Death of a captain (I)
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
We want our lives to have been worthwhile, with the bad things and the good things. It’s essential that the bad things, mainly, should have been worthwhile. And also the things that felt good, the everyday gestures that, we now realise, did so much harm to others. We want the empire, in which our parents were actors and which we have inherited, to have been worthwhile. We want the dead to have been worthwhile. We want the dead to have sacrificed themselves to make us wiser.
“I saw various men die in the war. The captain was the last one. For a long time, I had nightmares about it. Now, I don’t have them anymore. We were a company of riflemen, part of a battalion recruited locally, all of us men who had been born in Mozambique.”
I’ve never seen a man with such badly bitten nails. He practically doesn’t have nails. The ends of his fingers are round like balls, each nail reduced to a sliver. And he gnaws ceaselessly. He puts a finger in his mouth, manages to find an end into which he can dig his teeth and he tears off another sliver. One hears a dull crack, then he spits it out. He’s called Aurélio Lobo. He was a Sergeant in the Colonial War.
“My mother was from Goa, I was born there too, but my mother’s parents were from here, the Mainland. My maternal grandfather went to India right after the First World War. He was a career soldier with the rank of lieutenant. I was born in 1949. My parents left India in 1951. My father went to India as an army conscript and there he met my mother. My father’s idea, so he told me, was to come here to Oporto, his hometown, when he left India. My father was either a soldier or a corporal, I don’t know for sure, but he was going to enter civilian life here on the Mainland. Only, on the voyage, aboard the ship, they began to drum up people to stay in the colonies, in Mozambique and Angola, offering them jobs. Anyone who had been in the army could join the police, for example. He was coming to Portugal with no plans or prospects whatsoever and a wife and infant to support. He decided to stay in Mozambique and joined the police. He had only received the most basic schooling, but he was a man who read a great deal. He loved geography and he loved finding out about the world. He wrote a lot. Don’t ask me what he wrote, I don’t know whether it was based on what he was reading, but he wrote a lot and he had a talent for it. I didn’t keep any of those papers. Our departure was chaotic, as is well known. I didn’t even manage to bring the letters I wrote to my wife during those two years I was in Niassa. We didn’t bring back a single one.”
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I am taking part in this company’s annual lunch because in my research I found out that this unit was in the Chicôco and Necoleze barracks in Niassa in 1971 and 1972, the same places where my father’s company had been in 1967 and 1968. I bring photos of the barracks, I bring photos of Artur, the little black boy who Sergeant Gamito, my father’s comrade, cared for as if he were his own son and who he later left behind. Would any of these men remember seeing the kid in Chicôco, already grown up? I’ve been to Mozambique twice, I’ve visited these villages, I’ve returned without news. I couldn’t tell Sergeant Gamito that Artur, a child caught up in the meshes of the empire, is a happy man today. I could find no trace of him. But if on this afternoon I could telephone Gamito and tell him that someone saw Artur in Chicôco in 1972, four years after he saw him for the last time, then something in our imperial history would become kinder no matter how small. I look for traces of Artur like someone looking for redemption.
“The soldiers in the company were Negroes, in their majority, but there were also white men. Further up in the ranks there were Indians, whites, men of mixed race, but there were also Negroes, a lot of them. I have photos in my album in which there are seven or eight sergeants and perhaps it’s evenly balanced, between whites and Blacks. The captain was white. The captains, actually, because I knew two in the company. Captain Henriques is over there, I’ll introduce him to you. Then I’ll tell you how the first captain died.”
What always comes to the fore in these conversations is the question of whether Mozambicans and Angolans are better off now than before. For these men that’s the measure of whether or not it was all worthwhile. They use the terms “Negro” and “Black” interchangeably, as if they were travelling between two worlds, two times.
“Sincerely, I don’t know whether they’re better off now with independence. Of course in my time the Negroes didn’t live well. The lives of whites and Blacks were separate, not the same thing, not by a long shot. They were different worlds.”
Jorge Fagundes intervenes. He is of mixed heritage, also a former sergeant. A calm man who exudes a restful tranquillity.
“I left Mozambique in 1977, I only went back in 2006. Now, I go there every year, I have family there. In Beira, where I’m from, they called white people muzungos, the Swahili word for foreigners. The Indians, whom we called the monhés, and the mulatos weren’t muzungos. While I lived there, no one ever called me that. When I went back to Beira in 2006 people called me muzungo. I thought to myself: ‘Well now—after thirty years I’ve been promoted!’ But it’s all out of interest because of the poverty there. Now they regret what they did.”
