Daria Read online

  Motumba told Daria that he was separated from his wife, Ana Magalhães, a Mozambican white woman, who had stood side by side with him throughout the many trials of the ugly colonial war. Both had been members of FRELIMO,2 fierce fighters for the independence of Mozambique. They had boycotted the colonial regime in every way they could, directly and indirectly. Both had been incarcerated by Salazar’s regime in the Prison of Tarrafal in Cape Verde. For two long years they had stayed in that dungeon known as the Camp of Slow Death, where the guerrilla fighters—or anyone thought to be against the regime—would be punished severely. Prisoners often did not come out alive at all, or came out with their memories all twisted, as if they had been suffering from advanced and very pronounced dementia. Both Francisco and Ana suffered immensely at the hands of Salazar and his fascist counterparts. They would show up anywhere to spy and eavesdrop on suspected rebels so that they could catch them and take them to the dungeon. He told Daria how he had been persecuted and eventually captured by the PIDE, and how he had always had to exercise the most care in order not to be caught. He told her, in great and amazingly lively detail—where blood and passion and love intermingle and the great depth of human beings is revealed—about that doomed day when he had been caught unaware, how he was turned in by someone whom he thought was his friend, someone whom he thought was also fighting for the same cause. He recounted how Fernando Nobre Montenegro became a traitor to their memories, their childhood, their common goal of liberating Mozambique from the shackles of the oppressor. His friend had told the PIDE agents to pick him up, told them how and where to find him—and his wife too. Nobre Montenegro was a white Mozambican of Portuguese origin, and he had been a close friend of Francisco. They had both attended the same school in Lourenço Marques—Lourenço Marques High School—and had been the closest of friends in that beautiful city of acacias and jacarandas, that city full of light by the Indian Ocean. They had been the closest of friends since they were little boys, irrespective of race. They had shared dreams and ideologies, and they had written passionate poems and manifestos about an independent Mozambique. They had written beautiful stories about hope and the resilience of the Mozambican people, and they had spread the word among the populace as much as they could by acting out plays in public, reading manifestos or poems, and engaging in other literary work—firmly believing that art must be put at the service of the revolution, otherwise we would all die buried in metaphors that though splendid, do not feed the hungry. They had put on plays in which Mozambicans were represented as the masters of their own country, the owners of their own cotton and corn plantations, and in which Black women, who were being constantly abused and raped by colonial overseers, were displayed as full human beings who rebelled against their abusers and kicked them in the crotch, instead of just lying there quietly under their dirty white weight. The two friends had even travelled throughout the entire country—covering it lés-a-lés, from corner to corner, province to province, from Cabo Delgado to Maputo, from Zambezia to Inhambane, from Nampula to Sofala and beyond—always carefully hiding from the colonial state informants. Their goal was to bring awareness to Mozambicans and awaken them from their oppression and dormancy, a dormancy that had made them into something that could not be called human. Francisco and Fernando made them see how they had been suffering the blows of the colonial master’s iron fist since the capture of Ceuta in 1415, and how it was now time to regain their dignity, their land, and their dances by the bonfires. They had read the works of Agostinho Neto and Amílcar Cabral and Che Guevara, and hope—that stubborn and beautiful flame—was burning deeply within their core.

