WHEN THE BABY WAS BORN DEAD, I was at school. That morning I had been told by the teacher, an ex-nun from Coimbra, to stand with my hands on my head at the front of the classroom, for what misdemeanour I was not entirely sure, although I had begun to find myself in this posture more and more frequently. The teacher from Coimbra had earlier asked which of us had heard of Bartolomeu Dias. No one answered, but it so happened that I had recently heard a broadcast on Emissora Católica about Che Guevara meeting Agostinho Neto. It was reported that they recited poetry together and Guevara had told Neto that Dias was an invader…I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating the lion’s share of the fried plantains Ifigênia had put before me, when I heard the broadcaster’s indignant declaration: Invader! When the teacher from Coimbra asked who had heard of Bartolomeu Dias, I had therefore repeated, loudly, that he was the invader. At first surprised that I had spoken at all, she grew displeased. Her face became a confusion of piety and furious patriotism and all the edifices of knowledge and faith that until then been holding her up seemed to give way beneath her. She hovered over my desk before pulling me up by the arm to the front of the class. She proceeded to make an example of me, pointing first to the map of the world, then to the portrait of Salazar above the chalkboard and finally to the crucifix on the wall above the door. The other girls were mirthful and whispering and she clapped her hands to silence them. Her voice tremulous, she declared that Bartolomeu Dias had been commissioned by João II and Isabel; she said that he had battled storm and shipwreck and cannibalism to claim Angola for Portugal. Bartolomeu Dias, she said, was responsible for civilising the people of Angola and was part of that long line of fidalgos who had cultivated my own loinclothed and mud-thatched and blue-godded people! When she had made this speech, the teacher from Coimbra was standing close to me and yet it seemed I could not see her; her face was a blur. When she spoke, her breath smelt stale – as of onions and salt pork sitting in a pot too long. Not a day went by without one girl or other being humiliated by her, so I tried not to take this humiliation to heart. There was a rumour that the husband of the teacher from Coimbra – for whom she had left the convent and run away to Angola – had in turn left her and gone to the interior of the country to live with a native woman who was a Jehovah’s Witness. I now struggled to make out the defining characteristics of the teacher from Coimbra: her clothes were out of style and inappropriate for the Luandan climate – long woollen skirts, blouses that buttoned high at her neck and thick stockings. A patina of make-up turned between morning and midday to a crust on her pale, perspiring face. Her hands were never still but always nervously wringing and her nails bitten to the quick. Looking closely at her I thought, it is heartbreak that has defined her, and resolved at once that I would never allow such a thing to happen to me. What do you have to say for yourself? the teacher from Coimbra now rounded on me and demanded when she came to the end of her homage to Bartolomeu Dias. Up until now it was true I had little to say. Who was I? How had I come here? Such simple facts of geography and history went right over my head…My arms itched from the bites I had got sitting in my room the previous night, picking out fleas from Crio’s belly and crushing them between my fingers, and now I scratched them furiously. I had hiccups, for I had eaten my lunch quickly, and now that the teacher from Coimbra had finished releasing hers, I could not stop myself from breaking my own, sweet wind. I did not feel anger about the punishment meted out on me and neither did I feel remorse. In the surface of the streaky glass of the portrait of Salazar before which I stood with my hands on my head, paying the penalty for farting before the teacher from Coimbra, I could see her reflection; I could see the reflection of the girls who stood in their checked uniforms and long socks, mechanically chorusing the national anthem with the teacher from Coimbra’s voice tunelessly leading, ‘Heroes of the sea, noble people, valiant nation and immortal, lift today again Portugal’s splendour…’ I could hear the crows outside, cawing, cawing. A worker carried a bucket of lime across the compound to whitewash the statue of São José. Once or twice, the lime splashed out of the bucket. The wind coming off the sea swept dust about and sunlight now and again glinted through the palm fronds. Time passed but I was not aware how much time… Losing circulation at the front of the classroom, I began to have a vision. It was not a vision worthy of beatification but it stopped me as I imagine the three children ambling, their stomachs grumbling with hunger, were stopped in the valley of Cova da Iria in the days before the outbreak of World War I. The vision involved the mistress of the husband of the teacher from Coimbra. I imagined her sitting on the porch of a house in a quiet valley near the Cuanza River. It was bruxa to cut your nails after dark, as the clippings would fly into the air unseen and blind your enemy, and that is what the mistress of the husband of the teacher from Coimbra was doing as she sat on the porch with the mist rising. When the vision had come and gone, it was not the Blessed Virgin or the teacher from Coimbra but the kindly head nun standing behind me. Her secret did not overwhelm me; her revelation did not culminate in a transfiguration. The head nun led me out