Daria Page 13
She went into the bathroom alone, took off his shirt, and looked at herself in the mirror, carefully examining the signs of last night. She could see and sense the mark of his teeth, his lips, his breath, on her neck, her breasts, her nipples, her thighs, her belly. She felt herself between her legs and tried to find evidence of what happened last night between her and Francisco. She felt pain as her fingers reached her intimate part, where he went last night. She put her fingers in deeply, trying to find him there, mixed with herself, and she emerged with a mound of blood and plasma—a wound where surely they both now lived, their union forever sealed through an act of pure love. She then jumped into the shower and let the water slowly bathe her body, another rain of tender love coming down on her, mixing itself with all the love that Francisco had given her last night. They had not used protection even though she had protested a little. She had said that it may be too early for the babies to come because she wanted to finish her university degree first and did not want to be dependent on him. He had hushed her by saying, “Oh querida, there is no need to worry about that now. I am financially very well off, and I really, really want to have a baby, your baby, our baby, the most beautiful baby in the world. We’ll call her Santuaria if it’s a girl and Muranio if it’s a boy. And if we get twins, which is quite possible because I come from a very fertile lineage, we’ll call them Merania and Meranio.” Daria had smiled and said she liked the names, that they sounded strange. A good strange, she added, like very old rivers that came from the beginning of the world to meet us at this precise moment in the present and bless our existence. He told her she was a very deep soul, an old soul, full of wisdom and poetry, like the ancient Mozambican Goddess Bulane. And again she had felt happy, whole, understood. She felt at home.
A PETRARCHAN SONNET. Every day that passes I am more and more in love with Francisco. He is my life, will always be my life, me in him, him in me. Last night when we made love again he went all over my body and sung to me the most beautiful Petrarchan sonnet. A man of letters, lettering me all over, his body in mine, mine in his. His tongue and his chest, his hands and legs tour me up and down in a dance that I have never thought could be danced. I enter the land of beautiful oblivion, and I see all that has been missing from me is no longer calling out.
Daria, this is my body, poured upon yours with the cadences of waves that do not know black and white,
Skins intertwined in one carousel.
Daria, this is your body offering itself to me like a white earth finally feeding the baby it had abandoned and rejected.
Daria, we are the river and the sea, the sun and the moon, the night and the day.
Our babies will be nothing but light upon light lingering through tears of joy,
Torrents of splendid water, marbles dancing in the vacuum of God
Daria, your body and mine are the world.
Daria, your body and mine make up the totality of all there is.
They are all there will be, and all there ever was.
He sings these letters to me—incendiary verbs and just adverbs, consonances, and assonances, eternal music walking me up and down—and I open myself to this enchanting chant. I am Laura. He is Petrarch. Francisco and Laura, eternal Petrarchans, weaving the sounds, weaved by the sounds. His black chest against my full breasts that are flowers inside flowers, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls.
I am in him, he is in me. Nothing is missing. Nothing will ever be missing again—from him, from me, from the world. He tires me out, and yet I cannot have enough of him in me, enough blackness pouring light down on my pale skin, on my blushing shame—me, a prudish Renaissance Laura. I am nothing without him, nothing but a lost, fading, tiny, dying star in a night without the light that can only emerge from that pure black that shines and lives. He letters me all over, rivering me over and over again, and sometimes he sings me his Petrarchan song in all the languages that he knows, languages that he has learned while travelling the world to discover a way to liberate his people and help them regain their dignity. He sings to me in Latin, and then in Italian and Russian, the same poem spoken in all those different languages. He speaks with all the beautiful sounds that all the world’s peoples have invented so that we could be rich and learn from one another, so we could see life and wisdom where we thought there was none, expanding the corners of our irises beyond belief, so that we could believe more and more. And then he switches to Makonde, to Macua, to Swahili, to Zulu, to Shangaan, to Ronga, to Sena, and I no longer know where I am, who I am, or who I want to be. I only sense the sounds and the murmurs of the world in me through the tongue and mouth of Francisco. He circles my belly with his fingers, then his mouth, putting his tongue in the rift of my belly button, and he chants a lullaby to the baby or the babies that are living there. I feel pregnant, and my breasts suddenly become engorged with milk—thick white milk, thick white milk that he sucks slowly, following an ingenious methodology, so that he can live in me and I in him. I feel full, I feel empty, I feel adored. There is nothing missing. I am happy. I am safe. I am at home. I see my brother Alberto flying happily above the heavy Mayombe of Angola. He is happy. He has invented another method of seeking and finding justice: his Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He has forgiven his Black brothers who blew away his young and naïve body and turned it into pollen, food for the many bees of that dense tropical forest surrounding the Congo river, the great Amazon of Africa. I imagine the now nourished bees flying over that deep body of water that travels throughout many countries to quench the thirst of the needy people across the continent, a continent that suffers immensely from droughts and the depletions that foreigners and locals cause. He has forgotten, forgiven Salazar who forced him to go down there and exhaust his body for nothing. He has forgotten, forgiven the helplessness of my mother who allowed him to be taken away from the safety of her skirts and the milk of her breasts. I am at home; I feel safe.