These men think that the only way their comrades did not die in vain is for the poverty in present-day Mozambique, very visible, experienced in the flesh, to somehow wipe out Mozambican poverty of the past, always easy to ignore or romanticise, blurred by distance.
Jorge continues:
“After the Revolution on the 25th of April, here in Portugal, and Independence, I would drive in my car from home to work and from work to home, there in Beira, and every five kilometres there were militia in the road setting up roadblocks. They weren’t FRELIMO blokes, they were kids who formed militias and they were armed. Once I was stopped six times on the way to my mother-in-law. I had to open up the boot, then the bonnet, so they could see I wasn’t carrying weapons. When I reached the seventh checkpoint the kid came up to the window and I asked him: ‘Do you want me to open the front or the back?’ The guy took umbrage, he was really offended, I could see it would end in trouble. What saved me was the fact that there was a FRELIMO man there. He came over to me and asked: ‘What’s going on?’ I explained, and he said: ‘Get going, let it be, don’t get sucked in.’ But there was no way to carry on there.”
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The captain begins to speak, it’s time for the speeches.
“I am absolutely useless at speaking in public. That’s why I’ve not had many girlfriends.”
They all laugh, exchange knowing looks, I realise they already know the joke.
“You’ve helped me a lot. No general wins the war on his own.”
While he talks, an enormous bluebottle gets into the fold of a slice of ham sitting on a saucer and wanders about inside. I can see it through the transparency. To all intents and purposes, these men feel that they won their war. Other people lost it—not them.
Aurélio tells me about his departure from Mozambique. This, yes, was these men’s defeat. Having abandoned their country, having come to Portugal, where the overwhelming majority of them had never set foot.
“Independence was on the 25th of June ’75, I left with my wife in December of that year. We could have stayed there, we hesitated a lot, then we ended up thinking there was nothing more to be gained. My wife, although Mozambican, had practically never gone outside Lourenço Marques. She’d only been in Inhambane as a child. She knew nothing of Mozambique. Because my father was a policeman, and had been sent to many places, I knew Beira, Quelimane, Vila Cabral and the Nampula region very well. So I persuaded her that we should go on a trip, despite the troubled times, so she wouldn’t leave without knowing her country. I wanted to show her those lands. We knew it was likely we wouldn’t return. A week’s holiday. I went to a travel agency and bought aeroplane tickets. We spent a night in Beira, we strolled around, we went to the cinema, we didn’t have any problems. Then we went to Quelimane, two days if I’m not mistaken, in the Chuabo Hotel, one of the most important hotels in Mozambique, a stunning view, beautiful. It opened when I was eleven or twelve and was in Quelimane. I’d always wanted to stay there. I remember the hotel still being built; I had sneaked in with friends. We went up and laid down on the second or third floor in order to watch a car race without paying for tickets. “There was hardly anyone in the hotel. My wife and I were the only guests, apart from a mixed-race couple. The restaurant was closed, they were just serving grilled food in the bar. Then we went to Nampula. We hadn’t been married long, it was almost a honeymoon. I don’t know how to swim. We stayed in a hotel close the Nampula Railway Club, which has a swimming pool, and we went over there. My wife tried to teach me how to swim. We weren’t pressed for time, there wasn’t much to do, and she gave me some lessons. I knew the Island of Mozambique: I went there once with my parents as a child. I said to my wife: ‘We’re so close here, what do you think if we just pop over? We can take the train.’ We bought the ticket, the train journey took around four hours, we took a small suitcase, we left the rest of our luggage at the hotel, we just wanted to spend a night on the island. When we got into the railway carriage, it was full, full to bursting. That one and all the others. With crowds of people in the station, a sea of people as far as the eye could see. We took our seats and looked round. We were the only white people in the middle of all these Blacks. No one did us any harm, no one passed any remarks, nothing. But that was when our courage ran out. It seems that the feeling was mutual. It was enough for us to look at one another, we didn’t need to speak. I felt the fear in her, genuine fear, fear in her gaze. And she must have sensed the same in me, because I was also afraid. So I said to her: ‘Shall we get off?’ She said: ‘Yes, that would be best.’ We took the little case, got out of the train, went back to the hotel. We put on our swimsuits, picked up the towels and went to the Railway Club swimming pool. I never did learn to swim.”
None of the veterans in this company recognised Artur in Sergeant Gamito’s photos. Aurélio Lobo never went back to Mozambique with his wife.
January 2024