of the classroom and, putting her hands on my small shoulders, simply told me that the baby had been born dead. The baby was born dead, she repeated…I recalled seeing a girl coming out of the swimming pool on Rua de Salvador Correia; when she had removed her swimming cap, her long blonde hair had fallen down her back and I wondered whether the same happened when the head nun pulled the wimple from her head at night to bathe. Papá was waiting at the school gates; he had tears in his eyes. Yet when he embraced me it was as though he were not embracing a human being at all, but something spectral. Henrique died, he said, and I imagined a tiny form with bright brown eyes that opened and closed like a doll…My ears popped in the elevator that took us up many floors in the Maternidade Maria do Carmo Vieira Machado. The walls were white and vast, in the old colonial style. Nurses shuffled past in their rubber-soled shoes, whispering earnestly. Many women were asleep; some sat up knitting or talking to other patients; a few nursed babies. When the nurse accompanying us stopped at the entrance to a ward and pointed my mother out, she was lying against the pillows looking out the window, a copy of Time magazine on her lap. When I called to her, she turned to me slowly, as in a film when two people who have been parted are unexpectedly reunited with each other, but the nearer I came the more it seemed she was staring beyond me, as though it were not me she were waiting for but someone else, someone who may never have arrived but for whom she would always be lifting her eyes, feeling her heart quickening. Free of its weight, her belly rose and fell. She told me that little Henrique would be put in a coffin and laid in the earth at the cemetery. The Alto das Cruzes cemetery was on the plateau of Rua de São Tomé. Planes from the airport took off nearby and hovered above it. I imagined standing at the cemetery surrounded by a concatenation of airplanes. Ifigênia would wear her good dress of blue serge, and Caetano one of Papá’s old suits. Papá would perhaps cry again and the tear drops would fall and shine the tips of his brogues. Senhor Mascarenhas would be standing away in the distance…I wondered whether little Henrique would really be in the coffin, or whether it would be empty? I might be tempted to knock on it, to open the lid to see if Henrique, like Lazarus, might come out of the tomb, cleanshaven and lithe of limb? Would little Henrique come to meet me in my dreams; would he come to summon me to the world of the dead?…In the days and weeks afterward, I found that all I had to do was think of him and he suddenly appeared. Yet he was not filled out: he was notional, with a notional head of hair and notional eyes, a notional body and a notional sex, all of which could appear and disappear as mercurially as an idea. When I went outside to take my nightie off the line, little Henrique got into a tug of war in which the nightie was the casualty. When I brushed my teeth and wiggled a tooth that had been aching, Henrique naturally appeared to mock me in the mirror. When no one was looking it was little Henrique who swiped money from the bowl on the sideboard. Only when I called his name in my dreams did Henrique keep his distance. Though I invoked his name, he lurked further and further away from me. I chased him, the soles of my bare feet becoming broken on the surface of the rocks they traversed. I got up, only to fall down again and my mother appeared. What are you doing up? she asked and put me back to bed. Her hair was cropped short like a boy’s and her breasts were full of milk. Experiencing discomfort in the middle of the night she wandered restlessly through the house. Because she slept so far into the morning, Ifigênia prepared me for school, braiding and making coils of the braids on either side of my head. When I came home my mother was still in her nightgown, which was loose about her shoulders, and her feet were bare and dirty. She drank tea out of many cups and the empty cups were scattered about the house, a portrait of her mental state. She locked the pantry and took to keeping the key behind the icebox, muttering darkly about thieves. She ate almost nothing and would complain about Ifigênia’s cooking. When she passed my bedroom, she flew into a rage if my bed was badly made or the pillow out of place. She stopped reading books and took to carrying the Bible around, arbitrarily spouting passages from Proverbs. One evening I sat sucking a kola nut and completing my sums on the kitchen table. Though I had concealed it in my cheek, she asked me where I had got the kola nut. I answered that a school friend, Susana, had plucked it from a bush on the way back from school and given it to me. I launched into an elaborate description of the fictional bush, burning with a surplus of kola nuts, at the end of which she opened the palm of her hand and I spat it out; a thread of red saliva unravelled with it. Incidentally, she said, kola doesn’t grow here, it grows in Ambriz, so either you are lying or you have a fertile imagination. She said that I had grown sly; she said that I had turned into a person she no longer trusted. She pulled the bands from the end of my braids and began snaking her fingers through to loosen them. The following morning when she saw me saying goodbye to Ifigênia at the school gates, Susana asked me why my servant was the one to drop me off, and I told her my little brother had died, whereupon she slipped her hand sympathetically into mine. It was a great consolation and by the end of the day I had persuaded her to give me a rare marine stamp from São Tomé.