There is nothing missing. From him and me, Francisco and Daria, another Alberto will be born. The son of two former enemies, he will teach the parents how to forgive one another and how true love is to be found, fostered, discovered, rediscovered. I will bring this new son home to show to my mother, and she will open her sad mourning eyes, seeing in him her very own first-born—who had curly, curly hair and fair skin—her first-born whom she never saw again after he went down there, to that place down under. He was lost because Salazar, the son of landless peasants, was so poor that he felt he needed to conquer all the land he could find to grow potatoes and corn and beans to feed his children. He went on and on in a frenzied ad infinitum, excavating deeply into the bellies of the African land, much like my father did, pounding hard—hungry and angry—at the granitic entrails of the Beira Alta mountains. They had been trying to assuage their deep famine that never, never seemed to leave them. They were desperate, like a beast whose stomach reaches into the depths of its soul, making it forever doomed, forever hungry. They were eternal beggars for the material, never able to find flight in the immaterial, forever chained to the lower realms. Their penitence, his penitence—he, Salazar and his Lusitanian ancestors, who felt poor and therefore needed to expand his horizons so that they could call themselves men, fathers of a potent nation. Every day that passes I feel growing in me another world, another being, an Alberto, a Muranio, with savvy wide eyes, full of love for all the corners of the world. A future king, a future leader that possesses in him the duality necessary to make this world liveable, a new genetic code in which all the potencies and memories of many people live. He will be of a race that surpasses race only to engender the beautiful, the dream of lavender that I dreamed in the most startling of the nights when I entered the field and the sacred enveloped me in one single mantle of goodness. There will be a new flag waving at me and him and calling on to you. A new flag forged with the greatness of love and forgiveness. There will be Ghandi and Mandela and Mother Teresa and Jesus and Buddha and Allah singing happiness and justice wit
h open smiles at the wide window of the world, sending shredded petals of camellias and hydrangeas down on us, making us eternal, walking gardeners of light, of beauty, of love. The world will be a pathway of deliverance, of magic and belief, pure belief—just like when I was little and went to the circus and saw for the very first time how donkeys could become horses and how horses could become unicorns, suddenly taking flight and swimming through the mountains, the rivers, the seas, the skies. Everything was, everything lived. It was beautiful. And I believed in everything that appeared in front of me: a vast totality of you and me, and me and you, and all of us, in one single wide step from here to the beginning of the world, making us all giants of the best and most sacred kind. A world dreamed out of love and suffering and hope.
There is nothing missing from me, from him. I am in him, he is in me. I am happy. I am at home. I kiss his back where the marks live. I travel my fingers and then my tongue through the crosses and the minuses and the multiplication signs that he has all over his back, torturous remembrances of what they did to him in Tarrafal when he refused to speak, even when they brought Ana in and made him watch. Torturous remembrances of the games men play in their darkest hours, games in which humans become mathematical codes that generate no meaning, no wealth, no bread, leaving body and soul hungry and waiting for death, that last liberating dark bride that makes it all end. While immersed in lovemaking, we play Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor and his arias from Cantata No. 202, The Wedding Cantata, his favourite, the one he had listened to time after time since he was a young boy, and the one he says kept him alive in Tarrafal, for he would train his mind to hear it over and over again, so that he would forget where he was, flying above the cement cell, and the deadly sun, and the stench of urine and feces, and the pain that they were inflicting on him constantly, using the most unimaginable methods, methods so inhuman that he was sure these people could not be people, but only agents of the lowest and darkest forces. I sing a song to him in silence as he letters me all over with his grace.
