THE BRAZILIAN MUTINEERS from the Santa Maria did not get to the harbour of Luanda. Captain Galvão did not start a revolution. None of the prisoners that escaped from the São Paulo penitentiary tapped on our door, entreating us to harbour him as a fugitive. Yet in the days after the revolt at Baixa de Cassanje, there was a telex to say that a client of Papá’s, a German cotton-farm owner, had been killed in a northern reprisal. As he got ready to attend the funeral, my father spoke in a low voice about the circumstances of this man’s murder. My mother was in the kitchen, standing by the open door and I was playing just outside, turning the large, asymmetrical ears of Crio inside out, watching them flop back when he got bothered with the flies…Each time Papá said the word murder, my mother raised her eyebrows, glanced my way and then off toward the garden. I tried to picture the dead cotton-farm owner in his coffin — bound in tourniquets like the Egyptian mummies I had glimpsed in an old copy of National Geographic — in a simple robe like Jesus in the Passion. I wondered if it was because he was a stranger that it was so difficult to imagine him dead. When Papá went to the funeral I imagined what would happen if I could not recognise the cotton-farm owner when he appeared to make his fatal overture. Dona Angela paid us a visit. She had come from Madeira with her husband and they had started a business selling dry goods in the centre of Benguela. But her husband had died suddenly – a heart attack. That was only the beginning of her troubles, for soon the money evaporated and debts began to mount. She was homesick, my mother had told me, and that accounted for her nervous temperament. Homesick for what, I wondered, for where? Ifigênia had just fried some papos de anjos and my mother asked her to set them on the table. I sat by her, watching Dona Angela blowing cool air on her tea and absentmindedly devouring one after the other until the papos, slightly scorched, had vanished. When Ifigênia had left, Dona Angela lowered her voice and said she was afraid to go to sleep at night. She said, We gave education, housing and hospitals to the blacks – where would they be without us? I looked at that moment from Dona Angela’s face to my mother’s: my mother’s face was calm and serene. It was as though the sun was shining where she was; she seemed to be at once aware of what Dona Angela was saying and yet quite indifferent to it. She nodded, telling Dona Angela that she was quite right to be upset but meanwhile she was observing the plumes of smoke issuing from the bee boxes where Caetano was busy checking on the hives. I turned again to Dona Angela: her large body was cloaked in a heavy mantle of mourning; her hair was limp and thin; her brow was furrowed and a morsel of custard sat unflatteringly on her thick, lower lip. Perhaps she had been a young and pretty woman when she first came from Portugal, but now her face was ravaged – not only from the extraordinary misfortune of losing her husband but besieged by terror about an uncertain future, and all her gestures seemed colonised by this fear…Putting two fingers to her pulse, she said she felt faint and coughed to demonstrate her catarrh. My mother asked her if she had been to see her specialist and she answered that the doctors in Benguela were all charlatans and that she would not let them near her for her life. Dona Angela then began to reminisce about her son Mathias, and the loving letters he wrote her from Lisbon; she said it was her heart’s delight to receive these letters, what a boon it was to have a son, she said, for daughters were no guarantee…against what she did not say. When my eyes crossed the network of varicose veins to Dona Angela’s feet, I noticed she had no ankles to speak of. It was as though a bee had stung her, her ankles were so swollen. It must have perturbed me to look at these legs without joints which burgeoned into her feet because I remember looking away and again at her ankles. She caught me and told me I was getting shifty. She said, Sly or shy I’m not sure which but a child should speak when she is spoken to! To her surprise, and that of my mother, I then loudly enunciated that I would soon be going to school…When Dona Angela left my mother stood for some time in the front room. Daylight streamed onto the array of family portraits, distant strangers with dark skin like my own, dressed up in dresses and suits like good women and men of the Empire. My mother turned to me but as she opened her mouth it seemed she began haranguing these mute portraits. She said that Dona Angela had gall; she said everyone knew that her son Mathias was not studying accountancy