Confession of the Lioness

  Without waiting for an answer, Hanifa waved her arms about, as if she were warding off ghosts, entangling herself in the foliage that framed her. She raised her hand to her shoulder, and felt the flow of blood.

  What’s this, ntwangu? Who scratched me?

  No one. The thorns, it was the acacia thorns. I’ve got to cut that tree back.

  It wasn’t the tree. Someone scratched me. Look at my shoulder: There are fingernail marks, someone clawed me.

  And they argued. But both were right. In the village, even the plants have claws. In Kulumani, all living things are trained to bite. Birds devour the sky, branches rip the clouds, rain bites the earth, the dead use their teeth to reap revenge on their fate. Hanifa gazed at the forest aghast. Her face wore the expression of an alarmed gazelle.

  There’s someone out there in the dark, ntwangu.

  Calm down, woman.

  There’s someone listening to us. Let’s go back inside.

  The first light of day was beginning to dawn: It wouldn’t be long before one could move around the house without the help of a lamp. On top of the cupboard, the oil lamp was still flickering. Suddenly Hanifa once again had that pleasant feeling that the kitchen had its own moon. As she hadn’t been favored by the sun, at least she could enjoy a moonlit ceiling. She gained confidence and thought about challenging her husband, declaring in a loud voice:

  I don’t want any of your relatives here today. They’ll be rushing over here with their commiseration. Tomorrow, when I’m a widow, they’ll be in an even greater hurry to steal everything from me.

  But she said nothing. She already considered herself a widow. All that was needed was for Genito Mpepe to accept his own absence.

  Husband, are the ones who are coming real people?

  Yes, they are.

  Are you sure?

  Certified authentic people, people born and bred. Among them, there’s a hunter.

  The bucket she was carrying in her left hand fell to the ground, and water flowed all over the yard. The broom in Hanifa’s hand now became a sword to fight off demons.

  A hunter? she asked in a whisper.

  It’s him, it’s the one you’re thinking of: the mulatto hunter.

  At first the woman stood there motionless. Then, suddenly, decisiveness seized her: She slipped into her sandals, covered her head with a scarf, and declared that she was leaving.

  Where are you going, woman?

  I don’t know, but I’m going to do what you never did. I’m going out onto the road, I’m going to ambush him, I’m going to kill that hunter. That man mustn’t get to Kulumani.

  Don’t be crazy, woman. We need him, we need him to kill these damned lions.

  Don’t you understand, ntwangu? That man is going to take Mariamar away from me, he’s going to take my last daughter away to the city.

  Would you prefer Mariamar to be killed by lions?

  His wife didn’t answer. “Prefer” was not a verb that had been made for her. How can someone who has never learned to love have preferences?

  If you don’t let me leave now, husband, I promise I’ll run away.

  The man seized her by the wrists and pushed her up against the old cupboard, knocking over the lamp. Hanifa saw her little moon dissolving into blue flames across the kitchen floor.

  I need to stop that mulatto. She sighed, vanquished.

  At this point, I decided to intervene to defend my mother. When he saw me emerge from the shadows, my father’s fury was rekindled: He raised his arm, ready to impose his kingdom’s rule.

  Are you going to hit me, Father?

  He stared at me, perplexed: Whenever anger gets the better of me, my eyes flash intensely. Genito Mpepe looked down, unable to face me.

  Do you know who summoned the hunter? I asked.

  Everyone knows: It was the people from the project, the ones from the company, my father replied.

  That’s a lie. It was the lions that summoned the hunter. And do you know who summoned the lions?

  I’m not going to answer.

  It was me. I’m the one who summoned the lions.

  I’m going to tell you something, so listen carefully, my father declared angrily. Don’t look at me while I’m talking. Or have you lost all respect?

  I looked down, just as the women of Kulumani do. And I became a daughter again while Genito regained the authority that had escaped him for some moments.

  I want you to shut yourself away here when this hunter arrives. Do you hear?

