The Return

by Dulce Maria Cardoso

Genres: City Life; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Everyone has gone away... We too should no longer be here.

Luanda, 1975. The Angolan War of Independence has been raging for at least a decade, but with the collapse of the Salazar dictatorship, defeat for the Portuguese is now in sight. Thousands of settlers are fleeing back to Portugal to escape the brutality of the Angolan rebels.

Rui is fifteen years old. He has lived in Luanda all his life and has never even visited the far-away homeland - although he has heard many stories. But now his family are finally accepting that they too must return, and Rui is filled with a mixture of excitement and dread at the prospect. But just as they are leaving for the airport, his father is taken away by the rebels, and the family must leave without him.

Not knowing if the father is alive or dead - or if they will ever find out what has become of him, Rui, his mother and sister try to rebuild their lives in their new home. This turns out to be a five star hotel in a quiet, seaside suburb of Lisbon, where returnee families are crammed into luxurious rooms by the dozen.

These palatial surroundings are a cruel contrast with the reality of returnee life. The hotel becomes a curious form of purgatory as the families wait to discover what will become of them - ever conscious of the fact that they are hardly welcome back in their homeland. Rui has his own personal struggle with his new life: growing up, dropping out of school, facing discrimination, and the ever-present worry over his mother''s deteriorating health and his father''s fate.

And then one night Rui''s father returns from the dead.

Translated from the Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana

Release date: July 7, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 272

Sample

But there are cherries in the Motherland. Big, glossy cherries that the girls wear like earrings. Pretty girls like only those from the Motherland can be. The girls here don’t know what cherries are like, they say they are like the pitanga fruit. Even if they are, I’ve never seen them wearing pitangas as earrings and laughing with each other the way the girls from the Motherland do in photographs.

Mother tells Father to help himself to the roast. The food will go bad, she says, this heat ruins everything, just a few hours and the meat starts going off, when I put it in the fridge it becomes as dry as a shoe sole. Mother is talking as if we weren’t going to take an aeroplane to the Motherland tonight, as if tomorrow we’d be able to eat the leftover roast in a sandwich, during the long break at school. Leave me alone, woman. As he pushes away the platter Father knocks over the bread basket. Mother picks it up and arranges the bread rolls with the same care with which she arranges her pills every morning before taking them. Father wasn’t like this before it all began. By all I mean the gunfire ringing out around the neighbourhood. And our four half-packed suitcases in the living room.

We sit in a silence so solemn that the breeze sounds unusually loud. Mother helps herself from the meat platter with the restrained gestures she used when we had visitors. When she puts the platter back on the table her hand lingers over the tablecloth with the dahlias. Now there is no-one to visit us but even before it all started visitors were rare. My sister says, I still remember the day when that cockerel, the porcelain cockerel on the marble countertop, fell on the ground and broke its comb. We like to revisit insignificant anecdotes because we are beginning to forget them. And we haven’t even left home. The aeroplane leaves a little before midnight but we have to be there earlier. Uncle Zé will drive us to the airport. Father will come later. After he puts down Pirata and sets fire to the house and the trucks. I don’t believe Father will put down Pirata. I don’t believe Father will set fire to the house and the trucks either. He probably says it so we won’t think that they will be laughing at us. By they I mean the blacks. In the meantime, Father has bought petrol cans and stored them in the shed. Maybe it’s true, maybe Father will go through with putting down Pirata and will set fire to everything. Pirata could stay with Uncle Zé who is not going away because he wants to help the black people build a nation. Father laughs every time Uncle Zé talks about the glorious nation that will rise by the will of a people oppressed for five centuries. Even if Uncle Zé promised to take care of Pirata it would be no use, Father thinks the only thing Uncle Zé is good at is bringing shame on his family. And maybe he’s right.

