MY MOTHER TOLD ME that the dead walk backward; she said, they try to walk forward but can only walk backward. When she told me that, I was sitting on the step that led from the kitchen to the compound, my hand cupped on her kneecap. A draught of shadows from the pink guava tree splayed on the concrete when the sunlight pierced the clouds overhead. That was our first house, the one in which I was born in Benguela, and I can still see it in my mind’s eye, close and shimmering like a still life, although it probably has like so much else now gone…She had asked Caetano to fetch a papaya for our breakfast and while we waited for him we watched the guinea cock that my father had brought home as a gift from a client in Uíge: it did not crow, did not make a sound, only silently circled the compound, opening and shutting the tiny aperture of its beak, pecking uselessly for seed. When I clapped my hands, it did not scamper in fright, only bristled its red comb and lifted its tired wings. My mother said that if I dreamt of someone with their feet about-facing I should be sure to shout to wake myself up, because the nearer they seemed, the further they would have led me to their world, the world of the dead. I turned to face her: it was just then my favourite occupation simply to watch her. Her beautiful eyes, outlined with kohl, grew large and small, accentuating by turns this part of what she said, now that. It was the middle of the dry season but each time her lips parted I found myself in an oasis in which I wanted for nothing; I had no need to look at the horizon but if I did, it would have gone on and on, a hungerlessness that might well be called paradise. The wind was blowing from the coast, a salt wind from the Atlantic which I would feel against me as a phantom presence even when it was not there any more. The sun was not shining and its not shining was neither here nor there; I was not waiting for the sun to reveal itself to me…Although I was old enough – three years old, perhaps four – I seldom spoke at this time. No one really remarked on this fact nor how I hung off every one of my mother’s words. Indeed, I could have continued in this same vein for an aeon or more, unaware of the peril of what might lie ahead. That her words could come to have a dangerous sway over me – that they might make me look this way and that, only in vain, only to be met by a darkness which was also unnameable – I could not have conceived, for I was more contented by the fact of her voice than what she had to say. At that time, there were so many things I did not know; my mind and body were like a tabula rasa on which much would be written, even if later I might want it all to be erased too…She said that bruxas, being consorts of the dead, have twisted feet. Soon Caetano returned; he was carrying the papaya under one arm and a tin of honey in his other hand; it was quite a balancing act and yet he was able to secure the papaya under his arm as though it were second nature to him. Caetano wore an old pair of my father’s shoes; they were a little too big and so it seemed he might trip over at any moment. That morning Papá had joked that if Caetano were to die we would have to bury him in these shoes. My father had made this quip in Konkani. When he was angry, or trying to be funny, Papá spoke in Konkani. I did not yet know that Konkani was a tongue that might have belonged to a people from whom I was also descended, to a place and time of which I nevertheless had no memory, and so it was neither discordant nor alluring to my ear. My mother moved fluently between Portuguese and Konkani and the tone she used with me or my father no different than that she used to speak to Ifigênia and Caetano. She took the old tin when Caetano held it out to her, winked and said, At this rate we could go into business. She turned the few honeycombs that lay at the bottom of the tin towards the light and said, What do you say, Caetano? Caetano smiled uneasily, shrugged and made to brush something away from his face. His hair in that light was a copper colour. His father was a Dane who had settled on a coffee plantation in Mozambique only to return to Copenhagen when he had grown tired of the East African plains; his mother, a native of Cabo Delgado, had died when he was small so he had been brought up in a Lourenço Marques orphanage. Now when his hair fell over his eyes, my mother said he ought to get a haircut. Yes, Mummy, Caetano answered, swatting an invisible fly before his face. It was curious to hear him call her Mummy; he was still a child when he had come to my parents, some years before I was born, and now he might have been thirteen or fourteen and full of a wary self-consciousness. When he shifted his weight from one foot to another, my mother sighed and passed the papaya into my own small arms. Its skin was green speckled black; it felt cool and heavy and I wondered what would happen if it fell, what sound it would make when it hit the ground, whether it would split or roll away…She disappeared into the kitchen and appeared again with a few hundred centavos that she dropped into Caetano’s hand. He put the change into his pocket and passed quickly through the garden. My mother followed him to the gate. On either side the road was long and empty: a woman was returning from the dyeing factory, a child slung on her back; a fisherman clutching a small bundle of leftover catch walked by. My mother led me inside again, but only a few steps on stopped to look back; she looked back, clicked her tongue and said that there was no race like the Bantu race that had to be cosseted like a child because it could not look after itself. What a tragedy, she said, to be a person who cannot take care of his own affairs, who never grows up, for that is the fate not only of the blacks of Angola but all black Africans! If it surprised me to hear her talk this way, it was not a great devastation. If her eyes and mouth were not the reassuring shapes that they had been a moment before, I did not yet have cause to identify with the confused souls of Babel. Now she set about making breakfast. She peeled the papaya and cut it into long canoes, the way I liked it. As always, she boiled the milk, removing the skin with a spoon and swallowing it before setting the glass before me. She allowed me a mouthful of the honey before bottling it and storing it in the larder. The moist, unmoving eyes of the mackerel gleamed from the marble cutting board. Ifigênia was grinding the coconut and chillies for the recheado and, as she wandered down the corridor to give her an instruction, I watched my mother’s legs: she was wearing a house dress of beige linen; she had not put on her knee-highs and so her legs were bare. Her legs were bare but they did not look vulnerable; they were as strong and dependable as the trunk of any one of the trees that rose in the small orchard beyond the compound – I could see the tips of the branches through the open door: guava, lime and papaya. Her feet appeared to blossom out of her legs, and were so pretty that I could not imagine her being dead, I could not imagine it, though the thought would not leave me and I felt I had to keep looking each few minutes from her face to her toes to confirm that they were pointing in the same direction.