  Francisco and Fernando had thought that the fact that one of them was white and the other Black worked well because they were of the general opinion that the fierce fascists would never think that a white man and a Black man could be together, unless the Black man had accepted the white man’s will. And so they tended to go unnoticed for the most part, even though they had to exercise extreme care in all their activities. They had both gone to the USSR to train in communist liberating tactics and armed combat for some time, a common practice in African colonies, and they both spoke Russian fairly well. They were avid lovers of Tolstoy and, of course, Karl Marx, and they passionately transmitted their ideologies to their oppressed brothers and sisters. They read to the people the profound lyric poems of Agostinho Neto’s Sagrada Esperança, which called for action. They emphasized Neto’s juxtaposition of pathetic images with heroic images, showing the Mozambican people what they had been, what they were now, and how they could again become what they had been—how they could regain their full humanity, their beautiful African citizenship. Fransciso and Fernando read to the people out loud in public reunions arranged with the utmost care and secrecy. They read “Western Civilization,” “Saturday in the Musseques,” and then “Reconquest”; they read “The Path of the Stars,” “Bleeding and Germinating,” “Confidence,” “Green Fields,” “We Will Return” and then “Haste.” They read the poems in an order that was meant to generate a certain reaction, a certain action. They declaimed these beautiful verses with intense purpose and visceral emotion, sometimes screaming them out in sheer love for liberation, with tears in their eyes, and sometimes even dancing like proud African kings. In so doing, they showed those oppressed souls the power of brotherhood, the power of justice, the power of revolution. They showed them the need to revolt, to engage in armed struggle. Salazar was not going to give in easily, and no diplomatic talks would sway him to return Africa to Africans—he was a stubborn mule who was not going to yield. They, Francisco and Fernando and many of their comrades who believed in the same ideas of justice, had these powerful messages and poems translated into various Mozambican languages—Shangaan, Ronga, Sena, Swahili, Zulu, Macua, and Makonde. They knew that most Mozambicans did not speak the language of the oppressor and that this was largely why they were being oppressed. The people did not understand, could not understand the malignant seeds living inside the brains of those tugas who had come from a faraway land in the fifteenth century to impose their ways upon them. Francisco and Fernando also took it upon themselves to learn Mozambican languages because they too wanted to get closer to the Mozambican soul, the real Mozambican soul. They wanted to regain that thing that had been taken from them, because they too had been whitewashed; they were the real assimilados. In fact, some have pointed out that the assimilados were the ones who did not know who they were, not the mass of Mozambicans who did not doubt the gods they worshipped and the many sounds that twisted their tongues. When this beautiful idea finally came into being and Mozambique finally saw itself free from colonial rule, Machel became the man at the helm of the independent nation, and Portuguese the official language of Mozambique. The other many languages, the languages that transmit other ways of being and seeing and sensing the world, have been perishing and perishing since—the foreign one becoming more domestic and the domestic ones becoming more foreign. Every day one of them dies with the last elder of the tribe, and with it an entire vision—an entire way to access truth, beauty, and knowledge—is lost.

  They, Francisco and Fernando, did all this and much more. They did it together and with the help of many other guerrilla fighters and lovers of justice. And then Fernando became a traitor. He dishonoured all their promises to fight for justice and equality for all. He told the state secret police, PIDE, about Francisco and his wife in exchange for a high-ranking post in the colonial administration. And then, at the end of colonial ruling, just before the Mozambicans took control and Samora Machel became president of the newly independent nation; after thousands and thousands had died or lost some part of their bodies and souls all over Africa; just before the Portuguese army said no to the colonial war with a peaceful coup d’état, feeding carnations into their guns (when Lisbon woke up to Zeca Afonso’s beautiful song, “Grândola, Vila Morena” on the memorable dawn of April 25, 1974, when Daria was only five years old); just before all these memorable events
, Fernando, sensing he was running out of luck, managed to escape the country. Had he stayed, he would have suffered a bloody end at the hands of those he had betrayed. As it turns out, and as Francisco had recently discovered, Fernando was in fact now living in Canada; he too had become a Torontonian. He was actually a board member of the Lusitanian Social Service Centre. And since Francisco was also a board member, they had once again come face to face, now in very different circumstances that had nothing to do with the ones they had faced together in Mozambique—for Canada is a peaceful country, at least of late, after its own abundant blooshed.

  Daria was ecstatic with Francisco Magno Motumba, who was twenty-five years her senior. He described his life with such passion, love, eventfulness, intensity, and manic grandiosity that Daria could not resist. He became the man that she had been waiting for: he was educated; he had experienced suffering; and he had a poetic leftist soul, the type that is so rare to come by. And he also had that link with the colonial wars, where her brother Alberto had perished never to be seen again. He told her he was now forty-eight years old and that he had been separated from his wife Ana for two years now. She had returned to Maputo with their two twin children, Otu and Quintana, now adults in their early twenties, because she could not stand the coldness of this country, of this city, of these people. She missed Maputo, that bright bride, that blinding pearl of the Indian Ocean that sends rays of light in all directions. She missed the clarity and the sun of Africa and that warmth that people have there—always singing, always smiling. She missed their capacity to remain human even when faced with the most inhumane conditions. They had both decided that separation was best for them at this point in their lives; they had beautiful memories to hold onto, memories to make their children grateful to be who they were, proud descendants of distinguished revolutionaries. The twins sometimes came to stay with him, and sometimes he would go to Mozambique to visit them. They would take turns. Francisco planned to remain in Canada until the end of his term, which likely would be a long one because, he said half-jokingly, post-colonial African presidents frequently end up becoming presidents for life, and Chissano would probably not be an exception. He planned to return to Mozambique after his term, but for the time being he was happy to be in the Northern hemisphere where everything is so neat and organized. He had a degree in Italian Renaissance Literature from the University of Bologna, and he had had four books of poetry published by Caminho, the most prestigious publisher in Lisbon. “The next one,” he added, “is going to be called Beautiful Daria, My Finally-Found Home.”