at all but living a dissipated life in Lisbon and only wrote to finagle money she didn’t have. She said there was never a clearer case for a dandy and that all gays were mama’s boys…I trailed my mother through the house, at every corner imagining the dead cotton farm owner appearing on backward-facing feet, rounding on us with a scythe lodged in his breast. She told me to come nap with her but the mosquitoes, humming in the dusky air, kept me awake, so I wandered onto the front porch where it was cooler, waiting for some deathly footsteps, but only the postboy came, whistling a Cape Verdean folk song; it must have been a morna of Eugénio Tavares. When he lifted the catch to put the letters in the box he looked up, saw me and laughed. Admittedly I must have been an odd sight: my hair wet with sweat; my mouth agape. He then started to say something; I could not understand what he was saying because he spoke in Creole. I did not imagine that he was giving voice to a private thought, derisive or mocking, one that he in any case did not care to share with me; I was happy to hear him speaking, to hear this other voice with its unusual cadences…My mother appeared and, when he saw her, the postboy stopped what he was saying in mid-sentence and started down the street. When he was out of earshot, she said that she was sure the postboy was a communist and that I was not to speak to him again. I had no idea what a communist was, but I assumed that it must be something malevolent, something like the dead. The sky grew dark. The rains had ended but still it seemed there would be a downpour. Sitting on the cane chair, I could feel the mosquitoes at my legs, their tender stinging sensations at the extremities of my toes. In the distance I could hear the braking of the freight trains along the Benguela railway, the machinery of the Diamang mine, the droning of crude oil generators…One of Ifigênia’s friends, Philomena, whom she called Memu, came by; I could hear them talking in lowered voices in Kimbundu. Ifigênia had been told to speak Portuguese in my company but she often forgot and spoke Kimbundu anyway. Though I could understand only a smattering, I found Kimbundu, with its spirited rhythms, beautiful. And if it did not occur to me that they may have been talking about me, this was less because of humility than because it had not yet dawned on me that Kimbundu might be the language, as I might be the source, of some of their plaints and grievances. When this became evident I might find Kimbundu a cacophony, at the first sound of which I would reach for pliable beeswax to stop up my ears! I found my way into the compound and opened the coop. A hen had been bought to companion the cock, but one morning, finding her bloody and near-dead from his rapacious love-making, Papá had taken the cock to be destroyed. The hen had hatched chicks but bore them no love and now wobbled about with a furious and deranged look in her black eyes, her plumage of white feathers turned tawny and grey. Now when I imagined the dead man, the image I conjured was of a figure tall of stature and with a heavy step, moustachioed and precious about his appearance. Indeed, this description may have applied just as easily to my father and, in anticipating the footfall of the dead man, I was also anticipating the footfall of Papá. I was so accustomed to his footsteps coming and going, and now I wondered what would happen if we didn’t hear his approach at all? It was just then he turned into the drive. As he stepped out of the car, he was ashen-faced and I could see he was perspiring heavily under the black hat he had ceremoniously worn. He pulled me up, dusted my dress and admonished me it was not good for the servants to see me sitting in the dirt like that. Do you know whose daughter you are? he asked me with sudden ferocity. His breath, tobacco mixed with whis key, was pungent and I wriggled like a chick out of his arms. He chased the tattered hen which fled in his wake and shut her back in the coop. Caetano was smoking nearby and Papá muttered to him about leaving the coop open. Caetano had lately developed the habit of looking through Papá and now, as I followed my father inside, I felt Caetano looking through me too. That night, I could not go to sleep easily because I imagined meeting the dead in my dreams. I stayed awake for a long time, waiting for the dead cotton-farm owner’s appearance. During the night I woke my mother and she told me not to stir. She said that as long as she slept beside me nothing could happen, that if she saw me being led away by someone from the dead world she would call my name, and when she called my name I would come to her at once.