Salina’s abrasive temperature and the tsetse fly made my parents look for a more benign climate. They found it in Ebo, a small community hidden under the vastness of the South. Beneath the deep blue of its sky and prodigious light, the days were white like snow and the air feathery and dry.

Ebo wasn’t part of any geography. It existed mainly in the eyes of it’s own people, in the warmth of the hands near the ground and on an oblivion map.

The dusty roads didn’t have names of politicians nor of gentlemen with bow ties staging fatuous smiles at town halls of the capital. Even if they had such names the dust would just cover them.

It was there that the Captain started to be part of the history of our family.

He would show up at our door once in a while, hypnotized by his own lethargy. He was an old black man who made his living from handicrafts. He used branches of trees to take out the shape of dreams, in form of simple objects that were the means to get the flour for his meals, cigarettes and a melancholic glass of wine at the white man’s store. From his knapsack he would produce spoons made out of sticks, meat tenderizers and combs. Sometimes he would also bring brushes for firewood and go on other errands.
The objects of his ingenious talent would take him door to door – bare feet, cotton shirt and a peace of cloth rolled up around his waist. The locals wouldn’t pay him much. It was a small place and a community with limited economical resources. He returned home tired with little to show for, walking in short steps, the shadow of his curved back scattering over the high couch grass, intensely wetted by light. Africans are persistent, in spite of the most unfortunate existences. The Captain, old like the wind would return everyday to the village and its small world, carrying wood artifacts and the ardent bondage of twilight on his back.

One occasion my mother asked him to take a letter to the postal station. Rejecting the request, he shook his head vehemently:

– Hum, hum…
– What’s the problem, Captain?
– In that letter there is an order to put me in prison …
– What kind of nonsense is that, Captain? It’s only a letter to my mother in Portugal!

It was not easy to convince him there was nothing obscure behind her intentions. He took the letter reluctantly.

People those days dreaded the local authority, called “Chefe de Posto” and their subordinates known as “cipaios”, armed with batons. The local authority had supreme power and was well known by their repressive methods. We don’t know what Captain had gone through that originated such a state of pusillanimity.

In a box where I keep my correspondence, I rediscovered a letter mailed from Ebo in 1955 from my mother to my grandma Irene Bettencourt. This letter, very dear to me, was written on a fine paper that rustles in my fingers. It is noticeable her impeccable and precise handwriting, the words stretching against the white paper in an everlasting ocean color.

Restful like a shadow, this letter brings a diluvial mystery of nostalgia, love and memories, urgent and ineffable like the passage of a bird. The words sang and cried and were the flying emotions of a woman uprooted from the family nest to build her own world in those poetic and difficult days of Africa. Reading it today still brings me the rain of Ebo, the stridency of our nightly weeping from our childhood beds, the silence of my father raising new foundations for our lives and calling me to his arms and to the largest window of the past.

Was this the letter that old Captain took to the postal station? I don’t know. But I sure would like it to be.

in Tango nos pátios do Sul