The Tuner of Silences

  —It would be better if you’d died, boys. What you’ve done here, to this sacred monument, is an offence against God . . .

  Overwhelmed, Aproximado paid us no attention: he inspected the damage to the chassis, opened the hood, peered in at its inner workings and shook his head:

  —No one’s ever going to leave here now.

  We returned to the camp after leaving Marta at the big house. My father still paused for a moment beside the destroyed altar piece. We walked along in silence, silence even dripped from my brother’s lowered eyes. Suddenly our old man emerged from the darkness and muscling his way past us, declared:

  —I’m going to kill her!

  He entered the house and, seconds later, re-emerged carrying an old shotgun.

  —I’m going to kill her myself.

  The soldier Kalash intervened, blocking our father’s path. A crooked smile deformed Silvestre’s face and voice:

  —What’s this, Zachary?

  —I’m not letting you pass, Silvestre.

  —You, Zachary . . . Ah! Of course, you’ve stopped being Zachary . . . I’ll correct myself, then: you, Ernie Scrap, my old son-of-a-bitch, you have betrayed me . . .

  He took a step towards Kalash, prodded his shoulder with his gun and pushed him up against the wall:

  —Remember that shot in the shoulder?

  We were baffled: suddenly, a look of panic dominated the soldier’s face. He tried to slip away, but the barrel of the gun pinned him in place.

  —Remember, don’t you?

  A trickle of blood appeared: his old wound had re-opened. The soldier had been hit again by the bull1et of old. Silence reigned, and then Aproximado attempted to intervene:

  —For the love of God, Silvestre!

  —Shut your trap, you useless cripple . . .

  I’ll never quite believe what happened next, no matter how often I recall it. With astonishing serenity, my brother Ntunzi stepped forward and asserted:

  —Give me the gun, Father. I’ll go.

  —You?

  —Give me the gun, I’ll kill the Portuguese woman.

  —You?

  —Didn’t you send me to learn how to kill, Father? Well, I’m going to kill.

  Silvestre circled his son, venting surprise, oozing suspicion.

  —Zachary!

  —Yes, Silvestre?

  —Go with him. I want a report . . .

  —Don’t involve Ernie in this, Father. I’ll go alone.

  With a dreamlike slowness, my father handed the gun to his son. Ntunzi vanished into the dark. We listened to his determined footsteps fade away, swallowed by the sand. After a time, we heard a shot. My whole body was shaken by weeping. Silvestre’s threat was immediate:

  —Any more tears, and I’ll kick you to pieces.

  Sobs tumbled from my breast, and my arms quivered as if my inner being were being wracked by some deep schism.

  —Be quiet!

  —I ca . . .I can’t.

  —Stand up straight and sing!

  I stood to attention, in readiness. But my breast was still overflowing, heaving.

  —Sing!

  —But Father, sing what?

  —Sing the national anthem, then!

  —I’m sorry, Father, but . . . what nation’s anthem?

  Silvestre Vitalício looked at me, shocked at my question. His chin trembled, stunned by the simple logic of what I had asked. My only nation was the one we had left far behind, the house where I was born. And that nation’s flag was blind, deaf and mute.

  Ntunzi’s deranged eyes squinted at the room and his voice was unrecognizable when he blustered his confession:

  —Tonight it was the broad’s turn. Tomorrow, I’m going to kill him.

  —Ntunzi, please, put the gun down.

  But he fell asleep hugging it to him. That night I couldn’t sleep, beset by fear. I peered out at the haunted house. There was no sign of a lamp. The job had been done. I looked up at the sky to distract myself, my fear turning into panic. Up in the heavens there were no fixed heavenly bodies: all the stars were cascading, all the lights incandescent. On the darkened wall where Ntunzi had recorded the days passing, all the stars had fallen. Now, no stars shone in Jezoosalem, either down below or in the sky above.

  I closed the window abruptly. Our world was crumbling away like a dry clod of earth.