He rediscovers me through the sonnets of a Renaissance man. We are immersed in the true age of humanity, when European universalism is no longer the arrogant current of thought that steps on everything that falls outside of its lens. It now bows to give voice to other voices and chance to other destinies, to hear the suffering, to take responsibility, to accept guilt; it bows to be forgiven but it never dares to forget. It is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I am richer; he is richer. We are richer. My mother has not lost her son for nothing. She has gained another son, offered to her through the shades of the sublime where everything dances. Her eyes dream again. She no longer spends her days sighing and carrying that black cloud in her chest. She, who so deserves a rest after a life spent carrying the fleshy weights of all of us, we the ten children who came every sixteen months, not thinking of the heaviness of her legs and the varicose veins ready to burst into heavy bleeding.
ANA, FRANCISCO, AND ME. My love affair with Francisco matures as he discloses more and more about his life and the perils that he and Ana suffered because they both firmly believed in the beautiful idea and never ever let it slip. One day, when I was alone at Francisco’s home, I came across a book he was writing called The Idea Against Tarrafal. He had mentioned this book to me and I was very curious to read it, but he did not offer to show it to me and I did not feel I ought to ask. I thought that perhaps he was not yet ready to show it to anyone. But that day I came across the working manuscript by accident, when I was cleaning the shelves of his library and browsing through his impressive collection of books, and I could not stop myself from reading it. I felt I wanted to know everything I could about this man, this man I loved. He had a rich and varied collection of books, which included transnational fiction, African politics, Marxist political theory, and Italian and Portuguese Renaissance poetry. The collection also included many enigmatic books pertaining to the sisterhood between mathematics and poetry, a highly perplexing topic that hinged on the oracular or the mystical, and made me vaguely think of the stars and the act of travelling through space. I saw myself as a light monarch butterfly in cadent and slow motion, perfectly circular somersaults of ups and downs, through the vacuous nothingness of the skies. But when I tried to mentally match numbers, quotients, minuses, and pluses with words and metaphors, my mind would go blank. Later on, I had a professor who also swore there is a very intimate link between these two seemingly unlikely subjects: mathematics and poetry. To my surprise, I also found on the shelves some scandalous pornography magazines, the kind that made me blush and feel very guilty. I could not stop looking at the vivid images and fabulous games so clearly depicted on the pages, sensing deep down that I wanted to engage in some of them with Francisco. Francisco had gone to an important function at the Mozambican consulate that had to do with the visit of some Mozambican ministers to Canada. The two countries were attempting to foster trade relations, something Mozambique badly needed, for even though the country was now independent, its economic and ethnic situation was far from perfect. And this was to be blamed, some argued, on the hardcore Marxist post-independence regime and the ensuing bloody civil war between RENAMO3 and FRELIMO. The war had just ended in 1992, and it had seen the deaths of over 900,000 people, some dying by starvation and others through various other viscerally ugly means. It was a wretched conflict that gave rise to gang rapes, amputations, child soldiers, and the ravaging of the land. The Idea Against Tarrafal was based on Francisco and Ana’s life and described, in distinct and entangling details, many of the things that had happened to them. As I read the manuscript, I became more and more in love, more and more in awe of this man who had come my way—this man I was lucky enough to meet so that my life could become more fulfilled. I knew I could tell my children that their father was a true hero, a true man of substance, the Che Guevara of the African continent. The more I read about Ana and Francisco, the more I loved them both. I even felt that I was Ana’s sister in love and pain. I felt like I became her, and I offered myself to Francisco, body and soul. I was her; she was me. Daria and Ana, Ana and Daria, transmuted beings, forming one single woman who knows well Francisco’s pain. Through her, I came to live the real revolution and was thus equipped to be Francisco’s true soul mate. Through both, I too, defended and embodied the beautiful idea.
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3Resistência Nacional Moçambicana/Mozambican National Resistance.
The Idea Against Tarrafal
DEDICATION: To those who persevere even in the face of the ugliest evil eye. To Nelson Mandela, who withstood the thickest walls.
THE SUN AT SANTIAGO ISLAND. Ana Magalhães was picked up by the PIDE when she was blissfully sleeping in her apartment in Lourenço Marques. Francisco was away in the north of Mozambique doing some important revolutionary work with other FRELIMO members. When the secret state police came in the middle of night, Ana was taken by surprise, for she was immersed in the most beautiful dream. In this dream, she was in the middle of the city of Lourenço Marques, in the central avenue of this stunning pearl of light, the famous Avenida do Ultramar, standing on top of a military convoy with Francisco and many other comrades, men and women. The Avenida was full of people, Black and white, poor and rich, young and old, mulatto, Indian, Indian Black, Chinese, Chinese Black, and many other tonalities that the world can engender. There were all kinds of people in the convoy where Ana stood and all kinds of people around it—people of all genders and sexes. The crowd filled that entire long avenue that went on for kilometres and kilometres, only to end at the bay by the Indian sea. They were all were chanting, dancing, and hugging one another. Some were even making love in open view, all naked, frantically thrusting into one another and going from one to another, as if they had forgotten the vows of monogamy that certain types of marriage can impose. It was as if they could not care less if they were doing it with a white person, a Black person, or all the others that fall in between. Perhaps they were followers of a truly democr
atic polygamy, a future trend that was to take over in Mozambique and other countries around the world, African and otherwise. Ana herself was not just offering herself to Francisco, as she had done up to that point. She was opening her legs and her blouse to anyone who came to her to offer love and tenderness. And Francisco was doing the same and smiling and smiling, a smile of solace and contentment, the smile of a man who has so much love to give and receive that he cannot stop giving it and receiving it. People were also drinking and smoking ganza. Everyone was high, everyone was happy, and everyone was thanking the gods for this thing that had finally happened, this thing they had been nourishing for a very long time and for which they had suffered so much, for which they had lost many of their friends. This was a true festa, a festa dos vivos, a feast of the living, where everyone felt that finally the idea had manifested itself. At some point in the dream, Ana looked up. It was just at the moment when she had finished the most ferocious act of lovemaking with a man that she had never seen before, a man who made her go to heights that she did not remember ever having climbed with Francisco, even in the early days when their love was intense and fresh and their need for one another did not seem to ever appease itself. She looked up and saw the name of the street, and she realized that she was in the middle of Avenida da Liberdade and not in the middle of Avenida do Ultramar. At that moment of sudden awareness and cognition, she could not contain her happiness. She felt drunk to the core, inebriated with the sudden discovery that she no longer lived in a place that made her keep her mouth closed and forbade her from making love freely with the man of her choice. She felt sure that she had reached the place that she and Francisco, and all the others, had been trying to reach, that place where everyone could be paid equally for the fruits of their labour. They had reached a place where the light of the sun, the gentle lunar illumination, the soothing coolness of the weather, and all the other sensations that time and place allow us to have could be shared by the people of Mozambique. She felt so sure that she screamed from the top of her lungs so that everyone in that long avenue, which ended only at the bay by the Indian Ocean, everyone in that city, and everyone in that country could hear her. She screamed to everyone, shouting about her sudden discovery and pointing to the sign that now said Avenida da Liberdade. And as she did that, she also saw the magnificent administrative building across the avenue, and she became aware of the slogan in big letters hanging from it: This is Mozambique. She screamed again. She screamed louder than before, pointing at the street sign and the banner frantically, trying to inform the others of her sudden discovery. Everyone looked up, and everyone stopped what they were doing for a moment to stare at that blue neon sign. It was surrounded by a gentle dark light, as if it were dawn and the people were now waking up, waking up to stare at the beautiful dream that was no longer a dream but something very tangible they could grasp with their own hands, their own fingers, their saliva. There was a general silence, and everyone prayed with their hands held up high. Some even knelt on the floor and murmured words of gratitude to the forces that made it all happen. At that very moment of happiness, meditation, and beautiful realization, before all the people could really see the slogan hanging down from the building across the avenue and truly understand its significance, Ana was shaken violently by two rude and sturdy PIDE agents, one Black and one white. And that was the beginning of a long and arduous nightmare, one that lasted for two years, two days, five hours, and seven minutes.