That evening, after the reception, Father Anibal honored him by inviting him to his garden. They sat in wicker armchairs with cups of tea in their hands. The father was in an excellent mood, that of a jovial parish priest who has drunk good wine, attended a fashionable gathering, and been appreciated for his eloquence. “You see,” he was saying to Elias, “God so loves His creatures that He even allows them to commit evil. Yes. So great is God’s love, that He even grants them this freedom. And that’s why wars, famines and crimes occur.” He doubtless regretted losing his temper the day before and now wanted to show off his doctrinal skills. As he talked about the wars and famines tolerated by God, he had a benign and dreamy air.
I could become a priest, too, Elias said to himself. And he pictured a fine presbytery, a garden like this one, ablaze with bougainvilleas but, most of all, this serenity: nothing happens here that is not the Lord’s will. Then he suddenly knew that this God was hateful to him because he allowed his creatures to smash a woman’s collarbone. That slender broken collarbone was enough for him to reject this world and its creator!
Elias felt this so violently, choking on such a sob in his throat, that the priest, who had just fallen asleep in his armchair, woke up, as if the consistency of the air had changed. He shook himself, yawned, patted his dog, which had come to rub itself against his knees. “My old friend Boko’s been limping for the past couple of days. Take him to the vet tomorrow, all right?”
The police stopped Elias very close to the house of Antonio Carvalho, the vet. He had to explain himself. As he continued on his way Elias remarked to himself, with that sharp irony that would greatly assist him in life: “Boko s an assimilado already”
The state of the dogs health necessitated an extended course of treatment, with two weekly injections. The priest accepted this version in good faith. Elias would call on the vet, leave Boko to run about in the garden, and, with a pounding heart, settle down to listen to this strange white man, this Portuguese who wanted to change the world. Carvalho was married to an Angolan woman, not all that unusual a situation for a colonial. What was unusual was that he had not made a servant of his black wife. “You see, Elias, she’s the one who welcomes us into her country, not the other way round. One day the whites will have to understand this. Yes, we need a real revolution in people’s minds.”
It was at his house that Elias read the works of Marx for the first time, and believed he had found in them what he had grievously lacked: the certainty that the world of human beings was neither predestined nor irremediable and that it was therefore possible to transform it, make it better, root out the evil from it. One could erase from this world the room with yellow walls where an ugly, naked man hopped up and down before a woman who sold him her body for the price of a meal. In this transfigured world a man covered in dark wounds would not be left out in the middle of a prison courtyard crammed with human ghosts. And there would not be a woman’s slender, fragile collarbone, smashed by a soldiers boot… Years later he would study Marx in Moscow, arguing about it with his comrades. But his first reading would remain the most vivid, thanks to this promise of a fight against the evil that God tolerates.
Carvalho had known Elias s father, but there was a serious ideological difference between them. The vet maintained that, according to Lenin, revolution could not lead to victory without a revolutionary situation being created in advance. It was therefore necessary to wait, to prepare the ground, to raise the political consciousness of the masses. Whereas his father followed a voluntarist line advocated by Trotsky, hoping to conquer with the help of a small group of revolutionaries cut off from the people. Lenin called this strategy the “infantile disorder of leftism.”
One secret confided in him made a much greater impression on Elias than all these theoretical distinctions: Carvalho remained in touch with his fathers comrades, and from time to time was visited by his contact agents.
At the start of the following year, 1965, one of these spent several days in hiding at the vets house. Elias met him and heard an account of their struggle in the eastern Congo. During the course of two sleepless nights he made his decision: he would leave with this man to join his fathers companions. He could no longer wait for the famous “revolutionary situation.” For the revolution’s heart was already beating somewhere in the darkness of the Congolese jungle.
“The revolutions heart,” “the darkness”… He was fifteen, and it was in such terms that he pictured the world. But, most of all, he wanted his father to know how his mother had died.
3
SO HERE WAS WHERE THE REVOLUTIONS HEART was beating: in this village of the eastern Congo in the Kivu hills. Before his arrival there, Elias had pictured the clash of arms, faces etched by combat, fiery speeches, heroism and sacrifice, words whispered on the brink of death, warriors with proud, manly features. The revolution…
The first thing he saw bore no resemblance to any of that. Two women were preparing a meal in front of a hut, placidly arguing all the time, kneading the dough on the bare plank of the table. Their language was unknown to him, and this made the scene even more commonplace; it would have been the same in Angola or anywhere else, whatever the country, whatever the language. One of the women was big and mature, very fleshy. Her large, almost bare breasts, smeared with flour, swung heavily over the table, colliding with one another at each movement of her arms. The other was very young, with a smooth body and lithe buttocks. There was washing hung out on a line to dry, an almost homely mixture of mens shirts, towels, women’s underwear…
Numb with exhaustion after a long journey, Elias wandered about with the feeling that he had penetrated behind the scenes of the revolution, just where its actors were preparing to perform brave deeds, glorious feats of arms. In the alfresco canteen a soldier was asleep, seated at a table, his head resting on the thick planks where a stripped Kalashnikov lay spread out. One of the parts had tumbled onto the ground. Elias picked it up and set It down discreetly amid the rest of the military Erector Set. Another, stationed amid the bushes, was haranguing his audience. Elias drew closer to listen to him and saw that the orator had no one in front of him. He was addressing empty space, his vacuous gaze floated in a cloud of aromatic, slightly acrid smoke. The same, thought Elias, as used to swirl around the children of the streets, the little hemp smokers In Dondo’s shantytown in the evenings. A young warrior crossed the courtyard with a firmly resolute tread, adjusting a submachine gun on his shoulder, as if at any moment he were about to join battle, then stopped, began chatting with the two cooks and laughing.
Life in this backyard of the revolution seemed like a game Elias could not yet make sense of. They had told him his father was due to return the following morning, and he would doubtless be able to explain these relaxed rebels’ extraordinary way of life. Elias had already noticed a whole host of oddities: the drugged orators harangue, the young submachine gunner s unexpected laughter… And at night, in the room next door, the ponderous wrestling of copulating bodies, an utterly banal activity, so little In harmony with the passionate purity he associated with the revolution. By the full moon s phosphorescent light he could see the end of a bedframe and two pairs of feet. The movements of the soles of the feet reflected the pleasure taken. At one moment the mans right foot was waving wildly and dug a hole In the mattress. It was ridiculous. Pleasure is ridiculous when there’s no other bond between us, thought Elias. The toes curled, as if in a fit of cramp, then relaxed. The foot expressed everything, from feverish desire to final collapse. The woman was the fat cook he had seen on arrival. He was old enough to sense that among so many men on their own, the presence of such women was inevitable. But he could not understand why the dream of revolution had not yet taught these men and women to pursue a love different in kind from this brief, breathless jiggling.