  It was already late afternoon and none of us had been out of the house. A sultriness suddenly made itself felt. First came the smell: the smell of a dead body, eaten up by the heat, chewed over by the sun. My father sent me out to see. Could it be the Portuguese woman who was beginning to decompose?

  —Is she already smelling, so soon? Zachary, go out and bury the Portagee woman.

  She shouldn’t be left to rot thereabouts, attracting the big cats. Zachary went out and I overcame my lethargy and followed him. I was going to come face to face with death, stab myself with its cruel truth. Vultures circling in the sky led us out to the back. Ntunzi had dragged the body quite near to our house. And there we saw the corpse surrounded by voracious birds, squabbling and avoiding each other, hopping ridiculously away from their mutually traded ferocities. When Zachary got there, the flock gave way, and I saw the sight with my own eyes: the donkey, Jezebel, my old man’s faithful lover, lay torn to pieces by the vultures.

  BOOK THREE

  REVELATIONS

  AND RETURNS

  The God I speak of

  Is not a God of embraces.

  He is mute. Alone. Aware

  of Man’s greatness

  (and his baseness too)

  And over time He ponders

  The being that was thus created.

  […]

  Hilda Hilst

  LEAVE-TAKING

  In honour of your absence

  I avidly built a great white house

  And all along its walls I wept for you

  Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

  The image of the donkey’s mangled body drained my sleep all night long. I couldn’t imagine how much blood a furry creature can contain. It was as if the jenny had turned into a river of red waters, pumped out by a heart that was larger than the earth itself.

  Next day, my father went to bury Jezebel alone. First thing in the morning, his spade was already busy in his hands. We offered our help from afar.

  —I don’t want anyone here—he yelled.

  Nor did we want to get too near. Silvestre’s look was vengeful. Zachary walked round our house, his rifle at the ready, watching my father.

  —No one go near him—the soldier warned.

  He spoke as if about a rabid dog. Despite the warning, I decided to approach the place where Silvestre was guarding the dead donkey. Night had fallen and there by the grave he remained, toe to spade. I advanced, stepping lightly out of respect for his vigil, and coughed quietly before asking:

  —Aren’t you coming in to sleep, Father?

  —I’m staying right here.

  —All night?

  He nodded. I sat down carefully, some way off. I remained silent, knowing that there would be no more words spoken. But conscious too that no silence could fill that moment or any other moment ever again. In the distance, we could hear Aproximado hammering on metal as he repaired the damaged vehicle. Ntunzi was helping Uncle and a beam of torchlight helped them both.

  My father was the picture of grief. Defeated, solitary, disbelieving in everything and everyone. Without raising his head, he murmured:

  —Son, give me your hand.

  I thought I hadn’t heard him properly. I remained impassive, keeping my astonishment to myself, until once again Silvestre implored:

  —Don’t leave me here all alone.

  I lay down and fell asleep to the rhythm of the hammering coming from the improvised workshop. For me, that episode marked the end of Jezoosalem. Maybe that was why my sleep was disturbed by a nightmare. I was assailed by a vision that kept returning, no matter how hard I tried to chase it away: next to me, betw
een myself and my father, a huge snake had settled itself. It was inert, as if asleep, and my old man, lying next to it, contemplated it with a look of fascination.

  —Come here, son, come and get yourself bitten.

  A snake isn’t an animal: it’s a muscle with teeth, a legless centipede with a stomach in the middle of its neck. How could Silvestre Vitalício be so enamoured with such a lowly animal?

  —Get bitten?

  —I’ve already been stung.

  —I don’t believe you, Father.

  —See how swollen my hand is, how its colour has changed. My hand, my dear Mwanito, already belongs to the race of the dead.

  It was a hand without an arm, without veins, without nerves. A piece of body without family or familiarity. Silvestre added:

  —I’m like that hand.

  He’d been born without wishing to be, he’d lived without desires, and he was dying without warning or alarm.

  The snake decided to abandon its immobility and little by little began to coil itself sensually around me. I resisted by trying to back away slowly.

  —Don’t do that, Mwanito.

