We the people of Makulusu

Literary Review, Summer, 1995 by Jose Luandino Vieira, Richard Zenith

As simple as a gunshot ... He was a second lieutenant and got hit by a bullet. Fought in the war and poured his life on the ground, which drank down his blood. And it wasn't even in combat like he wanted. It made him weep, no doubt, to die the way he died: face-down on the ground, shot in an ambush. How did he used to say it? "The chicken's happy while it's getting fattened - it doesn't know that Sunday's coming." Like a chicken, kala sanji, like a poor dumb chicken, uatobo kala sanji ... He was obsessed with heroism, thought he was a commander-in-chief, and I was to blame, I'd made him read Cadornega's The Wars of Angola to see if he'd learn, but in the end he taught me, and I should be where he is now, because he was the best of us, the one to whom life spread out its rugs. Carried by four men of different heights, postures, steps, and feelings, the coffin rocks like a boat on rough water, he must be seasick, yes, the Kid was seasick, and so I said:

"You wimp!"

He just laughs, a blond sun, and I see Ruth at his side laughing her mulatto laugh at me. If you weren't my almost-but-never-will-be sister-in-law, if you weren't mulatto, I'd blow my breath into your laugh, I'd kindle you until you were ablaze with the fire that smolders inside you, and the Kid - my kid brother - interrupts:

"I'd like to see you up there in the woods! Among all those bullets flying back and forth ... You're the wimp, you who hide behind ideas that aren't even political ..."

He gives me a friendly tap on the head, and Ruth - I can feel it - is suddenly serious, because of the bullets that are whizzing in his voice.

"You and your morals, Older Brother. A rinky-dink morality for your own private use. You, who claim to be an atheist!"

It was our way of showing affection, ever since we were children: poking and jabbing and laughing at each other. We hug and Ruth screams, the boat's listing, no hands on the sails or the helm:

"You maniacs!"

The commander-in-chief of the kingdom of war laughed at me as the sun looked on: just a tiny hole, the eye of a needle, enough for a life to slip through and away. I still didn't know, and he didn't know. Only Ruth was serious, annoyed by our laughing.

Can women recognize death in the laughter of those they love?

Maria never loved me, she'll never love anyone, she always laughed when I laughed, and from this we learn nothing. This kind of love never knows the knowledge of death, and so it isn't really love, just a stupid blind flight, like setting fire to a field: good for clearing trees, for hunting game and for ashes, but it harms the land, snuffs out the soil. That's why her village of feelings has to move around, find new woods to laugh at, knock down, and never learn, until old age covers her beautiful blonde body with the marks of ashes, and suddenly she dies, before the stupidity of this cannibal life has time to mark her with the lugubrious wrinkles that would give dignity to her face with a silk handkerchief tied round her jaw to keep it from hanging open. She never loved me I realize today, October 24th, here on the hard ancient stones of Mercadores Street, where the sun is coloring a parrot perched on a windowsill and I'm happy because I'm not crying over the Kid's death. Coco and Dino are waiting at the door, and I can already smell the grilled codfish. A praying mantis, that's what she was, and I shiver with shame on account of the small piece of me she swallowed and digested and defecated green like our bodies when as children we rolled in the wet grass.

"How's it going?"

The Kid smiles, bathed by the sun filling the narrow street. He looks at them and I know what he's saying in his smile: that in the whole city of Luanda there're just a few parts I like, that for me Luanda begins and ends with Mercadores Street, Flores Street, Enforcados Street, the shantytowns of the old days ...

He provokes me:

"Streets of slaves ..."

It's a private game we play, a telepathy of words said over and over: streets hidden from progress ... streets of utopias ... personalized streets, colonial streets, colonialist streets, blood-stained streets ...

"Shall we go in? Or are you trying to get hypnotized?"

Buddy's not here, but Buddy's not coming. He's not coming, and he won't come to where I'm going, the Church of Mt. Carmel, and the smell of the codfish is the same as two years ago only I'm not the same. But I think the smell is what's different, it turns my stomach, makes me want to vomit right then and there, but I can't do that: I'm dressed in coat and tie, a black tie to boot, and it's bad manners to vomit while mourning.

"Chicken barbecue for three, codfish for one!"

Why didn't the Kid order chicken for four? Why didn't he count Buddy, and why hadn't Buddy come? We took a table in the back, where I sat down facing the narrow door, a small rectangle of sun leading to the street. I wanted to see him as he entered, I wanted to see those same eyes of our father gleaming in the middle of the black silhouette his body would make, outlined by the sun, and I wanted to see them while seeing the same gleaming eyes of the Kid in the foreground, sitting opposite me: my eyes in triplicate, I thought and laughed, and Coco flared up: