The Last Train to Zona Verde (31 page)

Remembering that Cuban soldiers had fought all over Angola,
and especially in the south, I said, “
Habla Español?”
The barman smiled. I said, “English?” He smiled again and patted his head. As a joke, I said, “
Parla Italiano?”

Behind me, I heard, “
Io parlo.”

It was Gilberto, one of my fellow passengers. I said in Italian, “Really — you speak Italian?”

“
Sono stato in Italia per sei mese,”
he said. “
Anno passato.”
Six months, that was something. And his friends began to laugh because Gilberto was fairly drunk, and bare-chested, standing with his blue jeans tugged down so that his underwear showed. Whether this was street style or bush slovenliness I did not know. “A priest took me, with some other boys.”

The priest was Italian, Gilberto said, a missionary in Angola, whose hometown was in Calabria, in the south of Italy, but whose friary was in Rome. Six boys went on the trip; Gilberto was about eighteen, and I assumed the others were the same age. They prayed at the Vatican, they visited the antique sights of Rome, they ate pasta, and they stayed at the friary.

I asked Gilberto whether the other priests talked to the Angolan boys.

“Yes. They were so nice to us! They took us to the beach” — to Ostia, the coast outside Rome. “They played football with us.”

Sometimes a person tells you a story and you seem to hear it in stereo. The storyteller is enthusiastic and gives details and believes he is persuading you of its truth. But as the monologue continues, you hear a parallel story, translating the details differently, and in your imagining you see something else.

Gilberto’s version was a jolly six months in Italy, paid for by the priest, a vacation from Angola. In my version, Gilberto was on a recruiting trip, the priest like a college coach showing football players around a campus, in order to dazzle them so they’d sign up for a place on the team. It is well known that parish priests are in short supply, and missionary priests even fewer, and that the next generation
of Catholic vocations will not come from Europe or America but from Christian Kerala in south India, the Philippines, Latin America, and Africa.

After Rome, Gilberto and his friends traveled by train to southern Italy and stayed on a small farm, where they worked in the gardens, prayed, and went to church. They studied Italian most evenings, and were encouraged to speak it in the daytime.

“Lots of words in Italian are the same as Portuguese,” Gilberto said, “so we didn’t have a problem.”

But Portuguese — notoriously nasal and slushy — lacks the crisp dentals and subtle labials of Italian, even if it shares an approximate Latinate vocabulary.

“You speak it well,” I said. “Did the priest want you to join the missionaries?”

“He mentioned it a little. He said for us to think about it. Doing good work, helping Angola. God would tell us the rest.” But Gilberto said this in passing. What he loved about Italy was the food, and he recounted the meals he’d eaten with such energy, describing the ingredients, that the others with us — João, Ronaldo, Camillo — listened with hungry, drunken impatience. I looked for Paulina but did not see her.

“What did you think about becoming a priest?”

“Angola is a Christian country. Most of the people are Catholic. We have so many churches!”

“Do you want to be a priest?”

He laughed. “I can’t, because of this.” He wagged his bottle of beer. “And I like women!” He repeated this in Portuguese for his friends, making them laugh.

We were standing outside, in the light that shot from the windows of the shed, the darkness all around us, the smell, which was a sharp hairiness of foul and turdy dirt. Cars had ceased to pass on the road as soon as night fell, though now and then someone wobbled by on a bicycle, the chain rattling in its sprockets.

“Ask that man where we are,” I said, indicating the barman. “What town?”

He asked, the man explained. Gilberto said, “No town. We are near Uia. The big market and the petrol station are at Xangongo.”

Camillo said, “
Zona verde.”

I understood that, and liked it as a euphemism for the bush.
Zona verde
— everything that was not a city — summed up the Africa that I loved.

“What about the music?” I couldn’t remember the Italian word for drumming, but he got the point when I imitated the sound: it was still loud. “Where is that coming from?”