  Yes.

  While these people are in Kulumani, you’re not to stick so much as your nose outside.

  Silence descended on the room once more. My mother and I sat down on the floor as if it were the only place left in the world. I patted her shoulder in an attempt to show comfort. She avoided me. In an instant, the order of the universe had been reestablished: we women on the ground; our father pacing up and down, in and out of the kitchen, displaying his mastery of the house. Once more, we were governed by those laws that neither God teaches nor Man explains. Suddenly Genito Mpepe stopped in the middle of the house and, opening his arms, declared:

  I know what the solution is: We let the mulatto come, we leave him to kill the lions. But then we won’t allow him to leave.

  Are you going to kill him? I asked, alarmed.

  Am I the sort of person who kills people? The one who’s going to kill him is you.

  Me?

  It’s the lions you summoned who are going to kill him.

  The Hunter’s Diary

  ONE

  The Advertisement

  There’s only one way to escape from a place: It’s by abandoning ourselves. There’s only one way to abandon ourselves: It’s by loving someone.

  —EXCERPT PILFERED FROM THE WRITER’S NOTEBOOKS

  It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep. A few hours from now, they’ll announce the result of the contest. That’s when I’ll know whether I’ve been selected to go and hunt the lions in Kulumani. I never thought I’d rejoice so much at being chosen. I’m in dire need of sleep. That’s because I want to get away from myself. I want to sleep so as not to exist.

  * * *

  The sun’s nearly up and I’m still wrestling with the sheets. My only ailment is this: insomnia broken by brief snatches of sleep from which I wake with a start. When it comes down to it, I sleep like the animals I hunt for a living: the jumpy wakefulness of one who knows that too much inattention can be fatal.

  To summon sleep, I resort to the ploy my mother used when it was our bedtime. I remember her favorite story, a legend from her native region. This is how she would tell it:

  In the old days, there was nothing but night. And God shepherded the stars in the sky. When he gave them more food, they would grow fat and their bellies would burst with light. At that time, all the stars ate, and all glowed with the same joy. The days were not yet born, and that was why Time advanced on only one leg. And everything was so slow up there in the endless firmament! Until, among the shepherd’s flock, a star was born that aspired to be bigger than all the others. This star was called Sun, and it soon took over the celestial pastures, banishing the other stars afar, so that they began to fade. For the first time, there were stars that suffered and became so pale that they were swallowed up by the darkness. The Sun flaunted its grandeur more and more, lordly over its domains and proud of its name, so redolent of masculinity. And so he gave himself the title of lord of all the stars and planets, assuming all the arrogance of the center of the Universe. It wasn’t long before he declared that it was he who had created God. But in fact what had happened was that with the Sun now so vast and sovereign, Day had been born. Night only dared to approach when the Sun, tired at last, decided to go to bed. With the advent of Day, men forgot the endless time when all stars shone with the same degree of happiness. And they forgot the lesson of the Night, who had always been a queen without ever having to rule.

  This was the story. Forty years on and this maternal comfort has no
effect. It won’t be long before I know whether I’m going back to the bush, where men have forgotten all the lessons learned. It’ll be my last hunting expedition. And once again, the first voice I ever heard echoes in my mind: And everything was so slow up there in the endless firmament.

  * * *

  First thing in the morning, having scarcely slept, I get ready to go to the offices of the newspaper, two blocks down from where I live. But before I leave, I take my old rifle out of the cupboard. I lay it across my legs and caress it with the loving care of a violinist. My name is engraved in the breech: Archangel Bullseye—hunter. My old father must be proud of the way an old family tradition has lived on through me. It was this tradition that justified our name: We Bullseyes always hit the target.

  * * *

  I’m a hunter—I know what it is to pursue prey. Yet all my life, I’ve been the one pursued. I’ve been pursued by a rifle shot ever since childhood. It was this shot that propelled me once and for all outside the realm of sleep. I was a child, and I slept with all the aptitude that children alone possess. The blast tore through the night and the world. I don’t know how, in response, I managed to run down the length of the corridor: My little feet were rooted to the floor. In the living room, I found my father with his chest blown apart and his arms spread out in a sea of blood, as if he were swimming toward a shore only he could glimpse. In the midst of this world in collapse, my brother, Roland, remained seated in his room, the gun resting in his lap.

  Don’t touch me, he ordered, strangely calm. Never touch me again. You’ll burn.

  That’s how he stayed, motionless, until relatives and neighbors burst into the house, panicking and shouting. From the window, I watched my brother being taken away by the police. There was no doubt about it: It was he who had shot our father, the respected hunter Henry Bullseye. An accident that our mother had already seen coming:

  Firearms in the house only bring tragedy.

  That was what Martina Bullseye used to say. On the day my father died, my mother was no longer there to witness her premonition. She had died some weeks before. A strange illness had consumed her in a trice. So at the tender age of ten—and in the space of a month—I became an orphan. And I was to be separated forever from my brother, Roland. As he was an adolescent, he was spared a police investigation. He was cleaning the gun, just as he often did, having been taught to do so by his father. And so they decided to take him to a psychiatric hospital. They say he never uttered another word; never again did he behave like a person. Roland was goodness incarnate but his mind was eclipsed, consumed by guilt. In the night sky of my mother’s story, my brother joined the stars that had been swallowed up by the darkness.

  * * *

  My father was a man who filled the world—his foot would cross the threshold and we would feel the steadiness of his weight, as if we were in a little boat. What he did in life was far more than an occupation: Our father, the esteemed Henry Bullseye, was a hunter who was in great demand, and when he went away, he left our house full of sighs and mysteries. A tall, austere man, he was little given to talking. If I’d been cared for by him alone, I might never have learned to speak. My mother provided relief from this introverted side to my father: He was an emigrant from the mountains of Manica, where he had grown up among escarpments and rock faces. We would often hear his nostalgic yearning:

  Where I was born, there’s more earth than there is sky.

  Maybe because he was from another tribe, Henry Bullseye chose a mulatto woman for a wife. At that time, it wasn’t common for a black man to marry a woman from another race. The marriage made him even more solitary, driven out by blacks and excluded by whites and mulattoes. In fact, I only understood my old man when I became a hunter. My father was a stranger in his own world.

  * * *

  The receptionist at the newspaper offices is a fat woman, unhurried in speech and gesture. She seems to have been born like that, sitting, her backside like a planet competing with the Earth.

  I’ve come to find out about the result of the contest.

  I wave the clipping of the advertisement in front of the glass partition. The receptionist’s shrill voice was made to seep out through the gaps in the broken glass:

  Are you the hunter in person?

  I’m the last of the hunters. And this is my last hunt.

  The woman gazes up at the ceiling like an astronomer gazing up at the noonday sky. She opens an envelope in front of me, while I start talking again excitedly. She clearly wants to bide her time disclosing the result.

  I don’t know why they published the advertisement. There aren’t any hunters anymore. There are people out there firing their guns. But they’re not hunters. They’re killers, every single one of them. And I’m the only hunter left.

  Archangel Bullseye? Is that your name?

  I’m the only one left, I repeat without answering her question. And I continue my feverish discourse. Soon, I assert, there won’t be any animals left. For these false hunters spare neither the young nor pregnant females, they don’t respect the closed season, they invade parks and reserves. Powerful people provide them with arms and whatever else they need.

  It’s all meat, it’s all nhama, I say with a sigh, despondent.

  Only then do I look again at the fat woman’s expressionless eyes, as she waits for my disquisition to end.

  Is your name Archangel Bullseye? Well, you’re going to be able to hunt to your heart’s content, you won the contest.

  Can I come into your office? I want to give you a kiss.

  With unexpected agility, the woman gets up, leans across the counter, and waits, her eyes closed, as if my kiss were the only prize she had won in her whole life.

