Bartleby goes to war
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
“While I was waiting to take ship, in Lisbon, I stayed in an uncle’s house. I asked him if there was any way he could arrange for me to see a typical Portuguese variety show. There was nothing like that here in Oporto at that time. So he bought the tickets and we went to the Parque Mayer to see a vaudeville.”
I wait for him to tell me whether he enjoyed the show or not, to hear him mention some detail he’d stored in his memory. Nothing. He falls silent and looks at me, completely at ease, not in the least embarrassed. He doesn’t think it’s important to add anything else about his stay in Lisbon. Or else his memories are reduced to this fleshless skeleton. Well, moving on.
“In December 1970, I embarked on the Carvalho Araújo for Guinea, as a second lieutenant, after being drafted into the army. It was the Carvalho Araújo’s last voyage. It was a cargo ship with absolutely no amenities. The squaddies travelled in the hold, in absolute filth.”
Me: “But did you go down there?”
“No, they told me about it.”
They’d spoken to me about Simão, telling me he was a Guinea veteran, perhaps traumatised by the war. The friend of the father of a very good friend. “They say that he came back from there not right in the head. He never talks about the war.” That’s all it took for me, hungry for other people’s memories of the colonial war, to make every effort to get hold of Simão’s contact details. A man who fought in Guinea, the harshest theatre of war, the scene of tremendous violence, he would certainly have a great deal to tell me.
“In Guinea, I spent almost two years in Porto Gole, a town next to the river Geba, which is almost an arm of the sea, seven kilometres wide at the river mouth.”
Excellent, I think, this is promising, someone who remembers these kinds of details is usually a good teller of tales.
“For some months, I was in charge of the company, in the absence of the captain, although I wasn’t the oldest second lieutenant. I was the second oldest. But I never knew for sure why it fell on my shoulders.”
Not so good… I feel the first twitch. He never found out why? Didn’t he think to ask why?
On the phone, Simão said he didn’t have a lot to tell me and that “perhaps it wasn’t worth the bother” for me to travel up to Oporto. And he was about to tell me about his colonial war there and then, on the phone. Wanting to collect war stories, I saw this as the reluctance of a troubled veteran who doesn’t want to open up. It wouldn’t be the first time I came across someone evasive, a man who possesses a wealth of eye-opening stories, but starts out by playing hard to get, as if it were a game of hide-and-seek. The difficulty my friend had in getting hold of Simão’s phone number only reinforced my suspicion. I insisted, we arranged the meeting, I caught the high-speed train on the appointed day.
“We didn’t go out into the bush very often. We avoided it. We just wanted to survive, to get back here safe and sound. We had nothing to do with the politics. We made the occasional incursion, but not very boldly. It was a fairly peaceful life. The soldiers didn’t have a lot to do, and we didn’t push them to do more.”
So that’s how the war was, I think, alternating between lethargy and terror. Let’s wait and see.
“On one occasion, we went out and captured a group of natives, men and women. They weren’t armed, but we suspected that they were supporting the so-called terrorists. That night they were held prisoner in the barracks, in a shed. On the following morning, we sent them by boat to the battalion headquarters.”
So far, nothing new.
“Soon after, on one of the sorties, several mines exploded on the trail we normally used. I think it was the guerrillas’ reprisal for our capturing those people. One soldier lost a foot, or were there two maimed soldiers? Or was it a soldier and a sergeant? I don’t remember exactly… I didn’t go out that day, luckily, it was a quartermaster…”
There’s something distant about Simão’s way of recounting his experiences, as if the subject weren’t particularly interesting. Or else as if he didn’t want to get too involved. Like someone avoiding a mire for fear of getting bogged down.
“The garrison was attacked regularly, always at the same hour. We already knew it would be around ten or eleven o’clock at night. They didn’t attack at two or three in the morning, they weren’t up for that. Nor did they attack during the day, so we wouldn’t summon the Fiat fighter-bombers or the helicopter gunships. They attacked with RPGs, with mortars. After an hour, they would leave.”
Anyone listening to him would have the impression that the guerrillas themselves couldn’t really be bothered with all that stuff.
“In the first attack, they began by firing a seamstress.”
Me: “A Kalashnikov?”
“No, the seamstress wasn’t the Kalashnikov… now I come to think about it, maybe it actually was. Now I am doubtful, I’m not sure.”
I take a deep breath. The conversation seems to be slipping between my fingers, he doesn’t seem impatient or especially concerned. He reviews these memories like someone clearing out the house of a dead relative, with the resignation and reluctance of a tiresome obligation.
"There was another, more complicated operation...”
Ah, at last, I think. It’s coming…
“It was an operation that involved the whole battalion, all of the companies took part, including a company of native troops. There was a firefight. We walked quite far, and on the way back, hot and weary, I felt unwell and told the medic, who was a corporal. He gave me a pill. I didn’t faint, but the news spread through the column and then a native soldier, a mountain of a man, came and offered to carry me on his back. But it wasn’t necessary.”
Pause. Simão takes another sip of coffee. He looks at me. He has nothing more to say about the “complicated operation”. I begin to lose heart. I try to shake him, awaken him from this torpor. I talk to him about the sexual debauchery in my father’s barracks in the bush, in Niassa, in Mozambique, which I became aware of when interviewing his comrades. But Simão remains unperturbed:
“There was nothing like that in Guinea. The fact is, the people in the village beside the barracks were of Balanta heritage. And it was unthinkable for a Balanta woman to have sexual relations with a white man.”
Me: “Were the Balanta Muslims?”
“Well, now that you ask, I don’t know. I never went into the religious question. They did practise some religion, I don’t know which one.”
I resort to one of the recurring catchphrases of the colonial war, in a final attempt to prod him: And hunting? Was there any hunting? I see a brief glint in his eye, which soon fades.
“Ah yes, there was a lot of hunting. Some soldiers went hunting, they loved to do it. I didn’t. I didn’t go. They brought back wild boar, gazelles. Mainly gazelles. There were some big animals there, what were they called? I can’t remember, they were real beasts, they weren’t bison, no, not those.”
Me: “Buffalo?”
“Maybe they were. The soldiers wanted to hunt one, but never managed it.”
He goes back into his shell.
Me: “What about crocodiles?”
“Yes, there were crocodiles. Lots of them.”
By now I was getting desperate: “Did you see them?”
“Yes, when we went in the boat. Basking in the sun, on the riverbank.”
And me, in a last attempt to wake him up: “Would you like to go back there?”
“There was a time when I wanted to. But the images I’ve seen… some of my mates from the company went back and posted photos in Facebook, but the pictures looked so sad that I went off the idea.”
And like someone bringing the matter to a close: “Now, I know I’ll never go back there.”
In the train, returning to Lisbon, I think that the same two years in Porto Gole, the mines on the trail, the torn legs and feet, the elusive women, the endless tedium, the attacks at set hours, the mortar shells exploding at night, if all this were narrated by another member of second lieutenant Simões’s company, it might translate into a roller coaster of emotions, shocks, feverish dread, epiphanies, violent passions, fantastic and terrifying visions. But then I think that certain parts of life are so exacting, they demand so much of us, the only way for some of us to survive is to ignore the call. And perhaps, at the end of the day, this can be applied to the whole of life.
September 2023