Rain by Mia Couto

Author:Mia Couto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2019-01-18T16:56:36+00:00

Serpent’s Embrace

The news on the radio spoke of the unexplained death of Acubar Aboobacar, found in a state of total demise in the vast chair in his living room. And so it went: by the looks of the direly departed, it’s suspected the cause of death was a snakebite. However, neither the animal nor evidence of its bite were found on the deceased’s body. The victim’s wife told the radio that Aboobacar had of late exhibited strange behaviour and threatened her frequently. Without foundation, he suspected conjugal infidelity.

What follows is a composite version of the facts and characters, irrepeatably never the same, like the river in which no man ever steps even once.

Mintoninho left the house in a hurry, running through endless green, overgrown fields of grass. He was going to fetch his father, Acubar Aboobacar. The boy didn’t want his mother, a merchant at the bazaar, to find her husband missing when she returned home. The kid had grown tired of the household fights that were complicated anew each time his father went on a bender.

On that afternoon, Mintoninho, nimble as always, hoped to prevent misfortune. As he stepped out on the street, though, he stopped short. A blue beret—one of those—lay on the ground in its arrogance. Could it have fallen from a United Nations vehicle? Could it belong to these soldiers exercising the exclusive profession of Peace who give the world more news than tranquillity? For a few moments, Mintoninho hesitated: could he claim this find as his own, since no one had seen him? He stood twirling the beret on his indecisive fingers, dreaming up sincere uses and abuses. Then he decided: later he would hand over the hat at the Blue Berets’ barracks. For now, he would just find a place for it at home.

He turned back to leave the sky-blue beret in pacific repose in the cabinet near the doorway. Then he stretched his legs on the road. But he didn’t even need to get to the bar. His father was already making his way home, staggering up the sidewalk, a walking beer-sponge. Watching that figure, the boy longed for his father as he’d been before the war. As if he’d been an orphan and the man who was drawing near were a mere stepfather, a passing passerby.

The two of them, father and son, greeted each other in shared silence and walked along as if they hadn’t a house in this world to call their own. And right there at the entrance, from the top of the cabinet, the blue beret seized the man with fear.

—Who is this?

At that moment, the entire universe couldn’t contain Acubar Aboobacar. His vast shock, unleashed, overran all his nerves. The man couldn’t believe what he was thinking. Could this woman, his wedded wife, have sampled new flavours among the uniformed foreigners, these witnesses to the transition from the tragedy of war to the misery of peace? To ask is shameful, to doubt is weakness. The affair demanded machismo without hesitation, ingenuity and surety.

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