothes soaked as he came out of the water, with his Rasta dreadlocks full of sand and trapped, glinting seashells.

Foam’s swims took place early in the morning, sun or no sun, whether in spots of rain or a downpour, with thunder or grey clouds, with or without medusas in the water.

“My body’s dirty, but mi alma, my soul, is clean… Not everybody can say that, right, little lobsters?” The Soviets looked away, shielding their eyes from the sun and not allowing the children to see their broiled faces. “The elders say: when one is not bienvenido , one must leave…Hahaha!”

At times he took off his clothes. Underneath, Sea Foam wore outfits so old and dirty it was impossible to tell what fabrics they were made from. At other times he went in with his clothes hanging on his body, and not just a few of them; when he came out of the water, they must have weighed a ton.

He wobbled, laughed as he started running and laughed even more if we were there. He knew that we watched his every move attentively and that later we’d go tell the others. He wobbled, ran as though he were one of those people who know how to dive into swimming pools, like athletes at the Olympic games who dive in fast without making the water stir, except that Foam would suddenly seize up and enter the water almost in slow motion. It was really funny, he seemed to be saying excuse me to the fish and the seashells; he sat down right on the shore and let his body sink into the waves where there wasn’t enough water for even a baby to go under.

“I don’t have a bath at home, but they can’t say I never took a foam bath.”

That was how he got his name, Sea Foam, there on the shoreline of Bishop’s Beach, where there was a huge blotch of white foam deposited by the breaking waves to ensure that the water merely lapped against the sand. Only if you walked far out did you lose your footing. There the foam disappeared, but closer in, where we also liked to pick up pretty seashells, it was just clean white foam, completely white as you looked to the right and the left, with Sea Foam’s body making a dark stain in the whiteness.

“ Oye, niños, es el cabello del mar … The hair of the sea, do you understand? I mean, hahaha…” He went under for a second, dipped all of his hair in the foam awash with sand and shattered seashells, came up almost breathless and then puffed like a little whale. “I mean… I’m just a louse in the white hair of the sea.”

3.14 looked at me with an expression of pity. Lots of people on Bishop’s Beach pitied Sea Foam. I never really understood this: Why pity him? A person who went swimming every day and laughed and said that there was the white hair of the sea; a person who spoke Cuban and knew the stars in the sky and the mathematical value of Pi and — who knew for sure? — a person who kept an alligator in a doghouse; maybe even a person who was happy, and only he could know this. 3.14 put his finger to his head to signal that Foam was cuckoo, demented, crazy, but to tell the truth I don’t know if Foam was crazy like those real crazies people talk about.