“The village,” Gilberto said, after conferring. “They are having a celebration. He told me what it is, but I don’t know the word in Italian. It is
Efundula”
— and he spoke to the other boys. “Even in Portuguese we don’t have the word
Efundula
. It is Oshikwanyama. These are Kwanyama people.”

“Is it circumcision?”

“No. They don’t do such things to girls here.
Efundula
is just for girls.” He spoke again to the barman for guidance. “It goes on for four days. Yesterday was the last day, but they are still dancing. Sometimes they dance all night.”

“Initiation?”

“Something like that.”

The barman went on talking, and his explanation became elaborate, because he had unwrapped his hands and arms from his head and was gesturing, speaking in his own language and in Portuguese. Gilberto was smiling, the others were listening with interest, and then Gilberto put up his hand so he could tell me what the man had said.

“The dancing is strong because if a girl is pregnant, she won’t be able to continue, and she will stop.”

“They don’t want pregnant girls?”

“Not for this
Efundula
, no.”

“Ask him if we can go to the village and see it.”

Gilberto didn’t ask; he knew what the answer would be. “It is just for them. But you can listen.”

We drank beer, we muttered, we listened, and then it occurred to me that if I didn’t claim a place in the car I would have nowhere to sleep. While they were talking I went to the Land Cruiser. I cranked the seat back into a reclining position, covered myself with my jacket, and to the drumming in the distance and the muttering of the boys sitting on the steps of the shed I subsided into sleep. From time to time I awoke, and I was surprised by the gusto of the drumming, but in the darkest hours of the morning it ceased, and the silence, which was like apprehension, kept me awake until sunlight and heat filled the clearing.

In daylight the place was ugly, more littered and beat-up than it had seemed the day before. The boys had tossed their empty beer bottles aside and they lay scattered in the dust. Some grease-stained plastic wrappers were stuck to withered tufts of grass. And the tree that had seemed noble in its height and overhang looked vandalized — the lower trunk had been hacked at and carved with initials and numbers and names.

The look of Angola was not just the ugly little town and the slum of shacks but also the ruin of a brutalized landscape, of the stumps of deforestation and the fields littered with burned-out tanks, of rivers and streams that seemed poisoned — black and toxic. And not the slightest glimpse of any animal but a cow or a cringing dog. In most parts of the southern African bush you at least saw small antelopes or gazelles tittuping in the distance on slender legs. The impala was everywhere, and it was almost impossible to imagine a stretch of savanna without the movement of such creatures. And wherever there were villages, there were always scavengers, hyenas or intrusive baboons.

But no wild animals existed in the whole of Angola. One effect of the decades-long civil war here was that the animals that had not been eaten by starving people had been blown up by old land mines.
The extermination of wild game had been complete. Now and then cows in pastures were shredded by exploding mines, and so were children playing and people taking shortcuts through fields.

A country without wild animals seems inconceivable, because many animals in Africa, antelopes especially, are prolific, reproducing in such large numbers they are able to establish sustainable herds in the unlikeliest places. But the long war had wasted them, the hungry Angolans had eaten them, eaten the hippos, even the crocs, and if there were snakes, I did not see any. Oddly, the bird life was thin too. Even where the landscape was not picked apart, where some trees had been spared, the absence of animals — and the presence of squatting, oppressed, if not defeated-looking, humans — made these places in
zona verde
seem mournful, violated, with an After-the-Fall atmosphere. Something inexplicably deleted from them had sapped their vitality.

In the land without animals, humans were more conspicuous and seemed to exist in greater variety, many of them, in their destitution, taking the place of wildlife, living at the edges of settlements in low simple shelters that were like the twiggy brakes that some animals huddled against.

Walking around this compound in the early morning saddened me and made me impatient. With the sun striking from above the tall grass, the heat took hold, and I had the fugitive thought again: What am I doing here?

I heard the dull clink of metal against metal, and saw the old woman in the yellow turban approaching with her bucket and tongs. I welcomed the sight of her, and said good morning. She swung her bucket up and lifted her tongs over it with the panache of a magician producing a little miracle out of the container.

