The priest’s shout was terse and harsh. Elias jumped to his feet and ran toward the exit, his head bowed to avoid a second blow from the stick. Father Anibal’s cane thumped on the paving stones with an angry clatter that accompanied the fugitive all the way to the creaking of the great door.
Father Anibal was not a hard man. He was quite simply frightened. At this hour each day he passed through the cathedral on his way to meditate in his big presbytery garden. He had already been deep in his reverie when this young black jumped up in front of him. Furthermore, even before taking fright, the priest had sensed an anguished intensity within the empty space of the building, an unaccustomed density amid that air laden with silent prayers, whether ancient or recent. He knew what people generally asked heaven for. On this occasion there was a difference in the vibration left by the unspoken words. And yet the cathedral was empty. He had taken several steps and then stumbled, knocking over a large basket. No, a birdcage! Strident trilling, wings flapping, and above all, the abrupt movements of this skinny black youth, whom he had at first taken for a lurking dog. He struck out and swore in order to conceal his fear… Once he was settled in his garden, his thoughts returned uneasily to the extraordinary tension he had sensed in the nave just now. The bond uniting the one who prays with the one who receives the prayer. And he, the priest, the confidant of both. In his youth he had truly believed in this… This evening he did not know what troubled his meditation more – the loss of his faith, eroded over the years by contact with the stupidity and cruelty of human beings, or the face of that child running away with his birdcage under his arm.
Two days later they brought his mother to the house. Elias had no time to think about his prayer being answered, for the woman they deposited on the low bed, like a thing, bore little resemblance to his mother. It was as if a blade had sliced this slender shaving of humanity off that solid mass of prisoners. Her arms, shrunk to the outline of the bones, were no longer black but gray. One of her collarbones was broken and stuck out from beneath a filthy bandage. Her mouth seemed very narrow, greatly extended, on account of the line of dried blood stretching her lips at the corners. The crook of her arm, which Elias touched with his brow, remained cold.
They had got rid of her because the authorities did not want a known opponents wife to die in prison. After months of massacres they were trying to calm things down, wipe away the blood, portray themselves to international opinion as humanitarians. The Americans, whose aircraft had been bombing insurgent camps several weeks previously, were now beginning to talk about democracy, decolonization…
At the end of the second night the bird became fren-ziedly agitated in its cage. Elias got up, held it in his hands, tried to calm it. But the creature escaped, flew toward the doorway, perched for a moment on the half that stood open, then vanished into the darkness. His mother died before sunrise while he was away drawing water from the Cuanza. As the dawn came, the river was tinged with pink, and it was almost possible to believe that the world existed for the joy of the living.
A week later Father Anibal, accompanied by two seminarists, came looking for Elias. Troubled by the memory of the young African he had driven away with blows of his stick, he decided to repair the damage. Elias listened to the priests proposals (commands, in fact, which simply had to be obeyed), but his thoughts returned to the pages of a book his mother had read to him long ago in their house in Luanda: a youth who had strayed was set back on the right path by a priest, and all at once a radiant horizon of promises opened up before him… The next day Elias was admitted to the Mission, the boarding school where he would live and study for four years. His own horizon would be the glorious title of assimilado. Which signified, as he would very soon learn, that he, a negro, little different from a monkey, could one day gain entry to the whites world.
HE STUDIED FEROCIOUSLY, with the obstinacy of a drug addict forever obliged to increase the dose in order to shut out memories. At his age he already had a whole world of blood and death to forget.
Besides, while he had not yet acquired his title of as-similado, it was in his interests not to stray too far from the Mission, for once outside it he reverted to being “a cheeky young African strolling about in the city of the whites.” It was better not to leave the cocoon while preparing, like a pupa, for his metamorphosis into a civilized man.
By the age of fourteen he spoke French and Spanish, in addition to Portuguese, and could read Greek and Latin. He sometimes surprised Father Anibal by quoting from philosophers whom the latter had never read and, occasionally, never even heard of. One day the priest completely lost his temper. They were talking about the history of the church, and Elias alluded to Pope Célestine V, the papal monk who abjured the luxury and pomp his predecessors had surrounded themselves with, a humble man who paid for it with his life. A man who, if he had been living today, would not have tolerated the brazen wealth of some and the poverty of others… Father Anibal flew into a rage, waving his stick; Elias even thought he was about to strike him. “You ve been cramming your poor black head with too many things. You Ve got it all topsy-turvy. Célestine is a saint. And the church needed warriors to bring the word of God to tribes like yours! If we’d not converted you to Christianity, you’d still be living in trees!”
He was a hot-tempered man, Elias knew, but one who bore few grudges and quickly repented of his choleric outbursts. The next day, to make up for it, Father Anibal took him to a reception given by the city authorities. In the great hall decked out with Portuguese flags, Elias stood apart from the elegant dresses and colorful uniforms, close to the window, through which the breezes from the Cuanza wafted in. The guests who caught his eye must have wondered whether they were looking at a servant or a youth of mixed race who had come with his white progenitor. They’ve noted that I no longer have my monkey’s tail, thought Elias with a smile. And they’re telling themselves that in a few more years I may have learned how to eat with a fork…
Watching the coming and going of uniforms, he remembered the yellow room in the long building on piles. It was probably one of these military men who had gone there on a certain evening to couple with a beautiful black woman. The white women among the guests were mainly short and thin, or else extremely fat, in which case they complained noisily about the climate. Each and every one of them clasped her glass in a particular hold that amazed him: reminiscent of a raptors talons, a firm, voracious grip. He reflected that to get to where they had got to in life, they had doubtless needed to be endowed with these tough, clawlike finger-joints. There were also some people of mixed race in the company. They were dressed with greater care than the whites and seemed continually on the alert. They practically stood to attention when spoken to and replied in a Portuguese so correct that It lacked all savor, articulating every syllable as people do after being cured of a stammer.
“And that’s the best that could ever happen to me,” thought Elias, as he studied their smooth, rigid faces, their uneasy eyes. Yes, with superhuman application, and by means of countless acts of servility and hypocrisy, he had a fair chance of joining the envied ranks of the people of mixed race – of living in constant fear of losing his status and sinking back to the level of a negro, of having to be whiter than a white.