One day I took a path that led to a tiny village. A young man came walking towards me. It seemed as if he was walking out of the sun. His clothes were in tatters. He could have been nineteen, maybe twenty. When he came closer, I noticed his feet. I saw something I shall never forget as long as I live. I can see it before my very eyes as I am telling this tale now. Rarely does a day pass when I don't think about this boy who was coming towards me as if from out of the sun. What did I see? His feet. He had painted shoes on to his feet. He had mixed paint from the soil and preserved his dignity for as long as possible. He had no boots, no shoes, nothing, not even a pair of sandals made from the remains of a car tyre. As he had no shoes, he had to make some himself, so he painted a pair of shoes on to his feet, and in doing so he boosted his awareness that, despite all his misery and destitution, he was a human being with dignity.
I thought at the time and I still think now that of all the strangers I have met in my life, this meeting may have been the most important of all. For what he told me with his feet was that human dignity can be preserved and maintained when all else seems lost. I learned that we should all be aware that there could come a day when we too will have to paint shoes on to our feet. And when that day comes, it is important that we know that we possess that ability. I don't know what his name was. He couldn't speak Portuguese and I didn't understand his language. I have often wondered what became of him. He is most probably dead, though I have no way of knowing for sure. But the image of his feet will always be with me.
It was like telling a fairy story, I thought. But Christine knew it was true. She turned to Aida.
"Do you understand what he is talking about?" she asked.
Aida nodded. But she didn't say anything. And Christine didn't push her to provide an answer, like the sensible mother she was.
35
I've seen it once. A person's face just after being told that she has tested positive. But I didn't see it just in her face. The pain and the shock was all over her body. Her feet were screaming, her arms were flailing desperately so as not to go berserk, despite the fact that they were hanging down by her sides.
It was a woman, and she can't have been more than twenty. It was in Maputo, in a private clinic of the simpler kind. I was there to check my blood pressure. I waited outside the closed door to the doctor's consulting room. It opened and the woman emerged. I knew immediately even though I didn't know: this young African woman had just been told that she was HIV-positive. She was just setting out on life, but had found that her time had been brutally cut short. Her life was coming to an end almost before it had started.
She walked away down the corridor. When they measured my blood pressure it was extremely high. The doctor frowned. But I told him it was only temporary. Something had happened shortly before I entered his room that had forced up my blood pressure. Now it was on its way down again.
I keep some people very close at hand, easily accessible in my memory. Aida is one, that nameless woman is another. I wonder very often what became of her, whether she is still alive.
36
There was once a famous library in Alexandria. It contained the sum of human wisdom, or as much of it as was recorded, on its shelves. Then it burnt down. Now, a few months before I go to Uganda, I pay a visit to the newly opened library in Alexandria. Architecturally, it is a remarkable creation. More of a cultural centre than a straightforward library. At the time of my visit an Austrian symphony orchestra is rehearsing in one of the halls.
While I am in Uganda it occurs to me that if all the memory books that are now being written could be gathered together, they might fill the library in Alexandria. There are so many memories to be written down, so many million little books will be left behind after the people who will shortly die from Aids. The vast majority of these millions of people will die too young. Most of their lives will be cut unjustly short. Many of their children, who are going to receive these books and are the reason why they are being written, will have been made homeless and will end up wandering aimlessly from continent to continent.
Then I have a vision: empty, abandoned libraries, and the great collections of books find themselves with no readers.
It is not a totally outrageous thought. Many a plot could be composed that would be just the thing for a science-fiction movie. There is already research which predicts that certain countries or regions in Africa south of the Sahara will be ruined if Aids continues to spread at the rate it is today. What they say should be taken seriously. The social fabric will be altered. A large percentage of the workforce will be wiped out, making society increasingly dependent on child labour. To make things yet worse, the whole existing intellectual heritage will be in danger of dying out because young people who are infected will not be able to raise the motivation for studies.
Wilderness, child labour, silence. Many people refuse to believe that this could happen. Or at least, think it is a threat that won't concern us for a very long time to come. But it takes only about nine hours to fly from the heart of Europe to the heart of Africa. In other words, a good night's sleep or a somewhat extended working day, and you are in the centre of what is threatening to become a wasteland, a return to the most primitive circumstances for work and property.