  And he explained: that snake was none other than Time. For years, he had resisted the snake’s incursions. On this night, he had surrendered, given up.

  —Can’t you hear the bells?

  It was the hammering on the metal panels of the truck. But I didn’t disabuse him. I had another concern: the snake was staring at me, but couldn’t decide whether to sink its fangs into me. It seemed hypnotized, unable to act in accordance with its own nature.

  —It doesn’t even need to bite— Silvestre explained. —Its poison is passed on through its eyes.

  That’s what had happened to him: while the snake had fixed his eyes with its own, his entire past had come to his mouth. The snake didn’t even need to bite him. The poison coursed through his insides in anticipation and Time began to fester inside his body. When, eventually, its slender fangs plunged into him, Silvestre could no longer see the venomous creature: it was no more than a memory, nebulous and dense, slipping away between the dew and the stones. And that was how his remaining memories paraded past him, slithering, viscous like snakes. Sluggish, almost timeless, like the heavy flow of rivers.

  —Time is a poison, Mwanito. The more I remember, the less alive I become.

  —Do you remember my mother, Father?

  —I didn’t kill Dordalma. I swear, my son.

  —I believe you, Father.

  —It was she alone who killed herself.

  People believe they commit suicide. And it’s never like that. Dordalma, poor soul, didn’t know. She was still convinced that someone could cancel their existence. When it comes to it, there’s only one true suicide: to stop having a name, to lose any awareness of oneself and of others. To be beyond the reach of words and the memories of others.

  —I killed myself far more than Dordalma ever did.

  He, Silvestre Vitalício, had certainly committed suicide. Even before reaching death, he had put an end to his life. He swept places aside, banished the living from himself, erased time. My father had even stolen names from the dead. The living aren’t, after all, mere buriers of bones: they are, before anything else, shepherds of the deceased. There isn’t an ancestor who’s not certain that, on the other side of light, there’s always someone to rouse him. In my father’s case, that wasn’t so. Time had never happened to him. The world was beginning within itself, humanity was ending within it, without precedent or antecedent.

  —Father, is that snake also going to open the doors of the past to me?

  Silvestre didn’t answer. Instead, he crawled forward like a hunter. Even a sleepwalker has the honour-bound duty to kill a deadly snake. Was it such a command that caused my father to rush after the snake and club it to death?

  Can a snake lie down? Well that one melted away like a shadow, forever expired. Old Silvestre bemoaned his sudden gesture that had worn his joints away:

  —My bones have died . . .

  Vitalício lamented the extinction of his own skeleton. While in my case, my bones were the only living part of me.

  The following morning, they came and woke me up. I had fallen asleep exhausted, some metres from Jezebel’s grave. Next to me, Silvestre Vitalício was still asleep, all curled up. When I got to my feet, my Uncle was already prodding his brother-in-law with the tip of his foot. Silvestre’s body rolled over as if devoid of life. How could he have sunken into such a deep sleep? Why was there thick, white froth seeping from his mouth? The answer wasn’t late in coming: there were two threads of blood from a small wound on his arm.

  —He’s been bitten! Silvestre has been bitten!

  Alarmed, Uncle called for Zachary and Ntunzi. The soldier rushed over with a knife and in a flash cut my father’s arm and then, leaning over him like a vampire, sucked the bloody wound.

  —Don’t do that! I responded heatedly. —Don’t do anything, it was all a dream!

  They looked at me, puzzled, and Zachary detected some sort of mental torpor in my words that led him to inspect me in search of the pinprick that might explain my confused state. Finding nothing, they carried Silvestre away in a state of semi-consciousness. In Zachary’s arms, my father looked like a child, even younger than I was. Words tumbled from his mouth like remnants of food, grains of rice lodged in an old man’s gums.

  —Dordalma, Dordalma, not even God is enough, nor are you going . . .

  They left me alone with Silvestre, while they prepared for the emergency.

  —So here I am—he sighed.

  And he slowly passed his hands up and down in his arms to show the extent of his disintegration, viscous as if he were returning to clay rather than to dust.

