Another Day of Life Page 5
He was typing a request to Luanda for people and weapons. The only armored personnel carrier he had at the front had been knocked out the day before by a mercenary. If the enemy attacked now with their own armored personnel carrier, he would have to give ground and retreat.
Monti read the letter that I had brought him from Luanda, ordered me to sit down—on the windowsill, because there were no chairs—and went on typing. A quarter of an hour later there were footsteps on the stairs and four people came in, a television crew from Lisbon. They had come here for two days and afterward they would return to Portugal in their plane. The leader of the crew was Luis Alberto, a dynamic and restless mulatto, sharp and gusty. We immediately became friends. Monti and Alberto knew each other from way back, since they both came from Angola and perhaps even from right here in Benguela. So we didn’t have to waste any time making introductions and getting to know one another.
Alberto and I wanted to drive to the front, but the rest of the crew—Carvalho, Fernandez, and Barbosa—were against it. They said they had wives and children, they had begun building houses outside Lisbon (near Cascais, a truly beautiful spot), and they weren’t going to die in this mad, senseless war in which nobody knew anything, the opponents couldn’t tell each other apart until the last second, and you could be blown away without any fighting, simply because of the crazy screwups, the lack of information, the laziness and callousness of blacks for whom human life had no value.
In other words, they expressed a desire to live.
A discussion began, which is what Latins love most of all. Alberto tried to sell them on the argument that they would shoot a lot of tape and make a lot of the money they all needed so badly. But it was Monti who finally assuaged them by saying that at that time of day—it was almost noon—there was no fighting on the front. And he gave the most straightforward explanation in the world: “It’s too hot.”
Outside the window the air was rippling like tin in a forge; every movement demanded effort. We started getting ready to hit the road. Monti went downstairs, woke up one of the soldiers, and sent him into town where, somewhere, there were drivers and cars. A Citroën DS and a Ford Mustang turned up. Monti wanted to make it nice for us, so as our escort he designated a soldier named Carlotta.
Carlotta came with an automatic on her shoulder. Even though she was wearing a commando uniform that was too big for her, you could tell she was attractive. We all started paying court to her immediately. In fact, it was Carlotta’s presence that persuaded the crew to forget about their houses outside Lisbon and travel to the front. Only twenty years old, Carlotta was already a legend. Two months earlier, during the uprising in Huambo, she had led a small MPLA detachment that was surrounded by a thousand-strong UNITA force. She managed to break the encirclement and lead her people out. Girls generally make excellent soldiers—better than boys, who sometimes behave hysterically and irresponsibly at the front. Our girl was a mulatto with an elusive charm and, as it seemed to us then, great beauty. Later, when I developed the pictures of her, the only pictures of Carlotta that remained, I saw that she wasn’t so beautiful. Yet nobody said as much out loud, so as not to destroy our myth, our image of Carlotta from that October afternoon in Benguela. I simply looked up Alberto, Carvalho, Fernandez, and Barbosa and showed them the pictures of Carlotta taken on the way to the front. They looked at them in silence and I think we all chose silence so we wouldn’t have to comment on the subject of good looks. Did it mean anything in the end? Carlotta was gone by then. She had received an order to report to the front staff, so she put on her uniform, combed out her Afro, slung the automatic over her shoulder, and left. When Comandante Monti, four Portuguese, and a Pole saw her in front of staff headquarters, she seemed beautiful. Why? Because that was the kind of mood we were in, because we needed it, because we wanted it that way. We always create the beauty of women, and that day we created Carlotta’s beauty. I can’t explain it any other way.