Despite this being the last day we spend here, nothing seems very different. We have lunch sitting at the kitchen table, Mother’s food is still bland, we’re hot and the moisture of the dry season, or cacimbo, makes us sweat. The only difference is that we are quieter. We used to speak about Father’s work, about school, about the neighbours, about the vacuum cleaner Mother saw in magazines and longed for, about the air-conditioning system that Father had promised, about the BaByliss to straighten my sister’s curls, about a new bicycle for me. Father always promised we’d have everything the following year and almost never kept his promises. We knew the score but we were happy with Father’s promises, I think we were content with the idea that the future would always be better. Before the gunfire began the future was always better. But it’s not like that anymore and that’s why we have nothing to talk about. And we have no plans. Father doesn’t go to work, there is no school and the neighbours have all gone away. There will be no air conditioning, no vacuum cleaner, no BaByliss, no new bicycle. Not even a house. We are silent most of the time. Our trip to the Motherland is an even more difficult subject than Mother’s illness. We never talk about Mother’s illness either. At most we refer to the bag full of medicines on the kitchen counter. Whenever one of us has to prepare anything, we say, careful with the medicine. Same with the gunfire. If one of us goes near the window, careful with the gunfire. But we soon fall silent. Mother’s illness and this war that makes us leave for the Motherland are similar in the silences they bring about.

Father coughs as he lights another cigarette. His teeth are yellow and the house smells of tobacco even when Father is away. I always saw him smoke A.C. cigarettes. Gegé, after returning once from a holiday in the Motherland, said that they didn’t have any A.C. cigarettes there. If that’s true, I don’t know how Father will cope. I’m certain it’s the last thing on Father’s mind now and I don’t know why I even think about it, why I waste my time thinking about uninteresting things when there are so many important things I should be thinking about instead. But I have no control over my thoughts. Perhaps my mind is not too different from Mother’s, she is always getting lost in the middle of conversations. Every now and then Mother asks Father to smoke less but Father doesn’t take her seriously, he knows that after some time Mother will forget her request the way she forgets almost everything. The neighbours used to get annoyed by Mother’s absent-mindedness, if Dona Glória were not the way she is we’d have had to take offence at some of the things she does. But Mother is how she is and the neighbours couldn’t hold a grudge against her, even if they had wanted to. But it was not only her absent-mindedness. The neighbours also thought that Mother did not take good care of me and my sister, whenever they saw us playing in rain puddles or running behind the T.I.F.A.’s fumigation truck they would say, pity those children growing up so wretchedly. The black children ran behind the truck, opening their mouths to gulp down the spray that killed malaria, but the white children never did this, the neighbours knew that the spray was dangerous and forbade their children from doing that just as they forbade them from splashing in puddles because of the roundworms. Dona Glória, those black people are different from us and nothing in this hellhole does them any harm, but we have to take care of our own, the neighbours warned.

It’s because of this country that Mother is the way she is. For Mother there were always two countries, this one, the country that made her ill, and the Motherland, where everything is different and where she was also different. Father never talks about the Motherland, Mother has two countries but Father does not. A man belongs to the place that feeds him unless he has an ungrateful heart, that is what Father replied when he was asked if he missed the Motherland. A man must follow work like a cart follows the oxen. And he must have a grateful heart. Father only got as far as second grade but there is nothing he doesn’t know about the book of life which, according to Father, teaches us the most. Lee and Gegé used to make fun of Father when he started talking about the book of life and I tried not to be embarrassed. It’s in parents’ nature to do and say things that embarrass their children. Or in children’s nature to be embarrassed by their parents.

Everyone has gone away. My friends, the neighbours, the teachers, the shop owners, the mechanic, the barber, everyone. We should no longer be here either. My sister accuses Father of not caring what happens to us and if it were up to Mother we would have gone away a long time ago, even before Senhor Manuel. I don’t think it’s true that Father doesn’t care what happens to us although I don’t understand why we haven’t left when something bad could happen to us at any moment. The Portuguese soldiers hardly come this way anymore and the few that do have long hair and untidy uniforms, their shirts unbuttoned and their boots unlaced. They go skidding into curves on their jeeps and they drink Cuca beer like they’re newly demobbed. Father calls the Portuguese soldiers lousy traitors but for Uncle Zé they are anti-Fascist and anti-colonial heroes. If Mother and my sister are not around my father says to Uncle Zé, instead of anti-fascists and anti-colonialists they should be anti-whores, anti-beer and anti-liamba, and an argument flares up between the two.

I don’t know how Uncle Zé can continue to stand up for the Portuguese soldiers after what happened to him. Perhaps things happened differently in his mind, people can easily change their minds about what happened even when their minds are not as feeble as Mother’s. It was only this morning, in my own mind, that today stopped being today. Mother was making rice pudding and, for a brief moment, this day became like any other earlier Sunday, one of those Sundays before there was any gunfire. The smell of rice cooking, the half-opened kitchen blind, the spots of sunlight on the green kitchen tiles, the buzzing of flies against the window’s thin netting, Pirata wagging her tail as she waited to lick the pot lid, everything was just like one of those Sunday mornings. My sister thinks it’s disgusting when Pirata licks the pot lids, so gross. She pulls the same face when my hands are dirty with bicycle oil but she doesn’t mind the avocado and olive oil mush that she puts into her hair to straighten out the curls, a revolting green mush that makes her look like an alien from Mars. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand girls.