  —Father, go and wait quietly in the shade.

  —I’m going to die, Mwanito. I’ll have too much shade before long.

  —Don’t say that, Father. You’re vaccinated.

  —Let me ask you, my son: wouldn’t you like to die with me?

  It’s solitude that we most fear in death, he continued. Solitude, no more than solitude. Silvestre Vitalício’s expression was vague and vacant. I got a sudden fright: my father no longer had a face. All he had were his eyes, pools without a shore, into which our anguished moments rushed headlong.

  —My blood is what makes your blood flow, did you know that?

  Those words had the weight of a sentence. His life, as Ntunzi used to say, had never allowed me to live. The strange thing was that he seemed to be dying within his own death.

  —Look— he said, holding out his hand. —They’re two almost invisible holes. And yet, a whole life is draining out through them.

  Could Silvestre Vitalício be dying? His face didn’t reflect such a final pronouncement, with the exception of his blank, unavailing look. Most worrying, however, was his hand: it had changed colour and swollen to double its size. Blood seeped from the slit they had made, and dripped onto the ground, to Zachary’s horror. Aproximado took charge of the situation and declared:

  —Let’s take advantage of this to get him back to the city.

  Zachary hoisted Silvestre in his arms, although he was no weight to carry. He was just dozy, deprived of body. He was sweating like a fountain and, every so often, was shaken by violent tremors.

  —The man needs to be in hospital.

  Uncle’s orders were precise and swift. We would all leave together, we’d get out of Jezoosalem before our father got his wits back.

  —Mwanito, go and get your things. Run.

  I entered my room, ready to rummage through every nook and cranny. But suddenly, I came to my senses: what did I have in the way of things? My only possessions were a pack of cards and a bundle of notes buried in the back garden. I decided to leave all these memories where they were. They were part of the place. The papers that I’d scribbled on were bits of me that I had stuffed into the soil. I had planted myself in words.

  —Ntunzi, aren’t you going to take your case?

  —
I’m only taking the map. The rest, I’ll leave here.

  Ntunzi went out. I couldn’t resist glancing into his case. It was empty except for a cloth folder tied with string. I undid the strings and dozens of papers fell out. In each one, Ntunzi had drawn women’s faces. There were dozens of faces, all of them different. In the corner of each piece of paper, he had written: “Portrait of my mother, Dordalma.” I gathered the drawings together and put them back in the case. Then, I dashed out without even taking a last look around the room. When we are children, we never take our leave of places. We always think we’ll be back. We never believe it’s the last time.

  I was the first to climb into the truck. Ntunzi sat next to me, at the back. Zachary appeared as we had never seen him before. For the first time, he was in civilian clothes. He was weighed down by a rucksack on his back.

  —Is that all you’re taking, Zachary?

  —I’ll be back later. We’re in a hurry now.

  Aproximado and Zachary went to fetch my old father. I still thought he might dig in his heels and refuse to come. But no. Silvestre came, walking like a child and as obediently as a servant. He installed himself in the front passenger seat, and made room for the Portuguese woman to sit beside him.

  The truck lurched forward with a whine and then advanced slowly, passing the entrance gate and leaving in its wake a cloud of dust and fumes.

  Seated on top of the baggage, Ntunzi was exultant, and he held my shoulders with both hands:

  —We’re going to the city, little brother. I can’t believe it . . .

  I turned my face away: before long my brother would be shedding tears of joy and at that moment all that I wanted were my impure feelings, in which happiness was mixed with nostalgia. I waved farewell, without realizing that there was no one on the other side. The only creature left in Jezoosalem was neither human nor alive: Jezebel, may God rest her soul.

  —Who are you saying goodbye to?

  I didn’t answer. It wasn’t Jezebel I was taking my leave of. I was saying farewell to myself. My childhood had been left on the other side. By setting out on this journey, I had ceased being a child. Mwanito had stayed behind in Jezoosalem, and I needed a new name, a new baptism.