The cars moved out and drove along the road to Balombo, 160 kilometers to the east. To tell the truth, we all should have died on the winding road, full of switchbacks that the drivers took like madmen; it was a miracle that we got there alive. Carlotta sat beside the driver in our car and, since she was used to that kind of driving, she kidded us a little. The force of the wind threw her head back, and Barbosa said he would hold on to Carlotta’s head so the wind wouldn’t tear it off. Carlotta laughed, and we envied Barbosa. At one of the stops, Fernandez proposed that Carlotta move to the back with us and sit on our knees, but she refused. We rejoiced out loud at his defeat. After all, Fernandez had clearly wanted Carlotta to sit on his own lap, which would have ruined everything since she didn’t belong to anyone and we were creating her together, our Carlotta.
She was born in Roçadas, not far from the border of Namibia. She received her military training a year ago in the Cabinda forest. She wants to become a nurse after the war. That’s all we know about this girl who is now riding in the car holding an automatic on her knees, and who, since we have run out of jokes and calmed down for a moment, has become serious and thoughtful. We know that Carlotta won’t be Alberto’s or Fernandez’s, but we don’t yet know that she will never again be anybody’s.
We have to stop again because a bridge is damaged and the drivers have to figure out how to get across. We have a few minutes, so I take a picture of her. I ask her to smile. She stands leaning against the bridge railing. Around us lie fields, meadows perhaps—I don’t remember.
After a while we drove on. We passed a burned-out village, an empty town, abandoned pineapple and tobacco plantations. Then a profusion of tamarisk shrubs that evolved into a forest. It got worse, because we were driving to the front on a road that had been fought over, and there were corpses of soldiers scattered on the asphalt. They aren’t in the habit of burying the fallen here, and the approach to every combat zone can be recognized by the inhuman odor of decaying bodies. Some additional fermentation must take place in the putrid humidity of the tropics, because the smell is intense, terrible—so stunning that, no matter how many times I went to the front, I always felt dizzy and ready to vomit. We had jerrycans full of extra gasoline in the lead car, so we stopped and poured some on the corpses, and covered them with a few dry branches and roadside bushes; then the driver fired his automatic into the asphalt at such an angle that sparks flew and a fire started. We marked our route to Balombo with these fires.
Balombo is a little town in the forest that keeps changing hands. Neither side can settle in for good because of the forest, which allows the enemy to sneak to within point-blank range under cover and suddenly attack the town. This morning Balombo was taken by an MPLA detachment of a hundred people. There is still shooting in the surrounding woods because the enemy has retreated, but not very far. In Balombo, which is devastated, not a single civilian remains— only these hundred soldiers. There is water, and the girls from the detachment approach us freshly bathed, with their wet hair wound around curling papers. Carlotta admonishes them: they shouldn’t behave as if preparing to go out for the evening; they ought to be ready to fight at all times. They complain that they had to attack in the first wave because the boys were not eager to advance. The boys strike their foreheads with their hands and say the girls are lying. They are all sixteen to eighteen years old, the age of our high school students or of the fighters in the Warsaw uprising. Part of the unit is joyriding up and down the main street on a captured tractor. Each group makes one circuit and hands the wheel over to the next one. Others have given up contending for the tractor and are riding around on captured bicycles. It is chilly in Balombo because it lies in the hills; there is a light breeze and the forest is rustling.
As the crew films, I walk along with them, snapping pictures. Carlotta, who is conscientious and doesn’t let herself be carried away in the euphoria of victory sweeping the detachment, knows that a counterattack could begin at any time, or that snipers lurking under cover could be taking aim at our heads. So she accompanies u
s all the time with her automatic at the ready. She is attentive and taciturn. We can hear the tops of her boots rubbing together as she walks. Carvalho, the cameraman, films Carlotta walking against the background of burned-out houses, and later against a background of strikingly exuberant adenias. All of this will be shown in Portugal, in a country that Carlotta will never see. In another country, Poland, her pictures will also appear. We are still walking through Balombo and talking. Barbosa asks her when she will get married. Oh, she can’t say— there’s a war on. The sun sinks behind the trees; twilight is approaching and we must leave. We return to the cars, which are waiting on the main street. We’re all satisfied because we have been to the front, we have film and pictures, we are alive. We get in as we did when we drove here: Carlotta in front, we in back. The driver starts the motor and puts the car in gear. And then—we all remember that it was exactly at that moment—Carlotta gets out of the car and says she is staying. “Carlotta,” Alberto says, “come with us. We’ll take you out to supper, and tomorrow we’ll take you to Lisbon.” Carlotta laughs, waves good-bye, and signals the driver to start.