Some are already commenting on this in their memory books. There are people who are about to die, but who do nevertheless try to see into the future. They can comprehend the consequences of their own death, magnified and on a global scale. If there is one thing that is certain when it comes to Aids in Africa, it is that you will not die alone. Also it is true that your death will have very far-reaching consequences.
I read about this in several of the memory books. The fear of impoverishment, the fear that children will be left to their own devices, the fear that all knowledge will be forgotten, rot away like the dead body of a human being.
Aids has to do with many kinds of death. Hence also with many kinds of life. Obviously, life can be assessed and interpreted in the number of books that are written and the books that are read.
In 1343, Petrarch found a voluminous manuscript in Verona containing Cicero's letters to his son Atticus: for many years the boy was an idle and unenthusiastic student in Athens. Those letters had been lost since Cicero's time, since the beginning of our chronology. After thirteen hundred years they suddenly reappeared.
Is this what will happen to all the memory books that are being written today? It seems hardly credible that in our day and age it would be possible to bury the written word in archives, even as we bury nuclear waste in caverns deep inside mountains. But you never know.
There was once a great library in Alexandria. It contained all of human knowledge until it burnt down. Now it has been rebuilt.
Perhaps that library ought to be a centre for all the memory books that are being written today. Perhaps at least copies ought to be kept there, for the future.
37
In the diary I kept during my visit to Uganda there is a stray sentence scribbled down on the inside back cover.
The pain can be seen in their smiles.
Strangely enough, I have to admit that I can't remember when I wrote that. Who had I met? Whose smiles was I referring to? It seems to me odd that I can't remember. I would hardly have made a note like that without good reason.
I scour my memory, but I cannot find the occasion or the cause.
How can I remember a smile without remembering the face?
38
It wasn't until my last visit to Gladys that I realised that there was a link between her and Christine which I had not known about. Gladys told me when I first visited her that when she heard she had tested HIV-positive, she sat down and stayed sitting down for several years, doing nothing, only waiting to die. On that occasion, I overlooked the obvious question: what shook you out of that apathy?
It was Christine who persuaded her to abandon her apathetic wait for death.
Gladys and Christine knew each other only slightly, but Ch
ristine had heard that Gladys was sitting in her dark room as if paralysed. She never went out, hardly spoke to her children. She just sat there motionless, waiting for the cold breeze on the back of her neck.
One day Christine went to see her. She knocked on the open door and went in. Gladys' house has three rooms. In the first one, which was used as the best room, there were two armchairs with white embroidered throws over their backs. It was in one of those chairs that Gladys was waiting for death to call. She had been sitting there for more than three years. Every morning was a long wait for the evening. A wait for death. Christine entered the room and sat down in the other chair. She began by telling Gladys that she too was HIV-positive, but that she was unwilling to sit down and wait to die. Gladys didn't say much, so Christine talked all the more. She spoke about all Gladys' children, and her own children. Christine said that between them, they had a responsibility for seventeen children. They simply had to live for as long as possible, and never forget that despite everything, there could always be room for a smile on their faces. They had no right to sit down and wait for death. He would call when the time came, in any case.
Christine kept going back, day after day. I don't know how long she spent trying to persuade Gladys, but the fact is that one day, Gladys left her chair and abandoned her unending wait for night to fall. Christine had succeeded. I asked Gladys what would have happened if Christine hadn't knocked on her door.
"I'd have still been sitting there, waiting to die."
And Christine?
"I knew that Gladys had many children. I heard that she was just sitting there in the darkness. I couldn't bear the thought of that. I thought that I might be able to talk her into making an effort to live longer."
Gladys also said: "I feel infinitely grateful to Christine. But for her, I'd have withered away. When she first came, I didn't want to listen to her. But she wouldn't give up. I thank her for that every morning when I wake up."
And Christine?
"I don't think I did anything out of the ordinary. It was just that I couldn't bear to walk past her house knowing that she was there, inside in the darkness, doing nothing, with no will to live. That was all. Nothing else."
39
In all I read some thirty memory books while I was in Uganda. Not all of them were complete, some had been interrupted by the death of the author and would never be more than fragments of stories. Some were written by people no longer with us, others had authors who were still alive.
