António Lobo Antunes | The Land at the End of the World

Ninda. Ninda's eucalyptus trees in the vast nights of Eastern Angola, seething with insects and the sound of grinding, saliva-less jaws made by the dry leaves above, as dry as our tense mouths in the dark: the attack began over by the landing strip, on the far side of the village, where moving lights flickered on and off like Morse code. The huge moon shed its oblique light on the prefab barracks, on the sentry posts protected by sandbags and wooden logs, and on the zinc rectangle of the powder magazine. Naked and barely awake, I stood at the door of the first-aid hut and watched as soldiers wielding guns raced over to the barbed wire, and then came the voices, the shouts, the spurts of red that emerged from the rifles, and all of that, plus the tension, the lack of decent food, the ramshackle accommodation, the water transformed by filters into a pap of indigestible cartridge paper, and the gigantic, unbelievable absurdity of the war, made me feel that I was living in a strange, unreal, fluctuating atmosphere, one that I encountered again later in psychiatric hospitals, islands of despair and misery from which Lisbon defended itself with walls and iron bars, just as bodily tissue protects itself from foreign bodies by wrapping them in fibrous capsules. Confined in dilapidated wards, wearing the uniform of the ill, we walked our incommunicable dreams, our formless angst, around the sandy parade ground of the barracks, viewing our past through the inverted binoculars of letters from home and photos kept at the bottoms of suitcases beneath the bed, prehistoric remains from which we could reconstruct, like biologists examining a single bone, the monstrous skeleton of our grief.

It occurred to me that when news of the ceasefire came on the radio, we would all have to undergo a painful re-apprenticeship in life, like those hemiplegics who exercise the recalcitrant spaghetti of their limbs on gym contraptions and in swimming pools, and that we might remain forever incapable of walking, reduced to the wheelchair of paralytic resignation, observing the simplicity of the everyday just as Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times views the terrifying machines implacably grinding him down: escaping the porter and the phony indulgence of doctors, like sheets of cardboard painted with smiley faces, and discovering gradually, farther down the hill, the geometric morning of the city chopped up into faded lozenges of glazed tiles, entering a phantasmagorical café for your first coffee as a free man, seeing the retirees playing dominoes in the eternal pose of Cezanne's cardplayers, and feeling that you have ceased forever to belong to that clear, direct world where things have the consistency of things, with no subterfuges, no hidden meanings, and that the days can still offer us, despite sore throats, bill collectors, and car payments, the surprise of the winning lottery ticket of an unsolicited smile. You, for example, with your aseptic, competent, dandruff-free air of an executive secretary, would you be able to breathe inside a painting by Bosch, overwhelmed by demons, lizards, gnomes hatching from eggshells, and staring gelatinous eyeballs? Lying in a hollow, waiting for the attack to end, watching the stiff, top-hatted silhouettes of the eucalyptus trees like glum seconds in a duel, with my G3 rifle useless in my sweating hands and a cigarette stuck in my mouth like a toothpick in a croquette, I discovered myself to be a Beckett character waiting for the mortar grenade of a redemptive Godot. The novels as yet unwritten accumulated in the attic of my mind like ancient bits of apparatus reduced to a pile of disparate parts that I would never manage to put together again, the women with whom I would never sleep would offer to others their splayed thighs like frogs in a biology class, and I would not be there to cut them open with the eager penknife of my tongue, my unborn child would remain forever the unlikely fruit of a far-off afternoon in Tomar, in a room in the officers' mess with the window wide open to the parade ground, with the sunlight sieving through the acacia leaves and us celebrating in bed the ardent liturgy of an all-too-fleeting desire. Tomar: a mattress that creaked like the sole of a shoe, urgent embraces, my erect penis, damp with thirst, thick with veins, flowering red, in Pessanha's* words, her hand rubbing it against her breasts, her mouth drinking it, her heels digginginto my buttocks, the exhausted silence afterward of marionettes deserted by the fingers that worked them. Now, when I meet her, it's as if I were looking at the pale rectangle left behind by a picture frame that contained a painting we no longer remember, and I struggle in vain to make out, behind those features grown old and serious, trying so hard to adopt an expression of benign camaraderie that was never hers, the young, happy face that I loved, closing around her own pleasure like the petals of a flower. And yet that is how she remains for me, despite the wear and tear of the years and the bitterness of failed reconcili-

* Camilo Pessanha (1867-1926) was a Portuguese symbolist poet.

ations, the wounds of mutual lies and the disillusion of our final parting: the dark, slender girl with large serious eyes, whom I met on the beach, where she was watching the waves with all the lofty majesty of a bored carnivore who had suddenly withdrawn into some painful, motionless meditation, shooing us off into the shadowy corner occupied by forgotten, futile objects. Do you remember Paul Simon's song "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover?"