We’re sad.
We drive away from Balombo on a road that grows darker and darker, and we drive into the night. We arrive late in Benguela and locate the one restaurant still open; we want something to eat. Alberto, who knows everyone here, gets us a table in the open air. It’s splendid—the air is cool and there’s an ocean of stars in the sky. We sit down hungry and exhausted and talk. The food doesn’t come for a long time. Alberto calls, but it’s noisy and nobody hears us. Then lights appear at the corner and a car comes around and brakes sharply in front of the restaurant. A tired, unwashed soldier with a dirt-smeared face jumps out of the car. He says that immediately after our departure there was an attack on Balombo and they have given up the town; in the same sentence, he says that Carlotta died in the attack.
We stood up from the table and walked into the deserted street. Each of us walked separately, alone; there was nothing to talk about. Hunched over, Alberto went first, with Carvalho behind him and Fernandez on the other side of the street, with Barbosa following and me at the end. It was better for us to reach the hotel that way and disappear from each other ’s sight. We had driven out of Balombo at a crazy speed and none of us had heard the shooting begin behind us. And so we hadn’t been fleeing. But if we had heard the shots, would we have ordered the driver to turn back so we could be with Carlotta? Would we have risked our lives to protect her, as she had risked hers to protect us in Balombo? Maybe she had died covering us as we drove away, because the boys were chasing around on the tractor and the girls were doing their hair when the enemy appeared out of nowhere.
We are all culpable in Carlotta’s death, since we agreed to let her stay behind; we could have ordered her to return. But who could have foreseen it? The most guilty are Alberto and I: we are the ones who wanted to go to the front, so Monti gave us an escort—that girl. But can we change anything now, call it off, run the day backward?
Carlotta is gone.
Who would have thought that we were seeing her in the last hour of her life? And that it was all in our hands? Why didn’t Alberto stop the driver, get out, and tell her: Come with us because otherwise we’ll stay and you’ll be responsible! Why didn’t any of us do that? And is the guilt any easier to bear because it is spread among the five of us?
Of course it was a tragic accident. That’s how, lying, we will tell the story. We can also say there was an element of predestination, of fate, to it. There was no reason for her to stay there, and furthermore it had been agreed from the start that she would return with us, In the last second she was prompted by some indefinable instinct to get out of the car, and a moment later she was dead. Let’s believe it was fate. In such situations we act in a way we can’t explain afterward. And we say, Your Honor, I don’t know how it happened, how it came to that, because in fact it began from nothing.
But Carlotta knew this war better than we did; she knew that dusk, the customary time for attack, was approaching, and that it would be better if she stayed there and organized cover for our departure. That must have been the reason for her decision. We thought of this later, when it was too late. But now can’t ask her about anything.
We knock on the hotel door, which is already locked. The owner, a massive old black man, opens up and wants to hug us because we’ve made it back in one piece, he wants to ask us all about it. Then he looks at us carefully, falls silent, and walks away. Each of us takes his key, goes upstairs, and locks himself in his room.
That small point disappearing into the sky is the plane in which Alberto and his crew are flying out. The throbbing of the motors rolls up over the airport, over the town, fainter and fainter but audible all the while as, for a long time after, the small, disappearing point floats away and then becomes invisible. It is as if the echoes of an unseen, distant storm among the stars were reaching us from space. Then it falls silent. The sky becomes immobile and fills with quiet and the morning glare. After a couple of hours, at the other end of the galaxy, a small point appears and begins to grow, to expand, until it assumes the stiff shape of a plane—which will mean that Alberto and his crew are landing in Europe.