Mother poured the rice pudding into pink glass bowls and wanted to write our initials with powdered cinnamon but her hand was shaking. She blamed the pills and tried again, the cinnamon powder dropping from between her thumb and index finger to make our misshaped initials and even that was the same, our initials were never properly shaped on those Sunday mornings when we came back from the beach and rinsed ourselves off with a hose by the water tank. Pirata slipping on the water as it ran into the flower beds, the beach towels hanging on the soursop tree, Mother calling from the kitchen, careful with the flower beds, remember that salt water kills the roses. Mother doesn’t like the sun or the salt water. She likes roses. Mother’s flower beds have roses of all colours that Mother rarely cuts, the neighbours paid no attention to what Mother said and simply shook their heads, Dona Glória is so odd, what’s wrong with cutting the flowers, they look so beautiful in a vase. Don’t let the salt water kill the roses, Mother said, but even though we tried our best to wash it away there were always a few small specks glinting in the flower beds. The salt always killed off some of the roses.

Mother licked the cinnamon off her fingers as if it were a delicacy and went to the sewing room to retrieve a tablecloth from the suitcase where she kept her linens. The morning was still like any other Sunday morning. So much so that I felt like going out into the back garden for a sneaky cigarette. I was certain that everything was going to be the way it was before and that in the other gardens the neighbours would be lighting up barbeques and slathering olive oil onto the meat using cabbage leaves and the neighbours’ children would be swinging on car tyres that hung from trees and licking the ice lollies they had just made. But Mother returned with the tablecloth, the one with the dahlias, and started crying once more, I’ll never see my linen again, I’ll never see this tablecloth again. And once again our morning became our last morning here, the gardens are empty, the barbeque grills are filled with old rain, the tyres hanging still from the trees like inquisitive eyes suspended in the air. Our last morning. So quiet despite the gunfire. Not even the gunfire can undo the silence of our departure, tomorrow we will no longer be here. Even if we like telling ourselves that we will be back soon, we know we will never be here again. Angola is finished. Our Angola is finished.

Pirata raises her head and then lays it back on my foot. The black spot around her right eye is the only spot on her short and bristly white coat. Pirata always welcomes us by jumping up and down, the way all dogs do, and has her ears folded back, as if someone had creased them forcefully. Father puts his lighter on the tablecloth with the dahlias, it’s a Ronson Varaflame, we bought it at Mr Maia’s jewellery shop when Father turned forty-nine. Mr Maia must also be in the Motherland. Father knows I smoke but I have never smoked around him, you need to be respectful, when you turn eighteen you can do whatever you want. I don’t really like smoking but girls prefer boys who smoke. Girls also prefer boys who have motorcycles but Father will never give me a motorcycle, I need to knock some sense into you, just look at how a motorcycle left my shin. The scar is ugly as hell, the skin all bunched up around the bone, but it won’t make me change my mind, the first thing I’ll buy when I earn some money is a motorcycle. The girls in the Motherland must also like boys with motorcycles, girls are the same everywhere, at least where these things are concerned.

I’m feeding Pirata the leftover meat, says Mother, as if Pirata did not eat our leftovers every day. My sister pulls off the elastic band that holds her hair in a ponytail and puts it around her wrist, at least Pirata won’t complain about the meat being bland, says my sister as she bunches up her hair, her gestures well practised, the elastic sliding off her wrist and onto her spread fingers, twice around the bunched-up hair, my sister never manages to get the smaller curls, the layer of curls closely attached to the dark skin of the nape of her neck, blonde curls, they are pretty but my sister hates them, you have black girls’ hair, the neighbourhood children used to say to wind her up, except that black girls don’t have blonde hair, girls take everything too seriously, it’s as if they want to take offence.

Apologise to your mother, Maria de Lurdes, Father orders. The electric fan starts screeching, Father gives it a good whack and the emerald-green blades go back to their usual whirr. Apologise to your mother, Maria de Lurdes, when Father is cross he calls my sister Maria de Lurdes but the rest of the time she is Milucha. At least she tried the food, Mother almost always defends us. Father gets cross, how can I educate them if you always take their side, he bangs his fist on the table, the cutlery clinks on the plates, clink clink, Mother blinks, it sounds as though it might be a happy sound, like a clinking of glasses at a party, parties in the Motherland must sound just like that, clink clink, parties are similar everywhere, Mother gets up from the table, clink clink, trips on her high heels, skinny legs, the pills diminish her appetite, the neighbours are no longer around to laugh at Mother’s clothes, clink clink, the neighbours packed into tight dresses copied from Burda magazine that exposed their thighs and their fat knees, let’s eat the rice pudding, says Mother putting the bowls in front of us, clink clink, she sits down again, lips invisible beneath the pink lipstick, eyes sombre beneath the blue powder she puts on her eyelids, the neighbours used to comment on it, Dona Glória certainly uses a lot of make-up, the neighbours with their plain washed-out faces and the layers of lacquer applied at Dona Mercedes’ salon and which made their foreheads so high they looked like extraterrestrials, the neighbours with their poisonous tongues, Dona Glória is too old to have long hair, it will give people the wrong idea, surely Dona Glória doesn’t want people speaking ill of her, clink clink. In front of me, the bowl of rice pudding with an R badly written in cinnamon powder, R for Rui, L for Lurdes, M for Mário and G for Glória. Clink clink.

Father lights another cigarette and stubs it out immediately on the ashtray with the Cuca logo, he grumbles, not even cigarettes taste the same. It was Dona Alzira who gave him the ashtray, Dona Alzira’s husband had been a distributor for the beer factory for over twenty years and got ashtrays for free even though he had never smoked a single cigarette, there were ashtrays in every room of Dona Alzira’s house, who knows, maybe she and her husband had taken a suitcase full of ashtrays to the Motherland. Maria de Lurdes, my father says again, annoyed, my sister knows she has to apologise to Mother, I bet she is plotting some revenge in her mind. Girls from the Motherland must also be vengeful. They wouldn’t be girls if they weren’t.

I’d like to go to Brazil or to South Africa. Even better would be to go to America like Senhor Luís. It must be good to live in America. The flight to America would take many more hours, though, I’m worried about being sick on the aeroplane like Gegé when he went to the Motherland on holiday. When we were children, Father took us to watch the aeroplanes, we sat in the airport’s observation deck sipping fizzy drinks, it was the closest we’d ever been to riding on an aeroplane. We even liked the aeroplanes’ noise. In the car, on the way home, my sister asked me to pretend we were in an aeroplane, just imagine the car is flying through the air, only girls could think up such silly games. Gegé vomited on the aeroplane, it is so common that they even had bags for it, Gegé is a liar but I think he was saying the truth about that, if I am airsick I wouldn’t even want to catch Father’s eye, it would be shameful, a man only vomits when he’s drunk or if he’s eaten something bad.

The sun appears behind the mango tree’s lowest branches and chases away the shadows that covered the deckchairs. We will never again take our siesta in the deckchairs, Father will never sit on the wooden stool while the barber gives him a haircut and a shave, a white barber, because only someone crazy would let a black man put a razor to his neck. My beard doesn’t need a barber yet, at my age Father already had the beard he has today, we became men sooner, the barber used to say, I bet all that studying is holding them back, there was a hint of disdain in the barber’s voice, studying is the best tool we can leave them, my father replied crossly bringing the conversation to an end. The barber is gone, he must be in the Motherland telling the joke about the midgets, a drunk man sees a group of midgets leaving a bar, hey, hey, the table football figures are running away, Father must have laughed the first time the barber told the joke and the barber told it every time he came here, the barber always laughed at the same joke, just make sure your hand doesn’t shake and you slit my throat, Father scolded. The barber must be in the Motherland telling the joke about the midget table football figures, perhaps we’ll find him there, Father says the Motherland isn’t big, perhaps it will be easy for all of us to find each other, perhaps I will find Paula. On second thoughts, I don’t want to find her, Paula is not so pretty and not even that much fun, the only thing in the world she cares about is window-shopping, the hours I spent with her looking at dresses through Sarita’s shop window, they’re pretty don’t you think, do you prefer the blue or the green. I didn’t know but Paula insisted, tell me, tell me. The green. And Paula says, but the blue is much prettier, boys are all the same, they have no taste. I need to meet the girls from the Mot. . .