Ninda: the maize outside the barbed-wire fence spent all night leafing through its dry pages, the witch doctor sucked with brutal voracity at the necks of decapitated chickens. The captain and I played chess at the table in the dining room, among the crumbs and the peelings, advancing an interrogative, reticent pawn rather like a finger fearfully probing an infected boil, or we would sit outside talking, on chairs made from the curved staves of barrels, estimating our approximate positions in the darkness from the echo that came back to us of our own voices, like distressed bats looking for each other. Into my untidy inner wax museum of doctors and poets, where Vesalius* and Bocaget discussed picaresque, clandestine anatomical details beneath the chaste, reproving gaze of General Fernandes Costa, he of the sonnets in the Almanaque Bertrand, from whom, as a child, I shamelessly plagiarized lines that had all the glassy glitter of the cheap metaphors I loved, an impetuous crowd of illustrious bearded men rushed in, singing first "The Internationale" and then "La Marseillaise," boldly replacing Dr. Julio Dantas, Dr. Augusto de Castro, and another

* Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy.

† Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage (1765-1805) was a Portuguese poet of French parentage. Salazar placed his scurrilous and erotic verse on the list of banned books.

dozen or so thick-skinned individuals sitting on Empire sofas whispering historical dramas embroidered in the cross-stitch of empty small talk. The captain introduced me in passing to Marx, who regarded me from afar and mumbled unintelligibly into his collar about economics, to Lenin in a toupee conspiring with a group of ardent frock coats, to Rosa Luxemburg limping sadly through the streets of Berlin, to JeanJaures shot dead in a restaurant, napkin around his neck, reminding me of murdered Chicago gangsters spinning round and round in barbers' chairs, accompanied by the sound of shattering mirrors and bottles, and I imagined going into the house with them to watch my terrified relatives fleeing to the safety of their class icons, brandishing the exorcisory garlic of an image of Sáozinha at the scornful Socialist vampires threatening them, oh horrors, with nationalizing the family china. The squad who went out at night to guard the barracks, crouching in the low, yellowish, anemic scrub that grew in the sand, would return in the dark, pass beneath the light surrounded by a lampshade of insects, and disperse silently to their respective huts, where depth of sleep was measured by the intensity of the odor given off by the bodies that lay in random piles like the dead in the mass graves of Auschwitz, and I asked the captain, What have they done to my people, what have they done to us, sitting here waiting in this landlocked place, imprisoned by three rows of barbed wire in a land that doesn't belong to us, dying of malaria and bullets, whose whistling trajectory sounds like a nylon thread vibrating, fed by unreliable supply lines whose arrival or not is dependent on frequent accidents en route, on ambushes and land mines, fighting an invisible enemy, fighting the endless days that never pass, fighting homesickness, indignation, and remorse, fighting the dark nights as thick and opaque as a mourning veil that I draw over my head in order to sleep, just as, when I was a child, I used the edge of the sheet to protect myself from the phosphorous-blue eyes of my ghosts.

Tell me something: how do you sleep? Face down, thumb in mouth, in a state of abandon vaguely reminiscent of a lost childhood fragility, or do you sleep wearing earplugs and a black mask like those decadent Hollywood movie stars or femmes fatales driven to despair by loneliness and champagne, by nightmares peopled with divorces, plastic surgeons, and yelping wirehaired terriers like caricatures of Audrey Hepburn? I bet you read esoteric poets before you turn out the light, men with complicated mustaches who sometimes haunt this bar, hoping to hide their unmitigated mediocrity behind a gin fizz, and who are admired by flat-chested girls and who smoke crumpled Gauloise cigarettes as greedily as unkempt old ladies in nursing homes devour their Sunday slice of sponge cake. I bet you have an engraving by Vieira da Silva* on your bedroom wall and, on your bedside table, a photo of the talentless movie director with whom you have a somewhat disenchanted relationship, I bet you wake in the morning as torpid as a chrysalis hovering eternally between larva and butterfly, then stumble blindly into the kitchen in the unrealistic hope that your first cup of coffee, gulped down among the dirty pots and pans, will guarantee that your horoscope wasn't telling lies when it promised you that efficient, waistcoated, wise, and gentle research executive with graying temples and designer tie, in charge of some multinational soap manufacturer. For my part, well, I don't expect very much from life: my daughters are growing up in a house that con-

* Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992), French-Portuguese abstractionist artist.

tains fewer and fewer memories of me, full of furniture drowned in the dark waters of the past, and then there are the women I meet only to abandon or to be abandoned by with a feeling of quiet mutual disappointment in which there is not even room for the kind of resentment that is like a retrospective sign of a sort of love, and I grow old gracelessly in an apartment that's far too large for me, sitting at an empty desk, watching the night and the glittering river through the closed balcony windows that reflect back at me a man sitting utterly still, chin in his hands, whom I refuse to recognize, but who continues to stare at me with stubborn resignation. Perhaps the war has helped to make me the person I am today whom I deep down reject: a melancholic bachelor whom no one phones and from whom no one expects a call, who coughs occasionally just to feel as if he had company, and whom the cleaning lady will find one day sitting in his rocking chair in his undershirt, mouth agape, his purple fingers trailing on the November-colored hair of the carpet.

Translated by: Margaret Jull Costa