  * * *

  I hurry away from the newspaper offices, dodging through the crowd of street vendors. I’m going to visit my brother, Roland, at the Infulene Psychiatric Hospital. He’s been in the hospital ever since the accident in which our father lost his life. It’s been a year since I last paid him a visit. Now I can’t wait to tell him about the contest. Roland deserves to be the first to know. Besides, I don’t have anyone else to share my happy news with.

  It’s a long bus ride. The hospital is quite a way beyond the suburban shanties. With my head leaning against the window, I watch crowds thronging the streets and sidewalks. Is there enough ground for so many people? And I hear my old man’s lament: Where I was born there’s more earth than there is sky! I close my eyes and, for a moment, I pretend that I come from somewhere else, full of earth and sky.

  I sometimes ask myself whether I shouldn’t be committed to the hospital as well. My brother’s girlfriend, whose name is Luzilia, is a nurse and is convinced I’m mad. I don’t argue—maybe I have gone mad. But then I ask: Can someone who no longer has a life also have his sanity? To tell you the truth, it was she, Luzilia, who made me lose my mind. It’s because of her that I’m writing this diary, in the vain hope that this woman will one day read my muddled scrawl. Moreover, it’s not the first time that I’ve embellished my handwriting for the sake of Luzilia. Once before, I addressed some brief but ill-fated lines to her. At the time, what I wrote was an invitation. What I’m scribbling now is my goodbye. A false farewell, like everything in a hunter’s life, is a charade. Where for others there are memories, for me there are merely lies and illusions.

  * * *

  Luzilia is right: My madness began on the day a gunshot tore through my sleep and I discovered my father in the living room, spread-eagled in his own blood. Before I became an orphan, everything in me was intact: the house, time, the sky where I was told my mother was guarding the stars. All at once, however, I looked at life and got a fright: It was all so boundless and I was so small and so alone. Suddenly I stepped on the earth and recoiled: My feet were so meager. All of a sudden there was nothing but the past: Death was a lake that was darker and more sluggish than the firmament. My mother was on the far shore, writing letters, while my father swam without ever crossing the endless waters
.

  * * *

  Nothing has changed in the old hospital. It’s Luzilia who comes to meet me in the large waiting room. She’s still beautiful, her look seductive, the same habit of moistening her lips with her tongue. Luzilia is a nurse in that hospital—nothing there is strange to her.

  It’s so long since you were last here …

  I’ve been so busy, one way or another, I lie.

  Your brother and I got married.

  I feign happiness. Luzilia talks and her voice recedes into the distance. She explains that Roland had been discharged the day before the wedding and they’d even tried living in her house. But it didn’t work. Roland didn’t know how to live outside his illness. And he was readmitted to the hospital.

  * * *

  I gradually stop listening to my brand-new relative. Perhaps I don’t know how to be the brother-in-law of someone I wanted as a lover. I escape the present, returning to the events of a year before. It was in that same room that I confessed the deep love I felt for Luzilia. It was a long, empty afternoon, the type that spins out like some contagious disease. Without looking at her face, I took a deep breath and declared my love to the startled Luzilia. As she said nothing, I pressed ahead:

  There’s something I should say, Luzilia: Every time I come here to the hospital, it’s you I come to see.

  That’s not true. What about your brother?

  It’s because of you that I come.

  At this point I handed her a letter. Her little fingers remained still as she took her time reading it. Her hand lingered. Then she read in a low voice:

  Ever since I started loving you, the whole world belongs to you. That’s why I’ve never given you anything. I’ve merely returned things to you. I don’t expect recompense. However, this message requests an answer. As tradition dictates: If you love me, if my feelings are reciprocated, fold the corner of this letter and return it to me tomorrow.

  * * *

  The next day, Luzilia made no mention of the subject. She didn’t bring the letter with her, and didn’t say a word. She couldn’t have imagined how wounded I was by her indifference. I should have contained myself, but was unable to: