Lobo Antonio Antunes

Eight years have passed since the end of the Portuguese Colonial War, which devastated Angola between 1961 and 1975: Salazar’s Portugal on one side, and the Angolan liberation movements on the other. The protagonist, who is also the first-person narrator, meets a woman in a bar, just as he has done so many times before, > when the bar is a shipwrecked Titanic, (...) a submerged Spanish galleon, populated by the drifting corpses of the crew, illuminated obliquely by a sublunary glow, corpses floating without clinging to their chairs, in mid-water, waving boneless arms in a calm of seaweed . We know little of this woman, but she undoubtedly knows how to listen, for our protagonist begins recounting his twenty-seven months of war, in «the ass-end of the world», dying > not from the death of war, which suddenly deprives us of our brains with a flash of an explosion and leaves in its wake a disjointed desert of moans and a chaos of panic and gunfire, but from the slow, afflicted, agonizing torment of waiting: the waiting of months, the waiting for landmines along the track, the waiting for malaria, (...) the waiting for the secret police jeep that passed by every week, (...) bringing along three or four prisoners who dug their own graves, huddled inside them, closed their eyes, and collapsed beneath the bullets as a soufflé collapses in the oven, with a red flower whose petals bloomed upon their foreheads ; a war that made one vomit and reply in > a child’s gentle voice Don’t waste your time on me because I am so tired of this war that not even bombs will get me out of here ; a war impossible to forget, so much so that > the moment her knees softly part, her elbows clutch my ribs, and her reddish pubis unfurls its fleshy petals with the moist surrender of warm, soft valves, I will enter her, do you understand?, like a humble, mangy cur dozing in a stairwell, in search of an impossible comfort on the hard wood of the steps, because the soldier of Mangando and all the soldiers of Mangando and Marimbanguengo and Cessa and Musuma and Ninda and Chiume will leap to their feet inside me in their lead coffins, wrapped in fluttering, bloody bandages, demanding from me, with the resigned lamentations of the dead, what fear kept me from giving them: the cry of revolt... The protagonist thus recounts his experience, yet we should not expect a mere report or an indictment: the cruel and cowardly devastation of war lays bare the poverty of our soul, its cowardice, its ideological and emotional void, while simultaneously revealing the futility of so many words, uttered by those who have never felt upon their own skin «the furious and piercing fear of dying», by those who can afford to > be competent, serious, wise, social-democratic, sardonic, carrying in their suitcase along with their books the facile cunning of the latest paper truth . The experience of war is a rupture between before and after, a descent into the depths of the soul, a spiritual death that strips away our capacity to love. Nothing remains but fleeting moments of tenderness, through which two lonely beings conjure up «a diaphanous peace of childhood». To be appreciated to the fullest, this book ought to be read aloud, like a long poem. If one had the patience to do so, one would discover the masterful cadence of the words and their evocative power, finding oneself in an oneiric yet terribly real world, where sensuality, nostalgia, despair, and death intertwine, unearthing the monsters of our childhood and our existential solitude. > Were we, for example, anteaters, you and I, (...) perhaps we could understand each other in a complicity of restless snouts sniffing together along the concrete for the nostalgias of nonexistent insects; perhaps we would unite, under cover of darkness, in couplings as bleak as Lisbon nights. (...) Perhaps, after feeling myself all over, I will find that I am suddenly a unicorn, perhaps I will embrace her, and perhaps she will flutter her astonished arms like a butterfly pinned to a needle, thick with tenderness. (...) And in this way we would have recovered something of childhood that belongs to neither of us and insists on sliding down the chute in a laughter whose muffled echo reaches us, now and then, in a kind of rage . Why read it? It is a great book, about war and human solitude.