The Tuner of Silences (22 page)

That night, alone in my room, I mulled over the motives that could have led Marcelo to want to travel to the reserve. It can't have been just for the sake of photography. Doubts gnawed away at my sleep, so much so that, first thing in the morning, I summoned the help of Noci's boyfriend. He turned up late, limping so heavily that his lameness didn't seem a defect so much as an apology for his lack of punctuality. Or who knows, maybe it was just out of consideration for the ground he was treading on? Noci was with him. But this time she was so distant and quiet that I hardly recognized the girl from the previous day. I got straight to the point:

—
Take me to where you left my husband.

I was waiting for his negative reaction. That it wasn't a place for men, let alone a woman. And a white woman, with all due respect. I pressed him to take me to the reserve.

—
But your husband, my dear lady, your husband is no longer there . . .

—
I know.

Orlando Macara didn't make things easy. I understood that there was the matter of costs. In the end, we reached an agreement: I would go with him as far as the entrance where he had left Marcelo. After that, Orlando wouldn't have anything more to do with it.

—
Why don't you tell her everything, Orlando?

Noci's intervention took me by surprise. She argued on my behalf and revealed that there were relatives of Orlando living in the reserve who would welcome me.

—
Relatives? Funny relatives.

—
They're a bit strange. But they're good folk.

—
Don't talk to them, they're all mad.

Orlando relented and then gave way. Nevertheless, he gave me a whole list of instructions: I should avoid contact with the family living in the encampment. And I should understand the idiosyncrasies of each of the four inhabitants.

—
For example, there, I'm not Orlando.

—
How do you mean?

—
I'm Aproximado. That's what they call me there: I'm Uncle Aproximado.

His condition for driving me there was that I should agree to lie: if they asked me how I had got to the reserve, I was to free Orlando from any responsibility. I'd come on my own.

Orlando came by my hotel early. I followed his old truck in my car. It was a long journey, the longest I'd ever made in my whole life. The old jalopy was in such a ramshackle condition that the journey would take three days.

I felt like doing something that I would certainly never have the chance to do again: to drive such a decrepit vehicle along such bewildering roads.

—
Orlando, let me drive, just a bit.

—
You'd better get used to calling me Aproximado.

He allowed me to drive. But only while we were still in the city. So that's how I found myself driving along narrow suburban thoroughfares. I was rarely able to see the roads, because they surged up before me so full of people and garbage. I guessed where the road was by the two lines of people who walked along on both sides of it. People here
don't walk along the sidewalks. They walk along the road as if it were their right.

I wondered to myself: will I be able to drive in this chaos? It was only later that I realized it wasn't me who was doing the driving. It was Marcelo's hands that were driving me, and I had long been blind both to the outside world and to my inner self. I was like an African road: you only realize it exists because of the presence of people walking along it.

I returned the controls to Orlando and went back to my vehicle, now sure of one thing: it made little difference to me whether I drove or was being driven. There was a time when I wanted to travel the world. Now, all I wanted to do was to travel without the world.

Once we had left the city, the heavens opened: never before had I seen such a deluge. We were forced to stop because the road was unsafe. All of a sudden, I seemed to glimpse Marcelo's clothes being carried along by the torrent of rainwater. And I thought to myself: “The Tagus has burst its banks in tropical soil and my beloved awaits me on some nearby shore.”

I thought I knew what it was to rain. But at that moment, I had to reassess the meaning of the verb, and began to fear that I should have hired a boat instead of a motor vehicle. Once the rain had stopped, however, the flood followed: a deluge of light. Intense, all powerful, capable of inducing blindness. Water and light: both billowed up before me indistinctly. Both were boundless, both confirmed my infinitesimal smallness. As if there were thousands of suns, endless sources of light both within and outside of me. Here was my solar side that had never been revealed before. All the colours lost their hues, the entire chromatic spectrum was transformed into a sheet of whiteness.

Marcelo always dresses like that, in white. Perhaps he is here, within my field of vision. I know for sure that Marcelo is here, present, within my field of words. I don't just see him because of the reverberation of light, the random occurrence of brightness.

Farther on, I pass a group of women. They are bathing in the still waters of a pond. Others, a little farther ahead, are washing clothes. I stop the car and walk over. When they see me, they cover themselves with cloth, fastened hurriedly round their waists. Their breasts are withered, hanging lifelessly over their bellies. For sure, Marcelo hadn't allowed himself to be smitten by this type of woman.

I linger for some time, watching them. They laugh as if they can tell my secrets. Could it be that they know of my condition as a betrayed woman? Or does our condition as women unite us, ever betrayed by an unfaithful destiny? Later, these country women take to the road again, carrying cans and bundles on their head. It's only then that I understand how graceful they are capable of being. Their gazelle's step cancels out the weight they carry, their hips swing as if they were ballerinas advancing across an endless stage. They are protagonists of an eternal spectacle, simply because no one ever looks at them. With their can on their head, they cross the frontier between heaven and earth. And I think to myself: that woman isn't carrying water; she's carrying all the rivers within her. It was that spring of water that Marcelo sought to find within his own self.

All of a sudden one of the washerwomen appears to drop some clothes that look very familiar to me. They are shirts of a whiteness that I seem to know. I am gripped by unease: those are Marcelo's clothes. Distressed, I stumble down the slope and the women are frightened by my impetuous approach.
They shout out in their language, gather the clothes from the water, and make their escape over the opposite shore.

We awake early on the second day of the journey. I contemplate the sun rising, and through the dusty haze, it's like a piece of earth that has become separated and is emerging in levitation. Africa is the most sensuous of the continents. I hate having to admit to this cliché. I get out of the car and sit on the back of the truck. This silence isn't like any period of quiet I have ever experienced before. This isn't some absence that we hasten to fill out of fear of emptiness. It's an awakening in our depths. This is what I feel: that I am possessed by silence. Nothing precedes me, I think to myself. And Marcelo is still to be born. I have come to witness his birth.

—
I am the first living creature
—I proclaim out loud, as I reopen my eyes, to the astonishment of Aproximado.

The lights, the shadows, the whole landscape all seem to have been created recently. And even the words: I was the one dressing them, as if they were the children who fill the main squares of small towns on Sunday.

—
See here, Miss Marta. See what I've found
—Aproximado announced, showing me a reel of camera film.

—
Was it my husband's?

—
Yes, I stopped here with him so that we could have a rest.

All of a sudden, a shadow was cast over my sense that we were present at the Creation. There is, after all, no beginning. In my life, everything has been in its death throes, on the point of ending. I'm the one who has already been. I've come in search of my husband. If one can call someone a husband who has run off with someone else. This may well be the place where the world is beginning. But it's where I am reaching my end.

Once again, women. These are other ones, but as far as I am concerned, they are indistinguishable from the previous ones. They cross the road, half-naked. The nakedness of Africans was once a topic of debate between myself and Marcelo. All of a sudden, black bodies emerged onto the market of desire as socially acceptable. Dark-skinned women and men took magazines, newspapers, television, fashion parades, by storm. Their bodies are beautiful, sculpted with grace, equilibrium, eroticism. And I wonder to myself: why did we never notice them before?