“
Frango.”
The two remaining pieces at the bottom were more flyblown than the day before, perhaps because I had eaten one of them and the flies, deprived of their meat, had settled on the other two pieces: less chicken, more flies.

I gave the women a dollar and clumsily asked her name.

“Ana Maria,” she said.

Seeing that Gilberto was up and stumbling, I called him over to translate.

He greeted the woman politely and smiled at my brushing flies from the chicken leg in my hand.

“Gilberto, ask her if she knows about the ceremony in the village.”

“She knows,” he said, translating my question. “She says it is the
Efundula.”

“Did she see the dancing and drumming?”

“She heard it. It is for the girls. But the important person is an old man. This old man comes from another village.”

“What does
Efundula
mean?”

The old woman’s explanation in Portuguese was lengthy, but Gilberto listened with recognition. He said, “We have this in my home village, but it has a different name. It means the girls become women — ready for marriage. They are decorated, they dance, they sing, sometimes they cook some food.” Now I couldn’t tell whether he was describing the ceremony at his village or the one here. “The girls wear special clothes, they rub them with a certain oil from a tree. They decorate their hair, they wear shells in the hair.”

“Ask this woman how long the ceremony lasts.”

“It is four days.”

He hadn’t asked the woman. He was speaking from his own experience, so I encouraged him to ask the woman for details.

“Four days,” he said, after she explained. “Each day has a name. She tells me in Oshikwanyama, but I don’t know the words.” He conversed with her some more, nodding as she spoke, then he nodded and said to me, “Yes. The first day is ‘the Sleeping of the Chickens.’ Yesterday they call ‘the Day of Love.’ The music we heard was that.”

To have arrived by accident in this remote and stricken place and to have discovered myself in the presence of a traditional initiation
rite was just wonderful, the kind of luck I had always depended on in travel. I knew nothing of the region. I did not know then that the Kwanyama people were related to the Ovambo in Namibia, and that they dominated this province. All I knew was that the war had been fought here — the wrecked vehicles were everywhere; that the villagers had been routed and the towns destroyed; that South Africans, Cubans, and the guerrilla army of Jonas Savimbi,
UNITA
(the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), had crept back and forth, torching villages, massacring and beheading civilians; and that this had gone on for almost thirty years.

How amazing after all that chaos and death to find, in the persistence of memory, this enduring ceremony with its particular names and purpose. A girl’s initiation into womanhood was common all over sub-Saharan Africa. In Malawi, the ceremony for girls who had experienced their first menstruation (and thus were regarded as ready for childbearing) was called
Ndakula
(“I have grown up”) and included a course of sexual instruction — how to please your man. As for Kenya, I was walking with a Masai man in the Masai Mara Reserve one September a few years ago, near the hot springs settlement in the Loita Hills called Maji Moto, and we came across a group of young girls out fetching water. They whooped when they saw us. One of them came boldly forward, laughing; she wore an ornate headpiece, partly a coronet that had a fringe of white beads that jiggled against her forehead. I remarked on this to the Masai spearman who was guiding me, and he told me that this headpiece advertised the fact that she had been
emuratare
— circumcised, he explained — the word was the same for both males and females. He said that the other girls with her were children, but that she was a woman. “She can be married now.” He became indignant when I questioned the cutting, the purpose of which was to eliminate a woman’s sexual pleasure.

But clitoridectomy, also known as female genital mutilation, widespread among the Masai and many other African peoples, was
not a feature of the Kwanyama initiation ceremony in the nearby village. The practitioners of genital mutilation nearest to this settlement were the Himba people, who straddled the Angola-Namibia border, a hundred miles southwest of where we were squatting.

Gilberto was still talking to the old woman, and was so engrossed that he had stopped translating into Italian so I could follow it. I sat and made another small fire, trying to kill the germs on the piece of chicken, then I ate it slowly. Afterward I joined Gilberto and the old woman again. When I interrupted, Gilberto smiled and, seeming to remark on what the woman had been telling him, said, “Very interesting!”