  Motumba was Daria’s love affair. Blood with blood. Blood in blood. He was the key to the mysteries that had populated both her life and the lives of her long-suffering peasant family. They had also endured the jug of Salazar’s regime—one that had forced them to work from sunrise to sunset; divide a sardine among three; and send their young sons to combat, one of whom never came back, forever lost among leaves, worms, and nothingness in the Moyombe. Motumba was a man of the world, a lover of pluri-continental and multiracial nations—and not in the sense that Salazar had advocated but never really practised, despite what he claimed. As Motumba explained, the apartheid in Mozambique had also been fiercely imposed, even though it was not neatly written in a book of laws, as was the case of the neighbouring nation of South Africa. He explained to Daria how he and Ana had often had to conceal their marriage; how he had had to pretend to be her houseboy, especially when they were in public spaces and when they went to South Africa together; and how Ana had been called a dirty traitor and a disgrace to the race, a dirty vagabond who sleeps with Black men and brings beings into the world who are closer to eunuchs than humans. Daria had no doubt about how she felt: she wanted to give to him that precious thing she had been keeping tightly sealed between her legs. Blood with blood. Blood in blood. He deserved it. Daria started imagining a life with Francisco. She started seeing herself as a woman of the world with two little biracial children. Their beautiful children would tell the world that redemption and forgiveness are possible, that the thunder can become silvery and gentle, and that dreams can fly and swim in the rainwater that gives to us all. She started dreaming and dreaming about a world where nothing could impede one from becoming happy, a world where everything makes sense. A world of roses. Roses and roses. Red pulsating carnations sending inebriating perfume to the soul of all of us, that deep self that sees with the great eye. As she thought of this beautiful world coming to her, Daria remembered how her mother always said that all flowers were roses. Daria realized that, in that very act, her mother may in fact have been applying metaphor—or would it be metonymy? Or perhaps even synecdoche?—even though she never went to school and would not know the meaning of such a word. If Daria were to say it in front of her, her mother would respond, in her usual foul mood, “What are you saying? Are you stupid?” And, as Daria thought all this, she smiled to herself or perhaps to her mother, communicating across a great distance the way only a mother and daughter can.

  * * *

  2Frente de Libertação de Moçambique/Mozambique’s Liberation Front.

  MASKS, STATUETTES, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER IMAGES. The first time Daria and Francisco made love, they both felt it was the end of the world. Or at least she felt that. And she really felt that he felt it too. He had been as gentle with her as possible and as his desire had allowed, and he had only entered her after many inventive games of foreplay, when she could no longer endure his teasing and started to scream dirty words, words she never knew she could pronounce. Later, when reflecting upon the event, she could not understand where she had heard them. It was as if she had in her, hidden at seven keys, all these sordid ungodly words. It was as if they were just ready to come to the surface at the right moment, the moment of incendiary heat, when body and soul give into the visceral instinctual urges that lurk in the animal that lives in all of us. He had invited her to his home, a home full of comfort and decorated with a mixture of western and African things—again indicating that Francisco was indeed a man of the world, a man between worlds who seemingly felt comfortable in all of them. When she first got there, she stared at the masks he had on the wall and the many naked statuettes of Black and white women he had in the many parts of the house. She felt excited and scared at the same time, as if anticipating him in her—his full lips, his hands going up and down, rivering her body with his skin, his colour, his magnetic pulse. (Rivering was a word she herself had invented just because it sounded exactly right to describe how she felt when she thought about him like this.) There were photos of his twin children, the ones he had had with Ana, Otu and Quintana, in several parts of the house too. This pleased Daria because it showed that he was a good father, a man who had his children in his mind; it showed that he needed to stare at them every day so that he did not forget the light in their eyes. The photos displayed the children at different stages of their lives—from birth to their current age—gradually revealing their growing bodies and facial features. She would stare at them, going from photo to photo, trying to see if the twins looked more like the father or the mother. In them, she saw remnants of the children she would have with Francisco. There was a photo of Francisco and Ana embracing one another in a comfortable hug. They were young in that photo and seemed happy, their eyes full of shining hopes and their facial expressions without any trace of worry—the faces of two young people who believe in love, who believe in the beauty of the world. Daria tried to imagine them meeting for the first time and then making love for the first time. She wanted to know how it was, how it felt, if he found her more beautiful than her. She was indeed beautiful, Daria thought. She had long dark hair and a slender long body, unlike Daria’s, which was full of curves and valleys; Daria had the type of figure that often makes men lose their vision and causes dangerous road accidents, as many kept reminding her. She did not quite like that comparison because it made her feel guilty for things that were out of her control.