Some were brief, laconic. That could be due to the style or the contents. There were some authors who knew practically nothing about their own ancestors, about the earlier generations of their families. They had left the "my family" pages blank. Other authors seemed to be overwhelmed by the feeling that they had "nothing to say". They thought they led humdrum lives. It had never occurred to them that they would leave any impression behind them apart from the houses they had built, the land they had cultivated, the children they had had. But even if some of the documents were thin, all of them were full of life, and often extremely expressive. Everything in them, whether written, drawn, pressed in the form of flowers or butterflies – everything was about life and death. Literally.
Most moving, of course, were the memory books written by sick parents of children who were still very small, in many cases infants. They would inherit these slim little books without having any memories whatsoever of the parent who had written this last will and testament bequeathing no money, no property. Nothing but a memory.
There were also memory books written by two parents together. They might not be married, but they have children together. Infidelity is a vague concept in cultures where polygamy has to do with traditions rather than a matter of morality. The infected parents sit together and write these memory books.
These suffering couples. It was as if they were sitting side by side, asking: Who are you? Who am I? Who are we? And so their memory books were created.
Needless to say, I also saw unwritten memory books. The pages remained blank. Not because the people concerned had no memories. Not because they had no desire, no intention of writing. They were blank memory books that bore witness to the overwhelming angst that induces paralysis in the face of disease, pain and death.
These empty memory books were almost always symptomatic of people who didn't dare start to write, as that was tantamount to accepting that death really was close at hand.
It is with Aids as it is with all other chronic diseases. Many of those infected will refuse to accept that they are ill until the bitter end. It starts much earlier, of course. When many people refuse to undergo tests. Some fall ill and will die with every symptom you can think of. But they insist that they are suffering from something else.
This disease is shameful, burdened with guilt. Whole villages, whole generations are riddled with guilt and shame in the shadow of Aids. Not everybody is affected in this way, not people like Gladys, Christine or Moses. But far too many are.
All those who refuse to accept that they are ill believe that they alone will survive. At least, as long as they refuse to start recording their memories in little exercise books made up of a few pages of grey paper.
40
One day my stay in Uganda comes to an end. In the evening I drive from Kampala to the airport in Entebbe. There is traffic chaos as usual, with frequent gridlocks: cars, overcrowded buses, lorries with lefhally packed loads. The only ones who get to where they want to go are those on cycles or mopeds, or on foot. It is Saturday evening, the jams are especially chronic. But eventually traffic starts moving again, and we get to the airport in time. The flight departs late at night and I head for Europe, and before long I shall be dreaming about the people in the coniferous forest.
Those faces projecting from the tree trunks, their frozen faces, their wordless horror. The coniferous forest crammed with the dying, and the already dead.
I must be honest. It was a relief to get away. So much death and suffering in a few intensive weeks is more than enough. I shall never forget the people I met. Nor shall I ever cease to be angry over the fact that so much of this suffering is unnecessary.
Christine again: the medication she needed cost twice her monthly wage as a teacher. She earned the equivalent of US$55 a month (£30). The drugs, in their simplest form, cost US$110. Approximately US$1300 (£720) per year. That's US$1300 for Christine, US$1300 for Moses, and another US$1300 for Gladys.
But they shouldn't really need to pay anything at all. When the history of this epidemic is eventually written, a chapter will be devoted to the gigantic pharmaceutical monopolies and the actions of their shareholders and executive boards during the years when Aids ravaged the world. No courts will be able to bring the owners of those companies to justice.
But the greed and inhumanity tells the story of our age. What we allowed to happen. We will never know how many people died before the drugs companies permitted or were forced to permit medicines to be manufactured in places and at prices that made the drugs accessible to the poorest people of the world.
The scale of this crisis is unique. The greed today concerning drug licensing, the ruthless exploitation of the weak economies, the increasing but nevertheless inadequate resources made available to combat Aids are another scandal. No wonder many Africans believe that the West has no objection to large numbers of poverty-stricken Africans being killed off so as to "ease the burden".
I think about this as I fly to London. It strikes me that these giant aircraft travelling through the night skies are the modern equivalent of sailing ships. In olden days they would ply the seas to Africa at a stately pace.
Nowadays, everything goes much faster. But the distances are no shorter. They are still vast. They are kept vast. They are not distances to be bridged. They are chasms to be left in place. Or patrolled.
The truth about Aids is of course a general truth about what the world is like today. In other words: what we allow the world to look like.