Daria Read online

  She was twenty-five years old then. She was a tall fierce woman with long black hair and unending legs that seemed to be made to walk the world from corner to corner or to penetrate deeply into the jungles of Africa and compete resolutely with the tall trees, without getting lost or breaking. She loved Africa more than anything, and though she had not visited any other continent, she knew she was home and had no desire to leave that home. Her ancestors had been living in Mozambique since the early nineteenth century. They had come from a region in the northern interior of Portugal, the province of Trás-os-Montes, a land full of mountains and rocky granite stones and snow and poverty, with little houses lost in the middle of that vast chain of mountains. The territory extends to the Spanish border, and many say that the most hardworking and fierce Portuguese people can be found there. She had never felt drawn to visit this land where her ancestors had come from, like many people do—people who are always looking for that which can never be found. She had no desire to travel the world and go from place to place to find happiness, to find wholeness. She was happy and whole where she was—or so she had thought before she had met Francisco. She first met him when she was twenty-one years old in a public gathering of FRELIMO members that had taken place in a recondite corner of Niassa, away from the vigilant eyes of the PIDE secret agents. When she saw Francisco, she could not resist his magnetism, the passion that shone in his eyes and the assurance that his thick sensual voice transmitted as he declaimed manifestos and poems about the destiny of man. He spoke about the right that everyone has to wake up in a land that they can call their own; a land that feeds all and allows people to speak their minds, their emotions, their souls; a land that allows men to make love with women in open air, without shame; a land that makes people want to wake up in the morning and walk slowly through the day, so that their feet can savour the feast of the early cooling dew, or the heat of the midday sun, or the mystery of the dark night. That blessed day when she first saw him was a new beginning for her. Just like Daria, the beautiful Daria with the poetic soul, Ana also felt that Francisco was the man she had been looking for all along. He was the purpose for which she had been made a woman, the purpose of her entire existence. He was her love, her revolution, her land. He made her want, and want more. He made her feel at home. He made her want to lie under him so that he could teach her how to become a woman and how to wake her body into wholeness. There were many people at that event, people of all ages, ethnicities, and colours. There were men and women and even precocious children who already had in their souls the desire to feel freedom, even though they were children and ought to feel free all the time, ought to feel that fairy tales are not tales but pulsating truth illuminating their night.

  The next thing Ana was aware of was waking up somewhere pitch dark and very cold. Though she did not know at the time, she was on Santiago Island in Cape Verde, very far from the Indian Ocean, inside that swamp of slow death that was Tarrafal. They did not take her to Machava in Mozambique where most of the political prisoners of that distant Ultramarine Province were often kept. They chose to take her far away, to the other colony, on the Atlantic Ocean, so that she would be isolated, trapped on that lonely inaccessible island, cut off from any of her relations and thus impeded in continuing her cause. When she woke up in Tarrafal, in a freezing, small room, she was naked and felt her body was bruised all over. She was hurting. She was hurting a lot. She did not recall how she got there and did not know whether it was night or day because she was imprisoned in a small dark cement cell, completely sealed, in which no ray of light was visible. She was shivering and talking to herself, words that made no sense, disconnected, disjointed words that only those who have endured a hard and long punishment can murmur: Francisco, the boat, the sun, the sea, Avenida da Liberdade, the blue neon light, cunt, Chief Oliveira, magnificent legs, what a waste, this bitch, that preto motherfucker who has been fucking my own women … After a long while, Ana Magalhães felt that her body was boiling. She could not breathe, and she felt sweat all over her and even on the floor she was lying on. As she tried to feel and understand her surroundings, she crawled all over that small space that was enclosing her. She crawled and crawled like a lost helpless animal or a baby with no understanding of the world yet, and then, unable to get her bearings, she started screaming. Her visceral scream seemed to go nowhere, for she was in a tomblike prison where nothing came in and nothing went out except for the infernal heat that was somehow able to enter that space and come down on her like a sentence from the meanest God or the most wretched human souls. She went on screaming, or howling, into that boiling darkness that she had fallen into, like a buried dog or a wolf trying to encounter another sound, but it was all to no avail because the only sound that came to her was her own cry, her own agony, her own pulsating pain—the echo of a profound abyss. She was doomed; she was dead. She was forever separated from her magnificent Francisco Magno Motumba, from the beautiful idea, from the beautiful two-year-old twins they had, Otu and Quintana. The children often stayed with her parents for safety reasons and because the couple moved a lot due to thier political activities. And so, on that fateful day, the children had been with her parents and were saved from the brutality of the state police, who likely would have had no qualms squashing their heads with their heavy boots—those thunderous feet of men who cannot walk lovingly and lightly on this earth, destroying everything in their wake.

  Sometime later, she could not know how long because she had lost all sense of time, someone came into the cell where she was. The door was abruptly opened, letting in a light so intense that her eyes could not see it as light but rather as a burning blinding darkness that did not permit her to gain any knowledge of her situation, her surroundings, understand where she was and why she was there. She was dragged out of the cell by two guards and taken to a cold shower somewhere in the compound. She felt some alleviation as the water came down on her and eased the suffocating heat she had endured in that dark closed room for God knows how long, even though the force with which the water came down on her was extreme, fustigating her bruised body and making her feel a throbbing pain all over. One of the guards held the shower and pointed it at her, often hitting her intimate parts. She felt uncovered, unguarded, and she wanted to hide from the assault, from the gaze, from the humiliation. The other guard stared at her, murmuring some unintelligible things that she could not understand. She tried to hide her body by recoiling and facing the wall or by assuming a fetal position, but the force of the water did not allow her to do that for more than a second and so she quickly ended up sprawled on the floor, totally exposed, totally at the mercy of the guards. They then took her, naked and clean, to the private office of the Director of Tarrafal, the feared Chief Arsénio de Oliveira. The Chief’s private office was nicknamed The Freezer or The Experimental Chamber. Oliveira ordered them to exit, and they left her there alone with him. Ana was now getting a better idea of what was happening, and she recognized Chief Oliveira because she had seen him many times on TV, along with other protectors and enforcers of the regime. She had heard him speak words of fear to those who were fighting for the cause of liberation, calling them dirty communists who had no idea of the faith awaiting them once he got his hands on them. She particularly remembered one day when she saw him making a speech that sounded more like a warning. It was June 16, 1964, exactly four years after the Mueda massacre had taken place in Cabo Delgado in the north of Mozambique. The Makonde nationalists had organized a protest demanding independence from Portugal only to be shot dead by the colonial administration. She remembered how Oliveira spoke, how he minutely described what had happened to those people who had dared to ask for independence from the great Lusitanian empire and from father Salazar, a remarkable man, who had come from nothing and was now the greatest leader in Europe. Salazar was a man of God, Oliveira said, who considered them, Africans, not distant relatives of a lower species, but in fact equals to the citizens of the metropolis. The Portuguese Empire
was unlike other colonial empires, which did not promote assimilation and even forbade mixed marriages. He went on, telling the crowd that they did not know how good they had it, that they were much better off than their neighbours in the south, and that the Portuguese could not be compared to any other empire. The Portuguese were the fathers of miscegenation and did not feel that making love with a Black man or a Black woman would make them lesser. On the contrary, they felt honoured and strengthened by such a union.

  Ana knew then that Oliveira was just being a demagogue. He was a son carrying the message of his father, a father who knew his days of glory were numbered. One can only swim against the currents for so long; if the currents are saying “Give independence to the Africans,” then independence will come sooner or later. She knew it, and she would not be fooled by such empty rhetoric. But what she remembered most vividly were the words Oliveira kept using to describe how the protesters had been killed. He said the ones who dared to rebel would also suffer the same, or worse, fate. And indeed, he had not been joking when he said that, as she was now finding out first-hand. He ordered her to stand still in front of him while he asked her specific questions about her associations and those of her husband. He wanted to know details about FRELIMO’s next moves: Who was running the operation? How many associates did it have? Who was the comandante? Was it her husband, or Samora Machel, or another son of the devil communist? And so on and so forth. She did not reply because she had taken an oath, an oath in the name of justice, an oath that could not be broken even if her life had to be sacrificed. She did not vacillate, even though he kept asking her the same questions over and over for four hours straight, telling her she could not move until she answered his questions truthfully. She stood there in front of him like that, naked and terrified, yet resolved to keep her oath. She stood first with her back turned to him and then, as per his orders, directly facing him, like a frozen statue asking for mercy. But no mercy was coming. When Oliveira’s tactics did not achieve any results, he told her he was going to try another dance with her, a dance he was sure she would not enjoy. He told her she was a traitor, a dirty cunt fucking any preto that came her way. He ordered her to come near him, and he unbuttoned his pants. He then forced her to perform oral sex on him and swallow whatever came out of him, adding that he was a clean man and that she should be honoured to get so intimate with him, to get so close and personal with a man of his stature. Ana felt sick, very sick, body and soul. She had never been with anyone other than Francisco, and she could not stand the smell of this dirty man. This was a man who came from the same place that her ancestors had come from a long time ago, but with whom she had nothing in common. The mere sight of him gave her nausea, a nausea that came from the deepest in her being. After he was done with her, he shouted for the guards to come and ordered them to take her back to the sealed and dark cement cell. The door was closed behind her, and she felt like she was entering a tomb, a tomb with no light and no air, and from which there was no hope of ever escaping.

  TRAVELLING BY SEA. Francisco was picked up on the road as he was driving back from Nacala, in Nampula, to Lourenço Marques. It was a Friday night, and he was travelling to rejoin his beloved Ana, his warrior princess, a woman who gave him immense pleasure in body and soul. His car was accosted by two men dressed in plain clothes and carrying pistols that they pointed at him in the middle of the road, making him abruptly break out of his thoughts and hit the brakes of his old Peugeot. At first, and because Francisco was not expecting such an intrusion into his night—a night high and dense and illuminating—he thought that a wild animal, like an elephant or a zebra, was trying to cross the road and had become disoriented by the intense lights of the car and the noise of the motor. He had been travelling peacefully and feeling a sincere contentment all over his being—the party’s meetings in Nampula had gone very well and he sensed that the change, the beautiful change, was not far from occurring. This was a change that would allow him to walk with Ana and enter cafés and restaurants without being harassed; a change that would make Mozambique the beautiful country that it truly was; a change that would honour the memory of all his ancestors who had fought the Portuguese since they realized that Vasco da Gama and the rest of the visitors, who had first reached that African coast by the Indian Ocean in 1498, were not there just to see the beauty of the place but actually wanted to settle and build mansions. In Nampula, he had met many of his colleagues and close associates who were doing important political work either in Mozambique or in Tanzania; he had also met many other supporters, young and old, Black and white, men and women. They were all people he had never before seen, all eager for change, all willing to fight with all their being for the beautiful idea to finally occur—that palpable, stunning child that they had been nourishing for a long, long time. He had shaken hands with Samora Machel, his closest associate and friend, the current president of FRELIMO, an extraordinarily courageous and intelligent man, and a true visionary who could bring freedom and goodness to Mozambique. He was currently exiled in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but he had managed to sneak into Mozambique for this important meeting. Machel had taken the reins of the party after the assassination of Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane in 1969, who had been brutally killed by a bomb at his headquarters in Dar es Salaam, the source of which was still being investigated, some claiming it was the dirty job of the PIDE and its international allies, others insisting it was an even dirtier affair—an inside job of FRELIMO pointing to dissidence and rivalry among party members. The bomb had been secretly put inside a book addressed to Mondlane that detailed the tactics of communist successful revolutions. When Mondlane saw the title of the book—O Comunismo Vencedor—he hurriedly opened it but the treasure hiding proved to be fatal and he was blown into pieces. Despite all this, Francisco felt hope. He felt reenergized. He felt that his life had a real purpose and that this time FRELIMO was going to attain its goals.

  The assault took place as he was reaching Beira in Sofala. When Francisco realized that his luck had come to a sudden halt, he instantly assumed the demeanour of a strong man who would not be scared by two Estado Novo secret agents. He maintained that impartial, frozen look, the look of a mask that no one can decipher because the secrets are well sealed within it. He had learned this from his selfless Russian tutors during his mandatory training in Russia before he became accepted as a high-ranking member of FRELIMO. He was told exactly the type of posture and facial expressions that he should assume whenever he faced the enemy. He was also made to train for several hours so that he could display this persona and display it well. The teachers were relentless and very methodical in their instructions, and they were satisfied only when Francisco acted exactly as they had in mind. They had specific sessions devoted to enacting scenarios of physical torture or severe mental manipulation. They were well aware of the tactics used by the PIDE and also by the South African Police (SAP)—apples of the same tree who often worked in conjunction—and they wanted Francisco to be well prepared to handle what came his way. At first, Francisco thought this training was unnecessary and that the Russians were overdoing it—and perhaps even enjoying the torture of an African in the process—but when he watched some PIDE and SAP videos that the Russians had somehow managed to obtain, he became convinced that this practice was essential if he were to be successful in liberating his country. He understood that he had to suffer in advance as preparation for the real thing. He knew this exercise was not just a game, but, in fact, absolutely required training. It was important that his body and mind could withstand the real beast when it was thrown at him. And there it was, right in front of him, in the form of two pistols pointed at his forehead by two PIDE agents. They had somehow managed to get him, even though he had exercised the most care by making it look like his travels to the north were related to his polygamous customs, that he had just gone there to visit one of his wives and the children they had. And indeed, he had stayed with Sarif Matou at her house, and they had made passionate love to one an
other. But the PIDE agents were wise. They would not be fooled by a pretend polygamist, for they knew that Francisco was an assimilado and that he was legally married to Ana Magalhães, as the records in Lourenço Marques very clearly indicated. They had done their job, and they had done it very well.