And I fly out of Benguela, but in the other direction, to the south, where the African continent begins to come to an end and, after a thousand or more kilometers, beyond Namibia and the Kalahari, plunges into two oceans. When we arrived at the airport that morning, aside from Alberto’s plane there was also a two-engine Friendship whose pilots— two unshaven, deadbeat Portuguese with red, sleepless eyes—said they were flying immediately to Lubango to pick up the last group of refugees there. Lubango, formerly Sá da Bandeira, lies 350 kilometers south of Benguela and is the headquarters of the southern front staff. I didn’t have a pass to go there because no one is admitted to the southern front, the weakest, most neglected, worst organized, and most poorly armed front. But I thought I might get away with it. So I thought, although to tell the truth I wasn’t thinking at all, because if I had really considered matters I might have lost the inclination to go. On the other hand, if I had considered the matter more carefully, I might have wanted to make the trip because, as I see it, it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through. In any case, I began asking the pilots if they would take me along. They were so exhausted from unbroken stretches of flying, so indifferent to everything, that they didn’t answer, which was probably a sign that they agreed. I was wearing jeans and a shirt, I had a pass for Benguela and a little money in my pocket, and I carried a camera. Everything else remained behind in the hotel, since there was neither time nor a car to get to town. Without waiting, therefore, I got into the empty plane and hid myself in a corner to avoid asserting my presence, just in case they thought better of it and ordered me to stay at the airport. A quarter of an hour later we took off from Benguela, flying first over the desert and then over the green hills, above a soft, enchanting piedmont landscape, and then over the great rainbow flower garden that is Lubango.
At the airport in Lubango a group of terrified, sweaty, apathetic Portuguese sat on kit bags and suitcases beside their even more terrified wives, and their children asleep in the women’s arms. They rushed for the plane before it had even shut off its motors. I went up to a mulatto who was wandering around the apron and asked him if he could take me to staff headquarters. He said he would take me, but then immediately asked how I planned to get out, since this was the last plane leaving; it seemed to him that, although the town was in the hands of the MPLA, it was surrounded, and that the road to town was either in the hands of the enemy or could be by tomorrow. To this I gave no exact answer, aside from something like: As the Lord will have it.
Everything from that moment on happened as in an incomprehensible, incoherent dream in which unknown persons and unseen powers entangle us in a succession of situations from which there is no way out, and from which we awaken every now and the
n drenched in sweat, more and more exhausted and devoid of will. At the front staff headquarters (a residential quarter on a hill), I was greeted by a young white Angolan, a political commissar. His name was Nelson. He greeted me with joy, as if I were a guest he had been expecting all along—and sent me at once to a near-certain death.
Nelson had a restless, violent nature, mad ideas, and an impulsive, feverish manner. The first thing I told him was that I wanted to go to the front, and that was all it took for him to write out a pass for me. Before I could figure out what was going on he was pushing me outside, where a driver was just starting the motor of a big old Mercedes truck. I barely managed to beg Nelson to give me a cup of water, because I was ready to pass out from thirst. The truck was loaded to capacity with rifles, ammunition boxes, barrels of gasoline, and sacks of flour. On top of this cargo sat six soldiers. Nelson pushed me into the cab, where the driver was already seated—a half-naked black civilian, extraordinarily thin. A moment later Diogenes, the leader of the expedition, joined us in the cab, and we started off down the road immediately.
We drove through town—in those days every town in Angola looked like a ghastly, corroding movie set built on the outskirts of Hollywood and already abandoned by the film crew—and the green suddenly ended, the flowers disappeared, and we entered a hot, dry tropical flatland, overgrown as far as the eye could see with thick, thorny, leafless gray brush. A low gray gorge cut through this bush and at the bottom of the gorge ran the asphalt road. This was the road we were driving along in the truck. The Mercedes was so old and overloaded that no matter how the driver exerted himself, it would not do better than sixty kilometers an hour.