The Tuner of Silences (19 page)

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Back there our sun doesn't speak.

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Where's “there,” Miss Marta?

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Back there, in Europe. Here, it's different. Here the sun moans, whispers, shouts.

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Surely
—I commented delicately,—
the sun is always the same.

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You're wrong. There, the sun is a stone. Here, it's a fruit.

Her words were foreign even though they were spoken in the same language. Marta's idiom was of another race, another sex, another type of smoothness. The mere act of listening to her was, for me, a way of emigrating from Jezoosalem.

At one point, the Portuguese woman asked me to turn away: she took off her blouse and let her skirt fall to the ground. Then, she went for a swim in her underwear. With my back to the river, I noticed Ntunzi, hiding in the
undergrowth. His signal suggested that I should pretend I hadn't seen him. From his hiding place, my brother's eyes bulged with desire as he indulged his fire. For the first time, I saw Ntunzi's face go up in flames.

My father guessed right away that we hadn't carried out his instructions. To our astonishment, he didn't get angry. Was it that he understood our plausible excuses, did he condone our reticence, the clouds that blocked out the sun? He went and got changed into his best clothes, put on the same red tie he sported on his visits to Jezebel, the same dark shoes, the same felt hat. He took each of us by the hand, and dragged us along with him to the haunted house. He knocked on the door, and the moment the Portuguese woman answered it, he blurted out:

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My sons have disobeyed me for the first time . . .

The woman contemplated him serenely and waited for him to continue. Silvestre lowered his voice, softening his initial harsh tone:

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I'm asking you a favour. On behalf of myself and my two legitimate offspring.

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Come in. I'm afraid I don't have any chairs.

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We're not going to stay long, lady.

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My name's Marta.

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I don't call a woman by her name.

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What do you call her by, then?

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I won't have time to call you anything. Because you're leaving here right now.

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My name, Mister Mateus Ventura, is like yours: a kind of illness inherited from birth . . .

On hearing his former name, my father was struck by an invisible whiplash. His fingers squeezed my hand, as tense as a crossbow's arc.

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I don't know what you've been told, but you're mistaken, my dear lady. There's no one by the name of Ventura here.

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I shall leave, don't worry. What brought me to Africa is now almost over.

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And may I know what brought you here?

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I came looking for my husband.

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Let me ask you something, lady: you came so far just to look for your husband?

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Yes, do you think I should be doing more?

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A woman doesn't go looking for her husband. A woman stays and waits for him.

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Well in that case, maybe I'm not a woman.

I looked at Ntunzi in despair. The stranger was stating that she wasn't a woman! Was she telling the truth, and therefore contradicting the maternal feelings that she had inspired?

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Before setting out on my journey, I heard your story
—Marta declared.

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There is no story, I'm here enjoying a short holiday in this exclusive retreat . . .

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I know your story . . .

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The only story, my dear lady, is the story of your departure, back to where you came from.

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You don't know me, a woman isn't only motivated by a husband. In life, there are other loves . . .

This time, my father was decisive in stopping her, by raising his arm. If he was allergic to anything, it was to conversations about love. Love is a territory where orders can't be issued. And he had created a little hideaway which was governed by obedience.

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This conversation has been dragging on for too long. And I'm an old man, lady. Every second I waste, I lose a whole Life.

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So you've finished saying what you came to say?

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That's all. You said you came looking for someone. Well, you can be on your way, because there's no one here . . .

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My dear Ventura, there's one thing I can tell you: you weren't the only one to leave the world . . .

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I don't understand . . .

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What if I were to tell you that we are both here for the same reason?

It was painful to watch. She, a woman, a white woman, and she was defying my old man's authority, showing up his weakness as a father and as a man in front of his sons.

Silvestre Vitalício excused himself and withdrew. Later, he explained that his anger was already overflowing, the magma in the crater of a volcano, when he brought the conversation to an end:

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Women are like wars: they turn men into animals.

After his confrontation with the visitor, my father couldn't get a good night's sleep. He tossed around in a minefield of nightmares and we listened to him, amid incomprehensible exclamations, calling, at one moment, for our mother, and at another for the donkey:

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My little Alma! Jezebel, my sweet!

The following morning, he was burning with fever. Ntunzi and I stood round his bed. Silvestre didn't even recognize us.

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Jezebel?

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Father, it's us, your sons . . .

He looked at us with a pained expression and lay there, his smile frozen on his face, his eyes expressionless, as if he'd never seen us before. After a while, he placed his hand on his chest as if to lend support to his voice, and arraigned us:

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That's what you wanted, isn't it?

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We don't understand
—Ntunzi said.

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Did you want to take charge of me? Is that what you wanted, to see me struck down, to be able to bury me in my moment of weakness? Well I'm not going to give you that joy . . .

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But Father, we only want to help . . .

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Get out of my room, and don't come back here, not even to get my corpse . . .

For days, my father lay sick in his bed. His faithful servant, Zachary Kalash, was always by his side. Those days were propitious for us to develop our friendship with Marta. I increasingly regarded her as a mother. Ntunzi increasingly dreamed of her as a woman. My brother became more and more taken by lust: he dreamed of her naked, he would undress her with the urgency of a male, and the Portuguese woman's most intimate items of clothing would fall to the floor of his slumber. What I liked about Marta was her gentleness. She would write, every day, she would be bowed over her papers, writing orderly lines of letters. Just like me, Marta was a foreigner in the world. She wrote memories, I tuned silences.

At night, my brother would boast of the advances he had made on her heart. He was like a general giving details of territories that had been conquered. He claimed he had got a glimpse of her breasts, had caught her at her most intimate moments, had seen her bathing naked. Soon, he would satisfy his hunger in her body. Galvanized by the proximity of that golden moment, my brother would get up in bed and proclaim:

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Either God exists, or He's about to be born now!

Such episodes were like a hunter's tale: their telling could only gain the seal of authenticity through a lie. Every one of his stories, however, left me unsettled, hurt, and betrayed. Even though I knew that they were more the product of his fantasies than of facts, Ntunzi's tales filled me with rage. For the first time, there was a woman in my life. And that woman had been sent by the dead Dordalma to watch
over what remained of my childhood. Little by little, this foreigner was turning into my mother, in a kind of second round of existence.

The erotic accounts of my brother may have been the product of his delirium, but three afternoons later I saw Ntunzi lying down with his head on her lap. Such intimacy made me unsure: could the rest of my little brother's romance with the foreign woman be true?

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I'm tired
—Ntunzi confessed, drooling over Marta.

The Portuguese woman stroked my brother's forehead and said:

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It's not tiredness. It's sadness. You miss someone. Your illness is called yearning.

It had been so long since our mother had been alive, but she'd never died within my brother's mind. Sometimes, he wanted to cry out in pain, but he didn't have enough life in him for it. The Portuguese woman gave him advice at that point: Ntunzi should go into mourning in order to blunt the vicious spike of nostalgia.

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You've got all these wonderful surroundings to weep in . . .

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What's the use of weeping if I don't have anyone to listen?

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Weep, my darling, and I'll give you my shoulder.

Jealous feelings made me move away, leaving the sad spectacle of Ntunzi lying on top of the intruder with his legs spread. For the first time, I hated my brother. Back in my room, I cried because I felt betrayed by Ntunzi and by Marta.